Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders – a group of volunteer cavalry raised during the Spanish-American War – are famed for their charge up San Juan Hill.
In reality, they charged up San Juan Heights, known as Kettle Hill. San Juan Hill was next to it, but the Rough Riders were not deployed there.
Teddy Ruxpin was the top-selling toy in the U.S. in 1985 and 1986. It was a talking, animatronic teddy bear, whose voice and movements were governed by special cassette tapes which were played via a tape player (which was hidden in the bear’s body).
The original maker of Teddy Ruxpin, Worlds of Wonder, went bankrupt in 1988. The toy has been revived several times since then, including by Hasbro (under its Playskool brand).
Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, in Oyster Bay NY, is at the site of Sagamore Hill, the home of Theodore Roosevelt from 1885 to 1919 (his death). When TR was President, Sagamore Hill was referred to as the “Summer White House”. In 1905, Roosevelt added one room. It is the North Room and at 40 ft x 30 ft is the largest room in the house. The cost for this one room expansion, in today’s dollars, was over $500,000.
Theodore Roosevelt’s oldest daughter Alice was quite well known for being so outspoken. Once, a White House visitor commented on Alice’s frequent interruptions to the Oval Office, often to offer political advice. The exhausted president commented to his friend, author Owen Wister, after her third interruption to their conversation and threatening to throw her ‘out the window’, “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”
English poet Wilfred Owen was killed in action in France on November 4, 1918, a month after he was awarded the Military Cross “for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty”. He was 25. His mother received the telegram informing her of his death exactly a week later, on Armistice Day, as the church bells were ringing out in celebration.
Owens Lake, in Inyo County, California, south of Bishop CA and near Lone Pine CA, was named by explorer John C. Fremont in honor of one of his guides, Richard Lemon Owens (1812-1902), a pioneer of the American West. Richard Owens was a close friend of Kit Carson. The lake that bears his name is a dry lake, but unlike the many dry lakes in the Great Basin area that have been dry for thousands of years, Owens Lake was drained in the early 20th century because water from the Owens River was diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. By 1926, Owens Lake was desiccated.
Although some water has returned to Owens Lake, it is still mostly dry and dusty, and as of 2013, it is the largest single source of dust pollution in the USA.
Therefore, still, L.A. is a large cause of air pollution.
ETA: if one drew a line between Las Vegas NV and Fresno CA, Owens Lake would lie just about on that line and just about smack dab in the middle of the two cities. gMap – Google Maps
The Los Angeles Aqueduct system is comprised of the original Los Angeles Aqueduct built in 1913 and the Second Los Angeles Aqueduct, finished in 1970. The total over 419 miles in length and have the capability of delivering of 700 cubic feet per second of water.
Los Angeles was founded in 1781 by a group of 44 settlers. They originally named the town ‘El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles.’ In English, this translates to ‘The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels.’
Actor Wayne Rogers left the TV series MASH* in 1975, largely because he felt that his character, Trapper John McIntyre, was overshadowed by Alan Alda’s Hawkeye Pierce. Rogers then was cast as the star of City of Angels, a short-lived NBC drama about a detective in 1930s Los Angeles; the series had been inspired by the film Chinatown.
Canadian singer and songwriter Sarah McLachlan’s song, “Angel”, is sometimes mistitled as “In the Arms of an Angel” or “Arms of the Angel”. McLachlan said it was inspired by articles that she read in Rolling Stone about musicians turning to heroin to cope with the pressures of the music industry and subsequently overdosing.
Andrew Lloyd Webber left his first wife Sarah Jane Tudor Hugill to marry his second wife, Sarah Brightman, who left her first husband Andrew Graham-Stewart to marry her second husband, Andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote the musical Phantom of the Opera for her, including the song Angel of Music.
Dizzying. :smack: It’s hard to keep up!
Sarah Brightman has sung in many languages including English, Spanish, French, Latin, German, Turkish, Italian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Catalan.
Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw once said, “The French do not care what they say, so long as they pronounce it correctly.”
In France you can marry a dead person – under French law, in exceptional cases you can marry posthumously, as long as you can also prove that the deceased had the intention of marrying while alive and you receive permission from the French president. The most recent approved case was in 2017, when the partner of a gay policeman gunned down on Paris’s Champs-Elysees by a jihadist was granted permission to marry his partner posthumously.
Sacrebleu!
The Champs-Élysées is an avenue in northwestern Paris. It is just 1.2 miles long, but it is widely recognized as one of the most famous avenues in the world. It is known for its theaters, cafés, and luxury shops, for the annual Bastille Day military parade, and as the finish of the Tour de France cycle race. At one end of the Avenue is the Place de la Concorde, where the Obelisk of Luxor can be found; at the other end is the Place Charles de Gaulle, location of the Arc de Triomphe.
Charles de Gaulle, besides being the leader of the Free French during World War II, also was asked to rewrite the Constitution of France and ended up founding the Fifth Republic after approval by referendum in 1958. He was elected President of France later that year, a position he was reelected to in 1965 and held until his resignation in 1969.
CDG is the code for Charles de Gaulle Airport. CDG is the world’s tenth busiest airport, and the second busiest in Europe behind Heathrow. According to Business Insider, by number of passengers in 2017:
CDG is the code for Charles de Gaulle Airport. CDG is the world’s tenth busiest airport, and the second busiest in Europe behind Heathrow. According to Business Insider, by number of passengers in 2017:
I added the ISO-3166 country codes; e.g. ATL airport is now listed as ATL in USA.
Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport is named after Edward “Butch” O’Hare, a U.S. Navy fighter pilot during WWII. O’Hare was the Navy’s first flying ace, and the Navy’s first recipient of the Medal of Honor during WWII. O’Hare’s plane was apparently shot down during a night mission near the Gilbert Islands in 1943, but his body was never recovered.
O’Hare was born and raised in St. Louis. His parents divorced when he was a boy, and his father, a lawyer, relocated to Chicago. O’Hare the elder worked for Al Capone for a time, before turning state’s evidence, and helping to convict Capone of tax evasion.
Before the airport was named after Butch O’Hare, it was called Orchard Field, and that name is why O’Hare’s airport code is ORD.