Canada has 10 provinces and 3 territories, for a total of 13 sub-national governments.
The Canadian territory of Nunavut was split off from the Northwest Territories, mainly from the former district of Franklin, in 1999 as a result of pressure from the Inuit for greater local autonomy. The other former NWT districts, Mackenzie and Keewatin, were dissolved.
The capital of Nunavut is Iqaluit, which is on Baffin Island. It is therefore one of four Canadian capitals on islands, along with St. John’s (Newfoundland and Labrador) Victoria (British Columbia) and Charlottetown (Prince Edward Island.) The USA has just one state capital entirely on an island, that being Honolulu. All the territorial capitals are on islands, of course.
(No, Providence, Rhode Island isn’t on an island.)
The two geographically closest US state capitals are Boston, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island (formally, The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations), about an hour apart on either Interstate 95 or the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority commuter rail line.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) began when numerous separate systems were folded into a single agency with the formation of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) in 1947, which became the MBTA in 1964. While not part of the MBTA, Amtrak connects with many of it’s services and the North Station, including Acela trains to Penn Station, Manhattan.
(worked in Railer’s post #42454)
The section of the T’s Green Line between Park Street and Boylston, along Tremont Street under the eastern edge of Boston Common, was the first subway line in the US. It of course is still in heavy daily use, even though it now uses electric power instead of horses. The surface above that section is densely packed with spectators, who typically use the Green Line to get there, for Boston’s duck boat parades for every major local team that wins another championship (12 in the last 18 years as of this writing).
The home of Paul Revere, one of the riders who warned of the march of British troops in April 1775 against Lexington and Concord, still stands in Boston.
Although best known for their lightweight pop hits, their regular appearances on Dick Clark’s Where the Action Is, Happening '68, and It’s Happening, and their tricorn-hat stage costumes, Paul Revere and the Raiders had their best-selling recording in 1971 with “Indian Reservation (Cherokee People)”.
The formal court robes of the Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada are red trimmed with white fur, black sashes, and black tricorne hats.
In its white winter coat, the stoat (Mustela erminea) or short-tailed weasel is known as the ermine. Ermine, a luxury fur, was used from the 15th century by various European monarchs, for entire capes or for trimming on cloaks, sometimes using the animal’s distinctively black-tipped tail as an accent.
I Am Weasel was an American animated television series created for Cartoon Network at the Hanna-Barbera studios. The series centers on I. M. Weasel, a smart, beloved and highly successful weasel, and I. R. Baboon, an unsuccessful, unintelligent baboon who is jealous of Weasel’s success and constantly tries to upstage him, usually failing to do so. Original episodes aired from 1997 to 2000
the Hamadryas Baboon is the only kind of baboon you will find anywhere outside of Africa (well, or zoos) as some are to be found on the Arabian peninsula. All the other kinds of baboons are native only to Africa.
Hamadryas baboons are extremely sexually dimorphic; males can be twice the size of females, and are not the same color.
Bald eagles, the national bird of the United States, are also sexually dimorphic - females tend to be larger than males, although they are identically-colored. Since the banning of DDT, bald eagle populations have rebounded in the U.S. Their dramatic comeback is considered one of the great wildlife-protection success stories of recent decades.
Some species of anglerfish show extreme sexual dimorphism. The females measure about a foot in length, while males barely reach half an inch. Females are more typical in appearance to other fish, whereas the males are rudimentary creatures with stunted digestive systems. A male must find a female and fuse with her: he then lives parasitically, becoming little more than a sperm-producing body.
Penis fencing is a mating behavior engaged in by many species of flatworm, such as Pseudobiceros hancockanus. Species which engage in the practice are hermaphroditic; each individual has both egg-producing ovaries and sperm-producing testes. Pairs can either compete, with only one individual transferring sperm to the other, or the pair can transfer sperm bilaterally.
Hermaphroditus was the son of Aphrodite and Hermes. According to Ovid, he was born a remarkably handsome boy with whom the water nymph Salmacis fell in love and prayed to be united forever. A god, in answer to her prayer, merged their two forms into one and transformed them into an androgynous form.
There have been ten warships named HMS *Hermes *to have served in the British Royal Navy, the first a captured Dutch sloop in 1796. Perhaps the best-known recent example was one of the two aircraft carriers which helped recapture the Falklands Islands from Argentina in 1982. A Centaur-class carrier, she was later sold to India (where she was renamed the INS Viraat) and eventually decommissioned two years ago. There are proposals to turn her into a museum ship.
China’s first aircraft carrier was the decommissioned Australian vessel HMAS Melbourne, from which engineers of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (that’s its name) reverse-engineered the steam catapults. China later bought the former Soviet carriers *Minsk *and Kiev, turning them into a theme park and a luxury hotel instead of putting them into service. The incomplete Ukrainian carrier *Varyag *went there next, and has entered PLAN service as the Liaoning, which is used for training pilots and crews in carrier operations.
The world’s first feature film, The Story of the Ned Kelly Gang, was filmed and made in Melbourne, Australia, in 1906.
The 1998 comedy film Waking Ned (titled Waking Ned Devine in North America) is centered on a small Irish village, where one of the residents has bought the winning ticket in the Irish National Lottery. When the villagers discover that the winner, elderly Ned Devine, died of shock when he discovered that he’d won, they hatch a plan to split the winnings among themselves, requiring them to deceive a lottery official who comes to the village to verify the winning ticket.