Wallachia was originally founded as a principality in the early 14th century after a rebellion against Hungary. In 1859, Wallachia united with Moldavia to form the United Principalities, which adopted the name Romania in 1866 and officially became the Kingdom of Romania in 1881. This territory was the foundation the modern Romanian state.
California Civil Code section 1859 limits a hotel’s liability for your damaged possessions to $1000.
California has such a large population that about one-fifth of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, are Californians.
The 2017 biographical comedy I, Tonya, which starred Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, and Sebastian Stan, was about Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding, and the attack on her rival, skater Nancy Kerrigan, during the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championship.
Um, not quite. Of the 435 members of the House, 53 are from California. This is 12.1%, which is just less than 1/8 of the total number of representatives.
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Nancy Davis Reagan, an actress before she was the First Lady of the United States, first appeared on screen in The Crippler, which was a 1940 short subject shown in movie theaters to raise donations for the crusade against polio. It was produced by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which later changed its name to the March of Dimes.
Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) is an experimental type of explosive that has a relatively small but effective blast radius. It is manufactured by producing a homogeneous mixture of an explosive material and small particles of a chemically inert material such as tungsten. The phrase*** inert metal ***refers to a metal that is not chemically active and therefore not part of the chemical reaction that causes the explosion, as opposed to some metals, such as aluminium, that do form part of the chemical reaction.
The periodic table symbol for tungsten is W, from wolfram, an archaic name for the metal.
“Archaic” is derived from the Greek word “arkhaikos”, meaning “old fashioned.”
The Old Fashioned cocktail is made with whiskey (commonly Bourbon), bitters, sugar, and water. A variation on the cocktail, the Brandy Old Fashioned, uses brandy as the alcohol, and is particularly popular in Wisconsin.
Green Bay, Wisconsin is home to the NFL’s Packers, making Green Bay the smallest city, by far, with a team in a major North American sports league.
All but one professional football team is named after a city or a state.
Let’s hear it for the only professional football team named after a whole region of the country, New England Patriots!
In 1936, Cleveland’s pro football team chose the name Rams in honor of the Fordham Rams, known for its offensive line, nicknamed “The Seven Blocks of Granite” and starring (among others) Vince Lombardi. Now known as the Los Angeles Rams, they are the only NFL franchise named after a college team.
When football made its TV debut, Fordham was one of the starring teams. On September 30, 1939, Fordham competed in the first live televised broadcast of a football game. That afternoon, NBC sent two iconoscope cameras (recently patented by RCA), an announcer, and a crew to Randall’s Island Stadium, where Fordham beat Waynesburg, 34–7.
Theatre composers Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber were both born on March 22 (1930 & 1948, respectively), make them both Aires The Ram. A quick google search reveals them to be “active, initiating, leading, independent, aggressive, impatient, combative, energetic, pioneering, naive, and assertive.”
(Technically, there’s another: the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are named after the region of western Florida around the body of water named Tampa Bay; there is no city named Tampa Bay. )
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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Chrysler Corporation was near collapse. Under then-CEO Leo Iacocca, the company introduced several new cars under the “K-Car” unified platform, including the Dodge Aries, the Plymouth Reliant, and the Chrysler LeBaron. The K-Car models sold well, and helped to stave off Chrysler’s demise.
The Barenaked Ladies sang “If I had a million dollars (if I had a million dollars), I’d buy you a K-car (a nice, Reliant automobile)”.
Wanda Gold’s 1928 children’s classic book Millions of Cats is one of the few picture books to win a Newbery Honor award and is also the oldest American picture book still in print.
According to the United States Mint, the current amount of gold bullion held at Fort Knox is 147.3 million ounces. As of today, the price of gold is $1,322.95 per ounce. If my math is correct, the value of the gold in Fort Knox right now is just short of 195 billion dollars.
The largest lottery jackpot in history was the Mega Millions $1.537 billion, won Oct. 23, 2018. The lucky winner lived in South Carolina, one of only a handful of states where you can choose to remain anonymous and still claim your winnings. She did not come forward to claim the cash prize until March 4, just a handful of weeks before the deadline to claim. She did take advantage of the option to remain anonymous, asking through her lawyer for that decision to be respected. As for the other decision of whether to take the annuity or the one-time lump-sum payment, the winner went for the cash payment of nearly $878,000,000.
Huh - thanks. I’d read somewhere reliable, I thought, that it was one-fifth.
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At the time of the 1860 secession debates, a pro-Union South Carolina politician said that the state was “too small for a republic and too large for an asylum.” South Carolina became the first state to secede from the United States after the election of President Abraham Lincoln, and was the only Southern state from which no numbered regiment of U.S. troops was recruited.
In Gone With The Wind, Charleston, South Carolina native Rhett Butler’s fortune is estimated at a half million dollars, the equivalent of $8,555,682 as of 2018.