President Barack Obama was sworn in for a second term in office on Jan. 20, 2013 in Washington, D.C. Unlike at the inauguration ceremony four years earlier, he and Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts did not mess up the inaugural oath.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning both came from families with property in the West Indies, and very possibly had some African ancestry. Robert’s grandmother is described as a “Creole” in early biographies; Elizabeth herself stated that her heritage included “the blood of the slave.” The title of her most famous work, Sonnets from the Portuguese, is derived from Robert’s nickname for her. Because of her dark hair and skin he called her “my little Portuguese”.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate on the death of Wordsworth.
The “Mailliard reaction” is a chemical reaction between certain amino acids and reducing sugars, which gives browned food a distinctive flavor.
The reaction typically occurs at food temperatures between 280-330F. It is responsible for producing flavor in a wide variety of foods and beverages, including seared steaks, pan-fried dumplings, breads and baked goods, roasted coffee, and the malted barley used in beers and whiskeys.
A compilation I’ve seen of the foods and beverages mentioned by American author George R.R. Martin in his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire runs to five single-spaced pages.
The HBO series Game of Thrones, which was based on A Song of Ice and Fire, reportedly cost 560 million dollars to produce. The final season, season 8, consisted of six episodes and cost 90 million dollars.
Emilia Clarke, the British actress who played Daenerys Targaryen on HBO’s Game of Thrones, is now 33. She made her Broadway debut as Holly Golightly in a production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 2013.
In the early 1980s, George R.R. Martin (who would later go on to write the fantasy series A Game of Thrones) ran a campaign of the superhero role-playing game Superworld for a group of science-fiction authors in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The other players in Martin’s game were Victor Milan, Gail Gerstner-Miller, John J. Miller, Melinda M. Snodgrass, and Walter Jon Williams.
The campaign formed the initial inspiration for a “shared-world” anthology, based on the superhuman characters from that game, called Wild Cards, which was edited by Martin, and which featured stories by most of the game’s players. It became a highly successful series, with new installments still being published today.
Shortly after the initial Wild Cards volume was published, English author Neil Gaiman approached Martin, and pitched an idea for a story about a character who lived in a world of dreams, for inclusion in the series. Martin declined, as Gaiman was not yet an established author; Gaiman went on to use the concept for his breakthrough comic series The Sandman.
George R.R. Martin, as a child growing up in New York City, once, to his mother’s horror, got fleas when he saw a movie in a dank old theater.
The color puce (a reddish brown) was popular in the court of Marie Antoinette. Supposedly, when Louis XVI saw the new fashionable color, he described it as the color of a flea, *puce *in French. Various shades of flea were described as “flea’s belly”, “flea’s thigh” or “old flea”.
Introduced in 1958, the box of Crayola 64 Colors Crayons (picture of the crayon box, with sharpener! – this’ll bring back memories for ya) included strange-sounding color names like Puce, yes, but also Goldenrod, Bittersweet, Maize, Aquamarine, Periwinkle, Mulberry, Mahogany, Burnt Sienna, and Sepia.
Commentary – At my young age then, my vocabulary must’ve doubled upon reading the names of those colors! 
The Republic of Siena was an independent state consisting of the city of Siena and its surrounding territory in Tuscany. It existed for over four hundred years, from 1125 to 1555. The Republic of Siena surrendered to the Spanish Empire on 21 April 1555, marking the end of the republic.
!@#$% ninja’d
Siena College in Loudonville NY is about 3 miles south of Latham Ridge Elementary School in Latham NY, and about 4 miles west of RPI, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY. It is a small private college with about 3,000 undergraduate students, and it was established in 1937. Siena College was named after Bernardino of Siena, a 15th-century Italian Franciscan friar and preacher. Its sports teams are named the Siena Saints, and its fight song is When the Saints Go Marching In.
Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, “the Rock of Chickamauga” and “the Sledge of Nashville,” a Virginian who remained loyal to the United States at the outbreak of the Civil War and then never lost a battle, died five years after the war ended. He was buried in Troy, N.Y., his wife’s hometown, having been disowned by most of his pro-Confederate family. President U.S. Grant was among the mourners.
Troy NY is the hometown of Uncle Sam. Troy residents claim that a local 19th century meatpacker named Samuel Wilson was the guy. Samuel Wilson, the urban legend goes, was called “Uncle Sam” around Troy because he employed a lot of nephews and was an amiable, honest fellow. When the War of 1812 broke out, Wilson answered a classified ad in the Troy newspaper and got a job packing his meat into barrels and shipping it eight miles downriver to the Army, which was preparing to go to war with Canada. Rations of fresh meat were rare in those days, and the soldiers asked who had supplied it. “Uncle Sam” was the answer, and because “U.S.” was stamped on the barrels, the goodness of “United States” and “Uncle Sam” became synonymous.
“Troy weight” is a system of units of mass which originated in 15th century England; the system is still in limited use today, primarily for measuring precious metals. Troy weight is not to be confused with the “avoirdupois weight” system, which is the primary system for measuring mass (ounces and pounds) in the U.S.
There are 12 troy ounces in a troy pound, while there are 16 avoirdupois ounces in an avoirdupois pound. A troy ounce weighs about 10% more than an avoirdupois ounce, but a troy pound weighs about 20% less than an avoirdupois pound.
The word avoirdupois is from Anglo-Norman French aveir de peis (later avoir du pois), literally “goods of weight”. This term originally referred to a class of merchandise: aveir de peis, “goods of weight”, things that were sold in bulk and were weighed on large steelyards or balances. Only later did the term become identified with a particular system of units used to weigh merchandise. The avoirdupois weight system is thought to have come into use in England around 1300. It was originally used for weighing wool.
The nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep was first printed in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, the oldest surviving collection of English language nursery rhymes, published c. 1744 with the lyrics very similar to those still used today:
Bah, Bah, a black Sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes merry have I,
Three bags full,
Two for my master,
One for my dame,
None for the little boy
That cries in the lane.
In 1951, together with “In the Mood”, “Baa Baa Black Sheep” was the first song ever to be digitally saved and played on a computer.
I always wondered, but never looked it up. Thanks, Bullitt!
In play:
The Lord Speaker of the British House of Lords sits on the Woolsack, a special seat intended to remind the nobles of the key role wool played in the British economy. In 1938, it was discovered that the woolsack at that time was actually stuffed with horsehair. That was soon set right.