Diamonds occur naturally in almost every color: black, brown, yellow, red,
orange, pink, blue, and green (I’m not sure about purple/lavender).
Those not clear, black or brown are referred to as “fancy” diamonds.
nm - rechecking
Diamond Head is an extinct volcano which forms the eastern end of the Waikiki district of Honolulu. Another at the western end of the city, named Punchbowl Crater, is the site of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
President Barack Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, was a World War II veteran and is buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
Charlie Chaplin got his start in the Fred Karno Comedy Troupe. His understudy was Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who became a success under his stage name of Stan Laurel.
Public events commemorating the inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton, Democrat of Arkansas, as President of the United States in January 1993 included a visit by Clinton and his running mate Al Gore, Democrat of Tennessee, to Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello.
Thomas Jefferson’s Memeorial in D.C was dedicated on the bicentenial of his birth, in 1943.
The joint USA-Australia postage stamp issue celebrating Australia’s bicentennial in 1988 features an eagle and a koala.
The Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) is the only extant representative of the family Phascolarctidae. It is not found in Tasmania or Western Australia.
Tasmania was discovered by Abel Tasman, who named it Van Diemen’s Land after the Governor of the Dutch Indies who had sent Tasman on his voyage. The name was changed to Tasmania in 1856 in order to obscure the bad reputation the penal colony on the island had.
The Tasmanian Devil population is suffering from a deadly communicable cancer called devil facial tumour disease. They like to fight and bite each other on the face. I was under the impression that they were attempting to restrict disease free Devils to the Tasman Peninsula due to the fact that there is some super narrow isthmus that isolates the populations. I’ve been there and the isthmus is about two road lanes wide. Most Devils trying to cross will be made into cancerous lumps of marsupial hamburger.
I’ve actually seen a Tasmanian Devil in the wild up at Cradle Mountain.
The Tasmanian Devil character on Looney Tunes was the main character of a cartoon, Taz-Mania, in the early 1990s. Two of the characters on the show were Taz’s father and uncle were voiced to sound like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.
Bing Crosby and Bob Hope made five “Road” movies together, all with Dorothy Lamour as the love interest. The trio’s final appearance together was The Road to Hong Kong, in 1962.
British secret agent James Bond 007 is the “victim” of a faked murder in Hong Kong in the movie You Only Live Twice.
The equestrian events were contested in Hong Kong during the 2008 Olympics principally hosted by Beijing.
“Beijing” means “northern capital”, following the East Asian tradition of explicitly naming capitals as such. Similarly named cities include Nanjing (“southern capital”), Tokyo (“eastern capital”) and Kyoto and Gyeongseong (now Seoul) (both meaning “capital city”).
In the early 1980, the pinyin system of romanization became the official method of transcribing Chinese into roman characters, supplanting the older Wade-Giles system. Thus, “Peking” in Wade-Giles became “Beijing” in pinyin. Thought pinyin is official, there are still occasional instances of Wade-Giles being used.
Other cities with alternate romanized spellings include Bombay aka Mumbai and Calcutta aka Kolkata.
Calcutta, Ohio is an unincorporated area just north of East Liverpool, Ohio, about an hour west of Pittsburgh.
O Calcutta! was a very controversial musical comedy that featured an orgy scene in which everybody in the cast, male and female, was on stage naked. One of the actors was Bill Macy, best known as Maude’s husband Walter.