Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in A.D. 922 is a 1976 novel by Michael Crichton. The story is about a 10th-century Muslim who travels north with a group of Vikings to their settlement. There they battle “mist-monsters,” or “Wendols,” a relict group of Neanderthals who go into battle wearing bear skins like the berserkers in Beowulf.
Vikings who sing about a certain trademarked canned meat in a Monty Python sketch are usually credited with giving rise to the later term “spam” for unwanted email.
To conserve metal during WWII, SPAM was sold to the American public without the little key soldered to the bottom of the can “for the duration.”
The residents of the state of Hawaii and the territories of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) consume the most Spam per capita in the US. On average, each person on Guam consumes 16 tins of Spam each year, and the numbers at least equal this in the CNMI. Guam, Hawaii and Saipan (the CNMI’s principal island) have the only McDonald’s restaurants that feature Spam on the menu. In Hawaii, Burger King began serving Spam in 2007 on its menu to compete with the local McDonald’s chains. In Hawaii, Spam is so popular it is sometimes referred to as “The Hawaiian Steak”. One popular Spam dish in Hawaii is Spam musubi, where cooked Spam is combined with rice and nori seaweed and classified as onigiri.
I truly miss my Spamburgers in Hawaii.
The 50 State Quarters program, in which all fifty states of the U.S. were depicted on the back of their 25-cent piece, ran from 1999 to 2008. In 2009, the U.S. Mint began issuing quarters depicting the District of Columbia and the U.S. Territories, which include Guam, American Samoa, the Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The U.S. government has made $3 billion as a result of seigniorage relating to the program.
Puerto Rico is a “United States commonwealth,” neither a state nor a colony, as such.
The capital city of Puerto Rico is San Juan.
Little Caesar’s last words were “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”
In 1970, Rico Carty of the Atlanta Braves was the first “write-in” candidate to be elected as a starter in major league baseball’s All-Star Game; that is, he was elected despite not appearing on the official ballot. Carty would go on to win the 1970 National League batting crown.
The National Security Agency, which handles signals intelligence for the U.S. Government, is part of the Department of Defense and is typically headed by either a uniformed general or admiral.
The National Security Agency is a key component of the U.S. Intelligence Community, which is headed by the Director of National Intelligence.
In the game of Monopoly, Chance cards are orange while Community Chest cards are yellow.
The history of the game Monopoly can be traced back to 1903, when an American woman named Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George (it was intended to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies). Her game, The Landlord’s Game, was commercially published in 1923.
Rich “Uncle” Pennybags is the name of Monopoly’s little man in the top hat on the box.
In the 1950s, Gore Vidal wrote a trilogy of mystery novels under the pseudonym Edgar Box.
In 1963 Ruben Rausing invented the Tetra Brik, the forerunner of today’s juice box. Thanks to its popularity, Rausing became the richest person in Sweden.
John Ericsson, an immigrant from Sweden, designed the Union’s first ironclad battleship, the USS Monitor.
The turret, anchor, steam engine, propellor and other parts of the USS Monitor (thus named because Ericsson predicted she would prove a “severe monitor” to the Confederacy, and any European powers which might try to intervene in the Civil War) are now being conserved at the Mariners’ Museum in Hampton Roads, Va.
The Hamptons is a generic name for the area on the south fork of Long Island, named for the towns of Southamption and East Hampton, and including Westhampton and Westhampton Beach, among other places.
Southfork Ranch in the “Dallas” TV series is located in Parker, TX, about 25 miles north of the city of Dallas. It was known as Duncan Acres after it was built in 1970.