“Snuffy” Smith was Canada’s last surviving recipient of the Victoria Cross. During his time in the Canadian Army, he was promoted from Private to Corporal, and busted back to Private, nine times.
A party animal, when he was to meet King George to receive his V.C., the military police locked him up, to keep him sober and out of trouble until after the ceremony.
Will Smith lost his place in the Guiness World Records book for most public appearances in 12 hours to German actors Jürgen Vogel and Daniel Brühl, who attended four red carpet premieres of their movie Ein Freund von Mir (2006), one more than Will.
The Russian Mir space station was operational from 1986 to 2001. Mir means peace or world.
Russian Ark was a 96-minute-long movie shot in St. Petersberg’s Hermitage museum showing the museum’s history, and Russian history in general. It’s notable in that it was shot in one take, on a single day’s filming, since the museum was only available to them for that long.
To prepare for his role as a Russian gangster in Eastern Promises (2007), Viggo Mortensen traveled alone to Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Ural Mountain region of Siberia, where he spent five days driving around without a translator. He read books on the gangs of the Vory v Zakone (thieves in law), Russian prison culture and the importance of prison tattoos as criminal resumes and perfected his character’s Siberian accent and learned lines in Russian, Ukrainian and English. During filming, he used worry beads made in prison from melted-down plastic cigarette lighters and decorated his trailer with copies of Russian icons.
13% of the population of Saskatchewan have Ukrainian ancestry.
Arsenalnaya Metro Station in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev is the deepest in the world at 105 meters. Built very close to parliament in 1960, some reportssay the tunnels near Arsenalnaya house secret shelters built specially for the political elite.
“Metro” was a Saskatchewan-Ukrainian comedian and singer who earned a Canadian Gold album with his collection of parody Christmas songs, named after the lead song: “Eleven Days from Christmas”.
The Golden Spike connected the Transcontinental Railway at Promontory Summit on 10 May 1869. Of the two locomotives at that ceremony, one of them, The Jupiter, was built at the Schenectady Locomotive Works in Schenectady NY.
Brigham Young was invited to the Golden Spike ceremony but did not attend due to pressing church business (and a distrust of anything with government officials); he was represented instead by some of his older sons (some of whom were raising capital for a spur line) and by one of his wives, Amelia Folsom, who though there were at least two dozen wives with seniority to her (and a few younger/prettier ones who were married after her) was the unquestioned “first among equals” of his wives by this point.
The Transcontinental Railroad National Back Country Byway, also known as the Central Pacific Railroad Grade, is a 90-mile dirt trail that can be driven by a 4X4 or high-clearance vehicle along an actual stretch of the Transcontinental Railroad. The west end of this byway is at the Golden Spike National Historic Site.
Adding the BLM.gov link:
Central Pacific co-founder Mark Hopkins, who became a millionaire as a merchant in the California Gold Rush, was the product of a first cousin marriage and in his 40s married his first cousin. He was notoriously thrifty, living in a very modest house in spite of being one of the richest men in the United States, until his wife finally nagged him into building a monstrosity of a house (especially for a childless couple) on Nob Hill. He died before it was completed and his wife married her much younger decorator, who inherited the mansion, and when it was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake he sold the lot to the company that built the Mark Hopkins Hotel.
The 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire in San Francisco destroyed the last California laurel railroad tie from the 10 May 1869 ceremony at Promontory Summit.
When the Canadian Pacific was completed at Craigellachie, in 1885, the management of the CPR rejected the idea of a golden or silver spike.
The Last Spike of the CPR was hard iron, just like the thousands of other spikes that held the railroad together.
The Canadian Pacific Railway did not actually open until June 1886, seven months after the Last Spike was driven in November 1885.
ETA: A silver spike had been created for the Governor General, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, who was to be present at the ceremony but he was forced, due to poor weather, to return with the spike to Ottawa.
In “The Ballad of Eskmo Nell,” Dead-Eye Dick’s sexual technique is described as being more powerful than the pistons of a locomotive on the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Gordon Lightfoot wrote and performed “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”, about the construction of the CPR, on a commission from the CBC for Canada’s 1967 centennial, also marked by Expo 67 in Montreal. According to Lightfoot, Pierre Berton said to him, “You know, Gord, you said as much in that song as I said in my book.” Berton was referring to his two books about the building of the railway across Canada, The National Dream and The Last Spike.
The CPR was in the verge of bankruptcy when the North-West Rebellion broke out early in 1885. The CPR made a commitment that they would get the Canadian troops from Ontario to the North-West, and did so, even though there were still gaps in the line.
Since there was no way troops could have been moved through the US, getting the troops out west proved the value of the CPR and lead to them getting additional funding from the federal government and from the London bond market, saving the CPR and likely the Dominion of Canada itself.
In 1954, James Elam was the first to demonstrate experimentally that cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was a sound technique and, with Dr. Peter Safar, he demonstrated its superiority to previous methods. Peter Safar wrote the book ABC of resuscitation in 1957. In the United States, it was first promoted as a technique for the public to learn in the 1970s.
