Frederick was a patron of the newly emerging sport of cricket. His death has often been attributed (probably inaccurately) to a blow from a cricket ball.
Some of P.G. Wodehouse’s earliest published stories were about cricket at public schools, such as “Mike at Wrykyn” and “Mike and Psmith”, wherein a young Rupert Psmith makes his first appearance.
The trophy for which Australia and England regularly compete in cricket is known as ‘The Ashes’. It is an urn reputedly containing the ashes of a burnt cricket bail.
In 1758, as part of the British campaign in St. Lawrence, General Wolfe ordered that an Acadian community be burnt, including the church. As a result, there is both a First Nation reserve and a small town known as “Burnt Church.”
Saint Lawrence is traditionally held to have been martyred by being roasted on a gridiron, which has since become his symbol. His feast day is 10 August.
The 1,864 islands of “The Thousand Islands” in the St. Lawrence Seaway range in size from over 40 square miles to smaller islands occupied by a single residence, or uninhabited outcroppings of rocks that are only home to migratory waterfowl.
To count as one of the Thousand Islands these minimum criteria have to be met:
- Above water level year round;
- Have an area greater than 1 square foot; and
- Support at least one living tree.
Thousand Island dressing, based on mayonnaise with a number of flavoring ingredients, was popularized by George Boldt, proprietor of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, who learned of it from actress May Irwin, a fellow vacation resident in the New York side of the island chain. Irwin learned of it from a local fishing guide’s wife. Boldt’s vacation home, Boldt Castle, is still a tourist attraction there today. Thousand Island dressing is a common substitute for the similar Russian dressing in the classic Reuben sandwich.
Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor, was rumoured to have been one of the lovers of Queen Marie of Romania.
May Irwin (1862 –1938) is buried in Kensico Cemetery, in Valhalla, Westchester County, NY.
So is Lou Gehrig, NY Yankee.
And Anne Bancroft, actress. And Tommy Dorsey, swing-era musician. And Ayn Rand, philosopher. And Danny Kaye, actor.
Ninja’d, and not able to fix in time due to slow connection.
Cunctator’s play is still in play:
Queen Marie of Romania gave birth to her first child, Prince Carol on 15 October 1893 when she was not quite 18. She requested the use of chloroform in order to ease the pains of labour, but her doctors were reluctant to do so, believing that “women must pay in agony for the sins of Eve”.
Queen Marie was not terribly fond of her first cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, and particularly disliked his intimidatory nature, saying that he “put your back up the moment he addressed you in his overloud and deliberately aggressive manner; you felt all prickly with opposition, there was something about him that roused opposition”.
The 1953 merger between the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, an independent automaker based in Willow Run, Michigan, and the Toledo, Ohio-based Willys-Overland Company, resulted in the Kaiser Jeep.
Kaiser Jeep lasted until 1970 when AMC bought the company. It then became the Jeep Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of AMC.
There were three Kaisers of the second German Empire: Wilhelm I, his son Frederick III, and his grandson, Wilhelm II.
Frederick was married to Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria, and unlike his father and his son, had liberal views, opposed militarism, and favoured a more democratic system of government, modelled on the British system.
Frederick died of cancer in 1888 at the age of 56, after a reign of only 99 days, and was succeeded by his conservative, militaristic son, Wilhelm II.
One of the great “what-ifs” of history is what would have happened if Frederick had lived longer and implemented his proposed political reforms: could World War I have been averted?
Each of the three Kaisers reigned for part of 1888, giving rise to the term Dreikaiserjahr.
Raymond Chandler, pioneering detective novelist and creator of Philip Marlowe, was born in Chicago on July 23, 1888.
In As You Like It, Shakespeare mentions “a great reckoning in a little room” which is commonly taken to refer to the death of Christopher Marlowe in a fight over a bar bill.
The longest word that Shakespeare uses in any of his works is ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’. It occurs only once, in the play Love’s Labour’s Lost. It is thus a hapax legomenon within the Shakespearean corpus.
The longest word in any of the major English language dictionaries is:
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters),
a word that refers to a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano; medically, it is the same as silicosis. The word was deliberately coined to be the longest word in English, and has since been used in a close approximation of its originally intended meaning, lending at least some degree of validity to its claim.
Wikipedia’s Longest word in English page also mentions a very (VERY!) long technical word, not in a dictionary, and it is disputed whether it is a word. The word is the chemical name of titin, the largest known protein.
The word,
Methionylalanylthreonylserylarginylglycylalanylserylarginylcysteinylproly…isoleucine,
has 189,819 letters and takes over 3 hours to pronounce(!).
This link downloads a 65KB text file of the word. That link was provided from this page.
The world’s longest stretch of perfectly straight railway track is a 478 km section of the Trans-Australian Railway across the Nullarbor Plain.