Friday, February 8, 2013

Trivia Bits 08 February

 

  • Traditionally practised by Royal children, curtseying or bowing to their parents was abolished by Queen Elizabeth’s mother Elizabeth, The Queen Mother.
  • James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (1740 –1795) was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland who is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson, which contemporary Johnsonian critic Harold Bloom has claimed is the greatest biography written in the English language.
  • Nora Heysen, daughter of the famous Australian artist, Hans Heysen, in 1943 was appointed the first female official war artist. Her initial task was to paint studio portraits of the commanding officers of the women's auxiliary services. In April 1944, Heysen travelled to New Guinea to record the activities of Australian nurses.
  • Pleb is a word for a common person from the social order of Ancient Rome and indicates that their ancestry could not be traced back to the first senate established by Romulus.
  • The Gothic Brou abbey-church built by Margaret of Austria after the death of her husband, Philibert II, Duke of Savoy, is in the Ain area of France.
  • Mt Etna is an active volcano on the east coast of Sicily and is the tallest active volcano in Europe, currently standing 3,329 m (10,922 ft) high.
  • Seoul is the capital of South Korea.
  • Prince Andrew, the third child of Queen Elizabeth, was a helicopter pilot in the Falklands war.
  • Australian painter Hans Heysen was born in 1877 in Germany.
  • Joe Gargery is a character in the book Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

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