Trivia Bits 22 December

 

• The 2013 innovative true-crime story Murder in Mississippi was authored by Australian documentary maker and radio broadcaster John Safran.
• In the TV series The Ultimate Fighter: the Smashes, Australian fighter Robert Whittaker won the Welterweight weight division on 14 December 2012 by defeating UK fighter Brad Scott.
• New Zealand singer-songwriter Ella Yelich-O’Connor is better known by her stage name of Lorde.
• The Gascoyne River is the largest river in the Australian state of Western Australia and is said to be an upside-down river, as it flows for about 120 days of the year and below the dry river bed for the remainder of the year. It is in effect a huge water storage system with the river's aquifers lying below the desert sands.
• Cataclysm is the third expansion pack in the game World of Warcraft which was released on December 7, 2010.
• The Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia, was, from 1732 to 1917, the official residence of the Russian monarchs and has been calculated to contain 1,786 doors, 1,945 windows, 1,500 rooms and 117 staircases.
• Adelaide’s first WOMADelaide, annual world music and dance festival, was held in 1992, in Botanic Park, Adelaide, South Australia as part of the WOMAD series of music festivals.
• The Phoenix is the mythical bird said to be reborn from the ashes of its predecessor.
• Tangutology, the study of the culture, history, art and language of the ancient Tangut people from north-west China, developed as an academic discipline after the Russian explorer Pyotr Kozlov discovered a hoard of Tangut documents at the lost city of Khara-Khoto in 1908.
• In competition target archery, the first and second outer rings are coloured white.
• Australian equestrian Wendy Schaeffer won a gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.
• The 2007 film Atonement, starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Vanessa Redgrave and Saoirse Ronan, received fourteen nominations from the British Academy Film Awards, the most of any film that year.
• In February 2012 rugby league player Sonny Bill Williams became the New Zealand Heavyweight Boxing Champion.
• The character Yukio in the 2013 movie The Wolverine was played by Japanese actor Rila Fukushima.
• Published in United Kingdom in 1971, the Mr Men books were originally written by Roger Hargreaves with Mr Tickle as the first published title.
• The practice of having two or more husbands at the same time is known as Polyandry from Ancient Greek where polys—many, anēr—man.
• American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor and musician Robert Rodriguez directed the 2013 movie Machete Kills.
• The Early Neolithic settlement of Nea Nikomedeia is one of the earliest known sites in Macedonia, dated to 6250–6050 BC.
• The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef extends along the coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras stretching over 1000 kms.
• In pre-Columbian Mexico many cultures matured into advanced civilizations such as the Olmec, the Toltec, the Teotihuacan, the Zapotec, the Maya and the Aztec before first contact with Europeans.