Trivia Bits 03 August

 

Rainbow nation is a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu (pictured) to describe post-apartheid South Africa, after South Africa's first fully democratic election in 1994 and was intended to encapsulate the unity of multi-culturalism and the coming-together of people of many different nations, in a country once identified with the strict division of white and black.

While Aleksandra Pakhmutova composed pieces for the symphony orchestra and a ballet, her fame in the former Soviet Union rests primarily on 400 songs she composed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Released on the 1980 album Double Fantasy, the John Lennon song Beautiful Boy features the lines Every day in every way/It's getting better and better inspired by the mantra of French psychologist Émile Coué.

British businessman John King was Chairman of British Airways from 1981 and was successfully sued by Richard Branson in 1992 for libel as a result of BA's dirty tricks against Virgin Atlantic.

Drawing heavily on the writing of Edward Grim, a clerk who was an eyewitness to the event, Murder in the Cathedral is a verse drama by T. S. Eliot that portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, first performed in 1935.

The iris of the eye was named after the Greek goddess who was the personification of the rainbow and messenger of the gods – Iris.

Martini: A Memoir is a book by the Australian writer Frank Moorhouse and is part autobiography, part history of the martini, the book's minimal plot involves deep conversations about the cocktail between the author and his martini-obsessed friend, V.I. Voltz.

Written in 1959 by Leiber and Stoller and originally sung by The Clovers, Love Potion No 9, has inspired many subsequent performances, a film of the same name and multiple references in popular culture.

Aphids, also known as plant lice, are small sap-sucking insects that are distributed worldwide, but are most common in temperate zones.

Coffee as a medicine reached its highest and lowest point in the 1600's in England when wild medical contraptions to administer a mixture of coffee and an assortment of heated butter, honey, and oil, became treatments for the sick but tea soon replaced coffee as the national beverage.