Saturday, July 25, 2015

Trivia Bits 25 July

 

 

The common name for plants in the Saintpaula genus native to Tanzania as African Violets (pictured)  typically a common household indoor plant but can also be an outdoor plant with several of the species and subspecies are endangered, and many more are threatened, due to their native cloud forest habitats being cleared for agriculture.

Antithesis, from the Greek for "setting opposite", from ἀντί "against" + θέσις "position", is used when two opposites are introduced in the same sentence, for contrasting effect eg Many are called, but few are chosen.

American Author E B White created the children’s character Stuart Little in a 1945 novel of the same name and was his first book for children which is widely recognized as a classic in children's literature.

Saint Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, professed to owe a debt of gratitude to Margaret of Navarre, who was the regent of Sicily between 1166 and 1171, for her support of him against King Henry II of England.

Opened in August 1964 and after operating for a single year, the Yokohama Dreamland Monorail in Japan spent 35 years awaiting repair or replacement before it was finally demolished in 2005.

Vincent Vega is a character in the 1994 American black comedy crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino Pulp Fiction starring John Travolta as Vincent Vega, · Bruce Willis as Butch Coolidge, Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace and Samuel L. Jackson as Jules Winnfield and Pulp Fiction premiered in May 1994 at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the Palme d'Or.

From the album Still Crazy After All These Years, according to Paul Simon’s 1975 song, there are 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover.

During his Formula One career, retired German racing driver Michael Schumacher drove for Jordan GP, Benetton, Scuderia Ferrari and Mercedes GP.

Dolly Parton’s debut album Hello, I’m Dolly was released in 1967 and contained Parton's hits Dumb Blonde and Something Fishy, both of which reached the top twenty on the U.S. country singles charts, and the album itself reached #11 on the country albums chart.

The average length of a blue whale calf is 7 metres and at birth can weigh up to 2,700 kilograms (6,000 lb).

Quotables 25 July

 

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Friday, July 24, 2015

Trivia Bits 24 July

 

The Lorelei  Rhine

On the eastern bank of the Rhine near St. Goarshausen, Germany, The Lorelei (pictured) is a rock which soars some 120 metres above the waterline at the narrowest part of the river between Switzerland and the North Sea and was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in June 2002.

In Giuseppe Verdi’s 1851 opera Rigoletto, the Duke of Mantua’s jester is named Rigoletto.

Maxwell Montes is the highest mountain on the planet of Venus and is named after James Clerk Maxwell whose work in mathematical physics predicted the existence of radio waves, which made radar possible, and hence the surface observations of Venus possible.

Curator at the National Air and Space Museum, Louis Purnell, flew 88 bomber escort missions during World War II as a Tuskegee Airman, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The 1980 Japanese anime television series with 26 episodes, The Littl' Bits has aired in Japanese, English, Spanish, Polish, German, and Italian.

Starring in the title role in the 1982 American police drama television series T. J. Hooker was Canadian actor William Shatner.

The Quokka, an Australian native animal, is the only member of the genus Setonix, a small macropod about the size of a domestic cat and can be found on some smaller islands off the coast of Western Australia, in particular on Rottnest Island just off Perth and Bald Island near Albany.

Having a little to no brim, a soft or full crown and worn by chefs is the toque but in Canada the term is primarily used for knit caps.

An archaeological site in the Al Hasakah governorate of northeastern Syria, Tell Halaf, contains archaeological remains of a Neolithic culture characterized by glazed pottery painted with geometric and animal designs.

English musician, singer-songwriter, actor and arranger David Bowie was born David Robert Jones who in July 1969 had his song Space Oddity reaching the top five of the UK Singles Chart.

Quotables 24 July

 

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Thursday, July 23, 2015

Trivia Bits 23 July

 

 

A slide whistle also known as a swanee or swanee whistle (pictured), piston flute or jazz flute is a wind instrument consisting of a fipple like a recorder's and a tube with a piston in it and dates back at least to the 1840s, when it was manufactured by the Distin family and featured in their concerts in England.

Alexander Selkirk was travelling on the British galleon Cinque Ports when he was abandoned on the uninhabited Pacific island of Juan Fernández in 1704 and that his tale inspired the story of Robinson Crusoe, a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719.

Ulan Bator is the capital and the largest city of Mongolia and was founded in 1639 as a movable (nomadic) Buddhist monastic centre.

Italian mathematician Guido Castelnuovo secretly taught geometry to Jewish students during World War II.

Erato is the music that accompanies erotic poetry and is usually represented by a lyre and is named after Erato the Muse of lyric poetry, especially love and erotic poetry.

With a magnitude of 7.9 to 8.0 on the Richter scale and an intensity of up to VIII on the Mercalli scale, the 1970 Ancash earthquake and the landslide that followed killed over 54,000 people and was the worst natural disaster ever recorded in the history of Peru.

A bartender's announcement that customers may order one more drink before the bar closes is known as the last call.

Nine years after the 1968 Belice earthquake sequence struck western Sicily, 60,000 refugees were still living in temporary accommodation.

The Larkin Administration Building designed in 1904 by Frank Lloyd Wright was the first entirely air-conditioned modern office building on record and was located at 680 Seneca St in Buffalo, New York.

Oscar Hammerstein teamed up with Richard Rodgers to write the songs for the 1959 Broadway musical The Sound of Music with the original Broadway production, starring Mary Martin and Theodore Bikel, opening on November 16, 1959.

Quotables 23 July

 

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Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Trivia Bits 22 July

 

Kayaker Ken Wallace 

Australian canoe sprinter Ken Wallace (pictured) won two medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games with gold in the K-1 500 m and bronze in the K-1 1000 m events.

Epistaxis affects the nose when the nosebleed is the relatively common occurrence of haemorrhage from the nose, usually noticed when the blood drains out through the nostrils.

Many around the world annually celebrate Epiphany on January 6 and is a public holiday in many countries with children being given sweets as part of traditional celebrations.

The crew of the Santa María, shipwrecked in Haiti on Christmas Eve 1492, was infected by the first reported cases of tungiasis, a disease caused by burrowing fleas.

A Swiss heritage site of national significance, the St. Ursus Cathedral or Solothurn Cathedral is the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Basel in the city of Solothurn, Switzerland with the main organ was ordered in 1763 from the organ builder Ferdinand Viktor Bosshard from Baar and was delivered on 24 April 1772.

Located at sites around the village of Carnac Brittany, the Carnac stones, with over 3000 neolithic menhirs, contain the largest stone rows of its kind in the world thought to be erected at some stage during the Neolithic period, probably around 3300 BC, but some may date to as old as 4500 BC.

Ode on a Grecian Urn is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819 and published anonymously in the January 1820, Number 15 issue of the magazine Annals of the Fine Arts.

Held in the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Modernist Australian painter Reginald Cecil Grahame (Rah) Fizelle’s 1938 painting Figures in a Landscape is an example of the painters interest n the relationship between the human form and the landscape.

First published in 1945, The Cousin from Fiji, a novel by Australian writer Norman Lindsay, was set in Ballarat, Victoria, in the 1890s, and describes the comically unsettling effects of Cecilia Bellairs and her 18-year-old daughter Ella, recently arrived from Fiji to live with their relations the Domkins

Rice grows in a paddy field which is a flooded parcel of arable land used for growing semiaquatic rice.

Quotables 22 July

 

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Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Trivia Bits 21 July

 

 Pink Friday minaj

The 2010 debut album by American recording artist Nicki Minaj was Pink Friday (cover pictured) released on November 19, 2010 and debuted at number two on the US Billboard 200 chart, selling 375,000 copies in its first week.

In 1914, Lois Weber was the first American woman to direct a full-length feature film when she directed The Merchant of Venice, and she adapted Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes novel for the first ever Tarzan of the Apes film in 1918.

Jalapic is anything that pertains to the Mexican purgative drug from the root of the plant Ipomoea purga.

Ratu Sir Penaia Kanatabatu Ganilau was the first President of Fiji, serving from 8 December 1987 until his death in 1993 after having previously served as Governor-General of Fiji, representing Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Fiji, from 12 February 1983 to 15 October 1987.

The top seed in the 2014 French Open women’s singles tennis tournament was American professional tennis player Serena Williams.

Troy VII is an archaeological layer of Troy associated with the city's destruction during the legendary Trojan War usually dated it to the 12th or 11th centuries BC.

Georgian-British singer Katie Melua agreed to re-record her 2005 song Nine Million Bicycles in response to criticisms from physicist Simon Singh, who described its lyrics as an insult to a century of astronomical progress.

Charles Darwin served as naturalist on the HMS Beagle with the voyage began on 27 December 1831; it lasted almost five years and Darwin spent most of that time on land investigating geology and making natural history collections, while the Beagle surveyed and charted coasts.

Black Ops and Black Ops2 belong to Call of Duty a first-person and third-person shooter video game franchise.

The 1935 original version of Monopoly, subtitled The Fast-Dealing Property Trading Game, was based in the US city of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Quotables 21 July

 

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Monday, July 20, 2015

Trivia Bits 20 July

 

Lincoln Park Chicago

Chicago's Lincoln Park was created in 1864 after the original 120 acre cemetery had most of its graves removed and was expanded to more than 1000 acres for recreational use.

Batman's Treaty was a treaty made between settler John Batman and local Wurundjeri elders in 1835 for the sale of land around Port Phillip and that it was one of the few attempts made by white settlers to negotiate with Australian Aborigines.

Lake Monger is one of the few remaining wetland areas in suburban Perth, Western Australia as up to 80% of the naturally occurring lakes and swamps north of the city have been reclaimed since European settlement in 1829.

The consonant Y is often referred to as the sixth vowel because it can sound like other vowels.

The discovery of the bacterium Salmonella enterica (var. Choleraesuis) in 1885 was by medical research scientist Theobald Smith who was at the time working as a research lab assistant in the Veterinary Division of the US Department of Agriculture which was under the administration of Daniel Elmer Salmon, a veterinary pathologist, after whom Salmonella was named.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to explain the relationship between reason and human experience.

The Senyavin Islands of Micronesia were named after Dmitry Senyavin, a Russian admiral who destroyed the Ottoman Fleet in the Battle of Athos in 1807.

In 1965, Singapore was expelled from its union with Malaysia gaining independence as the Republic of Singapore on 9 August 1965, with Yusof bin Ishak as President and Lee Kuan Yew as Prime Minister.

Published in 1972 Breakfast in the Ruins is the second novel by English writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, Michael Moorcock to feature Karl Glogauer as its protagonist, the other being Behold the Man published in 1969 in which Karl who travels from the year 1970 in a time machine to 28 AD, where he hopes to meet the historical Jesus of Nazareth.

Adopted on October 12, 1954 and designed by Somali scholar Mohammed Awale Liban, the star on the flag of Somalia is white being the five-pointed white Star of Unity representing the Somali ethnic groups with the light blue backdrop officially denotes the sky as well as the Indian Ocean, which flanks the country.

Quotables 20 July

 

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Sunday, July 19, 2015

Trivia Bits 19 July

 

Kiwi shoe polish

 First launched and sold in Australia in 1906, Kiwi shoe polish (pictured), developed by Australian William Ramsay, was named after the native bird of New Zealand, the homeland of his wife.

Iceland has been rated as the world’s most peaceful country on the Global Peace Index from 2008 through to 2014.

Nairne, an Adelaide Hills town, was named by Matthew Smillie, who arrived in South Australia from Leith, Scotland in 1839, after his wife’s maiden name Elizabeth Corse Nairne,

Created by Antoine Bauza in 2010 and originally published by Repos Production in Belgium, 7 Wonders is a draft-based card game that is played using three decks of cards that features ancient civilizations, military conflicts and commercial activity.

Logie Award-winning Australian actress Kat Stewart plays Billie Proudman in the 2010 Australian television drama/comedy series Offspring.

Federico García Lorca wrote in his poem Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, on the death of friend and famous Spanish Bullfighter At five in the afternoon. It was exactly five in the afternoon after he died after a goring (cornada) in the Plaza of Manzanares on August 11, 1934.

Carbine, the sire of the legendary Phar Lap, carried the heaviest weight to victory in the history of the Melbourne Cup and Carbine carried 10 stone 5 pounds to win the 1890 Melbourne Cup.

With his roles in Malcolm in the Middle and Unhappily Ever After, American actor, writer and producer Justin Berfield is the youngest person to appear in over 100 episodes of two different television shows.

The Golden Charter of Bern is the bull that made Berne, Switzerland, an Imperial Free City in 1218 but is now considered by scholars to have been forged decades later by the Bernese themselves to confirm the rights they had seized.

In 1941, the British Secret Intelligence Service had John Waddington Ltd., the licensed manufacturer of the game Monopoly in the United Kingdom, create a special edition for World War II prisoners of war held by the Nazis but hidden inside these games were maps, compasses, real money, and other objects useful for escaping and were distributed to prisoners by Secret Service-created fake charity groups.

Quotables 19 July

 

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