Saturday, November 14, 2015

Trivia Bits 14 November

 

Mel Blanc

The voice for animated cartoon character Daffy Duck, produced by Warner Bros, from 1937 to 1989 was American voice actor and comedian Mel Blanc (pictured).

Ireland’s national airline is Aer Lingus which was formed in 1936 and now operates a fleet of mostly Airbus aircraft serving Europe, North Africa, Turkey and North America.

In the 1978 Australian Open tennis Final, Argentinian Guillermo Vilas defeated John Marks 6–4, 6–4, 3–6, 6–3.

Hungarian born Georg Solti, orchestral and operatic conductor, best known for his appearances with opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt and London, and as a long-serving music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra earned the nickname The Screaming Skull because of his rehearsal technique and balding head.

Situated on Hokkaido Island, Japan, the port of Otaru on an arm of the Sea of Japan serves Sapporo, the island’s main city.

The sport of Water Polo has the positions of goalie, centre, driver and point with the sport beginning as a demonstration of strength and swimming skill in late 19th century England and Scotland where water sports and racing exhibitions were a feature of county fairs and festivals.

The German coat of arms features a black eagle against of a yellow and was adopted 20 January 1950.

Tiberius was Roman Emperor from 14 AD to 37 AD and it was during the government of Tiberius that, in the Roman province of Judea, Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate.

Australian siblings, Connie Johnson and Samuel Johnson, released the 2014 book Love Your Sister part memoir, part travel diary, part conversation that tells of when at 33, Connie was diagnosed with breast cancer, Samuel undertook to break the world record for the longest distance travelled on a unicycle, promote breast cancer awareness, and to raise more than $1 million for research.

It was in the art period known as Baroque that the works of Italian artist Caravaggio and Italian artist and a prominent architect Bernini were painted.

Quotables 14 November

 

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Friday, November 13, 2015

Trivia Bits 13 November

 

David Livingstone

Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary David Livingstone (pictured) is best known for his exploration of the continent of Africa with an inscription in the base of the statue to him at Victoria Falls reading Christianity, Commerce and Civilization.

Philip of Poitou, Bishop of Durham from 1197 to 1208, quarrelled so fiercely with his monks that he tried to burn them out of a church, and later excommunicated the entire chapter.

Hecto or hecta is a unit prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of one hundred as in hectare (ha), in surveying, as a measure of land area equal to 10,000 sqm.

In 2015, Australian singer Grace Sewell, known simply as Grace, had a hit with the song You Don’t Own Me her first single with RCA Records and a remake of the 1963 Lesley Gore song, produced by Quincy Jones and featuring G-Eazy.

The unit used to measure electrical resistance is the ohm named after German physicist Georg Simon Ohm.

Now known as the Kronenbourg Brewery, the brewery was founded in 1664 by Geronimus Hatt in Strasbourg, France but due to the frequent flooding of the River Ill compelled in 1850 a move to the higher terrain of Cronenbourg, an area of Strasbourg.

Kim Cattrall is best known as the TV and movie character Samantha Jones in the films Sex and the City (2008) and Sex and the City 2 (2010).

The four Jovian planets are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune with jovian planet refers to the Roman god Jupiter—the genitive form of which is Jovis, hence Jovian—and was intended to indicate that all of these planets were similar to Jupiter.

The siblings in the American pop duo The Carpenters were Karen and Richard who during their 14-year career from 1969 to 1983, recorded 11 albums, thirty-one singles, five television specials, and a short-lived television series.

St Oswald's Church, Grasmere, Cumbria, is notable for its associations with William Wordsworth and its annual ceremony of rushbearing which is an old English ecclesiastical festival in which rushes are collected and carried to be strewn on the floor of the parish church.

Quotables 13 November

 

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Thursday, November 12, 2015

Trivia Bits 12 November

 

BMW logo

In English the acronym BMW (logo pictured) stands for Bavarian Motor Works and is a German automobile, motorcycle and engine manufacturing company founded in 1916.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933 and wrote Being and Time which explored the way that the given features ('past') are interpreted in the light of their possibilities.

The Yiddish King Lear an 1892 play by Jacob Gordin is not a translation of Shakespeare's King Lear, but that the title is an acknowledgement of the roots of the plot.

The world's largest art gallery is the Winter Palace and Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia where visitors would have to walk 15 miles to see the 322 galleries which house nearly 3 million works of art.

Dyn is the symbol for the unit of force equal to 10x10-6 newtons.

Playing Boston-based lawyer Nellie Porter in the 1997 – 2002 American legal comedy-drama television series Ally McBeal was Australian-American actress and model Portia de Rossi.

The landlocked country of Kazakhstan has the largest territory of 2,727,300 square kilometres (1,053,000 sq mi) and larger than Western Europe.

Dr. Acacio Gabriel Viegas was credited with the discovery of the outbreak of bubonic plague in Mumbai in 1896, and later became the president of the Bombay Municipal Corporation.

British sitcom, Outnumbered¸ centres around Pete and Sue Brockman and their three children with five series aired on BBC One in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2014.

The dams and reservoir that form the Bull Run Hydroelectric Project in the Sandy River basin in the U.S. state of Oregon was decommissioned in 2008 due to the rising costs of meeting environmental laws.

Quotables 12 November

 

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Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Trivia Bits 11 November

 

Radiohead

Brothers Colin and Jonny Greenwood are members of the English rock band Radiohead (pictured) formed in 1985 and have sold more than 30 million albums worldwide.

Japanese waraji are sandals made from straw rope that in the past were the standard footwear of the common people in Japan and were also worn by the samurai class and foot soldiers (ashigaru) during the feudal era of Japan.

The world’s largest jazz festival, The Festival International de Jazz de MontrĂ©al, is held in Montreal, Canada with the first jazz festival held in 1980 featuring Ray Charles, Vic Vogel, Chick Corea and Gary Burton on the bill.

The White House Tee Ball Initiative was created by President George W. Bush to promote baseball and softball by allowing youth Tee Ball events on the grounds of the White House in 2001.

The Hallmark is the official stamp or series of marks struck on gold and silver indicating purity or fineness.

Located at the University of Chicago, the Doomsday Clock is currently set at five minutes to indicate to indicate how close the world is to nuclear war and has been maintained since 1947 by the members of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The song If Ever I Would Leave You sung by Lancelot to Guinevere that despite their unfulfilled love, he will not leave her and is the opening song of the second Act of the 1960 Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical Camelot.

When referring o the image format, the letters gif stand for graphics interchange format and is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987.

Originally Rick Jones was sidekick to superhero the Hulk and was created in 1962 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in Hulk #1.

Released on Epic Records, Columbia Records in the U.S., in 1986, A Different Corner by George Michael became the first #1 in the UK singles chart to be written, sung, played, arranged and produced by the same person.

The Ghan passenger train service from Adelaide, South Australia to Darwin, Northern Territory began operating in August 1929 takes 54 hours to travel the 2,979 kms/1,851 mi with a four-hour stopover in Alice Springs.

Quotables 11 November

 

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Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Trivia Bits 10 November

 

 John Coltrane

American jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane (pictured) whose albums include My Favourite Things (1961), was beatified by the African Orthodox Church and is possibly the only jazz musician to be made a saint with the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, San Francisco being the only African Orthodox church that incorporates Coltrane's music and his lyrics as prayers in its liturgy.

Spanish General Fernando Alba led the invasion of Portugal in late August 1580 defeating the Portuguese army at the Battle of Alcântara, entered Lisbon thus clearing the way for Philip II to become Philip I of Portugal, and creating a dynastic union spanning all of Iberia under the Spanish crown.

18th century English actress Anne Bracegirdle most frequently played vivacious, breeches-wearing, guardian-tricking young women of great initiative.

Represented as a bearded elderly man carrying a trident and sometimes sitting astride a dolphin is Neptune, the Roman god of the sea.

French novelist and memoirist Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin is best known by her pseudonym George Sand, and wrote approximately 40 novels and 12 plays from 1831 to 1872.

Opening in April 2011, The Turner Contemporary art gallery is located in the British seaside town of Margate commemorating the association of the town with noted landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, who went to school there, and visited throughout his life.

Car manufacturer, Aston Martin, built the limited edition One-77 two-door coupe which was fully revealed at the 2009 Geneva Motor Show, with a limited run of 77 cars, giving part of the name of the One-77, and sold for £1,150,000.

John Brown's Fort in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, was built there in 1848, moved to Chicago in 1891, and then returned to its original site in 1968.

Indigenous Australian professional football striker Kyah Simon is best known for representing Australia in soccer after making her debut for the Australia women's national football team in August 2007, at the age of 16, in a match against Hong Kong.

Kermit Roosevelt III, author of the 2005 legal thriller In the Shadow of the Law, is the great-great-grandson of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.

Quotables 10 November

 

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Monday, November 9, 2015

Trivia Bits 09 November

 

Suzuki Cappuccino 

The Suzuki car manufacturer made from 1991 to 1997 a small car called the Cappuccino (pictured), a small 2-door, 2-seater demountable hardtop minicar.

The racehorse Parisot, winner of the English 1796 Epsom Oaks, was named after French ballet dancer Mademoiselle Parisot whose performance created a stir in London that year.

A critically endangered species and found in the waters off Alaska and Eastern Siberia, the Kittlitz's Murrelet nests in isolated locations on inland mountaintops, unlike most other seabirds, which nest in seashore colonies.

Ninety Mile Beach in Victoria, Australia is the longest uninterrupted stretch of sandy coastline in the world.

The Zippe-type centrifuge, named after Austrian-German mechanical engineer Gernot Zippe, is a device designed to collect uranium-235.

Tortoise John, voiced by Ned Beatty, and Rattlesnake Jake, voiced by Bill Nighy, are characters from the 2011 American computer-animated action comedy western film Rango with the titular character being a chameleon voiced by Johnny Depp.

Nephropathy relates to the damage or disease of the kidney with Nephrosis being a non-inflammatory nephropathy and Nephritis an inflammatory kidney disease.

Cyclone Tracy devastated Darwin in 1974 from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day killing 71 people and destroyed more than 70 percent of Darwin's buildings, including 80 percent of houses.

Czech-born British playwright Tom Stoppard's 1984 play Rough Crossing is a loose adaptation of Hungarian dramatist Ferenc Molnár's Play at the Castle.

Espoo is the second largest city and municipality in Finland and it is thought the first inhabitants in the area arrived about 9,000 years ago.

Quotables 09 November

 

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Sunday, November 8, 2015

Trivia Bits 08 November

 

Johnny Weissmuller

Perhaps better known as the actor playing Tarzan in films of the 1930s and 1940s, it was at the 1924 Paris Summer Olympics that Johnny Weissmuller (pictured) won three gold medals for individual 100 m freestyle, individual 400 m freestyle and in the 4×200 m freestyle.

The scientific collections of French biologist Jacques Labillardière, noted for his descriptions of the flora of Australia, were seized by the British in 1793 as spoils of war, but were returned after lobbying by Sir Joseph Banks.

Laying just a few degrees north of the celestial equator, Aquila is a constellation in the northern sky with the name being Latin for 'eagle' representing the bird that carried Zeus/Jupiter's thunderbolts in Greco-Roman mythology.

The fibre of the flax plant is used to make linen and is a food and fibre crop that is grown in cooler regions of the world.

Patrilineality also known as agnatic kinship is a system in which an individual belongs to his or her father's lineage and generally involves the inheritance of property, names, or titles through the male line.

The Trevi Fountain is in the Italian city of Rome designed by Italian architect Nicola Salvi and completed by Pietro Bracci with the work beginning in 1732 and was completed in 1762 and was officially opened and inaugurated on May 22, 1732 by Pope Clemens XIII.

The wedding in 1510 of the parents of Anne of Cleves, the fourth wife of King Henry VIII, took place at Schloss Burg, now the largest reconstructed castle in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Becoming an UNESCO World Heritage listed in 1982, Leptis Magna, located in the ancient region of Tripolitania in Libya, Africa, is believed to have been founded as early as the 7th century BC and was one of the most beautiful and prosperous cities of the Roman world with the city is now being recovered, piece by piece, and contains some of the world’s finest remains of Roman architecture in the world.

Street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat appears in the video for American rock band Blondie’s 1981 song Rapture which was the first #1 song in the U.S. to feature rap.

The traditional French biscuit originating from the Lorraine region in north-eastern France, the Madeleine, is shaped like a seashell and is similar to a mini-sponge cake and can be coated in jam and desiccated coconut, and are usually topped with a glacé cherry.

Quotables 08 November

 

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