Saturday, December 5, 2015

Trivia Bits 05 December

 

Caspar David Friedrich

19th-century German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (pictured) was a painter of landscapes and is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins

In May 2015, English professional snooker player Stuart Bingham became World Champion in the sport of snooker and who has compiled 269 century breaks during his career, including three maximum breaks.

Chancellor, from the Latin: cancellarius, is a title of various official positions in governments with original chancellors being the cancellarii of Roman courts of justice—ushers, who sat at the cancelli or lattice work screens of a basilica or law court, which separated the judge and counsel from the audience and a chancellor's office is called a chancellery or chancery.

Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia was established in 1976 and named in honour of navigator Matthew Flinders, who explored and surveyed the South Australian coastline in the early 19th century.

Alfred Rolfe was a stage actor who directed early Australian silent films that include The Lady Outlaw (1911) and The Hero of the Dardanelles (1915).

The traditional Indian dish dal bhat consists of steamed rice and a cooked lentil soup called dal.

The Wars of the Roses fought between 1455 and 1487, resulted in the English dynasty of the Tudors ascending to the English throne.

The world's first geothermal power station was built in Larderello, Italy in 1911.

Playing the wife of Robin William’s character in the 1993 American comedy film Mrs Doubtfire was American actress, singer, producer, director, and screenwriter Sally Field.

France and Spain have coastlines on the Bay of Biscay which is home to some of the Atlantic Ocean's fiercest weather.

Quotables 05 December

 

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Friday, December 4, 2015

Trivia Bits 04 December

 

The Hanging of the Sigismund Bell

Polish painter Jan Matejko's 1874 painting The Hanging of the Sigismund Bell (pictured)received a golden medal in the Paris World's Fair of 1878 and now hangs in the National Museum, Warsaw.

Representative Edith Nourse Rogers sponsored the 1942 G.I. Bill and the legislation that created the Women's Army Corps before and until 2012 was the longest-serving woman in the U.S. Congress.

The African Grove Theater was founded by free blacks in New York City in 1821, when New York was still a slave state, and it launched the career of the great black Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge.

A rondeau, plural rondeaux, is a form of medieval and Renaissance French poetry, as well as the corresponding musical chanson form which is structured around a fixed pattern of repetition of material involving a refrain and is believed to have originated in dance songs involving alternating singing of the refrain elements by a group and of the other lines by a soloist.

The word honcho comes from a Japanese word meaning squad leader and first came into usage in the English language during the American occupation of Japan following World War II.

Establised in 1927, The Ryder Cup is a biennial men's golf competition between teams from Europe and the United States with the venue alternating between courses in the USA and Europe and is named after the English businessman Samuel Ryder who donated the trophy.

Born Nicolas Kim Coppola and known professionally as Nicolas Cage was born on January 7, 1964 in Long Beach, California, the son of August Floyd Coppola, a professor of literature, and Joy (Vogelsang), a dancer and choreographer.

Chetan Sharma, a former Indian cricketer, was the first Indian ever to get a ten wicket haul overseas, taking 10/188 against England in a Test Series in 1986.

Gold is mined at the Granny Smith Mine in Western Australia, is 20 kilometres (12 mi) south of Laverton, Western Australia near Mount Weld and was discovered in 1979 with the construction of the mine took place in the late 1980s.

The 1169 Sicily earthquake happened on the eve of the feast of St. Agatha and killed many who were gathered in the Catania Cathedral for the feast.

Quotables 04 December

 

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Thursday, December 3, 2015

Trivia Bits 03 December

 

Beavers

Beavers (pictured) are known for building dams, canals, and lodges (homes) with two main grouping of beaver – the Eurasian beaver and the North American beaver

American boxing trainer and cornerman, Angelo Dundee, best known for his work with Muhammad Ali during1960 to1981, was born Angelo Mirena on August 30, 1921 in Philadelphia of Italian descent.

The collective noun for lions is pride.

The largest group of freshwater lakes in the world, The Great Lakes contain 6 quadrillion gallons of fresh water which is approximately one-fifth of the world's fresh surface water.

Jodie Foster’s character in the 1991 American thriller film blending elements of crime and horror genres The Silence of the Lambs was Clarice Starling, a student at the FBI Academy who is sent her to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer, played by Anthony Hopkins.

The illegitimate son of Eddard Stark, the honorable lord of Winterfell, an ancient fortress in the North of the fictional kingdom of Westeros, Jon Snow, is played by English actor Kit Harrington in the 2011 premiered American fantasy drama television series Game of Thrones.

The bass player in the American fictional garage band The Archies was Reggie Mantle who with Archie Andrews and Jughead Jones formed the a group of adolescent characters of the Archie universe, in the context of the 1968 animated TV series, The Archie Show.

Commonly associated with the mental condition often called "split personality", or dissociative identity disorder where within the same body there exists more than one distinct personality, is described in the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a novella written by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson first published in 1886.

Polish film score composer Zbigniew Preisner wrote the title music for the monumental 1995 26 part BBC documentary People's Century.

In 1964, the inaugural men’s World Surfing champion was former Australian world surfing champion Bernard “Midget” Farrelly.

Quotables 03 December

 

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Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Trivia Bits 02 December

 

Anne Bancroft

Born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano in 1931 was actress Anne Bancroft (pictured) who won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her lead role in the 1962 movie The Miracle Worker as the teacher of teenage Helen Keller.

Originating in Derbyshire Dales, England, a shortcrust pastry is traditionally used in bakewell tarts topped with a layer of jam and a sponge using ground almonds.

The foil, sabre and épée are three weapons used in competitive fencing with classical fencing using the same three weapons, but approaches fencing as a martial art

The adrenal glands are a pair of endocrine glands situated immediately above the kidneys and are chiefly responsible for releasing hormones in response to stress through adrenaline (epinephrine) and noradrenaline.

In the Battle of San Juan Bautista fought on 27 February 1864 during the French intervention in Mexico, more Imperialist soldiers were wounded by machete cuts than gunshots.

The Zone Improvement Program Plan is better known as ZIP Codes used by the United States Postal Service (USPS) since 1963.

The Berlin Wall Memorial in Bernauer Straße includes a reconciliation chapel consecrated on 9th November 2000 on the site of a church in Ackerstraße that was destroyed because it stood in the border strip.

With a name derived from an aboriginal word meaning near the sea, Iluka is a small village at the mouth of the Clarence River in New South Wales, Australia.

Denzel Washington won the Best Actor Oscar for the 2001 American crime thriller film Training Day which co-starred Ethan Hawke with the story following two LAPD narcotics detectives over a 24-hour period in the gang neighbourhoods of North West and South Central Los Angeles.

The eighth century bishop and saint Rupert of Salzburg set up his base in the old Roman town of Juvavum and renamed it Salzburg

Quotables 02 December

 

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Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Trivia Bits 01 December

 

Kate Bush

English singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer Kate Bush (pictured) wrote her debut single Wuthering Heights when she was 18 years old, released it as her first single in January 1978 and the song is based on the novel of the same name by Emily Brontë with whom she shared her birthday of 30 July.

On 22 May 1990, the country of Yemen that had been divided into north and south since 1962, became a unified country and was home of the Sabaeans, a trading state that flourished for over a thousand years and probably also included parts of modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea.

An American computer scientist Robert Alan Eustace, who served as Senior Vice President of Knowledge at Google, holds the world record for the highest-altitude free fall jump of 135,889.108 ft or 25.736573 miles/41.419000 km since October 24, 2014.

Ichthyology, from Greek: ἰχθύς, ikhthus, "fish"; and λόγος, logos, "study", is the branch of biology devoted to the study of fishes.

Sue Rubin, the subject of the 2004 documentary film Autism Is a World, was considered mentally challenged until she learned to communicate with a keyboard with the documentary nominated in the 77th annual Academy Awards for Best Documentary Short Subject.

In 2013, a 20 metre meteor hit Chelyabinsk, Russia injuring more than 1,200 people.

Five of Australia’s 19 natural World Heritage Areas are located in Queensland and include Fraser Island, The Gondwana Rainforests, The Great Barrier Reef, Riversleigh fossil site and The Wet Tropics of Queensland.

Toxicodendron radicans is better known as poison ivy, a poisonous North American and Asian flowering plant well known for causing an itching, irritating, and sometimes painful rash in most people who touch it, caused by urushiol, a clear liquid compound in the sap of the plant.

Joseph Cornelius O’Rourke, an Irish Count born in Estonia, became a Russian Lieutenant General, and was honoured with a statue in Belgrade for his victory over the Ottoman Empire in 1810.

The first recorded strategic use of napalm incendiary bombs during World War 2 and was developed in 1942, in a secret laboratory at Harvard University in Massachusetts, by a team led by chemist Louis Fieser.

Quotables 01 December

 

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Monday, November 30, 2015

Trivia Bits 30 November

 

Woodstock Festival

Billed as An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music (poster pictured), The Woodstock Festival held near the town of Bethel, New York, from August 15 to 18, 1969.

Norwegian painter Mathias Stoltenberg, who died in poverty in 1871, was rediscovered following the 1914 Jubilee Exhibition in Kristiania, Oslo, and marked the centennial anniversary of the 1814 constitution and focused on industry and agriculture.

The Gothic-style Washington National Cathedral contains the remains of the only US president buried in Washington: Woodrow Wilson whilst William Howard Taft and John F. Kennedy are buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, VA.

The word tip dates back to the old London coffeehouses where conspicuously placed brass boxes etched with the inscription To Insure Promptness encouraged customers to pay for efficient service with the resulting acronym, TIP, becoming a byword.

Beginning in 1973 as an event to test the best sled dog mushers and teams but evolving into the highly competitive Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race which is an annual long-distance sled dog race run in early March from Anchorage to Nome and is officially set at 1,049 miles (1688 km), which honours Alaska's status as the 49th U.S. state.

The French word détente is used to describe the easing of strained relations, especially in a political situation.

World Asteroid Day is held on June 30 the day in 1908 when a 50 metre asteroid or comet crashed into Tunguska, Siberia with the explosion recorded to have knocked down trees and the shock waves caused were measured as far away as England.

Formicidae is the scientific name for ants that form colonies that range in size from a few dozen predatory individuals living in small natural cavities to highly organised colonies that may occupy large territories and consist of millions of individuals.

Mossman is a town on the Mossman River in Far North Queensland, Australia, which hosts the Bally Hooley Rail Tour tourist attraction where tourists from nearby Port Douglas can take an open carriage steam train to the town’s sugar mills.

Cable-stayed 5.4km bridge, the Suramadu Bridge, connecting the islands of Java and Madura, became the longest bridge in Indonesia after opening in June 2009.

Quotables 30 November

 

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Sunday, November 29, 2015

Trivia Bits 29 November

 

Mothers of Invention

American musician, bandleader, songwriter, composer, recording engineer, record producer, and film director Frank Zappa performed with a band called the Mothers of Invention (pictured) with Zappa producing almost all of the more than 60 albums he released with the band The Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist.

The French inventor Félix du Temple accomplished a short flight with his steam-powered aircraft Monoplane in 1874 often considered the first manned powered flight in history.

Ray Charles Robinson was an American singer-songwriter, musician and composer known as Ray Charles who started to lose his sight at the age of five and went completely blind by the age of seven, apparently due to glaucoma.

Liverpool Football Club in the early 1960s began a signature tradition by using the song You’ll Never Walk Alone from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel.

The capital of Brunei, the Nation of Brunei, the Abode of Peace, is Bandar Seri Begawan with Brunei rated the fifth-richest nation out of 182, based on its petroleum and natural gas fields.

2012 Australian rhythmic gymnastics Olympian Janine Murray had difficulties getting to school while growing up in Zimbabwe because of petrol shortages.

Comparing the death tolls of hurricanes with male and female names between 1950 and 2012, US scientists found the females have, on average, killed more than the males.

The bombing of Dresden was a major American and British attack that took place in the final months of the Second World War in the European Theatre from 13 to 15 February 1945.

The Costa Brava is a coastal region in the north-east of Spain with the coast named Costa Brava by Ferran Agulló i Vidal in an article published in the Catalan newspaper La Veu de Catalunya in September 1908.

In the 1936 Siege of the Alcázar, around 1000 Spanish Nationalists in Toledo held a medieval castle for two months despite aerial and artillery bombardments and a sustained assault by 8000 Republican troops.

Quotables 29 November

 

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