Trivia Bits 13 April

 

English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy, and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh (pictured) was well known for popularising tobacco in England and possibly introducing potatoes to Ireland.

The Amaryllis, a Canadian cargo ship built in 1945, was sunk off the coast of Florida and used as an artificial reef after being wrecked by Hurricane Betsy in 1965.

Queen Elizabeth II made the German trumpeter and conductor Ludwig Güttler an officer of the OBE, in recognition of his 1994–2004 efforts to reconstruct the Frauenkirche in Dresden destroyed during World War II, a Lutheran church in Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony.

Australian actress and model Brooke Satchwell’s character was Sophia Marinkovitch in the 2002 Australian television series White Collar Blue which dealt with a division of the police force working in the city of Sydney.

Bungy jumping was invented by AJ Hackett, of New Zealand in the mid 1980's who based it on some tribal practices of a south Pacific island tribe, who jump from a tall. rickety wooden tower and rely on vines tied around one leg to stop their fall.

English athlete George Larner is the only gold medallist in the history of the Olympic Games in both the men's 3,500 metres and 10 miles walk both at the London 1908 Summer Olympics.

An egg of the extinct elephant bird given to David Attenborough in 1960 inspired the making of his 2011 documentary Attenborough and the Giant Egg which explores the history of the elephant bird, what led to its extinction, and the role of conservation in preventing the extinction of critically endangered species.

In 2015 Marjorie Davey, from Burnie Tasmania, writer of short stories, published her first novel at the age of 95 which is an historical fiction Never to Return telling the stories of English boys sent across the world to a harsh, isolated prison in the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land.

It is in Tanzania that the Serengeti National Park can be explored which is famous for its annual migration of over 1.5 million white bearded (or brindled) wildebeest and 250,000 zebra and for its numerous Nile crocodile.

Renée Smith is an American actress best known for portraying Nell Jones, an NCIS Intelligence Analyst, on NCIS: Los Angeles.