Trivia Bits 18 November

 

A group of monkeys are known as a troop (pictured).

The light cruiser Oyodo of the Imperial Japanese Navy was Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa's flagship after the aircraft carrier Zuikaku was sunk during WWII's Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Best known for his Civil War novel Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, American Civil War-era novelist John William DeForest coined the phrase the Great American Novel as the title for his 1869 essay published in US weekly magazine The Nation.

Emma Constance Stone, who in 1890 became the first woman to be registered with the Medical Board of Victoria, became the first woman to practice medicine in Australia and played an important role in founding the Queen Victoria Hospital in Melbourne.

The two main insects in the Lepidoptera order of species are moths and butterflies both called lepidopterans.

Frank Music Company on West 54th Street, New York opened in 1937 supplied generations of instrumentalists, singers and composers including pianist Emanuel Ax and violinist Pamela Frank prior to closing in 2015.

Burrata, a fresh Italian cheese, is made from cream and mozzarella and is a typical product of the Murgie in Puglia, a region in the south of Italy.

Used in Spain until the mid-19th Century, doubloons were 32-real gold coin, weighing 6.77 grams (0.218 troy ounces) being were minted in Spain, Mexico, Peru, and Nueva Granada with the term first used to describe the golden excelente either because of its value of two ducats or because of the double portrait of Ferdinand and Isabella.

The Ombla River near Dubrovnik, Croatia, is claimed to be the shortest river in the world, flowing approximately 30 metres (98 feet) before emptying into the Adriatic Sea.

Thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road, reaching the Crimea by 1343, the Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people and peaking in Europe in the years 1346–53.