Trivia Bits 26 September

 

 

Snugglepot and Cuddlepie are the two best known Gumnut babies found in a series of books written by Australian author May Gibbs first published in 1918 (cover pictured).

Starring as Ren McCormack in the 1984 American musical-drama film directed by Herbert Ross Footloose was American actor, musician and philanthropist Kevin Bacon.

Active roughly from 1830 through 1870, the Barbizon school of painters existed in the 19th century from the village of Barbizon in north-central France with painters like Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet amongst the leaders.

The title song to the 1978 movie Grease was performed by Frankie Valli, an American popular singer, most famous as frontman of The Four Seasons beginning in 1960.

The world's first anti-influenza drug, Relenza, was invented in Australia by the Victorian College of Pharmacy, Monash University, and Biota Holdings in 1996

Mexican American Cesar Millan is a renowned expert in dogs widely known for his television series Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan, broadcast in more than eighty countries worldwide from 2004 to 2012.

A parsec consists of 3.26 light years and is a unit of length used to measure the astronomically large distances to objects outside the Solar System.

Having a worldwide breakthrough hit song with I Should Be So Lucky in 1988 was Australian recording artist and songwriter Kylie Minogue following a 29 December 1987 release by Mushroom Records and PWL Records with its now-iconic image of Minogue on the front cover was shot by David Levine.

The Ore Mountains in Central Europe have formed a natural border between Saxony and Bohemia for many centuries and are oriented in a southwest-northeast direction being about 150 km long and, on average, about 40 km wide.

Founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen, The Lego Group is a family-owned company based in Billund, Denmark, and best known for the manufacture of Lego brand toys with the word Lego derived from the Danish words "leg godt", meaning "play well."

Quotables 26 September

 

Trivia Bits 25 September

 

Featured as the twelfth and final track on their 1991 album Innuendo (cover pictured), the song The Show Must Go On by the British rock band Queen was written by guitarist Brian May, and is about lead singer Freddie Mercury's desire to continue making music even as his health was deteriorating.

Barbers at one time combined shaving and haircutting with bloodletting and pulling teeth hence the white stripes on a field of red that spiral down a barber pole represent the bandages used in the bloodletting.

The U.S. National Arboretum, the new D.C. Convention Center, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Corcoran Gallery of Art are all located on or near New York Avenue in Washington, D.C.

The city of Ulan Bator or Ulaanbaatar is the capital and the largest city in the country of Mongolia, is the centre of Mongolia's road network and is connected by rail to both the Trans-Siberian Railway in Russia and the Chinese railway system.

The Russian victory at Molodi in 1572 put a stop to the northward expansion of the Ottoman Empire into present-day Russia.

The poems of German poet and writer Richard Dehmel were set to music by composers like Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Arnold Schönberg and Kurt Weill, or inspired them to write music.

Wedge Antilles, portrayed by Scottish actor and director Denis Lawson, is a supporting character in the film franchise Star Wars and was a starfighter pilot for the Rebel Alliance, and founded Rogue Squadron with his friend Luke Skywalker.

Lennie Small is the main character in the novel Of Mice and Men written by Nobel Prize–winning author John Steinbeck in 1937 and tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in California, United States.

Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton and Felipe Massa were the drivers place first, second and third in the 2015 Austrian Formula One Grand Prix.

On September 21, 2005, passengers aboard JetBlue Airways Flight 292 were able to watch their own malfunctioning aircraft circle Los Angeles International Airport on the satellite television screens at each seat until the flight crew disabled the system in preparation for the aircraft's successful emergency landing.

Quotables 25 September

 

Trivia Bits 24 September

 

Originally created around the year 1580, the lion appears on the centre of the Finland’s coat of arms (pictured) with the crowned lion being on a red field, the right forepaw replaced with an armoured hand brandishing a sword, trampling on a sabre with the hind-paws.

From the area of the Peshawar valley in Pakistan, the Buner reliefs depict scenes of ancient Greeks in India during the 1st century.

The currency of Iran is the Rial with The Unicode Standard having a compatibility character defined Rial sign ﷼.

In gradings for karate, the brown belt is awarded prior to the black belt after starting at White and progressing through Yellow, Orange, Green, Blue, Brown, Black and Red and White.

Following Ottoman rule, Qatar became a British protectorate in the early 20th century and declared its independence from the United Kingdom in 1971

Australian actress of screen and stage Cate Blanchett played Queen Elizabeth I in the 1998 movie Elizabeth, for which she won the British Academy Award for Best Actress (BAFTA) and a Golden Globe award, and earned her first Academy Award for Best Actress nomination.

Ichthyology is the study of fish with the word derived from Greek: ἰχθύς, ikhthus, "fish"; and λόγος, logos, "study".

Later retitled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the original Star Wars movie was released in 1977 and was written and directed by George Lucas, staring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, and Alec Guinness.

Musician and composer Nicolas-Charles Bochsa, who helped found the Royal Academy of Music in 1822, was only in London because he had fled France five years earlier to avoid prosecution for multiple counts of forgery and fraud.

Great Uncle Walter is a character from the children’s animated TV series Little Princess which debuted in the United Kingdom in 2006 with English stage, screen and television actress Jane Horrocks providing the voice of the Little Princess.

Quotables 24 September

 

Trivia Bits 23 September

 

Brimstone (pictured), California Dogface and Painted Lady are species of butterflies.

Described as new to science in 2011 in the journal Mycologia, Spongiforma squarepantsii is a type of mushroom with two specimens collected in 2010 in Lambir Hills National Park, in Sarawak, Malaysia.

Due to World War II, the cancelled 1944 Winter Olympics were to be held in Italy at Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy but did host the 1956 Winter Olympics.

Bastille Day is a French National Day that commemorates the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and in 1979, concert with Jean Michel Jarre on the Place de la Concorde in Paris to celebrate Bastille Day attracted one million people, securing an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the largest crowd at an outdoor concert.

Holi is an annual ancient festival associated with Hinduism and is also known as the festival of colours or the festival of love signifying the victory of good over evil and is celebrated at the end of winter, on the last full moon day of the lunar month Phalgun in either February or March.

Held in the town of Pushkar in the state of Rajasthan , India, the annual five-day camel and livestock fair, the Pushkar Fair is the world's largest camel/cattle fair.

In relation to the categories in the board game Pictionary, the acronym AP stands for All Play.

Epicarp is a botanical term for the outermost layer of the pericarp or fruit forming the tough outer skin of the fruit, which bears oil glands and pigments and is sometimes called the exocarp especially in citrus.

Pristina is the capital of Kosova a self-declared state proclaimed in 1990 by the assembly of Kosovo.

Items on display at the Royal New Zealand Navy's Torpedo Bay Navy Museum include the Māori warrior's skirt which the captain of the battlecruiser HMS New Zealand wore for good luck in battle during World War 1.

Quotables 23 September

 

Trivia Bits 22 September

 

 

Harmony of the Seas (pictured), the world’s largest cruise ship as of June 2015, was built in France with 2,744 passenger staterooms with a capacity of 6,360 passengers (5,488 double occupancy) as well as 1,197 crew cabins capable of berthing the 2,100 crew.

Literally meaning a red dwarf, nain rouge appeared as a small childlike creature with red or black fur boots and is a mythical creature that some believe originated in Normandy, France.

With a capacity of about 15 - 20mL, the tablespoon with an abbreviation of TBS which is a measurement that the cautious might use in determining how much brandy to put in the Christmas mince-pie recipe.

In the United Kingdom and Australia a tuck shop is a small food retailer found in schools often run in Australia by the school using parental volunteers.

Fort Story at Cape Henry in Virginia Beach, Virginia was the site of the first landing of the Jamestown settlers in 1607, and the Cape Henry Lighthouse, first in the U.S., in 1792.

2014 American comedy-drama film directed by Lasse Hallström The Hundred-Foot Journey starring Helen Mirren tells the story of a feud between two adjacent restaurants in a French town: one operated by a recently relocated Indian family and the other a Michelin-starred restaurant.

The first multi-focal contact lenses were invented by Stephen Newman, an optical research scientist in Australia, in 1992.

At the Cannes Film Festival that The Palme d'Or /The Golden Palm is awarded every year to the director of the Best Feature Film of the Official Competition, and presented in a case of pure red Morocco leather lined with white suede.

An envoy could be either a diplomatic agent or a postscript to a poetic composition.

A private citizen, Avabai Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, entirely funded the 1841 to 1846 construction of the Mahim Causeway, a major throughfare connecting the island city of Mumbai (Bombay) with its north-western suburbs.

Quotables 22 September

 

Trivia Bits 21 September

 

 

The Painted Desert is located in South Australia to the north-east of Coober Pedy, is just a few miles away from Arckaringa Station and is notable also for its distinctive mesas, mountains and geological formations.

Berri, South Australia, the original home of the Berri juice company, is on the north bank of the Murray River which, at 2,508 kilometres (1,558 mi) in length, is Australia's longest river.

Bananas are perennial crops grown and harvested year-round that does not grow from a seed but rather from a rhizome or bulb with each fleshy bulb sprouting new shoots year after year.

In the American state of Florida are the Everglades, one of the largest wetlands in the world and are of a complex system of interdependent ecosystems that include cypress swamps, the estuarine mangrove forests of the Ten Thousand Islands, tropical hardwood hammocks, pine rockland, and the marine environment of Florida Bay.

Stringybark Creek, the site where the Kelly Gang killed policemen in the 1870’s is located in Victoria, Australia.

Playing the schoolteacher Miss Elizabeth McKenzie in the 1977 Australian TV series The Restless Years was Australian actress and author prominent in theatre and television June Salter who was best known for her character roles.

Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, Seamus Heaney began his 1999 translation of Beowulf with the word So.

Opened in 2011, The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is located within the Moorilla winery on the Berriedale Peninsula in Hobart, Tasmania.

DVD audio commentaries were introduced as laserdisc features to appeal to hardcore movie fans and are an additional audio track consisting of a lecture or comments by one or more speakers, that plays in real time with video with the first audio commentary featured on the Criterion Collection release of the original King Kong movie, on laserdisc in December 1984.

The Night Witches, the English translation of Nachthexen, were a group of female pilots who fought for the Soviet Union during World War 2 and flew harassment bombing and precision bombing missions against the German military from 1942 to the end of the war.

Quotables 21 September

 

Trivia Bits 20 September

 

 

The patron saint of dentists is St. Apollonia (pictured) who reportedly had her teeth pulled out in 249 AD by an anti-Christian mob.

Discovered in 1687 by Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius, Sextans is the faint constellation on the celestial equator near Leo and Hydra.

The commonly used spice of ginger is the rhizome of the plant zingiber officinale which is indigenous to southern China, from whence it is spread to the Spice Islands and other parts of Asia, and subsequently to West Africa and to the Caribbean.

Written by former child rockabilly star Larry Collins and songwriter Alex Harvey, the song Delta Dawn was first sung by Tanya Tucker in 1972, was turned down by Barbra Streisand before gaining widespread pop success by Helen Reddy in 1973.

Australian professional tennis player Lleyton Hewitt was 20 years old when he became the youngest make to be ranked World Number 1 in singles tennis in 2001.

English author Enid Blyton created the children’s character Noddy a little wooden boy from Toyland, that first appeared in the Sunday Graphic on 5 June 1949, and in November that year Noddy Goes to Toyland, the first of at least two dozen books in the series, was published.

In the Gulf of Mirabello in northeastern Crete, the islet of Pseira has an archaeological history from the end of the Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age with the Minoan ruins being the most studied.

Denzel Washington played Rubin Carter in the 1999 biographical movie The Hurricane, the story of former middleweight boxer who was convicted for a triple homicide in a bar in Paterson, New Jersey.

American voice actor, Mel Blanc, was known as the man of a thousand voices and is best remembered for his work with Warner Bros. as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote, the Tasmanian Devil and many of the other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoon short films.

The Super Buddies, a team of DC Comics superheroes, were a comedic Justice League offshoot who first appeared in the Eisner Award-winning miniseries Formerly Known as the Justice League in 2003.

Quotables 20 September