1. Members of the Royal 22e Regiment, also known as the Van Doos (corruption of the French vingt-deux) performed at Buckingham Palace’s Changing of the Guard to as part of the regiment’s 100th anniversary celebrations.
2. The Danish West Indies are today the US Virgin Islands: St Thomas, St John and St Croix, ceded to the United States in 1916 for 25,000,000 in gold. In exchange, the Danes also demanded and received a declaration that the United States had no objection to Denmark extending its political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.
3. Gloria Vanderbilt’s aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was a sculptress who founded the Whitney Museum in New York City.
4. Karst is a landscape formation created by water erosion on carbonate rock – limestone, marble and dolomites, eg – over many thousands of years, resulting in the likes of caves, sinkholes and disappearing underground streams.
5. Wormholes, predicted by the General Theory of Relativity, are hypothetical passages through space-time that could create shortcuts for journeys across the universe.
