Accounting

The ancient Romans were obsessed with record keeping. Their military bases kept detailed accounts on everything from how much grain was in their stores to how many nails were in their workshops.

St Matthew the Evangelist, author of the first of the Gospels, is the patron saint of accountants. He is also the patron saint of tax collectors, bookkeepers, stock brokers and bankers. Matthew was a tax collector for the King of Judea (Herod) when Jesus called him to be one of his first Disciples.　

Saint Matthew and the Angel (1661) by Rembrandt.

Cost accounting is mentioned in the Bible Luke 14 v 28 says “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it?"　

The word "accountant" comes from the French word “compter,” which means to count or score. Over time, the “p” was dropped in both spelling and pronunciation.

During the 13th century bankers from north Italy, collectively known as Lombards, gradually replaced the Jews in their traditional role as money-lenders to the rich and powerful. Creative accountancy enhanced by the recent invention of double-entry book-keeping enabling them to avoid the Christian sin of usury interest on a loan was presented in the accounts either as a voluntary gift from the borrower or as a reward for the risk taken.

In 13th century western Europe, businessmen commonly opened on their books an account for “Messer le Bon Dieu” or “God Esquire”. When a contract was signed, God was called in as a witness and received a penny.

The first manual on a double-entry bookkeeping system was written by Benedikt Kotruljević in 1458.

The Summa de arithmetica, thought to be the first printed work on algebra, contains a description of double-entry accounting. Written by Luca Pacioli and first published in 1494, it describes the accounting methods then in use among northern-Italian merchants, including double-entry bookkeeping, trial balances, balance sheets and various other tools still employed by professional accountants.

The phrase "to square accounts with someone" means to get even with a person or take revenge on him or her. The expression derives from "squaring accounts" in bookkeeping, so that the debit balances the credit.

Italian mathematician and Franciscan friar Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli wrote a book on double-entry accounting in 1494. Although double-entry bookkeeping had been around for centuries, Pacioli’s 27-page treatise on the subject has earned him the title “The Father of Modern Accounting.”

Bubble gum was invented in 1928 by accountant Walter Dimer.

The state of New York gave its first certified public accountant (CPA) exam in 1896.

Michael Böllner, the German actor who portrayed Augustus Gloop in the 1971 classic Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, only acted in that one film. Afterward, he returned to Germany and eventually became a tax accountant. He didn’t continue a career in acting and lived a relatively private life. For many years, he had no idea how beloved and iconic the movie had become, especially in the United States. It wasn't until he was invited to a fan convention decades later — where he saw the immense enthusiasm and nostalgia surrounding the film — that he fully realized its impact.

Times Square Tower and 5 Times Square, across the street from each other, were built for rival accounting firms during a redevelopment of New York City's Times Square. 

"Bookkeeping" is the only word in the English language with three consecutive sets of double letters.

Accordion

The accordion is a musical instrument of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type. Box-like in form, and small enough to be portable, it comprises a pair of bellows with many folds and a keyboard of up to 50 keys.

An accordion-like instrument called the Handäoline was invented by Friedrich Buschmann in Berlin, Germany, in 1822.

Viennese organ and piano manufacturer Cyrill Demian patented the first actual accordion on May 23, 1829. It was the first instrument to be called  "accordion" and was named thus because the buttons of the left hand manual produced both bass notes and preset chords.  (The word 'accordion' derives from the German word 'akkord', meaning chord or harmony.)

8-key bisonoric diatonic accordion (c. 1830) By Henry Doktorski - Wikipedia Commons

The concertina, invented in 1829 by Sir Charles Wheatstone, is a small, hexagonal, accordion-like instrument made in single-action and double-action versions.

Hugo Herrmann composed the first piece for a solo accordion entitled "Sieben neue Spielmusikenin" in 1927.

In the 1990s it was compulsory for all North Korean school teachers to learn to play the accordion which was known as the "people’s instrument". They needed to pass an accordion test before getting their teaching certification.

The accordion is played by compressing or expanding the bellows to generate a flow of air, while pressing buttons or keys to open valves (called pallets). This directs the air across strips of brass or steel (called reeds) that vibrate to produce sound inside the body.

Castelfidardo, Italy has arguably produced and exported the most accordions ever.

The accordion is the designated instrument for the city of Detroit.

There is a tradition of accordion polka-based music in Mexico due to a large migration of Germans to Mexico in the 1800's.

By the time she was four-years-old, Connie Francis was appearing regularly at talent contests, pageants, and other neighborhood festivities as a singer and accordion player.

Al Yankovic is not related to Frankie Yankovic, "America's Polka King." However, both Yankovics became famous for playing the accordion.

Another name for the accordion is a squeeze box.

Here's a list of pop songs featuring the accordion.

Accident

The first ever first self-propelled road vehicle was built by Nicholas-Joseph Cugenot in France in 1770 to pull cannon for the army.  Cugenot was also responsible for the first ever motor vehicle crash when he drove into a stone wall in Paris.

As a child Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, was accident-prone. He survived a three story fall, a gunpowder explosion, falling onto a hot cast-iron frying pan, burning his side, drinking a bowl of sulfuric water, a near-poisoning due to furniture varnish, and falling into a speeding river - all before the age of nine. His neighbors called him "Little Sax, the ghost" .

The first man killed by a train was David Brook, a Leeds, Yorkshire carpenter. On December 5, 1821, he was walking home in a sleet storm along the lines of the Middleton freight railway when he was run over with fatal results.

1822 locomotive (Railway Magazine, 100, October 1905 Wikipedia

The first road accident victims in a self-propelled vehicle occurred in 1834 when five passengers died in a steam coach crash at Paisley, Scotland.

The first pedestrian knocked down and killed by an automobile in Britain was a certain Bridget Driscoll. According to eye-witness accounts, on August 17, 1896, she walked in front of a Benz vehicle going four miles an hour (6.4 km/h) at Crystal Palace and was so startled that she stood rooted to the spot and was struck.

69-year-old Henry Hale Bliss was the first person killed by a motor vehicle accident in the United States. On September 13, 1899 he was disembarking from a streetcar at West 74th Street and Central Park West in New York City, when an electric-powered taxicab struck him and crushed his head and chest. He died from his injuries the next morning. Arthur Smith, the driver of the taxicab, was arrested and charged with manslaughter but was acquitted on the grounds that it was unintentional.

Henry Bliss, 1873

The first mortality in an airplane crash was Lieutenant Thomas E. Selfridge who was the passenger when Orville Wright crashed a US War Department test plane in on September 17, 1908 after losing control at 75 feet. Orville broke a leg and two ribs.

Crashed Wright Flyer that took the life of Tom Selfridge

The worst rapid transit accident in US history occurred on November 1, 1918 in Brooklyn, New York City, when a five-car train derailed in the Malbone Street tunnel after negotiating a curve too quickly. 97 were killed at the site, and five later died of their injuries.

In 1920, Boulder, Colorado’s first (two day old) police car crashed into the city’s first fire truck while responding to a call. The accident killed three people, including the chief of police.

Guglielmo Marconi, the developer of the wireless, lost the use of his right eye in an automobile accident.

Because of the blackouts introduced in Britain during World War II, a 20 mph speed limit in darkness was introduced in 1940 in an attempt to combat the high number of road accidents.

Murphy's law is an adage that is typically stated as: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. It is named after aerospace engineer, who worked on safety-critical systems Edward A. Murphy Jr. (January 11, 1918 – July 17, 1990) and is a misinterpretation of his statement "If there's more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then he [his assistant] will do it that way."

A 17-year-old girl, Juliane Diller, was the sole survivor of 92 passengers and crew in the December 24, 1971 crash of LANSA Flight 508 in the Peruvian rain forest. While still strapped to her seat, she fell 10,000 feet from the aircraft and landed down into the Amazon rain forest, where she trekked through the jungle for 10 days until she was rescued by local forestry workers.

The deadliest road accident in U.S. history was the 1976 Yuba City bus disaster when 29 were killed in Martinez, California.

The worst aviation accident in history occurred on March 27, 1977 when two Boeing 747 airliners collided on a foggy runway on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, killing 583 (all 248 on KLM and 335 on Pan Am). 61 survived on the Pan Am flight.

During takeoff from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on May 25, 1979, an engine detached from American Airlines Flight 191, causing a crash that killed a total of 273 people, the deadliest aviation accident in United States history.

On October 20, 1986, two Russian airline pilots Alexander Kliuyev and Gennady Zhirnov, got into an argument over whether one could land the plane without vision. Kliuyev pulled the curtains over the windows, insisting he could. The aircraft touched down at a speed of 174 miles per hour (280 km/h) and came to rest upside down killing 70 of the passengers.

The deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in history occurred when the MV Doña Paz sank on December 20, 1987 after colliding with an oil tanker in the Tablas Strait in the Philippines, resulting in an estimated 4,385 deaths. 

Road accidents are the leading cause of death around the world for people aged 15-29.

The odds of dying in a car accident are 1 in 5000. Odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 11 million.

Around the world traffic accidents kill more than 1.25 million people a year and injure 50 million.

In Texas, there hasn't been a single day without a deadly car accident since November 7, 2000.

Silver-colored cars are the least likely to be involved in motor accidents, because they’re most visible on the road and in low light.

Eighty per cent of plane crashes occur in the first three or last eight minutes of a flight.

On average you could fly every day for 123,000 years before being in a fatal crash.

An average passenger travelling on Western-built planes would have to take over 5.3 million flights before being involved in an accident.

In the US between 1983 and 2000, there were 568 plane crashes. 51,207 of the 53,487 people aboard, got out alive: a survival rate of 96%.

69% of people in the rear of an airplane survive crashes, compared to 49%, at the front.

The day after Memorial Day starts the "100 Deadliest Days" for teen drivers in the US, where fatal accidents involving teen drivers increase by 15% compared to the rest of the year.

On Super Bowl Sunday, pizza delivery drivers get into more accidents than on any other day of the year.

Your bedroom is the scene of about 40 percent of all accidents in the home. No other room in your home ranks higher.

Accent

Americans didn’t lose their British accent – rather they kept the accents the arrived with and the British accent evolved differently. Today’s Americans probably sound more like the British of the past than do today's Brits.

It's thought that Received Pronunciation - the traditional "cut-glass" English accent - only emerged relatively recently, in the 19th century.  Because the Received Pronunciation accent was regionally "neutral" and easy to understand, it spread across England and the empire through the armed forces, the civil service and, later, the BBC.

American elites, actors, and announcers in the 1920s were taught to speak in this iconic, "all-treble" accent, the era's preferred pronunciation for topics of high society and culture.

The Transatlantic accent was developed mainly in private independent preparatory schools especially in the American Northeast and in acting schools during the 1930s and 1940s. Although it became fashionable in Hollywood and related media, the accent's overall usage declined following World War II.

The stereotypical American southern accent is an aristocratic British accent with a southern lilt.

William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, the radio traitor was captured because of his ‘Jairmany calling’ accent. Passing two British Army officers who were gathering sticks in a wood near the German border, Joyce remarked that he too often collected firewood there. One officer said: "You’re William Joyce — I’d know your voice anywhere."

Wilfred Pickles was a northern English BBC newsreader during the Second World War. Because of his strong Yorkshire accent, he was chosen for the job as "a deliberate attempt to make it more difficult for Nazis to impersonate BBC broadcasters".

Dick Van Dyke was unaware of his horrifically bad Cockney accent in the 1964 film Mary Poppins. None of his fellow actors said a word about it.

Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't allowed to dub his own role in Terminator in German, as his accent is considered very rural by German/Austrian standards and it would be too ridiculous to have a death machine from the future come back in time and sound like a hillbilly.

Before his success, the actor James Franco would practice different accents on the customers he served at McDonald's.

Many languages are split into regional dialects. Accents in Britain change noticeably every 25 miles.

Singers with accents (e.g British accent) sing with an "American" or "neutral" accent because it is simply the easiest way to sing. Words are drawn out and more powerfully pronounced making the accents "neutral". It's not done intentionally.

A study by researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich found that researchers who spent the winter at the British Antarctic Survey Halley Research Station started to develop a new accent. The study found that the researchers' accents changed in a number of ways, including:

They started to pronounce their vowels longer.

They started to pronounce the "ou" sound in words like "flow" and "disco" from the front of their mouth, as opposed to the back of their throats.

They started to use different intonation patterns.

In real life, the dwarves from J.R.R Tolkien's books would have Arabic or Hebrew accents, since he based their speech on Semitic languages.

Babies have accents, which they pick up in the womb. For example, a French infant's cry will end with a rising note, while German bundles of joy have a dropping note at the end of theirs.

Cats have accents. Phonetics researchers have suggested that cats and their humans develop a "pidgin language" together to communicate, which may influence regional variations in cat vocalizations.

Cows have different 'moo' accents depending on what region in the world they live in. 

Academy Award

HISTORY

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was founded in Los Angeles on May 11, 1927, with just 230 members. One of its first committees suggested it might be a good idea to hold an annual award ceremony — and the Oscars was born.

The first Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored the best films of 1927 and 1928 and took place on May 16, 1929, at a private dinner held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. AMPAS president Douglas Fairbanks hosted the show.

The first Academy Awards was at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Date, May 16, 1929 ...

The first winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, and the only silent film to achieve that honor, was the 1927 movie, Wings.

Only 12 awards were given out at the first Oscars and the entire ceremony lasted just 15 minutes.

The guests at the first Academy Awards ceremony knew who had won three months in advance but still paid $5 a ticket for their seats.

The Academy Award was rumored to have gotten its nickname of Oscar for its resemblance to a film librarian’s Uncle Oscar.

Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to be awarded an Oscar, winning Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind at the 1940 Academy Awards. When McDaniel won she was seated at a segregated table at the back of the room.

After winning her Academy Award, McDaniel was accused of being an Uncle Tom by the NAACP to which she responded that she would, "rather make seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid than seven dollars being one".

Hattie McDaniel studio publicity photo

The Academy Awards were first broadcast on television by NBC on March 19, 1953; The first color broadcast was in 1966.

Sidney Poitier became on April 13, 1964 the first African-American male to win the Best Actor Academy Award for the 1963 film Lilies of the Field. The film tells the story of an itinerant worker who helps a group of nuns build a chapel in the desert. Poitier's performance in the film was widely praised and his win was seen as a major milestone for African-American actors in Hollywood, who had long been marginalized and excluded from many leading roles. 

Sidney Poitier won in 1963 for his performance in Lilies of the Field, thus 

RECORDS

The youngest movie star to win an Academy Award was Shirley Temple who won an Oscar in 1934 at the age of 6.

The longest Oscar acceptance speech was made by Greer Garson for 1942's Mrs. Miniver. It took an hour.

The shortest Oscar speech ever was given by 16-year-old Patty Duke in 1962.  The winner of Best Supporting Actress for her role as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962), Duke said "Thank You", then walked off the stage.

Actress Tatum O’Neal is the youngest Oscar winner in history. She accepted the trophy for best supporting actress for her role as Addie in Paper Moon in 1973 when she was 10-years-old.

Jessica Tandy is the oldest winner of an Academy Award. She won the 1989 Best Actress award for Driving Miss Daisy at the age of 80 years and 9 months. She beat George Burns for that distinction by just a few months.

Christopher Plummer is the oldest winner in any acting category; he was 82 when he won for the 2010 movie Beginners.

Clint Eastwood became the oldest person to win the Best Director Oscar when on February 27, 2005, at age of 74, he won the gong for Million Dollar Baby.

Bob Hope holds the record for hosting the most Academy Awards, having emceed or co-emceed 19 ceremonies between 1940 and 1978.

Composer John Williams is the most Oscar-nominated living person - with 54 nominations and five wins. Walt Disney holds the all-time nomination record with 59. 

Peter O'Toole was nominated for eight Academy Awards. He holds the record of having the most nominations for an acting Oscar without winning.

Hollywood sound man Greg P Russell holds the record for most Academy Award nominations with no wins. He's been nominated 17 times for 17 different films.

Sound mixer Kevin O'Connell did hold the record for most Oscar nominations without a win: 20. He finally won for Hacksaw Ridge at the 2017 ceremony.

Steven Spielberg is the most thanked person in Oscar acceptance speeches. God is #6 just behind Peter Jackson.

Films that have won most Oscars are Ben-Hur (1952), Titanic (1997) and Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King (2003), which each won 11.

In 1986, both The Color Purple and Out Of Africa received 11 Oscar nominations without winning any. This is also a record.

FUN OSCAR FACTS

A ventriloquist's dummy won an Oscar in 1937. Charlie McCarthy, a wooden dummy invented by Edgar Bergen, father of film star Candice Bergen, won it for best comedy creation

Only one man named Oscar has won an Oscar. He was Oscar Hammerstein who won two Academy Awards in the 1940s from lyrics to The Last Time I Saw Paris and It Might As Well Be Spring.

The most famous Oscar tie ever was in 1969 when Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn tied for Best Actress.

Kenneth Branagh is the first actor ever to be nominated in five different Oscar categories: Best Director, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Live-Action Short and Supporting Actor. He’s yet to win one.

No movie has ever won all four acting awards at the Oscars (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress) and only three have ever won three out of the four: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Network (1976), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).

Three movies have swept the top five major awards (best picture, actor, actress, director and screenplay). Those films were, It Happened One Night (1934), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar for Silence of the Lambs with only 16 minutes of screentime.

Sylvester Stallone is the only actor that has two Academy Award nominations for playing the same character, (Rocky Balboa) 39 years apart.

Cate Blanchett's Academy Award for playing Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator made her the only actor to win an Oscar for portraying another Oscar-winning actor.

Matthew McConaughey turned down a whopping $15 million to play Magnum Pi in favor of less than $200,000 to star in Dallas Buyers Club. He was compensated with the 2014 Best Actor Oscar.

An Oscar trophy weighs 8.5 pounds and stands 13.5 inches tall. Clutching an Oscar feels like holding a gallon of milk.

Wikipedia

One thing Academy Award winners can’t do is sell their statue for a profit. Since 1950, recipients have been required to sign an agreement promising that neither they nor their heirs will sell their statuette without first offering it back to the Academy for $1.

The actual Oscar award trophy is estimated to be worth about $150.

The model for the Oscar statuette is said to have been Mexican actor Emilio Fernandez.

Kate Winslet keeps her Oscar for The Reader in the bathroom so her guests can hold it and make acceptance speeches in the mirror without feeling self conscious.

Jack Nicholson is said to have used one of his Oscar trophies as a hat stand.

Disney is the only major studio to never win an Oscar for Best Picture.

Here is a list of songs that won Oscars

Sources: Daily Express, International Business Times

Abraham

Abraham (d c1850 BC) was a rich farmer who lived in Ur in Southern Babylonia

With his father Terah, wife Sarah and nephew Lot and flocks and herds Abraham left for a foreign land, wandering through desert places, seeking a country where he could worship God in his own way.

Proceeding to Canaan, Abraham received there God’s promise that he would be the father of a great nation, and that his descendants would be greatly blessed.

Still childless at the age of 76, Abraham subsequently fathered Ishmael with his wife's maidservant Hagar, and eventually, at the age of 100, Isaac with Sarah.

Legend has it that Abraham's aged wife Sarah bathed in the Dead Sea before conceiving Isaac.

Abraham trusted God so deeply that he was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac, but God prevented him from doing this.

Sacrifice of Isaac is a painting by Rembrandt

From his son Isaac, Abraham became the father of the Jewish nation together with Judaism and Christianity. Also through Ishmael he became the father of the Arab people together with Islam.

Abraham saw God in control of everything and established firmly that basis of monotheism which made the Jews a people apart, and thus the only race capable of producing Jesus, and of becoming the inspiration of Christianity.

Genesis chapter 17 describes the circumcision of Abraham and his relatives and slaves, making him the first named individual to undergo the procedure.

Abraham had six more sons after Sarah died.

Abraham is greatly revered both by Jews and Muslims to this day.

Abortion

Abortion is the ending of a pregnancy before the fetus is developed sufficiently to survive outside the uterus. Loss of a fetus at a later gestational age is termed premature stillbirth.

Abortion may be accidental (miscarriage), or deliberate (termination of pregnancy).

In the Middle Ages if a pregnant woman was having pains, it was often thought it was because she had kittens crawling inside her womb as a result of a witches curse. As a result abortions were often allowed by courts in order to remove these cats from the womb. The phrase "Someone is having kittens" originates from this.

The first reference to abortion in English law appeared in the 13th century, when the law followed Church teaching that abortion was acceptable until "quickening". This, it was believed, was when the soul entered the fetus at around 13 weeks.

The first law making abortion illegal in Britain was the 1803 Malicious Shooting or Stabbing Act.

Iceland became the first Western country to legalize therapeutic abortion on January 28, 1935.

In Britain, the Abortion Act legalized abortion, making it free on demand and available on the National Health Service in 1967.

In America the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade and the lesser known Doe v. Bolton, both on January 22, 1973, overturned all state laws restricting abortion. As a result abortions became legal during the first six months of pregnancy. Roe v. Wade reshaped national politics, dividing much of the United States into pro-choice and pro-life camps, while activating grassroots movements on both sides.

The picture below shows Rep. Albert Wynn (left) and Gloria Feldt (right), President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, on the steps of the Supreme Court, rallying in support of the pro-choice movement on the Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Six years after the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, abortions had doubled in the US to 1.5 million per year, nearly half the number of live births.

"Jane Roe" was the legal pseudonym of Leah McCorvey, the plaintiff in the Roe v. Wade case. In 1994 she became a Christian and voiced remorse for her part in the Supreme Court decision. McCorvey devoted the rest of her life to opposing the social change she had helped bring about,

In 2021, the US state of Mississippi asked the United Stated Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation – a dispute over Mississippi’s proposed law banning most abortions after 15 weeks gestation. On June 24, 2022, in a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court determined abortion is not a protected right, overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

In 2005 it was calculated that there were three abortions in the UK for every ten births-a total of 190,000 terminations in England and Wales every year. The average British woman would have 2.2 healthy pregnancies in her lifetime, but would give birth to only 1.7 children. The number of abortions accounts for the difference. This would not enough to keep the UK population stable.

According to 2021 figures from the World Health Organization (WHO), on average 73.3 million abortions are performed every year. That's 200,821 per day., 8,367 per hour, 139 per minute.

A 2021 survey of more than 5,000 women suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum (morning sickness) found that five per cent of them had terminated a wanted pregnancy because of it, while 52 per cent had considered termination.

Sierra Leone is the only country where a British law from 1861 still explicitly bans abortion. The Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, a piece of British legislation, was inherited by many of its former colonies. However, while many of these countries have since reformed their abortion laws, Sierra Leone has retained the original, strict prohibition.

It is estimated that, in India, 100,000 abortions are performed every year solely because the fetus is female.

In El Salvador, it is illegal to have an abortion under any circumstances including rape, incest, or harm to the mother or child.

Here is a list of songs that deal with abortion.

Source  Britain In Numbers: The Essential Statistics