General knowledge

It is something taken by the Russians. Very famous.

Alka Seltzer?

Hohoho

ahhh ha -Schielman's Treasure, aka Treasure of Troy - part of which is Priam's Treasure.

Interesting little dig around - it appears Schlieman was not that clever, or very honest!

Article

Definitely not very honest. I read a really good novel a couple of years ago - The Fall of Troy by Peter Ackroyd - which is based loosely (or not so loosely) on Schliemann's excavation of Troy.

Yes - it is Schliemann's Trojan finds. Some in The Neues Museum in Berlin (not much though), some in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and some in the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

We couldn't believe our eyes when we went into the Neues Museum and saw 'Schliemann's Troy' on the list of what is in the collection. So exciting, even though there wasn't much of it.

So, in the best traditions of Blue Peter - here's one I made earlier, and very theatrical it is too.

stoupaduck wrote:Which famous person's last words are said to be "Oh Dear!"

(I'm sure there may be others but the judges decision is final)

Oh, I don't know. Donald Wolfit.

Nope - a much much earlier period than Wolfit's.

How about location then SD. In the UK?

Most definitely an Englishman - here's a painting

Hmm. Dunno. Daniel Defoe?

Nope, not Defoe - my original clue hinted at theatrical.

Got him!!!

David Garrick........................“You are indebted to your imagination for three-fourths
of your importance.”

Quite correct

Garrick?

He of the Garrick theatre I presume Lydia.

Yes indeed. Sorry, my post was made without seeing yours. Strangely, yours wasn't showing. The last one I could see was SD's theatrical clue. My 'Garrick?' was an answer, if you see what I mean, not a question.

Which natural wonder connects two men, friends, whose surnames carry the same initial?

One for for the power of words, the other for words of power?

Summink to do with Niagara Falls?

Yes indeed!

And the two friends?

Hmm - dunno yet.

Might Roosevelt be one of them - just guessing.

No politicos in this one.

Perhaps, a rather long clue may be in order. Written in 1871

Niagara Falls is a most enjoyable place of resort.
The hotels are excellent, and the prices not at all exorbitant. The
opportunities for fishing are not surpassed in the country; in fact,
they are not even equaled elsewhere. Because, in other localities,
certain places in the streams are much better than others; but at
Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the reason that the
fish do not bite anywhere, and so there is no use in your walking five
miles to fish, when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful nearer
home. The advantages of this state of things have never heretofore been
properly placed before the public.


The weather is cool in summer, and the walks and
drives are all pleasant and none of them fatiguing. When you start out
to "do" the Falls you first drive down about a mile, and pay a small sum
for the privilege of looking down from a precipice into the narrowest
part of the Niagara river. A rail way "cut" through a hill would be as
comely if it had the angry river tumbling and foaming through its
bottom. You can descend a staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down,
and stand at the edge of the water. After you have done it, you will
wonder why you did it; but you will then be too late.


The guide will explain to you, in his blood
curdling way, how he saw the little steamer, Maid of the Mist, descend
the fearful rapids-- how first one paddle-box was out of sight behind
the raging billows and then the other, and at what point it was that her
smokestack toppled overboard, and where her planking began to break and
part asunder- and how she did finally live through the trip, after
accomplishing the incredible feat of traveling seventeen miles in six
minutes, or six miles in seventeen minutes, I have really forgotten
which. But it was very extraordinary, anyhow. It is worth the price of
admission to hear the guide tell the story nine times in succession to
different parties, and never miss a word or alter a sentence or a
gesture.


Then you drive over to the Suspension Bridge, and
divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet
into the river below, and the chances of having the railway train
overhead smashing down on to you. Either possibility is discomforting
taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to
positive unhappiness.


On the Canada side you drive along the chasm
between long ranks of photographers standing guard behind their cameras,
ready to make an ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying
ambulance, and your solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are
expected to regard in the light of a horse, and a diminished and
unimportant background of sublime Niagara; and a great many people have
the incredible effrontery or the native depravity to aid and abet this
sort of crime.


Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you
may see stately pictures of papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis, or a
couple of country cousins, all smiling vacantly, and all disposed in
studied and uncomfortable attitudes in their carriage, and all looming
up in their awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed and diminished
presentment of that majestic presence whose ministering spirits are the
rainbows, whose voice is the thunder, whose awful front is veiled in
clouds, who was monarch here dead and forgotten ages before this hackful
of small reptiles was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in
the world's un-noted myriads, and will still be monarch here ages and
decades of ages after they shall have gathered themselves to their blood
relations, the other worms, and been mingled with the unremembering
dust.


There is no actual harm in making Niagara a
background whereon to display one's marvelous insignificance in a good
strong light, but it requires a sort of superhuman self-complacency to
enable one to do it.


When you have examined the stupendous Horse shoe
Fall till you are satisfied you cannot improve on it, you return to
America by the new Suspension Bridge, and follow up the bank to where
they exhibit the Cave of the Winds.


Here I followed instructions, and divested myself
of all my clothing, and put on a waterproof jacket and overalls. This
costume is picturesque, but not beautiful. A guide, similarly dressed,
led the way down a flight of winding stairs, which wound and wound, and
still kept on winding long after the thing ceased to be a novelty, and
then terminated long before it had begun to be a pleasure. We were then
well down under the precipice, but still considerably above the level of
the river.


We now began to creep along flimsy bridges of a
single plank, our persons shielded from destruction by a crazy wooden
railing, to which I clung with both hands-- not because I was afraid,
but because I wanted to. Presently the descent became steeper, and the
bridge flimsier, and sprays from the American Fall began to rain down
on us in fast increasing sheets that soon became blinding, and after
that our progress was mostly in the nature of groping. Now a furious
wind began to rush out from behind the waterfall, which seemed
determined to sweep us from the bridge, and scatter us on the rocks and
among the torrents below. I remarked that I wanted to go home; but it
was too late. We were almost under the monstrous wall of water
thundering down from above, and speech was in vain in the midst of such a
pitiless crash of sound.


In another moment the guide disappeared be hind
the deluge, and, bewildered by the thunder, driven helplessly by the
wind, and smitten by the arrowy tempest of rain, I followed. All was
darkness. Such a mad storming, roaring, and bellowing of warring wind
and water never crazed my ears be fore. I bent my head, and seemed to
receive the Atlantic on my back. The world seemed going to destruction.
I could not see anything, the flood poured down so savagely. I raised
my head, with open mouth, and the most of the American cataract went
down my throat. If I had sprung a leak now I had been lost. And at this
moment I discovered that the bridge had ceased, and we must trust for a
foot hold to the slippery and precipitous rocks. I never was so scared
before and survived it. But we got through at last, and emerged into the
open day, where we could stand in front of the laced and frothy and
seething world of descending water, and look at it. When I saw how much
of it there was, and how fearfully in earnest it was, I was sorry I had
gone behind it.


The noble Red Man has always been a friend and
darling of mine. I love to read about him in tales and legends and
romances. I love to read of his inspired sagacity, and his love of the
wild free life of mountain and forest, and his general nobility of
character, and his stately metaphorical manner of speech, and his
chivalrous love for the dusky maiden, and the picturesque pomp of his
dress and accoutrements. Especially the picturesque pomp of his dress
and accoutrements. When I found the shops at Niagara Falls full of
dainty Indian bead work, and stunning moccasins, and equally stunning
toy figures representing human beings who carried their weapons in holes
bored through their arms and bodies, and had feet shaped like a pie, I
was filled with emotion. I knew that now, at last, I was going to come
face to face with the noble Red Man.


A lady clerk in a shop told me, indeed, that all
her grand array of curiosities were made by the Indians, and that they
were plenty about the Falls, and that they were friendly, and it would
not be dangerous to speak to them. And sure enough, as I approached the
bridge leading over to Luna Island, I came upon a noble Son of the
Forest sitting under a tree, diligently at work on a bead reticule. He
wore a slouch hat and brogans, and had a short black pipe in his mouth.
Thus does the baneful contact with our effeminate civilization dilute
the picturesque pomp which is so natural to the Indian when far removed
from us in his native haunts. I addressed the relic as follows:


"Is the Wawhoo-Wang-Wang of the Whack-a Whack
happy? Does the great Speckled Thunder sigh for the warpath, or is his
heart contented with dreaming of the dusky maiden, the Pride of the
Forest? Does the mighty Sachem yearn to drink the blood of his enemies,
or is he satisfied to make bead reticules for the pappooses of the
paleface? Speak, sublime relic of bygone grandeur-- venerable ruin,
speak!'


The relic said:


"An' is it mesilf, Dennis Hooligan, that ye'd be
takin' for a dirty Injin, ye drawlin', lanternjawed, spider-legged
divil! By the piper that played before Moses, I'll ate ye!"


I went away from there.


By and by, in the neighborhood of the Terrapin
Tower, I came upon a gentle daughter of the aborigines in fringed and
beaded buckskin moccasins and leggins, seated on a bench with her pretty
wares about her. She had just carved out a wooden chief that had a
strong family resemblance to a clothes pin, and was now boring a hole
through his abdomen to put his bow through. I hesitated a moment, and
then addressed her:


"Is the heart of the forest maiden heavy? Is the
Laughing Tadpole lonely? Does she mourn over the extinguished
council-fires of her race, and the vanished glory of her ancestors? Or
does her sad spirit wander afar toward the hunting-grounds whither her
brave Gobbler-of-the-Lightnings is gone? Why is my daughter silent? Has
she aught against the paleface stranger?"


The maiden said:


"Faix, an' is it Biddy Malone ye dare to be
callin' names? Lave this, or I'll shy your lean carcass over the
cataract, ye sniveling blaggard!"


I adjourned from there also.


"Confound these Indians!" I said. "They told me
they were tame; but, if appearances go for anything, I should say they
were all on the war path."


I made one more attempt to fraternize with them,
and only one. I came upon a camp of them gathered in the shade of a
great tree, making wam pum and moccasins, and addressed them in the
language of friendship:


"Noble Red Men, Braves, Grand Sachems, War
Chiefs, Squaws, and High Muck-a-Mucks, the pale face from the land of
the setting sun greets you! You, Beneficent Polecat-- you, Devourer of
Mountains-- you, Roaring Thundergust-- you, Bully Boy with a Glass
eye-- the paleface from beyond the great waters greets you all! War and
pestilence have thinned your ranks and destroyed your once proud nation.
Poker and seven-up, and a vain modern expense for soap, unknown to your
glorious ancestors, have depleted your purses. Appropriating, in your
simplicity, the property of others has gotten you into trouble.
Misrepresenting facts, in your simple innocence, has damaged your reputation with the soulless usurper. Trading for forty rod whisky, to enable
you to get drunk and happy and tomahawk your families, has played the
ever lasting mischief with the picturesque pomp of your dress, and here
you are, in the broad light of the nineteenth century, gotten up like
the ragtag and bobtail of the purlieus of New York. For shame! Remember
your ancestors! Recall their mighty deeds! Remember Uncas!-- and Red
Jacket!- and Hole in the Day!-- and Whoopdedoodledo! Emulate their
achievements! Unfurl yourselves under my banner, noble savages,
illustrious gutter snipes--"


"Down wid him!" "Scoop the blaggard!" "Burn him!"
"Hang him!" "Dhround him!"


It was the quickest operation that ever was. I
simply saw a sudden flash in the air of clubs, brick bats, fists,
bead-baskets, and moccasins-- a single flash, and they all appeared to
hit me at once, and no two of them in the same place. In the next
instant the entire tribe was upon me. They tore half the clothes off me;
they broke my arms and legs; they gave me a thump that dented the top
of my head till it would hold coffee like a saucer; and, to crown their
disgraceful proceedings and add insult to injury, they threw me over the
Niagara Falls, and I got wet.


About ninety or a hundred feet from the top, the
remains of my vest caught on a projecting rock, and I was almost drowned
before I could get loose. I finally fell, and brought up in a world of
white foam at the foot of the Fall, whose celled and bubbly masses
towered up several inches above my head. Of course I got into the eddy. I
sailed round and round in it forty-four times -- chasing a chip and
gaining on it -- each round trip a half mile -- reaching for the same
bush on the bank forty-four times, and just exactly missing it by a
hair's-breadth every time.


At last a man walked down and sat down close to
that bush, and put a pipe in his mouth, and lit a match, and followed me
with one eye and kept the other on the match, while he sheltered it in
his hands from the wind. Presently a puff of wind blew it out. The next
time I swept around he said:


"Got a match?"


"Yes; in my other vest. Help me out, please."


"Not for Joe."


When I came round again, I said:


"Excuse the seemingly impertinent curiosity of a
drowning man, but will you explain this singular conduct of yours?"


"With pleasure. I am the coroner. Don't hurry on
my account. I can wait for you. But I wish I had a match."


I said: "Take my place, and I'll go and get you
one.


He declined. This lack of confidence on his part
created a coldness between us, and from that time forward I avoided him.
It was my idea, in case anything happened to me, to so time the
occurrence as to throw my custom into the hands of the opposition
coroner over on the American side.


At last a policeman came along, and arrested me
for disturbing the peace by yelling at people on shore for help. The
judge fined me, but I had the advantage of him. My money was with my
pantaloons and my pantaloons were with the Indians.


Thus I escaped. I am now lying in a very critical
condition. At least I am lying anyway-- critical or not critical. I am
hurt all over, but I cannot tell the full extent yet, because the doctor
is not done taking inventory. He will make out my manifest this
evening. However, thus far he thinks only sixteen of my wounds are
fatal. I don't mind the others.


Upon regaining my right mind, I said:


"It is an awful savage tribe of Indians that do
the bead work and moccasins for Niagara Falls, doctor. Where are they
from?"


"Limerick, my son."

Ok, so it's Mark Twain..............but his mate?? I'll continue to look - and no doubt someone will sweep in with the answer. I shan't mind at all!

Ah - Nikola Tesla!