Today is Victoria Day. Yes we all know to celebrate a past Queen, but how many of us actually know some history about her? For many May 2 4 has become a “party weekend” the first weekend to camp and drink beer, or perhaps to stay at home and get the yard and planting done.
I’ve put some quick fact together about Queen Victoria.
Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901
She married her first cousin in 1840 (ummn ew)
She had 9 children. 26 of 42 grandkids married into the royal family
She held the longest reign of any British female Monarch, 63 years and 7 months
She set the world wide trend of the “white” wedding dress. Still honoured to this day
Her first language was German but she also spoke English, French and Hindi
She survived 7 assassination attempts ( I do believe thats a few more then fifty cent)
Want more info? Check out Wikipedia
Happy Holiday!
Please do not check out “Wikepedia” as a reliable source of information.
Thank you!! Happy Victoria Day
Great post Sally 🙂
I think that might have been true of Wikipedia in the past, but it is a self-regulating environment. The information you get is probably even more accurate than those found in books because it is constantly updated and revised in a collaborative community.
It’s “Wikipedia”.. 🙂
All I care about is that it’s a paid day off work 🙂
Actually, Wikipedia is many times reliable. If you change something on wikipedia, and its not right the moderators will change it back quite quickly.
Are there any stores open?
Married first cousin? Hmm, Charles’s weird ears and other Royal family not so attractive facial features…..I think now I know why….
Queen Victoria also established TORCHWOOD to capture Doctor Who. (I’m such a nerd)
ONe other thing that is around we know about today that she in effect has some bearing on. The “Victorian Age” was named after her as basically the time she was in power. Those things associated with it are still around today. Bronte and Dickins were writers of this era.
the only queen i like is the queen of spades for hearts lol. Nice props to 50 cent 🙂 a true icon .
If the current Queen stays in power long enough, she will break the record
for longest reign.
Yes, Wikipedia is many times reliable. That’s what I want in my search for knowledge: “many times reliable.” Sort of like my old ’86 Chevette. In terms of it being self-regulated, this dictates that “majority rules” and that even if the information is false, if enough people believe it to be true, it is erroneously labelled as accurate. Stephen Colbert had fun with that idea. Sometimes this works. Fortunately, the majority has never been ill-informed or inaccurate before. (Read: sarcasm.) I’m just glad that Wikipedia wasn’t around one hundred years ago when women were not considered “people” in Canada and consequently didn’t have the right to vote. Perhaps such an exercise – creating Wikipedia articles from previous eras – would illuminate the trouble with putting the power of information in the hands of a biased or uninformed majority.
My cousin in the UK told me that Victoria Day isn’t celebrated in the UK…. another excuse for a 3 day weekend…..I’ll take it
Simma down. We’re not writing scholarly articles here; Wikipedia is a plenty good thing. I’m pretty sure one hundred years ago, the biases and ignorances of the that time would be present in the era’s historical record.
And I think the very point of Wikipedia is that information is for all–even the biased, uninformed majority. Because while there will be articles on completely made up people and pages on corporations that look like advertisements, most important things get cleaned up and corrected quickly. Wikipedia is not a static, published thing. It is constantly changed, defiled, and corrected.
There is absolutely always a need for unbiased, informed record keeping in the traditional sense, where things are edited and reviewed and fact checked many times over before being released to the world. But that has it’s place, and Wikipedia has it’s own.
I must admit that Victoria Day doesn’t seem all that connected to it’s namesake but having a holiday that is really revelant might not be so great. Like call it “we all have hands weekend” because we live on the Ivory Coast and that weekend was the first weekend the milita stopped cutting off peoples….. well you get the idea. Or we can’t remember anything past 10 years ago because of the “Vorlex”think cataclimic event that wiped out anything that recorded history. So we have movies called sense and sense or Pride and judge because no one remembers who jane austen is. Traditions, Holiday and history are great so is living here in the colonies.
I’m just tired of all this “ew” stuff about marrying one’s first cousin.
First of all, it’s silly to judge them based on American society today. They’d say “ew” about plenty of stuff they do, and Canadian society actually allows it (so do almost all European societies).
20% of worldwide marriages are between first cousins… Einstein and Darwin married their first cousins, too.
The only reason to call cousin marriage gross is because of the genetic factors. What about cousins who are infertile? We’ll stop them marrying just because other cousins could get pregnant? Do we start mandatory genetic testing for everyone?
If not, and if you’re still paranoid about genetic diseases, then you’d better start banning marriage within racial group, given genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs and sickle cell. In many immigrant communities, they prefer to marry cousins as a cultural practice, kind of like we prefer to marry based on “love” (and then half of us get divorced later).
When cousins do have kids, one study found that 93% of the time, nothing bad happens. Or, to put it another way, first-cousin marriage “entails a similar increased risk of birth defects and mortality as a woman faces when she gives birth at age 41 rather than at 30”.
Now, let’s start saying “ew” without thinking to older mothers, marriages inside racial groups, standard practices in societies that aren’t as repressed as us, and anything that we don’t bother to do the research on first!
(Sorry, a bit of a rant, but I can’t stand seeing people make baseless comments like this without realizing how ignorant it seems to those who’ve actually done the research. *sheepish grin*)
I read this book not long ago baught from bookcloseout.com it has a fantastic section on Queen Victria she was a amazing Woman
In Triumph’s Wake
Royal Mothers, Tragic Daughters and the Price they Paid for Glory
By Julia Gelardi
Another book from Julia Gelardi is Born to Rule : Five Reigning Consorts,Granddaughters of Queen Victoria
Ya sorry I’d still never marry my first cousin. Here we call that imbreeding. Wouldn’t marry my brother either. It wasn’t a baseless comment. It was MY OPINION. Since when exactly are personal opinions baseless?