April 11th, 1912 Titanic set sail on a maiden voyage across the Atlantic, never reaching New York.
Ottawa has a very strong connection to this ill-fated ship that you can visit. This quiet connection rests on a pedestal in the lobby of the Chateau Laurier Hotel...
Sitting atop a wooden pedestal in the Chateau Laurier is a stone carving of the Prime Minister, Sir Wilfred Laurier, who was Prime Minister of the time the Chateau was built in 1911, and whose name adorns the hotel. Now, just to back it up a bit...
Built at cost of $2million in 1911, the grand opening of the opulent hotel was planned for April 26th 1912 with owner Charles Hays and Laurier to be in attendance. To complete the grand hotel before its opening, Hays travelled to London, England.
Hays boarded Titanic to return.
Hays paid a small fee to travel aboard Titanic in a deluxe suite (cabin B69) on the Promenade Deck.
Another passenger, French sculptor Paul Chevre, of whom Hays had commissioned to do a bust of Canadian prime minister Sir Laurier for the lobby of his Château Laurier Hotel.
He got on Titanic in Cherbourg, France as a first class passenger (ticket number PC 17594, Cabin A-9) and played cards with some other French passengers as they crossed the Atlantic.
After the ship hit the iceberg, a lot of commotion took place & despite was thought to be a minor incident, Chèvre pocketed his playing cards, boarded one of the first lifeboats to be lowered, and escaped the fate that befell Hays and the other 1500 passengers that night.
The bust of Laurier he carved was safe on another ship, and it was later placed on pedestal in the lobby of the hotel, where it still stands today.
Chèvre apparently never recovered from the trauma of what happened, and he died within two years of the sinking.
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In 1857 Queen Victoria chose Ottawa to be the capital & in 1867, Sir John A. MacDonald became our first prime minister.
These two important parts of history, Ottawa being chosen as the capital, and Sir John A. MacDonald are mysteriously connected to the Witch of Plum Hollow…
Just past Smiths Falls, there is a curious old log cabin near a place called Plum Hollow.
This little cabin now was once home to a respected real-life witch, THE WITCH OF PLUM HOLLOW…
Jane Elizabeth Martin was born around 1794 in Cork Ireland, Ireland. Just under five feet tall, Elizabeth was the daughter of a Spanish gypsy and her father a colonel in the British army. Being the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, Elizabeth would later claim this was the reason behind her psychic abilities using a mystical “sixth sense.”
It’s a Wet Wednesday, and raining…a perfect night for a whisky and reflection…
Gather round for a Whisky Wednesday episode…🥃
Tonight: what was the first boat on the Great Lakes?
Going back thousands of years, the first vessels on the lakes and rivers in what is now Canada were likely dug out canoes…
Archeologist in the 1980s south of OTtawa found a rock that has a carving of what appears to be a watercraft with 6 people in it. It was found on the surface of an ancient campsite during an archeological exploration and was discovered along with chipped stone points, ground stone axes, copper projectile points and hooks.
Although it cannot be radio carbon dated as it is not an organic material, finding Archaic type ground slate tools alongside it substantiates the idea that these ancient people from 8,000 years ago had a type of canoe watercraft of which they inscribed its image onto a rock.
What was found on a rock in the 1980s could very well be the first image of a watercraft in Canada, as most other representations of boats in either petroglyph form (carved rock) or pictographs (painted images on rocks) date from 2,000 years or 5,000 years ago respectfully. (Peterborough Petroglyphs)
Good evening, and welcome back to another episode of WhiskyWednesday where we pour a glass, and discuss topics that are relegated to the shadows…
Not for everyone, so mute or unfollow as your wish, and for those tuning in, let’s get started…
Tonight’s Topic: The ELF
THE ELF
Not the mischievous gnome type but rather, Extremely low frequency (ELF) electric and magnetic fields…
This is something that we can’t see but rather “perceive” through our body…
I have been having troubling sleeping, which has never been a problem, also feeling on edge…a feeling of unusual anxiousness, and short fuse…
Anyone else feel it? It’s like a collective anxiety and short temperedness.
Extremely low frequency (ELF) electric and magnetic fields (EMF) occupy the lower part of the electromagnetic spectrum in the frequency range 0-100 kHz.
ELF EMF result from electrically charged particles. Artificial sources are the dominant sources of ELF EMF and are usually associated with the generation, distribution and use of electricity at the frequency 60 Hz, but mostly 1-300Hz
Since melatonin, a neurohormone secreted by the pineal gland, has been shown to possess oncostatic properties, a “melatonin hypothesis” has been raised, stating that exposure to EMF might decrease melatonin production.
Melatonin is a hormone in your body that plays a role in sleep.
Good evening, and welcome to a Thursday edition of WhiskyWednesday, where we examine some of the lesser known and obscure elements of this realm.
As always, pour a drink and pull up a chair l, or mute and leave.
Tonight’s episode is the result of much research…let’s begin.🥃
Situated on the Ottawa River approximately 18 kilometres northwest of downtown Ottawa lies a small island with such a haunting ancient history it truly should be called…
The Island Of The Dead.
What lies beneath the sands of this small, one acre island is a solemn reminder of our area’s turbulent ancient past, and reminds us of those that were here long before us. Dozens of buried skeletons, weapons and a mysterious inscribed stone tell a story of violence, ritual and what I believe is a place of extreme archeological importance.
This seemingly innocuous sand island one kilometre offshore is often visited, but rarely those that step foot upon its shore fully comprehend what lurks below.
Good evening and welcome to a new episode of #WhiskyWednesday where we delve into some obscure elements of the world…
Tonight we look into what seems to be the world’s first nuclear reactor…in OTtawa. 🤯
With the recent popularity of the the film “Oppenheimer”, I was curious as to where the world’s first nuclear reactor would have been located.
It’s amazing the information you can find by doing a simple Google search.
It seems that with proper funding, more time and purer materials, the first man-made nuclear chain reaction would have taken place in Ottawa…
A scientist working at he National Research Council in 1940 on Sussex Drive by the name of George C. Laurence made the first experimental nuclear reactor in 1940.
(It would be a year later, the Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) became the world’s first successful artificial nuclear reactor. On December 2nd, 1942, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated in Chicago with the CP-1 reactor.)
Good evening and welcome to an all-new #WhiskyWednesday where we explore some avenues of the unknown…
Thanks for joining, and hope you are enjoying the month of August…I am grateful to have been able to pursue some extra curricular activities after a busy summer…
Let’s pour a drink and try and find where the Norse explorers settled in N.America/Canada because no one has found it…
How far back do we go to determine who first discovered the North American continent?
You could say it was migration of humans from Asia across the Bering land bridge about 20,000 years ago. This is the theory we are told in grade school and has been imprinted on us from an early age, but another concept could be that seagoing coastal settlers may have crossed over to North America much earlier than the land trudging bridge crossers.
Yet, in order to prove this we would need to study the coastal sites of that time period for their evidence of habitation, which unfortunately now lie submerged in up to a hundred metres of water offshore…
Skipping ahead to more recent times, according to the Icelandic sagas—Eirik the Red’s Saga, Saga of the Greenlanders, plus chapters of the Hauksbók and the Flatey Book, the Norse that left Scandinavia around 900AD started to explore lands to the west of Greenland only a few years after their Greenland settlements were established.
These stories, or “sagas” as they are called describe that in 985AD while sailing from Iceland to Greenland with a migration fleet consisting of 400–700 settlers and 25 ships (14 of which completed the journey) a merchant named Bjarni Herjólfsson was blown off course, and after three days’ sailing he spotted a land west of the fleet. Bjarni was only interested in finding his father’s farm In Greenland, but he described his discovery of a new land to Leif Erikson who later explored the area in more detail and planted a small settlement there fifteen years later, which puts Europeans in North America around 900-1000AD