These days, dog and pony show means an elaborate briefing or visual presentation, usually for promotional purposes. Writers in recent decades have applied dog and pony show pejoratively to military briefings, political speeches and photo opportunities as well as to sales pitches. To find the origin, we have to go back to the small towns of the middle west of the USA at the end of the nineteenth century. From the 1880s, reports start to appear in local newspapers of the arrival by rail of small travelling troupes of performers billed without any hint of sarcasm as “dog and pony shows”. The earliest example I know of: The dog and pony show of Prof. Morris drew big houses at the matinee and at the evening performance yesterday. All who went, old and young, seemed delighted. Omaha Daily Bee (Nebraska), 23 Sep. 1885. The most famous was that run by “Professor” Gentry (actually four brothers), but many others existed, including those of Sipe & Dolman, the Harper Brothers, Stull & Miller, and the Norris Brothers. They were in truth small circuses, many of them running on a shoestring, with no more than a band and a ringmaster in addition to the animal acts, which did consist only of dogs and ponies. The Gentry operation was bigger than its rivals and around 1894 it had some 40 ponies and 80 dogs in each of two troupes (later it would grow into a full-scale circus). http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-dog3.htm

Quotes
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Practice is the best of all instructions.
Aristotle (384 B.C.-322 B.C.) Greek philosopher

The original Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was built in 1890 and burned down by accident in 1919. To replace the original wooden structure, the owners commissioned a design by Frank Lloyd Wright. The second Imperial Hotel, built from 1915-1923, would be the best-known of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings in Japan. It was designed roughly in the shape of its own logo, with the guest room wings forming the letter "H", while the public rooms were in a smaller but taller central wing shaped like the letter "I" that cut through the middle of the "H". The structure famously survived the magnitude 8.3 Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. In reality, the building had damage; the central section slumped, several floors bulged, and four pieces of stonework fell to the ground. The building's main failing was its foundation. Wright had intended the hotel to float on the site's alluvial mud "as a battleship floats on water." This was accomplished by making it shallow, with broad footings. This was supposed to allow the building to float during an earthquake. However, the foundation was an inadequate support and did nothing to prevent the building from sinking into the mud to such an extent that it had to be demolished decades later. Furthermore, alluvial mud, such as that at the hotel's s ite, amplifies seismic waves. The hotel survived an earlier earthquake that struck Tokyo during its construction. While many buildings in the area were destroyed, the hotel itself — while shaken — stood completely undamaged. The hotel came through World War II unscathed, despite the devastating bombings of Tokyo by the Americans. It was commandeered for a period by the Occupation forces and managed by the US Government, before being returned to its owners. As the guest wings of the Wright building were only three stories tall, it actually had relatively few guest rooms, and so a new tower wing was constructed directly behind Wright's building in the 1950s. The hotel eventually slipped into decay as time took its toll. In a controversial decision, it was decided to demolish the old hotel and replace it with a high-rise structure, to maximize the use of land. While most of Wright's building was destroyed, the iconic central lobby wing and the reflecting pool were disassembled and rebuilt at The Museum Meiji Mura, a collection of buildings (mostly from the Meiji Era) in Inuyama, near Nagoya, where they are open to the public. See more plus pictures at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Hotel,_Tokyo

Cross the Rubicon or Pass the Rubicon: to commit oneself irrevocably to some course of action The Rubicon is a river in northern Italy that Julius Caesar crossed with his army, in violation of the orders of the leaders in Rome, who feared his power. A civil war followed, in which Caesar emerged as ruler of Rome. Caesar is supposed to have said, “The die is cast” (referring to a roll of dice), as he crossed the river. The name is from L. rubicundus "ruddy," in ref. to the color of the soil on its banks. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Rubicon

A tsunami is a series of waves generated when a body of water, such as a lake or ocean is rapidly displaced on a massive scale. Earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions and large meteorite impacts all have the potential to generate a tsunami. The effects of a tsunami can range from unnoticeable to devastating. The word "tsunami" is Japanese for "harbor wave", because tsunamis cause little or no visible effect in deep sea, and often Japanese fishermen would be out at sea fishing in deep sea when a tsunami came, and in the evening they came home and found their home village devastated by the tsunami, and thus they theorized that tsunamis only happen in harbors and elsewhere close inshore. Although in Japanese tsunami is used for both the singular and plural, in English tsunamis is well-established as the plural. The term was created by fishermen although they had not been aware of any wave in the open water. A tsunami is not a sub-surface event in the deep ocean; it simply has a much smaller amplitude (wave heights) offshore, and a very long wavelength (often hundreds of kilometres long), which is why they generally pass unnoticed at sea, forming only a passing "hump" in the ocean.
http://www.crystalinks.com/tsunami.html

The powerful earthquake that unleashed a devastating tsunami March 11 appears to have moved the main island of Japan by 8 feet (2.4 meters) and shifted the Earth on its axis. Reports from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy estimated the 8.9-magnitude quake shifted the planet on its axis by nearly 4 inches (10 centimeters). http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-12/world/japan.earthquake.tsunami.earth_1_tsunami-usgs-geophysicist-quake?_s=PM:WORLD