I’ve seen the Hudson River frozen. Not frozen solid down to the bottom, it’s pretty deep and that rarely happens in any river, but frozen across the top. This wasn’t technically even the river portion, it’s actually the Hudson Bay up until around West Point because the bottom is below sea level and the water is brackish. But it was frozen solid across the top as far south as Croton at least. If anyone remembers the old Tappan Zee bridge, which was still there just a few years ago, the bridge pilings were surrounded by logs to protect them break from ice on the river as the current pushed it against the bridge. I don’t know if you’d ever see ice like that looking out on the river from Manhattan, but it’s really not at all a river down there.
The wider parts of the St. Lawrence around Montreal normally freeze solid after about two weeks of sub-freezing temperatures. If there is no precipitation to cause ridges in the ice, it’s suitable for ice-boating -as long as the boaters stay clear of the narrow downstream parts of the river which have open water year round. I’ve rarely seen ice-boaters out there, but they do have snowmobile races when/if the ice is thick enough.
Ferry traffic between Amherst Island and Kingston; Ontario is kept ice-free by pumping compressed air through a perforated hose under the channel.
The 1860 story of Hans Brinker introduced Americans to the popular Dutch sport if speed skating, made possible then by the annual freezing of Amsterdam’s canals.
Errrm, there is a lot more water in our country than the Amsterdam canals, which also used to freeze regularly. Now, not so often anymore.
Also iceskating is much older than Amsterdam.
So there is no direct relation between ice skating and Amsterdam canals.
My friend was driving us through Boston years ago (after the RTOR law), when we came to an intersection and he wondered if he could make a Left Turn on Red (from a one-way street to a one-way street; Arlington to Boylston in case you’re interested). I told him he could, but he argued with me about it but eventually did it. Later, we were driving into Kenmore Square and he made a very questionable maneuver (Beacon St inbound across Comm Ave inbound through a u-turn lane to Comm Ave outbound). I told him “You question a Left Turn on Red but then you pull a stunt like that??!?”
The character of Oliver Barrett in “Love Story” was based on Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones.
Having ridden through evening traffic in nearly every metro area in the USA, I can safely say BOS is the most “third world” of the bunch. Left turn from right lane just before the light goes green and jumping up onto the sidewalk as an extra driving lane. Onto a bridge? Seen it done. More than once. Them folks be crazy!
There’s an intersection of two one-way streets on the way home from my daughter’s place where I do this regularly. Legal almost everywhere in Canada (and most US states).
The St. Louis Browns were set to move to Los Angeles for the 1942 season, but the final vote was held on December 8, 1941, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor had transformed the idea of relocating an American League team to the West Coast from a mere logistical nightmare to an unforgivable wartime indulgence. This article combines fact with alternate-history speculation about how baseball relocation and expansion might have unfolded had the fateful vote been held just one week earlier.
A week earlier I bet the deal would simply have been rescinded due to the War. But had it occurred enough earlier, or Pearl Harbor been enough months later, such that it wasn’t practically reversible, then I could see the baseball future unfolding very differently.
My contribution (and summarizing mightily):
The fabled lost world of Atlantis was invented by Plato to serve as a foil for his tale of his enlightened Democracy defeating the human forces of darkness. It was the Evilania of his story.
It took until the 1800s for silly self-promoters to bastardize that into an actual lost land now under the sea. It’s just Discovery Channel telling $elling tall tales to the rubes for the last almost 200 years.
In 1983, the NHL St Louis Blues were set to move to Saskatoon. The move was voted down 15-3 by the NHL Board of Governors. Legal actions ensued; the team forfeited its draft picks, and the team was almost dissolved. The Saskatoon Blues: The Story - St. Louis Game Time
Until recently, I had not known that the Detroit Lions had started out in Portsmouth, OH in 1928 as the Spartans. They joined the NFL in 1930 and moved to Detroit and took the name Lions in 1934.
I had also not known that in 1943, the Steelers and the Eagles merged (due to wartime manpower shortages and other reasons) to become the Steagles. That lasted a year.
And in 1944, the Steelers joined with the Chicago Cardinals to become the Card-Pitts, a team informally renamed the Carpets as they didn’t win any games.
In the same vein, the Cubs purchased and were about to install lights for night games at Wrigley Field in 1941 but sold them as scrap metal for the war effort. Thus leading 40+ years later to Chicagoans (mostly Wrigleyville residents) insisting on TRADITIONNNNN! that baseball can only be played in sunlight. 
Here’s one I found out from a Japanese trivia show where, if you get the answer wrong, a live/cartoon 5-year-old girl will explode at you and holler “Don’t sleep through life!” (Google “Chico chan” if you want to see more about that.)
The fact: the word “carat” which is a unit of weight for gem stones, is a translation from Greek through Arabic and Italian for the carob seed, which was used before standardized weights. Needless to say it has now been standardized at 200 mg.
Note: the word “karat” which is currently used for the fineness of gold, probably came from the same root source, but the meanings diverged over the years. It is considered acceptable to use “carat” instead of “karat” but not vice versa.
I wrote a history of the transformation of Atlantis from a political fable into a super-scientific Neverland here
Intriguingly, Jules Verne wrote about Captain Nemo finding the remains of Atlantis underwater before this pop culture transformation took place. The Atlantis he found was simply a city comparable to those of ancient Greece, with no flying machines, death rays, prehistoric creatures, or pan-global colonies. Ignatius Donnelly, Helena Blavatsky, and the fantasy writers all came after him.
It’s kind of like how he acknowledged that Transylvania was the home of vampire legends in his Carpathian Castle, but nothing more came of that because he wrote it before Stoker’s Dracula and all the came in its wake.
Tres Cool!. Not a quick read, but worth every second.
Montgomery Ward was briefly nationalized in the 1940s:
https://old.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/kl4tf4/76_years_ago_today_retail_giant_montgomery_ward/
I’d never heard that one before, cool. Steagles, heh.
Many thanks.
I’ve been kind of obsessed with George Pal’s film ever since I was a kid. I wondered where it came from, and why it wasn’t really very good, and ever since I’ve been searching for a really satisfying Atlantis book or movie. I’ve read and seen a lot of them, but even the best of them leaves me unfulfilled.
Later, at Rosehill Cemetery:
Though seemingly a peaceful resting place, Sears is said to be disgruntled because of his room’s proximity to that of one of his most bitter rivals: Aaron Montgomery Ward, who also operated a successful mail order business in Chicago at the same time as Sears.
“Some have claimed to have seen the figure of a tall man in a top hat within Sears’ locked room, walking toward the crypt of A. Montgomery Ward,” writes Graveyard.com. “These two titans of the mail-order business are entombed only a short distance apart — bitter rivals in life, neighbors in death.”
Something I stumbled across in the past couple of days:
Prince Philip will turn 100 on the 10th of June 2021.