And my kid is just across the river in SE Minnesota.
”It’s a small world after all…
I had never heard of the term ‘Driftless Region’, so I looked it up. Turns out my brother and his wife live smack dab in the middle of that area.
In play: Jean Nicolet established a trading post on the present site of Green Bay. He named it La Baie des Puants, which is French for ‘the Bay of Stinking Waters’. This settlement was one of the oldest European permanent settlements in America.
Legendary coach Vince Lombardi led the Green Bay Packers to victory in the very first two Super Bowls ever played.
Minnesota Vikings, an American professional gridiron football team founded in 1961 and based in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota, has played in four Super Bowls (1970, 1974, 1975, and 1977), losing each time.
iow: we suck
In 1964, a chemist named Norman Stingley invented a type of synthetic rubber. He offered his invention to his employer, Bettis Rubber Company, but they turned it down. He then took it to the toy company Wham-O; they developed a more refined version which resulted in the product known as the Super Ball.
The toy was an instant hit. At its peak, over 170,000 Super Balls were manufactured each day.
Today, over 95% of the natural rubber produced is extracted from the Hevea brasiliensis rubber tree. Because all of the trees in plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia came from 1,900 seedlings smuggled from Brazil in the 1870s, they could succumb to American leaf blight disease, which can cause the devastation of an entire plantation. It is still confined to the tropical Americas, but if it arrives in Asia, it could mean the end of the rubber plantations.
In the 1959 film A Hole in the Head, Frank Sinatra and child actor Eddie Hodges sang the song High Hopes. The song had the lyrics,
oops there goes another rubber tree plant.
The song won an Oscar for Best Original Song at the 32nd Academy Awards.
Frank Sinatra recorded an adapted version of the song “High Hopes” in support of his friend, Sen. John F. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, when Kennedy was campaigning for President in 1960.
Six members of the Kennedy family have served in the U.S. Congress:
- John F. Kennedy was both a Congressman and a Senator, representing Massachusetts
- Robert F. Kennedy was a Senator, representing New York
- Edward Kennedy was a Senator, representing Massachusetts
- Joseph P. Kennedy II was a Congressman, representing Massachusetts
- Joseph P. Kennedy III is a Congressman, representing Massachusetts
- Patrick J. Kennedy was a Congressman, representing Rhode Island
John Neely Kennedy, the current junior Senator from Louisiana, began his political career in 1988, serving as special counsel to Democratic Governor Buddy Roemer. After losing in the Senatorial Democratic primary in 2004, he switched to the GOP in 2007. He was again unsuccessful in a Senatorial run in 2008, but was elected to the Senate in 2016 in a runoff election.
John Neely Kennedy is not related to the Kennedy clan of Massachusetts.
The former Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court, long regarded as a key swing vote on the Court, was also no relation to the Kennedys of Massachusetts. He was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, Republican of California.
In the 2016 presidential election, almost 4 million California voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump. This was the 3rd-highest number of votes for Trump in one state, behind Florida and Texas.
Three states use their flags from when they were independent nations as their state flag: California, Hawai’i, Texas.
OK some (most?) would dispute that California was officially an independent nation, but their is no dispute that the “Bear Flag” is from when California declared independence from Mexico.
The word ‘republic’ does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, but does appear in Article IV of the Constitution which “guarantee(s) to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government.”
The Magna Carta has been strongly influential since it was composed in 1215; it influenced the writing of the US Constitution. There are four originals of it still surviving; they were displayed together at the British Library for one day, 3 February 2015, to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.
The Portuguese White Fleet, still surviving into the 70s, fished the Grand Banks of Newfoundland under full sail, and were an imprressive sight during storms in the shelter os St. John’s harbor. Then, the Russian factory trawlers overfished the grounds, and exploding populations of now-protected seals ate the rest, and codfish were extirpated in a decade in what had been the richest fishing grounds in the world.
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Newfoundland’s Grand Banks are one of the world’s richest fishing grounds. Situated off the south coast of Newfoundland, the Grand Banks are an underwater plateau where the Labrador Current of cold Arctic waters flows south around Newfoundland in an anti-clockwise direction and mixes with the warm water currents of the Gulf Stream flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico, The Bahamas, and the Caribbean Sea. The shape of the ocean bottom here lifts nutrients to the surface, creating one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. Fish species include Atlantic cod, swordfish, haddock and capelin; shellfish include scallop and lobster. The area also supports large colonies of seabirds such as northern gannets, shear waters and sea ducks and various sea mammals such as seals, dolphins and whales.
Overfishing in the late 20th century caused the collapse of several species, particularly cod, leading to the closure of the Canadian Grand Banks fishery in 1992.
Not in play:
It seems like you’re often not seeing the most recent posts in these thread games; unless I’m completely missing something, the above seems to be a play off of a post from a couple of days ago, rather than a play off of the most recent post.
The vaquita porpoise is the most endangered marine mammal in the world. The vaquita inhabit only the waters of the upper Gulf of California, and it is estimated that there are less than 60 individuals remaining. Less than half of this number are reproductive age females.
The Gulf of California is home to nearly a third of the world’s marine mammal species, more than 170 types of seabirds and over 700 different fish species. 70% of Mexico’s commercial fish is caught there.