The former colonial Spanish Sahara is now claimed by both Morucco and the unrecognized Republic of Sahrawi. The Moroccan claim would extend the country to La Guera, an old town that I visited before it was depopulated and reclaimed by the desert. La Guera once issued its own postage stamps.
The first self-adhesive United States postage stamp, per Wiki, was a Christmas 1974 10-cent stamp. It was not considered successful, and the surviving stamps, though not rare, are all gradually becoming discolored due to the adhesive used. Self-adhesive stamps were not issued again until 1989, but are now the majority of all first-class stamps.
With the September publication of her mystery Christmas Cupcake Murder, Joanne Fluke will have 26 books in the cozy mystery series. Leslie Meier also has 26 titles in her cozy mystery series, and they all end in Murder.
I’m reading one a week, alternating the two authors for the entire year.
In 1974, the debut of TV’s Happy Days sitcom occurred.
In 1989, the debut of Northrop Grumman’s B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber occurred when it made its first flight. ETA: then on September 8, Partnair Flight 394 flew past an F-16 Fighting Falcon on its way home, then the Convair 580 rolled upside down and fell in the North Sea. 50 passengers and 5 crew members on board the aircraft died, and it was the deadliest aviation disaster in Denmark. The crash was caused by use of counterfeit aircraft parts in repairs and maintenance.
The ‘Black Box’ was invented by an Australian scientist named Dr. David Warren. The first demonstration unit was produced in 1957, but it was not until 1960, after an unexplained plane crash in Queensland, that Australia became the first country in the world to make the Black Box mandatory for all commercial aircraft.
The Black Box is actually two separate pieces of equipment: a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder.
And the color of this equipment is orange.
That inventor, David Warren, was a young boy of about 9 or 10 when his father died in an airplane crash in 1934 over the Bass Strait of southeast Australia (between Tasmania and Victoria). After a 1953 airliner crash of a de Havilland Comet, the first commercial jetliner, Warren remembered thinking that “If a businessman had been using one of these (miniature voice recorders) in the plane and we could find it in the wreckage and we played it back, we’d say, ‘We know what caused this.’ Any sounds that were relevant to what was going on would be recorded and you could take them from the wreckage.”
One of the 9/11 conspiracy theorist’s favorite claims is that “no black boxes were recovered from the four planes.” This is an outright lie, as both recorders were recovered from the planes that hit the Pentagon and the one that went down in Pennsylvania.
The flight recorders from the two planes that hit the WTC towers could not be found, due to significant impact and fire exposure at the site.
The Pentagon’s 9/11 Memorial Site is temporarily closed until May 2020. Signs last week informed us.
Which is a bummer because I really wanted to see it.
Barbara Olson was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77 on her way to a taping of Politically Incorrect in Los Angeles, when it was flown into the Pentagon in the September 11 attacks. Her original plan had been to fly to California on September 10, but she waited until the next day so that she could wake up with her husband on his birthday, September 11.
American Airlines Flight 77 was a Boeing 757 originating from Dulles and flying to LAX. All 66 on board died. The Pentagon Memorial commemorates 184 people who died on board and at the Pentagon. The memorial is 3" high at its shortest point, and 71" high at its tallest point, representing the ages of the victims.
Dulles International Airport, serving Washington, D.C, was named for U.S. Secretary of State and diplomat John Foster Dulles. The main terminal was designed in 1958 by famed Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, and is supposedly “highly regarded for its graceful beauty, suggestive of flight” (but I’ve flown in and out of Dulles several times and never noticed it)
On May 24, 1976 supersonic flights between the U.S. and Europe began with the arrival of a British Airways Concorde from London and an Air France Concorde from Paris.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was no fan of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who served during President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Administration. Once, after speaking with the Secretary, Churchill muttered to an aide, “Dull, duller, Dulles.”
John Foster Dulles strongly opposed communism, believing it was “Godless terrorism”. He was a strong supporter of President Eisenhower’s decision to direct the CIA, then headed by his brother Allen Dulles, to draft plans to overthrow the Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran. This led directly to the coup d’état that placed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran.
A son of John Foster Dulles was Avery Dulles (1918-2008). He was a Roman Catholic Cardinal.
Avery Foster Dulles was also a great-grandson of Secretary of State John Watson Foster and great-nephew of Secretary of State Robert Lansing.
While Avery Dulles was a brilliant scholar (with a doctorate from the Gregorian University and 33 honorary doctorates) and had a colorful life (for his liaison work with the French Navy, he was awarded the French Croix de guerre), his speaking style was uninspiring. (I heard him speak twice and was disappointed. Churchill’s response to the father in Elendil’s Heir’s post #257 would also have applied to the son)
One-third of the Catholic Church’s current College of Cardinals studied at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University.
The Gregorian Calebdar was adopted in 1582, largely erasing a drift in astronomical dates of about a day every 150 years. First adopted by Roman Catholic countries, it did not become official in Greece until 1923, within the lifetime of a few living Greeks, including 113-year-old Ekaterini Kornarou from the town of Krestena in Peloponnese .
The Greek Uprising was a successful war of independence waged by Greek revolutionaries against the Ottoman Empire between 1821 and 1830. Assisted by Russia, Great Britain, and France, Greece was finally recognized as an independent, sovereign state under the London Protocol of February, 1830. in 1832, the Treaty of Constantinople defined the final borders of the new state and established Prince Otto of Bavaria as the first king of Greece.
A Migratory Bird Treaty has been in place since 1918, to protect over 800 species of birds. Originally between the US and Canada, it now includes Mexico, Russia and Japan, and compels each country to conform internally with protective laws of alll members…
The two and only two colors of the flags of both Canada and Japan are red and white.