Civil asset forfeiture cases brought by the Department of Justice or U.S. Attorney offices in U.S. district courts are captioned United States v. [name of property], as they are in rem proceedings, or, in essence, lawsuits against the object itself. Thus you might see cases like United States v. $13,403.02 in U.S. currency, or United States v. One 1993 Chevrolet Camaro, or United States v. Eighteen Pornographic Films, and the like.
There are 94 United States district courts. Each state, including the District of Columbia, has at least one district court. Additionally, four U.S. territories have district courts: Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
The Empire of Japan renamed Guam “Omiya Jima” meaning “Great Shrine Island” during their occupation between 1941 and 1944 during World War II.
The Preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867, states that creating the new country of Canada would “promote the Interests of the British Empire”.
Iwo Jima means sulfur island. The first European to arrive at Iwo Jima was in the mid-1500s. Spanish sailor Bernardo de la Torre named it Sufre Island, after the old Spanish term for sulphur (azufre in modern Spanish). At that time Iwo Jima and other nearby islands represented boundaries between the Spanish and Portuguese Empires.
The Portuguese man o’ war is a marine hydrozoan creature, which is found in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (as well as in the Pacific Ocean, where it is known as the Pacific man o’ war).
Though the Portuguese man o’ war resembles a jellyfish, with a large floating “sail” structure and tentacles which dangle underneath, it is a completely different type of organism – each individual “animal” is actually a colony organism, made up of numerous specialized, integrated organisms which work together to function as a single animal, and which cannot survive independently.
November 3rd is World Jellyfish Day. Who knew?
Currently, about 2000 species of jellyfish have been identified and documented around the world. Some scientists theorize that there may be more than 300,000 species that have not yet been identified.
The lifespan of most jellyfish is a few months, although some individuals have lived as long as three years in captivity.
A group of jellyfish is called a smack.
Words like smack are called homonyms, words that share the same spelling, regardless of pronunciation and/or words that share the same pronunciation, regardless of spelling. Smack can mean a blow, often with the hand, or a loud kiss, or something occurring in a quick and violent way, or a way to express an exact location, or in common vernacular today, insulting or trash talking or as a slang term for heroin.
Heroin is properly called diamorphine. “Heroin” is a trademark of the Bayer Company but it lost its rights to the “Heroin” and “Aspirin” trademarks in the US, UK and France with the Treaty of Versailles but Bayer still maintains the trademark rights elsewhere.
Unlike “smack”, heroin/heroine is a true homonym. The two words are pronounced the same, even though spelled differently. Smack is not a homonym, because all meanings of the word share the same spelling AND pronunciation.
Sidebar: “Heroin” and “heroine” sound differently to me.
A ‘triple homonym’ is a set of three words that are spelled differently, have different meanings, but are all pronounced the same. Examples of this are “flew, flu, flue” and “pair, pare, pear”.
There are also a limited number of examples of ‘quadruple homonyms’, which are sets of four words with the above characteristics. Here is one such set: “right, rite, wright, write”.
The Triple Glaciers are in Grand Teton National Park Wyoming, United States. The glaciers are disconnected from each other and occupy three separate cirques on the northwest face of Mount Moran and northeast of Thor Peak. The glaciers are unofficially referred to as East, Middle and West Triple Glacier.
Lord Moran, 1st Baron Moran, was Winston Churchill’s personal doctor from 1940 until Churchill’s death in 1965.
A year after Churchill’s death, Lord Moran published extracts from his diary covering his relationship with Churchill. The extracts may indicate that Churchill suffered at times from clinical depression. Moran was criticised for publishing the diaries, which appeared to breach patient confidentiality.
Erin Moran was an actress, who was best known for playing Joanie Cunningham on the television comedy series Happy Days, and its spinoff, Joanie Loves Chachi, in the 1970s and 1980s.
Moran suffered from depression and other personal issues, and her acting career foundered after the end of Happy Days’ run. She passed away in 2017, at the age of 56, of complications stemming from throat cancer.
Colonel Sebastian Moran is a character in the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. An enemy of Sherlock Holmes, he is described as “the second most dangerous man in London,” the most dangerous being Professor James Moriarty.
Doyle Wolfgana von Frankenstein was a punk rock guitarist who played most of his career with The Misfitsn but formed an act in his own name in 2013. His real name was Paul Doyle Caiafa.
The Chelyabinsk meteor was a larger than normal meteor that entered Earth’s atmosphere over Russia on 15 February 2013 and exploded at a height of approximately 18.5 miles (30km). The energy released was estimated at 26 times the strength of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. Some 7,200 buildings in six cities across the region were damaged by the explosion’s shock wave and over 1,500 people needed medical attention.
The Hiroshima nuclear bomb exploded with a blast yield of approximately 15 kilotons of TNT. By contrast, the most powerful nuclear weapon currently in the US arsenal is the B83 aircraft bomb, which has a maximum yield of about 1,200 kilotons.
President Harry S Truman, Democrat of Missouri, is the only person to ever decide to use nuclear weapons for military objectives, in authorizing U.S. air attacks in August 1945 upon both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Although controversial, then and now, the attacks forced the surrender of the Japanese Empire and ended World War II sooner than it probably would have ended otherwise.