San Salvador (“Holy Savior”) is the capital and the most populous city of El Salvador. The city is located in the Boquerón Volcano Valley, a region of high seismic activity. The city has suffered from many severe earthquakes, the most disastrous of which occurred in 1854. The San Salvador volcano erupted again in 1917, resulting in three major earthquakes that damaged the city so extensively the government was forced to temporarily move the capital to the city of Santa Tecla (known at the time as Nueva San Salvador ).
The retired aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge was adapted, redressed and used for filming of spacecraft interiors in the 1972 ecological sf movie Silent Running, starring Bruce Dern. The filmmakers named the spacecraft after the carrier in its honor. The carrier was scrapped after filming was complete.
Valley Forge, the 1777-1778 winter encampment location for the Continental Army, is located northwest of Philadelphia, which was occupied by the British Army at that time. The initial population of 12,000 soldiers and 400 women and children made it the fourth-largest city in the United States. Although there were no attacks on the camp, nearly 2,000 people died from disease during the six-month encampment.
During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress issued a form of currency known as the “Continental” that proved worthless due to rapid depreciation. The term “not worth a continental” entered the American vocabulary as something that was worthless/had no value.
The Lincoln Continental has been a luxury car model, offered by the Lincoln division of the Ford Motor Company on and off since it was first introduced in 1939. Over the years, the Continental has served a variety of roles in Lincoln’s product lineup, sometimes acting as the marque’s flagship car, and other times being a base-trim sedan.
The most recent generation of the Continental was introduced for the 2017 model year, and ended production in October, 2020, as Lincoln discontinued its automobile models, to focus on their more popular SUVs.
Abraham Lincoln’s eldest surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, built a beautiful country home in Manchester Center, Vermont, called Hildene, which still stands and is now available for visits, tours and rentals.
Not a play — Hildene seems to be open now, even during covid.
Clark Todd was an award-winning Canadian TV reporter, who was killed by a stray shot while covering the civil war in Lebanon in 1983. He was my best friend and long-time colleague.
My condolences, jtur.
In play:
National Lampoon in the early 1980s ran a Tintin parody in which the intrepid young adventurer finds himself in Lebanon during the civil war there, and is nearly killed in the suicide truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks. The spoof ends with Tintin being evacuated to an offshore U.S. Navy warship and watching then-Vice President George H.W. Bush order the destruction of Beirut with a nuclear-tipped cruise missile.
Pretty dark.
The National Lampoon magazine, which ran from 1970 till 1998, was known for pushing the boundaries of what was considered appropriate. For instance, the cover of the August 1971 issue featured a picture of court-martialed Vietnam War veteran William Calley sporting the grin of Alfred E. Neuman, with the caption “What, My Lai?”
Extremely dark.
On August 2nd, 1971, U.S. Secretary of State William P. Rogers announced that the United States would support the entry of the People’s Republic of China as a member of the United Nations, reversing a policy of almost 22 years of opposing representation by China’s Communist government in the UN. Rogers declared that the U.S. would oppose the expulsion from the UN of the Republic of China, based on the island of Taiwan, which had claimed to represent the interests of the world’s most populous nation even after being forced to abandon the mainland
Three of Canada’s ten provincial capitals lie off the mainland. Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, is now connected by a long causeway. It is still a day-long ferry crossing to Victoria and St.John’s, even though the bulk of their provinces, British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador, are on the mainland.
Two different islands were used for the establishing shots at the beginning of the TV series “Gilligan’s Island”. In the first season the island seen in the distance during the opening credits is an island in the Bahamas called Sandy Cay, while in seasons two and three the opening showed an island named Mokuoloe, also known as ‘Coconut Island’, in Oahu’s Kaneohe Bay.
-“BB”-
Tina Louise, who played Ginger Grant in the “Gilligan’s Island” TV series, is the last surviving member of the cast of the sitcom. Louise’s breakthrough role came in 1958, when she made her film debut in “God’s Little Acre.” She received the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year for her work in the film.
Julia Grant, wife of General and later President Ulysses Grant, was born with strabismus (more commonly known as “crossed eyes”) which prevents both eyes from lining up in the same direction. When she was younger, one of the best surgeons in the country offered to perform the simple operation that would fix them. Julia was not keen on surgery, however, and declined.
After her husband became president, Julia reconsidered surgery, but once again decided against it. Because of this, her portrait and surviving pictures of her are almost always in profile.
“Hardscrabble”, the Grant family farm in St. Louis, is now in the south / southwestern part of the city and near to Ulysses S Grant National Historic Park. It is about 15 miles SW of the Gateway Arch (map).
Julia Grant was the first First Lady ever recorded on film.
The board game Scrabble was originally developed by an American architect, Alfred Mosher Butts, in 1938, under the name “Criss-Crosswords,” based on an earlier game which he had created, called “Lexiko.” Butts determined the distribution and point values of the letters in the game by analyzing how frequently each letter was used by various sources, including the New York Times.
By 1948, Butts had only made and sold a few copies of the game, but one of the owners of a copy, James Brunot, liked it, and licensed the rights to the game from Butts. Brunot made some small changes to the board layout, and renamed the game “Scrabble.”
According to Guinness, the highest score ever recorded in Scrabble tournament is 850, by Toh Weibin of Singapore at the Northern Ireland Scrabble Championship in Belfast, UK, on 1/21/2012. The highest-scoring word by Weibin during his record-setting game was BEAUXITE, which was worth 275 points.
Beauxite is an archaic form of the word bauxite, which is an amorphous clayey rock that is the chief commercial ore of aluminum.
Here, shown with a US penny for comparison —
Rebecca Ore is an American SF author, best known for her Becoming Alien series.