Phoenicia was an ancient civilization composed of independent city-states located along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea stretching through what is now Syria, Lebanon, and northern Israel. They were famed as the ‘traders in purple’, referring to their monopoly on the precious purple dye of the Murex snail, used for royal clothing.
Collecting a similar snail dye is a subplot of Gary Jennings’s 1980 historical epic Aztec. The novel focuses on Mixtli, a peasant with a talent for languages who is a soldier, servant and merchant before rising to become an interpreter in the court of the Revered Speaker (emperor) Moctezuma not long before the Spanish conquistadores arrive.
Euler’s constant, e, is the mathematical constant 2.7182818284… and is attributed to Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. e is sometimes called Euler’s number. e is a transcendental number in that its digits extend infinitely without repeating. Another way to say this is that e is not a solution of any non-constant polynomial equation with rational coefficients. Jeffrey Shallit, in Number theory and formal languages, helped to describe transcendence.
In mathematics, these five numbers are eminently important: 0, 1, π, i, and e.
ETA: Euler defined an equality that combined these five numbers. This equality is called Euler’s identity and is:
e^(iπ) +1 = 0 (where ^(iπ) denotes the exponent of e. For clarity, the exponent is the product of i and π.)
The 1968 World Series set a record that may never broken. The opposing shortstops, Dal Maxvil of St. Louis and Ray Oyler of Detroit, finished their careers with a combined batting of less than .200. (Oyler is pronounced the same as Euler.)
Ray Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres including fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery fiction. Bradbury was mainly known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 and his science fiction and horror story collections The Martian Chronicles , The Illustrated Man, and I Sing the Body Electric!
The Doors front man Jim Morrison’s first vocal performance on stage was “Louie Louie” in 1965 with Rick and the Ravens (with Ray Manzarek) at the Turkey Joint West in Santa Monica.
The NFL Baltimore Ravens chose their team nickname partly because Baltimore was the home of Edgar Allen Poe, most famous for hos dark poem “The Raven”. The team was organized as a replacement for the Baltimore Colts, who slipped out of town in the middle of the night and went to Indianapolis.
Art Modell was the owner of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns franchise in the 1990s, when he wished to relocate the team to Baltimore. As a result of a legal agreement between Modell, the NFL, and the city of Cleveland, when Modell moved the franchise in 1996, while he was allowed to move the team’s personnel and players to Baltimore, where they became the Ravens, Modell gave up the franchise’s connection to its history and records as the Browns.
Thus, the Ravens were effectively an expansion team, with no previous history, and when the NFL awarded an expansion team to Cleveland (which began play in 1999), the “new” Browns were treated as a continuation of the old franchise, and inherited the old Browns’ records and history.
The Japanese torpedoing and sinking of the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis during World War II, and the subsequent loss of many of her crew to shark attack, were described by Quint (Robert Shaw) in the 1975 Steven Spielberg movie Jaws. The wreck of the U.S. Navy warship was found by a team financed by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen in 2017.
ETA: Ninja’d!
At the time of the Cleveland Browns’s hasty and much-objected-to departure from northeast Ohio, a popular bumper sticker there read “MUCK FODELL.”
After the Colts became the Indianapolis Colts, a Canadian Football League expansion team was established in Baltimore. They originally tried to use the moniker: Baltimore CFL Colts, but the Indianapolis Colts objected based on their trademarks rights. The CFL team renamed itself the Baltimore Stallions, and were the only American expansion team to ever win the Grey Cup, on a cold windy day in Regina.
The Baltimore Ravens are the only NFL franchise to have appeared in multiple Super Bowls and be undefeated in those appearances. The Ravens won Super Bowl XXXV over the Giants in January of 2001, and they also won Super Bowl XLVII over the 49ers in February of 2013.
Two other NFL teams are undefeated in the Super Bowl, having won the game in their only appearance. Those franchises are the Jets, winners of Super Bowl III over the Baltimore Colts, and the Saints, winners of Super Bowl XLIV over the Indianapolis Colts.
Since Elendil’s Hair got sort of squeezed there, being Ninja’ed and all, I’ll include theirs:
The only Non-Stop flights between Cleveland Hopkins airport and Baltimore’s Thurgood Marshall Airport are conducted by Southwest Airlines, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. All other airlines require a connecting flight from one of their hub cities.
Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall was sometimes mistaken by tourists at the U.S. Supreme Court for being an elevator attendant. He would good-naturedly push the buttons for the floors requested and not tell them his actual job.
On November 14, 1970, a chartered jet crashed two miles short of the Tri-State Airport in Kenova, West Virginia, killing all 75 people aboard. The plane was carrying 37 members of the Marshall University football team, as well as coaches, medical personnel, and team boosters. Earlier in the day, Marshall had lost a football game to East Carolina 17-14. It was the first time that season that the Marshall team had travelled by air to an away game.
Despite the tragedy, Marshall fielded a football team the next season and finished with a 2-8 record.
The story of the Marshall crash became the basis for a movie in 2006, starring Matthew McConaughey:
On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal was finalized on November 13, 2006. Google’s acquisition launched new newfound interest in video-sharing sites.
The three founders of YouTube were all employees of PayPal when they created their new venture. The domain youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, and video upload options were enabled on April 23 of that year.
Currently, youtube.com is the second-most visited website in the US, trailing only google.com.
President George W. Bush was sworn in for a second term of office on January 20, 2005 by Chief Justice of the United States William H. Rehnquist. The Chief Justice was already in poor health due to thyroid cancer and left the Capitol shortly after administering the oath. Later that year, he died, and the President appointed a former clerk of Rehnquist’s, District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John G. Roberts, to succeed him. Roberts had served as a pallbearer at memorial services for the late Chief in the Supreme Court building.
Assuming Prince William succeeds to the throne, he will be King William V. If Prince George succeeds him, he will be King George VII.
The mummy of King Tutankhamun was entombed with a dagger that was forged from a meteorite.