After 40 years on the fringes of cigarette sales, Marlboro took over the top spot in the US in 1962. Publicity about cancer in the 50’s drove smokers to a milder and filtered cigarette, and Marlboro was a leaderi in "ladies’ cigarettes. So “Marlboro men” switched to a lady’s brand.
In 1961, the American League expanded from 8 teams to 10 teams, marking the first time since 1900 that the AL had more than 8 teams. A year later in 1962, the National League did the same, adding two teams to bring the total in that league to ten. The two new National League teams were the New York Mets and the Houston Colt .45s.
The Houston Colt .45s played their first game at Colt Stadium in Houston on April 10, 1962. They opened their season with an 11-2 win against the Chicago Cubs.
In 1964 the team moved from Colt Stadium into the newly-built Houston Astrodome and changed their name to the Houston Astros in honor of Houston’s ties to the US/NASA space program.
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Colt is a term for young male horses from the age of two up to and including the age of four. A young female horse of the same age is called a filly.
Robert Lawson wrote a series of children’s books about animals associated with famous people, including Paul Revere’s Horse, which, in his fictionalized tale, was named Scheherazade. The black horse, nicknamed Sherry, formerly owned by a foppish, inbred British infantry officer, suffered various misfortunes, serving as a badly-treated wagon horse before being saved from the glue factory. She ended up a beloved member of the Revere household in Boston at the outset of the American Revolution.
The name Scheherazade derives from Persian, meaning “noble lineage” and first appeared as a woman’s name in “1001 Nights”, a collection of familiar tales from from the 8th to the 14th Century. Many similar tales were later reassembled later by Boccaccio and Chaucer.
Geoffrey Chaucer was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets’ Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Other notables that are buried in that area include Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, George Frideric Handel, and Alfred Tennyson.
Although William Shakespeare is not buried there, there is a monument honoring him, which was erected over 100 years after his death.
William Shakespeare has been played by such actors as Kenneth Branagh (All is True), Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love), David Mitchell (Upstart Crow), Rafe Spall (Anonymous), Mathew Baynton (Bill), Rupert Graves (A Waste of Shame) and John Williams (“The Bard,” The Twilight Zone)
Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Duke of Cumberland, was a German-English army officer admiral, scientist and colonial governor. He most notably came to prominence as a Royalist cavalry commander during the English Civil War . Rupert was the third son of the German Prince Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth, eldest daughter of James VI of Scotland and later King James I of England.
As the first Governor of the Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson’s Bay, Prince Rupert gave his name to the area covered by the Hudson Bay company charter granted by his cousin, King Charles II of England. Rupert’s Land was approximately 3,9 million square kilometres, approximately one-third of Canada’s total area. A small portion of Rupert’s Land is now part of the United States, located south of 49.
The Hudson’s Bay Company was granted a charter by King Charles II in 1670. The company continues to operate in the present day, though it has long since transitioned away from the fur trade, and into retail sales and financial services. It operates the Hudson’s Bay department store chain in Canada, and also owns the Saks Fifth Avenue department store chain in the U.S.
Tim McCarver, the baseball player-turned-announcer, plated in the majors as a teammate of Phil Gagliano, who was also his high school teammate in Memphis, one of the few such examples who were not brothers. McCarver’s dad owned a 1952 Hudson.
Tim McCarver was born in Memphis, attended high school in Memphis, attended the University of Memphis, and played most of the 1960 season for the AA Memphis Chickasaws baseball team. The minor-league baseball stadium in Memphis was christened Tim McCarver Stadium in 1978.
McCarver currently resides in Sarasota, Florida.
For over a century, every student at Cornell University has had to learn to swim to get a diploma. But Covid-19 is changing that. The swim test was suspended in the fall of 2020.
Then 64-year-old Diana Nyad became the first person ever to swim the 103-mile distance from Cuba to Florida. Nyad had attempted the swim at least six times prior to her record-breaking swim. It took here nearly 53 hours to accomplish the feat.
Swimmer Diana Nyad’s surname is a homophone of the Greek word “naiad” – in Greek mythology, naiads were female spirits, or sprites, which presided over wells, springs, ponds, and other bodies of fresh water.
Sprite is a lemon-lime flavored colorless soft drink created and marketed by The Coca-Cola Company. It was first developed in West Germany in 1959 as “Fanta Klare Zitrone” (“Clear Lemon Fanta”) and was introduced in the United States in 1961.
The original lemon-lime soda was 7 Up, which was created and introduced in 1929.
7Up contained lithium until the late 1940’s (when lithium in food was banned by the FDA ) purposefully as a mood stabilizer.
Lithium has the lowest density of any metal. Lithium can float on water. However, lithium reacts violently with water, forming a strong corrosive base. Therefore, it is often stored in oil to prevent this.
Lithium-ion batteries are a type of rechargeable electric battery. The lithium-ion battery was first developed in the 1970s and 1980s, and began to be commercialized in the early 1990s; they are now commonly used in portable electronics, power tools, and electric vehicles.