Actor Tommy Lee Jones attended Harvard University in the 1960s; while he was there, he was the roommate of future politician Al Gore.
Jones played guard on Harvard’s football team, and played in the famous 1968 Harvard-Yale game, in which Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds to tie the game.
The 1959 memoir Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, about his youth in rural England, has sold over 6 million copies. It was published in the US as Edge of Day: Boyhood in the West of England, in 1960. It was adapted for television by the BBC in 1971 and 2015, by ITV in 1998 with a screenplay by John Mortimer.
President John Adams drank a tankard of cider every morning because he believed it promoted good health. Adams lived to 90, making him our fourth longest-living president, behind Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter.
According to wiki, a tankard is a form of drinkware, consisting of a large, roughly cylindrical, drinking cup with a single handle. They are usually made of silver or pewter, but other materials are also used, including wood. A hinged lid is also found on many tankards.
There is no standard size for a tankard, but a capacity of 25 ounces is common.
American patriot Paul Revere, whose 1775 ride to alert Massachussets colonists to movements of British troops was immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1861 poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” was also a skilled silversmith and metalsmith.
Revere helped to pioneer mass production of metal products in the U.S., and one of the companies he founded, Revere Copper Products, continues to operate today.
Paul Revere & the Raiders was an American pop-rock band that enjoyed considerable success in the latter half of the Sixties and early Seventies. Founded in Boise, Idaho, in 1958 by Paul Revere Dick, the band was originally called the Downbeats. They changed their name just before releasing their first record in 1960. Their first song to make the charts was an instrumental entitled “Like, Long Hair” which was released in 1961 and rose as high as #38 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
The statehouse in Boise, Idaho is geothermally heated from underground hot springs, pumped from a source 3,000 feet underground.
President-elect Abraham Lincoln attended a very crowded reception held in his honor at the Ohio Statehouse on the way from Springfield, Ill. to his March 4, 1861 inauguration in Washington, D.C. Rutherford B. Hayes, himself a future President, was among those in attendance.
Rutherford Hayes and his wife Lucy were supporters of the temperance movement. He banned alcohol from the White House. His wife has been nicknamed “Lemonade Lucy” by historians, but the nickname was not used at the time.
Auto racing driver Johnny Rutherford was one of the leading drivers on the Indy Car circuit in the 1970s; he won the the Indianapolis 500 race three times (1974, 1976, and 1980), making him one of ten drivers to win that race on at least three occasions.
Rutherford, who grew up in Texas (though he was born in Kansas), was nicknamed “Lone Star J.R.,” and his racing helmet was emblazoned with the Texas flag.
The Rutherford model of the atom was proposed by physicist Ernest Rutherford after analyzing the results of scattering in the gold foil experiment by Geiger and Marsden. He theorized that atoms have most of their mass concentrated in a very small nucleus. Later experiments discovered the proton, and, under his direction, the neutron. The standard model of an atom in popular culture is the slightly modified Rutherford-Bohr model.
Rutherford commented many years later about the experiment which led him to envisage the atomic nucleus theory:
There are two 15-inch guns outside the main entrance of the Imperial War Museum in London. One of the guns is from the Battleship HMS Ramillies, the other from the Battleship HMS Resolution.
The Imperial War Museum London is a museum that focuses on the history of modern war and the wartime experience. It is located in a facility that was formerly the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Southwark, London.
Not in play: I’ve been fortunate to visit this museum twice (along with the Air museum in Duxford) and for anyone interested in military history, it’s well worth the visit–IMHO
In the beginning of World War II the British Royal Navy was the strongest navy in the world, with naval bases across the globe. Its fleet counted 15 battleships, 7 aircraft carriers, 66 cruisers, 164 destroyers and 66 submarines. The Royal Navy fought in every theatre in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and the Pacific oceans.
By the end of the war, however, the United States Navy was the largest navy the world had ever seen.
By the end of WWII in 1945, the US Navy had added nearly 1,200 major combatant ships since the beginning of the war, including:
These came to over 70% of the world’s total numbers and total tonnage of naval vessels of 1,000 tons or greater.
The Ever Given, a 193.5-feet cargo vessel, ran aground in the Suez Canal yesterday, and became wedged diagonally across the waterway. 40-knot winds and a sandstorm had caused low visibility, a power outage on the ship, and poor navigation. It was heading north in the canal en route to the port of Rotterdam.
Complicating the efforts to unwedge it is the Ever Given being one of the largest ships in the world, almost as long as the Empire State Building is tall. The traffic blockage has already raised oil prices, with supply being disrupted.
Rotterdam, NY is a township in Schenectady County, NY, founded in 1819
Following the Six-Day War in 1967, which resulted in Israel occupying the Sinai Peninsula, and the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, Egypt blockaded the canal, and it remained closed to ship traffic until its reopening in 1975.
Alas! Ninjaed! RealityChuck’s post is in play.
Schenectady is the name of a city and county on the Mohawk River in east-central New York State. The name comes from the Mohawk word skahnéhtati, which means “beyond the pines” (although the Mohawks themselves used the name for what is now nearby Albany, New York).