‘Ask Jeeves’ was an early question-answering website, designed to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language. It was named after Jeeves, Bertie Wooster’s valet in the books of P. G. Wodehouse. It was launched on June 1, 1997, and was rebranded to ‘Ask’ in February of 2006. It has been criticized and branded as malware, due to its browser toolbar, which is damn near impossible to remove from a Windows computer. (I speak from experience!)
Bill Clinton was inaugurated for his second term as President at the West Front of the Capitol on Jan. 20, 1997. The oath was administered by Chief Justice of the United States William H. Rehnquist. During the ceremony, Arkansas poet Miller Williams read “Of History and Hope,” a poem he wrote for the occasion.
Before being appointed as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court by Richard Nixon in 1971, William Rehnquist had served in Nixon’s Justice Department as Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel. In several of the recordings which were made of Oval Office conversations (and which were released during the Watergate investigation), Nixon could be heard mistakenly referring to Rehnquist as “Renchberg.”
The White House was constructed in 1792 but it did not include a private work space for the president. It was President William Howard Taft who ordered the Oval Office to be added in 1909. President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t like the original location of the Oval Office because it was in the center of the West Wing and didn’t have any windows. So he moved it to the edge of the West Wing, where it remains today.
William Howard Taft was most probably the first U.S. President to have a mother who was a college graduate. Taft’s mother, Louisa Torrey of Boston, graduated from one of the first women’s colleges, Mount Holyoke College (then Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in 1845.
Two of the events for which William Howard Taft is most commonly known, among the general public, are both either apocryphal or embellished:
- There is no evidence that the hefty Taft ever became lodged in the White House’s bathtub
- Taft was not responsible for creating the “seventh-inning stretch” in baseball games – it appears to have been a common practice prior to Taft’s presidency, but reports of his standing up at that point during a 1910 Washington Senators game may have helped to make the “stretch” more widespread
The Howard family is one of the oldest established English families. Claiming descent from Herward the Wake, an Anglo-Saxon who resisted the Norman conquest, they have collected numerous titles along the way, such as Duke of Norfolk, the premier dukedom in England, and Arundel Castle, which has been in the family for over 400 years.
The Blickling Park mausoleum is found on the grounds of Blickling Hall, Norfolk, England. It was commissioned in 1793 by Lady Caroline Suffield, the daughter of John Hobart, 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, as a tomb for her father and his two wives. The structure was designed by the Italian architect Joseph Bonomi the Elder and built by Henry Wood. It is in the form of a pyramid, modelled on that of Cestius in Rome, as an early example of Egyptian Revival architecture. The structure is now in the ownership of the National Trust.
NOTE: neat–Blickling Park mausoleum - Wikipedia
Steve Martin had a hit with his 1978 novelty song “King Tut,” tapping into the great public interest surrounding the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit of Egyptian artifacts then touring the U.S. Martin’s backup band was the Toot Uncommons, actually members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
The world’s largest mausoleum is believed to be one of the Tang dynasty mausoleums, of which 18 have been discovered. Located in the province of Shaanxi, it covers an area of over 20 hectares and contains the bodies of at least 190 individuals. Among the artifacts discovered inside were sculptures of six horses, two of which were stolen by an American in 1914 and smuggled to the USA, where they are still kept in the museum of the University of Pennsylvania.
Tang (the juice drink) was used by early NASA crewed space flights. In 1962, when Mercury astronaut John Glenn conducted eating experiments in orbit, Tang was selected for the menu; it was also used during some Gemini flights, and has also been carried aboard numerous space shuttle missions.
Tang was not invented by NASA , nor was it engineered in any way with space flight in mind, but once it became a staple of astronauts’ menus, General Foods was happy to let consumers believe whatever they wanted.
NASA currently has only four flight ready extravehicular space suits, and they are all over forty years old. Built in 1974 for the space shuttle, they cost $15 to $20 million each.
Three of the space shuttle orbiter names had been previously given to Apollo spacecraft between 1969 and 1972: Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia, Apollo 15 Command Module Endeavour, and Apollo 17 Lunar Module Challenger.
The Space Shuttle Pathfinder is a Space Shuttle test simulator made of steel and wood. Constructed by NASA in 1977 as an unnamed facilities test article, it was purchased in the early 1980s by the America-Japan Society, Inc. which had it refurbished, named it, and placed it on display in the Great Space Shuttle Exhibition in Tokyo. The mockup was later returned to the United States and placed on permanent display at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in May 1988.
Space Jam is a 1996 live action/animated movie starring NBA legend Michael Jordan. Jordan is enlisted by Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes characters to lead them in a basketball game against a group of aliens. Although the film received mixed reviews, it became the highest-grossing basketball film of all time.
A sequel, titled Space Jam: A New Legacy and starring LeBron James, is scheduled for release on July 16, 2021.
I don’t think that’s right: Extravehicular Mobility Unit - Wikipedia
In play:
In 2020, former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot and NASA Space Shuttle pilot Terry Virts wrote How to Astronaut, a collection of essays about his experiences on Earth, in the skies and in orbit, which I highly recommend.
My cite is more recent than the Wikipedia article:
18 suits were developed for the Space Shuttle program in 1974 and have vastly overworked their original 15-year-life design. Suit No. 1 was only used for certification, while suit two was destroyed during ground testing. Two suits were lost in the Challenger disaster in 1986, and another two in the Columbia disaster in 2003. The most recent spacesuit loss was unit 17, during SpaceX-7’s cargo-mission mishap. The exact cost to replace this unit is unknown, but estimates range as high as $250 million. For the remaining 11 suits, the damage is mounting, with seven in various stages of refurbishment and maintenance. That leaves only four flight-ready spacesuits aboard the International Space Station.
Terry and the Pirates was a serialized action-adventure newspaper comic strip, which was created by writer/artist Milton Caniff in 1934. Caniff wrote and drew the popular strip until 1946, when he became dissatisfied with his lack of control over the strip (which was owned by the Chicago Tribune New York Times Syndicate) – he then left the strip, and created another adventure strip, Steve Canyon.
After Caniff’s departure, the syndicate assigned another writer/artist, George Wunder, to Terry and the Pirates; Wunder helmed the strip until it was finally discontinued in 1973.
The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines syndicate as a group of people or businesses that work together as a team. This may be a council or body or association of people or an association of concerns, officially authorized to undertake a duty or negotiate business with an office or jurisdiction. It can also mean an association of racketeers in organized crime. In addition, it may refer to a business concern that sells materials for publication (newspaper, radio, TV, internet) in a number of outlets simultaneously, or a group of newspapers under one management.
The CPR Syndicate was the group of Canadian and American businessmen, entrepreneurs, and railwaymen who won the contract with the Government of Canada to build the transcontinental railway from Ontario to the shores of the Pacific in British Columbia. The railway was the single longest railway in the world when it was built, and went through extremely difficult terrain, including the Canadian Shield north of the Great Lakes, and the various mountain ranges in British Columbia. It was completed in 1885.