The first Academy was founded by Plato around 385 BCE. It was located north of Athens, outside of the city walls. The name for the Academy came from the pre-existing name for the site, named for a legendary hero, Akademos. The site was sacred to Athena, and also to the twins, Castor and Pollux. It was located in a grove of olive trees.
The Academy lasted for three centuries, until destroyed by the Roman dictator Sulla in 83 BCE. He ordered the sacred olive trees cut down to make siege engines.
“Athena” is a song by English rock band The Who, from their 1982 album It’s Hard. It was the last song by The Who to reach the Top 40 on the U.S. Billboard chart, making it to #28. Pete Townshend wrote the song about actress Theresa Russell (and it was originally named “Theresa”), after he had unsuccessfully attempted to romance her.
The Who, considered by many (including me!) to be the greatest live band of all time, were formed in 1964. In 1965, they had 3 Billboard Top 10 hits: “I Can’t Explain”, “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere”, and “My Generation.”
When the relatively young and unknown Joe Clark was elected leader of the federal Progressive Conservative party in Canada, one newspaper headline was simply “Joe Who?”
The nickname stuck, even when Clark won the 1979 election.
In the 1978 movie Superman, editor Perry White of The Daily Planet demands that his reporters get out there and find out all they can about the new superhero, including what’s his favorite ball team. Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve) seems about to answer, but White charges on before giving Clark a chance to speak.
Anglo-Saxon England had the basic unit of land called a hide - the land to support one family. Ten hides made a tithing and ten tithings made a hundreds. Groups of hundreds were called a shire and controlled by an earl but the actual administrator of the shire was the reeve.
The home region of the title character in the J.R.R. Tolkien book The Hobbit was unnamed; it was not until The Lord of the Rings that Tolkien called it the Shire.
The Shire is a British breed of draught horse. It is usually black, bay, or grey. Shires have at various times held world records both for the largest horse and for the tallest horse. It was used for farm work, to tow barges at a time when the canal system was the principal means of goods transport, and as a cart-horse for road transport. The Clydesdale was used for cross-breeding in the 1950s and 1960s, which changed the conformation of the Shire and most notably changed the feathering on the lower legs from a mass of coarse hair into the silky feathering associated with modern Shires.
The Clydesdale and Shire breeds of draught horse are both considered to be at risk of becoming extinct, due to low and declining numbers of individuals. In 2010, the worldwide population of Clydesdales was estimated to be around 5000 horses (mostly in North America), while there are estimated to be fewer than 2000 Shires worldwide.
The shire reeve (OE scīrgerefa ) had legal responsibilities in a shire. They were an appointed official (a reeve) charged with keeping the peace. The word is recognizable as modern English “sheriff.”
In 1974, Eric Clapton included a song on his album 461 Ocean Boulevard entitled “I Shot the Sheriff.” The song was also released as a single and peaked at #1 on the Billboard Top 100.
The song, however, was written by Bob Marley and was released in 1973 on the album Wailin’ by Bob Marley and the Wailers.
The early English sheriff had a variety of functions which we would now recognise as a mixture of judicial, police, and civil law enforcement.
Interestingly, although the term sheriff is commonly used in Commonwealth countries and the US, the function of the sheriff in those different jurisdictions is different, as different jurisdictions have continued the office for different purposes.
In Scotland, the Sheriff’s role is judicial, with local Sheriff’s courts.
In Canada, the sheriff is a civil law enforcement officer, charged with enforcing civil judgments of the courts and court security, but is not a police type LEO.
In the US, the sheriff is a police officer.
Commonwealth is a term used by four of the 50 states of the United States in their full official state names. “Commonwealth” is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good. The four states are Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and are all in the Eastern United States, and prior to the formation of the United States in 1776, were British colonial possessions (albeit Kentucky was considered a part of Virginia during British rule).
The name ‘Kentucky’ is believed to have been derived from the Iroquois word ‘ken-tah-ten,’ which means ‘land of tomorrow.’ On June 1, 1792, Kentucky became the 15th state to join the Union, a year after #14 Vermont, and four years before #16 Tennessee.
I saw an extradition warrant from the Commonwealth of Kentucky just today! Extradition from state to state is provided for in the United States Constitution, Art. IV, Sec. 2:
A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.
In Ohio, if a person does not “waive extradition” (that is, does not object to extradition, and agrees to be taken in custody back to the original state), it can take about a month for the governor of the first state to formally request extradition and for the Governor of Ohio to issue an order that the defendant must indeed go back.
A former Guatemalan drug lord and associate of the Mexican criminal group known as Los Zetas was arrested in Guatemala in 2012 and extradited to the USA.
He has an interesting name: Horst Overdick.
Horst Wessel was a street brawler and member of the Nazi Party’s SA. He was shot to death by two self-identified Communists in Berlin in Jan. 1930. Wessel, 22, instantly became a martyr of National Socialism. A song named after him, set to lyrics he wrote, later became a co-national anthem of Nazi Germany.
The Wessel Islands is a group of islands off the Australian coast.
Map > Google Maps
They are part of Australia’s Northern Territory. The islands were named after a 17th century Dutch ship, the Wesel, that was used to explore them.
… clenching my teeth to keep from posting something here about “nuclear wessels” …
-“BB”-
Australia has six states and ten territories. Three of the territories are on the Australian mainland, and the other seven are external. Five of the states are on the mainland, while the sixth, Tasmania, is an island off the southeastern coast of Australia. Six of the seven external territories are islands or island groups; the seventh is located on Antarctica.