The history of stop-motion animation is almost as long as that of film itself. The very first stop motion film produced was 1898’s The Humpty Dumpty Circus, a short film made using dolls with jointed limbs to simulate the movements of circus acrobats. Sadly, this is a lost film, and no verified stills or parts of the film have been recovered. One of the earliest surviving films to use stop motion is 1902’s Fun in a Bakery Shop, which uses a “lightning sketch” version of claymation to animate a face made out of dough.
At 1 million joules, the typical lightning strike contains only about ¼ of a kilowatt-hour of power, which is not enough to make much difference on your electric bill. At current rates of about 20 cents a kWh, the amount of energy from a lightning bolt would be worth only about a nickel.
In 1976, the NFL’s New Orleans Saints selected running backs with their first two draft picks: Chuck Muncie from Cal in the first round, and Tony Galbreath from Missouri in the second round. Saints head coach Hank Stram dubbed the duo “Thunder and Lightning;” the two of them were the Saints’ starting running backs for four seasons (1976-79).
To matriculate means to be enrolled at a college or university. Hank Stram famously said to his team from the sidelines, in Super Bowl IV, to ‘let’s keep matriculating the ball down the field, boys!’
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Actor Henry Stram is Hanks’s son. Henry matriculated at Juilliard. He has played a ticket taker in the movie The Greatest Showman (2017), and in Regarding Henry (1991) he was a waiter. He is more known for his stage acting.
There have been eight English kings named Henry. The first was Henry I, the fourth son of William the Conqueror. He reigned from 1100-1135. The last (thus far) king named Henry was the well-known Henry VIII, who reigned from 1509-1547.
The Henry Repeating Arms company is the leading manufacturer of lever-action rifles. The company began in 1996 and takes its name from Benjamin Tyler Henry, the inventor who patented the first repeating rifle in 1860, known as the Henry rifle. There is no family connection to Benjamin Henry.
Maj. Gen. George Henry Thomas was the highest-ranked Virginian officer in the U.S. Army to remain loyal to the Union at the outbreak of the Civil War. He went on to become one of the most successful generals of the war, never losing a battle in which he was in command, and winning the nicknames “the Rock of Chickamauga” and “the Sledge of Nashville.” He died in 1870, five years after the war’s end, while on duty at the Presidio in San Francisco. He was buried, in part due to his continued estrangement from his pro-Confederate sisters, in his wife’s hometown of Troy, N.Y.
Troy NY is home to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the oldest private engineering and technical university in the US, founded in 1824. RPI alumni include Theodore Judah (designer, First Transcontinental Railroad, and organizer and founder of the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR)), Washington Roebling (construction supervisor of the Brooklyn Bridge), George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. (creator of the ferris wheel), Leffert L. Buck (chief engineer of NYC’s Williamsburg Bridge), Ted Hoff (father of the microprocessor), and Curtis Priem (designer of the first graphics processor for the PC, and co-founder of NVIDIA).
The first Ferris wheel was built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Standing 264 feet tall, it was the centerpiece of the Midway. There were 36 passenger cars, each fitted with 40 revolving chairs and able to accommodate up to 60 people, giving a total capacity of 2,160. Powered by steam, the wheel took 20 minutes to make two revolutions, the first involving six stops to allow passengers to exit and enter, and the second was a nine-minute non-stop rotation. Cost for the ride was 50 cents.
The U.S. Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers - the Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu - in the June 1942 Battle of Midway. All four had taken part in the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor just six months earlier. The U.S. lost just a single carrier, the USS Yorktown. The battle is commonly regarded as one of the most decisive naval victories in history.
That USS Yorktown (CV-5), was the lead ship in the Yorktown-class carriers that included the USS Enterprise (CV-6) and USS Hornet (CV-8). Hornet was sunk in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. Enterprise , the sole survivor of the class, was the most decorated ship of the US Navy in the Second World War.
CV-7, the USS Wasp, was a reduced-size version of the Yorktown-class aircraft carrier hull.
After the USS Yorktown (CV-5) was sunk in the Battle of Midway, CV-10 – an Essex-class carrier which was already under construction and was scheduled to bear the name USS Bonhomme Richard – was renamed the USS Yorktown in memory of the lost ship. This iteration of the Yorktown saw action and survived the war, remaining in service until being decommissioned in 1970. She is currently a museum ship located in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
The name Bonhomme Richard was later assigned to CV-31, another Essex- class carrier that was commissioned in late 1944 and saw limited action in WWII.
‘Bonhomme Richard’ is a French phrase which can be translated as ‘good man Richard.’ Les Maximes du Bonhomme Richard was the French title of Poor Richard’s Almanack, the yearly pamphlet published by Ben Franklin from 1732 through 1758. At the height of its success, print runs for the pamphlet reached 10,000 per year.
The first US warship to carry the name Bonhomme Richard was a French ship, originally named the Duc de Duras, which was loaned to the Americans during the Revolutionary War and placed under the command of John Paul Jones (4 Feb 1779), who subsequently renamed her. As noted above, the name is a reference to Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’, which was published in France under the title ‘Les Maximes du Bonhomme Richard’.
She was constructed in 1765 as a merchant ship for the French East India Company; however, her design was such that she could easily be converted to a warship if the need arose. As an armed vessel, she carried 42 guns of various sizes (nine, twelve, and eighteen-pound smooth-bore cannon).
She was lost in battle with HMS Serapis and other elements of the British fleet at the Battle of Flamborough Head (23 Sept 1779). It was during the early part of this battle that Jones, in response to a British request to surrender his by-then devastated ship, replied with the famous quote, "Sir, I have not yet begun to fight!" True to his claim, he reversed his fortunes, overcoming the British advantage and eventually capturing the Serapis. He then transfered his flag to his new prize before watching his original command slip beneath the waves.
A war quote by Herodotus is, “In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.”
Other war quotes include these:
“The objective of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other son of a bitch die for his.”
— George Patton
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
— Sun Tzu
“It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded, who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”
— William Tecumseh Sherman
“When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
“Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”
— Sun Tzu
“We are not isolationists except in so far as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war. I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. . . . I hate war.”
This quote is from a speech by FDR on August 14, 1936, as he was campaigning for re-election to the presidency. At the same time, however, he warned the American people to prepare for retaliation against the totalitarian threat and embrace America’s role as the “arsenal of democracy.”
The Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, London, has a history of munitions testing and production going back to the 1500s. It was long known as “The Warren”, because the site was originally used as a domestic warren for breeding rabbits for meat. The Royal Arsenal ceased to be a military establishment in 1994. The name lives on in the Arsenal Football Club which was founded in 1886 by munitions workers.
Notable past residents of Woolwich, London, England, UK have been mathematician Charles Hutton, painter Ray Richardson, cricketer Neil Vartan and musician Boy George, who was raised there;
Prior to forming Culture Club, singer Boy George was briefly a member of the new wave group Bow Wow Wow, performing under the stage name “Lieutenant Lush.”
