Arcadia University is a private university in Glenside, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.
The school was founded in Beaver, Pennsylvania in 1853 as Beaver Female Seminary, and became Beaver College in 1872. Due to the double-entendre meaning of its name, the school was often the subject of humor; by the late 1990s, Beaver College discovered that its web site was often blocked by obscenity filters, and it was also determined that many prospective students chose to not attend the school specifically due to its name. In 2001, the school became a university, and changed its name to Arcadia.
The magazine of Canada’s National History Society used to be called The Beaver. In the Internet age, when searches for “beaver” would often yield eye-opening results, the magazine’s name was changed to Canada’s History.
Wood Buffalo National Park is the largest park in Canada’s system of National Parks and the 2nd largest protected area in the world. At 44,741 square kilometres, it is larger than Switzerland. It is home to the largest beaver dam in the world, which is 2,790 ft (850 m) in length, more than half a mile long. The dam was discovered via satellite imagery in 2007; when the park received a call from a BBC film crew, who had discovered information about the dam online, park staff were caught by surprise. Wood Buffalo National Park staff have flown over the location but because of the remoteness of the site, its dense forest cover and lack of road access, they have been unable to land and do a physical survey of the dam.
It is the location of a “buffalo jump” – a cliff which indiginous people (in this case, the Blackfoot people) would use as part of a buffalo hunt. The Blackfoot would disguise themselves as coyotes or wolves, and spook the buffalo, driving them off the cliff to their deaths.
Head-Smashed-In (yes, that is really its name) gets its name from a Blackfoot legend, in which a young Blackfoot stood at the bottom of the cliff during such a hunt, wanting to watch the buffalo fall. He wound up buried under several buffalo, and when he was found, his head had been smashed in.
The Canadian province of Alberta is Canada’s fourth most populous province. Alberta is bordered by the provinces of British Columbia to the west and Saskatchewan to the east, the Northwest Territories to the north, and the U.S. state of Montana to the south. The capital of Alberta is Edmonton.
Alberta was named after Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria. Lake Louise was also named in her honor.
The Princess telephone was introduced in 1959, as the first “personal” ph0ne. Early Princess phones had rotary dials, and were so light, they jumped off the table when dialing, so a dummy lead weight was added to make them stable. Touch-tone came four years later.
Dual-tone multi-frequency signaling was developed by the Bell System as an improvement over the earlier “pulse dialing” system for telephones. The system uses 8 different audio frequencies, transmitted in pairs to produce 16 unique dual-tone signals, representing the numbers 0-9, the “*” (“star”) and “#” (“number sign,” “pound,” “hash,” or “octothorpe”) symbols, and the letters A-D (though the latter were rarely used on consumer telephones.
The system was trademarked by AT&T as “Touch-Tone,” and first introduced to the U.S. market in 1963, though it was not until the 1980s that push-button phones became the norm in U.S. homes.
(Parenthetical: when my family moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1975, Wisconsin Telephone was not yet offering Touch-Tone service in that area.)
The first true rotary phone appeared in 1892 and was installed in La Porte, Indiana. This rotary dial phone was built based on an 1891 patent by Almon Brown Strowger. The phone used lugs on the finger plate rather than the holes that came later.
The day after he died, singer James Brown’s death was on the front page of the (Bergen County, New Jersey) record newspaper on December 26, 2006. On page 3 was an ad for the December 31th New Year’s Eve show at the Englewood PAC starring (you guessed it) James Brown.
The retraction and apology was printed the next day.
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), often mentioned as a potential running mate for the next Democratic presidential nominee, has written a book, Desk 88. It is about his desk on the Senate floor, and several of the progressive senators (including Hugo Black and Robert F. Kennedy) who used it before him. Senators traditionally carve their names on the inside bottom of their top desk drawer.
In January 2003, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote a controversial article in The Atlantic Monthly about the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut, in which he insists that his first cousin Michael Skakel’s indictment “was triggered by an inflamed media, and that an innocent man is now in prison”. The article argues that there is more evidence suggesting that Kenneth Littleton, the Skakel family’s live-in tutor, killed Moxley. He also calls Dominick Dunne the “driving force” behind Skakel’s prosecution.In July 2016, Kennedy released a book titled Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit.
The place-name “Greenwich” first appears in a Saxon charter of 918, where it appears as Gronewic. It is mentioned in passing in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, being on the pilgrim route from London to Canterbury in Kent: “Lo Greenwich, there many a shrew is in”, with “shrew” meaning a malignant, spiteful person, or a scoundrel.
William Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew has been produced several times for the screen, as well as providing the source material for a number of films which were adapted from the story, including Kiss Me Kate, McLintock!, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Deliver Us From Eva.
The Killer Shrews is a cult classic film, produced by a radio station owner, Gordon McLendon, who pioneered the Top 40 format. It was filmed near Dallas, using some of his disk jockeys as cast, and hand-puppets and costumed dogs as shrews.
Two retired members of President John F. Kennedy’s Nov. 22, 1963 Secret Service detail visited the acclaimed Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas fifty years later, but, not wanting to make a fuss, purposefully didn’t tell museum staff who they were.