In 1633, the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church forced Galileo Galilei, one of the founders of modern science, to recant his theory that the Earth moves around the Sun. Under threat of torture, Galileo – seen facing his inquisitors – recanted.
In 1992, 359 years later, the Church finally agreed. At a ceremony in Rome, before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II officially declared that Galileo was right.
The first-mentioned shuttlecraft of the USS Enterprise, commanded by Capt. James T. Kirk, was the Galileo, named after the famous Italian astronomer. Its name appeared in a 1967 episode title: The Galileo Seven (episode) | Memory Alpha | Fandom
In that ST:TOS episode, The Galileo Seven, the Galileo shuttlecraft was commanded by Mr. Spock, with a crew consisting of Dr. McCoy, Scottie, Yeoman Mears, and specialist Boma (red shirt), and expendable red shirts Lattimer and Gaetano. Latimer and Gaetano die, and Boma survives the episode.
Leonard Nimoy, who portrayed Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek series, passed away in 2015. There are still four members of the original cast still living: William Shatner (Captain Kirk), Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Nyota Uhura), Walter Koenig (Ensign Pavel Chekov), and George Takei (Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu.)
Majel Barrett as Nurse Christine Chapel, and Grace Lee Whitney as Janice Rand, Captain Kirk’s yeoman, were two members of the recurring cast. Majel Barret married Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry in 1969 and the ST:TOS final season was in 1968-1969. Majel Barrett-Roddenberry passed away in 2008, some 17 years after Gene Roddenberry passed. Grace Lee Whitney was 85 when she passed away in 2015. She died in her town of Coarsegold, California, a gold mining town from the 1849 California gold rush. She lived there to be close to one of her sons, and she was a recovered survivor of alcohol and substance abuse. Her son, Jonathan Dweck, said that his mother wanted to be known more as a survivor of addiction than as a Star Trek cast member.
Majel Barrett played a number of roles on various Star Trek television series and films:
Majel Barrett was Lumpy’s mother on Leave it to Beaver before she was on Star Trek.
Jerry Mathers, who was born in 1948, starred as ‘Beaver’ Cleaver in the series Leave it to Beaver from 1957 through 1963. After the series ended, Mathers, who was in high school at the time, formed a band called Beaver and the Trappers.
Eldridge Cleaver was an author and activist and one of the leaders of the Black Panther party in the 60s. He ran for president in 1968 for the Peace and Freedom Party, despite being ineligible because he was too young.
Had he been elected President, Eldridge Cleaver would have been just 33 at the time of his inauguration on Jan. 20, 1969. However, Art. II, Sec. 1, cl. 5 of the U.S. Constitution provides that “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
Many people know that Stephen Colbert ran for President of the United States, but most don’t know that this is a fairly common thing amongst comedians. Other notable funny people who ran for the office (with varying degrees of seriousness) were Will Rogers, whose only campaign promise was to resign, and Gracie Allen, who when asked if she would recognize Russia replied “I’m not sure. I meet so many different people.” Dick Gregory ran for POTUS while being a strong voice for the civil rights movement and Pat Paulsen ran in an amazing 5 presidential campaigns. Even Roseanne Barr ran as a Green Party candidate in 2012, though she actually filed as part of the “Green Tea Party”.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously had no sense of humor and little knowledge or appreciation of comedians. When the opposition Liberal Democrats adopted a bird (‘the bird of liberty’) as their logo, Thatcher’s speechwriters came up with the idea of quoting Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch in order to mock it. Mrs. Thatcher, however, had never seen the sketch and had never heard of Monty Python. She was shown a tape of the sketch and seemed puzzled by it, and right before she delivered the speech, asked an aide “Who is this Monty Python, and is he one of us?”
The Burmese python in now an invasive species in Florida because Hurricane Andrew destroyed a python breeding farm and the animals escaped into the Everglades.
The Florida Everglades is the only place on Earth that alligators and crocodiles live together.
Alaska has the four largest National Parks in the US:
Alaska also has 7 of the 10 largest, and 8 of the 17 largest. But in the lower 48, the largest by size are
There have been four warships named the USS Alaska to serve in the United States Navy, including an Ohio-class Trident ballistic missile submarine commissioned in 1986 and still in service.
A trident is a three-pronged spear. It is believed that it was originally developed as a tool for spear fishing.
Poseidon, the mythological Greek god of the sea, used a trident as his weapon of choice. Shiva, a Hindu god, also used a similar weapon, called a trishula.
Poseidon’s trident is the logo for Maserati. Specifically, it is the trident from the Fountain of Neptune, Fontana di Nettuno, in Piazza del Nettuno, next to Piazza Maggiore, in Bologna, Italy.
Trident is a brand of sugar-free chewing gum, currently sold in the U.S. by Mondelez International (it was previously owned by Warner-Lambert).
Trident is well-known for its long-running marketing slogan: "Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.”
Chewing gum was sold from vending machines at New York subway stations as early as 1888.
