Louis Riel advanced a similar argument at his treason trial in 1885 in Regina, North-West Territories, Canada.
He argued that as an American citizen, he could not be guilty of treason against Queen Victoria. The courts disagreed and held that the concept of treason was not tied to citizenship, but to an obligation of anyone resident in the country to respect the governmental structure.
Riel was hanged on November 16, 1885, in Regina, after the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London rejected his appeal.
The Northwest Territories of Canada include the Dehcho, North Slave, Sahtu, South Slave and Inuvik administrative regions. Great Slave Lake, spanning both the North Slave and South Slave regions, is the deepest body of water in North America at 2,014 ft deep. At 10,500 sq mi in size, it is the tenth-largest lake in the world by area (Lake Erie is the eleventh-largest).
The five regional offices are located in:
(1) Inuvik, Inuvik Region NWT CAN
(2) Fort Simpson, Dehcho Region NWT CAN
(3) Norman Wells, Sahtu Region NWT CAN
(4) Yellowknife, North Slave Region NWT CAN
{Behchokǫ̀, North Slave Region NWT CAN (a regional sub-office)}
(5) Fort Smith, South Slave Region NWT CAN
{Hay River, South Slave Region NWT CAN (a regional sub-office)}
Of these, from the United States by car, all can be driven to except for Norman Wells.
The “Jolly Green Giant” is a well-known commercial spokes-character, created in 1935 by advertising copywriter Leo Burnett for the Minnesota Valley Canning Company. Due to the popularity of the character, the company was renamed the Green Giant Company in 1950.
Elmer “Len” Dresslar Jr. (March 25, 1925 – October 16, 2005) was an American voice actor and vocalist. He is best known as the deep bass voice of the Jolly Green Giant in commercials for General Mills.
The Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallion heavy lift transport helicopter is nicknamed “The Jolly Green Giant“. It can carry from 38 to 55 Marines or a payload of 8,000 pounds.
On 25 April 1980 (the day I graduated from boot camp), six of them crashed near Tabas, South Khorasan, Iran, at grid 33.073056, 55.892500, about 320 miles southeast of Tehran while attempting to rescue 52 embassy staff held captive at the US Embassy in Tehran. The failed op was named Operation Eagle Claw.
A few years later, Marines of 3D ANGLICO out of Long Beach Naval Station jumped from some Jolly Green Giant helicopters in a rappelling exercise. (I was one of them)
ANGLICO is an acronym standing for Air - Naval Gunfire Liaison Company, an airborne fire support and liaison unit to provide Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF, or “magg-taff”) Commanders a liaison capability to plan, coordinate, and conduct terminal control of fires in support of joint, allied, and coalition forces.
The Marine Corps currently has six ANGLICOs:
1ST ANGLICO — Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton
2D ANGLICO — Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune
3D ANGLICO — Marine Corps Reserve Center, 5631 Rickenbacker Rd., Bell CA
4TH ANGLICO — Marine Corps Reserve Center, 1226 Marine Drive, West Palm Beach FL
5TH ANGLICO — Camp Hansen, Okinawa
6TH ANGLICO — Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington
The Gentle Giant was a 1967 film produced by Ivan Tors (who was also the creator of Sea Hunt, Flipper, and Daktari) about a young boy’s friendship with an American black bear. It was based on the 1965 book Gentle Ben by Walt Morey, and was created as the ‘pilot’ for the CBS-TV series of the same name. Filmed with the same actors cast for the series, it was originally slated for release prior to the start of the 1967 TV season in order to introduce the characters – however, the release was pushed back so it would open nearer to the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday season, which meant the show had already been running for more than two months before the ‘introductory’ footage was seen by the public.
The TV series Gentle Ben ran for two seasons58 episodes from 1967 to 1969. It starred Dennis Weaver and Clint Howard, and Clint’s father, Rance Howard.
Rance Howard is also the father of actor/director Ron Howard, and has appeared in several of his son’s productions including Splash, Cocoon, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, and Frost/Nixon. He also played Dottie and Kit’s father in A League of Their Own.
Tom Hanks played astronaut Jim Lovell in the 1995 Ron Howard-directed film Apollo 13. Lovell appears in the movie as captain of the USS Iwo Jima and shakes Hanks’s hand when the Apollo 13 crew are recovered from the ocean after splashdown. Howard offered to have Lovell play an admiral, but Lovell said, “I retired [from the Navy] as a captain, and a captain I shall be.”
Astronaut Wally Schirra famously developed a head cold while commanding the Apollo 7 mission in 1968. Decades later, Schirra served as a television spokesperson for an over-the-counter cold medicine, which contained the same active ingredients he had been prescribed to use during Apollo 7.
Where’s Wally is a series of children’s book puzzles created by Martin Handford. The title character, dressed in a distinctive read-and-white striped shirt, is hidden in each illustration, and the reader is challenged to find him. Released in 1987, the books have become extremely popular.
In the United States, of course, the main character has been renamed to Waldo.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu of Cape Town, South Africa was the commencement speaker at Oberlin College on May 25, 1987 (and I got the chance to meet him and shake his hand). Tutu had won the Nobel Peace Prize three years earlier.
Alfred Nobel’s decision to posthumously donate the majority of his wealth to found the Nobel Prize has been credited to him wanting to leave behind a better legacy. This happened when a newspaper erroneously published an obituary of the inventor (it was his brother Ludwig who died, not Albert), stating “the merchant of death is dead”, and went on to say, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.”
Off game: During WWII my father worked on a planned road from Norman Wells to the then-being-constructed Alcan Highway (the CANOL Project). The purpose of the road was to provide part of an oil pipeline project from Norman Wells to supply the war effort with much-needed crude. While the road was not completed, it’s possible to drive to Norman Wells in the winter over an ice road.
Apollo 7 was the first crewed flight in NASA’s Apollo program, and saw the resumption of human spaceflight by the agency after the fire that killed the three Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee during a launch rehearsal test on January 27, 1967.
President Jimmy Carter awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor posthumously to Grissom on October 1, 1978. President Bill Clinton awarded it to White and Chaffee on December 17, 1997.
On 2020-02-04, just before all of the covid lockdowns, I visited Gus Grissom’s and Chaffee’s graves at ANC, Arlington National Cemetery, and snapped these pictures. Ed White’s final resting place is in the West Point Cemetery.
Gus Grissom was one of the “Mercury Seven,” the seven men who were in the U.S.'s first group of astronauts. Grissom was nearly disqualified from the astronaut program, when it was discovered that he had a “hay fever” allergy; he successfully convinced NASA to allow him to continue with the program, by arguing that there was no ragweed pollen in space.
