The Möbius strip was independently discovered by Johann Listing who invented the term “topology” for the mathematics of surfaces.
Johann Sebastian Bach, widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time, was also an accomplished organist, and was considered by his contemporaries to be an expert in the building of organs.
In Germany B-flat is called B and B-natural is called H. Thus a note/chord progression of B-flat A C B-natural is called the BACH progression.
Actress Barbara Bach, who played a “Bond girl” in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), met former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr in 1980s, while the two of them were filming the comedy movie Caveman. Bach and Starr married in 1981, and celebrated their 42nd wedding anniversary this past spring.
As of today (9/7/23), Ringo Starr has appeared in more theatrical films than any of his bandmates (14).
Whitewater Independent Counsel Ken Starr had previously served as Solicitor General, the top appellate lawyer for the U.S. Government, and as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He died a year ago this month at the age of 76 of complications from surgery.
In both the series premiere and season finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the malevolent, omnipotent being known as Q appeared as a judge of the Earth of the year 2079, “by which time ‘rapid progress’ had caused all United Earth nonsense to be abolished.”
In such a courtroom, summary executions of defendants and even court officials were routinely carried out.
A kangaroo court is defined as a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted, or a court characterized by irresponsible, unauthorized, or irregular status or procedures. The earliest mention of the term was approximately at the time of the 1849 California Gold Rush. It first turned up in print in 1853 in a book about Texas.
Traditionally, those put in front of a kangaroo court are found guilty. The idea was subverted; a sort of “reverse kangaroo court”, one might say, near the end of the musical Oklahoma!, in which the townspeople very quickly acquit Curly of any wrongdoing in the death of Jud Fry.
In 1965, the Quaker Oats Company introduced two new ready-to-eat breakfast cereals: Quisp and Quake. The two cereals (which both had similar, sweetened corn recipes) were promoted through animated cartoon ads, done by animator Jay Ward, featuring the two mascots: Quisp, a space alien, and Quake, a miner.
In a 1972 promotion, children were encouraged to mail in ballots, in an “election” to determine which of the two cereals would be discontinued. Quake lost the election, and the original Quake cereal was discontinued, and replaced with “Quake’s Orange Quangaroos,” an orange-flavored cereal, promoted by the Quake character’s new sidekick, a talking kangaroo mascot.
Quake started out as a burly miner, but at some point was transmogrified into a svelte freckled cowboy.
Several breakfast cereal companies attempted to market orange-flavored cereals, with little success. The most recent attempt was by Tropicana Fruit Juice, who introduced “Tropicana Crunch”, a honey-almond cluster variety that would be paired with orange juice instead of milk.
Quakes’ “Quangaroos” is probably the most successful of those attempts.
In the late 1980s, Tropicana had a cute commercial in which it mentioned, since its only ingredient is orange juice, that you can’t get any closer to pure orange goodness except by putting a straw through an orange.
So they rolled oranges across a table and had a woman try to stab a straw through them. That commercial has stuck with me for the last 30 years, and it’s a family joke that we sing the little “ba-ba-baaaaaaa-ba-ba-bum” theme song whenever we put a straw through a plastic lid.
Tropicana Field (“the Trop”) in St. Petersburg FL has been the ballpark of the Tampa Bay Rays since the team’s inaugural season in 1998. The Trop is the only non-retractable domed stadium in MLB baseball, and it is the MLB’s smallest stadium by seating capacity. Tropicana Field opened in 1990 and was originally known as the Florida Suncoast Dome. Along with the Oakland Coliseum, the Trop is often cited as one of the worst ballparks in Major League Baseball and consistently takes the last or second-to-last spot in rankings of stadiums.
St. Petersburg was the capital of Russia from 1732 to 1917.
The Russian city of Saint Petersburg was renamed “Petrograd” in 1914 by Tsar Nicholas II, during the early days of World War I, in order to remove the Germanic aspects of the city’s name.
In 1924, after the death of Vladimir Lenin, the city was renamed, again, to “Leningrad,” a name it carried until 1991, when it was restored to its original name, in a wave of “de-Leninization” which accompanied the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
There would be eight leaders of the USSR, from Lenin in 1917 to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. Following Gorbachev’s resignation, the USSR became the Russian Federation and named Boris Yeltsin as its president
Boris Yeltsin served as President of the Russian Federation from 1991 to 1999, when he resigned and was succeeded by his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin kept a low profile after leaving office and was accorded a state funeral upon his death in 2007.
Two years later, former U.S. President Bill Clinton said in a USA Today interview that, on a 1995 visit to Washington, Yeltsin had been found on Pennsylvania Avenue, drunk, in his underwear and trying to hail a taxi cab in order to find pizza.
Bill Clinton was the first Democratic president elected to two terms in his own right since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The Franklin’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a story of a married couple, a knight and his lady, another young knight who longs for the lady, and a magician who makes all the black rocks off the Breton coast disappear.