Playing off of @Railer13 's post:
The Toronto Argonauts are a professional Canadian football team, and a member of the Canadian Football League. The team was originally founded in 1873, by members of the Argonaut Rowing Club, as the Argonauts Football Club; it is the oldest professional sports team in North America which still operates under its original team name.
Sadly, the CFL does not have a team in Atlantic Canada. There have been proposals for teams in Nova Scotia and occasionally New Brunswick, but so far the Atlantic Schooners remain but a vision.
Thanks for those links, knoodler, but I’d say that’s still a long way from officially designating America, or any part of it, as a penal colony, as you originally posted.
In play:
Canada is one of several countries which have the technical and scientific know-how to build nuclear weapons, but have chosen, for political and/or moral reasons, not to do so.
The original five nations that signed the 1970 Treaty of Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) were France, China, Russia, The United Kingdom and The United States of America. As of May 1995, a total of 191 States have joined the NPT.
According to ICANW, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons organization, nine countries have nuclear weapons and there are 12,512 warheads in existence (the dates come from wiki):
1945 — United States, with 5,244 warheads
1949 — Russia, with 5,899 warheads
1952 — UK, with 225 warheads
1960 — France, with 290 warheads
1963* — Israel, with 90 warheads
1964 — China, with 410 warheads
1974 — India, with 164 warheads
1998 — Pakistan, with 170 warheads
2006 — North Korea, with 30 warheads
* — exact date is uncertain
6 other countries host nuclear weapons as part of a nuclear-sharing agreement:
Türkiye, with 35 warheads
Italy, with 20 warheads
Belgium, with 15 warheads
Germany, with 15 warheads
Netherlands, with 15 warheads
Belarus, with an uncertain number of warheads
The TPNW, Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons of 2017 which entered into force in 2021, currently has 92 signatories and 68 states parties. The TPNW was carefully crafted to reinforce, complement, and build on the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, about 1700 nuclear warheads remained in Ukrainian territory. In 1994, citing an inability to circumvent Russian nuclear launch codes, Ukraine reached an understanding to transfer and destroy the weapons and join the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
On 01 January 1700, Protestant nations in Western Europe, except England, began using the Gregorian calendar. Catholic nations had been using it since its introduction in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII.
In Great Britain, the Gregorian calendar was adopted in September 1752. In order to deal with the discrepancy of days, which by now had grown to eleven, it was ordered that 2nd September 1752 would be immediately followed by 14th September 1752. This led to crowds of people on the streets demanding, ‘Give us back our 11 days!’ It also explains why their financial year begins on 6th April. The official start of the year used to be Lady Day (25th March), but the loss of eleven days in 1752 pushed this back to 5th April. Another skipped day in 1800 pushed it back again to 6th April.
Nitpick: Shouldn’t this be the USSR?
In play: The French Revolutionary Calendar was used from 1793 through 1805. The calendar was divided into 12 months, with each month consisting of 30 days. Each month was divided into three 10-day weeks; the tenth day of each week was the ‘weekend’, which was set aside for rest and recreation. The five (or six) extra days at the end of each year were called ‘complementary days’. Each year began at midnight of the day of the Autumnal Equinox.
One of the few remaining references to the French Revolutionary Calendar today is lobster Thermidor, a seafood dish named after one of the calendar’s summer months. Robespierre was overthrown and executed, and the Reign of Terror ended, in Thermidor in our year 1794. The month typically began on July 19 or 20 and ended August 17 or 18.
I would like to blame this on my source material, but you are correct. The Russian Federation did not exist prior to 1990. Although in fairness, while technically it was called the USSR, or Soviet Union, and the people collectively called Soviets, the terms “Russia” and “Russians” were still used during that period.
Thermador is an American brand of high-end kitchen appliances. The company was founded in 1916, and originally sold electric heaters and evaporative coolers for homes, before expanding into kitchen appliances in the 1930s. The brand is now a division of the German engineering firm Bosch.
Harry Bosch is a fictional veteran police officer created by novelist Michael Connelly who has appeared in 24 of his own novels and six of the novels in which his half-brother Mickey Haller (“The Lincoln Lawyer”) is the protagonist.
“Mickey Mouse Money” was the satirical nickname that Filipinos gave to the banknotes printed by the Japanese during their World War II occupation of the Philippines. More formally known as Japanese Invasion Money, it was used as a replacement for local currency after the conquest of Far Eastern states and colonies including Malaya, Burma, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies in World War II.
Terry and the Pirates was a comic strip created by Milton Caniff. Terry Lee was an American boy who, with his friend Pat Ryan, had multiple adventures in the Far East. They strip was notable for the various attractive women as protagonists, including the Dragon Lady, Burma (no last name given), and Normandie Drake
16th century British explorer Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe in 1577–80 and was the most renowned seaman of the Elizabethan Age of 1558–1603, when Queen Elizabeth I ruled England. He searched the Pacific coast for the supposed Northwest Passage back to the Atlantic and went as far north to what is now Vancouver BC before cold weather forced him to retreat southward. He anchored near what is now San Francisco. Drakes Bay, roughly 30 miles north of San Francisco, is named after him and is considered to be his most likely landing spot on that journey.
In the fictional Star Trek universe, San Francisco is home to Starfleet Academy, and Paris is home to Federation Headquarters.
William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek (TOS), would go on to play government agent Jeff Cable in Barbary Coast (1975-76), which takes place in the notorious Barbary Coast area of San Francisco.
William Shatner has played on TV game shows in the 1970s including Match Game, Tattletales, and Hollywood Squares.
In 1972, three years after the cancellation of Star Trek, William Shatner, a native of Montreal, did a TV ad featuring a sneaky penguin for the Canadian supermarket chain Loblaws: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ5YTx_9MdU