As the bull was sacred in Minoan culture, an important sport/ritual practiced by both men and women was bull leaping. It is still unknown (but is suspected) that the more daring did not use the horns for assistance.
The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf, about a peaceful bull who did not want to fight, won the 1941 Caldecott Award for the best picture book.
There were three Holy Roman Emperors named Ferdinand.
Didn’t know about Dole’s and Specter’s shared ties to Russell, Kans., Railer13 - thanks!
In play:
The Scottish rock band Franz Ferdinand, formed in 2002, takes its name from the Austro-Hungarian archduke whose assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 sparked the beginning of World War I. They liked its alliteration, and wanted to change the world just as the archduke had (although not in remotely the same way).
The Story of Ferdinand is a children’s book, written by American author Munro Leaf in 1936. It tells the story of a Spanish bull who would rather smell flowers than fight in bullfights.
The book was adapted into an animated short film by Walt Disney in 1938, which won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject. It was also adapted into a full-length computer-animated film in 2017.
Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães in his native Portuguese) was the first to almost completely circumnavigate the globe in recorded history. After he was killed on Mactan Island (now part of the Philippines), Magellan’s surviving crew members completed that expedition’s circumnavigation. The next expedition to complete a circumnavigation was not accomplished until 58 years later, led by Francis Drake.
Because of his numerous raids on Spanish ships and settlements, Francis Drake was nicknamed ‘El Draque’ (the Dragon) by Spaniards.
Drake was said to be playing bowls when the Spanish Armada was sighted. He finished his game before heading off to war.
Four centuries later, Punch magazine published a cartoon of Winston Churchill in Elizabethan costume, playing bowls on the cliffs of the Channel and waiting for a telegram to summon him to join the government.
In the late 1500s Sir Francis Drake searched fervently for San Francisco Bay, but he never found it. It is thought that San Francisco’s famous heavy fog kept obscuring the bay from his view from the ocean, and he kept sailing past the Golden Gate.
Drakes Bay in northern California, which at first was called the Bay of San Francisco, is about 25 miles northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge and has long been considered Francis Drake’s most likely landing spot on the west coast of North America during his circumnavigation of the world by sea on his ship the Golden Hind in 1579.
It wasn’t until November 1769 when San Francisco Bay was discovered by European explorers. Captain Don Gaspar de Portolá, on an expedition to establish Franciscan missions in Alta California, discovered San Francisco Bay from land and not from the sea. Portolá was atop Sweeney Ridge, between what today are the cities of San Bruno and Pacifica, at the approximate DD coordinates ▲ 37.6046, -122.4578.
If you paste those coordinates into a map it’ll take you to the spot where Portolá stood when he spotted the Bay.
Here they are again: ▲ 37.6046, -122.4578
Fort Ross was the southernmost point that Russia settled in North America and is approximately 90 miles north of San Francisco. The “Ross” part of name is based on “Rus”, a name for the Russian people at the time.
Fort Ross, California was established by the Russian-American Fur Company in 1812 for three main reasons: to take advantage of the fur trapping and trading, to open trade with Spanish Alta California, and to supply Russian settlements in Alaska. DD coordinates ▲ 38.5138, -123.244.
The population of the post, including Russians, Aleuts, and California Indians, never exceeded 400.
Painter Bob Ross, who gained fame for his PBS instructional series The Joy of Painting, was in the U.S. Air Force for twenty years before becoming a professional painter and television host. Ross served as a medical records technician, and rose to the rank of Master Sergeant; he took up painting after attending an art class at a USO club in Anchorage, Alaska.
In 2014, the blog FiveThirtyEight analyzed 381 episodes of The Joy of Painting in which Bob Ross painted live, concluding that 91% of Ross’s paintings contained at least one tree, 44% included clouds, 39% included mountains and 34% included mountain lakes. By his own estimation, Ross completed more than thirty thousand paintings. His work rarely contained human subjects or signs of human life. On rare occasions, he would incorporate a cabin, sometimes with a chimney but without smoke, and possibly unoccupied.
R v Dudley and Stephens is a significant English court case involving the defence of necessity. A group of sailors survived a shipwreck but were cast away in a small rowboat. Dudley and Stephens killed and ate the ailing cabin boy.
Jeffrey Dahmer was known as the Milwaukee Cannibal. A serial killer, he took the lives of 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He was captured in 1991 and sentenced to 16 life terms. He was killed by fellow prison inmate Christopher Scarver in 1994.
I read R. v. Dudley and Stephens in law school!
The cannibal pair of sailors were charged in a criminal case in which the first two letters refer to Regina versus, that is, “The Queen against,” as British criminal cases were and are brought in the name of the monarch. Queen Victoria was the British monarch in 1884, when the case was filed.
The “R.” refers to Rex, the King, when, as now, a man is on the throne.
@Elendil_s_Heir did you read this one too?
In play:
The murder of Roger Whetmore is a legal scenario in the fictional cannibalism Case of the Speluncean Explorers, a 1949 legal case study in a Harvard Law Review article written by legal philosopher Lon L. Fuller. It presents a legal philosophy puzzle in a hypothetical scenario where five cave explorers are trapped by a landslide. They learn via intermittent radio contact that, without food, they will certainly starve to death before they can be rescued. They decide that one of them should be killed and eaten, so that the others might survive.
➜ https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/_file/TheCaseOfTheSpelunceanExplorers.pdf ■
The Harvard Law Review, which is published by an independent student group at the university, released its first issue in 1887. The establishment of the paper was largely due to the efforts of alumnus Louis Brandeis, who would later become a Supreme Court Justice. Many notable individuals have served as an editor of the journal, including Barack Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Learned Hand, and Alger Hiss.
As a lawyer, Brandeis broke legal ground by introducing large amounts of social science information in trials he ran involving matters of public policy. The term “Brandeis brief” refers to this kind of material being filed, in addition to more classical legal briefs which focus on the applicable law.
No, Bullitt, I didn’t read and have never heard of that case before.
In play:
Louis Brandeis, best-known at the time as a crusading pro-worker, anti-monopoly lawyer, was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson, Democrat of New Jersey, in 1916. Much of the conservative opposition to him is now considered by historians to have been due to the fact that he was the first Jewish person nominated to the Court.