Andrew Lawson, professor of geology at the University of California, was the author of the 1908 report on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The report is known as the “Lawson Report”.
At least 3,000 people perished in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The quake, which struck at 5:12 in the morning of April 18, lasted for over 40 seconds, and caused fires which burned for several days. Over 80% of the city was destroyed.
The San Andreas Fault Trail is a self-guided interpretive trail in the Los Trancos Open Space Preserve of Los Altos CA. The San Andreas fault splits the preserve, and the loop trail starts and ends at lat / long 37.325364, -122.175521 and goes to the northwest. It uses this interpretive guide by openSpace.org, the Midpeninsula Tegional Open Space District, here – https://is.gd/wKFn0f.
Oops — it’s Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. Duh.
Heh. When I read this last night, my rye-addled brain didn’t register this typo.
In play: With a population of almost 40 million, California is by far the most populous state. Texas is second with just over 28 million. Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania are the next 3 most populous states.
6 states (Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Delaware) have a population of less than 1 million.
The states granting women the right to vote prior to the 19th Amendment were:
1890 Wyoming
1893 Colorado
1896 Utah
1896 Idaho
1910 Washington
1911 California
1912 Arizona
1912 Kansas
1912 Oregon
1914 Montana
1914 Nevada
1917 New York
1918 Michigan
1918 Oklahoma
1918 South Dakota
Product 19 was a brand of breakfast cereal, marketed by Kellogg’s. It was introduced in 1967, as a response to General Mills’ Total, and was marketed as containing all of the recommended daily allowance of vitamins and minerals.
The brand’s unusual name was said to have been a reference to either Kellogg’s nineteenth attempted formulation of the product, or that it was the company’s nineteenth new product in development that year.
After years of declining sales, Kellogg’s discontinued Product 19 in 2016.
Oh man, and I liked Product 19.
Total cereal was launched in 1961.
Yeah, that’s my play.
A strobogrammatic number is a number that appears the same when viewed right-side up or upside down. 1961 was the last ‘upside-down’ year; before that, the most recent upside-down years were 1881 and 1691.
The next such year will be 6009, should the calendar, humanity, and the earth last that long.
Calendars are arbitrary things. There are something like a dozen different calendars out there (not counting things like Star Trek’s “Stardate” numbering system), including the Julian calendar, the Islamic calendar, and the Hebrew calendar. The general difference lies in which date the calendar uses as its ‘zero’ date. The Holocene calendar, for example, uses the start of the human era as its base date (and this date was arbitrarily declared to be 10000 years before the birth of Christ), so this is year 12020 according to those calculations.
The Hebrew calendar, on the other hand, uses the date of creation as its start point. This year was arrived at by doing some biblical math acrobatics too complicated to go into here; suffice it to say that this is currently year 5780 according to the Hebrew calendar. So if you’re a devout Jew, the next strobogrammatic year (6009) is less than 230 years away.
(and I’ll bet you were wondering how I was going to tie all this together!)
-“BB”-
While poet Emma Lazarus is best known for her sonnet “The New Colossus”, inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, she published many volumes of poetry including Jewish Poems and Translations before her death at age 38.
Many readers assume that Lazarus was an immigrant, inspired to write her poem after coming to America as one of the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. However, she came from a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family whose ancestors arrived in New Amsterdam over a hundred years before the American Revolution. She travelled to Europe twice, both times meeting leading authors of the day, including Robert Browning and Henry James.
Emma Goldman was perhaps the most influential Leftist in American political history. So much so, that she was the inspiration for Emmanuel Goldstein, the antithesis of Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984. This is evidence the Orwell was warning against s future dominated by a right-wing America, not a left-wing Russia.
Emma was the last of Jane Austen’s novels to be published during her lifetime; it was published in December, 1815 (though the title page gives an 1816 date).
The novel has been adapted for film, television, and stage many times, and the actresses who have played the title character include Gwyneth Paltrow, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Churchill, and Kate Beckinsale. Modern-day adaptations of the story include Clueless (starring Alicia Silverstone) and Aisha (starring Sonam Kapoor).
Emma of Normandy, Queen of England was the mother of two different Kings of England, themselves fathered by two different Kings of England. Her first husband was Aethelred the Unready, by whom she had Edward. Her second husband was Cnut, by whom she had Harthacnut. Cnut, a Dane, deposed the Anglo-Saxon house of Aethelred, and was in turn succeeded by his son Harthacnut. Harthacnut in turn was succeeded by his half-brother Edward, who became known as Edward the Confessor.
Edward the Confessor died without an heir in January 1066. On his deathbed he named his brother-in-law Harold Godwinson, the powerful Earl of Wessex, as king. The Witenagemot met and chose Harold to succeed Edward. Edward’s cousin, William of Normandy, claimed the throne had been promised to him and that Harold had sworn to uphold his claim. He assembled a fleet and invaded England in September 1066.
William and Harold met at Hastings, and Harold was killed. The Witenagemot met and elected Edgar Aetheling, the grandson of Edmund Ironside, Edward’s half-brother, king, but he was never crowned and William had other ideas.
In the year 897, Pope Stephen VI had the rotting corpse of his predecessor, Pope Formosus exhumed and put on trial for ecclesiastical crimes. With the corpse propped up on a throne, a deacon was appointed to answer for the deceased pontiff. Eventually, the corpse was found guilty. After having the corpse stripped of its papal vestments, Stephen cut off the three fingers of the right hand that it had used in life for blessings, then formally invalidated all of Formosus’ acts and ordinations. The body was finally interred in a graveyard for foreigners, only to be dug up once again, tied to weights, and cast into the Tiber River.
There have been 54 Super Bowl football games to date, and so far there has never been a shutout. The fewest points scored in a Super Bowl was by the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl VI against the Dallas Cowboys. Against Dallas’ famed Doomsday Defense the Dolphins only scored 3 points on a field goal by the Cypriot Garo Yepremian. Miami lost 24-3 and their 3 points was the lowest ever to date… until 2019 when the LA Rams only scored 3 points and lost to the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LIII, 13-3.
In four straight Super Bowls, VI through IX, the losing teams’ scores were only in single digits (and that has never happened again):
Super Bowl VI, 24-3, Dallas Cowboys over the Miami Dolphins
Super Bowl VII, 14-7, Miami Dolphins over the Washington Redskins
Super Bowl VIII, 24-7, Miami Dolphins over the Minnesota Vikings
Super Bowl IX, 16-6, Pittsburgh Steelers over the Minnesota Vikings
In that run of Super Bowl games,
- the Vikings were the first team to lose back-to-back Super Bowls
- the Dolphins were the first team to appear in 3 straight Super Bowls
- the Dolphins were the second team to win back-to-back Super Bowls. The Green Bay Packers were the first, winning Super Bowls I and II (although at the time, the games were not called Super Bowls).
Getting back to fewest points scored by a Super Bowl team, the years when the Dolphins and the Rams scored only 3 points were in 1972 and in 2019, over 47 years between those games.
The NFL knew they needed to open up the game, to change it from ‘3 yards and a cloud of dust’ to the more wide-open passing schemes we enjoy today, and so they made several rules changes over those years to promote higher scoring, in general, in the NFL game.
“Three yards and a cloud of dust,” is a descriptive term for an offensive strategy in American (gridiron) football, which emphasizes a strong running game, and de-emphasizes passing. The term is widely ascribed to Woody Hayes, longtime football coach at Ohio State, though it is not clear if Hayes was, in fact, the person who coined the term.
When the Pilgrims sailed to the New World in 1620 aboard the Mayflower, she was heavily armed; her largest gun was a minion cannon which was brass, weighed about 1,200 pounds, and could shoot a 3.5 pound cannonball almost a mile (1,750 yards). She also had a saker cannon of about 800 pounds, and two base cannons that weighed about 200 pounds and shot a 3 to 5 ounce ball. She carried at least ten pieces of ordnance on the port and starboard sides of her gun deck: seven cannons for long-range purposes, and three smaller guns often fired from the stern at close quarters that were filled with musket balls.
The standard towed medium howitzer for the US Marine Corps in the 1980s and 1990s was the M198 howitzer. The “emm one niner eight” was 155mm caliber, and its standard HE round (for high explosive) weighed 97 lbs. At a standard high charge it could be fired about 10 miles, and farther with special powder.
The M198 was developed in 1969 by the Rock Island Arsenal at Rock Island IL on the Mississippi River about 275 miles upriver from St. Louis and the last lock and dam on the upper river, and near to Moline IL and Davenport IA.
Firing tests for the M198 began in 1970, and in 1978 the gun went into production. It entered service in 1979 (hey! the year I graduated high school and a year before I enlisted in the Marines!), and to date about 1,600 units have been placed into operation.
The M198 replaced the WWII-era M114 155mm towed howitzer, in service since 1942 and also produced at Rock Island (over 10,000 were built). The M777, which debuted in the 2001 war in Afghanistan, is replacing the M198 throughout the US Army and Marine Corps. The M777 (or “emm triple seven”) is manufactured by BAE Systems out of London and Farnborough in the UK, by their Global Combat Systems Division HQ’d out of Arlington VA USA.
The M198 was a nuclear-capable howitzer. It could also fire the laser-guided Copperhead projectile. I was USMC field artillery FDC with the M198, but never got to fire the Copperhead. Or the nuke. 
The nuke round had an explosive yield of 72 tons, quite small by nuke standards but if you’re at the gun line you wouldn’t want a high yield explosive.
The nuke round, the W48, was retired in 1992. I retired in 1993.