Selma, California is a city in Fresno County and is about 200 miles southeast of San Francisco. Selma is 15 miles southeast of Fresno.
Bobby Cox, former manager of the Atlanta Braves baseball team, hails from Selma, California. He was born in Tulsa OK but he attended Selma High School and Reedley College which are both in the California Central Valley.
Lake Corcoran was an ancient body of water that covered the entire Central Valley of California, stretching from Redding in the north down to Bakersfield in the south. The lake existed until 400,000 years ago, when melting glaciers and increasing precipitation caused an overflow near present-day Sacramento and carving the Carquinez Strait (now part of the main confluence of the Sacramento and San Joachin Rivers), emptying into the San Francisco Bay.
Today’s Lake Corcoran is long gone, and in its place is the fertile Central Valley of California. But Lake Corcoran does have its occasional remnants, however. When flooding, heavy rains, or heavy snowfall occurs then 3 usually dry lakes can re-form: Buena Vista Lake, Kern Lake and Tulare Lake.
The winter of 2022-2023 brought heavy snowfalls to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the spring thaw in 2023 brought massive amounts of water into the Central Valley. Tulare Lake submerged over 94,000 acres of farmland and the water remains to this day. It will eventually evaporate.
Added — in April 2023 I visited Tulare lake and posted my pictures. It was impressive to see!
The Kern River is considered by many to be one of the (if not THE) deadliest river in the United States. There are an average of 7 deaths a year due to the river not counting deaths on the Upper Kern River.
The Kern River (with DD coordinates)
Kern River source ▲ 36.6967, -118.398
Kern River mouth ▲ 35.2678, -119.307
110 miles straight line distance
164 miles actual river length
The Kern River runs from its source in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, about 8 miles northwest of the summit of Mount Whitney and about 19 miles west northwest of Lone Pine, for about 164 miles to its mouth at Buena Vista Lake, which is a straight line distance of about 110 miles.
The Kern River was named for Edward Kern, cartographer for General John C. Frémont’s 1845 expedition, which crossed Walker Pass. The Kern River was originally named Rio Bravo de San Felipe by Father Francisco Garcés when he explored the area in 1776.
John C. Fremont was born in Savannah, Ga. He briefly served as military governor and US senator from California. He was, in 1856, the first Republican nominee for President of the United States, but lost to James Buchanan. After an undistinguished military career during the Civil War, he was appointed by President Rutherford B. Hayes to be governor of the Arizona Territory.
I confess that I did not know (or had forgotten) this fact. Ignorance fought, again.
In play:
Rutherford B Hayes served as the 19th President of the USA, defeating Samuel TIlden in the 1876 electoral college election, despite losing the popular vote. One of the defining moments of his presidency was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, where over 100,000 railroad workers went on strike in states from New York to California over cuts in wages. The strike ended only when Federal troops, the National Guard, local police forces, and unofficial militias organized by the railroads used force to disband the strikers. It is estimated that over 100 workers were killed during the strike.
Johnny Rutherford is a retired racing-car driver, and was one of the stars of the “Indy Car” circuit during the 1970s, winning the Indianapolis 500 three times. Rutherford also regularly competed in NASCAR and IROC races; after his retirement, he worked as a race analyst on television and radio, and frequently served as the pace-car driver for CART series races.
On four occasions, the NBA’s Indiana Pacers have had a home playoff game on the same day as the Indianapolis 500. They are 0-4 in those games, all in the Eastern Conference Finals, losing to the Knicks in Game 1 in 1999; the Pistons in Game 5 in 2004; the Heat in Game 3 in 2014; and the Knicks again in Game 3 in 2025.
They went on to lose the first three series but won the fourth series.
The Indianapolis Colts have been part of the city since 1983, when the owner of the Baltimore Colts moved the team from Baltimore. The Baltimore Colts appeared in two Super Bowl matches, losing the first to the Joe Namath-led New York Jets in 1969, and winning their second against the Dallas Cowboys in 1971. The Indianapolis Colts have appeared in one Super Bowl match, defeating the Chicago Bears in 2006.
A foal is a young horse of either sex. A colt is specifically a young male horse. Ben Stein missed this distinction during the final round on an episode of his game show Win Ben Stein’s Money.
The Dodge Colt was a subcompact car, sold in North America by Dodge (but manufactured as a “captive import” by Mitsubishi), which was marketed from the 1971 through 1993 model years. The Colt went through seven “generations,” and was at times also sold under the Plymouth marque, under the model names Cricket, Colt, and Champ.
The first World Championship 300 Mile Motorcycle Race was held in Dodge City, Kansas, on July 4, 1914. Two of the attendees were William Harley and Walter Davidson. According to legend, native Kansan Ray Weishaar, who drove for the pair, brought a piglet from a nearby farm with him to the race. Harley and Davidson subsequently adopted the ‘hog’ as a mascot, and the rest is history.
I read a sf short story years ago set in an alternate timeline. There was passing reference to Fremont having been elected in 1856; it did not seem to have made a significant difference in US history.
In play:
Alfred Mossman “Alf” Landon served as the 26th Governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937. He was the Republican Party’s nominee in the 1936 presidential election, and was defeated in a landslide by incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The margin of victory in the Electoral College was the largest of Roosevelt’s four national elections: Landon won just 8 electoral votes to Roosevelt’s 523. Landon died just a month past his hundredth birthday in 1987.
Actor Michael Landon starred in television dramas on the NBC network for 30 consecutive years: Bonanza (1959-1973), Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983), and Highway to Heaven (1984-1989). Landon’s final public appearance was also on NBC, on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, less than two months before he died from pancreatic cancer in July of 1991.
Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker is the daughter of Alf Landon. Born in 1932, she was elected to the Senate from Kansas in 1978. She was the first woman senator from Kansas, and, at the time, was the only woman serving in the US Senate. She served 3 terms as a senator before retiring in 1997. One of her major achievements was the Kennedy–Kassebaum Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which, among other things, assured health insurance coverage for people changing jobs who have pre-existing medical conditions.
Having had my career in medical device technology, specifically for cancer treatment systems, I can almost list these by memory…
Almost.
The 1996 HIPAA Act established privsec of PHI, the privacy and security of a patient’s Protected Health Information. The specific 18 key identifiers of PHI are:
(That’s quite the memory, Bullitt.)
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is responsible for enforcing the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules.
I copied that list from a reference source, but yes when you work in electronic medical records it is drilled into you by TPTB.
Remember the 1970s beauty Farrah Fawcett? What red-blooded American male doesn’t? Later in life she suffered from anal cancer. In 2009 she died from the disease. She was only 62. In her 20s, in the 1970s she was a blonde bombshell beauty.
Farrah Fawcett was being treated at UCLA Medical Center. There, a greedy and selfish lady named Lawanda Jackson, an admin at UCLA, leaked her diagnosis and treatment information to the National Enquirer, and in return she received about $5,000. UCLA was later fined $865,000 for this HIPAA violation, although the fine also includes violations against the privacy of Farah Fawcett, Britney Spears and Maria Shriver.
Lawanda Jackson was indicted and found guilty. She died of breast cancer before sentencing. She was 50 when she died.
References
➜ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-apr-30-me-ucla30-story.html ■
➜ https://www.hipaajournal.com/ucla-hospitals-receives-865k-hipaa-fine-failing-protect-celebrity-medical-records ■
➜ https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/cac/Pressroom/pr2008/049.html ■
➜ https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/snooping-celebrity-medical-records-cases-settled-1.1046236 ■
➜ https://www.tmz.com/2009/05/09/hospital-worker-who-sold-out-celbs-dies ■
In play —
The US HHS, Department of Health and Human Services, was formerly US HEW, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It was formed in 1953, and then in 1979 the separate Department of Education was created under Jimmy Carter. DOE is the Department of Energy, while DoEd is sometimes informally used for Department of Education.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which was first established as the Health Care Financing Administration in 1977.
CMS’s responsibilities include administering the U.S. Medicare program, overseeing HealthCare.gov (and the related “individual” (Obamacare) health insurance program), collaborating with individual states on the administration of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP), and overseeing the U.S.'s nursing home / assisted living industry.