OUT OF GAME: Yeah, at these shops at various Caribbean cruise ports, you’ll see signs that say “CUBAN (seed) CIGARS!” I’m not enough of a cigar connoisseur* to know if a cigar made with tobacco grown in Honduras from Cuban seeds is as good as a cigar grown in Cuba, with Cuban seed, and cured and rolled by a Cuban.
*I don’t smoke tobacco in any form.
Winston Churchill’s love of cigars began in 1895, while he was in Cuba. He is reported to have lived for weeks off of oranges and cigars. In another anecdote: while serving as prime minister during WWII he was to take his first high-altitude airplane flight in an unpressurized cabin. According to biographer Gilbert, when Churchill went to the airfield on the evening before the flight to be fitted for a flight suit and an oxygen mask, he conferred with the flight expert who was to accompany him on the journey and requested that a special oxygen mask be devised so that he could smoke his cigars while airborne. The request was granted, and the next day Churchill was happily puffing away at 15,000 feet through a special hole in his oxygen mask.
There are eight people who have been granted honorary US citizenship. Winston Churchill was the first, and one of only two who were granted the honor during their lifetime (Mother Teresa is the other). The rest include Raoul Wallenberg, William Penn, Hannah Penn (William’s spouse), the Marquis de Lafayette, Casimir Pulaski, and Bernardo de Galvez.
Mother Teresa and Princess Diana both died within a week of each other in late August / early September 1997. Diana was just 36, and Mother Teresa was 87. If Diana were still alive today she’d be 64.
Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia in 1910. At the age of 18 she went to an Irish convent and then, just a few weeks later, was on a ship to India
After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the former state of Macedonia declared independence and named themselves the Republic of Macedonia. Greece objected to this name, as there are Greeks living in the northern part of their country who call themselves “Macedonians.” The Treaty of Prespa in 2018 settled the matter by renaming the country, “The Republic of North Macedonia”, or North Macedonia.
Prespa is a region shared between North Macedonia, Greece and Albania. In the late 10th century, the town of Prespa was mentioned as the capital of the First Bulgarian Empire. There is an island of Achilles, on the small Prespa Lake, at the DD coordinates ▲ 40.784, 21.083. There is a large Prespa Lake just to the north. They are in North Macedonia and Albania.
OUT OF GAME: It’s been over 24 hours since the most-recent post in this thread, and since I don’t want to see it die, I’m going to break my own self-imposed rule about not posting too often and go ahead and revive the thread.
IN-GAME: Modern Greeks can more-or-less get the gist of Ancient Greek - viz, the Greek used to write the New Testament. There are changes in spelling, verb tense, pronoun use, etc., but they’re not impenetrable. Compare it to a modern-day English speaker making sense of the King James Bible, for example.
As a girl, Elizabeth Cady (later Elizabeth Cady Stanton), won a prize in school for Greek studies. (She was the only girl in this class.) Her father’s reaction? “Ah, you should have been a boy.” Years later, she was one of the founders of the movement to gain the vote for women in the United States.
FYI we’ve often gone a day or three between plays.
In play —
In Upstate New York, in the Finger Lakes region, is the town of Seneca Falls. Seneca Falls is known as the Birthplace of the Women’s Rights Movement, is the site of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention where the “Declaration of Sentiments” was drafted (also known as the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, a document signed in 1848 by 68 women and 32 men—100 out of some 300 attendees at the first women’s rights convention to be organized by women), and is home to the Women’s Rights National Historical Park and the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
The town of Seneca Falls is also known as the inspiration for “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946, Frank Capra).
Seneca Wallace was a quarterback in the National Football League. After being drafted by the Seattle Seahawks in the fourth round in 2003, he played eleven seasons in the league, primarily as a backup quarterback, while also occasionally seeing action at wide receiver.
After seven seasons with the Seahawks, Wallace was traded to the Cleveland Browns, where he played for two seasons. He last played in the NFL in 2013, for the Green Bay Packers, for whom he started one game.
The Green Bay Packers are the third oldest franchise in the NFL, established in 1919. They are also the only non-profit, community-owned major sports team in the US. Rather than being the property of an individual, partnership, or corporate entity, they are held by stockholders. As of 2025 they have more than 570,000 shareholders, with no one holding more than 200,000 shares.
Even though it is referred to as “common stock” in corporate offering documents, a share of Packers stock does not share the same rights traditionally associated with common or preferred stock. It does not include an equity, cannot be traded, has no securities-law protection, and brings no season ticket purchase privileges. All shareholders receive are voting rights, an invitation to the corporation’s annual meeting, and an opportunity to buy exclusive shareholder-only merchandise. Shares of stock cannot be resold, except back to the team for a fraction of the original price. While new shares can be given as gifts, transfers are technically allowed only between immediate family members once ownership has been established.
(Not in play: I am a Green Bay Packers shareholder; I have one share of stock, which I bought in 1997, when the team conducted a stock sale to raise funds for the first major remodel of Lambeau Field. I’ve yet to attend the annual shareholders’ meeting (though it’s on my bucket list), but otherwise, it’s a $200 souvenir, and I joke that it grants me the right to yell at the television when “my employees” are playing poorly.)
(Also not in play — I too am a shareholder; I got mine about three years ago during the last offering Yeah, it’s a two-hundred dollar thing that hangs on the wall, but unlike a Brett Favre or Reggie White jersey that becomes more-or-less useless after the player retires or is traded, that share is always going to look good on the wall and the bragging rights will never expire.)
in play — Green Bay Packer season tickets have been fully sold out since 1960, which means the only way to legitimately obtain Green Bay Packer season tickets is to put one’s name on a waiting list. As of this writing, there are roughly 140,000 names on this list.
Since the stadium seats just over 80,000 spectators and the renewal rate for season tickets is something like 99%, if the parents of a child born today were to put the newborn’s name on the list, this child’s name would still probably never reach the top of the list during his or her lifetime.
-“BB”-.
Ashbel Green, who served in the New Jersey militia, was twice briefly quoted in the recent Ken Burns PBS documentary, The American Revolution. After the war he entered the clergy and served both as a chaplain to Congress and as president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton).
(He was also an ancestor of mine on my mother’s side).
Not in play —
You just had to bring up the Seattle Seahawks, didn’t you?
Thank you @kenobi_65 . My Niners got thoroughly spanked by them today.
@Bullitt : sorry about that! Who knew that Seneca Wallace had that kind of pull? 
In play:
A chaplain is a representative – either a cleric or a lay representative – of a religious tradition, who is attached or assigned to a secular institution. For example, chaplains may be assigned to, and provide pastoral care to, organizations such as military units, hospitals, governmental bodies, schools, fire and police departments, universities, sports teams, etc.
Since we’re sharing…
(Not in play)
My brother served as a chaplain in the USAF for over twenty years. He was stationed in Osan, South Korea when he turned fifty, and I sent him a birthday gift that included an old photo of us as toddlers along with an old, pre-owned comic book and a pack of chewing gum. The latter was an inside joke: when we were kids, my parents would give us five dollars to buy gifts for each of us, as well as my two sisters. I would buy them a fifteen-cent comic book and a ten-cent pack of gum, and pocket the rest. The irony is that it cost me $70 to ship his gift to Osan.
In play: The cape of Saint Martin of Tours, a revered religious relic, was carried by priests accompanying armies. The priest holding it was called a cappellanu (from cappella, Latin for cloak), and the word chaplain (and chapel) derives from that term.
Majel Barrett had appeared in several small roles in television and the movies before being cast as Number One against William Shatner’s Captain Kirk in Star Trek. Her role was a TV first: a woman in a strong supporting role as a person of some authority. Unfortunately the studio forced show creator Gene Roddenberry to replace her after seeing the pilot episode; he rewrote the episode with Leonard Nimoy as Spock, the science office being elevated to First Mate of the Enterprise and Barrett was recast as Nurse Christine Chapel.