The USS Constitution is the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world today, but among decommissioned ships the USS Constellation – in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor – is the only Civil-War-era vessel still afloat. It was the last all-sail warship built by the U.S. Navy.
The USS Constellation was not named for an astronomical constellation, but for the Flag Act of 1777, which speaks of how the stars in the flag are “representing a new constellation”.
Flag Day is a holiday celebrated on June 14 in the United States. It commemorates the adoption of the flag of the United States on June 14, 1777. It was first proposed in 1861 to rally support for the Union side of the Civil War.
In 2024, the U.S. state of Minnesota introduced a new state flag. The flag features a dark blue field, representing the night sky (which is also an abstraction of the state’s shape) a white star, symbolizing the North Star (one of Minnesota’s nicknames is “The North Star State”), and a light blue field symbolizing the state’s rivers and lakes.
The Minnesota North Stars played in the NHL for 26 seasons, from 1967 to 1993, before moving to Dallas as the Dallas Stars. They never won the Stanley Cup, but the Dallas Stars did, once, in 1999.
North Dallas Forty, a movie based on an autobiographical novel written by former Dallas Cowboy receiver Pete Gent, premiered in 1979. The book had received much attention because many thought the unflattering portrait of pro football, Dallas Cowboys-style, was fairly accurate.
Former Dallas Cowboys receiver Pete Gent did not play college football; he was a star basketball player at Michigan State. After he graduated from college, he had a tryout with the Cowboys, who were impressed by his athleticism. The Cowboys signed Gent, and briefly tried him out as a defensive back, before making him a wide receiver.
Gent wound up playing for the Cowboys for five seasons, making 68 receptions and scoring four touchdowns, before knee injuries led to an end to his career.
The Beatles arrived in Dallas about ten months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the city was still on-edge at the time, which made the Beatles themselves on-edge. Lennon and Harrison both wondered if they would make it out of the city alive, and indeed, while in town, so overbearing was the police effort at keeping the crowds away from them that they spent most of their time at their hotel, passing the time by watching news coverage of their visit to the city. The local press corps didn’t help much, either, peppering (no pun intended) the lads with more-pointed questions than they were used to at their press conferences.
John Lennon had two singles which reached #1 on the U.S. charts after the breakup of the Beatles.
The first was the 1974 song “Whatever Gets You thru the Night,” a collaboration with his Plastic Ono Nuclear Band and Elton John. The second, “(Just Like) Starting Over,” which was the final song released by Lennon before his assassination in December of 1980, hit #1 three weeks after his death.
When Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s song “Say Say Say” hit number one in 1983, McCartney became the first artist to hit number one on the Billboard charts under five different names: the Beatles, Paul & Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney & Wings, Wings, and Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson.
Yorba Linda, California is a city of 68,000 in Southern California, near Anaheim. Richard Nixon was born there in 1913 and lived there until he was 9, and then his family moved 25 miles west to Whittier.
Although Richard Nixon served in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War II, he never served aboard the battleship USS Arizona.
The Arizona is no longer a commissioned warship, BTW; she was struck from the Naval Vessel Register or Navy List a little less than a year after the Pearl Harbor attack: USS Arizona - Wikipedia
In the Navy, Richard Nixon held billets supporting logistics and intelligence efforts. He was commissioned in 1942 at the age of 29 and then underwent aviation indoctrination training at the Naval Training School in Quonset Point RI. He was an aide to the commander of the Naval Air Station Ottumwa in Iowa (NAS Ottumwa). Then he was assigned to Marine Aircraft Group 25 (MAG 25) to support the war in the South Pacific. Near the end of the war, in early 1945 Nixon served at the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington DC. He then supported the Bureau of Aeronautics Contracting Officer for Terminations in the Office of the Bureau of Aeronautics General Representative in New York. In 1946 Nixon transferred to the inactive ready reserves, and then in 1966 he transferred to the Retired Naval Reserve.
Today, NAS Ottumwa is the Ottumwa Regional Airport. About 14 of the original NAS buildings remain. Scott Carpenter, one of the seven Project Mercury astronauts and the second American to orbit the Earth, also served at NAS Ottumwa.
The character of Radar on the TV series MASH came from Ottumwa, Iowa.
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Not to nitpick but to expand: McCartney released “Coming Up” in 1980 under Paul McCartney (McCartney II) which peaked at No. 1 in both US and UK. That makes six different names.
The Des Moines River, which flows through Ottumwa, is approximately 525 miles in length from its headwaters in Minnesota to its mouth at the Mississippi River. It is the largest river flowing across the state of Iowa, basically flowing from the northwest part of the state to the southeast.
The origin of the name is somewhat obscure, although early French explorers named it ‘La Rivière des Moines’, which means the ‘River of the Monks’. That name may have referred to early Trappist monks who built huts near the mouth of the river at the Mississippi.
Trappist monasteries were/are known for their exquisite beer, brewed with love and with exacting attention to detail by monks who have been brewing for decades, who themselves learned their skill from monks who had been brewing for decades, etc., going back centuries. Alas, none of the dozen or so Trappist monasteries in the US brew beer, the last to do so having shut down that operation in 2022. But if you don’t mind Benedictine beer, there are two Benedictine monasteries-cum-breweries here in the States: one in Oregon (Mt. Angel Abbey) and one in New Mexico (Monastery of Christ in the Desert). There’s also a brewery on the grounds of a convent, and it’s more of a commercial partnership between the Benedictine sisters and a (I assume) secular Brewmaster.
Benjamin Franklin’s father Josiah sired seventeen children by two wives; the future US minister to France and postmaster general had seven sisters or half-sisters, and was the youngest of all the boys.
Benjamin Franklin was known for taking “air baths” for his health. These air baths had him sitting naked in front of open windows for 30 to 60 minutes every morning. Franklin believed that cold, fresh air was a “tonic” that improved health and cured colds better than water. Franklin would read or write during this time.
Sometimes these trivia snippets can be TMI.
Some images in my head, I just do not need.
Benjamin Franklin, when asked why he favored older women, is said to have responded, “Because they are so grateful.”