Tuskegee University founder Booker T. Washington was the first black guest to dine as a free man at the White House when he accepted President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation to dinner on the date of October 16, 1901, at a time virtually no one in America would have believed President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama would be inaugurated to the People’s House barely more than 100 years later.
Centennial Park in Sydney was dedicated by Sir Henry Parkes in January 1888 to celebrate the first 100 years of European settlement in Australia and described by him as ‘emphatically the people’s park’.
It was in Centennial Park that the official proclamation of the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia was made on 1 January 1901.
Parkes was married three times. With his first two wives he had 17 children. At 80 he married his third wife, a 23-year old young lass. They did not have any children but I’m guessing he tried and tried and tried. The town of Parkes, NSW is named after him, and so is the nearby Parkes Observatory. See the movie, The Dish (2000), for a story of the observatory.
On 18 January 2003 the Mount Stromlo observatory near Canberra suffered devastating damage due to bush fires, which destroyed five telescopes, workshops, seven homes, and the heritage-listed administration building. The only telescope to escape the fires was the 1886 15-centimetre Farnham telescope. Relics from the fire are preserved in the collection of the National Museum of Australia.
Redevelopment is completed and the Observatory is now a major partner in the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope.
The GMT, Great Magellan Telescope, is a planned extremely large telescope being constructed in the Las Campanas Observatory in the southern Atacama Desert in Chile. Light from the edge of the universe will first reflect off of the GMT’s seven primary mirrors, then reflect again off of seven smaller secondary mirrors, and finally, down through the center primary mirror to the advanced CCD (charge coupled device) imaging cameras. Commissioning of the GMT is scheduled to begin in 2021.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth’s oceanic divisions, with an area of 165.25 million km[sup]2[/sup].
The ocean’s current name was coined by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan during the Spanish circumnavigation of the world in 1521, as he encountered favourable winds on reaching the ocean. He therefore called it Mar Pacifico in Portuguese, meaning “peaceful sea”.
Explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521) has a penguin named after him, the Magellanic penguin. He was the first European explorer to spot one. It is a South American penguin found in Argentina, Chile, the Falklands, and Brazil. Magellan spotted the Penguins in 1520, a year before he died.
Czech hockey player Jaromir Jagr, now of the NHL’s Florida Panthers, is the only man ever to play in the Stanley Cup finals in both his teens (with the Pittsburgh Penguins) and his forties (with the Boston Bruins).
The Bruins are one of the “Original Six” NHL teams who played the 25 seasons between the 1942-43 season and the expansion in 1967 that added six new teams (including the Penguins).
When Boston television station WSBK-TV began broadcasting Bruins games in 1967, the producers of the games’ telecasts wanted a suitable piece of music to air for the introduction of each game. Perhaps inspired by the Boston Ballet’s annual Christmas performance of The Nutcracker had become closely identified with Boston, The Ventures’ instrumental rock version of the Nutcracker’s overture, known as “Nutty”, itself thought to be that group’s version of the slightly earlier hit “Nut Rocker”, was selected as the opening piece of music for Bruins telecasts. The song “Nutty” has been identified with the Bruins ever since, and is still sometimes played at the TD Garden during Bruins games.
Rene Rancourt has been the Bruins’ anthem singer (both “The Star Spangled Banner” and “O Canada”) for all their home games since 1976, and performs at Fenway Park for Red Sox home games on nights when the Bruins are in a playoff game on the road. Rancourt’s signature fist-pump at the end of the anthem was modeled after the “Stump Pump” of former Bruin Randy Burridge, whom Rancourt admired. He also salutes at the end of the anthem, for men and women who have served in the armed forces.
The Bruins also often play “Brass Bonanza”, the instrumental-only theme tune of the old Hartford Whalers, to appeal to Connecticut-based fans as well.
While none of the actors in the cast of Bonanza were familiar stars when the show began its run in 1959, they quickly became favorites of the first television generation. The order of billing at the beginning of the broadcast was shuffled randomly each week, with no relation whatsoever to the current episode featured that week.
The longest Morse code telegram ever sent was the Nevada state constitution, sent from Carson City to Washington D.C. in 1864. That was on 26 October 1864, from NV Governor James Nye to President Abraham Lincoln.
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman reported the successful completion of his March to the Sea with this short telegram to President Lincoln, dated December 22, 1864: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”
The Skyline to the Sea trail is a San Francisco Bay Area trail, in the South Bay and on the peninsula, that winds 30 miles from the summit of the Santa Cruz mountains at Saratoga Gap down to the Pacific Ocean. Many people do this trail hike over two days, not by camping out, but by staging cars at the beginning and ends of their day’s planned trek. Much of the trail is exposed so bring sun protection.
Starfleet Command is shown in Star Trek: The Motion Picture to be based at what is now the Presidio in San Francisco, California.
Two batteries were built in the Presidio with two not very imaginative names, West Battery, and Battery East. Built in 1873, West Battery was the first gun emplacement. A powder magazine at Battery West can be seen there today. By 1898, Battery East had 8-inch rifled Rodman cannons emplaced. Battery East is above the Warming Hut and to the east of Doyle Drive, near Lincoln Blvd and Battery East Rd. A gun emplacement can be seen there today.
These battery areas can be seen along the Batteries to Bluffs Trail which has amazing views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Pacific Ocean, and San Francisco Bay.
The northern Sydney suburb of Castlecrag was designed and developed in the 1920s by the American architect Walter Burley Griffin. The suburb’s streets were given names of the various features of a castle: The Barbette, The Barbican, The Barricade, The Bartizan, The Bastion, The Battery, The Battlement, The Bulwark, The Citadel, The High Tor, The Outpost, The Palisade, The Parapet, The Postern, The Rampart, The Redoubt, The Scarp, The Tor Walk and Sortie Port.
The Citadel in Quebec City is the official residence of the Governor General of Canada in Quebec. It is built not far from the location of the Governor’s Palace from French colonial days.
The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina is one of six United States Senior Military Colleges, in which all able-bodied male students are members of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). The others are North Georgia, Norwich, Texas A&M, Virginia Military Institute, and Virginia Tech.