The Parramatta Eels aren’t doing so well this season. They’re on the bottom of the ladder.
In play: A memorial was erected in 1888 in Parramatta Park near the site where Lady Mary FitzRoy, wife of the then Governor of New South Wales Sir Charles FitzRoy, was killed in a carriage accident on 7 December 1847. As the newspaper reported at the time: “The awful tale can be told in a very few words: His Excellency and Lady FitzRoy were about to visit Sydney. The horses being fresh, ran away the moment their heads were let go – the carriage was dashed to pieces and Lady FitzRoy [was] so much injured that she died almost immediately, and Mr Masters, the aid-de-camp, survived but a few hours. The Governor, although much shaken, is not supposed to be seriously injured.”
Robert FitzRoy was captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin’s famous voyage to the Galapagos Islands. He was also a pioneering meteorologist who invented forecasts, and established what is now the Met Office. Later, as Governor of New Zealand, FitzRoy defended Maori property rights against British settlers’ claims.
President Franklin Roosevelt was a distant cousin of President and New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR’s proposed message to Congress initially was,
“Yesterday, December 7th 1941, a day that will live in World History…”
before he changed it to
“Yesterday, December 7th 1941, a day that will live in infamy…”
Franklin Armstrong was first introduced in the Peanuts comic strip on July 31, 1968. Charles Schulz got letters protesting his going to an integrated school with Peppermint Patty and Marcie.
Charles Schulz’s dog character, Snoopy, was originally going to be called Sniffy but that name was already used in another comic strip. Snoopy was the name chosen by Schulz’s late mother because it is similar to Snuppa, a Norwegian term of endearment.
Some other names of US airports where the word “airport” or “field” is either incidental or unused are:
Port Columbus (Ohio)
Albuquerque Sunport
Pease International Tradeport (New Hampshire)
Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport (Wyoming) - it’s a dirt strip
The first country to give women the right to vote was New Zealand in 1893. Saudi Arabia is the most recent, King Abdullah having bestowed the right only in 2011.
In 1848 in Seneca Falls, in the Finger Lakes region of New York state, was the location of the Women’s Rights Convention. This was the obviously-visible beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States.
Seneca Falls is on the edge of what was called the Burned-Over District, basically western New York state, in the 1800’s. It originally referred to the area being so heavily evangelized that there were no souls left to save in the Second Great Awakening. Religious or utopian social organizations founded there, or extremely popular there, then include:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
The Millerites
Seventh Day Adventists
Jehovah’s Witnesses
International Bible Students
Spiritualism
The Shakers
The Oneida Society
Social radicalism, including women’s suffrage, abolitionism, and racial nondiscrimination, heavily popular there whether or not originating there, were outgrowths of the environment later in the period.
The Shakers is a dying religion as they do not believe in sexual intercourse even if married which seems to be correlated to the lack of new Shakers being born.
Shaker Heights, Ohio is a planned community in the eastern Cleveland suburbs. There had been members of the Shaker sect living there before it was laid out in the 1920s, but they were long gone by then.
Shaker High School in Latham New York is the alma mater of NBA veteran Sam Perkins. Perkins won an Olympic gold medal for the US basketball team in the Los Angeles Olympics. Perkins’ NBA career was from 1984 to 2001.
That 1984 US Olympic Basketball team had the following members:
Steve Alford, Guard
Patrick Ewing, Center
Vern Fleming, Guard
Michael Jordan, Guard
Joe Kleine, Forward
Jon Koncak, Center
Chris Mullin, Guard
Sam Perkins, Forward
Alvin Robertson, Guard
Wayman Tisdale, Forward
Jeff Turner, Forward
Leon Wood, Guard
The kingdom of León was an independent kingdom situated in the northwest region of the Iberian Peninsula. It was founded in AD 910 when the Christian princes of Asturias along the northern coast of the peninsula shifted their capital from Oviedo to the city of León. The County of Portugal separated to become the independent Kingdom of Portugal in 1139 and the eastern, inland part of León was joined to the Kingdom of Castile in 1230. The kingdom eventually became part of a united Spain.
The earliest and longest lived of the modern European colonial empires, spanning almost six centuries, was the Portuguese empire. It began in1415 with the capture of Ceuta from the Moors and ended in 1999 with the return of Macau to China.