In 2009, during the Speech from the Throne by the Governor-General, a page in the Canadian Senate held up a sign which read ‘Stop Harper’. She was escorted out of the chamber by the Sergeant-at-Arms and fired the next day, for breaching the neutrality required by parliamentary employees.
In 2012, the Washington Nationals’ right fielder Bryce Harper was selected for the All-Star Game, becoming the youngest position player to ever be selected.
When told by painter Benjamin West that George Washington would probably resign his Continental Army commission and return to his plantation at the end of the American Revolution, rather than seize power, King George III exclaimed, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
The tiny island of West Caicos is home to many flamingos, but no people.
The tiny Brazilian island of Ilha da Queimada Grande is also empty of people, but not because any flamingos: there are an estimated five deadly poisonous golden lancehead snakes per square meter on the island, supported by a diet of migratory birds (God what stupid birds!).
Yeah, five per square meter sounds like an exaggeration to me too, but even five per 1000 square meters would be a lot more than enough to keep me away from the goddam place!
Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the site of nuclear weapons testing between 1946 and 1958, is one of the most dangerous islands in the world. It is also often visited. Eating locally grown produce is strongly not advised.
The two-piece swimsuit called the Bikini was named for the atoll, which was in the news at the time for the nuclear tests. It was designed not by a couturier but an engineer, Frenchman Louis Réard, in the hope that it would create a similar “explosive commercial and cultural reaction”.
In France, people eat approximately 500,000,000 snails per year.
Charles de Gaulle, postwar President of France, is said to have remarked, “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?”
President Theodore Roosevelt commented to his friend, author Owen Wister, after daughter Alice Roosevelt’s third interruption to their conversation and threatening to throw her ‘out the window’, “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”
The university library on the UCSD campus ( University of California, San Diego) is named the Geisel Library, after Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel, because of his financial contributions to the institution and of his efforts to improve literacy. Outside the library is a statue of Dr. Seuss.
ETA, picture of statue: https://c1.staticflickr.com/7/6175/6160556122_3945875977_b.jpg
What Pet Should I Get?, the newly published Dr. Seuss children’s book is believed to have been written between 1958 and 1962. The book is based on manuscripts discovered while cleaning up his office shortly after his death in 1991 and then rediscovered in 2013.
Published in 1961, The Sneetches and Other Stories is a collection of stories by American author Dr. Seuss composed of four separate stories, “The Sneetches”, “The Zax”, “Too Many Daves”, and “What Was I Scared Of?”.
The Sneetches, one of my personal favorites, tells of a group of yellow creatures called Sneetches, some of whom have a green star on their bellies. At the beginning of the story, the Star-Belly Sneetches discriminate against and shun the Plain-Belly Sneetches. A scheming salesman offers, for just $3, to run the Plain-Belly Sneetches through his machine that puts a green star onto their belly. The Plain-Belly Sneetches thus become “better” Star-Belly Sneetches. But the Star-Belly Sneetches don’t like it, and the same salesman has a machine that for only $10 will remove the star from the belly. The discrimination snd shunning continues.
“The Sneetches” was intended by Seuss as a satire of discrimination between races and cultures, and was specifically inspired by his opposition to antisemitism.
In a July 1974 collaboration with political humorist Art Buchwald, Dr. Seuss took a two-year-old copy of his book Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now? , crossed out “Marvin K. Mooney” wherever it occurred and wrote in “Richard M. Nixon”. With Dr. Seuss’s consent, Buchwald and his editors reprinted the markup as a newspaper column, published July 30, 1974. Beset by Watergate, Nixon resigned ten days later on August 9, 1974.
As a young paperboy delivering the Hartford Courant in the early 1970s, I was shocked at the largest headlines I’d ever seen,
**Nixon Resigns
**,
on that August 1974 morning issue on America’s oldest continuously published newspaper.
Image: http://www.trbimg.com/img-53d6abe0/turbine/hc-day-in-history-august-20140728-001/600/600x338
The TV soap Another World was running a story on Iris taping her stepmother Rachel’s phone calls when the whole Nixon taping his phone calls came out. It was pure coincidence, but a poll revealed that most people found the soap more interesting than politics.
M.C. Escher’s woodcut print Another World depicts a cubic architectural structure made from brick. The structure is a paradox with an open archway on each of the five visible sides of the cube. The structure wraps around the vertical axis to enclose the viewer’s perspective. At the bottom of the image is an archway which we seem to be looking up from the base, and through it we can see space. At the top of that arch is another arch which is level with our perspective, and through it we are looking out over a lunar horizon. At the top of that arch is another arch which covers the top of the image. We are looking down at this arch from above and through it onto the lunar surface.
The Penrose triangle was developed and popularized independently by father and son, Lionel and Roger Penrose. It was inspired in part by the works of the Dutch artist, Maurits Cornelis Escher. Though a physical impossibility, a physical construct of the optical illusion exists in East Perth, in Western Australia.
According to Clement of Alexandria, Pythagoras, who provided the first valid proof of the right triangle theory we all learned in Geometry class, is reported to have been a disciple of Soches, the Egyptian archprohet, and Plato of Sechnuphis of Heliopolis.
Herodotus, Isocrates, and other early writers all agree that Pythagoras was born on Samos, the Greek island in the eastern Aegean, and we also learn that Pythagoras was the son of Mnesarchus. His father was a gem-engraver or a merchant. His name led him to be associated with Pythian Apollo; Aristippus explained his name by saying, “He spoke the truth no less than did the Pythian”, and Iamblichus tells the story that the Pythia prophesied that his pregnant mother would give birth to a man supremely beautiful, wise, and beneficial to humankind.
A later source gives his mother’s name as Pythais. As to the date of his birth, Aristoxenus stated that Pythagoras left Samos in the reign of Polycrates, at the age of 40, which would give a date of birth around 570 BC.
NPR reported this morning on the current problems of Greek agriculture. 90% of Greek farms are family-owned and less than five square acres in size. Looming EU-imposed austerity measures will cut current national tax exemptions that may severely harm Greek farmers.