There are two doubly landlocked countries, surrounded by other landlocked countries - Liechtenstein (bordered by Switzerland and Austria) and Uzbekistan (bordered by Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan).
Not counting Antarctica, North America and Australia are the only continents with no landlocked countries.
Although not landlocked, Canada is one of the few non-island countries that has a land boundary with only one other country.
Canada has the longest coastline of any country in the world and, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, its coastline is almost 4X longer than the next country, Indonesia.
The National Security Act of 1947, dissolved the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), and established both the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1949, the Central Intelligence Agency Act was enacted, (Public law 81-110) which authorized the agency to use confidential fiscal and administrative procedures, and exempted it from most limitations on the use of Federal funds. It also exempted the CIA from having to disclose its “organization, functions, officials, titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed.” It created the program “PL-110”, to handle defectors and other “essential aliens” who fell outside normal immigration procedures
When the CIA developed the U-2 to fly at altitudes well above 63,000 feet, they contracted with the David Clark Corset and Brassiere Manufacturer to construct form-fitting, insulated pressure suits to protect its pilots from depressurization and low temperatures during flight.
Gen. George Washington had an extensive and very effective spy network during the American Revoluion. A statue of Nathan Hale, executed by the British Army for espionage, stands outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/a-walk-outside-headquarters.html
Sorry, Elendil’s Hair beat me to it. New response coming.
Comet Hale–Bopp (formally designated C/1995 O1) was perhaps the most widely observed comet of the 20th century and one of the brightest seen for many decades. It was visible to the naked eye for a record 18 months, twice as long as the previous record holder, the Great Comet of 1811.
Hale–Bopp was discovered on July 23, 1995, at a great distance from the Sun, raising expectations that the comet would brighten considerably by the time it passed close to Earth. Although predicting the brightness of comets with any degree of accuracy is very difficult, Hale–Bopp met or exceeded most predictions when it passed perihelion on April 1, 1997. The comet was dubbed the Great Comet of 1997.
In March 1997, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide with the intention of teleporting to a spaceship they believed was flying behind the comet.
In 1910 the Earth passed through the 24-million-mile long tail of Halley’s Comet for six hours on Thursday, May 19. President William Howard Taft observed the comet at the U.S. Naval Observatory and came away suitably impressed. However, Pope Pius X dismissed the entire show as overblown.
The rotund William Howard Taft, Republican of Ohio, is the only person to serve as both President of the United States and Chief Justice of the United States.
Robert A. Taft was a conservative American politician, statesman, and presidential hopeful who served as a United States Senator from Ohio from 1939 until his death in 1953. A member of the Republican Taft political family, he was the elder son of William Howard Taft (the 27th President of the United States and 10th Chief Justice of the United States).
He campaigned for the Republican nomination for President in 1940, 1948, and in 1952 came close to being nominated, finally losing a bitter floor fight to Dwight D. Eisenhowers’ patrons.
The city of Taft, California, in the large San Joaquin Valley, was previously called Moron.
Really: Moron, CA!
The town initially was called ‘Siding Number Two’ on the Sunset Railroad. Later, around 1900, its residents asked the Southern Pacific RR if they could name the town Moro, but the RR declined because its name was too close to another city, Moro Bay. Instead, the railroad directed the station be called Moron, a word which as yet had no association with stupidity. Pictures of local businesses, including the Moron Pharmacy, hang in the museum. I couldn’t find a picture of that, though. I will have to visit that Museum one of these years. After a fire burned much of the town, the name was changed to Taft in honor of William Howard Taft.
Morón Air Base, in southern Spain near Gibraltar, originally built for Franco’s Ejército del Aire, was used by the United States Air Force during the Cold War to stage bombers and transports. It was also one of a number of airfields prepared as an emergency landing base for the Space Shuttle but was never used as such.
In 1910, American psychologist and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard became famous for his ideas about “feeble-mindedness”, particularly his belief that it was a hereditary trait. His seminal work, The Kallikak Family, studying two strains of the same family (one strain considered normal, the other considered “defective”) became an international bestseller and became extremely popular in Germany under the Nazi regime.
It was in the midst of Goddard’s work on intelligence testing that he coined the word “moron.” He created a classification system for those on the bottom end of the intelligence scale:
people whose IQ was between 0-25 would be classified as idiots,
people with an IQ between 25 and 50 would be imbeciles and
those with an IQ between 50 and 75 would be classified as Goddard’s own invention: morons.
He derived the word from the ancient Greek moros meaning dull or foolish.
Robert H. Goddard, was an American engineer, professor, physicist, and inventor who is credited with creating and building the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket, which he successfully launched on March 16, 1926. Goddard and his team launched 34 rockets between 1926 and 1941, achieving altitudes as high as 2.6 km (1.6 mi) and speeds as high as 885 km/h (550 mph).
Goddard’s work as both theorist and engineer anticipated many of the developments that were to make spaceflight possible. He has been called the man who ushered in the Space Age. Two of Goddard’s 214 patented inventions — a multi-stage rocket (1914), and a liquid-fuel rocket (1914) — were important milestones toward spaceflight. His 1919 monograph A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is considered one of the classic texts of 20th-century rocket science. Goddard successfully applied three-axis control, gyroscopes and steerable thrust to rockets, to effectively control their flight.
Abe Dranetz built the first practical, commercial, piezoelectric accelerometer in the United States.
Sovereign citizens / freemen on the land are particularly fond of quoting the Uniform Commercial Code in support of their bunkum.
They get very irritated here in Canada when they are told that the Uniform Commercial Code does not apply in Canada.
The Uniform Commercial Code is the body of laws governing commercial transactions in the USA. It directly inspired the enactment of Personal Property Security Acts in every Canadian province and territory but Quebec from 1990 onward.
[off-game]. Shhhh! Don’t tell the FoL/SovCits about the PPSA! I don’t want to deal with bogus PPS filings!
The origins of the word “Quebec” are uncertain, but it may be derived from an Algonquian word for “it narrows”, referring to the narrowing of the St Lawrence estuary at Quebec City.