The Flying Scotsman was a famous steam locomotive operating between London and Edinburgh on LNER, London and North Eastern Railway. It was the first steam locomotive to be officially authenticated at reaching 100 miles per hour (160.9 km/h) on 30 November 1934, and then setting a record for the longest non-stop run by a steam locomotive when it ran 422 miles (679 km) on 8 August 1989 while in Australia.
The locomotives Union Pacific No. 119 and Central Pacific No. 60 (the Jupiter) were the locomotives to meet at the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit to commemorate the completion of the transcontinental railroad on 10 May 1869. The Jupiter was built at Schenectady Locomotive Works in Schenectady, NY.
Schenectady Locomotive Works was later named American Locomotive Company, or ALCO. They later produced the largest steam locomotive model ever built, the 4-8-8-4 articulated “Big Boy”, which took Union Pacific trains over the Continental Divide between Cheyenne and Ogden.
Schenectady was one of several cities in New York State chosen to host a casino. The plan is to build it on the grounds of the former ALCO plant by the Mohawk River.
There have been three USS Mohawks in the U.S. Navy, the most recent of which was a tug sunk as an artificial reef off Wrightsville Beach, N.C. in 1970.
Cohoes Falls, near the east end of the Mohawk River, is Mohawk for Canoe Falls. The falls are 90 feet high and 1,000 feet wide.
Don Starkell (December 7, 1932 – January 28, 2012) was a Canadian adventurer, diarist and author, perhaps best known for his achievements in canoeing.
In 1986, after paddling from Winnepeg, Manitoba to Belem, Brazil, the names of Don Starkell and his son Dana were entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for having completed the longest canoe journey ever, a distance of 12,181 miles (19,603 kilometres).
The longest solo journey in a canoe or kayak was made by Helen Skelton of the UK. From 20 January 2010 to 28 February 2010 she paddled 2010 miles from the confluence of the Rio Maranon and Rio Ucayali, Peru to St. John in the Amazon Delta, Brazil.
She is also thought to be the first woman to paddle down the Amazon alone.
Betty Skelton, an aerobatics pilot who also set several land-speed records, mainly in Corvettes, is best remembered for her exhibitions in one of the first Pitts Special aerobatic biplanes, Li’l Stinker, which hangs inverted in the main entrance to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Washington Dulles International Airport, part of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
A red 1967 Chevy Corvette L88 is among the most expensive vehicles in the world. There were only 20 1967 Chevy Corvette L88s produced — and only one of them was red.
At the 2014 Barrett-Jackson’s auction in Scottsdale, this baby sold for $3.85M.
Scottsdale, Arizona, has six sister cities located in Alamos, New Mexico; Cairns, Queensland, Australia; Haikou, China; Marrakech, Morocco; Kingston, Ontario, Canada; and Uasin Gishu, Kenya.
The Crosby, Stills, and Nash song “Marrakesh Express” is, surprisingly, not about drugs. Graham Nash wrote it to describe an actual train trip he once took from Casablanca to Marrakesh. He began the journey in First Class, surrounded by people he found to be uninteresting—as he described it, they were all “ladies with blue hair.” Upon this observation, he decided the compartment was “completely fucking boring”, so left his seat to explore the other train carriages. He was fascinated by what he saw. The song mentions “ducks and pigs and chickens,” and that, according to Nash, is actually what was there. He recalls the ride by commenting: “It’s literally the song as it is—what happened to me.”
The Casablanca Conference (codenamed SYMBOL) was held at the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca, French Morocco from January 14-24, 1943, to plan the Allied European strategy for the next phase of World War II. In attendance were U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and representing the Free French forces, Generals Charles de Gaulle, and Henri Giraud. Soviet Premier Josef Stalin had declined to attend, as the ongoing fighting in Stalingrad required him to remain in the Soviet Union.
In Casablanca, when Capitain Renault asks Rick why he came to Casablanca, he replies
Renault: I’ve often speculated on why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with a Senator’s wife? I like to think that you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.
Rick: It’s a combination of all three.
Renault: And what in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.
One of Casablanca’s most well known and beloved ones is Bogart’s incredibly cool line “Here’s looking at you, kid”. We hear it during the wonderful Paris flashback sequence and then later on close to the end.
The line was completely improvised by Bogart. It was never a part of the script but Bogart, who had actually used the line in an earlier film, threw it out there and it absolutely worked perfectly. One of cinema’s greatest lines was actually a product of improvisation.
Humphrey Bogart first came to fame as the baby on the jars of Mellin’s Baby Food (not Gerber, as urban legend has it). His mother, a commercial artist, painted him, and the likeness was used for an advertising campaign. Another famous Mellin’s baby was actress Ruth Gordon.
Near the Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad was the Abu Ghraib Infant Formula Plant, bombed during the first Gulf War due to intelligence that it was a biological weapons factory. Saddam’s government allowed CNN reporter Peter Arnett to film the destroyed building along with a conspicuous hand-painted sign that read, in English, “Baby Milk Factory”. The UN Iraq Survey Group later determined that the plant, in disuse for some time, housed discarded infant formula, but found no evidence of production of either weapons or baby milk.
Comment only: RC, check out fhe Schenectady posts beginning at post 25,917.
Play on…
I’ll play…
The late San Francisco journalist Herb Caen (pronounced “cane”) coined San Francisco’s nickname, Baghdad-by-the-Bay. He coined the term and published a collection of essays titled Baghdad-by-the-Bay in 1949. Caen coined the term to reflect San Francisco’s exotic multiculturalism.[URL=“Herb Caen - Wikipedia”]
Peaches & Herb is an R&B duo formed in 1966 by Herbert “Herb Fame” Feemster and Francine “Peaches” Barker. Herb Fame disbanded the group in 1970 but reformed in 1976 with a new “Peaches”, Linda Greene (this despite “Peaches” being the childhood nickname of Francine Barker.) This incarnation of the duo recorded their most successful singles, “Shake Your Groove Thing” and “Reunited”. In all, seven different women have filled the role of “Peaches”.