Quincy, Massachusetts, known as the "City of Presidents,"is the birthplace of two U.S. presidents, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, as well as John Hancock, a President of the Continental Congress and the first signer of the Declaration of Independence.
An easy way to tell if a person is really from Massachusetts is to ask them how to pronounce the name of Quincy. Despite being named after John “quin-cee” Adams, the locals pronounce it ZWIN-zee.
Quincy was the first name of Mr. Magoo (a proud Rutgers grad), voiced by Jim Backus.
Jim Backus voiced God in the recording of Truth of Truths, a 1971 rock opera based on the Bible.
Jim Backus was the first person to appear in two different TV shows on two different networks in the same season and in the same time slot. For the last half of the 1964-65, The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo was shown at 8:30 on Saturdays – the same time slot at Gilligan’s Island.
Once, in his youth, Jim Backus was expelled from the Kentucky Military Institute for riding a horse through the mess hall.
Huh?
In play:
William B. Cushing was expelled from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1861 for pranks and for failing Spanish. When the Civil War broke out, he pleaded his case directly to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who reinstated him. Cushing went on to become one of the most celebrated naval officers of the war.
The market-qouted spot price of crude oil is defined as that price for which it is bought and sold at Cushing, Oklahoma.
He forced himself to say the right words, but was patently insincere.
The most common benchmark oil price is Brent Crude, a “light sweet” crude. It is extracted from the North Sea and comprises Brent Blend, Forties Blend, Oseberg and Ekofisk crudes (also known as the BFOE Quotation). The Brent Crude oil marker is also known as Brent Blend, London Brent and Brent petroleum.
When Brown’s quote quickly got wide play in the media and the reaction was negative, he choked an apology to Elvis Grbac.
In play:
Diesel and gasoline are both made from petroleum/crude oil. Their energy contents differ, where diesel has 38.6 MJ/L and gas has 34.6 MJ/L. For a 10L engine, the torque generated by a diesel engine is about 1,000 Nm @ 2,000 RPM while that by a gas engine is about 300 Nm @ 4,000 RPM. The power generated by a diesel engine is about 490 HP @ 3,500 RPM, while for a gas engine it is 600 HP @ 5,500 RPM. The auto-ignition temperature for diesel is 210°C, and for gasoline is 246°C. At lower temperatures, the viscosity of diesel increases while that of gasoline does not change. Diesel ignites directly, by compression, while gas ignites from a spark.
For some reason cannot edit, but, Elvis got it.
Ah, thanks about the apology details.
The debut rap album by Shaquille O’Neal, then a star center for the Orlando Magic, was 1993’s Shaq Diesel, including the hit tracks “(I Know I Got) Skillz” and “I’m Outstanding”. It was followed by the release of his martial arts video game Shaq Fu, which GameTrailers rated as number 4 Worst in their “Top Ten Best and Worst Video Games” of all time.
Susanna Clarke has been working on a sequel to her fantasy novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, about the return of magic to Regency England, for a decade.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008, was a British - Sri Lankan science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host. His science fiction writings earned him a number of Hugo and Nebula awards, along with a large readership, making him into one of the towering figures of the field. For many years he, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov were known as the “Big Three” of science fiction.
Arthur Clarke is credited with inventing the geostationary communications satellite, an idea he wrote about in the British ham radio magazine Wireless World in 1945. The Clarke Belt is the part of space about 35,786 km (22,236 mi) above sea level, in the plane of the Equator, where near-geostationary orbits may be implemented.
GSO, a geosynchronous orbit, is an orbit around the earth with orbital period of one sidereal day.
GEO, a geostationary orbit, is a special case of GSO where GEO is a circular orbit 35,786 kilometres (22,236 mi) above the Earth’s equator and following the direction of the Earth’s rotation. To stationary ground observers, a GEO object appears motionless in the sky.
A GSO object returns to the same point in the sky at the same time each day.
A GEO object never leaves its position.
EWSK and NSSK, east-west station keeping and north-south station keeping, are functions that keep an object in GEO to correct for any minor perturbations.
The notion of a geosynchronous satellite for communication purposes was first published in 1928 (but not widely so) by Herman Potočnik. The first appearance of a geostationary orbit in popular literature was in the first Venus Equilateral story by George O. Smith, but Smith did not go into details. British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke disseminated the idea widely, with more details on how it would work, in a 1945 paper entitled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays — Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?”, published in Wireless World magazine. Clarke acknowledged the connection in his introduction to The Complete Venus Equilateral.
The Pacific Scandal was a Canadian bribery scandal arising from a railway contract that threatened to bring down the first Macdonald government. On a motion for non-confidence in the Commons arising from the scandal, one of the key speakers was Donald Smith, M.P., who tended to vote with the government but was respected for his integrity. He began his speech by praising Macdonald and his accomplishments, but then concluded by saying in spite of all that, he could not support Macdonald on this matter.
Macdonald, furious at what he saw as a betrayal, tried to rush across the Commons aisle at Smith and had to be restrained. He is said to have yelled, “I could lick that fellow Smith faster than Hell could scorch a feather!”
Dating from 1634, the oldest city park in the USA is Boston Common.
The Common Crane is the least common member of the crane genus that occurs in North America. The Common Crane is a Eurasian species, of which one occasionally gets lost and joins a flock of American Sandhill Cranes.
Two of Canada’s Parliament buildings have been lost to fires.
One was burnt down by angry rioters in 1849, upset that the Governor General had given Royal Assent to a bill to compensate people who had lost property in the 1837 rebellions.
The second Parliament was lost to a fire in 1916, believed to have been started by a cigar end carelessly thrown into a wastebasket in the Reading Room of the Commons, which was full of newspapers. The Commons was sitting that night, and members formed human chains to get out through the smoke. The Prime Minister had to go on his hands and knees to avoid the smoke. Only the parliamentary library survived.
To quote Lady Bracknell, the loss of one Parliament may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.