Edmund Fitzgerald was a civic leader in Milwaukee who served as chairman of the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, which owned the Great Lakes freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald, popularized in the song by Gordon Lightfoot. His son, Edmund B. Fitzgerald, was instrumental in bringing the Seattle Pilots baseball club to Milwaukee, to become the Brewers, five years before the loss of the ship bearing his father’s name…
The Milwaukee Brewers have played in four of the six divisions of Major League Baseball - the American League East, West and Central, and the National League Central. The other current franchise to have changed leagues is the Houston Astros, a longtime NL staple now in the AL West.
In 1940, baseball team owner Lou Perini changed his team’s name from the Boston Bees to the Boston Braves. In 1953, Perini moved his team to Milwaukee WI, where they became the Milwaukee Braves. Milwaukee was where the Boston Braves had their top farm club, the Milwaukee Brewers. Those Milwaukee Brewers then moved to Toledo OH where they became the next incarnation of the Toledo Mud Hens.
In 1966 the Milwaukee Braves moved to Atlanta GA to become the Atlanta Braves.
Today’s Milwaukee Brewers began play in 1969 as the Seattle Pilots, who moved to Milwaukee after one season in Seattle WA.
The original Milwaukee Brewers played in the American League, in 1901, the first year of the league’s existence. In 1902, the franchise became the St. Louis Browns. The present-day St. Louis Cardinals had been known as the St. Louis Browns until 1898. The New York Yankees did exist until 1903, when the team moved to New York from Baltimore, the only other franchise change in the first half of the century.
In 1953, when Boston Braves owner Lou Perini moved his team to Milwaukee, St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck had tried to return his team there earlier that same year (Milwaukee was the original home of that franchise), but Veeck’s proposal was voted down by the other American League owners.
The Hanseatic League (which nobody actually remembers from school history, so qualifies as Trivia), was a strip along the north cost of Europe, between the present-day Belgium and Lithuania, but excluded Denmark… It’s existence was more economic than political, and reached its peak around the year 1400.
The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was a dualistic state, a bi-confederation, of Poland and Lithuania ruled by a common monarch, who was both the king of Poland and the grand duke of Lithuania. It was one of the largest and most populous countries of 16th- and 17th-century Europe. At its peak in the early 17th century, the Commonwealth spanned some 450,000 square miles and sustained a multi-ethnic population of 11 million.
The union was formalized by the Union of Lublin in July 1569. The First Partition of Poland in 1772 and the Second Partition of Poland in 1793 greatly reduced the nation’s size and the Commonwealth disappeared as an independent state following the Third Partition of Poland in 1795
The highest mountain in Australia was named in 1840 by Polish explorer Paul Edmund Strzeleck as Mount Kosciuszko because of the mountain’s resemblance to the Kosciuszko Mound in Krakow.
Tadeusz Kościuszko was a Polish-Lithuanian military engineer and a military leader who became a national hero in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and the United States. He fought in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s struggles against Russia and Prussia, and on the American side in the American Revolutionary War. In Polish, his hame is pronounced /koash-CHOO-skaw/. In 1933, he became one of the first non-Americans to be commemorated on a US postage stamp.
Colonel Sir George Everest (July 4, 1790 — December 1, 1866) was a Welsh surveyor and geographer, and the Surveyor General of India from 1830 through 1843. He was largely responsible for completing the section of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India along the meridian arc from southern India extending north to Nepal, a distance of about 2,400 kilometres (1,500 mi). This survey was started by William Lambton in 1806 and it lasted for several decades.
In 1865, Mount Everest was named in his honour in the English language despite his objections by the Royal Geographical Society. This enormous peak was surveyed by Everest’s successor, Andrew Scott Waugh, in his role as the Surveyor-General of India.
Sir Everest pronounced his name EEV-rist, while the mountain has become known as EVV-e-rest.
As big and tall as Mt. Everest is, it is dwarfed by Olympus Mons, on Mars.
The only town in the USA named Everest is in northeast Kansas. Population 284, named for Aaron Everest, a local politician. There was once an Everest, North Dakota, but it is now gone and just farmland.
Kathy Sebelius, former Governor of Kansas, was the daughter of John Gilligan, a former Governor of Ohio. They are the only pair of daughter-father governors of different states in U.S. political history.
Elevations:
29,029’ - Mount Everest
17,598’ - Everest Base Camp
1,148’ - Everest, Kansas
-282’ - Death Valley, California
-1,409’ - The Dead Sea, Jordan and Israel
The Badwater Ultramarathon describes itself as “the world’s toughest foot race”. It is a 135-mile course starting at 279 feet below sea level in the Badwater Basin, in California’s Death Valley, and ending at an elevation of 8360 feet at Whitney Portal, the trailhead to Mount Whitney. It takes place annually in mid-July, when the weather conditions are most extreme and temperatures over 120 °F (49 °C), even in the shade, are not uncommon.
off topic: Things like this is why I believe the human race is not a rational-thinking species…I have hopes, however, for the future…
The USS Mount Whitney, commissioned in 1971, is a Blue Ridge-class command ship of the U.S. Navy and flagship of the Sixth Fleet. She is also the command and control ship for the Commander Joint Command Lisbon and the Commander Striking Force NATO.
The word “nato” means “them” in the West African language of Chichewa, and “face” in the south African Zulu language. It means “tattoo” in Javanese, and “born” in several Romance languages, in which the defense organization is expressed as OTAN.
There have been three ships in the British Royal Navy named HMS Zulu, the last of which was a Tribal-class frigate in service from 1964 to 1984.
KwaZulu-Natal is a province of South Africa that shares borders with Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho.
Different versions of the International Phonetic Alphabet code use Zulu or Zebra for the letter Z, which as a letter is pronounced ‘zed’ in all English-speaking countries besides the USA. Otherwise, there is general agreement on all the other letters of the alphabet.