Magnesium (Mg) is the fourth most abundant element in the earth, comprising 13% of the planet’s mass. It is also the eleventh most abundant element in the human body. The metal itself was first produced by Sir Humphry Davy in England in 1808.
The Davy lamp is a safety lamp for use in flammable atmospheres, invented in 1815 by Sir Humphry Davy. It consists of a wick lamp with the flame enclosed inside a mesh screen. It was created for use in coal mines, to reduce the danger of explosions due to the presence of methane and other flammable gases, called firedamp or minedamp.
If there is a magnesium fire, handle with extreme caution. Adding water will produce hydrogen. Not a good thing.
REMEMBER THE HINDENBURG!!
ETA: ninja’d but it still works… fire, flammable.
The ill-fated Hindenburg was named after the late Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, Prussian aristocrat, descendant of Martin Luther and President of Germany from 1925 until his death in 1934.
The memorial at the Hindenburg crash site is an arrow on the ground, a rectangle with a triangle at the pointed end, that is about 15’ wide by about 40’ long and oriented the same way the Hindenburg was pointed when it burst into flames and crashed on 06 May 1937.
A tragic punctuation near the end of, but not quite at the end of, the Great Depression.
The Great Depression was as much a function of weather, as of economic misadventure. The depth of the recession could have been contained, under the direction of the US economy, but shortly after the market fell, a severe drought reduced American agricultural productivity to a crisis, and impoverished Americans had no resources to right the ship during the dust bowl. Dominoes then fell in most of the rest of the industrialized world.
Asking Uncle Google for ‘dust bowl mother photo’ yields an iconic photo of a mother with a distant gaze, chin resting near right hand, and her two children. That photo was taken in Nipomo, CA, a small town near San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria. About 200,000 migrants left the plains states for California during the Dust Bowl.
http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/themed_collections/subtopic4a.html
]Bullit, I’ve been at the crash site at Lakehurst too (I get around <grin>) It’s actually quite underwhelming. Better too stick to 800-year old universities…
TANJ!!!
Mother and Child Reunion" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Paul Simon. The title has its origin in a chicken-and-egg dish called “Mother and Child Reunion” that Simon saw on a Chinese restaurant’s menu.
Paul Simon published and performed at least 69 songs from 1960 to 1969, including such classics as:
The 59th Street Bridge Song
America
April Come She Will
Bleecker Street
The Boxer
Bridge Over Troubled Water
For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her
He Was My Brother
Homeward Bound
I Am A Rock
Kathy’s Song
Mrs. Robinson, and
The Sound of Silence
Some of my very favorites, his older works.
Here’s more: Florence Owens Thompson - Wikipedia
In play:
Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) and singer-songwriter Paul Simon once made a simultaneous appearance on Saturday Night Live, pretending to have been victims of a scheduling error.
Thanks!
In play:
Senator Paul Dimon (D - IL) was succeeded by Dick Durbin who currently holds the seat. Durbin has been the Assistant Minority Leader (the Whip) since 2015.
A character in the novel Good Omens nicknames his crappy car ‘Dick Turpin’ after the 18th century English highwayman because “Everytime [the car] goes on the road he holds up traffic”.
The above should read:
A character in the Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman novel *Good **Omens *nicknames his crappy car ‘Dick Turpin’ after the 18th century English highwayman because “Everytime [the car] goes on the road he holds up traffic”.
“The Highwayman” is a narrative poem written by English writer Alfred Noyes, first published in 1906, becoming an immediate success. In 1995 it was voted 15th in the BBC’s poll for “The Nation’s Favourite Poems”. According to editors and poets Iona and Peter Opie, it is “the best narrative poem in existence for oral delivery”. A melodramatic story of love, self-sacrifice and betrayal, it has been adapted into films, songs and novels.
The Highwaymen was a country music group active from 1985 to 1995 comprising four superstars in their own right, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson. Waylon Jennings died in 2002, and Johnny Cash died in 2003. Willie and Kris are still living.
Waylon Jennings always regretted a joke he told Buddy Holly in January 1959 while they were together on tour in Iowa. When Buddy Holly learned that his band mates had given up their seats on the plane they had chartered and had chosen to take the bus rather than fly, a friendly banter between Holly and Jennings ensued, and it would come back to haunt Jennings for decades to follow.
Holly jokingly told Jennings, “Well, I hope your ol’ bus freezes up!”
Jennings jokingly replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!”
Less than an hour later, it did, killing all on board.
That was the day the music died.
The reason pipes and drums go so well together in a band is that they complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Because the flow of air is continuous in the pipes, there are no rests. That means that it’s difficult to change rhythms; the strength of the pipes is in the melody.
It’s just the opposite with the drums. They’re all rhythm, and almost no melody.
Then, of course, there’s the fact that they’re both LOUD! 
The story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, popularized by poets Goethe and Robert Browning, originated from the 1300s. The lost children, supposedly lured away by the piper, may refer to waves of emigration to Eastern Europe from Hamelin.
The word “pied” means spotted or multicolored, referring to the piper’s clothing.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poems were set to music throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by several composers including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Charles Gounod, Richard Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Felix Mendelssohn, Hector Berlioz, Gustav Mahler, and Jules Massenet.
Franz Manderson is the deputy governor of the Cayman Islands with responsibility for leadership of the Civil Service, Public Sector Reform, citizenship, legislative matters, archives and providing administrative support to the Parole and Prisons’ Inspection Board and the Advisory Committee for the Prerogative of Mercy.