According to military records, US Army Sergeant Joyce Kilmer died on the battlefield near Muercy Farm, beside the Ourcq River near the village of Seringes-et-Nesles, in France, on July 30, 1918. He was 31. For his valor, Kilmer was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre (War Cross) by the French Republic.
Kilmer was buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, near Fere-en-Tardenois, Aisne, Picardy, France. A cenotaph erected to his memory is located on the Kilmer family plot in Elmwood Cemetery, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Kilmer had been assigned to the 69th Infantry Regiment (known as the “Fighting 69th”). Though he was eligible for commission as an officer and often recommended for such posts during the course of the war, Kilmer refused, stating that he would rather be a sergeant in the Fighting 69th than an officer in any other regiment.
Joyce George was the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio during the G.H.W. Bush Administration. She was succeeded by Emily Sweeney during the Clinton Administration, the first time that one woman succeeded another in that top Federal law-enforcement post in Ohio.
The Joyce Theater is a 472-seat dance performance venue located in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. It is located in the former Elgin Theater, a 1941 revival movie house that was closed by the community after it became a porno theatre. The Joyce was funded largely by LuEsther T. Mertz whose family founded Publishers Clearing House. In appreciation of her generosity, when it was founded in 1982 the theater was named after her daughter, Joyce.
In 2007, as a special commissioning initiative to celebrate its 25th anniversary, The Joyce awarded 25 New York City-based, national and international dance companies with grants of $25,000 each to support the development of a new work. Among the recipients were Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Eiko & Koma, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, John Jasperse Company, Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, Molissa Fenley and Pacific Northwest Ballet. The Stephen Petronio Dance Company regularly performs at The Joyce.
According to his obituary in the New York Times, author James Joyce knew seventeen languages, ancient and modern, including Arabic, Sanskrit and Greek. He learned Norwegian as a young man so that he could read the plays of Ibsen in the original.
In the 1840s, James Strang, a leader of a sect of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, proclaimed himself King James of Beaver Island, a nearly uninhabited island 30 miles offshore in Lake Michigan. Strang gained nearly 12,000 adherents prior to his murder in 1856, which brought down his kingdom.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the first post-New Testament church that actually had the name Jesus Christ in its title. Up to then every Christian church was named after a man or religious movement.
Kentucky Bourbon is named for the original Bourbon County, Kentucky, which covered a far larger area than the modern county (which has no distilleries today) and came to be called “Old Bourbon.” As the corn whiskey made by area distillers was shipped around the country, the barrels were stamped with the county’s name, and people started calling the Kentucky whiskeys bourbon to differentiate them from other regional styles. Bourbon County, in turn, was named for the royal House of Bourbon, which produced monarchs that ruled over France, Spain, Sicily, Naples, Spain and elsewhere.
The battleships USS Kentucky and Kearsarge, sister ships in the Great White Fleet, were so similar in appearance that drunken sailors from one occasionally tried to board the other.
The sea shanty “What Shall We Do with a/the Drunken Sailor” was originally a work song. According to one sailor’s account, from the 1800s, “this is a song that’s usually sang when men are walking away with the slack of a rope, generally when the iron ships are scrubbing their bottom.”
The first published description of the shanty, “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor” is found in an account of an 1839 whaling voyage out of New London, Connecticut to the Pacific. Shanties, or chanties, may have come from the French chanter, “to sing.” The name given to a person, Chantelle, comes from the French for singer.
Shanties had antecedents in the working chants of British and other national maritime traditions. They were notably influenced by songs of African Americans, such as those sung whilst manually loading vessels with cotton in ports of the southern United States. They were adapted to suit musical forms matching the various labor tasks required to operate a sailing ship. Such tasks, which usually required a coordinated group effort in either a pulling or pushing action, included weighing anchor and setting sail.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus just announced that a new Arleigh Burke-class destroyer will be named after former United States Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.). The warship is expected to enter service in 2020.
Jim Webb served as Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration under Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci. Other than Daniel Howard, who briefly served for 11 days as acting SecNav in 1992, Webb is the latest US Marine to serve in that post. Webb graduated from Annapolis and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps. He served from 1968 and was injured in Vietnam and medically retired. Howard enlisted in the Marines after high school and served from 1961-1965.
The Royal Marines of Great Britain were formed in 1755 as the Royal Navy’s amphibious infantry troops. However, the marines can trace their origins back to the formation of the English Army’s “Duke of York and Albany’s maritime regiment of Foot” at the grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company in 1664.
In a new program started in August 2015, British Royal Marines are being embedded with US Marines to share training and experience. The program places young British officers with U.S. Marine platoons for about 18 months. It is designed to familiarize Marines on both sides of the Atlantic with their allies and increase interoperability for future maneuvers.
Owing to the submersion of Southern California in the Pacific Ocean until 10 million years ago, Aliso Creek flows over marine sedimentary rock that dates from the late Eocene to the Pliocene.
(From today’s random Wiki article, proving that any piece of trivia can follow any other.)
The Porter Ranch natural gas leak occurred last fall. Some sources say it started on 23 Oct 2015. SoCalGas (Southern California Gas Company) reported finding the leak on that date, but several residents in the area reported feeling ill days before then. SoCalGas operates the Aliso Canyon natural gas underground storage facility at 12801 Tampa Avenue in Northridge, CA. Porter Ranch is a neighborhood of Aliso Canyon CA and 4 miles due north of Northridge CA.
In the four months before Southern California Gas Co. finally capped a leak in a well at the Aliso Canyon Gas Storage Field, at least 96,000 tons of methane spewed into the air.
Sources reporting the leak was found on 23 Oct 2015:
Statistics vary regarding how much methane the average dairy cow expels. Some experts say 100 liters to 200 liters a day (26 gallons to 53 gallons), while others say it’s up to 500 liters (about 132 gallons) a day. This amount is comparable to the pollution produced by a car in a day.