Winnipeg MB is the capital of Manitoba, and is located very near the longitudinal centre of Canada, 96° 48’ 35". TV’s Monte Hall and actress Anna Paquin are from Winnipeg.
Lake Winnipeg is the 12th largest lake in the world, and is larger than Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes. In fact, there are two other lakes in Canada (Great Bear and Great Slave Lake) that are also larger than one of the Great Lakes. Which means Lake Ontario is only the 8th largest lake in North America.
Veronica Lake was a movie star of the 40s, known for her “peek-a-boo” hairstyle, where a lock of hair hung down to cover the side of her face. She gave up that style during WWII, on the urging of the government, who feared that women who imitated it would get their hair caught in machinery while working for the war effort. That’s often credited for her decline as an actress; the hair was what made her a star.
Bullwinkle Moose discovered the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam floating in Veronica Lake and entered it in the Frostbite Falls Flotilla Festival. He and Rocket J. “Rocky” Squirrel were accused of stealing it from the Pasha of Lower North Pakistan and were brought there for trial aboard the SS Plankton, but arranged their escape.
There were three ranks of pashas, an honorary title given to people already of authority: the first, or highest class, had the privilege of bearing a standard of three horse-tails, the second of two, and the third of one. In some cases according to local culture, it could have been yak tails or peacock tails. Only the Sultan himself was entitled to four tails, as sovereign commander in chief.
A money belt filled with gold sovereigns is an important plot point in *Have His Carcass * by Sayers.
The first recorded gold ever discovered in the United States was was a 17-pound nugget found in Cabarrus NC. When more gold was discovered in Little Meadow Creek NC in 1803, the first US gold rush began.
The term acid test was coined from the process of dissolving gold-bearing ore with nitric acid, which would leave the raw gold unaffected but would remove ‘baser’ metals. If there was no gold present, the ore failed the test.
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank on Lake Superior on 10 November 1975. She left Superior WI with a load of taconite iron ore pellets twenty-six thousand tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty, and was headed to Zug Island near Detroit.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr.'s only clear memory of living in the White House is having a dog that loved to go up the stairs and slide down the slide they had in the back yard.
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was named for the chairman of the company that owned the ship, the Northwest Mutual Life Insurance Company of Milwaukee. His son, Edmund B. Fitzgerald, was an instrumental figure in the move to bring the Seattle Pilots baseball team to Milwaukee as the present-day Brewers.
NM - ninja’d.
Jim Bouton’s humorous memoir of his time as a Major League Baseball pitcher, Ball Four, covers his time with the Seattle Pilots, among other teams.
The last communication from the SS Edmund Fitzgerald came at approximately 7:10 pm on Monday 10 November 1975, when the nearby SS Arthur M. Anderson notified the Fitzgerald of an upbound ship and asked how she was doing. Fitzgerald’s pilot, Ernest M. McSorley reported back, “We are holding our own.”
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank only minutes later. No distress signal was received, and ten minutes later, Anderson lost the ability either to raise Fitzgerald by radio or to detect her on radar.
Later, at the memorial service, *In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
In the maritime sailors’ cathedral
The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
*
About fifteen minutes before the Titanic hit the iceberg, Cyril F. Evans, a wireless operator on the Californian, which was about 20 miles away, attempted to contact the Titanic to tell them they were surrounded by dangerous icebergs.
“The captain said … Better advise (the Titanic) we are surrounded by ice and stopped,” Evans testified in a U.S. Senate inquiry. “So I went to my cabin, and at 9:05 p.m. New York time I called him up. I said, ‘Say, old man, we are stopped and surrounded by ice.’ He turned around and said ‘shut up, shut up, I am busy; I am working Cape Race’ (Newfoundland) and at that I jammed him."
When questioned, Evans explained. “By jamming we mean when somebody is sending a message to somebody else and you start to send at the same time, you jam him. He does not get his message. I was stronger than Cape Race. Therefore my signals came in with a bang, and he could read me and he could not read Cape Race.”
“At 11:35 I put the (ear) phones down and took off my clothes and turned in.” He was awakened by the Californian’s captain at 3:40 am when the crew observed distress rockets coming from the Titanic’s position. By that time, it was too late to help.
The radio ‘jamming’ term described above became ‘stepped on’ or ‘stepping on’ by the 1980s and 1990s as used in the US military.
The Vice President has no place in the chain of command between the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense and their subordinate uniformed generals and admirals of the U.S. military.
In the 1900s, five US Vice Presidents became Presidents due to death or resignation: Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford all took over for their superiors.
The Twelfth Amendment, which came into place largely due to the Thomas Jefferson-Aaron Burr election mess of 1800 which ultimately led to Burr’s duel with Hamilton- has a peculiar provision that is the subject of this season of the HBO series Veep: in the event of an electoral tie the vote goes to the House and in the event the House does not choose a president by a set date then the Vice President (or VP Elect if the sitting president is a candidate) will act as president.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced a redesign to the $10 bill, with plans to replace Alexander Hamilton with a then undecided woman from American history. Because of Hamilton’s surging popularity, due in part as a result of the musical Hamilton, United States Treasury Secretary Jack Lew reversed the plans to replace Hamilton’s portrait, instead deciding to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill