Bryophyllum daigremontianum, also called mother-of-millions, mother-of-thousands, alligator plant, or Mexican hat plant, is a succulent plant native to Madagascar. Like other members of its genus Bryophyllum, it is able to propagate vegetatively from plantlets that develop on its phylloclade margins. All parts of the plant are poisonous (they contain daigremontianin and other bufadienolides), which can even be fatal if ingested by infants or small pets. And they spread like wildfire if you let them get a hold.
Mexican Hat Rock in southern Utah is 25 miles northeast on highway 163 from Monument Valley on the UT-AZ state line. John Ford filmed so many westerns in that area that there is a point named after him there.
Thailand’s Ko Samui has two famous rocks, called Grandfather Rock and Grandmother Rock.
Famous rock singers England Dan and John Ford Coley, both Texans, were a pop singing duo in the 1970s. Their real names were Danny Wayland Seals and John Edward Coley. Dan was born and raised in Upton County, Texas, a rural county in the southwest desert which has a population of onnly 3,000 in the entire county. They reached number 2 on the pop charts with their 1976 single, “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight”,
Besides I’d Really Love to See You Tonight, other hits of England Dan and John Ford Coley include Nights Are Forever Without You, Love is the Answer, We’ll Never Have to Say Goodbye Again, and It’s Sad to Belong. “England” Dan Seals, the younger brother of Seals & Crofts’ Jim Seals, died in 2009 at the age of 61 of a fairly rare form of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma (NHL), Mantle Cell Lymphoma (MCL). About 6% of NHL cases are MCL. The median survivability of MCL patients is from 3 to 6 years. England Dan died two years after his MCL diagnosis.
This is the first year im the history of the NHL that no teams based in Canada qualified for the playoffs.
That sounds familiar. From post #28,790:
The San Jose Sharks lead their Conference Championships Semi-Finals against the St. Louis Blues, 2-1. The Sharks have never advanced beyond this round in their history. GO SHARKS! The Blues just announced they are making a goalie change for Game 4. Jake Allen will make his first start in the 2016 Stanley Cup playoffs, replacing Brian Elliott in tonight’s game at San Jose.
The winner of this series advances to the Stanley Cup Finals against the winner of the Tampa Bay Lightning vs. the Pittsburgh Penguins.
GO SHARKS!!!
Lord Stanley, who donated the Stanley Cup, was the Governor General of Canada at the time. He presided over the transfer of government upon the death of Sir John A Macdonald in 1891, and also cemented the principle of the Governor-General’s political neutrality by granting assent to a controversial bill, the Jesuit Estates bill.
Sir Henry Stanley, the Welsh-American journalist and African explorer, who spent much of his early adulthood as a New Orleans storekeeper, is believed to be the only man to serve in the Confederate Army, Union Army, and Union Navy in the Civil War.
The Flat Stanley Project was created to increase literacy. Student send paper cutouts of Stanley Lambchop around the world to be photographed.
Shari Lewis, best known as the ventriloquist, puppeteer, and co-star of Lamb Chop, was the daughter of Abraham Hurwitz, who had been named New York City’s “official magician” by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia.
Abraham ben Terah, the 2nd Ulul Azmi and grandfather of Israel, was ordered by his God to sacrifice his son Isaac. The conventional story is that God was testing Abraham, but there is much controversy — some say Abraham was testing God. There is wide agreement that the sacrifice was to be done on the Foundation Stone where Solomon later built his famous Temple, but this view isn’t universal: One well-known scholar places the sacrificial site out on Highway 61.
.US-61 was one of the major pre-Interstate highways, running north from New Orleans to the Canadian border on the shore of Lake Superior. Bob Dylan, whom came from a town near the northern terminus of the highway, named one of his albums “Highway 61 Revisited”. US-61 passed through both New Orleans and Memphis, and became known as “The Blues Highway”. I hitchhiked it mamy times
One Doper and his buddy stuck their thumbs out one long weekend, following the cars’ paths to see where chance would take them. Various strange people picked them up, including one who had made his own personal freeway exit into the mountains off I-80. The turning-around point came in Reno, Nevada where the (under-age) buddy lost the few dollars of lunch money left trying a martingale at a craps table.
I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
And a crashin’ blow from a huge right hand
Sent a Lou’siana fellow to the Promised Land, Big John
Before he wrote and performed “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)”, Rupert Holmes wrote “Timothy”, the other great song about coal mine cave-ins, and the greatest describing cannibalism. Since Scepter Records had signed The Buoys but required them to do their own promotion for any songs they might record, Holmes had the idea of gaining notoriety for them with a song that was sure to be banned by some stations and therefore played on others.
Rupert Holmes joined the creative team of the Broadway musical Curtains after the deaths of both Peter Stone (the original book-writer) and Fred Ebb (the lyricist). Holmes rewrote Stone’s original book and contributed additional lyrics to the Kander and Ebb songs. Curtains played at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on Broadway, and David Hyde Pierce and Debra Monk starred in the lead roles. Holmes and Peter Stone (posthumously) won the 2007 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical for Curtains.
Actress Riley Stone did not like her early career stage name. The name Emily Stone was already registered with the screen actor’s guild, so she took on the nickname her mother called her and most of the world knows her as Emma Stone. In 2015, Forbes magazine rated her as one of the highest paid actresses, earning $6.5M annually.
John Forbes Kerry is related, through his mother, to the Forbes family, a wealthy extended American family long prominent in Boston, Massachusetts. The family’s fortune originates from trading between North America and China in the 19th century plus other investments in the same period. The name descends from Scottish immigrants, and can be traced back to Sir John de Forbes in Scotland in the 12th century.