The human body contains approximately 0.2 milligrams of gold, most of which is diffused in our blood.
Venice introduced the gold ducat in 1284 and it became the most popular gold coin in the world for the next 500 years. Ducat is Latin for “duke.” It is the currency used in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and is referenced in The Merchant of Venice. In his song “I Ain’t the One,” rapper Ice Cube sings that “he’s getting juiced for his ducats.” The ducat is also used in the “Babylon 5” sci-fi series as the name of the Centauri race’s money.
The height of the Babylonian empire coincided with the life of Hammurabi, who lived from ca. 1810-1750 BC. Hammurabi became King in ca. 1792 BC.
The height of the basketball hoop was never specified in Naismith’s original rules, but early on, ten feet became standardized, as it is today. But an early photograph of the site of the first basketball games at Springfield College shows a hoop that wold seem to be at least 12 feet above the floor.
Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Theodor Robert and Henrietta (née Seuss) Geisel Mulberry Street in Springfield was made famous in Dr. Seuss’ first children’s book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street! and is less than a mile southwest of his boyhood home on Fairfield Street
Besides basketball and Dr. Suess, Monopoly was also born in Springfield Mass, created under license by Parker Brothers, in 1935. The inventor of the game, Charles Darrow, was the first person to become a millionaire from devevloping a game. The first time I played Monopoly was in 1944. (If you want to baffle a touch typist showing off speed, ask them to type a sentence containing the word “monopoly”.)
The Milton Bradley Company is an American board game company established by Milton Bradley in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1860. In 1920, it absorbed the game production of McLoughlin Brothers, formerly the largest game manufacturer in the United States.
Milton Bradley was taken over by Hasbro, Inc., in 1984. Now wholly owned by Hasbro, it is still retained as one of Hasbro’s brands, similar to the manner in which former Milton Bradley arch-rival Parker Brothers is one of Hasbro’s brands.
Bill Bradley (Princeton, 1965) was the most grossly overrated basketball player of all time.
Bradley was undoubtedly a college All-Star of mid-1960s caliber, but clueless observers of the time made absurd claims about his native ability, even comparing him to the still incomparable Oscar (The Big O) Robertson, who is still the only player to average a Triple Double for an entire NBA season (1961-1962, and the immensely smooth, quick,strong, fast 6-5 225 Robertson would be a thread to turn the same trick today).
Bradley went off from Princeton to Oxford on a probably undeserved Rhodes Scholarship (I read somewhere his SATs were under 1000). After 2 years at Oxford Bradley parlayed his reputation into a ridiculously wealthy contract (his rightfully jealous, much more skillful teammates called him “Dollar Bill”) with the NY Knicks, becoming the worst starting forward in the league, and kept on the roster only because the Knicks lost their minds and traded Walt Bellamy.
It is not known when Oxford was founded, but there is evidence of teaching at Oxford dating back to the late 11th century, making it the oldest English-speaking university in the world.
(facetiously) Wow, brutal. Why don’t you tell us what you really think?
I am just old enough to have watched him play on TV as a kid, but I don’t temember how bad he was. You may be very right in your assessment of his skills. Or lack thereof.
The Oxford comma, or serial comma, is the last, optional comma after the penultimate item in a list of three or more items.
Examples:
With: The 1972-1973 NY Knicks’ starting five were Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, and Walt “Clyde” Frazier.
Without: The 1972-1973 NY Knicks’ starting five were Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe and Walt “Clyde” Frazier.
ETA: the Oxford comma can remove anbiguity. Consider the apocryphal book dedication quoted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden: To my parents, Ayn Rand and God. Or consider a newspaper account of a documentary about Merle Haggard, a heterosexual man: Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.
Tuition at Oxford and Cambridge is capped at 9,000 pounds (US$12,809) for UK and EU undergraduate students; for international students it ranges from US$22,460 for a humanities or social science degree to US$ 33,050 for an engineering or computer science degree.
In contrast, at Harvard, MIT and Stanford, tuition ranges from US$46,704 - US$45,729.
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The first name of Leland Stanford is Amasa.
The Leland Palmer cocktail was invented by Damon Boelte, bar manager at Prime Meats in Brooklyn. HE was in Los Angeles visiting his girlfriend, enjoying his favorite hangover drink, the Arnold Palmer, and watching an episode of Twin Peaks, where Leland Palmer almost whacks Agent Cooper with a golf club. For this adult version of the popular drink that’s half lemonade and half iced tea, Boelte combined gin, jasmine tea, limoncello, lemon juice, and grapefruit juice in a pitcher. It’s summer’s essential back-porch sipper, and, Boelte adds, “It’s definitely much better than a golf club to the head.”
Wow, that’s good trivia! I had no idea: Please Please Me - Wikipedia.
In play:
On Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper was a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He often dictated memos to his never-seen secretary, Diane.
Augusta and Adeline Van Buren were sisters, who, in 1916, were the first women to ride 5,500 miles in 60 days over hazardous roads to cross the continental United States, each riding a 1000cc Indian Power Plus motorcycle. Along the way, they became the first women to reach the 14,109 feet summit of Pikes Peak by any motor vehicle. During the ride, they were arrested numerous times, not for speeding, but for wearing men’s clothes.
Zebulon Pike never reached the summit of his mountain, Pikes Peak. His only child to survive to adulthood, his daughter, married a son of President Wiliam Henry Harrison.
Pikes Peak provides the “purple mountain’s majesty above the fruited plain” in Katharine Lee Bates’ lyrics for “America the Beautiful”. She originally wrote the words as a poem, titled “Pikes Peak”. The line “Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears” refers to the White City, the main buildings at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
In 1947, songwriter Johnny Mercer wrote brilliant, literary lyrics to an instrumental song he heard on his car radio while driving home from Palm Springs:
Your lips were like a red and ruby chalice,
Warmer than the Summer night.
The clouds were like an alabaster palace,
Rising to a snowy height.
Each star its own Aurora Borealis,
Suddenly you held me tight,
I could see the midnight sun.
The Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis are caused by electrons colliding with the upper atmosphere. Protons cause faint and diffuse aurora, usually not easily visible to the human eye. But electrons follow the Earth’s magnetic field lines down to the Polar Regions where they collide with oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth’s upper atmosphere and transfer their energy to the atmosphere. It is this energy transfer and release that results in the lights we see.