Doctor Norman Bethune, a Canadian, is considered a national hero in China. After first serving as a volunteer medic in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Bethune went to CHina to organize medical services there in Mao’s mach across the country. Mao wrote an essay praising Bethune, which is still in all school children’s textbooks, and there are hundreds of statues and monuments commemorating Bethune in China.
Bethune is credited with inventing the first mobile blood transfusion unit, which he used in the Spanish Civil War.
In 1941 the Pulitzer Prize committee for letters unanimously recommended *For Whom the Bell Tolls,*Ernest Hemingway’s novel based on his experience in the Spanish Civil War, be awarded the prize for that year. The Pulitzer Board agreed; however, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University at that time, overrode both and instead no award was given for letters that year.
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NASA Mercury Astronaut Gordon Cooper hails from Murray, Kentucky after having grown up in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Cooper was the last American to orbit the earth solo. Cooper was a US Marine before he joined the US Air Force. His wife, Trudy, was the only Project Mercury astronaut wife to have a pilot’s license.
Hail is listed in The Bible as one of the plagues of Egypt (Ex. 9:23). It is mentioned by Haggai as a divine judgment (Hag. 2:17). A hail-storm destroyed the army of the Amorites when they fought against Joshua (Josh. 10:11). Ezekiel represents the wall daubed with untempered mortar as destroyed by great hail-stones (Ezek. 13:11).
President Chester A. Arthur did not like the song Hail to the Chief and asked John Philip Sousa to compose a new song, which was entitled Presidential Polonaise. After Arthur left office, the Marine Band resumed playing Hail to the Chief for public appearances by the President.
Arthur was chosen for the VP nomination as a “Stalwart” to balance out the reformer, Garfield. He was considered the puppet of the New York Republican boss, Roscoe Conkling, the chief of the Stalwarts.
When Garfield was shot and spent a long time dying, one NY newspaper editor summed up the feelings of the nation: “Chet Arthur as President! Good God!”
In spite of that inauspicious beginning, President Arthur, independent of Conkling for the first time, turned out to be a reformer himself and helped push through the Pendleton Civil Service Act, which ended the “spoils system” in the federal bureaucracy.
President Calvin Coolidge’s terseness became legendary. He could be “silent in five languages,” a contemporary asserted. A favorite joke had a pretty young woman approaching the president to explain that she had bet a friend she could make him say more than two words. “You lose,” Coolidge replied. Alice Roosevelt Longworth said he looked as though he’d been “weaned on a pickle.” And the most famous quote of all: When Dorothy Parker heard in 1933 that Coolidge had just died, she archly inquired, “How could they tell?”
Calvin Coolidge was the last President to write his own speeches and he deliberately kept them short. He held press conferences twice a week, regularly made off-the-record comments to the press, and generally tried to use the press to facilitate public awareness of — and support for — his administration. He was also the first president to have his State of the Union broadcast nationally.
Calvin J. Spann was an original Tuskegee Airman and fighter pilot with the 100th Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group. Spann received his wings from the Tuskegee Flight School, and was a member of the United States Army Air Corps, serving in Europe during World War II, where he flew 26 combat missions. After the war, he applied to be a pilot at every newly formed commercial airline, and was turned down by every one of them.
Almost a quarter of all mammals in the world possess the quality of Flight. Bats are the second most numerous family of mammals after rodents. Single caves are home to as many as 20-million bats, and the bat population of the the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, at 1.5-million, exceeds the human population of metropolitan Austin.
Megabats, more commonly known as fruit bats, can attain a wingspan of over five feet and weigh several pounds. They typically roost hanging upside down, with their wings wrapped around them.
Seeing them all go airborne at dusk in western Africa was like being in some sort of Indiana Jones movie.
Seeing that was impressive. Standing too close, you feel droplets of guano as they fly away to feed on insects.
Now that would be cool to see.
In play: During the summer months at Carlsbad Caverns, thousands of bats can be seen near sunset exiting to feed on insects. One part of the caverns has a Bat Flight Ampitheater which provides a good vantage point. The bats emerge from the cave, flying up out of the cave, then outward and away into the distant evening sky. Not being particularly strong flyers, as they fly up to exit the cave they do not fly in a line, linearly up and then out of the cave. Instead they fly in circles and spirals, climbing more gradually that way, so that you see a swarm of spiraling bats, flying in an organized formation up to the mouth of the cave, then out and away.
That differs from the Congress Avenue Bridge, which is already up high in the air, so those Austin TX bats merely drop out of the cracks in the concrete bridge to fly away.
One of the eight species of North American swallows, the cave swallow, nests in caves. Historically, the only place in the USA they could be found was in Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico, but in recent decades, a few colonies have become established under road culverts in extreme south Texas.
Only two U.S. Navy warships have been named USS New Mexico, after the 47th state. The second is a Virginia-class nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, commissioned in 2010 and still in service.
A number of religions require believers to fast on certain occasions, such as Judaism and Yom Kippur, Islam and Ramadan, Catholicism and Good Friday.
Not in play: I just read Joshua Kendall’s recent book on U.S. presidents and their families, “First Dads”, where he says that Coolidge’s demeanor was due to repressed grief and depression after the death of his teenaged son. Robert Gilbert has a full length biography of Coolidge showing that before his son’s death Coolidge was energetic and not silent.
Lutherans do not, as a rule, fast on specific days. Martin Luther felt that individual fasting was acceptable as a spiritual exercise left to the individual. In general, fasting remains optional in most Protestant groups and is less popular than among other Christian denominations.
A non-constructive proof is a demonstration that something with a stated property must exist, without being able to name any specific thing with that property.
For example, there must be a digit(*) which occurs infinitely often in the decimal expansion of π = 3.14159… but there is no specific digit which can be proved to occur infinitely often.
(* - In fact there must be at least two digits that occur infinitely often; this was proven by the 18th century mathematician Johann Lambert.)