After JFK’s assassination, and after the funeral, Jackie Kennedy met privately with three heads of state: Charles de Gaulle of France, Eamon de Valera of Ireland and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia.
The purpose and details of this meeting is not known.
Haile Selassie’s full title in office was “By the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings of Ethiopia, Elect of God”, reflecting Ethiopian dynastic traditions, which hold that all monarchs must trace their lineage to Menelik I, who in the Ethiopian tradition was the offspring of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
Among the Rastafari movement, Haile Selassie is revered as the returned messiah of the Bible, God incarnate. Beginning in Jamaica in the 1930s, the Rastafari believe he will lead a future golden age of eternal peace, righteousness, and prosperity.
In the Bible’s New Testament book of Acts, Philip the Evangelist was told by an angel to go to the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. There, he met an Ethiopian eunuch who had been to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home. The eunuch was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah, and had come to Isaiah 53:7-8. Philip asked the Ethiopian, “Do you understand what you are reading?” He said he did not (“How can I understand unless I have a teacher to teach me?”), and asked Philip to explain the text to him. Philip told him the Gospel of Jesus, and the Ethiopian asked to be baptized. They went down into some water and Philip baptized him.
The Isaiah 53:7-8 verse is,
7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished.
A professional shearer can shear a sheep in less than 2 minutes. The world record is 37.9 seconds, set in 2016 by Ivan Scott from Ireland. Other world records include shearing 839 lambs in 9 hours by Rodney Sutton of New Zealand and 720 ewes in 9 hours by Darin Forde of New Zealand.
Among several interesting objects in Globular cluster Messier 15, 33600 light-years from Earth, is a binary system of two Sol-sized neutron stars in tight (10.1 hour) orbit. This system led to improved measurements of various effects (and further confirmation of Einstein’s theories). Key to the studies is that one of the neutron stars, PSR1534+12, is a radio pulsar with period 37.9 milliseconds.
Charles Messier was a French astronomer who catalogued over 100 astronomical objects in 1771.
Mark Messier was an NHL star who played professional hockey from 1978 to 2004.
Mark Messier was the last active former WHA player. The WHA ceased operations in 1979.
Enoch, son of Jared and father of the long-lived Methuselah, didn’t die but was taken by God to be Chief of his Archangels. In some traditions, Enoch was the first astronomer.
Enoch Light was a classically trained violinist, danceband leader, and recording engineer. As the leader of various dance bands that recorded as early as March 1927 and continuing through at least 1940, Light and his band primarily worked in various hotels in New York. For a time in 1928 he also led a band in Paris. In the 1930s Light also studied conducting with the French conductor Maurice Frigara in Paris. Throughout the 1930s, Light and his outfits were steadily employed in the generally more upscale hotel restaurants and ballrooms in New York that catered to providing polite ambiance for dining and functional dance music of current popular songs rather than out and out jazz. At some point his band was tagged “The Light Brigade” and they often broadcast over radio live from the Hotel Taft in New York where they had a long residency.
Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) has had 34 past and present members and at least 14 different incarnations, with English songwriter, composer, arranger, singer, multi-instrumentalist and record producer Jeff Lynne being the band’s leader and sole constant member…
Bud Light beer was introduced in 1981. Miller Lite Beer (“Tastes great! Less filling!”) was introduced in 1973.
Deon Richmond who played Rudy Huxtable’s friend Kenny (nicknamed “Bud”) on the NBC sitcom The Cosby Show, did not realize the how great it was at the time he sang a duet with B. B. King
Two days ago the Washington Post reported that two more women have filed complaints against the 79 year old alleged sexual assaulter Bill Cosby. This brings the total number of women complaining against Cosby to be at least 60.
Jason Robards received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in consecutive years - for All the President’s Men (1976), portraying Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and for Julia (1977), as crime writer Dashiell Hammett.
The Washington Post was founded in 1877. To promote the newspaper, the Post’s owners requested the leader of the United States Marine Band, John Philip Sousa, to compose a march for the newspaper’s essay contest awards ceremony. Sousa composed “The Washington Post” in 1889 and it remains one of his most popular marches in the US and other countries. It was first played in public on 15 June 1889.
The “two step” dance became so closely associated with Sousa’s The Washington Post, that the dance was often called “The Washington Post.”
ETA: the USMC band plays The Washington Post, after a brief historical intro by the band leader.
In early 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, author Dashiell Hammett enlisted in the United States Army. He was a disabled veteran of World War I, a victim of tuberculosis, and a Communist, but he pulled strings in order to be admitted. He served as a sergeant in the Aleutian Islands, where he edited an Army newspaper.
Tom Paxton wrote his first song, The Marvelous Toy, while taking a mandatory typing class while serving in the army at Fort Dix, New Jersey, despite the fact that he already knew how to type. He wrote it on the typewriter, and the sounds the marvelous toy makes (zip when it moved and bopped when it stopped and whirrrr when it stood still) are the sounds an electric typewriter makes when the TAB key is hit.
Dix Hills, a wealthy suburb on Long Island, NY, is supposedly named for a local native American, Dick Pechegan, likely of the Secatogues. Pechegan’s name appeared on a 1692 deed. The addition of English names like “Dick” to indigenous names like “Pechegan” was a common practice. Scholar William Wallace Tooker wrote that Pechegan’s wigwam and his planted fields became the hilly area’s namesake, known as the shortened “Dix Hills” by 1911.
The local school district is named “Half Hollow Hills”, a shortened version of the “Half Way Hollow Valley”, a notable geographical feature in an otherwise flat landscape.
William Wallace “Willie” Lincoln was the third son of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln. He was named after Mary’s brother-in-law, Dr. William Wallace. He died, probably of typhoid caused by unclean water, in the White House on February 20, 1862.
At the Olympic aquatic center in Rio de Janeiro, the water in the Olympic diving pool, which hosts diving, water polo, and synchronized swimming, suddenly turned green overnight. Yesterday it was nice and blue, as is normal, while today it is a strong shade of green. The pool right next to it, which hosts the racing events, is still nice and blue. The green is likely due to an algae issue. The Maria Lenk Aquatics Centre is named after the first Brazilian woman ever to compete in the Olympics.
Macrocystis pyrifera, commonly known as giant kelp or giant bladder kelp, is a species of kelp (brown algae) common along the coast of the eastern Pacific Ocean, from Baja California north to southeast Alaska, and is also found in the southern oceans near South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Individual algae may grow to more than 45 metres (150 feet) long at a rate of as much as 60 cm (2 ft) per day.