The longest drought in major American sports ended on Wednesday night when the Cubs won the World Series. The longest current World Series droughts, including the last year won or the year of the team’s founding, ate:
68 years: (1948 World Series Champions) Cleveland Indians
56 years: (1961, team founded) Texas Rangers
55 years: (1962, team founded) Houston Astros
48 years: (1969, team founded) Milwaukee Brewers
40 years: (1977, team founded) Seattle Mariners
The Texas Ranger Division, better known as just The Texas Rangers is, of course, a law enforcement agency dating back to 1823. While the Rangers accomplished many good things over the years, there was a time when they were as lawless as the people they pursued. In January 1919, an investigation by the Texas Legislature found that from 300 to 5,000 people, mostly of Hispanic descent, had been killed by Rangers from 1910 to 1919, and that members of the Rangers had been involved in many acts of brutality and injustice. This was largely due to the sudden recruitment of hundreds of “special” Rangers without doing a thorough screening.
An FBI “special agent” is any member of the FBI who is above the rank of Probationary Agent.
Probation in criminal law is a period of supervision over an offender, ordered by a court instead of serving time in prison. While used informally for many years, the passing of the National Probation Act of 1925 legally allowed courts to suspend the imposition of incarceration and place an offender on probation.
The 1960s TV show Get Smart was a satire of the secret agent genre. It featured bumbling Maxwell Smart (Don Adams), Agent 86 for CONTROL, battling the evil forces of KAOS and its super-criminals with the help of his competent partner Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon)
In 1859, James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that the rings of Saturn could not be solid, as had been previously thought, or they would become unstable and break apart. He proposed that the rings must be composed of numerous small particles, all independently orbiting Saturn. Later, Sofia Kovalevskaya found that Saturn’s rings cannot be liquid ring-shaped bodies. Maxwell’s proposal was proven to be correct in 1895 through spectroscopic studies of the rings carried out by James Keeler of Allegheny Observatory and Aristarkh Belopolsky of Pulkovo Observatory.
In the mid-1980s, General Motors released the Saturn Concept Car. The car, which resembled the first Saturn SL, was not originally meant to start up a brand, however, GM planned to release the Saturn car under one of its brands, which, at the time, were Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac. In the late 1980s, GM changed their plan and founded Saturn as its own brand, with its first cars being the Saturn SC and Saturn SL.
Interbrand, a company in the UK, publishes the Best Global Brands report on an annual basis and its report for 2011 has Coca-Cola as the world’s most valuable brand.
In Forbes’ opinion, the most valuable brands in the world are Apple, Google, Microsoft, Coca Cola, Facebook, Toyota, IBM, Disney, McDonald’s and GE.
The GE logo – known in the company as “the meatball” – has been the logo of the company – with minor variations – since 1899.
One of the top-selling items at the Swedish furniture retailer Ikea, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in the U.S. last year, is its Swedish meatballs. Ikea Group sold around 236 million Swedish meatballs in the U.S. in the fiscal year that ended August 2016.
Peter Ho, head of food-product development at Ikea USA, said that, globally, the retailer sells 1 billion meatballs a year at its 360 locations in 47 countries.
“Non Ho L’eta” won the Eurovision song contest in 1964, composed and sung by 17 yer old Gigliola Cinquetti, the Italian entry. The title means “I’m not old enugh”. The singer, now 69, is a now a presenter on an Italian current affairs TV show.
Too late to edit: Every version of the above song has been scrubbed from YouTube in the past few days. But it will be back.
The United States Marine Corps advertising catchphrase has long been, “The few, the proud, the Marines.” The Marines are a smaller combat-arms service than the Army, Navy or Air Force; they are bigger than the Coast Guard, however.
The roots of the Coast Guard lie in the United States Revenue Cutter Service established by Alexander Hamilton under the Department of the Treasury on 4 August 1790. The first Coast Guard station was in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Until the re-establishment of the Navy in 1798, the Revenue Cutter Service was the only naval force of the early United States. It was established to collect taxes from a brand new nation of patriot smugglers. When the officers were out at sea, they were told to crack down on piracy; and to rescue any mariners in distress.
Smugglers’ Notch Resort is a ski resort area in the Town of Cambridge, near Jeffersonville, Vermont. It has a vertical drop of 2,610 feet. It is named for a narrow notch (mountain pass) running adjacent to Sterling Mountain, which smugglers used many years ago.
At least 129 of the world’s total 780 Nobel Prize winners have been, at some point in their careers, affiliated with universities in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
While many US presidents have gone to a university and attained advanced degrees, only Woodrow Wilson received a PhD. Most other advanced degrees were either Masters degrees or Law degrees.
The first First Lady to have an advanced college degree was Hillary Clinton (JD from Yale), followed by Laura Bush (masters in library science) and Michelle Obama (JD from Harvard).
In November 2001, Laura Bush became the first person other than a president to deliver the weekly presidential radio address.