Nematodes appear in an early episode of SpongeBob SquarePants as a ravenous horde of undersea critters which will eat anything in their path.
On May 18, 1388, Chinese troops of General Lan Yu routed Mongol hordes led by Toghus Temur, the Khan of Northern Yuan, in the Battle of Buyur Lake. In his flight from the Ming army, Toghus Temur eventually arrived at the Tula River, where he was murdered by a Mongol chieftain.
7’6" basketball center Yao Ming was the first overall pick of the 2002 NBA Draft. He was named an NBA All-Star during all eight of his seasons in the NBA with the Houston Rockets, then was forced to retire in 2011 after numerous foot and ankle injuries.
He practiced 10 hours a day in order to make the Shanghai Sharks junior team at the age of 13.
The first Chinese exonym for “Yao people” was the graphic pejorative yao 猺 (犭"dog radical" and yao 䍃 phonetic) “jackal”, which twentieth-century language reforms changed twice; first with the invented character yao 傜 (亻"human radical") “the Yao”, and then with yao 瑤 (玉 “jade radical”) “precious jade; green jasper”.
In chemistry, a free radical is an atom, molecule, or ion that has unpaired valence electrons. With some exceptions, these unpaired electrons make free radicals highly chemically reactive towards other substances, even themselves. Most radicals are reasonably stable only at very low concentrations in inert media or in a vacuum.
The first upright vacuum cleaner was invented in June 1908 by James Murray Spangler, an asthmatic who suspectiedthe carpet sweeper he was using at work was the cause of his ailment and created a basic suction-sweeper by mounting an electric fan motor on a Bissell brand carpet sweeper then adding a soap box and a broom handle. After refining the design and obtaining a patent for the Electric Suction Sweeper he set about producing it himself and gave one of his Electric Suction Sweepers to his cousin Susan Troxel Hoover, who used it at home. Impressed with the machine, she told her husband and son about it. William Henry “Boss” Hoover and son Herbert William Hoover, Sr. Seeing a marketing opportunity, Hoover bought the patent from Spangler in 1908, founding the Electric Suction Sweeper Company with $36,000 capital, retaining Spangler as production supervisor with pay based on royalties in the new business.
On October 22, 1879, Thomas Edison performed a successful test using a carbon filament thread in an incandescent light bulb, which would become the most successful version of the electric light bulb. The test involved a bulb that lasted 13.5 hours.
During the Dutch tulip mania in 1636-7, the price of a tulip bulb rose to hundreds of guilders, ,without a single bulb ever being delivered. The contracts for future delivery were never fulfilled, because the market crashed in February, before the season.
The Black Tulip is a historical romance by Alexandre Dumas, père. The story takes place in the Dutch city of Haarlem, where a reward is offered to the first grower who can produce a truly black tulip.
“The Black Dahlia” was a nickname given to Elizabeth Short, the victim of one of the oldest unsolved murder cases in Los Angeles history. Short acquired the moniker posthumously from newspapers in the habit of nicknaming crimes they found particularly lurid. Short was found mutilated, her body sliced in half at the waist, on January 15, 1947, in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, California. Short’s unsolved murder has been the source of widespread speculation, leading to many suspects, along with several books, television, and film adaptations of the story.
With a remarkably similar name, Elizabeth Smart was a fourteen year old teenager who was abducted from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, Utah on June 5, 2002. She was rescued by police officers nine months later on March 12, 2003, in Sandy, Utah, about 18 miles from her home, in the captivity of Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Ileen Barzee, who were indicted for her kidnapping, but initially ruled unfit to stand trial.
On January 25, 1890, an American woman completed a circumnavigation of the globe in a then-record 72 days. Nelly Bly was the pen name of journalist** Elizabeth** Cochrane Seaman. She had been inspired by Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. She was also a writer, industrialist, inventor, and a charity worker who was widely known for the trip around the world and for an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within.
The octagonal building of the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, where Nellie Bly lived for her expose, Ten Days in a Mad-House, still stands. It has been converted into the central block of The Octagon, a high-end residential rental apartment building where 3-bedroom apartments cost $5,000 a month, and houses a lobby, recreation rooms, and a small art gallery. Blackwell’s Island is now known as Roosevelt Island.
In 1880, Queen Victoria signed an Order-in-Council transferring to Canada the Arctic Archipelago, consisting of over 35,000 islands.
Victoria Principal dated teen idol Andy Gibb after meeting him on The John Davidson Show in 1981. The two hit it off immediately and she sang a duet with Gibb. A year later, she gave him an ultimatum: “Choose me or choose drugs.” The couple split in March 1982, and Gibb died six years later on March 10, 1988.
“Perhaps Love” is a song that John Denver wrote and recorded as a duet with tenor Plácido Domingo. The song appeared on Domingo’s 1981 album of the same title. In spite of what many perceive as a vocal mismatch between Denver and Domingo, the song was successful. Lee Holdridge, who conducted the music on the album, credited the pairing of Domingo and Denver with paving the way for later “popera” phenomena like the Three Tenors, Josh Groban, and Andrea Bocelli.
Plácido Domingo’s 1983 album My Life for a Song including an original Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice composition I Don’t Talk to Strangers (it seems a waste of time to hear someone you don’t know recall a life you won’t know). In 1986 ALW would recycle the melody in Phantom of the Opera’s “All I Ask of You” (No more talk of darkness/Forget these wild eyed fears/You’re here/Nothing can harm you/My words will warm and calm you)
Lloyd Aero Boliviano was the oldest airline that survived into the 21st century. The airline was started in 1925, using a plane donated by the Bolivian German community, and used the name Lloyd as a reference to the London insurer’s reputation for safety and security. LAB, which I have flown on several times, ceased scheduled operations in 2006. Today, people of German ancestry comprise 3% of Bolivia’s population.
The three largest international airports in Bolivia are El Alto International Airport in La Paz, Viru Viru International Airport in Santa Cruz, and Jorge Wilstermann International Airport in Cochabamba.
The air traffic control and baggage code for Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport, CLE, has in recent years been used in publicity and tourism promotions for the City of Cleveland, Ohio, itself.