Mercury is tidally or gravitationally locked with the Sun in a 3:2 resonance, and rotates in a way that is unique in the Solar System. As seen relative to the fixed stars, it rotates on its axis exactly three times for every two revolutions it makes around the Sun. As seen from the Sun, in a frame of reference that rotates with the orbital motion, it appears to rotate only once every two Mercurian years. An observer on Mercury would therefore see only one day every two years.
In December 2008, actor Jeremy Piven was diagnosed with mercury poisoning possibly resulting from eating sushi twice a day for twenty years, or herbal remedies he was also taking.
Project Mercury astronaut John Glenn, who recently died, is portrayed by actor Glen Powell in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures, about the long-overlooked black female mathematicians who helped NASA win the Space Race. Glenn was from Ohio and served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a much-decorated pilot; he later entered politics and was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate.
The United States Marine Corps traces its institutional roots to the Continental Marines of the American Revolutionary War, formed by Captain Samuel Nicholas by a resolution of the Second Continental Congress on 10 November 1775, to raise two battalions of Marines. However, at the end of the American Revolution, both the Continental Navy and Continental Marines were disbanded and not reinstituted until 1798.
The term “root crops” refers to any edible underground plant structure, but many root crops are actually stems, such as potato tubers. Edible roots include cassava, sweet potato, beet, carrot, rutabaga, turnip, parsnip, radish, yam and horseradish. Spices obtained from roots include sassafras, angelica, sarsaparilla and licorice.
Rutabagas are referred to in England and other parts of the Commonwealth as “swedes”. Except in Scotland, where “swedes” can mean turnips. Or not, as the case may be:
Alan Dean Foster has written several science fiction books, including Icerigger, in which humanity is part of the Humanx Commonwealth, an interstellar alliance with the friendly Thranx insectoid race.
Ninja’d.
Actor Dean Cain was born in Mount Clemens, Michigan, the biological son of Roger Tanaka and actress Sharon Thomas. He is of French Canadian, Irish, Japanese, and Welsh descent. In 1969, Cain’s mother married film director Christopher Cain, who adopted Dean and his brother, musician Roger Cain.
Michael Caine took his acting name from the Caine Mutiny, an on-the-spot decision made when he was in a telephone booth in Leicester Square, talking with his agent. He was already acting under the name “Michael Scott”, but his agent told him he would have to change it, because there was already an actor named Michael Scott. He looked around, saw that the Caine Mutiny was playing in the Odeon theatre, and decided that was his name. (His birth name was Maurice Joseph Micklewhite.)
Odéon is a station on lines 4 and 10 of the Paris Métro in the heart of the Left Bank. The station was opened on 9 January 1910 and was named after the nearby Odéon theatre. The station is located under the Carrefour de l’Odéon.
To clarify, as the article title states, that’s “neeps” and not “needs”, as in “neeps and tatties”, turnips/swedes and potatoes as a side.
In play:
Odeon is the name for ancient Greek and Roman buildings built for music, such as singing exercises, musical shows, or poetry competitions where the poems were accompanied by music. The word comes from the Ancient Greek ᾨδεῖον, Ōideion, literally “singing place”, or “building for musical competitions”; from the verb ἀείδω, aeidō, “I sing”, which is also the root of ᾠδή, ōidē, “ode”, and of ἀοιδός, aoidos, “singer”.
oops! quite right!
damn this anti-Scottish spell-checker!
The noir-film phrase “send him up the river”, meaning incarceration, refers to the location of Sing Sing Prison, on the banks of the Hudson River upstream from New York City. The facility is also sometimes called “Warble Twice on the Hudson”
On June 19, 1816, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company, rival fur-trading companies, engaged in a violent confrontation in present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. In 1821, the two companies were forcibly merged by intervention of the British government to put an end to often-violent competition.
Alexander Mackenzie was a trader with the North-West Company. In 1793, he carried out the first European crossing of North America north of Mexico, twelve years before the Lewis & Clark expedition.
The earliest human artifacts in Mexico are chips of stone tools found near campfire remains in the Valley of Mexico and radiocarbon-dated to circa 10,000 years ago. Mexico is the site of the domestication of maize, tomato and beans, which produced an agricultural surplus. This enabled the transition from paleo-Indian hunter-gatherers to sedentary agricultural villages beginning around 5000 BCE.
The earliest print cite to the phrase “Mexican standoff” was in a short story printed on March 19, 1876 about Mexico, an American being held up by a Mexican bandit, and the outcome: “Go-!” said he sternly then. “We will call it a stand-off, a Mexican stand-off, you lose your money, but you save your life!”
The news of the defeat of George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in June 1876 cast a pall over the U.S. Centennial celebrations soon afterwards. Quoted in The New York Herald on September 2, President U.S. Grant said, “I regard Custer’s Massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary – wholly unnecessary.”
Buffalo Nickels are graded by numismatists mainly by attention to the clarity of the date and the detail of the buffalo’s horn. A nickel in very fine (VF) condition might be advertised as “full date/full horn.”