King George VI of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, father of Queen Elizabeth II, has in recent years been played by two distinguished actors who look almost nothing like him - Colin Firth in The King’s Speech, and Jared Harris in The Crown.
Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, and Aurora Australis, the Southern Lights, are caused by electrons colliding with oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. In these collisions, the electrons excite the oxygen and nitrogen to higher energy states, and when the oxygen and nitrogen relax back down to lower energy states they release their energy in the form of light.
The Earth’s atmosphere is more than 78% nitrogen and almost 21% oxygen.
Potato chip companies pack their product in foil bags filled with not with ordinary air containing the normal amount of oxygen, but with nitrogen gas. Oxygen would quickly turn the chips rancid. The nitrogen preserves the freshness of the chips, and creates sufficient cushioning during shipping so the chips don’t get crushed.
NASA reports that bags of potato chips taken aboard super-modified jets respond to the sudden change in air pressure soon after takeoff by exploding.
The boost-phase shifting of a NASA resupply capsule’s payload and its subsequent disintegration is a key plot point in the book and movie The Martian.
Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth as a young man after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians. In 2012, the US Library of Congress named it one of 88 “Books that Shaped America”.
“88” is a neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler” - H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
In the background of Robert Harris’s alternative history novel Fatherland, Adolf Hitler prepares for a summit meeting with U.S. President Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. in Berlin in 1964.
Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. was a major influence on his sons, three of whom rose to high office: John F. became President, Robert F. was a Senator and Attorney General, and Edward M. (Ted) was a Senator.
The position of Attorney General is one of the most ancient offices in the common law systems inherited from England. It dates back to at least the 13th century.
Eleven US jurisdictions still recognize common-law marriage. also known as sui juris marriage, informal marriage, marriage by habit and repute, or marriage in fact, without that couple having formally registered their relation as a civil or religious marriage.
Actor William Hurt was involved in a lawsuit with Sandra Jennings, who alleged that the two shared a common-law marriage, based on the fact that they lived together in South Carolina, a state that recognized common-law marriages. Hurt and Jennings remained officially unmarried, later separated and Jennings sued him in New York, seeking recognition of the “marriage” under South Carolina law. The New York court, which did not recognize common-law marriage and was reluctant to recognize a common-law marriage originating in South Carolina, found in Hurt’s favor that no common-law marriage existed.
Blues singer and finger-picking guitarist Mississippi John Hurt was known for his versions of “Frankie and Johnny” and “Spike Driver Blues”. On occasion, Hurt would use an open tuning and a slide, as he did in his arrangement of “The Ballad of Casey Jones”.
Common-law marriages in the United States are permitted in 11 jurisdictions: Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and the District of Columbia.
Of those 11, only 4 will have the 21 August 2017 Total Solar Eclipse’s path of totality touch them: Iowa Kansas, Montana, and South Carolina. But all 48 CONUS states will see at least a partial eclipse. The path of totality touches 14 states: Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina, and in that order.
The total eclipse will not touch Mississippi.
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Singer-songwriter Tom Paxton, who met Mississippi John Hurt and played on the same bill with him at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village around 1963, wrote and recorded a song about him in 1977, “Did You Hear John Hurt?”, which he still frequently plays in live performances.
Leonard Nimoy, a struggling actor and L.A. cab driver, once had then-Sen. John F. Kennedy as a fare.
The term gaslighting refers to attempting to plant seeds of doubt in a person’s memory or recollection of events. The term comes from the play Gas Light, which involves a man trying to make his wife think that she is going insane,
The 1938 play Gas Light was turned in the 1940 British film Gaslight, directed by Thorold Dickinson which stars Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, and featuring Frank Pettingell. The film adhered more closely to the original play upon which it is based than the better-known 1944 MGM adaptation. The play had been shown on Broadway as Angel Str] so when the film was released in the United States it was given the same name
The town of Wynyard, Saskatchewan, was named after the wife of a CPR official, whose maiden name was Wynyard.
The Wynyard Court House closed in 2013 and is now a heritage site.
CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, was developed in the 1960’s at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, when James Jude, Guy Knickerbocker, Peter Safar, William Kouwenhoven, and Joseph Redding established that chest compression alone worked as well as when in conjunction with the then-standard mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.