The marble lions guarding the steps of the New York Public Library have been given several names since the library was dedicated in 1911. During the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia named them Patience and Fortitude, for the qualities he felt were needed by New Yorkers to survive the Great depression. These are the names they are known by today; Patience guards the south side of the Library’s steps and Fortitude sits to the north.
Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who led New York City through the Depression, was the subject of both a musical, Fiorello!, and a play, The Little Flower. The musical ran for two years on Broadway and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Tom Bosley originated the title role of the Broadway musical* Fiorello!*, earning the 1960 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical. He was later best known for playing Howard Cunningham on the TV show Happy Days.
The death of William P. Wilson, who coached Mass. Sen. John F. Kennedy for his famous 1960 televised debates with Vice President Richard M. Nixon, is referred to in the 2016 documentary Obit, about the obituary staff of The New York Times.
Great movie, BTW.
In a prophecy indexed 1 Q26, Nostradamus in 1555 wrote:
Le grand du fouldre tumbe d’heure diurne,
Mal & predict par porteur postulaire:
Suiuant presage tumbe d’heure nocturne,
Conflict Reims, Londres, Etrusque pestifere.
The great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt,
The evil deed predicted by the bearer of a petition
According to the prediction another falls at night time.
Conflict in Reims, London, and pestilence in Tuscany.
This has been interpreted to predict the deaths of John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.
During World War II, only one raven of the Tower of London’s resident flock was able to survive the hardships of the bombing during the Blitz, so the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, ordered more ravens to be brought in, in order to bring the flock up to the correct size of at least six. The Tower ravens are enlisted as soldiers of the Kingdom, and were issued attestation cards in the same way as soldiers and police. As is the case with soldiers, the ravens can be dismissed for unsatisfactory conduct.
The first reference to an early version of the legend that Britain will fall if the ravens leave the Tower comes from July, 1944, when ravens were being used as unofficial spotters for enemy bombs and planes during the Blitz.
The Simpsons first “Treehouse of Horror” parodies Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” in its third segment as Lisa reads the story to Bart and Maggie. In the animated segment, Homer serves as the protagonist, Bart takes the raven’s form, Marge appears in a painting as Lenore and Lisa and Maggie are angels. Bart complains that the poem is not scary, and at one point the raven says his catchphrase “Eat my shorts” instead of “Nevermore.” Homer provides the spoken dialogue for the narrator, while James Earl Jones voices his thoughts.
Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel spends his offseason time studying for his PhD in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focusing on spectral graph theory, numerical linear algebra, and machine learning. In 2015, Urschel co-authored a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics titled “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians”.
Noted science fiction author Joe Haldeman, perhaps best known for The Forever War, has often served as an adjunct professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As he explained in the foreword of his collection A Separate War and Other Stories, each semester he writes down a variety of sf concepts, twice the number of students in his class plus two more, and then has his students draw two each from a hat. Each has to write a sf short story incorporating those two concepts; he then writes a short story of his own based on the two remaining.
Only four states have state mottoes that are single words in English: Hope (RI), Friendship (TX), Industry (UT) and Forward (WI).
The motto of the Percy family, “Esperance”, the French word for hope, is used as a battle cry by Henry Percy (also known as Hotspur) in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1.
The Percy card is the single largest nobility card in the game of Kingmaker, with a value of 100.
Percy Faith was a Canadian band leader and composer, perhaps best known for “Theme from A Summer Place”
Summer Smith, a teenage girl with a taste for interdimensional adventure, is the daughter of Jerry and Beth Smith on the animated science fiction parody Rick and Morty. She’s voiced by Spencer Grammer, 33, daughter of Cheers and Frasier actor Kelsey Grammer.
None of the above are related to country singer Andy Grammer, best noted for his hit “Honey, I’m Good”. He is the son of Red Grammer, a composer and performer of uplifting childrens’ songs. The Grammers observe the Bahai’i faith.
Humans have been collecting honey since pre-historic times. One cave painting from Spain, believed to be approximately 8,000 years old, shows two humans gathering honey from a wild bee nest.
If kept in a properly-sealed container, honey never spoils.
The term “spoils system” was derived from the phrase “to the victor belongs the spoils” by New York Senator William L. Marcy, referring to the victory of Andrew Jackson in the election of 1828, with the term spoils meaning goods or benefits taken from the loser in a competition, election or military victory. It was prevalent in US government employment, with the winning party putting its own members into jobs freely, until the advent of Civil Service laws. Those came in response to the assassination of President Garfield by a whack job commonly described as a “disappointed office seeker”.
As President, Andrew Jackson oversaw the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Native Americans from their homelands in the East to “less desirable” lands in Oklahoma. In the last forced removal of Cherokees, in 1838, approximately 2,000-6,000 of the 16,543 relocated Cherokee died along the way.
(My Choctaw mother-in-law hates even touching a $20 bill with Jackson’s face on it - we can’t wait for the Harriet Tubmans, if Trump doesn’t cancel the idea).
Although the Choctaws were still recovering from the ravages of the Trail of Tears, in which 6000 of them died, they were still able to collect a relief donation during the Irish potato famine. Their gift has been permanently commemorated with a sculpture of nine eagle feathers in Middleton, Ireland, near Cork. The ceremony last year included both Irish step dancers and Choctaw snake dancers. In 1990, Choctaw leaders traveled to County Mayo to take part in a re-enactment of an 1848 protest. The gesture was returned in 1992, when Irish leaders took part in a trek from Oklahoma to Mississippi. Former Irish President Mary Robinson also has been named an honorary Choctaw chief.