The musical Jersey Boys ran on Broadway from 2005 to 2017, had two North American national tours and productions in London’s West End, Las Vegas, Chicago, Toronto, Melbourne and other Australian cities, Singapore, South Africa, The Netherlands and elsewhere. Jersey Boys won four 2006 Tony Awards including Best Musical, and the 2009 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical.
On April 15, 1997, MLB baseball player Jackie Robinson’s jersey number, 42, was retired throughout Major League Baseball. It was the first time any jersey number had been retired throughout one of the four major American sports leagues. Under the terms of the retirement, a grandfather clause allowed the handful of players who wore number 42 to continue doing so in tribute to Robinson, until such time as they subsequently changed teams or jersey numbers. The Yankees’ Mariano Rivera, who retired at the end of the 2013 season, was the last player in Major League Baseball to wear jersey number 42 on a regular basis.
Since 1997, only Wayne Gretzky’s number 99, retired by the NHL in 2000, has been retired league-wide.
So, 42 in MLB and 99 in the NHL are the only league-wide retired numbers.
Agent 99, Barbara Feldon’s character in the 1960s sitcom/spy spoof Get Smart, was unusual for the era, showing a capable woman in a stressful career. Her competence was in contrast to her bumbling partner Maxwell Smart. Feldon noted “A lot of women said 99 was a role model for them. Because she really was smart and always got the right answer.”
George H.W. and Barbara Pierce Bush’s oldest daughter Pauline Robinson “Robin” Bush died of leukemia at the age of three. The Bushes, who already had one son (George W.) would have three more sons (John Ellis, Neil & Marvin) and one more daughter, their last child Dorothy.
Stem cells in bone marrow mature and develop into three types of blood cells: red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. Rapid production of abnormal white blood cells causes leukemia. Myeloma is a cancer of the plasma cells.
Platelets function to stop bleeding by clumping and clotting blood vessel injuries. The ratio of platelets to red blood cells in a healthy adult ranges from 1:10 to 1:20.
When platelets were first seen, in the early to mid 19th century by microscope, they were first called by names such as spherules, or piastrine (little plates), or third corpuscles, or blood plaques. In 1910 the pathologist James Homer Wright, from Pittsburgh PA and Boston MA, called them platelets and that name persists.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch tradesman and scientist from Delft, Netherlands who is commonly known as “the Father of Microbiology.” He was the first person to ever observe microorganisms through a magnifying lens, referring to them as “cavorting, wee beasties” and “animalcules.”
Bill Muncie, the greatest hydroplane racer of all time, won four Seafairs in a row driving for Atlas Van Lines. He may have won more but he died during a race in 1981.
Cool, Elvis!
Jan Hendrik Oort (1900 – 1992) was a Dutch astronomer who determined that the Milky Way rotates and overturned the idea that the Sun was at its center. The European Space Agency website describes him as “one of the greatest astronomers of the 20th century”.
The Oort cloud was named after him and is a theoretical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals believed to surround the Sun to as far as between 50,000 and 200,000 AU. It is divided into two regions: a disc-shaped inner Oort cloud (or Hills cloud) and a spherical outer Oort cloud. The Kuiper belt and the scattered disc, the other two reservoirs of trans-Neptunian objects, are less than one thousandth as far from the Sun as the Oort cloud.
James Van Allen, space scientist at the University of Iowa, is credited with the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belt. He originally was interested in entering the US Naval Academy, passed the written exam and was backed by his Congressman, but failed the physical exam due to flat feet, poor eyesight and poor swimming skills.
(A friend who was in his introductory Astronomy class at the University of Iowa in the 1980s told me that students speculated on the girth of Van Allen’s own belt; their estimates ranged from 44 to 50 inches)
President Theodore Roosevelt, a great admirer of early American naval hero John Paul Jones, arranged for his exhumation from a pauper’s grave in Paris, his return to the U.S. in a Navy warship, and his burial in an impressive tomb in the chapel of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.
The Michelson–Morley experiment was performed in 1887 by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley in Cleveland. It compared the speed of light in perpendicular directions, in an attempt to detect the relative motion of matter through the stationary luminiferous aether (“aether wind”).
Albert A. Michelson is an Annapolis grad, class of 1873.
aether, also spelled æther or ether, also called quintessence, is the material that fills the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere. The Michaelson-Morley Experiments and Einstein’s therory of General Relativity have supplanted this in modern cosmology.
The Ether Monument, also known as The Good Samaritan, is a statue and fountain near the northwest corner of Boston’s Public Garden. Massachusetts General Hospital, where the first modern anesthesia procedure took place using ether, is located about a 15-minute walk from the site of the monument. The operating theater at MGH where the experiment by WTG Morton and Charles Thomas Jackson took place was renamed the Ether Dome.
The young virtuoso and prodigy Alma Deutscher, aged 12, will perform the opera that she fully composed, Cinderella (her version, with a twist) next month in San Jose, California, at the California Theater. It will be her USA debut. Young Alma Deutscher is a virtuoso on both the violin and piano. Her gifts seem almost Mozart-like.
ETA: and I got tickets!
Prodigy, which once competed with AOL and CompuServe as Internet providers, was formed as a partnership of CBS, Sears, and IBM.
Arthur C. Clarke always denied that HAL was intended as a one-letter-better joke at IBM’s expense, as IBM had been helpful to him and Stanley Kubrick in the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Over 1,000 ancient manuscripts of Homer’s works exist, far more than for any other ancient author and many more of the Iliad than the Odyssey. The earliest Homeric papyrus is from the third century BCE. The “Bankes Papyrus”, from second century BCE Egypt, was most probably a student’s school text of Book 24 of the Iliad since many accent and pronunciation marks were added to the manuscript after the work of the original scribe.
Egypt received the third-most foreign aid from the United States in FY2013, behind only Afghanistan and Israel, at $1.6 billion.