Of the at least 134 deaths from Hurricane Irma in September 2017, there were at least 4 fatalities on Sint Maarten. Hurricane Irma was also the most intense Atlantic hurricane to strike the United States since Katrina in 2005, and the first major hurricane to make landfall in Florida since Wilma in 2005. Hurricane Irma was the first Category 5 hurricane of the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season.
On 09 September, Hurricane Irma, together with Hurricane Jose, marked the first time in documented history that multiple active hurricanes in the Atlantic simultaneously had wind speeds of at least 150 mph.
2017 was one of only six years on record to feature multiple Category 5 hurricanes.
Year & Hurricane Names
1932: Bahamas, Cuba
1933: Cuba–Brownsville, Tampico
1961: Carla, Hattie
2005: Emily, Katrina, Rita, Wilma (4? holy shit!)
2007: Dean, Felix
2017: Irma, Maria
That Irma, she’s a real bitch!
While the Bergen County blue laws forbidden Target from opening on Sunday, the Target Superstore got permission to open on Sunday October 29, 2012 solely for the purpose of letting people who lost electricity due to Hurricane Sandy (which was the most powerful superstorm to hit New Jersey) to recharge their hand held devices.
Target is a major sponsor of Chip Ganassi Racing (CGR). CGR cars are easy to spot with their solid red cars and prominent white Target logo (or, er… target). CGR competes in the IndyCar Series, NASCAR, the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, and the FIA World Endurance Championship. CGR won the Indy 500 in 2000 by Juan Pablo Montoya, 2008 by Scott Dixon, and 2010 and 2012 by Dario Franchitti.
The surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, who helped Charles Mason plot the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, is sometimes thought to be the source of the nickname “Dixie” associated with the slave-holding Southern U.S.A.
Among several other theories for the name “Dixie”: The Citizens State Bank (located in the French Quarter of New Orleans) and other banks in Louisiana issued ten-dollar notes labeled “Dix” (French for “ten”) on the reverse side. The notes were known as “Dixies” by English-speaking southerners, and the area around New Orleans and the French-speaking parts of Louisiana came to be known as “Dixieland”.
On January 5, 1865, the Union Army captured Fort Fisher, the last seaport of the Confederacy. Union Major General Benjamin Butler of the Expeditionary Corps of the Army of the James, together with naval forces under Rear Admiral David Dixon, seized the port of Wilmington NC.
“I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” (often referred to as the “Major-General’s Song”) from Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance, is one of the most famous songs in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas. A nonsense version, featured in the 2017 film Despicable Me 3 and posted on Youtube as a singalong challenge, has over 15 million views.
Gilbert Hodges (Gil Hodges) was a Major League Baseball 1st baseman who plaed for the Brooklyn and L.A. Dodgers. He also managed the NY Mets to the 1969 World Series upset against the Baltimore Orioles. During WWII, Hodges served with the US Marine Corps. The Marine Parkway Bridge in New York City has the full formal name of the Marine Parkway–Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. Hodges, a fan favorite and beloved member of the Dodgers, died suddenly at age 47 of a heart attack.
For a couple of decades, there was no American bird species officially named the Baltimore Oriole. The Baltimore oriole received its name from the resemblance of the male’s colors to those on the coat-of-arms of Lord Baltimore. Observations of interbreeding between the Baltimore oriole and the western Bullock’s oriole led to both being classified as a single species, called the northern oriole, from 1973 to 1995. But further study showed that the interbreeding was too insignificant to support species lumping, and the species Baltimore Oriole was restored to ornithological nomenclature.
Baltimore, with 621,000, is the largest city in Maryland. Burlington VT, with 42,400, is the smallest of the largest cities in any US state. Charleston WV, with 51,400, is the next largest of the largest cities in any US state.
“Lord Burlington” is one of the titles used by the heir to the Duke of Devonshire; however, in his career as a photographer he prefers to be called Bill Burlington. He manages one of the family properties, Lismore Castle in Waterford, Ireland, and in 2005 converted the derelict west range into a contemporary art gallery, known as Lismore Castle Arts. The castle gardens also contain contemporary sculpture as well as two sections of the Berlin Wall, and are open to view by the public.
Burlington is the only city name in the USA that has three minor league baseball league teams. There are teams in Iowa, Vermont and North Carolina. There are also teams in Salem Virginia and Oregon, and Winston Salem, North Carolina.
Burlington Corporation, formerly Burlington Coat Factory (named after Burlington, NJ) was acquired by Bain Capital in 2006, more recently made notorious by Mitt Romney.
When Nunavut was split off from the Northwest Territories in 1996, there was a campaign to choose a new name for what was left. Pranksters got the name “Bob” up to second in the polls before the effort faded. Various First Nations names were also listed, along with “Restavut”.
Rent creator Jonathan Larson died unexpectedly the morning of the show’s first preview performance Off Broadway. He suffered an aortic dissection, believed to have been caused by undiagnosed Marfan syndrome, in the early morning on January 25, 1996. New York State medical investigators concluded that if the aortic dissection had been properly diagnosed and treated, Larson would have lived.
Larson had been suffering severe chest pains, dizziness, and shortness of breath for several days prior to his death, but doctors at Cabrini Medical Center and St. Vincent’s Hospital could not find signs of a heart attack even after doing a chest X-ray and electrocardiogram so they misdiagnosed it either as flu or stress.
*Rent *was a rewrite of Puccini’s La Bohème, moved from Paris to modern NYC’s East Village, and with tuberculosis replaced by AIDS, and with some characters’ names only slightly changed.
Rent is spoofed in Scott Rudin, Matt Stone, and Trey Parker’s 2004 puppet action-adventure parody Team America: World Police, which includes the song, “Everyone Has AIDS.” Be assured it is in very bad taste.
The Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) is an annual American model rocketry competition for students in grades seven to 12 sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association and the National Association of Rocketry. Co-sponsors include NASA, United States Department of Defense, the American Association of Physics Teachers and the Civil Air Patrol.
