The HP-29C was a scientific/engineering pocket calculator made by Hewlett-Packard between 1977 and 1979. It used RON logic, for “Reverse Polish Notation”, as a different way to enter equations. For example, the calculator did not have an equals key, and it instead had an Enter key.
Not in play: I had one as a kid and loved programming and playing with it.
William Redington Hewlett and David Packard began their partnership in a rented garage with an initial capital investment of $538. In 1939 Hewlett and Packard decided to formalize their partnership. They tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
Their first financially successful product was a precision audio oscillator. One of the company’s earliest customers was Walt Disney Productions which bought eight oscillators (at $71.50 each) for use in certifying the Fantasound surround sound systems installed in theaters for the movie Fantasia.
Correction: RPN logic, not RON logic. Mistyped on the iPhone.
In play: Packard cars were first built in 1899. All Packards were single-cylinder cars up until 1903. Packard did well until post-WWII when competition from the Big 3, GM, Ford and Chrysler, strained independent car manufacturers. GM and Ford entered a price war that forced the independents to merge. The American Motors Corporation was formed in 1954 when the four major independents (Nash, Hudson, Packard, and Studebaker) all merged into one large outfit.
Lee Iacocca, popular Chrysler CEO and TV pitchman for the company, successfully led the effort to restore the Statue of Liberty in time for the 1986 centennial of its dedication. He was mentioned as a potential candidate for President of the United States soon afterwards, but showed no interest in the gig.
Automobile manufacturer Walter Chrysler was descended from German immigrants who arrived in Canada in the early 1700s from the Rhineland-Palatinate area; they spelled their name Greisler or Kreißler. He was probably not related to a famous person of his era with a similar name, violinist-composer Fritz Kreisler, who was born in Vienna to a Jewish family.
Since its founding, Canada’s official sport was…
lacrosse.
The Buick LaCrosse is a large luxury car manufactured and marketed by Buick since 2004. The automobile was originally sold as the Buick Allure in Canada. For 2010, the LaCrosse was completely redesigned and moved upmarket as a large premium sedan. The model was redesigned again for 2017.
In March 2006, Crystal Gail Mangum, a black student at North Carolina Central University accused three white Duke University students – all members of the Duke Blue Devils men’s lacrosse team – of raping her. The rape was alleged to have occurred at a party held at the house of two of the team’s captains in Durham on March 13, 2006. Durham District Attorney Nifong suggested that the alleged rape was a hate crime.
On April 11, 2007, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper dropped all charges and declared the three lacrosse players innocent of the rape allegations. Cooper stated that the players – Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans – were victims of a “tragic rush to accuse.”
The last American to be launched alone to conduct an entirely solo orbital mission in space was Astronaut Gordon Cooper, in 1963.
A cooper is a person trained to make staved containers, such as a wooden barrel, from timber that was usually heated or steamed to make it pliable. Other examples of a cooper’s work would include casks, buckets, tubs, and butter churns. Presently, coopers mostly operate barrel-making machinery and assemble casks for the wine and spirits industry.
A stave church is a medieval wooden Christian church building once common in north-western Europe. The name derives from the building’s structure of post and lintel construction, a type of timber framing where the load-bearing ore-pine posts are called *stafr *in Old Norse (*stav *in modern Norwegian). Originally much more widespread, most of the surviving stave churches are in Norway.
Comment: cool images, when searching ‘stave church norway’ — stave church norway - Google Search
That is cool trivia!
In play:
One of the sermons in the Old Norwegian Homily Book is known as the “stave church sermon”. The sermon dates from around 1100 and was presumably performed at consecrations, or on the anniversary of such. The sermon text is a theological interpretation of the building elements in the church. It names most of the building elements in the stave church, and can be a source of terminology and technique. For instance, the sermon says: “The four corner posts of the church are a symbol for the four gospels, because their teachings are the strongest supports within the whole of Christianity.”
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II holds the titles of Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith. Since Henry VIII, the Church of England has been the state church, despite periodic proposals to disestablish it. The British monarch must, by law, be a member of the Church of England.
Queen Elizabeth II is Britain’s 40th monarch since William the Conqueror was crowned in 1066, the same year Halley’s Comet visited the Earth.
Edmond Halley, who computed the orbit of the Comet named after him, was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, succeeding John Flamsteed. In articles published in 1686, he identified solar heating as the cause of atmospheric motions and also established the relationship between barometric pressure and height above sea level.
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald (Edmund with a u, not an o) was, when launched in 1958, was the largest ship on the Great Lakes. She sank on 10 November 1975, as captured in Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting ballad, and she remains the biggest ship to have sunk in the Great Lakes of North America.
Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Countess Kennedy, born in 1890, was the matriarch of the Kennedy family. Her father, John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, was mayor of Boston in the early 1900s. She was the wife of businessman and investor Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.; their nine children included President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Senator Ted Kennedy. She was the sixth American woman to be granted the title of Countess by the Pope. She died in 1995 at the age of 104.
Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. is the President of the United States, preparing for a summit meeting with German Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler in 1964 Berlin, as senior Nazi Party officials begin dying under suspicious circumstances in Robert Harris’s critically acclaimed alternative-history novel Fatherland.