The language of the ancient Etruscans (for whom Tuscany is named) is not completely understood, with only around 300 words deciphered. It is apparently unrelated to any other extant language.
J.R.R. Tolkien was a philologist before he was a novelist, and once said he first invented languages such as Sindarin and Quenya, and only then invented people - the Elves - to speak them.
Tolkien‘s first name was John, which has been a popular name throughout history because of two highly revered saints, John the Baptist (forerunner of Jesus Christ) and the apostle John (traditionally considered the author of the Gospel of John).
Pope John XXII was Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from August 1316 to his death in 1334. The next Pope to take the name John was John XXIII, who was elected Pope in October 1958, over six centuries later.
President-elect John F. Kennedy was meeting with his aide Ted Sorensen in New York City soon after the 1960 election. Sorensen was juggling several phone calls when yet another phone in the office rang. JFK answered it and said, “Mr. Sorensen is busy at the moment. Perhaps I might help you…?”
John Turner, future Prime Minister of Canada, was the federal Solicitor General in the Trudeau government in the spring of 1968.
One day he got a phone call from Bobby Kennedy, former US AG, who said: “John, I’m running for President and I don’t know anything about Canada. Could you give me a briefing?”
Turner went to Michigan where Kennedy was campaigning and gave him a briefing on things Canadian.
As Turner tells the story: “Four days later Kennedy was dead.”
Started in 1968, Sorensen’s Resort is a small, private resort on the eastern edge of Hope Valley, near Lake Tahoe, some 200 miles east of San Francisco (gMap Google Maps), and 20 miles south of Lake Tahoe.
Comment: I’ve never stayed there, nor do I have any connection to the place.
(Hadn’t heard that about Turner and RFK before, NP. What a shame).
Theodore “Ted” Sorensen traveled extensively with then-Sen. John F. Kennedy for several years before the 1960 Presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for JFK’s ultimately successful bid for the White House. Sorensen said that in at least three states, local Democratic Party officials told the candidate and him with a perverse kind of pride that theirs was the most corrupt state in the country.
The Bay Runway at JFK Airport was a backup landing strip for the Space Shuttle.
The Reef Runway, 8R/26L, at Honolulu International Airport was also a designated alternate landing site for the Shuttle. Completed in 1977, it was the world’s first major runway constructed entirely offshore. Entire airports built offshore since then include Osaka-Kansai, Seoul-Incheon, and Hong Kong-Chek Lap Kok.
In 1977, Walter Mondale became the first Vice President of the United States to have an office in the West Wing of the White House. His predecessors had offices in the Old Executive Office Building and the U.S. Capitol, or in private homes.
In 1948, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota was elected to the US Senate for the first time. One of his campaign workers was then 20-year-old Walter Mondale. In 1964, Humphrey resigned his Senate seat after being elected Vice-President of the United States. Mondale, who was then the Minnesota Attorney General, was appointed by the Minnesota governor to fill the vacancy left by Humphrey’s resignation. Mondale held the Senate seat until 1977, when he resigned after being elected Vice-President of the United States.
The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis was the next to last inflatable-dome stadium in North America. Only the Carrier Dome at Syracuse University still stands. The Pontiac Silverdome near Detroit and the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis have been demolished, and BC Place in Vancouver was re-roofed.
While various existing ships were converted to carrying aircraft during and immediately after World War I, the first The first purpose-designed aircraft carrier to be commissioned was the IJN Hōshō by Japan in 1922, followed by the HMS Hermes by Britain in early 1924. Hōshō survived WWII and was scrapped in 1946; Hermes was sunk by japanese dive bombers in April 1942.
The first US Navy aircraft carrier was the USS Langley (CV-1), converted in 1920 from the collier USS Jupiter (AC-3) and renamed for Smithsonian Institution head and aviation experimenter Samuel P. Langley. It too was sunk by Japanese bombers in 1942, when serving as a seaplane tender off Java.
Eugene Burton Ely was an aviation pioneer credited with the first shipboard aircraft take off and landing. It happened on 18 January 1911. Ely landed on the USS Pennsylvania, an armored cruiser re-purposed into an early version of the aircraft carrier.
This milestone happened in San Francisco Bay.
The San Francisco Bay drains water from approximately 40 percent of California. Major rivers which flow into the bay include the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Napa, Petaluma, and Guadalupe. The bay is connected to the Pacific Ocean via the Golden Gate strait.
The Guadalupe River of California flows from the Santa Cruz Mountains to San Francisco Bay at the Alviso Slough. The river marks the eastern boundary of the City of Santa Clara and the western boundary of Alviso. The main river is 14 miles long, but when its source creeks are considered it is much longer.
The Guadalupe River is the southernmost major U.S. river with a Chinook salmon run.
The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Roman Catholic church and shrine in the north of Mexico City, was built near the hill of Tepeyac where the Virgin Mary is believed to have appeared (under the title of Our Lady of Guadalupe) to Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, an indigenous Chichimeca. One of the most important pilgrimage sites of Catholicism, the basilica is visited by several million people every year.
Pope Francis, originally from Argentina, is the only supreme pontiff and leader of the Roman Catholic faith known to have been born south of the Equator. He is also the first Pope to come from the Jesuit order.