FDR’s Presidential Library is in Hyde Park NY, which id FDR’s birthplace, lifelong home, and burial place.
FDR’s home in Hyde Park never legally belonged to him; his father had willed it to his wife Sara and prior to her death in 1941, Franklin had asked his mother to deed the estate to the federal government. He is buried in his mother’s rose garden, and during tours of the house, guides point out that Sara’s bedroom is in between Franklin and Eleanor’s bedrooms.
At FDR’s grave, nobody lies between Franklin’s and Eleanor’s graves. They rest side by side.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s beloved Scottish Terrier Fala is buried nearby in the same garden. The dog outlived the President by seven years.
President Clinton acquired Buddy, a chocolate-colored Labrador Retriever as a three-month-old puppy from Caroline County, Maryland in December 1997. He named him after his late great-uncle, Henry Oren “Buddy” Grisham, who had died the previous June and whom Clinton often cited as a major influence on his life.
Buddy was killed by a car while “playfully chasing a contractor” who had left the Clinton home in Chappaqua, New York, on January 2, 2002. The Clintons were not home at the time of the accident; their home was being watched by Secret Service agents. The agents rushed Buddy to an animal hospital where he was pronounced dead.
In 2005, Clinton acquired another chocolate Lab whom he named “Seamus”.
According to Gun Dog magazine, “the Chesapeake Bay Retriever is the only retriever breed that consistently produces dual champions.” According to AKC rules, “Any dog that has been awarded the title of Champion of Record (Ch.) may be designated as a ‘Dual Champion,’ after it has also been awarded the title of Field Champion (FC) or Herding Champion (HC).”
Chesapeake is the seventh oldest surviving English place-name in the U.S., first applied as “Chesepiook” by explorers heading north from the Roanoke Colony into a Chesapeake tributary in 1585 or 1586. The word Chesepiooc is an Algonquian word referring to a village “at a big river”.
The Roanoke Colony, established in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh, was established ion Roanoke Island in North Carolina. It known as the Lost Colony because all the people had disappeared by 1587 when a second expedition arrived. For many years it was widely accepted that the colonists were massacred by local tribes, but no bodies were ever discovered, nor any other archaeological evidence. The most prevalent hypothesis now is that environmental circumstances forced the colonists to take shelter with local tribes, but that is mostly based on oral histories and also lacks conclusive evidence. Some artifacts were discovered in 1998 on Hatteras Island where the Croatan tribe was based, but researchers could not definitively say these were from the Roanoke colonists.
The city of Roanoke, Virginia, was home to the corporate headquarters of the Norfolk and Western Railway until its merger with the Southern Railway in 1982. The merged companies were renamed the Norfolk Southern Railway, and its headquarters were established in Norfolk, Virginia.
A Norfolk jacket is a loose, belted, single-breasted jacket with box pleats on the back and front, with a belt or half-belt. It was originally designed as a shooting coat that did not bind when the elbow was raised to fire. It was named either after the Duke of Norfolk or after the county of Norfolk and was made fashionable after the 1860s in the sporting circle of Queen Victoria’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII). The style was long popular for boys’ jackets and suits, and is still used in some military and police uniforms.
Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, annoyed his mother Queen Victoria by siding with Denmark on the Schleswig-Holstein Question (Victoria was pro-German) and, later, making an effort to meet Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian general and nationalist who contributed greatly to Italian unification.
According to factRetriever.com, in Denmark there are twice as many bicycles as there are cars.
Top 10 Hell lists Denmark as #2 in the list of countries with most bicycles per capita. The Netherlands is the #1 country on this list. Germany, Sweden, and Norway round out the top 5.
Rosencrantz (“rosary”) and Gyldenstjerne/Gyllenstierna (“golden star”) were names of Danish noble families of the 16th century; records of the Danish royal coronation of 1596 show that one tenth of the aristocrats participating bore one or the other name. James Voelkel suggests that the characters were named after Frederik Rosenkrantz and Knud Gyldenstierne, cousins of Tycho Brahe who had visited England in 1592.
The lunar crater Tycho is named in honor of Tycho Brahe, as is the crater Tycho Brahe on Mars and the minor planet 1677 Tycho Brahe in the asteroid belt. The bright supernova, SN 1572, is known as Tycho’s Nova and the Tycho Brahe Planetarium in Copenhagen is named after him.
According to Dr. Mark Reid, a senior astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, if a supernova were to go off within about 30 light-years of us, it would lead to major effects on the Earth, possibly including mass extinctions.
X-rays and more energetic gamma-rays from the supernova could destroy the ozone layer that protects us from solar ultraviolet rays. It also could ionize nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, leading to the formation of large amounts of smog-like nitrous oxide in the atmosphere.
Only three Milky Way naked-eye supernova events have been observed during the last thousand years. Many have been seen through telescopes, in other galaxies. The most recent directly observed supernova in the Milky Way was Kepler’s Supernova in 1604.
It was about 20,000 light years away. Astronomer Johannes Kepler lived from 1571 to 1630.
One well known star that will probably explode as a supernova is the supergiant Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion, now near the end of its lifetime. On average, because of its variable brightness, it is the 9th brightest star in the night sky, in spite of its being 430+ light years away. Someday soon (astronomically speaking, this could mean a million years from now) it will run out of fuel, collapse under its own weight, and then rebound in a spectacular supernova explosion. When this happens, Betelgeuse will brighten enormously for a few weeks or months, perhaps as bright as the full moon and visible in broad daylight.
Orion is most visible in the evening sky from January to March. In the Southern Hemisphere’s summer months, when Orion is normally visible in the night sky, the constellation is actually not visible in Antarctica because the sun does not set at that time of year south of the Antarctic Circle.
Orion is very useful as an aid to locating other stars. By extending the line of the Belt southeastward, Sirius can be found; and northwestward, is Aldebaran. A line eastward across the two shoulders indicates the direction of Procyon. A line from Rigel through Betelgeuse points to Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini.
The John Carpenter alien-horror movie The Thing is shown yearly at the start of the winter season at McMurdo Base in Antarctica.