According to Janet Sinclair Gray, author of Race and Time, the nursery rhyme “Three Little Kittens” may have origins in the British folk tradition, but the poem as known today is a sophisticated production far removed from such origins. Gray supports her assertion by pointing out that the cats are not the barnyard felines of folk material but bourgeois domestic cats who eat pie and wear mittens. Gray observes that the mother cat’s disciplinary measures and the kittens’ need to report their movements to her are also indicators of a bourgeois status.
Donna Shalala, who yesterday won a U.S. House of Representatives seat in Florida at age 77, was good friends with the late Janet Reno, also a Floridian, when both served in the Bill Clinton Cabinet. Shalala was Secretary of Health and Human Services, while Reno was Attorney General.
Floridian anti-gay activist Anita Bryant started the Save Our Children campaign, the beginning of an organized opposition to gay rights that spread across United States. She made the following statements during the campaign: “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children” and “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters.”
In the 11th century, a priest named Bernard established a pair of travelers’ hospices near two mountain passes in the western Alps. Bernard was later canonized, and the two passes are now named for him (Great St. Bernard and Little St. Bernard), as is the dog breed which was developed to assist in mountain rescues in the region.
According to the Mother Nature Network, the Saint Bernard is the world’s 7th largest breed of dogs. The largest breed, in terms of a combination of height and weight, is the Great Dane. The world record holder for tallest dog was a Great Dane named Zeus who stood 44 inches tall.
5731 Zeus is an Apollo asteroid and near-Earth object discovered on November 4, 1988. Apollo asteroids are a group of near-Earth asteroids named after 1862 Apollo, discovered by German astronomer Karl Reinmuth in the 1930s. They are Earth crossing asteroids that have an orbital semi-major axis greater than that of the Earth but perihelion distances less than the Earth’s aphelion distance. As of November 2016, the number of known Apollo asteroids has reached a total of 8,180 members.
Corey Stoll, who plays Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, is a graduate of Oberlin College.
Buzz Aldrin was the first astronaut with a doctoral degree. He has a Sc.D doctorate.
Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr., whose mother’s birth name was Marion Moon(and how appropriately cool is that?) got his nickname (which became his legal first name in 1988) as a result of his sister Fay’s mispronouncing “brother” as “buzzer”, which was then shortened to “Buzz”.
The three members of the Apollo 11 spaceflight were Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. While Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon in the Lunar Module, Collins continued orbiting the moon in the Command Module. Apollo 11 was the second spaceflight for Collins; his first was on Gemini 10 in 1966 with John Young.
Neil Young and Daryl Hannah have been in a relationship since 2014. Young and Hannah were reported to have wed on August 25, 2018, and Young confirmed his marriage to Hannah in a video released on October 31, 2018.
Daryl Hannah is missing the tip of her left index finger, having apparently lost it in a childhood accident. Hannah typically wears a prosthetic tip on that finger when acting.
John F. Kennedy Jr. and American actress Daryl Hannah dated for awhile. Kennedy’s mother, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was said to have considered Hannah an unsuitable potential wife for JFK Jr.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis worked as an editor for Viking Press, starting in the 1970s, and moved to Doubleday where she stayed until the 1990s. Among the books she edited are Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon History of the Universe, the English translation of the three volumes of Naghib Mahfuz’s Cairo Trilogy, and autobiographies of ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, singer-songwriter Carly Simon, and fashion icon Diana Vreeland.
General Abner Doubleday (1819-1893) of the Union Army was a 2-star General, or what today would be a Major General. He fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter, the opening battle of the Civil War, and had a pivotal role in the early fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg. After the war, Doubleday was living in San Francisco in 1870 when he applied for a patent to build the first railed street car service in the United States.
This is today’s San Francisco Cable Cars.
This same Abner Doubleday also invented the game of baseball. This invention was a declaration made by a commission by Abraham Mills. Doubleday himself never claimed to have created the game.
Alexander Cartwright, often credited with writing the first set of rules for baseball as a member of New York City’s Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, is in the Hall of Fame while Doubleday, whose candidacy is spurious, is not, although the Hall itself is in his hometown (which he shared with James Fenimore Cooper). The first clearly documented match between two baseball clubs under these rules took place on June 19, 1846, at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. In this match, the Knickerbockers lost to the “New York nine” (probably the parent Gotham Club) by a score of 23 to 1.
The Elysian Fields, also called Elysium, is the final resting place of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous in Greek mythology and religion. The fields were, according to Homer, located on the western edge of the Earth by the stream of Okeanos.
Two Paris landmarks are named for the Elysian Fields. One is the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, known for its theatres, cafés, and luxury shops, for the annual Bastille Day military parade, and as the finish of the Tour de France cycle race. The other is the Élysée Palace, the official residence of the President of France, two blocks away from the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
Emmanuel Macron is current President of France, serving since May 14, 2017. Macron is the 25th French President. The first President of France is considered to be Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (later known as Napoleon III), who was elected in 1848.
Napoleon III, the last Emperor of France, has the humiliating distinction of being one of the few modern heads of state to be captured in battle, in his case at the Battle of Sedan during the Franco-Prussian War in September 1870.