Sax, Minnesota, some 175 miles north of Minneapolis (gMap, Google Maps), was named for Solomon Saxe, an original owner of the town site. The nearby Sax–Zim Bog area is home to one of the world’s best birdwatching places and the site of the annual Sax–Zim Winter Birding Festival held in February. The bog was named for the two nearby communities of Sax and Zim.
Saxe-Weimar was one of the Saxon duchies held by the Ernestine branch of the Wettin dynasty in present-day Thuringia. It plays a major role in the “Ring of Fire” series of Science Fiction novels by Eric Flint, in which a small W. Virginia town is transported there in 1631.
The smoot is a nonstandard, humorous unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot, a fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 lay down repeatedly on the Harvard Bridge (between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts) so that his fraternity brothers could use his height to measure the length of the bridge. One smoot iis equal to Oliver’s height of 5 feet 7 inches.
The first fraternal organization in the United States is believed to be the Phi Beta Kappa Society. It was founded on December 5, 1776 at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. This also established the precedent for naming American college societies after the Greek-letter initials of a secret Greek motto.
The group consisted of students who frequented the Raleigh Tavern as a common meeting area off the college campus.
College of William and Mary professional football players and coaches include Lou Creekmur of the NFL, and Mike “Pinball” Clemons and Ralph Sazio of the CFL. Coach Marv Levy did not attend W&M, but he coached William & Mary for five years (1964–68). He earned two Southern Conference Coach of the Year awards and one SoCon title (1966). His team’s 1967 27–16 win over Navy is considered by the NCAA to be one of the Top 10 greatest college football upsets in history
By the end of 1932, there were approximately 150 companies manufacturing pinball machines, most of them in Chicago, Illinois. Chicago has been the center of pinball manufacturing ever since. Competition among the companies was strong, and by 1934 there were only 14 companies remaining.
“Pinball Wizard” is a song written by Pete Townshend and performed by The Who for the Rock Opera “Tommy”. It charted at #19 in the US and #4 in the UK.
Elton John initially refused to play “Pinball Wizard” in The Who’s film version of Tommy but was eventually persuaded by filmmaker Ken Russell. Pete Townshend described the recording session for the cover in his Who I Am autobiography: “Elton arrived at the Battersea studio in a Phantom 5 limousine, similar to the one used by the Queen; I hadn’t seen one in the rock world since Andrew Oldham’s in 1967. It was a revelation to observe how quickly and efficiently Elton and his band worked, nailing a driving track with solos, lead and backing vocals in less than four hours.”
The Who was formed in 1964 and over the next 3 years had 4 singles that reached the Top 10. Their first tour in the United States began in New York City and culminated with a performance at the Monterey Pop Festival. Along the way, however, the band played wherever they could find a gig, including as a back-up band to The Buckinghams at Shawnee Mission South High School in suburban Kansas City, Kansas.
In 1976, the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada nominated Joe Clark, a young and relatively unknown MP from Alberta, as their party leader, on the fourth ballot of their convention.
The next day the Toronto Star ran the headline “Joe Who?” and it stuck as his nickname, even after he became Prime Minister in a short-lived minority gouvernement three years later.
The Toronto Star is a Canadian broadsheet daily newspaper. Based on 2015 statistics, it is Canada’s highest-circulation newspaper on overall weekly circulation; while it is a close second to The Globe and Mail in daily circulation on weekdays, it overtakes the Globe in overall weekly circulation with both its Saturday and Sunday editions, especially as the Globe and Mail doesn’t publish a Sunday edition.
The flag of Toronto, Canada was designed by a 21-year-old college student. It was adopted as the official flag of the city in 1974 and slightly altered in 1999.
NAVA is the North American Vexillological Association, an organization of flag scholars and enthusiasts, “promoting excellence in vexillology and camaraderie among those interested in flags since 1967”. Their booklet “Good Flag, Bad Flag” summarizes basic principles of flag design, with numerous examples, such as the flag of New Mexico, “Red and yellow recall the state’s Spanish heritage, while the sun symbol comes from the Zia Indians. This design was voted the best U.S. state flag by NAVA members” compared to the flag of Virginia, “Imagine, 18 different colors in the official flag specifications! Not only are they difficult to distinguish, but having so many colors drives up the manufacturing cost.”
In vexillology, a guidon is a small flag that a military unit flies, and a jack is a flag flown from a short jackstaff at the bow of a ship, and a vexilloid is a flag-like object that is used in a similar symbolic manner as a flag, but that differs from a conventional flag in some way.
“Vexillology” is a word of very recent invention, appearing just in the 1950s. It was invented sometime around 1957 by Whitney Smith, the first self-styled vexillologist.
Eli Whitney (1765 - 1825) is best known as the inventor of the cotton gin. Whitney invented the gin in 1793 and applied for a patent the next year, but the patent wasn’t validated until 1807. In the meantime, other entrepreneurs copied his design; as a result, Whitney and his partner were forced to spend most of their profits on patent infringement lawsuits.
Whitney later made money by procuring government contracts for the manufacture and sale of muskets to the United States War Department.
The north-south running Sierra Nevada 250-mile long mountain range lies between the large California Central Valley depression on the west, and the Basin and Range Province on the east. The Sierra Nevadas are home to the largest trees in the world, the sequoias, and its peaks rise to between 11,000 and 14,000 feet above sea level. Mount Whitney, at 14,494’, is the highest in the USA’s lower 48 states. US highway 395 runs north-south along the eastern side of the Sierras and has some beautiful, rugged scenery during the days, and crysstal-clear, often cloudless star-packed** skies during the nights.
A drainage basin is any area of land where precipitation collects and drains off into a common outlet, such as into a river, bay, or other body of water. In North America, the term watershed is commonly used to mean a drainage basin, though in other English-speaking countries, it is used only in its original sense, that of a drainage divide.
The USS America, a Kitty Hawk-class supercarrier, is the largest warship ever to be purposefully sunk in peacetime. She was scuttled, after testing in simulated underwater attacks, about 250 miles southeast of Cape Hatteras, N.C. in May 2005, despite the protests of former crewmembers who wished to see her preserved as a memorial or museum ship.
One famous hawk is an urban red-tailed hawk, “Pale Male”, recognizable because his head plumage is unusually light. He became the subject of a non-fiction book, Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park, and was the first known red-tail in decades to successfully nest and raise young in Manhattan, in the 1990s. Since then, over a dozen nesting pairs of red-tailed hawks have taken up residence in New York City parks, green spaces and buildings near them. As of November 14 this year, Pale Male, age 28, was hunting in Central Park: http://palemale.com/