There have been four warships named USS Colorado to serve in the U.S. Navy. The current one, a Virginia-class fast attack submarine, was commissioned on March 17 of this year and is now on active duty. She has a crew of 134.
There have been four warships named USS Alaska to serve in the US Navy in honor of the territory acquired by the United States from Russia in 1867 which later became the state of Alaska. Three were commissioned and decommissioned before Alaska became a state in 1959. The latest USS Alaska (SSBN-732), is an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine commissioned in 1986 and is currently in service. An SSBN typically has a crew of 141.
Odd, since the US-Britain Oregon Treaty splitting the territory and establishing the border had been signed in 1846.
The first Alaska governor to take a role in the Cabinet was Walter Hickel, Nixon’s Secretary of the Interior. When asked why Nixon chose him, he joked “When Nixon was asked who he wanted for Interior, he said ‘Any hick’ll do.’”
Alaska’s largest lake, Lake Iliamna, is 1,014 sq mi in size. After the Great Salt Lake, it is the second largest lake in the US that is wholly within the US. Lake Iliamna is roughly the same size as Rhode Island.
The Great Salt Lake of Utah is the largest salt water lake in the Western Hemisphere, the eighth-largest terminal lake in the world, and the 33rd largest lake on Earth. A Terminal Lake is one that has no surface outlet (rivers flowing from it).
The Salton Sea, also a saline endorheic lake, was intermittently dry over the years until a 1905 engineering blunder diverted the Colorado River into it via irrigation canals. Although the problem was fixed in two years, the Salton Sea has remained liquid since. In the 1957 film The Monster That Challenged The World, the flooding incident and an earthquake reanimated ancient giant mollusk eggs and you know the rest.
The Aral Sea was formerly the 4th largest lake in the world until the USSR began diverting the rivers flowing into it for irrigation projects. The lake is now about 10% of its original size.
Back to California… The Salton Sea is the largest lake wholly in California, at some 375 square miles. Its water is 30 percent saltier than the Pacific Ocean.
In 1987, Billy Joel covered the Beatles’s song “Back in the USSR” on his live-in-the-Soviet Union album KOHЦEPT. Paul McCartney, who wrote the song, said in 1997 that Joel’s adoption of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” for his Russian concert tours had contributed to the “jokey” song’s standing as “a bit of an anthem now”. “Back in the USSR” also features features a bridge section based on the Beach Boys’s song “California Girls.”
KOHЦEPT, or Kontsert, was Billy Joel’s second of five live albums after Songs in the Attic of 1981. His last live album, Live at Shea Stadium: The Concert, was from 2011.
The title of Billy Joel’s 1981 live album Songs in the Attic was obviously inspired by V.C. Andrews’s enormously popular first book, published in 1979 Flowers in the Attic.
During his career, Billy Joel has had 33 Top 40 hits in the US, three of which rose to #1 in the charts. Winner of six Grammy Awards, he has sold over 150 million records worldwide. His 1985 compilation album, Greatest Hits Vol. 1 & 2, is one of the best-selling albums in the US.
According to businessinsider.com, the best selling Greatest Hits album is the Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975).
When Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) declares in the Coen Bros. movie The Big Lebowski, “I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man,” he is thrown out of a cab by the enraged, Eagles-loving cabbie.
The Philadelphia Eagles, an American professional football team, began in 1933 as a replacement for the bankrupt Frankford Yellow Jackets, when a group led by Bert Bell secured the rights to an NFL franchise in Philadelphia.
The Yellowjackets is an American fusion jazz group originally founded and headed by Robben Ford.
The Walton family owns the largest family-owned company in America, headquartered in Bentonville AR. The second largest such company is Ford, headquartered in Dearborn MI.
Gerald Ford, while a Congressman, was deeply involved in the abortive 1970 effort to impeach and remove from office Associate Justice William O. Douglas of the U.S. Supreme Court for financial improprieties. Ford famously said at the time, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
The 1970 World Series was won by the Baltimore Orioles, beating Cincinnati four games to one. The Orioles were one of the best teams in history, winning two thirds of their regular season games and easily defeating Minnesota and Cincinnati in the playoffs.
In each of the years 1969, 1970, and 1971 the Baltimore Orioles posted the best record in baseball with 109 wins, 108 wins, and 101 wins. However, in 1971, the Oakland Athletics also had 101 wins, but the Orioles had a better winning percentage because they played fewer games. Baltimore finished with a record of 101-57, while Oakland finished 101-60.
Baltimore won the AL pennant each of those years, but lost in the World Series to the Mets in 1969 and to the Pirates in 1971.