“Music at Kohl Mansion” (https://musicatkohl.org/) is a series of classical music performances at Kohl Mansion in Burlingame CA. Several quartets have played at Kohl, and currently the Music of Remembrance Ensemble is scheduled to perform on Sun 27 Jan. They are a string quartet with clarinet ensemble.
President Barack H. Obama Highway is open. You can drive it in California.
New green signs with reflective white lettering proclaiming President Barack H. Obama Highway have appeared along one stretch of a Los Angeles-area freeway.
Installation of the signs on the 134 Freeway from State Route 2 in Glendale to Interstate 210 in Pasadena was completed this week, more than a year after the presidential tribute was signed into state law in September 2017.
While attending Occidental College in Eagle Rock from 1979-81, before transferring to Columbia University in New York, Obama lived in Pasadena. The stretch of highway named in his honor runs through Eagle Rock, too.
Eagle Rock is a neighborhood of Northeast Los Angeles, California. It was incorporated as a city in 1911, and in 1923 it combined with the City of Los Angeles, due to its need for an adequate water supply and a high school.
The Philadelphia Eagles are the biggest underdogs, 6 points (to Da Bears of Chicago) in this weekend’s games, the Wild Card Weekend, the first weekend of this season’s NFL playoffs.
The Los Angeles Rams are among the favorites to win the Super Bowl.
Piers Gaveston was the favourite of Edward, Prince of Wales, later Edward II. Their close relationship and Gaveston’s access to royal patronage created major rifts with the established nobility. There were also rumours that the two were lovers, which Kit Marlowe later included in his play, Edward II.
Gaveston was exiled from England on three separate occasions, but returned each time. When he returned the third time, it triggered a baronial revolt. Gaveston was captured and promised safe conduct, but the Earl of Warwick found where he was, captured him, and had him executed by a couple of Welshman by the side of a road in Yorkshire. They abandoned his body where he was killed.
Edward later had the remains buried at a Dominican friary attached to his favourite residence, King’s Langley. Nothing now remains of the residence nor the friary, and the tomb has been lost.
British actor Sir Patrick Stewart hails from Mirfield, Yorkshire, England. As a tip of the hat to him, the special effects team of the remastered Star Trek: The Original Series created the starship Yorkshire.
York is the largest city in Yorkshire, and for much of English history was the second largest city in England, after London.
King George V (former Duke of York) commented that the history of York was the history of England .
Actor Dick York originated the role of Darrin Stephens, “mortal” husband to the witch Samantha Stephens (played by Elizabeth Montgomery), on the 1960s television sitcom Bewitched.
York had suffered a serious back injury during production of the film They Came To Cordura several years earlier. The ongoing effects of the injury caused York to become progressively more disabled during the run of Bewitched, often forcing the show’s writers to depict Darrin reclining (or not appearing at all in some episodes).
Finally, York collapsed on set during production of a fifth-season episode, and he decided that he needed to leave the show. Before production began on the sixth season of the show, the role of Darrin was recast, and Dick Sargent portrayed the character for the final three seasons.
Elizabeth Montgomery was 62 years old when she died in 1995 of cancer of the colon which had metastasized to her liver. Her summer home in Patterson, Putnam County, NY was sold to New York State and became Wonder Lake State Park. It contains over eight miles of walking trails on more than 1000 acres of land.
Wonder Lake State Park — no mention of Elizabeth Montgomery on that page
gMap, 65 mi N of Manhattan: https://goo.gl/dsDtA7
A bronze statue of Elizabeth Montgomery wearing a witch’s hat and riding a broom is one of the most popular photo sites in the witch-trial city of Salem, Massachusetts, despite the lack of any other connection to “Bewitched”, and over the objections of history-minded purists. In fact, most of the defendants came from Salem Village, now the city of Danvers, not from Salem Town, now the city.
Quincy, Massachusetts boasts the first Dunkin Donuts on Hancock Street and the first Howard Johnson’s on Newport Ave.
At the 1965 Newport Folk Music Festival, when Bob Dylan and his band performed “Phantom Engineer”, an early version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” on electric (nto acoustical) guitars, some of the crowded booed them, feeling that folk music should not be played like rock music. Dylan was said to have “electrified one half of his audience, and electrocuted the other”.
Despite the complaints, folk rock and other sub-genres of this now classic music style of rock, continue to this day.
Phantom pain sensations are described as perceptions that an individual experiences relating to a limb or an organ that is not physically part of the body. Sensations are recorded most frequently following the amputation of an arm or a leg, but may also occur following the removal of a breast, teeth, or an internal organ.
Seattle Seahawks defensive back Shaquem Griffin, who had his birth-deformed left hand amputated in childhood, is the first NFL player with only one hand to be drafted. He and his twin brother Shaquille, a Seahawks linebacker, both played at the University of Central Florida, winning a (okay, disputed 
) national championship there in 2017. Go Knights! Charge on!
The griffin is a legendary creature with the body, tail, and back legs of a lion; the head and wings of an eagle; and sometimes an eagle’s talons as its front feet. In Greek and Roman texts, griffins were associated with gold. Pliny the Elder wrote, “griffins were said to lay eggs in burrows on the grounds and these nests contained gold nuggets.”
The UCF Knights went 12-0 in 2017. It was their first ever undefeated regular season. But in 2015 the UCF Knights had an 0-12 winless season. UCF became the first team in the history of NCAA Division I FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) to improve from a winless regular season to an undefeated regular season in only two years. And the Griffin twins helped make that happen.
Both UCF QB McKenzie Milton, a Heisman candidate, and Alabama QB Tua Tagovailoa, the Heisman runner-up, come from metropolitan Honolulu, Hawaii, and were both mentored by Oregon Ducks / Tennessee Titans QB and fellow Hawaiian Marcus Mariota, a Heisman winner. UCF has just recruited Dillon Gabriel, who played QB at the same high school (Mililani) as Milton.
To support Milton after his (possibly career-ending) knee injury in the USF game at Tampa, at the AAC title game against Memphis Orlando fans wore leis in the team’s black and gold colors at the Bounce House, aka Spectrum Stadium. The facility got its nicknames because use of substandard bolts give it enough structural flexibility to move noticeably during rhythmic jumping by fans.
In Baldwyn Mississippi, some 200 mi NE of Jackson MS (gMap Google Maps) and 100 mi SE of Memphis TN (gMap Google Maps), in April 2017 a wet tree was struck by a lightning bolt burned from the inside and left its exterior trunk undamaged for some time.
NDTV.com article and pictures — interesting: Tree Burns From Inside After Lightning Strikes. See Stunning Photo
The American rock group Grand Funk Railroad’s name was an adaptation of that of the Grand Trunk Railroad, which operated in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario and in the American states of Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont until 1923.
Charles Melville Hays (1856-1912) was the president of the Grand Trunk Railway. In April 1912 he was in London conducting business. He was eager to return home and accepted the invitation of J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, to join him on his fantastic new ship, the RMS Titanic.
Hays’ body was recovered in the north Atlantic. He is buried at Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal.