The playground game “Red Rover” has been the subject of lawsuits and bans at schools in the US and Canada due to injuries to children.
(BTW this is the 8th post using “rover”)
The Apollo space missions’ lunar rover flew on three missions: Apollos 15, 16 and 17. Nicknamed the Moon Buggy, its tires were 32" x 9" with titanium chevron treads. It was 4-wheel drive, with each wheel having its own motor. Fully loaded, the Moon Buggy had 14" of ground clearance.
The Moon Buggy’s speed was restricted to 8 MPH, but Gene Cernan worked his up to 11.2 MPH, giving him the unofficial land speed record on the moon.
ETA: This is now the ninth post for “rover”, over.
The Blackburn Rovers are an English professional football (soccer) club, based in Blackburn, Lancashire. The Rovers currently compete in the Championship, the second tier of the English football league system, though they have competed in the top-tier Premier League in the past, and were the Premier League champions in 1995.
(does The Count voice Ten, ten rovers! Ahh ahh ahh ahhh!)
Ninja’ed!
(Comment – I drive a Jeep, so I’ll post “rover” #11 about…)
Land Rover as a company has existed since 1978. Before that, Land Rover was a product line within Rover Company. The first Land Rover, nicknamed later as the Series I, debuted in production in 1948 and continued until 1957. It was followed by the Series II which was in production from 1958 to 1961.
Between 1948 and 1961, a total of fourteen seasons inclusive, the New York Yankees earned a spot in the World Series eleven times. Only in 1948, 1954 and 1959 did they fail to do so.
They also made it in 1962, 1963, and 1964, actually.
In the 1948 World Series, the Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Braves, 4-2 games. It their first World Series win in 28 years. And as of 2018, this would be the Cleveland Indians’ most recent World Series championship. The Yankees appeared in 1949 and beat the (boo!) Dodgers, 4-1. The Yankees had appeared in 1947 and also beat the (boo!) Dodgers, 4-3. 1947 would start an amazing run of 18 straight years (through 1964) when the Yankees appeared in every World Series except for three — the three that Rick mentioned.
The Atlanta Braves franchise is the oldest continuous professional baseball franchise in the world. It originated as the Boston Red Stockings in 1871, and made the change to the Braves in 1912. The franchise played baseball in Boston until the of the 1952 season, when it moved to Milwaukee. It remained in Milwaukee from 1953 through 1966, when the franchise moved to Atlanta, where it remains today.
It is not known, exactly, when the tomahawk chop was invented. However, it is claimed by a former Florida State University president that it was invented by the Florida State University Marching Chiefs in the 1980s to complement their war chants. The tomahawk chop was adopted by fans of the Atlanta Braves in 1991 following the signing of former FSU cornerback Deion Sanders.
That damned tomahawk chop — it’s all Neon Deion’s fault!
“Neon light” is a general term for lighting devices consisting of electrified glass tubes filled with one or more gases, which give off light when ionzed by electricity.
The noble gas neon is frequently used in these lights – a true neon light gives off an orangish light. Other colors can be produced with other gases or chemicals, including hydrogen (red), helium (yellow), carbon dioxide (white), and mercury (blue).
Mercury is the god of both merchants and thieves.
The Mercury Cougar was manufactured in 8 generations, from 1967 to 1997 and from 1999 to 2002. Representative pictures are included here:
◆ 1967-1970 — 1st generation; the original classic
◆ 1971-1973 — 2nd gen; For its first two generations, the Cougar was derived from the Ford Mustang; initially developed as a pony car, it replaced the Cyclone muscle car in the Mercury model line.
◆ 1974-1976 — 3rd gen
◆ 1977–1979 — 4th gen; For its third and fourth generations, the Cougar adopted the chassis of the Ford Torino. The Cougar XR7 becomes the counterpart of the Ford Thunderbird.
◆ 1980–1982 — 5th gen
◆ 1983–1988 — 6th gen
◆ 1989–1997 — 7th gen; After 1997, the Cougar and Thunderbird were discontinued.
◆ 1999–2002 — 8th gen; the Cougar returned for 1999 as a sports compact hatchback. Sharing a chassis with the Ford Contour, the model line began development as a third generation of the Ford Probe.
The cougar is the largest member of the cat family native to North America. The cougar is also known by other names including catamount, mountain lion, panther, and puma.
Those animals cannot be mentioned without bringing up Tommy Smothers’ horror at learning there are pumas in the crevasses. He was referring to the Kingston Trio’s song “South Coast”:
South Coast, the wild coast, is lonely
You may win at the game at Jolon
But the lion still rules the barranca, and a man there is always alone.
The origin of the word cougar as a slang term for an older woman/younger man relationship is debated, but it is thought to have originated in Western Canada and first appeared in print on the Canadian dating website Cougardate.com. It has also been stated to have “originated in Vancouver, British Columbia, as a put-down for older women who would go to bars and go home with whoever was left at the end of the night”.
Per Wiki, Red Rover was a captured 650-ton Confederate steamer during the American Civil War. After refit, she became the U.S. Navy’s first hospital ship, serving the Mississippi Squadron until the end of the war. USS Red Rover’s medical complement included nurses from the Catholic order Sisters of the Holy Cross, the first female nurses to serve aboard a Navy ship.
ETA: Oops, new page! The nurses were not, as best we know, referred to as “cougars.”
Poet Walt Whitman served as a nurse in US Army hospitals in Washington during the Civil War. He would write of this experience in “The Great Army of the Sick”, published in a New York newspaper in 1863 and, 12 years later, in a book called Memoranda During the War.
Though Walt Whitman’s now classic “Leaves of Grass” was often labeled pornographic or obscene when it was first published, only one critic remarked on its author’s presumed sexual activity: in a November 1855 review, Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested Whitman was guilty of “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians”.
Walt Whitman once wrote his own (anonymous) review of Leaves of Grass. “No sniveller, or tea-drinking poet, no puny clawback or prude, is Walt Whitman,” he wrote in part. “He will bring poems fit to fill the days and nights—fit for men and women with the attributes of throbbing blood and flesh.”
Who but Kinky Friedman could write and sing “The Ballad of Charles Whitman”?
He was sitting up there for more than an hour
Way up there on the Texas tower
Shooting from the twenty-seventh floor
He didn’t choke or slash or slit them
Not our Charles Joseph Whitman
He won’t be an architect no more
Got up that morning, calm and cool
He picked up his guns and went to school
All the while he smiled so sweetly
And it blew their minds completely
They’d never seen an Eagle Scout so cruel