On June 30, 1956, a United and a Trans World airliner collided above the Grand Canyon, killing all 128 people aboard both planes. At the time it was the worst civil aviation disaster in history, and led to the implementation of modern air traffic control as we currently understand it.
United Airlines’ origins trace to the 1929 creation of United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, formed by a merger of Boeing, its in-house airline Boeing Air Transport and several other airlines, enginemaker Pratt & Whitney, propeller maker Hamilton Aero, Sikorsky, Chance Vought, Stearman, and a number of smaller companies, forming a completely vertically integrated airline industry company. In 1934, federal antitrust regulators split it into United Aircraft (now United Technologies, about to merge with Raytheon), Boeing Aircraft, and United Airlines.
Author Thomas Pynchon worked as a technical writer at Boeing while he was writing his first novel V. His time there influenced his depiction of Yoyodyne in that book and others.
The 1984 film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension used the name Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems for a defense contractor whose corporate offices feature the sign, “The future begins tomorrow”. Yoyodyne is a front for a group of red Lectroid aliens, all with the first name John, that landed in New Jersey in 1938, using the panic created by Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio play as cover. The Grovers Mill, NJ firm secretly built a spacecraft to return the Red Lectroids to the Eighth Dimension, under the disguise of making the US Air Force’s new Truncheon bomber.
In Canada, the federal Parliament has exclusive legislative jurisdiction over aliens.
Yesterday, July 2nd, was World UFO Day, celebrated annually on the anniversary of the Roswell incident, when it is believed by some that a flying saucer piloted by aliens crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.
The states with the most UFO sightings are:
Washington
Montana
Vermont
Alaska
Maine
The states with the least:
Texas
Louisiana
Georgia
Mississippi
Alabama
The medieval counts of Maine, the French province, included Robert Curthose (a nickname meaning short stockings), Banzleibs, Rorgon, Gauzbert, and Herbert I Wakedog (from French Eveille-chien), who obtained his nickname for having to constantly resist the Angevin intruders on his southern border.
Features typically associated with French Provincial furniture include cabriole legs, and simple scalloped carving. Dining chairs often have a wheat pattern carving reflecting the country surroundings of the maker. The ladder back chair with a woven rush seat is the typical French Provincial dining chair. Finishes vary though common to all colors is the accumulation of polish or grime in the carving over time resulting in an aged patina and emphasis on the carving regardless of whether the furniture is painted or stained.
Francesco “Frank” Lentini was an Italian-American sideshow performer who toured with numerous circuses. Lentini was born with a parasitic twin. The twin was attached to his body at the base of his spine and consisted of a pelvis bone, a rudimentary set of male genitalia, and a full-sized leg extending from the right side of his hip, with a small foot protruding from its knee. Lentini’s photo is featured on the back cover of rock band Alice in Chains’ self-titled 1995 album.
Here’s the album’s back cover: http://www.feelnumb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/AllCDCovers_alice_in_chains_alice_in_chains_2001_retail_cd-back.jpg
In play:
One day before the band Alice in Chains was due to record at the Music Bank studio in Seattle, Washington in 1988, police shut down the studio during the biggest cannabis raid in the history of the state
The Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula (“St. Peter in chains”) is the parish church of the Tower of London. It is situated within the Tower’s Inner Ward and dates from 1520. It is a Royal Peculiar. The name refers to St. Peter’s imprisonment under Herod Agrippa in Jerusalem. The Chapel is probably best known as the burial place of some of the most famous prisoners executed at the Tower, including Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey.
Earl Grey tea is one of the most recognized flavored teas in the world. This tea is a black tea base flavored with oil from the rind of bergamot orange, a hybrid citrus fruit. Legend has it that a Chinese mandarin tea master blended the first Earl Grey tea as a gift for Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl of Grey and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1830 to 1834. The tea master supposedly used bergamot as a flavoring to offset the lime flavor in the well water on Earl Grey’s estate.
The musical Fidler Afn Dakh (פידלער אויפן דאך) premiered in 2018 at the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene’s seasonal mainstage production under the direction of Joel Grey. It is a Yiddish adaptation of the musical Fiddler on the Roof and reflects a connection to collection of Yiddish short story the original ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ was based on – Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem.
As members of the family Ocypodidae, fiddler crabs are most closely related to the ghost crabs of the genus Ocypode. This entire group is composed of small crabs – the largest being slightly over two inches across. Fiddler crabs are found along sea beaches and brackish inter-tidal mud flats, lagoons and swamps. Fiddler crabs are most well known for their sexually dimorphic claws; the males’ major claw is much larger than the minor claw while the females’ claws are both the same size.
“Crabs,” the lice that infest pubic hair, are not crabs, they’re insects. They are capable of living in your eyelashes.
Ew. I’m not going to conjecture how those little buggers might get into one’s eyelashes.
In play: The eyelash curler was patented April 7, 1931 and the images drawn in the patent application look very much the same as the eyelash curlers seen on the market today.
Frieda was one of the secondary characters in Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts. Frieda was tremendously proud of her “naturally curly hair,” which she tried to work into conversations as often as possible.
The character was based on a real person, Frieda Rich, a friend of Schulz’s whom he met while he was in art school.
Charles, Prince of Wales, 70, has now waited longer than anyone in British history to take the throne (since 1952). His mother, Queen Elizabeth II, is now 93.
Adlai Stevenson II, who was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate in both 1952 and 1956, is one of three men who were nominees of their party in consecutive presidential elections and lost both times in the general election. The other two were Thomas Dewey (Republican candidate in 1944 and 1948), and William Jennings Bryan (Democratic candidate in 1896 and 1900). Bryan was also the unsuccessful Democratic candidate in the 1908 election.