Big Brown, winner of the 2008 Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, was named by his owner, Brooklyn trucking company owner Paul Pompa, Jr., in honor of the United Parcel Service.
UPS uses a routing software called Orion that calculates the best possible route for each truck while favoring right-hand turns. Their studies have shown that left-hand turns add unnecessary time and fuel consumption to the delivery routes. The software analyzes 250 million address points a day and performs 30,000 route optimizations per minute.
The three stars in the Belt of Orion, one of the most noticeable star formations in the night sky, have been known by various names around the world, including The Weighing Beam in Chinese, Freya’s Distaff in ancient Scandinavia, Three-in-a-row in ancient Polynesia and Hawaii, the Three Kings and Three Marys in Latin America. The star Alnitak, located at the eastern end of the Belt, is a triple star system itself.
The longest name for any star in the sky is the Arabic name for zeta tauri, the tip of one of the horns in the constellation Taurus the bull. “Shurnarkabtishashutu”, means “under the southern horn of the bull”.
Taurus was the first sign of the zodiac established among the ancient Mesopotamians, who called it as “The Great Bull of Heaven”, because it was the constellation through which the Sun rose on the vernal equinox at that time. Cults centered around sacred bulls began to form in Assyria, Egypt, and Crete during The Age of Taurus, or “The Age of Earth, Agriculture, and the Bull”.
There is speculation, neither proven nor disproven especially without his cooperation, that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was also the Zodiac Killerand the Tylenol poisoner, neither of whom were ever caught. Enough facts line up to convince CT’ers.
Seven people died over the course of three days at the end of September, 1982 in the Chicago area from cyanide-laced Tylenol pills. Tamper-resistant packaging became the norm in the aftermath.
On September 11, 1982, Chris Evert won her sixth (and final) US Women’s Open tennis title. The next day, Jimmy Connors won his fourth (out of five) US Men’s Open tennis title.
Eight years earlier, Evert and Connors both won Wimbledon titles, and were engaged at the time. By the next Wimbledon tournament, however, the engagement had been called off.
Jimmy Connors’ tennis coaches during his formative years were his mother Gloria and her mother, his grandmother Bertha Thompson. He was well known for his two-handed backhand, which he developed early; when he was 11, Gloria and Bertha tried to make him give up this “childish” stroke but soon realized that it was a strength rather than a weakness.
Jimmy Connors never won the French Open.
The French Open, the only Grand Slam tournament to be contested on a clay court, is played at Roland Garros Stadium, named for the WWI aviator who invented the first means to fire a machine gun through the arc of the propeller. Earlier, he had made the first nonstop flight across the Mediterranean Sea.
The two longest running West End musicals are Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera. Both are based on books originally written in French, and bothwere produced by Cameron MacIntosh.
Chris Evert has the most women’s singles French Open wins with seven.
In professional tennis, the term Grand Slam refers to the achievement of winning all four major championships within a single calendar year in one of the five events: men’s and women’s singles; men’s and women’s doubles, and mixed doubles. The last woman to win a women’s singles Grand Slam was Steffi Graf in 1988. The last man to win a men’s singles Grand Slam was Rod Laver in 1969.
On November 1, 2016 Chicago Cub Addison Russell hit the 19th World Series grand slam home run in the sixth game and also tied an MLB record of 6 RBI by one player in a game on a team facing elimination from the fall classic and became the first player of full or part Filipino ancestry to hit a grand slam in a World Series game. It was also the first World Series grand slam since Paul Konerko of the Chicago White Sox in the 2005 World Series, and the first World Series Grand Slam to be hit in November.
In bridge, a “grand slam” is a successful contract to win all 13 tricks.
In the modern era of golf, a ‘grand slam’ consists of winning all four majors in a calendar year. The majors are the Master’s, the US Open, the PGA Championship, and the British Open. Nobody has won the grand slam, although Tiger Woods won all four major events consecutively within a 365-day period, but his victories were spread over two calendar years (winning three events in 2000 and the Masters in 2001).
The Tasmanian tiger, also called Tasmanian wolf and thylacine, was not a tiger or a wolf, but a marsupial closely related to the Tasmanian devil. Benjamin, the last known Tasmanian tiger, died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936, but hundreds of unconfirmed sightings in Tasmania and in Queensland, Australia, have led to investigations into whether there may still be survivors in the wild.
Garret Hobart was Vice-President during McKinley’s first term. He died of heart disease in 1899 and his place on the ticket the next year was taken by a young Theodore Roosevelt.
Theodore Roosevelt’s accession to the presidency left the vice presidency vacant. He served his first term without a vice president.
The 25th Amendment, which wasn’t adopted until 1967, states in Section 2, “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.”