The salamander is the official state amphibian of South Carolina. (Many thought it was Strom Thurmond, but this was never true.)
The late Joe South wrote Deep Purple’s first hit, “Hush.” as well as Lynn Anderson’s “Rose Garden” and Billy Joe Royal’s “Down in the Boondocks.”
Elijah Wood played a young astronomer in the disaster movie Deep Impact.
Jews traditionally pour an extra glass of wine at the Passover seder, in honor of the prophet Elijah.
(getting back to Elijah Wood)
Elijah Wood is 31 years old. He’s not tall; he stands 5’ 6". His middle name is Jordan.
The Passover meal is held in recognition of the night of the tenth plague in Egypt, in which the Israelite families each slew a lamb and put its blood on the door, thus instructing the angel of death to “pass over” this house.
This occurred in the book of Exodus, the second of the bible’s 66 books (Protestant bible, anyway), and part of the five books of Moses, often called the Pentateuch.
David Plotz created a blog where he read each book of The Old Testament, summarized it and gave a commentary.
The finished blog was later published as Good Book. Damn fine read, too.
(hmm, interesting, thanks Annie)
There are 39 books in the Old Testament, and 26 in the New Testament (again, Protestant bible). The Pentateuch (or Torah for our Jewish brothers and sisters) was for many centuries passed down to each generation orally, as a spoken story; an “oral tradition” if you will. They were not written down until about 1400 B.C.
The 39 O.T. books were written between then and roughly 450 B.C. (when the books of Malachi, 1st and 2nd Chronicles, and Nehemiah were likely written).
The 26 N.T. books were all likely written in the 1st century A.D., between roughly the 40s and the 90s.
These dates are approximates, of course.
The 39 Articles of Faith were the defining principles of the Church of England during the Reformation. Published in 1563, they define the Church of England’s doctrinal differences from both Roman Catholicism and Calvinism.
John Wesley’s adaptation of the Thirty-Nine Articles for the Methodist denomination he founded remains (under the name Articles of Religion) official doctrine for the current United Methodist Church.
Jack Benny celebrated his 39th birthday for 41 consecutive years.
John Lambton, Lord Durham, was nicknamed “Radical Jack” for his advanced liberal views.
President John F. Kennedy’s adroit management of the Cuban Missile Crisis was discussed by political scientist Graham Allison in his book The Essence of Decision.
Cuba was the first Latin country (including Spain and Portugal) to have a cemetery outside of a church, in 1806.
In 1806, on the 8th of January, Lewis & Clark found a skeleton of 105’ blue whale in Oregon.
John Clark, a lethal CIA agent in several Tom Clancy novels, was a former Navy SEAL named John Kelly. He faked his own death after committing a series of vigilante murders that were documented in the novel Without Remorse.
OFF (written in response to two posts ago)
In the original Oregon Trail game for AppleIIe, which thousands of elementary school children around the United States played as part of their curriculum, a tombstone appeared very early in the game saying, “Here lies andy. peperony and chease.” [sic] This was a reference to the Tombstone Pizza commercials that were something of a meme back then.
ON
Tom Clancy wrote a book entitled Red Storm Rising, in which the Soviet Union starts World War III after the catastrophic accidental destruction of a key oil refinery cripples their economy.
Unlike most Tom Clancy novels, Red Storm Rising is completely unconnected to the “Jack Ryan” universe / series of novels, and the events portrayed in it could not have happened in the Jack Ryan continuity.
Red Storm Rising is Tom Clancy’s second novel, published in 1986. His first, The Hunt for Red October, published in 1984, was a technically accurate novel whose plot weaves in the intricacies of ASW (anti-submarine warfare). The movie by the same name, released in 1990, hardly touches on the ASW details of the novel.