Rosa Parks grew up in the home of her maternal grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, a red haired and blue eyed farmer in Pine Level, Alabama who was the son of an enslaved mulatto seamstress and her master. Because of all the death threats during the bus boycott she moved to Detroit to live with her younger brother, also named Sylvester, in Detroit, where for a time his 4br/1 ba home housed himself, his wife, 11 of their children, Rosa, her husband, and Sylvester and Rosa’s mother Leona.
James Gandolfini was good friends with John Travolta. Travolta’s father sold tires to Gandolfini’s father.
GPS users can thank Ronald Reagan for his Presidential Directive to make the technology available for common civilian use at no charge (other than, of course, the costs to the US taxpayers for the NAVSTAR-GPS constellation). The fathers of GPS include American physicists William Guier and George Weiffenbach at Johns Hopkins’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) who determined the position of Sputnik by the Doppler Shift of its signal, then later calculated the inverse of the problem to locate one’s position on earth given the satellite’s position.
GPS calculations have to take into account relativistic effects to be accurate.
Really? How many Nobel Prizes in Mathematics have been awarded to the French?
In play: GPS is the abbreviation for the airport serving Baltra in the Galapagos. Not to be confused with GPS Airport in South Carolina.
None. I don’t think there is such a thing: Nobel Prize - Wikipedia
In play:
The South Carolina National Guard provided armed soldiers to assist with security at the Charleston Airport in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (I was there, and saw them).
Rhett Butler was from Charleston, SC, and his name was probably inspired by a prominent family that owned what is now known as the Rhett-Aiken house museum there. The Ashley River that empties into Charleston Harbor share’s a name with Rhett’s rival for Scarlett’s heart, Ashley Wilkes.
SC is an abbreviation for “Senior Counsel”, an honorific for lawyers used in some Commonwealth jurisdictions instead of QC, “Queen’s Counsel.”
As for the Nobel Prize in Math, my source apparently got carried away and worded it in that manner, but I now see they really meant the Fields Medal, which is often described as the “mathematicians’ Nobel Prize.” I should have caught that. Here is an article detailing math and the French. France is second only to the US in medals received. Sorry about that. Should have caught it. :o
In play: Queen Latifah was the first hip-hop artist honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, on January 4, 2006.
Cersei Lannister serves variously as either Queen Consort or Queen Regent of Westeros in George R.R. Martin’s books, which gave rise to the HBO series Game of Thrones.
The R.R. in George R.R. Martin stands for Raymond Richard.
Glenn L. Martin was an aviation pioneer who founded the Glenn L. Martin Company in 1912. In 1916 he merged with Wright to form the Wright-Martin Aircraft Company. In 1917 Glenn Martin left that company to form a second Glenn L. Martin Company, and in 1961 that company merged with the American-Marietta Corporation to become Martin Marietta. In 1995 they merged with Lockheed to form Lockheed Martin.
Martin is the most common surname in France.
Suriname is a country on South America’s northern (Atlantic Ocean) coast. It sits north of Brazil and also lies just north of the equator. From west to east, the six countries on the north side of South America, on the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, are Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and Brazil.
One of the proposed names for the film “Brazil” when Sidney Sheinberg took over the marketing of it was “Gnu Yak Gnu Yak and Other Bestial Places.”
Three of Sidney Lumet’s films are listed on the American Film Institute’s 100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time – Serpico (1973) at #84, The Verdict (1982) at #75 and 12 Angry Men (1957) at #42.
The Verdict and 12 Angry Men are both on the recommended list of law-related movies for students in the Trial Advocacy course at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.
12 Angry Men is now sometimes performed as 12 Angry Jurors, in order to diversify the casting.
In Canada, jurors are prohibited by federal law from disclosing the jury deliberations.
The 21st Amendment of the US Constitution was and is the only Amendment that repeals a previous Amendment – the 18th Amendment, which prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol.