The Right Rev. Mark Hollingsworth is the current Episcopal Bishop of Ohio. The rector of the largest church in his diocese, the Rev. Alan Gates of St. Paul’s in Cleveland Heights, was just elected Bishop of Massachusetts.
St. Paul, Minnesota is one of two U.S. state capitals named after a religious figure. The other is Helena, Montana (named after Saint Helena, the mother of Roman Emperor Constantine.)
Saint Paul Island in the Bering Sea, familiar to watchers of Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch”, is the largest of the Pribilof chain and the home of the largest Aleut community in the US.
The Feast Day of St Peter and St Paul, June 29, celebrates two of the most important Apostles, who together built the early church. In recent years, it has acquired significance in the ecumenical movement, observed by the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches as a symbol of reconciliation.
The Peter and Paul Fortress is the original citadel of St. Petersburg, and was used as a prison by the Tsarist governments. The first person to escape from the fortress prison was the anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin. Other people incarcerated in the “Russian Bastille” include Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich, Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Decembrists, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Bakunin, Leon Trotsky and Josip Broz Tito.
Peter, Paul and Mary came by their group name honestly, as the trio comprised Peter Yarrow, Mary Travers and Noel Paul Stookey.
When the group broke up in 1970, each member released a solo album. Peter’s was named Peter, Mary’s was called Mary, and Paul’s was entitled Paul and.
“St Paul’s Survives” is one of the iconic pictures of the Blitz in London. In black and white, it shows the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral surrounded by smoke. It became a symbol of British resistance to the Nazis.
When an American football team’s defense goes on a blitz, the desired outcome in a passing play is a sack of the quarterback. The term “sack” was first coined by Hall of Fame defensive end Deacon Jones in the 1960s, who felt that a sack devastated the offense in the same way that a city was devastated when it was sacked.
The Sack of Trantor was a major event in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation epic sf series, marking the catastrophic fall of the world-spanning capital of the Galactic Empire.
Isaac Asimov described Carl Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own. The other, he claimed, was the computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky.
Françoise Sagan was only 18 when she wrote her novel *Bonjour, Tristesse *(Hello, Sadness), about the coming-of-age love affair of an teenage girl on a French Riviera vacation.
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40 AU) from Earth. In the photograph, Earth is shown as a fraction of a pixel (0.12 pixel in size) against the vastness of space. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of Carl Sagan.
Subsequently, the title of the photograph was used by Sagan as the main title of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
The PBS children’s show “Big Blue Marble”, promoting intercultural communication, was titled after a description of a photo of Earth taken by the crew of Apollo 17, probably by geologist and future Senator Harrison Schmitt. NASA archivist Mike Gentry has speculated that The Blue Marble is the most widely distributed image in human history.
After winning back to back Best Actor Oscars in 1993 for Philadelphia and 1994 for Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks was not even nominated in 1995 for Apollo 13, despite his fine performance.
The Miami Dolphins were the first team to win back to back Super Bowls, when the games were called Super Bowls at the time played.
There have been three U.S. Navy warships named the USS Miami. The current one, a Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine, was badly damaged in a May 2012 fire purposefully set by a dockyard worker who later said he wanted to leave work early. He was convicted, sentenced to 17 years in prison and ordered to pay $400 million in restitution. The submarine was so badly damaged that the Navy has decommissioned her.
The San Francisco Giants will be playing at the Miami Marlins on Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 July.
Bermagui, on the NSW south coast, is renowned for its big game fishing, including marlin.
It’s about a 520-km drive from Bermagui, NSW to Parkes, NSW. Parkes is where the radio telescope observatory was built in 1961 and which was one of several radio antennas used to receive live, televised images of the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969.
ETA: Parkes is about a 360-km drive from Sydney, NSW.
The town of Parkes was named for Sir Henry Parkes, one of the earliest advocates for the federation of the Australian colonies.
And a very nice place it is too.