Trivia Of The Day November 8

Louis Armstrong introduced scat when recording "Heebie Jeebies" in 1926 after he dropped the sheet music.

When You Dish Upon a Star, the fifth episode of The Simpsons' tenth season, originally aired in the United States on November 8, 1998. The show lampooned 20th Century Fox as a division of The Walt Disney Company. Nineteen years later, Disney indeed made a deal to purchase the studio from Rupert Murdoch.

A chipmunk's cheeks can expand to three times the size of its head.

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Happy Birthday November 8

Bram Stoker, the inventor of the Dracula character, was born on November 8, 1847 at 15 Marino Crescent, Clontarf, on the northside of Dublin, Ireland. The manager of the actor Sir Henry Irving's London's Lyceum Theatre, Stoker began writing in his spare time. He was inspired by a trip to Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast in 1890 to write his vampire fantasy novel. Stoker never visited Transylvania; he simply read travel books for details about the country.

English comedian Ken Dodd was born on November 8, 1927 in Knotty Ash, Liverpool. He was the second of three children of a coal merchant, Arthur Dodd, and wife Sarah (née Gray). Ken Dodd kept a ‘giggle map’ of Britain to record which jokes go down best in which parts of the country. He set in 1967  a world record for the longest joke-telling session, telling 1,500 jokes in three and a half hours.

For more November 8th anniversaries, including the death of John Milton, the patenting of Nikola Tesla's radio controlled boat and the election of the youngest ever US president, check out OnThatDay.

Today is November 8

World Urbanism Day, also known as "World Town Planning Day" is an opportunity to unite planners and celebrate town planning around the globe. The day was founded in 1949 by Professor Carlos Maria della Paolera of the University of Buenos Aires, a graduate at the Institut d'urbanisme in Paris, to advance public and professional interest in planning. It is celebrated in more than 30 countries on four continents on November 8th.

Flag of urbanism

In ancient China, towns were often arranged in patterns so that if seen from above, the whole community would resemble an animal or a symbolic design. Some were arranged to resemble dragons, snakes, stars and sunbursts.

Hippodamus of Miletus (498 – 408 BC), was an ancient Greek architect who is considered to be "the father of European urban planning". Hippodamus developed a new way of laying out the towns and cities of Greece. Using a rectangular grid, he brought together a number of large units, each of which was dedicated to some function of the town's life.

Nine days after the Great Fire of London in 1666, Christopher Wren prepared a plan for rebuilding the city which he presented King Charles II with. with. In it he removed the crowded alleyways which were a fire and health hazard. All new streets would have one of three widths - 90,60 or 30 feet.

On This Day November 8

While experimenting with high voltages applied to an evacuated tube on November 8, 1895, German scientist Wilhelm Röntgen noticed a fluorescence on a nearby plate of coated glass. Within a month, he discovered that the radiation causing this was able to pass through everyday materials such as paper, wood and living tissue and it produced an image on photographic plates as well as a fluorescent screen. Röntgen called this type of radiation X rays. Below is the first medical X-ray by Wilhelm Röntgen of his wife Anna Bertha Ludwig's hand.

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Trivia of the Day November 7

The first recorded use of the word "calypso" in Trinidad was in 1900.

The world’s tallest church building is the 161m (528ft) Ulm Minster in Germany.

Ulm Minster, aerial view (2014) Armin Appel Wikipedia

Harry S. Truman held both the highest (at 91%) and tied for the lowest (at 22%) approval ratings since Gallup started compiling them in 1937.

 

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Happy Birthday November 7

English explorer Captain James Cook was born in Marton, (in present-day Middlesbrough) on November 7, 1728. His father, James Cook, was an agricultural laborer who eventually became a bailiff and landowner. At the age of 16, Cook was apprenticed to Mr William Sanderson a grocer and haberdasher in the fishing village of Staithes. According to tradition, it is during his time there that Cook first felt the lure of the sea while gazing out the shop window.

Official portrait of Captain James Cook

Marie Curie was born Marya Sklodowska on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, in the Russian partition of Poland. The fifth and last child of a Warsaw professor, Marie displayed a powerful intelligence and unusually good memory in her education. The discoverer of two radioactive elements: radium and polonium, Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in 1903 when she won the award for physics. In 1911, she won the award again for chemistry becoming the first person to win the prize twice.

French author Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913 in Dréan (then known as Mondovi) in French Algeria. Albert's father, Lucien, was a poor agricultural worker and his mother, an illiterate house cleaner. His philosophical novels which include The Stranger, The Plague and The Fall are known for their association with both existentialism and absurdism. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44 in 1957, the second-youngest recipient in history.

Evangelist Billy Graham was born on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina on November 7, 1918. His mother and father Morrow Coffey and William Franklin Graham managed the farm. Both parents were devout Christians. Graham was converted in 1934 during a revival meeting in Charlotte led by local evangelist Mordecai Ham. Billy Graham held more than 400 crusades in 185 countries and territories across six continents — reaching 215 million people.

For more November 7th anniversaries, including the first air freight shipment, the first spoken-word election night radio broadcast and the election of the first African American mayor of a major American city, check out OnThatDay.

Today Is November 7

The Inuit are a people of the Arctic who live in Greenland and Canada.

By Ansgar Walk - photo taken by Ansgar Walk

The Inughuit of northwest Greenland are the world's northernmost people. When contact was made in 1818 they had been isolated for several hundred years and were completely unaware of the existence of other humans.

Although they live in a climate inhospitable to crop development, the Inuit do not suffer from vitamin C deficiency (scurvy) due to their diet of frozen and raw fish and mammal organs. By not cooking the food, the vitamin C is not broken down and can be absorbed by the human body.

International Inuit Day is a holiday that was created to celebrate Inuit and amplify their voices. It falls on November 7.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States, defeating three rival candidates. Lincoln, a Republican, won with just under 40 per cent of the popular vote, but secured a comfortable majority in the Electoral College. He was the first Republican to become president. His election was deeply unpopular in the Southern states, where his opposition to the expansion of slavery caused alarm. Within weeks, South Carolina voted to secede from the Union, and by the time Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven Southern states had broken away. The country was heading towards the American Civil War.


Today is National Bison Day. Bison or buffalo are large, even-toed mammals. "Bison" is a Greek word meaning ox-like animal, while "buffalo" originated with the French fur trappers who called these massive beasts bœufs, meaning ox or bullock—so both names, "bison" and "buffalo", have a similar meaning.

The buffalo formed the mainstay of the economy of the Native Americans, providing them with meat for food, hides and fur for clothing and shelter, and sinew and horn for tools

In the 1800s, the westward-moving pioneers and railroad workers wantonly killed the huge animals by the thousands for food. Only the choicest pieces of the slaughtered buffalo, the hump and tongues, were cut out of the carcasses.

The near-extinction bison hunting in the 1800s was not only to gain food. The pioneers also wanted to restrict the American Indians' dominant food supply; herds were shot from trains and left to rot where they died.

By 1870s, the buffalo had been decimated east of the Mississippi River thus removing a major source of meat. The extension of railroads across the Great Plains had led to the destruction of the huge herds that foraged on the vast grasslands there.

The Buffalo Protection Act of 1894 was one of the earliest official recognitions of an endangered species problem in the United States. By the late 1880s fewer than a thousand bison were left on the continent, two thirds of them in Canada.  The law to protect the few remaining in Yellowstone National Park was the first federal legislation that focused on conserving a once-vast wildlife resource.

The United States Senate has passed resolutions each year since 2013 making the first Saturday of November National Bison Day. The purpose of National Bison Day is to encourage celebration of the American Bison, also commonly known as the American buffalo. The species is acknowledged as the first American conservation success story, having been brought back from the brink of extinction by a concerted effort of ranchers, conservationists and politicians to save the species in the early 20th century.  Bison can also play an important role in improving the types of grasses found in landscapes to the benefit of grasslands and hold significant economic value for private producers and rural communities.

President Barack Obama signed into law on May 9, 2016 the National Bison Legacy Act, which designated the bison as the official mammal of the United States.