Weekend Open Thread

My Man, CW….Using his 26 leaden soldiers to win the Victory! Scoop up some Lois Lane and enjoy, My Liege!

Did you know …

… a state you always thought had four sides really has a lot more? Look at a map of the United States, and pay attention to Colorado. Four long sides, right? Wrong. In the 19th Century, surveyors were mapping the boundary between Colorado and Utah, and during the process they laid out markers every mile on the border. But when later surveyors reviewed the records, they discovered that the border was far from straight. In fact, the errors made by the first crews were so bad that Colorado’s border actually has – get this – 697 sides, many of them on the line with Utah. That makes rectangular Colorado actually a hexahectaenneacontakaiheptagon. Because correcting the mistakes would take a very long time and cooperation from Congress, nothing was done and the border up close is as jagged as you can imagine. (You try to pronounce that word. I sprained my tongue.)

… in one species of deer, both the males and the females grow antlers? Reindeer do that. Reindeer live in the Arctic tundra, and also in Canada, Alaska, Russia, Greenland and Scandinavia. (There are also about nine or so at the North Pole, I hear.)

… only three major fruits are native to North America? The cranberry, the blueberry and the Concord grape are the only ones native to the continent. All other fruits are imports. (I, for one, am glad they were all imported!)

… you can find a typographical error on the Lincoln Memorial? When the Memorial was being constructed in 1909, an engraver was etching Abraham Lincoln’s (1809-1865) Second Inaugural Address into the north wall, and accidentally etched an E instead of an F in the word “future.” The mis-etching was later fixed but you can still see where the bottom line on the E was filled in. (A rare instance in which SpellCheck would have been a benefit!)

… New Coke™ wasn’t quite the flop everyone thought it was? Introduced in 1985, during a time when sales of Coca-Cola™ were second to rival Pepsi-Cola™, New Coke was a change in the soda’s formula designed to make it more directly competitive with Pepsi. But people who really loved the traditional Coke flavor turned their noses up at it en masse, and it was quickly replaced by the original formula. However, New Coke didn’t completely go away at first. It was rebranded as Coke II™ and was actually available to be purchased until 2002. (So it was really a flop, but not an immediate flop. Got it.)

… the U.S. space agency was not known for its sense of humor? NASA would not allow astronauts to give their spacecraft names after the flight of Gemini 3 in 1965, which Virgil “Gus” Grissom (1926-1967) called the Unsinkable Molly Brown. Not thrilled with Grissom’s attempt at being funny, management asked him to change the name, and Grissom suggested Titanic. The names were references to his Mercury flight, Liberty Bell 7, which sank after splashdown. That bit of levity caused NASA to prohibit names for spacecraft until the flight of Apollo 9 in 1969. In that mission, for the first time, two separate manned spacecraft would be used during the same mission, and each would need a radio call sign. The crew, James A. McDivitt (1929-2022), David R. Scott (born 1932), and Russell L. Schweikart (born 1935), kept it conservative with Gumdrop for the command/service module and Spider for the lunar module. The names were in keeping with the overall shapes of the craft. NASA would be somewhat embarrassed by the Apollo 10 mission, however. Thomas P. Stafford (born 1930), Eugene Cernan (1934-2017) and John Young (1930-2018) hearkened back to Grissom’s thoughts with Charlie Brown for the command/service module and Snoopy for the lunar module. Additional trivia note: Young had been Grissom’s co-pilot on Gemini 3.

Happy Birthday, young’un (the column, not you)

Holy shit… Steve Dallas is.. he’s… Hunter Biden!

I dressed my basset hound as the X-15 cruise bassalope for Halloween one year. Mrs not chevy was not amused. I offered to dress her cat up as Bill the Cat; she was definitely not amused.

Bloom county was always a good cartoon. Even if skewed to the left.

Congratulations to perp on successful completion of rehabilitation program.