Fun Facts for Friday, January 2, 2015

National Buffet Day

Fun Facts for Friday, January 2, 2015

The 2 day of the year

363 days left to go 

THIS WEEK IS

• New Year's Resolutions Week
• Celebration of Life Week
• Diet Resolution Week
• Silent Record Week

TODAY IS

• 55-MPH Speed Limit Day
• Happy Mew Year for Cats Day
• National Buffet Day
• National Motivation and Inspiration Day
• National Personal Trainer Awareness Day
• National Science Fiction Day
• Pet Travel and Safety Day
• National Cream Puff Day

ON THIS DATE...

533: Mercurius becomes Pope John II, the first pope to adopt a new name upon elevation to the papacy.


1788: Georgia became the fourth state admitted to the Union. 
1839: French photographer Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the Moon.
1842: the first wire suspension bridge was opened in Fairmont, Pennsylvania. 

1859: Erastus Beadle published The Dime Book of Practical Etiquette.



1870: construction began on New York's Brooklyn Bridge. 

1872: Brigham Young was arrested on bigamy charges.  The Mormon Church leader had 25 wives.  


1910: the nation's first junior high school opened in Berkeley, California. 
1921: The first religious broadcast on radio was heard, as Dr. E.J. Van Etten of Calvary Episcopal Church preached on KDKA radio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
1929: The United States and Canada reached an agreement to preserve Niagara Falls.
1935: Bruno Hauptmann went to trial on charges of kidnapping and murdering Charles Lindbergh's infant son. 

1941: the Andrews Sisters recorded their classic song "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." (Song)


1960: Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.

1965: Joe Namath signed a 400-thousand dollar contract with the New York Jets of the American Football League.  At the time, it was the richest rookie contract in professional football history.    

1973: Led Zeppelin bandmates Robert Plant and Jimmie Page hitchhiked to their concert in Sheffield, England, after their car broke down. 
1974: President Richard M. Nixon signs the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act

1980: Miss America Pageant officials announced Bert Parks would not return as host of the annual beauty contest.  He held the position for 25 years.  



1983: the Broadway musical "Annie" closed after two-thousand-377 performances.  
1995: four years after leaving the office to serve a six month prison sentence for a misdemeanor drug charge, Marion Barry was inaugurated as mayor of Washington, D.C. again.  

1995: The most distant galaxy yet discovered was found by scientists using the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. "8C 1435+63" was estimated to be 15 billion light years away. The discovery was made by a team of astronomers from the University of California, led by Hyron Spinrad. They found the new galaxy to be 150,000 to 200,000 light-years across.
2007: talk show host Oprah Winfrey opened her school for girls in South Africa on this date.  The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy in Gauteng will educate 152 students in grades seven through twelve.  The school cost 40-million-dollars to build and features computer and science labs, a library and a wellness center. 2009: the 16-year-old son of actor John Travolta died on this date.  The family's lawyer said Jett Travolta suffered a seizure at his family's vacation home at the Old Bahama Bay hotel in the Bahamas.  Jett Travolta, who had a history of seizures, was the eldest child of John Travolta and his wife, Kelly Preston.  



HISTORY SPOTLIGHT

I can't drive 55...President Richard M. Nixon signs the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act on this date in 1974. (Taken from Link) 

Sammy Hagar "I Can't Drive 55" (Link)

Prior to 1974, individual states set speed limits within their boundaries and highway speed limits across the country ranged from 40 mph to 80 mph. The U.S. and other industrialized nations enjoyed easy access to cheap Middle Eastern oil from 1950 to 1972, but the Arab-Israeli conflict changed that dramatically in 1973. Arab members of the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) protested the West's support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War by stopping oil shipments to the United States, Japan and Western Europe. OPEC also flexed its new-found economic muscle by quadrupling oil prices, placing a choke-hold on America's oil-hungry consumers and industries. The embargo had a global impact, sending the U.S. and European economies into recession. As part of his response to the embargo, President Nixon signed a federal law lowering all national highway speed limits to 55 mph. The act was intended to force Americans to drive at speeds deemed more fuel-efficient, thereby curbing the U.S. appetite for foreign oil. With it, Nixon ushered in a policy of fuel conservation and rationing not seen since World War II.


QUICK TRIVIA 

The cream puff (Taken from Link) 

No one knows who invented the cream puff. During the 13th century in southern Germany and France, chefs had created puff pastries filled with rich cheese mixtures. By the mid 19th century in both France and England, the cream puff had become known as the profiterole. Often created in elaborate shapes by skilled pastry chefs, elegant Victorian diners could find cream puffs shaped like swans or pyramids of tiny, fragile chocolate or vanilla filled puffs to nibble on with the dessert wine, tea or coffee. In the United States, the first recorded mention of the cream puff on a restaurant menu dates to 1851 at the Revere House Restaurant in Boston.



WORD OF THE DAY

quagmire  [kwag-mahyuhr, kwog-]  noun

1. an area of miry or boggy ground whose surface yields under the tread; a bog.

2. a situation from which extrication is very difficult.

"As Joey looked at the two flat tires and one spare, he realized that the situation was quagmire"



INTRIGUING BIBLE FACT

In the time of the early church, the Roman emperor Claudius expelled all of the Jews from Rome 

"After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all the Jews to leave Rome" (Acts 18:1-2).



WORD FROM THE WORD 

The Lord God . . . said to him, “Where are you?” —Genesis 3:9



Read today's "Our Daily Bread"