Irish Traditions
St. Patrick is considered the Patron Saint of Ireland, but he was born in Britain. He was born near the end of the 4th Century to wealthy parents and was abducted by Irish Raiders and held in captivity in Ireland for 6 years. During this captivity he became a devote Christian.
He is believed [...]
Flowers – Myth or Fact
The leaves of a Poinsettia are poisonous.
Myth. There has never been a death that has been proven to have occurred due to ingestion of the leaves or any other part of the flower. The myth began in 1919 when the child of an army officers died and the poinsettia was thought to [...]
The State of Maine
On March 15, 1820 the State of Maine was admitted to the union of the United States as its 23rd State.
The first European settlement in Maine was in 1604 by a French party that included Samuel de Champlain. The first English settlement in Maine was established by the Plymouth Company at Popham in 1607. [...]
Springing Ahead
For those who don’t know the rhyme we spring ahead an hour in the spring and fall backward one hour, in the fall. Some people mistakenly call it Daylight Savings Time, but it is Daylight Saving Time. There is not ‘S’. In 2007 with the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that President George Bush [...]
Millard Kaufman
Two days after his 92nd birthday, Millard Kaufman died. Kaufman was a screen writer beginning in the late 1940s and into 1970s. He was the co-creator of Mr. Magoo.
Born March 12, 1917, in Baltimore, Kaufman spent two years as a merchant seaman after high school. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from [...]
19th Century People
On March 7, 2010 Mary Josephine Ray died. To her friends and family Mary Ray was a special person. And had it not been for the fact that she was the oldest person living in the United States, she would still be unknown to many of us. When she died she was [...]
The Truths of Washington
George Washington, the leader of the Continental Army and later the first President of the United States, thought of February 22nd as his birthday. He was born on February 11, 1731 under the Julian Calendar. The Julian Calendar was used in England, in which Virginia was a colony in 1731, but the Gregorian [...]
Serendipity
Serendipity is defined as a discovery of something fortunate while looking for something else.
The word was first used by Horace Walpole in a letter dated January 28, 1754 to Horace Mann, an Englishman living at the time in Florence. This is not the Horace Mann who was a American educator.
Walpole had read a Persian [...]
Facts Relating to Coffee
Coffee is one of the most popular drinks in the United States with an average American adult estimated to consumes 26.7 gallons of coffee per year. Even with this it is only 20% of the world’s consumption.
After petroleum, coffee is the second largest commodity in the world. With the exception of Hawaii, no coffee [...]
40 Years Gone
Here we are coming to the close of the first month of 2010 and for some odd reason I just realized that the 1960s are now all 40 years gone. To some the 1960s was a golden age, to others it’s little more than history. To me it was my childhood.
But it was [...]
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