“Bill Russell is one of the great names in basketball, an all-American… the only athlete to ever win an NCAA Championship, an Olympic Gold Medal, and a professional championship all in the same year—1956…But Bill Russell had this one problem: He threw up before every game.” ~ Dr. John Eliot from Overachievement

Every night you see the usual stars:the Big Dipper and others. What stars are on the other side of the planet where it is daytime?
The star that can be seen on the other side of the planet where it is daytime is the Sun, which is so bright, except for during a total eclipse; it outshines all the other stars. To see what is/was behind the sun you will have to wait half a year until the earth’s orbit takes it to the other side of the sun. Then the night sky will show you the stars that the sun was hiding.

Nancy Astor was one of the five beautiful Langhorne sisters, born in Virginia, USA, whose second marriage to the millionaire Waldorf Astor brought her to London. In 1910, her husband was elected Conservative MP for Plymouth South. Following his elevation to the peerage in 1919, Nancy determined to stand in the by-election that followed. She won. Personally welcomed into the House of Commons by the prime minister himself, Nancy was soon championing women’s causes such as equal rights in the civil service, votes at twenty-one and keeping the women police.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/timeline/nancy_astor.shtml

See if you can use this final stretch of time to stretch yourself creatively, to try something new and playful with language, to let your characters surprise you, to let yourself surprise yourself. Never let yourself forget what a profound thing you’re doing. As Margaret Atwood says “A word after a word/after a word is power.” You have that creative force inside you. You are poised to give birth to a whole new world.

Henry Ford introduced the first mass-produced automobile on the market a century ago in 1908. The 2-seater Model T cost $825. By 1927, when the Model T was phased out, production had become so streamlined that dealers were able to reduce the price to $300. While Ford did not invent the assembly line, he made it so much more efficient that it revolutionized the industry. In the very early days, it took 12 hours to produce an automobile. By 1913, when Ford opened his new, more efficient Model T factory, it took only 93 minutes; by the time the last Model Ts rolled off the line in 1927, a car was produced every 24 seconds.

Marathon Runners Cross
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
A pale blue Cadillac convertible carried the first toll-paying driver and his companions across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which opened to traffic on this date in 1964. The longest suspension bridge in the US — it was the world’s largest until 1981 — the span connects Brooklyn to Staten Island. The bridge was named for explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, the first known European navigator to enter New York Harbor and the Hudson River, while crossing the Narrows. O.H. Ammann designed the Verrazano-Narrows, as well as the George Washington and Bayonne Bridges, among many others.

Sir Walter Raleigh, best known by some as the man who laid his coat over a puddle for Queen Elizabeth I, was beheaded on October 29th of 1618. Though a favorite of Queen Elizabeth and one of her courtiers, Raleigh was less popular with her successor, King James I, who had Raleigh imprisoned and eventually executed for treason. Raleigh was an explorer and a writer of political essays, treatises on philosophy and poetry. Having made expeditions to the New World, he introduced two of its products, potatoes and tobacco, to England.

Enjoy the present and don’t worry about the future, as in It’s a beautiful day, so forget tomorrow’s test – carpe diem! Latin for “seize the day,” an aphorism found in the Roman writer Horace’s Odes, this phrase has been used in English since the early 1800s. Latin, a dead language, lives on in English.

method of elementary education devised by British educators Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell during the 19th century, to furnish schooling to the underprivileged even under conditions of severely limited facilities. All students met in one room, with about 10 students and one monitor to each bench. The monitors, older and better students, were instructed directly by the teacher and in turn instructed the other pupils. This system, which might involve several levels of monitors, used elaborate programs of reward for good deportment and scholarship, supplemented by punishment based on “shame rather than pain.”

The popular explanation is that the word “cab” is short for the French word, “cabriolet,” meaning “to leap.” The English adopted the word for their one-horse carriage back in the 18th century. The term “cab” came to be used for carriages available for hire. Another French term, “haquenee” (for “horse”), became the word “hackney” or “hack” in English and cab drivers are often still referred to as “hackies.”