Month: October 2025

Today is the birthday, in 1830, of Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood, American lawyer, politician, educator, and author who was active in the women’s rights and women’s suffrage movements. She was one of the first women lawyers in the United States. In 1879 she became the first woman to be admitted to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court. Lockwood ran for president in 1884 and 1888 on the ticket of the National Equal Rights Party and was the first woman to appear on official ballots.

Belva Ann Bennett was born in Royalton, New York. By age 14, she was teaching at the local elementary school.^[4] In 1848, by age 18, she married Uriah McNall, a farme local to the area. McNall died of tuberculosis in 1853, three years after their daughter Lura was born. Realizing that she needed a better education to support herself and her daughter, she enrolled in Genessee College. Lockwood graduated with honors in 1857 and soon became the headmistress of Lockport Union School. It was a responsible position, but Lockwood found that whether she was teaching or working as an administrator, she was paid half of what her male counterparts were making.

n February 1866, Belva and her daughter Lura moved to Washington, D.C., as Belva believed it was the center of power in the United States and would provide good opportunities to advance in the legal profession. She opened a coeducational private school while exploring the study of law. She applied to the Columbian Law School in the District of Columbia. The trustees refused to admit her, fearing she would distract the male students.^[9] She and several other women were finally admitted to the new National University School of Law (now the George Washington University Law School). Although she completed her coursework in May 1873, the law school refused to grant her a diploma because of her gender.

Without a diploma, Lockwood could not gain admittance to the District of Columbia Bar. After a year, she wrote a letter to the President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, appealing to him as president ex officio of the National University Law School. She asked him for justice, stating she had passed all her courses and deserved to be awarded a diploma. In September 1873, within a week of having sent the letter, Lockwood received her Bachelor of Laws. She was 43 years old.

he District of Columbia Bar admitted her, although several judges told Lockwood they had no confidence in her, a reaction she repeatedly had to overcome. When she tried to gain admission to the Maryland Bar, a judge lectured her and told her that God Himself had determined that women were not equal to men and never could be. When she tried to respond on her own behalf, he said she had no right to speak and had her removed from the courtroom.

Lockwood drafted an anti-discrimination bill to have the same access to the bar as male colleagues. From 1874 to 1879, she lobbied Congress to pass it. In 1879, Congress finally passed the law, which President Rutherford B. Hayes signed into law. It allowed all qualified women attorneys to practice in any federal court. Lockwood was then sworn in as the first woman member of the U.S. Supreme Court bar on March 3, 1879.

Late in 1880, Lockwood became the first female lawyer to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing Kaiser v. Stickney. In 1906, Lockwood represented the Cherokee Nation in United States v. Cherokee Nation. She was successful in ensuring the payment of the five million dollar suit, one of the largest made to that date to a Native American tribe for land ceded to the government.

She ran in the presidential elections of 1884 and 1888 as the candidate of the National Equal Rights Party. Belva Lockwood died on May 19, 1917, and was buried in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

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Engagement…

SIGNS…

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Today is the birthday, in 1937, of American steel guitarist Santo Farina, who, with the instrumental rock and roll duo Santo & Johnny Farina scored the 1959 US No.1 hit ‘Sleep Walk’. The track has since been used in over 25 movies, including La Bamba, The Irishman, Mermaids, Eddie and the Cruisers, Hearts in Atlantis, Charlie’s Angels and was used in the Stephen King film Sleepwalkers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rwfqsjimRM

On this day in 1947, Carl and Gerty Cori, along with Bernardo Houssay of Argentina, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Coris were the third married couple to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

Carl grew up in Trieste and Gerty grew up in Prague. Gerty was tutored at home before enrolling in a lyceum for girls, and at the age of 16, she decided she wanted to be a medical doctor. Pursuing the study of science, Gerty learned that she lacked the prerequisites in Latin, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Over the course of a year, she managed to study the equivalent of eight years of Latin, five years of science, and five years of mathematics. She was admitted to the medical school of the Karl-Ferdinands-Universität in Prague in 1914 where she met Carl.

Carl was drafted into the Austrian army and served during World War I. Life was difficult after the war, and Gerty developed dry eye caused by severe malnutrition due to food shortages. These problems, in conjunction with the increasing anti-Semitism (Gerty was from a jewish family), contributed to the Coris’ decision to leave Europe. In 1922, the Coris both immigrated to the United States (Gerty six months after Carl because of difficulty in obtaining a position) to pursue medical research at what later became the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. In 1928, they became naturalized citizens.

They continued their research, specializing in investigating carbohydrate metabolism. They were particularly interested in how glucose is metabolized in the human body and the hormones that regulate this process. They published fifty papers while at Roswell. The lead author of each paper was the one who had done the most research. Gerty Cori published eleven articles as the sole author. In 1929, they proposed the theoretical cycle that later won them the Nobel Prize, the Cori cycle. The cycle describes how the human body uses chemical reactions to break some carbohydrates such as glycogen in muscle tissue into lactic acid, while synthesizing others.

Gerty Cori with her husband and fellow-Nobelist, Carl Ferdinand Cori, in 1947.

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Here’s Tuba Skinny! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYJhgz4L3UU

This day in 1844 was the day of The Great Disappointment. The Great Disappointment in the Millerite movement was the reaction that followed Baptist preacher William Miller’s widely believed proclamation that Jesus Christ would return to the Earth by 1844, which he called the Second Advent. His study of the Daniel 8 prophecy during the Second Great Awakening led him to conclude that Daniel’s “cleansing of the sanctuary” was cleansing the world from sin when Christ would come, and he and many others prepared. When Jesus did not appear by October 22, 1844, Miller and his followers were disappointed.

These events paved the way for the Adventists who formed the Seventh-day Adventist Church. They contended that what had happened on October 22 was not Jesus’s return, as Miller had thought, but the start of Jesus’s final work of atonement, the cleansing in the heavenly sanctuary, leading up to the Second Coming.

William Miller

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On this day in 1966, The Supremes became the first female group to have a No.1 album on the US chart with ‘The Supremes a Go Go’, knocking The Beatles Revolver from the top of the charts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTBmgAOO0Nw

Today is the birthday, in 1833, of Alfred Nobel. Nobel’s father was an alumnus of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and was an engineer and inventor who built bridges and buildings and experimented with different ways of blasting rocks. He encouraged and taught Nobel from a young age.

As a young man, Nobel studied with chemist Nikolai Zinin; then, in 1850, he went to Paris to further the work. There he met Ascanio Sobrero, who had synthesized nitroglycerin three years before. Sobrero strongly opposed the use of nitroglycerin because it was unpredictable, exploding when subjected to variable heat or pressure. But Nobel became interested in finding a way to control and use nitroglycerin as a commercially usable explosive; it had much more power than gunpowder.

Nobel found that when nitroglycerin was incorporated in an absorbent inert substance like kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth) it became safer and more convenient to handle, and this mixture he patented in 1867 as “dynamite”. Nobel later combined nitroglycerin with various nitrocellulose compounds, similar to collodion, but settled on a more efficient recipe combining another nitrate explosive, and obtained a transparent, jelly-like substance, which was a more powerful explosive than dynamite. Gelignite, or blasting gelatin, as it was named, was patented in 1876.

On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed his last will and set aside the bulk of his estate to establish the Nobel Prizes, to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality. He also made several other important contributions to science, holding 355 patents during his life.

Portrait of Nobel by Gösta Florman

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Seventy Five!!!

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BADA BING BING BING…

Don’t worry, Donald. You’re still eligible for the No Ball Prize.

tRUMP, putting the NO in Nobel Peace Price.

Anti-vaxxers, how do you feel about your Dear Leader getting a flu vaccine and Covid booster? It’s almost as if he took you for complete suckers.

I don’t have a train of thought, I have a Roomba of thought. It can move straight ahead, but as soon as it bumps into something, it turns around and starts moving in a brand-new, random direction.

They held a contest to choose the best neckwear. It was a tie.

Daughter: Alexa play “Let it Go.” Me: When I was your age I had to call the radio station, wait on hold for 30 mins to request a song, then sit by my boom box for an hour with a blank cassette tape for my song to play so I could record it. Daughter: I don’t know what any of that means.

Mr. Rogers did not adequately prepare me for the people in my neighborhood.

I was walking a pretty girl home from school one day when we ran upon one the school bullies. Good thing I was carrying her books or she wouldn’t have been able to beat him up.

Medical researchers have determined stress will kill you. Great … one more thing to worry about.

Apparently it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, which can’t be true because I’ve been an adult a lot longer than 10,000 hours and I still have no idea what I’m doing.

You donate a kidney, you’re a hero. You donate three kidneys, and suddenly the police are involved.

Husband: The nerve of that doctor. Saying I’m so old that he referred me to an archaeologist. Wife: Audiologist, dear. You can’t hear.

I’m not sure I agree with the idea that “when you snooze you lose.” At my age, snoozing seems more like winning to me.

IF YOU ARE ARGUING LOUDLY ON YOUR PHONE IN PUBLIC, PLEASE PUT IT ON SPEAKER, I NEED TO HEAR BOTH SIDES OF THE STORY.

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Today is the birthday, in 1957, of American guitarist, singer, songwriter, arranger and record producer Steve Lukather, who with Toto had the 1983 US No.1 & UK No.3 single ‘Africa’. Lukather has recorded guitar tracks for more than 1,500 albums including the guitar solo for Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 No.1 single ‘Physical’, Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’, and was also heavily involved in the recording of virtually all of Jackson’s Thriller album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTQbiNvZqaY

On this day in 1818, The United States and the United Kingdom signed the cleverly named Treaty of 1818. This treaty resolved standing boundary issues between the two nations. The treaty allowed for joint occupation and settlement of the Oregon Country, known to the British and in Canadian history as the Columbia District of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The two nations agreed to a boundary line involving the 49th parallel north, in part because a straight-line boundary would be easier to survey than the pre-existing boundaries based on watersheds. The treaty marked both the United Kingdom’s last permanent major loss of territory in what is now the Continental United States and the United States’ first permanent significant cession of North American territory to a foreign power.

The Treaty of 1818, along with the Rush–Bagot Treaty of 1817, marked the beginning of improved relations between the British Empire and its former colonies, and paved the way for more positive relations between the US and Canada although repelling a US invasion was a defense priority in Canada until 1928.

Cutting on the 49th parallel, on the right bank of the Moyie River, looking west, 1860.

(courtesy North American Boundary Commission)

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Her Shoes…His Shoes…

Signs remind us that we have NO KINGS

…and thousands more

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Wow! What a coupon!

Today is the birthday, in 1950, of Tom Petty, American singer and songwriter. He was the frontman of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and was a founding member of the late 1980s supergroup the Traveling Wilburys and Mudcrutch. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had the 1977 single ‘American Girl’, the 1989 UK No.28 single ‘I Won’t Back Down’, and the 1991 UK No.3 album ‘Into The Great Wide Open’. With the Traveling Wilburys, the 1988 UK No. 21 single ‘Handle With Care’. Petty has also released a string of solo albums, and Throughout his career and has sold over 60 million albums. Petty died on 2 October 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvlTJrNJ5lA