Jackie Mitchell

Jackie Mitchell (1914-1987)   In the spring of 1931, Joe Engel, owner of the Southern Association's AA Chattanooga Lookouts, signed 17-year-old pitcher Jackie Mitchell.  The Chattanooga papers were full of stories about the first woman to ever play in the minor leagues. (Jackie Mitchell was actually the second woman to sign a minor-league contract.  In 1898, Lizzie Arlington played one game, pitching for Reading (PA) against Allentown.)  On April 2 of that year, the New York Yankees stopped in Chattanooga for an exhibition game, on their way home from spring training down south.  Manager Bert Niehoff started the game with Clyde Barfoot, but after Barfoot gave up a double and a single, the manager signaled for Jackie Mitchell.  The first batter she faced was Babe Ruth.   Jackie only had one pitch, a wicked, dropping curve ball. Ruth took ball one, and then swung at -- and missed -- the next two pitches. Jackie's fourth pitch caught the corner of the plate, the umpire called it a strike, and Babe Ruth "kicked the dirt, called the umpire a few dirty names, gave his bat a wild heave, and stomped out to the Yank's dugout."  The next batter was Lou Gehrig.  He stepped up to the plate and swung at the first sinker -- strike one!  He swung twice more, hitting nothing but air.  Jackie Mitchell had fanned the "Sultan of Swat" AND the "Iron Horse," back-to-back.  After a standing ovation that lasted several minutes, Jackie pitched to Tony Lazzari, who drew a walk.  At that point, Niehoff pulled her and put Barfoot back in. The Yankees won the game 14-4.  A few days after the exhibition game, Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis voided Jackie Mitchell's contract, claiming that baseball was "too strenuous" for a woman.  http://www.exploratorium.edu/baseball/mitchell.html 

Malt is germinated cereal grains that have been dried in a process known as "malting".  The grains are made to germinate by soaking in water, and are then halted from germinating further by drying with hot air.  Malted grain is used to make beer, whisky, malted shakes, malt vinegar, confections such as Maltesers and Whoppers, flavored drinks such as Horlicks, Ovaltine and Milo, and some baked goods, such as malt loaf, bagels and rich tea biscuits.  Malted grain that has been ground into a coarse meal is known as "sweet meal".  Various cereals are malted, though barley is the most common.  A high-protein form of malted barley is often a label-listed ingredient in blended flours typically used in the manufacture of yeast breads and other baked goods.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malt 

The night sky was always important to the Miami people.  They recognized a constellation in the shape of a fisher, a minklike mammal that populated their Midwestern homelands.  They called the Milky Way the “Spirit Trail” and believed its stars were the campfires of the dead.  In 1846, after ceding much of their land to the U.S. government, the Miami were barged south, first to Kansas, then to northeast Oklahoma, where many Miami and members of other displaced tribes remain today.  (The name of Miami, Florida, comes from the language of the unrelated Calusa Indians.)  Their variety of white corn didn’t grow well in the arid prairie soil, nor did their language, Myaamia, fit the landscape—they had no word for “armadillo,” for instance.  Gradually they stopped planting their staple crop and, as their children learned English in government-run schools, neglected their native tongue.  By the 1960s, the last fluent speaker was dead, and Tim McCoy grew up without knowing a single word.  “My family knew of our heritage, but we weren’t enrolled in a community,” says McCoy, 48, a Miami Indian and Museum of Natural History geologist.  His ancestors had stayed in Kansas after the first removal, and he grew up in Illinois and eventually settled in Northern Virginia.  He roams even farther afield professionally:  A meteorite expert, he helps direct NASA’s Mars rovers, among other extraterrestrial pursuits.  After McCoy named a prominent pile of Mars rocks “Miami” in 2005, he learned that another Miami was working on the Mars rovers:  Scott Doudrick, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.  Over the next year or so, the two developed a summer-camp curriculum on the heavens and the earth for Miami children, and in 2007 they traveled to Miami, Oklahoma, and taught it to tribe members of elementary-school age.  But “the style of teaching didn’t match the culture,” McCoy says.  The children, he felt, needed more opportunities to explore on their own.  Perhaps most of all, “we needed the language” to make the lessons come alive.  Myaamia had slowly been reviving, thanks to the Miami tribe and scholars who translated hundreds of records from 18th-century Jesuit missionaries’ efforts to document it.  McCoy began to teach the language to himself and his two sons.  “It’s a polysynthetic language, so it has very long words that intimidate a lot of people,” he says, “but if you get the flow of the language, you get used to it fairly quickly.”  Gradually he introduced Myaamia words in his summer-camp curriculum.  Abigail Tucker  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/smithsonian-institution/Rediscovering-a-Lost-Native-American-Language-213881651.html 

The history of Gibraltar, a small peninsula on the southern Iberian coast near the entrance of the Mediterranean Sea, spans over 2,900 years.  Gibraltar's location has given it an outsized significance in the history of Europe and its fortified town, established in medieval times, has hosted garrisons that sustained numerous sieges and battles over the centuries.  Gibraltar was first inhabited over 50,000 years ago by Neanderthals and may have been one of their last places of habitation before they died out around 24,000 years ago.  Gibraltar's recorded history began around 950 BC with the Phoenicians, who lived nearby.  The Carthaginians and Romans later worshipped Hercules in shrines said to have been built on the Rock of Gibraltar, which they called Mons Calpe, the "Hollow Mountain", and which they regarded as one of the twin Pillars of Hercules.  Gibraltar became part of the Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania following the collapse of the Roman Empire and came under Muslim Moorish rule in 711 AD.  It was permanently settled for the first time by the Moors and was renamed Jebel al-Tariq – the Mount of Tariq, later corrupted into Gibraltar.  The Christian Kingdom of Castile annexed it in 1309, lost it again to the Moors in 1333 and finally regained it in 1462. Gibraltar became part of the unified Kingdom of Spain and remained under Spanish rule until 1704.  It was captured during the War of the Spanish Succession by an Anglo-Dutch fleet in the name of Charles VI of Austria, the Habsburg pretender to the Spanish throne.  At the war's end, Spain ceded the territory to Britain under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gibraltar 

Our eyes are sensitive to light which lies in a very small region of the electromagnetic spectrum labeled "visible light".  This "visible light" corresponds to a wavelength range of 400 - 700 nanometers (nm) and a color range of violet through red.  The human eye is not capable of "seeing" radiation with wavelengths outside the visible spectrum.  The visible colors from shortest to longest wavelength are: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.  Ultraviolet radiation has a shorter wavelength than the visible violet light.  Infrared radiation has a longer wavelength than visible red light.  The white light is a mixture of the colors of the visible spectrum.  Black is a total absence of light.  Read more at:  http://science-edu.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/Wavelengths_for_Colors.html 

Liverpool (N.Y.)  Public Library has put together eight OnSafari Geocaching Kits, including a Garmin eTrex 20 handheld GPS device, a getting-started guide and The Geocaching Handbook, all tucked neatly away into a small, red shoulder bag.  Not only are adults permitted to borrow the equipment for up to one week using their Onondaga County Public Library card, but a contest provides a greater incentive for adventurers to go out and locate all five geocaches hidden at Onondaga Lake Park.  After you enter coordinates, a GPS system will lead you to 30 feet or so away from the hidden geocache.  From there, you must rely on the clues provided on geocaching.com to close in on your find. Upon locating your desired geocache, a barter-and-trade system takes place.  The container is filled with a number of small trinkets that other geocachers leave behind. You must then trade something of your own for one of the trinkets provided.  While some people leave behind impersonal nonperishable items like pens or small flashlights, there are others who leave travel bugs and coins that have designated adventure paths.  It’s then up to geocachers to send them on their way.  Liverpool Public Library is the first library in New York state loaning out geocaching kits, and one of the few nationally that’s doing this.  The idea first sprang up after observing the popularity of their Eagle Watching kit, including a pair of binoculars and a map of where to spot eagles in the area.  Having heard about the Onondaga Partnership grants, which seek to attract positive attention to Onondaga Lake, the library began to gather a proposal asking for more money to afford other kits, specifically the geocaching kit.  Amanda Galster  http://www.syracusenewtimes.com/newyork/article-5928-geocaching-in-onondaga-lake-park.html

There are many mnemonics for remembering the order of the planets in our solar system - one of the most popular being My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas, but the demise of Pluto as a planet has changed the picture.  We now have a plethora of mneumonics for the eight remaining planets such as:  My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nothing and My Very Easy Method Just Stop Using Nine.  Find statistics and graphics on the eight planets at:  http://www.astronomyknowhow.com/solar-system.htm