In 1927, Charles Lindbergh made the first solo flight over the Atlantic, flying from a small airfield in New York state to Paris. It took 33 hours, with no autopilot, so Lindbergh was on the stick the whole time. So how did he keep himself awake? Through an ingenious homemade device.....he tied a heavy iron nut (as in a nut that holds a bolt in place) to a one foot long length of string, and tied the other end to one finger. He held the nut in his hand the whole flight. If he started to drift off, his grip on the nut loosened, it fell and jerked his finger, waking him up again.
Kind of like when I am sitting here playing a word game on my phone and I start falling asleep and the phone starts slipping through my hands... that wakes me up!
Was prepared to challenge this, but its probably correct. In July 1979, Donna Summer had number one songs with "Hot Stuff" and then "Bad Girls", but there was a two-week gap between the two. I know this because I'm a stat geek and every now and then I get into total geek project mode. Just finished my latest, which was to determine the most popular songs of the 70s decade. I did this by inputting every weekly Billboard Top 40 Pop chart on a spreadsheet and scoring the songs; 40 points for #1, 39 for #2 and so on. A little surprising that a lot of "traditional" 70s hits like Stairway to Heaven, Hotel California, etc, didn't chart well at all. I expected the disco era would be huge, and sure enough, the Bee Gees and their brother Andy Gibb had 5 of the top 10 songs. I thought the number one song would turn out to be "Night Fever", and it was top 10, but number one was "How Deep Is Your Love."
I know Tool knocked her out of the top spot ~2019 and all those little teeny bopper idiots lost their shit because they had no idea who Tool was. It was awesome!
You would like Professor of Rock on YouTube. Sometimes he features a specific artist or song, but other times he does a Top Ten review of a week from the 1980s. He finishes by re-ranking the top ten on streaming, so we see which ones had staying power.
A ship's captain named John D. Phillips once pulled off the greatest navigational prank of all time. Phillips was commanding the passenger steamer SS Warrimoo on the Vancouver, Canada to Australia run when he received a plot position from the ship's navigator. Noting the position and time, Phillips made a slight course and speed change and managed to have the ship located at the precise point where the International Date Line and the Equator meet at midnight. Crossing the IDL changed the date from December 31, 1899 to January 1, 1900. Phillips had managed to place his ship in: Two different dates, two different months, two different years, two different centuries, two different hemispheres and two different seasons at the same time.
I'm 20 pages into My Effin' Life, by Geddy Lee and picked up a LKF: Geddy Lee and Rick Moranis were elementary school classmates.
