Leslie Elman

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Tue, 06/27/2023 - 6:34pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: June 26, 2023

Equus simplicidens is commonly known as the Hagerman horse, for Hagerman, Idaho, where its fossilized remains were discovered in 1928. Closely related to zebras — although possibly lacking a striped coat — Hagerman horses disappeared from North America about 10,000 years ago, so finding their remains was big news for paleontologists. Idaho’s Hagerman Fossil Beds is now a national monument.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 06/18/2023 - 7:14pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: June 19, 2023

Vincent Van Gogh painted “The Starry Night” in June 1889 while residing in a mental asylum in the south of France. Astronomers and art historians have found that it replicates the position of stars and planets in the night sky at the time it was painted, including the bright planet Venus, “the Morning Star.” In his depiction of the moon, however, Van Gogh took artistic license. He made it a waning crescent when history shows it would have been in the waning gibbous phase.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 06/11/2023 - 3:38pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: June 12, 2023

Bitterroot is the state flower of Montana. Its scientific name is Lewisia rediviva for Meriwether Lewis, who collected samples of it for botanical research. The “rediviva” part of the name refers to the plant’s capacity to revive after it had been without soil or water during its extended trip back east. Lewis boiled the plant’s root and ate it, as the local Shoshone people did, but he said it had “a very bitter taste” that he found “naucious to my pallate.” Thus, we get bitterroot’s common name.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 06/04/2023 - 7:24pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: June 5, 2023

When President George W. Bush established the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in Hawaii in 2006, it covered 139,797 square miles in the Pacific Ocean — more area than all the U.S. national parks combined. In 2016, President Barack Obama enlarged the park area to 582,578 square miles, making it the largest marine protected area on Earth. Its boundaries encompass the habitats of several critically endangered species, the submerged wreck of the USS Yorktown and the Battle of Midway National Memorial on Midway Atoll.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Tue, 05/30/2023 - 4:29pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: May 29, 2023

The U.S. Military Academy Class of 1846 might be the most poignant in West Point’s history. Those 59 classmates who studied and trained together at the academy included 22 who achieved the rank of general during the American Civil War — 12 on the Union side and 10 on the Confederate. Among them were George B. McClellan, briefly general in chief of the Union Army; Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, who died at Chancellorsville; and George E. Pickett, who led the unsuccessful Confederate charge at Gettysburg.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 05/21/2023 - 5:44pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: May 22, 2023

On May 22, 1960, a 9.5 magnitude earthquake occurred near Valdivia, Chile. It remains the largest magnitude earthquake ever recorded. Tsunamis resulting from the quake caused destruction and loss of life in Southern California, Hawaii and as far away as Japan and Alaska. Four years later came the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964. With a 9.2 magnitude, it’s the second-largest earthquake ever recorded.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 05/14/2023 - 5:20pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: May 15, 2023

In poetry, an anapest is a group of three syllables: two unstressed and one stressed. A poem written in anapestic tetrameter has four anapests in each line. (The prefix tetra means four.) It all sounds very fancy until you realize that much of the poetry you loved best as a kid — and possibly still do! — was written in anapestic tetrameter. That includes most of Dr. Seuss as well as Clement Clark Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” Read them aloud and you’ll see.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 05/07/2023 - 8:39pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: May 8, 2023

Helen Magill White was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in the United States, receiving a doctorate in Greek from Boston University in 1877, the year she turned 24. By that time, she was already a full-fledged academic pioneer. She had been the only female student in her class at Boston Public Latin School and a member of the first graduating class at Swarthmore College.

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Sun, 04/30/2023 - 7:31pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: May 1, 2023

Earth isn’t the only celestial body that experiences quakes. NASA started measuring the moon’s seismic activity when the Apollo 11 mission left a seismometer on the moon’s surface in 1969. The InSight space lander recorded more than 1,300 seismic events on Mars between 2018 and 2022. And data from NASA’s MESSENGER space probe showed that Mercury, the smallest planet, is becoming even smaller as a result of “mercury quakes.”

Leslie’s trivia bits - test your knowledge

Published by admin on Tue, 04/25/2023 - 4:26pm

LESLIE’S TRIVIA BITS: April 24, 2023

Chinese checkers is sort of like checkers, but it’s not Chinese. It’s based on a game called Halma — from the Greek word for “jump” — devised in the 1880s by Massachusetts surgeon George Howard Monks. Originally, Halma was played on a square board. The star-shaped board came from Germany, where the game is sometimes called Sternhalma (Star Halma). Naming it Chinese checkers was an American marketing concept from the 1920s intended to capitalize on people’s fascination with the “exotic East.”

Conservative Chronicle

Conservative Chronicle
P.O. Box 29,
Hampton, IA 50441-0029
Phone: 1-800-888-3039

Mid-America Publishing

This newspaper is part of the Mid-America Publishing Family. Please visit www.midampublishing.com for more information.