Shift gears without grinding or stalling

– Saudi Arabia is larger than Texas and Oklahoma combined, but has no permanent rivers. The country has some almost-always dry river beds. The rafting business has proven to be a suspect monetary investment throughout that region.

– Each year there are 2,430 regular season major league baseball games scheduled.

– Have you ever attempted to compete in the pole vault? I did while in high school, but I was never considered to be a “young phenom” by any person deemed to be sane. Some show-off high jumpers were clearing heights well beyond my best vaults. Besides that, I frequently spiked myself or missed the landing pit. It was a brief career. Enter one Armand Duplantis, a junior at Lafayette High school in Louisiana. This guy cleared 19 feet 4 inches in a recent pole vault competition. Now we are talking about a phenom.

– Upswings in the U.S. economy combined with stressful fiscal times in the U.K. have been influences that led a few wealthy Americans to purchase large estates in the tradition-rich country of Scotland. In 2015-2016, eight of the sixteen sold domains (that exceeded 6,000 acres) were acquired by American-based buyers. Most of the marketed manors had been owned by native Scots for centuries.

– A functional automatic transmission for automobiles was developed in 1921. First retailed on a large scale in 1940, the invention made it possible for drivers like me to shift gears without grinding or stalling.

– On the topic of driving: Americans averaged driving 344 million miles every hour in 2016. I can attest that many of those miles were traversed in the Houston and Dallas areas. I have a daughter that swears LA is far more congested than either of those regions. Do understand that I am reporting unofficial observations.

– Fortunately for research linguists, explorer John Wesley Powell used primitive sound recording devices in the nineteenth century to create auditory documentations of numerous Native Americans speaking their languages. Digitized versions of those recording are available at siris.si.edu, click on Native American language.

– A street dubbed The Magnificent Mile is in Chicago. Mucho local residents claim the Magnificent Mile is haunted by victims of the famous 1871 Chicago Fire. Hundreds of people say they have observed what appear to be charred firemen. Many witnesses claim to have detected a strong odor of smoke – and to have heard numerous eerie screams. Sightings are most common in October. The horrendous fire occurred October 8-9, 1871. Well, I cannot recommend the angling prospects in Saudi Arabia, but I have read that realm has access to significant oil reserves.