AWESOME FACTS ABOUT EVERYTHING CLV

1. Janette Rankin was the first woman ever elected to Congress in the United States - to the House of Representatives in 1916 from Montana. A life-long pacifist and advocate for the rights of women and children, she was one of 50 members of Congress who voted again entry into WW I. Re-elected in 1940, she was the only member of Congress to vote against entering WWII (suspecting as others did that Roosevelt had ulterior motives). She said, "I may be the first woman elected to Congress, but I won't be the last." She was right about that, but ironically not a single woman from Montana has been elected to Congress since Janette Rankin.

2. The title Czar refers back to Julius Caesar.

3. Abraham Lincoln was a highly-regarded wrestler - losing only one of 300 matches.

4. The Continental Plates generally move at a rate of a few centimeters per year - roughly the speed at which fingernails grow.

5. The Florida Keys Overseas Highway is considered by some to be the Eighth Wonder of the World - spanning 800 keys over 113 miles of open ocean - from the mainland to Key West. 

6. The "belly button" of the surface of the Earth is where the Equator meets the Prime Meridian - located in the South Atlantic Ocean at an imaginary place called Null Island (0 degrees latitude - 0 degrees longitude - hence the Null). Null Island is not an actual land mass, but a point used in geospatial data (there's a buoy floating there to mark the spot). The point on the Earth closest to everyone in the world, on average, is in Central Asia. The farthest point from everyone on earth is near Easter Island in the South Pacific.7

7. Hurricane names are chosen from six, pre-determined rotating lists maintained by The National Hurricane Center and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Each list contains names starting with 21 letters of the alphabet, alternating between male and female names. The letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z are not used because of the shortage of names starting with those letters. The lists are rotated every six years, so the names used in 2024 will be re-used in 2030. The names of particularly devastating hurricanes, like Andrew and Katrina, are taken off the list and never used again.

8. The 1913 Gettysburg Reunion commemorating the 50th anniversary of the historic battle and turning point of the Civil War (July 1-3, 1863), drew 54,407 veterans (about 8,750 Confederate). Despite concerns "that there might be unpleasant differences, at least, between the blue and the gray", the peaceful reunion was characterized by Union-Confederate camaraderie. President Wilson's July 4th address summarized the spirit: "We have found one another again as comrades and brothers in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten - except that we shall not forget your splendid valor."

In either creating or literally fulfilling the idiom, two veterans left the reunion and went into town and bought a hatchet. They walked to where their regiments had met and buried it.