Ford Island is an islet in the center of Pearl Harbor, Oahu, in the U.S. state of Hawaii. Its original area of 334 acres (135 ha) was increased during the 1930s to 441 acres (178 ha) with fill dirt after the U.S. Navy dredged Pearl Harbor to make it safe for battleships. The island was the site of an ancient Hawaiian fertility ritual, which was stopped by Christian missionaries during the 1830s. It was given by Kamehameha I to Spanish deserter Francisco de Paula Marín, and was later owned by Seth Porter Ford. In 1916 the U.S. Army bought part of it for use by an aviation division, and by 1939 it was taken over by the U.S. Navy, for whom it was a strategic center of operations in the Pacific Ocean. Ford Island was at the center of the attacks on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. By the late 1990s hundreds of millions of dollars had been invested in real-estate development and infrastructure. Ford Island is home to the USS Arizona memorial, the USS Missouri museum, the Pacific Warfighting Center, and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. The island has been featured in films such as Tora! Tora! Tora! and Pearl Harbor.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Island
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
43 BC:
Cicero, widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists, was killed after having been proscribed as an enemy of the state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero
1815:
Michel Ney, Marshal of France, was executed by a firing squad near Paris' Jardin du Luxembourg for supporting Napoleon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Ney
1972:
The crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft took the photograph "The Blue Marble" (pictured), the first clear image of an illuminated face of Earth, on their way to the Moon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble
1999:
The Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit against the peer-to-peer file sharing network Napster, alleging the service facilitated widespread copyright infringement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster
2007:
A crane barge that had broken free from a tugboat crashed into an oil tanker near Daesan, South Korea, causing the country's worst-ever oil spill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_South_Korea_oil_spill
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
blunderbuss: An old style of muzzleloading firearm and early form of shotgun with a distinctive short, large caliber barrel that is flared at the muzzle, therefore able to fire scattered quantities of nails, stones, shot, etc. at short range: Timothy was excited to find a toy blunderbuss waiting under the Christmas tree. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blunderbuss
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
As soon as one identifies, challenges and overcomes illegitimate power, he or she is an anarchist. Most people are anarchists. What they call themselves doesn’t matter to me. … This world is full of suffering, distress, violence and catastrophes. Students must decide: does something concern you or not? I say: look around, analyze the problems, ask yourself what you can do and set out on the work! --Noam Chomsky https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky