Where the second biggest is still pretty darn big!
07/01/2019
Updated on 01/16/2020
It didn’t have as compelling a birth as the first Special Air Service regiment. It didn’t have its great founder driving point in a souped-up jeep during attacks on German air bases. It didn’t have the romance of the desert as its initial stomping grounds. About the only thing it seemed to have going for it was the reputation of…read more
02/27/2019
Updated on 07/13/2019
Venus is the planet second-closest to the the sun in our solar system and Earth’s nearest neighbor. The cloudy rocky planet orbits the sun at an average distance of 67,238,251 mi (108,209,475 km) at a mean orbital velocity of 78,339 mph (126,074 km/h). For us Earthlings, Venus also the second-brightest object in the night sky, with the first being the…read more
01/27/2019
In the never-ending political theater whose current star is U.S. President Donald Trump, even something as mundane as the State of the Union Address had become an issue. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) had rescinded her invitation to the President to address a joint session of Congress, thus giving pundits everywhere more reason to yell at each other on…read more
01/06/2019
When it comes to polar exploration, history is the mother of all excursion. To close out 2018, Louis Rudd became the second person to complete a solo crossing of the continent of Antarctica. In what seems a repeat of the Shackleton/Amundsen race to the pole (that was a race to the pole and not a traversal of the continent), the…read more
12/23/2018
John Rutledge (1739-1800) of South Carolina was an intriguing political figure whose highly preventable downfall came swiftly. In the early days of the U.S., political rules and practices were still being hammered out while the lines between what was appropriate and what wasn’t were slowly being drawn. What didn’t always help matters was the press at the time. Rumors were…read more
11/11/2018
Updated on 12/31/2018
This being the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended major fighting in WWI, SilverMedals.net presents “second” facts about the Great War.
09/17/2018
Updated on 10/26/2018
By the time Burt Reynolds signed up for the movie Armored Command (Allied Artists, 1961), his second full-length feature movie, he had already put together a respectable resumé as a stage and TV actor having appeared in at least 15 television shows in not only bit parts but in regular roles. An ex-athlete from Florida with a rugged sexiness that…read more
05/29/2018
Updated on 10/09/2018
When Alan Bean retired from NASA and decided to become a full-time professional fine-art artist, he had to shed his aeronautical engineering and astronaut self to allow his inner artistic vision come through to the canvas. Not an easy task for the former Apollo 12 astronaut, one of only 12 men to have walked on the surface of the moon,…read more
03/08/2018
Updated on 01/13/2019
Second feats and events can come to me from anywhere here at SilverMedals.net, where I’ve taken the collection of “seconds” in history to new and obsessive levels. This one comes from an interesting book review in the The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik who wrote about composer Andrew Lloyd Weber’s new memoir, Unmasked. In the article, Gopnik expounds on the…read more