* Astronomy

The Moscow-Washington hotline is a system that allows direct communication between the leaders of the United States and Russia.
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The hotline became operative August 30, 1963. Because the link was not in constant use it had to be tested each day. This called for creative dialogue between two archenemies. Poems and stories of all sorts were exchanged. Sometimes baseball game scores from the American side or excerpts from Ivan Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter" on the Soviet side were transmitted. However, some of the exchanges caused puzzlement on the Soviet end. One day, Andrei Gromyko asked Dean Rusk 'What does it mean when your people say, "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog?"
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