11-15-14

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Almanac: Week: 46 \ Day: 319 
November Averages: 51° \ 22°



Holiday Observances Today:
America Recycles Day
Clean Your Refrigerator Day
George Spelvin Day- traditional pseudonyms in programs in American theater
Guinness World Record Day
I Love to Write Day
National Bundt (Pan) Day
National Day of Play
National Philanthropy Day
Rock Your Mocs Day
**
Dynasty Day (Belgium-1866-honors Belgium’s 1st patron saint, St Albert the Great
Republic Day (Brazil-1889)
Shichi-Go-San (Japan- traditional rite of passage for 3 & 5 yr old girls/5 &7 boys)
           
Quote of the Day



Historical Highlights for Today
1577 - Sir Francis Drake aboard Pelican travels from Chile to Washington
1660 – 1st kosher butcher licensed in New Amsterdam (now New York City)
1763 - Charles Mason & Jeremiah Dixon begin surveying Mason-Dixon Line between PA & MD
1777 - Articles of Confederation adopted by Continental Congress
1791 - 1st Catholic college in US, Georgetown, opens
1806 - 1st US college magazine, Yale Literary Government, publishes 1st issue
1864 - Union Major General Sherman leaves Atlanta on the "March to the Sea"
1881 - American Federation of Labor (AFL) founded (Pittsburgh)
1884 - Colonization of Africa organized at international conference in Berlin
1920 - League of Nations holds first meeting in Geneva
1932 - Walt Disney Art School created
1941 - Cow Palace opens in San Francisco
1954 - 1st regularly scheduled commercial flights over North Pole begins
1969 - 250,000 peacefully demonstrate in Wash DC against Vietnam War
1969 - Wendy's Hamburgers opens
1977 - Pres Jimmy Carter welcomes Shah of Iran
1979 - Iran cancels all contracts with U.S. oil companies
1990 - US President Bush signs Clear Air Act of 1990
1993 - 13 Cuban refugees land in Florida after stealing a crop-duster in Cuba
2013 - Sony launches the PlayStation Four, selling one million units on the first day
·        •  •
  Birthdays Today:
How many can you identify? Answers below in Birthday’s Today



My Rambling Thoughts
An overcast day with some wind. Two fronts are changing places and bringing in some colder weather. I can handle it.
I’ve got a stack of reading before our discussion on Ebola tomorrow night. Lots of medical stuff that will take some time and google to understand. Looking forward for lots of information from the medical community on Ebola, rather than the dumbed down media. Every day the media makes these blanket statements that really have no meaning. A couple of days ago “America is Ebola free”, today ‘another case of Ebola found in US’. Crazy.
·        •  •
Game  Center (answers at the end of post)
Brain Teasers
Camp Pineveiw's cook, Margaret Johnson, was just about to begin preparing the picnic lunch for all the campers. She already knew she needed to fill 55 bowls of the same size and capacity with the same amount of food. When she was done, she decided to read the guidelines for the picnic, just out of curiosity. The guidelines said:

1. Every camper gets their own bowl of soup.
2. Every two campers will get one bowl of spaghetti to share.
3. Every three campers will get one bowl of salad to share.
4. All campers are required to have their own helping of salad, spaghetti, and soup.

After some rapid calculations, Margaret was able to figure out how many campers were going to the picnic. Can you?           


Found on You Tube with some relevance to today





OK Then…
 ·        •  •
Paraphernalia 4 the Brain:     
Dog Facts…
—A dog's naked behind leaves absolutely no bacteria when pressed against carpet.
—Dogs have been man's pet for over 14,000 years.

England Facts…
—Capt. Robert Campbell, a British officer captured during World War I, was granted leave to visit his dying mother on one condition - that he return to captivity. He kept his word and returned, only to try escaping as soon as he returned.
—The biggest burger in Britain, dubbed the 'Apocalypse Burger', is a mammoth 25,000 calories, weighs 11kg (25lb) and contains £150 (around $233 USD) worth of ingredients.

Flagstaff, AZ History…
100 YEARS AGO
Mr. W. F. Griffin, credit man at Babbitt Bros., was out in his auto when it quit near Bellemont. He was running for the train when he fell on a round rock and broke his leg. He was brought into town by #1. The break is a severe one and will lay him up for some time.
           
Hair Facts…
—When you get Goosebumps and your hair stands, the hair helps to trap air, making you feel warmer by keeping in your body heat.
—Some Chinese-made hair bands were fashioned from recycled condoms.

Harper’s Index…
Estimated number of US fathers of minors in 1989 who did not work outside the home: 1,100,000
Estimated number today: 2,000,000 
           
Internet Facts…
—You can't block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook.
—Facebook is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is colorblind and best sees the shade of blue.

That’s Outrageous from Reader’s Digest…
When Stefan and Erika Svanstorm of Stockholm, Sweden, packed for their four-month honeymoon in December 2010, they had no idea that they should have left room in their suitcases for a fire extinguisher, snowshoes, and a raft. Follow their route as they encounter six natural disasters. Munich, Germany: Caught in one of Europe’s worst blizzards ever; Cairns, Australia: Weathered a cyclone, were evacuated, and spent 24 hours on a cement floor in a shopping center with 2,500 evacuees; Brisbane, Australia: Stuck in floods; Perth, Australia: Narrowly escaped bushfires; Christchurch, New Zealand: Arrived shortly after a 6.3-magnitude earthquake hit; Tokyo, Japan: Survived the horrific earthquake; Stockholm, Sweden: Returned home, marriage still intact.

Rules of Thumb…
BODY HEAT
A resting human gives off as much heat as a 150-watt light bulb. You can use this fact to keep the temperature in a greenhouse constant, even as you come and go. Just turn the light out whenever you go in.
           
Unusual Fact of the Day…
12+1 = 11+2, and "twelve plus one" is an anagram of "eleven plus two."
·        •  •
Joke-of-the-day
A man wrote a letter to the IRS: “I have been unable to sleep knowing that I have cheated on my income tax. I understated my taxable income and have enclosed a check for $200.00. If I still can’t sleep, I will send the rest.”
           
Yep, It Really Happened
Los Angeles Times
Angry taxpayers and retail customers sometimes protest their debt by paying the bill with containers of coins (especially pennies), but what if a company did that to a customer? A court had ruled that Adriana's Insurance Services in Rancho Cucamonga, California, had unjustifiably ejected (and assaulted) 74-year-old Andres Carrasco from its office when he complained about a canceled policy, and ordered Adriana's to pay him about $21,000. Consequently, in August, the still-irritated company dropped off at least 16 buckets full of coins at the customer's lawyer's office.
           
Somewhat Useless Information
Which is the smallest restaurant in the world?
Did you know that ‘SOLO PER DUE’ (“Just for Two”) is the smallest restaurant in the world? The restaurant is in Italy, it has only one table and it takes just two people at a time.
 ‘SOLO PER DUE’ is in a very evocative historical location and in the grounds there are the remains of a Roman villa.
When customers are ready for their meal the lights go down, the atmosphere takes on a magical quality, and you can summon the waiter whenever you like with a silver bell.
The feedback from customers is positive, as they say that they feel moved and that it’s like they have gone back in time.
+++
Who actually writes Wikipedia?
Recent findings of Wikipedia’s growth have been quite interesting, as the bulk of the changes to the original text, are made by a core group of 1400 editors who make thousands of tiny edits.
Prior to that, there are tens of thousands of outsiders, each of whom may not make many other contributions to the site.
In other words, an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it, as businessinsider.com mentions.
However, as Jimbo Wales pointed out, Wikipedia was actually written by “a community … a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” where “I know all of them and they all know each other”. Really, “it’s much like any traditional organization.”
He added: “I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.”      
·        •  •
Check Your Calendar
Observances This Week:
Geography Awareness Week; National Nurse Practioner's Week: 9-15   
National Young Reader's Week; World Kindness Week: 10-16    
National Donor Sabath: 14-16 

National Hunger & Homeless Awareness Week; International Fraud Awareness Week: 15-23      
·        •  •
Today’s Events through History
1620 - Myles Standish leads 16 men in a foot exploration of the northern portion of Cape Cod
1835 - Charles Darwin reaches Tahiti on board HMS Beagle
1919 - US Senate 1st invokes cloture to end a filibuster (Versailles Treaty)
1956 - Elvis Presley's 1st film "Love Me Tender" premieres in NYC
1969 - Janis Joplin, accused of vulgar & indecent language in Tampa, Fla
1993 - Joe Buttafuoco sentence to 6 months for statutory rape of Amy Fisher
·        •  •
Birthday’s Today
C. W. McCall, outlaw singer (Convoy) is 86
Edward Asner, actor (Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant) is 85
Petula Clark, rock vocalist (Downtown) is 82
Yaphet Kotto, African-American actor (Homicide: Life on the Street) is 75
Sam Waterson, actor (Killing Fields; Law & Order) is 74
Kevin Eubanks, bandleader (Tonight Show) is 57

Remembered for being born today
F William Herschel, German/English astronomer (discovered Uranus) (1738-1822)
Gerhart Hauptmann, author (Before Dawn-Nobel 1912), (1862-1946)
Felix Frankfurter, Vienna, Austria, 80th Supreme Court Justice (1882-1965)
Georgia O'Keefe, sculptor/painter (Cow's Skull) (1887-1986)
Erwin Rommel, German Field Marshal (WW II-African campaign) (1891-1944)
W Averell Harriman, US, (Gov-NY)/ambassador to USSR (1891-1986)
Curtis E Le May, air force general/VP candidate (1906-1990)
"Macho Man" Randy Savage, [Poffo], wrestler (1962-2011)
·        •  •
Historical Obits Today
Johannes Kepler, German astronomer, fever, 1630, @58
Lionel Barrymore
, [Blythe], actor (Dr Kildare, Key Largo), heart attack, 1954, @ 76

Tyrone Power, actor (Mark of Zorro), heart attack, 1958, @44
Margaret Mead, anthropologist (Thoughts & Female), cancer, 1978, @76
Baby Fae, received a baboon's heart, 1984, @3 weeks
Stokely Carmichael, American civil rights activist, cancer, 1998, @57
·        •  •
Brain Teasers Answers
 30 campers.
·        •  •
Disclaimer: All opinions are mine…feel free to agree or disagree.
All ‘data’ info is from the internet sites and is usually checked with at least one other source, but I have learned that every site contains mistakes and sadly once the information is out there, many sites simply copy it and is therefore difficult to verify. Also for events occurring before the Gregorian calendar was adopted [1582] the dates may not be totally accurate.
§…And That Is All for Now…§


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Flagstaff, Arizona, United States
I retired in '06--at the ripe old age of 57. I enjoy blogging, photography, traveling, and living life to it's fullest.