10/2/13

FYI: Any blue text is a link. Click to check it out!

Almanac: Flagstaff:  Week: 40/ Day: 275   

Today: H 69°…L 35°…Ave. humidity: 46%

Wind: ave:   8mph; Gusts:  21mph  

Average High: 69° Record High:  82° (1991)

Average Low: 36° Record Low:  18° (1971)

Quote of the Day

Today’s Historical Highlights

1st cartoon comic strip (The Yellow Kid) is printed in a newspaper…1895

24th Olympic games close at Seoul, Korea…1988

5 school girls are murdered in a shooting at an Amish school in PA…2006

Brigham Young, Mormon leader, arrested for bigamy…1871

George Washington sends Bill of Rights to the States for ratification…1789

J Osterhoudt patents tin can with key opener…1866

NFL plays first regular season game outside US- AZ Cardinals defeat the 49ers 

     in Mexico City…2005

Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz first published…1950

Pres Woodrow Wilson has a stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed…1919

Prototype of modern reflecting telescope completed by Jan Lippershey…1608

San Diego Zoo founded…1916

Thurgood Marshall sworn in as 1st black Supreme Court Justice…1967

US colony Connecticut passes law against Quakers…1656

♫  Today’s Birthdays: ♫   

How many can you identify?…answers in Today’s Birthdays

My Free Rambling Thoughts   

Had my teeth cleaning and checkup early this morning. Things are going well. Still need to do a crown sometime in the future.

 

I didn’t watch a lot of news today, since all that was really on was the government shutdown. I did hear some interesting campaign speech excerpts from the 2010 congressional races. In many of the ‘new’ districts that were created after the census, the Republican candidate was already saying that a shutdown was the only way to get what they want. Here is N. AZ we were all reminded of the 1996 shutdown when our Governor showed up at the Grand Canyon with state police officers demanding to let them do the work and reopen the National Park.  He failed, but during the next shutdown, he brokered a deal that allowed the state to pay the salaries of park employees to keep the park open. The Fed repaid all that money. Our current governor was offered the same deal and she declined. There are some 18,000 visitors (mostly foreigners)/day at this time of year. Also one large group of tourists had spent $30,000 for a private trip down the Grand Canyon. They were turned back by rangers at Lee’s Ferry, the entry point, and will probably lose their money, unless they had trip insurance. This is more proof that the shutdown has serious consequences for the vendors at all National Parks by this silly shutdown. No tourists means no jobs, now and in the future. I heard from several currently working former colleagues who have been deemed ‘essential’ who are working but been told they may not get paid. The work still has to be done…but why should they not get paid while the people who caused this shutdown are getting paid. And the latest guess is that a 3 day shutdown will cost the economy $32billion. And good for the WWII vets who moved the barrier at the WWII memorial in DC so they could see the open space memorial.

Game  Center (answers at the end of post)

Brain Teasers

This deadly 8-letter word can really "put people in a frenzy," and for very good reason. If you drop letter 1 and order the rest of the letters like so [8745623], then you get exactly what the word can do. So, if you are affected by it, you had better get a good [65478], or you could be taking a very long [321]!

Lifestyle  Substance:     

Found on You Tube with some relevance to today

• Mahatma Gandhi First Television Interview

• Duchamp interviews

• Don Mclean American Pie

• Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens

• Chris LeDoux Riding For a Fall

Hmmmm…Fearsome Phobias

If you have an irrational fear of... Eating
You're suffering from... Phagophobia Greek phago 'to eat'

If you have an irrational fear of... Electricity
You're suffering from... Electrophobia Modern Latin electricus "resembling amber" 

Interesting Disney

Harper’s Index    

• Percentage of all petitions to hear a case the Supreme Court has granted in the past three years: 1

• Percentage of positions it has granted that were supported by an amicus brief (legal opinion) from the US Chamber of Commerce: 32

Unusual Fact of the Day

The first Star Wars movie (A New Hope) was originally given a movie rating of G. That changed when they added the burning corpses of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. The rating was quickly changed to PG.

Joke-of-the-day

Did you hear about the dead cabbage? There was a big turnip at the funeral.

Rules of Thumb:   

Easy shortcuts to make an ‘educated’ guess

SELLING BOOKS

Ten percent of bookstore customers buy 90 percent of the books. Ten percent never buy anything.   

Yeah, It Really Happened

MINNEAPOLIS - Thousands of volunteers helped catalog more than 300,000 galaxies, the first time so much galaxy population information was collected, a U.S. researcher said. While computers are good for automatically measuring properties such as size and color of galaxies, the human eye is better for tackling the more challenging characteristics, such as shape and structure, the University of Minnesota said Tuesday in a release. Enter "Galaxy Zoo 2" project, the second phase of a crowdsourcing effort to help categorize the galaxies in the universe, the Minneapolis university said. "This catalog is the first time we've been able to gather this much information about a population of galaxies," said Kyle Willet, one of the researchers. "People all over the world are beginning to examine the data to gain a more detailed understanding of galaxy types." From February 2009 to April 2010, more than 83,000 Galaxy Zoo 2 volunteers worldwide looked at images online gathered from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The participants answered questions about the galaxy, including whether it had spirals, the number of spiral arms present, or if it had galactic bars, which are long extended features representing a concentration of stars. Each image was classified an average of 40 to 45 times to ensure accuracy, the researchers said. Researchers estimate the volunteers' effort represents about 30 years of full-time work if it were done by one researcher, and represents a boon to scientists gathering more information than ever using telescopes. "With today's high-powered telescopes, we are gathering so many new images that astronomers just can't keep up with detailed classifications," said Lucy Fortson, another researcher and a professor of physics and astronomy at the U of M. "We could never have produced a data catalog like this without crowdsourcing help from the public."

Somewhat Useless Information   

Facts About Weather and Nature

• You may have heard someone say, “It’s raining cats and dogs.” There have been actual documented cases from all over the world of fish, frogs, dead birds, snakes, snails, beetles, worms and jellyfish raining down from the sky in great numbers, but no reports of showers of cats or dogs.

• Almost two-thirds of the earths surface is covered by water. If the earth were flat, water would cover everything in a layer two miles deep!

• During a solar eclipse, the shadows of leaves make the same crescent shape of the eclipsing sun. The image is made by light passing through tiny holes in the leaves.

• Tired of the cold weather? Take a vacation on the hottest planet in the solar system – Venus. At over 800 degrees, it is hotter than Mercury because the clouds and abundant carbon dioxide hold in most of the heat received from the sun.

• Geologists have discovered there seems to be more water miles deep between the rocks of Earths mantle than in all the oceans of the world. The intense pressure of the tons of rocks above keeps the hot water from turning to steam and escaping.

Calendar Information        

Happening This Week:

1-7

Universal Children's Week
World Dairy Expo

Today Is                                                                      

·        Balloons Around The World Day

·        Country Inn, Bed-and-Breakfast Day

·        Guardian Angels Day

·        Intergeneration Day

·        International Day of Non-violence

·        National Custodial Workers Day

·        Phileas Fogg's Wager Day

·        World Farm Animals Day

~~~~

·        Guinea: Independence Day (1958 from France)

Today’s Events through History  

"Alfred Hitchcock Presents" premieres…1955

"Twilight Zone" premieres on CBS-TV…1959

"Ben Casey" premieres on NBC-TV…1961

~~~

1st Pan American conference (Washington DC) …1889

Jacques Cartier discovers Mount Royal (Montreal)…1535

Steffi Graf becomes the youngest woman to win 500 pro tennis matches…1991

Today’s Birthdays                                                           

Rex Reed, movie critic/actor (Myra Breckinridge) is 75

Don McLean, singer/songwriter (American Pie, Vincent) is 68

Annie Leibovitz, photgrapher (Rolling Stones) is 64

Sting, [Gordon Sumner], rock vocalist (Police-Roxanne)/actor (Dune) is 62

Lorraine Bracco, actress (Sopranos) is 58

Kelly Ripa, actress (Talk Show host/actress) is 43

Remembered for being born today

Nat Turner, Virginia, leader of major slave rebellion [1800-1831]

Mahatma Gandhi [Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi], pacifist and spiritual leader [1869-1948]

Jack Parsons, American rocket scientist, author, and occultist [1914-1952]

Bud Abbott, comedian (Abbott & Costello) [1895-1974]

Groucho Marx, [Julius], comedian (Marx Bros, You Bet Your Life) [1890-1977]

Johnnie Cochran, attorney (OJ Simpson defense attorney) [1937-2005]

Chris LeDoux, country singer (Ridin' for a Fall) [1948-2005]

Today’s Historical Obits                                                           

Gene Autry, singer, actor, and entrepreneur…1998…@91

Samuel Adams, US revolutionary (Boston Massacre-Tea Party) and politician…1803…@81

Marcel Duchamp, French painter and sculptor (Nude Descending a Staircase)…1968…@81

Harriet Nelson, actress (Ozzie & Harriet)…1994…@85

Rock Hudson (Roy Harold Scherer, Jr.), actor (MacMillian & Wife)…AIDS…1985…@59

Frank Lovejoy, actor (Man Against Crime, Meet McGraw)…heart attack…1962…@50

Brain Teasers

PANDEMIC

DEM is a Greek root for people. A (PAN- [DEM] -IC) puts people (DEM) in a frenzy (PANIC).

[8745623] = CIDE MAN

Cide is a Latin root for kill. A pandemic "kills mankind."

And of course...if you contract the disease, you need a good [65478] = MEDIC, or you may take a long [321] = NAP (death).

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 has mistakes and sadly once out 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  §