1-15-14

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Flagstaff Almanac:

Week: 02 / Day:  015 

Today: L 16°…H 50°… Ave. humidity: 46%

Wind: ave:   24mph; Gusts:  45mph  

Average Low: 16° Record Low:  -12° (1937)

Average High: 43° Record High:  65° (1943)

Quote of the Day

 

Today’s Historical Highlights

1535 - Henry VIII declares himself head of the Church in England

1759 - British Museum opens in Montague House, London

1797 - 1st top hat worn (John Etherington of London)

1831 - 1st US-built locomotive to pull a passenger train makes 1st run

1844 - University of Notre Dame receives its charter in Indiana

1864 - Sixty starving NAVAJOs surrender to Kit Carson after the Canyon de Chelly fight

1870 - Donkey 1st used as symbol of Democratic Party, in Harper's Weekly

1895 - Tchaikovsky's ballet "Swan Lake" premieres, St Petersburg 

1919 - 2 million gallons of molasses flood Boston MA, drowning 21

1922 - Irish Free State forms; Michael Collins becomes 1st Premier

1943 - World's largest office building, Pentagon, completed

1951 - Supreme Court rule "clear & present danger" of incitement to riot is not 

          protected speech

1973 - Pres Nixon suspends all US offensive action in N Vietnam

1998 - NASA announces John Glenn, 76, may fly in space again

2001 - Wikipedia, a free Wiki content encyclopedia, goes online.

2009 - US Airways Flight 1549 makes an emergency landing into the Hudson River

♫  Today’s Birthdays: ♫   

How many can you identify? Answers in Today’s Birthdays

 

My Free Rambling Thoughts   

An unexpected windy day with not a cloud in the sky. The wind made it a little too cool to spend much time outside.

 

AOL’s spam engine must have been turned off today…I got at least 15 spam mails that had weird addresses saying they were sending me my requested documents. Never requested any, and so didn’t open any of them. Just hit the spam button. Come on AOL, get your act together.

 

Amazing story I read today has cleared John Kerry in the ‘Swift Boat’ incident and the people investigated the charges for 9 years and now say he is a ‘true American hero’. He seems to be doing a great job as SofS and thanks to the political machines, never had a chance to show us how he would have been as a President. It is way past time for a change in our two party system. I’m all for vetting a candidate, but raising questions that have no merit is not fair to the process. Sadly, it happens with both parties. There has to be a better way.

 

Never give up seems to be the mantra of our former US Rep. He has been found guilty of several counts of misusing his office, yet he keeps stalling his prison sentence. First he held off the actual trial with a bunch of legal gibberish. Then the trial had numerous postponements then finally he was found guilty and sentenced to prison. He was to report to prison next week, but has filed yet another of his never-ending appeals. I didn’t like him when he was representing us, as he was a carpetbagger who came in to our district when it was determined by political powers that he might win, if he moved. So he did, then after a couple of terms, he resigned while under investigation and hasn’t been seen or heard from in our district since then. Now we just hear about him while he lives somewhere else. A real disgusting former politician.

Game  Center (answers at the end of post)

Brain Teasers

A group of four prisoners were held captive by the enemy and each prisoner was to be shot each day through the week. As natural disasters were common in this specific part of the world, the group of prisoners decided to make up a plan of distracting the guards. Before each prisoner would be shot, they would shout out a natural disaster, which would cause chaos and distract everyone to give enough time for each prisoner to escape. As three days passed the first three prisoners escaped by shouting out their chosen natural disasters and running away, however the final prisoner shouted out a disaster and was shot dead on the spot. 

What was the natural disaster he shouted?

Lifestyle  Substance:     

Found on You Tube with some relevance to today

• Charo performs Malagueña

• gene krupa buddy rich drum battle

• George Harrison-My Sweet Lord (Studio Version)

• Harry Nilsson - Everybody's Talkin'

• Hill Street Blues Intro

• SNL THE CONEHEADS!

Actual Complaints… These are actual complaints received from dissatisfied customers by Thomas Cook Vacations (based on a Thomas Cook/ABTA survey):

"We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price."

Suggested New State Mottos:

New Mexico: Lizards Make Excellent Pets

Something to Ponder in your free time…

• If work is so terrific, why do they have to pay you to do it?

• If all the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?

Auction Prices

A $138 Picasso painting.

The 1914 work, "Man in the Opera Hat," is actually worth a whopping $1 million, but a charity event in Paris offered the painting up for a measly $138 raffle ticket. A 25-year-old Pennsylvania man named Jeffrey Gonano was the lucky winner.

OK Then…

 

Harper’s Index 

Number of privately operated prisons in the United States: 106

Unusual Fact of the Day

Kentucky Derby fans may notice that race horses never walk to the starting gate alone. Horses are social animals, and thoroughbreds spend a lot of lonely time on the road. Therefore, it is traditional to bring their stable mate, or “companion pony” along to keep them soothed.

Joke-of-the-day

During a robbery, one of the robbers mask slid down.

He looked at a man and asked. Did you see my face?

The man said yes! The robber shot him.

Then he asked a woman. Did you see my face?

She said no, but my husband over there did.

Rules of Thumb:   

Easy shortcuts to make an ‘educated’ guess

LEANING A KAYAK

In a kayak, when in doubt, lean downstream.   

Yeah, It Really Happened

 VICTORIA, British Columbia - A newly discovered three-star system may yield clues to cosmic mysteries and even challenge Einstein's theory of General Relativity, a Canadian astronomer says. University of British Columbia astronomer Ingrid Stairs is part of an international team studying a system of two white dwarf stars and a superdense pulsar all packed within a space smaller than the Earth's orbit around the sun. The pulsar, 4,200 light-years from Earth and spinning nearly 366 times per second, was found to be in close orbit with a white dwarf star and the pair are in orbit with another, more distant white dwarf, the researchers said. The three-body system offers the best opportunity yet to test a possible violation of a key concept in Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity: the strong equivalence principle, which states that the effect of gravity on a body does not depend on the nature or internal structure of that body, they said. "By doing very high-precision timing of the pulses coming from the pulsar, we can test for such a deviation from the strong equivalence principle at a sensitivity several orders of magnitude greater than ever before available," Stairs said in a university release Monday. "Finding a deviation from the strong equivalence principle would indicate a breakdown of General Relativity and would point us toward a new, revised theory of gravity." When a massive star explodes as a supernova and its remains collapse into a super dense neutron star, some of its mass is converted into gravitational binding energy that holds the dense star together; the strong equivalence principle says that this binding energy will still react gravitationally as if it were mass, while several proposed alternatives to General Relativity hold that it will not. "This triple system gives us a natural cosmic laboratory far better than anything found before for learning exactly how such three-body systems work and potentially for detecting problems with General Relativity that physicists expect to see under extreme conditions," study leader Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va., said. "This is a fascinating system in many ways, including what must have been a completely crazy formation history, and we have much work to do to fully understand it."

Somewhat Useless Information   

• Barbie, our favorite fashion doll, was a creation by the Mattel toy company and an inspiration by the American businesswoman Ruth Handler. She launched it as soon as she realized that there was a gap in dolls market, as little children used to play only with infant dolls up to those days. Ruth Handler used the German doll ‘Bild Lilli’ as her inspiration and moved to the creation of Barbie in March 9, 1959, which means that Barbie is going to be 55 years old in March 9, 2014!

• Steve Jobs, the American  entrepreneur, marketer, and inventor, who was the co-founder (along with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne), chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc, had several sides of his life unknown till… now!

• Ten things you may have ignored about Steve Jobs, are the following: He didn’ t know his sister, the novelist Mona Simpson,  until he was an adult. His father’s name was Abdulfattah Jandali. He made the game “Breakout”. Claiming he was sterile, he denied paternity on his first child. He used to eat fish and no other meat, he was a ”
pescetarian”. He didn’t give any money to charity. And when he became Apple’s CEO he stopped all of their philanthropic programs. He lied to his partner Steve Wozniak. When they made Breakout for Atari, Wozniak and Jobs were going to split the pay 50-50. Atari gave Jobs $5000 to do the job. He told Wozniak he got $700 so Wozniak took home $350. He was a Zen Buddhist. He never went to college. He used LSD at least once when he was younger.

• It is true that once a woman gets angry, she has many weapons to defense her feelings. One of these weapons is her… footwear! It is said that 40% of women have hurled footwear at a man, including trainers, as well as high heels.

• If your dog eats grass it is not something you should worry about. Modern dogs are not like their ancestors which means that do not adopt eating habits of them, such as eating a prey entirely. Experts say that modern dogs use to eat plants (mostly grass as it is the closest at hand) because of evolution and domestication. In other words, dogs eat grass as an alternative food source. Apart from grass, there are dogs such as wild canines who eat fruits, berries, and other vegetables.

Calendar Information        

Happening This Week:

11-17

Cuckoo Dancing Week
13-19

National Vocation Awareness Week  
National Soccer Coaches of America Week

Today Is                                                                      

·        Humanitarian Day

Today’s Events through History  

1863 - 1st US newspaper printed on wood-pulp paper, Boston Morning Journal

1882 - 1st US ski club forms (Berlin NH)

1889 - The Coca-Cola Company, then known as the Pemberton Medicine 

           Company, incorporated

1907 - Gold dental inlays 1st described by Wm Taggart, who invented them

1961 - Supremes signed with Motown Records

1971 - George Harrison releases "My Sweet Lord"

1975 - Space Mountain opens (Disneyland)

1977 - Coneheads debut on "Saturday Night Live"

1981 - "Hill Street Blues" premieres on NBC-TV

Today’s Birthdays                                                           

Charo [Maria Baeza], Spanish-American actress, comedienne and flamenco guitarist is 63

Mario Van Peebles, Mexico, actor (Posse, South Bronx Heroes) is 57

LeShon Johnson, running back (Arizona Cardinals) is 43

January Jones, actress (X-Men) is 36

Remembered for being born today

1622 – Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), French playwright  

1754 - Richard Martin, Irish animal rights activist  

1798 - Thomas Crofton Croker, Irish story teller (Fairy legends)

1845 - Ella Flagg Young, 1st woman pres (National Educational Association)

1908 - Edward Teller, Budapest Hungary, fathered H-bomb (Manhattan Project)

1909 - Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman's drummer (Sing Sing Sing)

1913 - Lloyd Bridges, actor (Sea Hunt, Roots, Airplane)

1918 - Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt (1954-1971)

1929 - Martin Luther King Jr, clergyman and leader of the Civil Rights Movement (Nobel 1964)

Today’s Historical Obits                                                           

Daisy Ashford, English child writer (The Young Visitors) in 1972 @90

Ray Bolger, actor/dancer (Wizard of Oz) in 1987 @83

Sean MacBride, Ireland, commander of Irish Republican Army in 1988 @83

Dru Drury, English entomologist in 1804 @78

Harry Nilsson, rock vocalist (Everybody's Talkin') heart attack in 1994 @52

Brad Renfro, actor (The Client) of OD in 2008 @25

Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia murdered in 1947 @22

Brain Teasers

Fire

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  §