1-18-14

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Flagstaff Almanac:

Week: 02 / Day:  018 

Today: L 16°…H 52°… Ave. humidity: 47%

Wind: ave:   mph; Gusts:  mph  

Average Low: 17° Record Low:  -8° (1995)

Average High: 43° Record High:  64° (1971)

Quote of the Day

 

Today’s Historical Highlights

1644 - Perplexed Pilgrims in Boston reported America's 1st UFO sighting

1733 - 1st polar bear exhibited in America (Boston)

1788 - 736 convicts from England setup a penal colony

1911 - 1st shipboard landing of a plane 

1958 - The LUMBEE break up a KKK meeting and make national headlines.

1962 - US begins spraying foliage in Vietnam to reveal Viet Cong guerrillas

1983 - IOC restores Jim Thorpe's Olympic medals 70 years after he was paid $25 

             in semipro baseball

1993 - Martin Luther King Jr holiday observed in all 50 states for 1st time

♫  Today’s Birthdays: ♫   

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

 

My Free Rambling Thoughts   

Still dry here…and we already had our first ‘wildfire’ of the year in Flagstaff. It was small and put out be numerous engines from our local fire dept. Still, very scary…way to dry…with no moisture predicted in the near future.

 

What? Another school shooting today…two wounded in their arms…in Philadelphia. There have been at least 28 SCHOOL SHOOTINGS since Newtown. That is like one shooting every two weeks in the last year. Every interview shows people crying ‘we thought it couldn’t happen here’. While I am not a complete news junkie, the NRA seems to have been very quiet of late. Congress seems to be pretty quiet on gun violence also. This was certainly not the direction I expected education to take during my career and thereafter. We need to find a way to keep guns out of the hands of children and the mentally unbalanced. The conservative side has very little problem to take away the privacy of every American citizen to make us safer from terrorists but is unable to deal with gun violence…saying the 4^th amendment protects us. They say that we should not be concerned about losing privacy because if one is not doing anything wrong, then there is nothing to worry about. Well more background checks for gun purchases should be the same…if you haven’t done anything wrong, you shouldn’t worry about it.

 

I did listen to Obama talk about the NSA today. He laid out US history for those who don’t know it, telling us how everyone from Paul Revere until today has spied. He is making some changes in the spying, but is not ending it. What a world we live in.

Game  Center (answers at the end of post)

Brain Teasers

In each sentence below, two words are incomplete. The two words end in the same three letters, so they look like they should rhyme, but they don't. See if you can figure out the missing letters in each sentence.
Example: One symptom of bronchitis is a ro___ co___. (The two words are: rough & cough.)

1. When God speaks, it is a w___ from the L___. 2 After the fl___, Noah disembarked and st___ on Mount Ararat. 3. If it doesn't rain today, I will wa___ the garden la___. 4. He was so___ to wo___ his family by arriving home late.

Lifestyle  Substance:     

Found on You Tube with some relevance to today

• $6 Million Man

• Cary Grant tribute narrated by Michael Caine

• Celebrity Billiards wiht Minnesota Fats

• Samantha Mumba - Baby Come On Over

• THE DONNA REED SHOW (1958-1966)

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

• "They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax."
• "No one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared."

Suggested New State Mottos:

• Kansas: First Of The Rectangle States

• Maryland: If You Can Dream It, We Can Tax It

Something to Ponder in your free time…

• Why do we put suits in garment bags and garments in a suitcase?

• How come abbreviated is such a long word?

Auction Prices

A 65-year-old slice of Royal Wedding cake. A piece of the fruit cake served at the 1947 wedding of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh was sold by PFC Auctions for $925. Long live the fruit cake.

OK Then…

 

Harper’s Index 

Potholes in the United States: 55,961,000

Unusual Fact of the Day

Born Harold Jenkins, Conway Twitty got his stage name from two cities (Conway, Arkansas, and Twitty, Texas) near his home.

Joke-of-the-day

This guy goes into a doctor's office. The doctor says, "Oh, Mr. Jones! We have the results of your test. Do you want the bad news first or the very bad news?"

The guy shrugs and says, "Well I guess I'll have the bad news first."

"Well the bad news is, you have 24 hours to live," the doctor replies.

The man is distraught, "24 hours to live? That's horrible! What could be worse than that? What's the VERY bad news?"

The doctor folds his hands and sighs, "The very bad news is...I've been trying to contact you since yesterday."  

Rules of Thumb:   

Easy shortcuts to make an ‘educated’ guess

DRINKING VODKA

You need four cans of tomato juice for one bottle of vodka. You need four bottles of vodka and one package of lemons per bottle of hot sauce.    

Yeah, It Really Happened

The stench of manure was in the air outside French parliament Thursday after a protester dumped a truck-full of animal excrement in front of the National Assembly in Paris.

According to local reports, the driver left the odorous present for parliament members and President Francois Hollande. "Out with Hollande and the whole political class!" a statement on the side of the truck read, the Agence France-Presse reports.

Somewhat Useless Information   

• The kid on the Cracker Jack box is named Robert.

• The seven Gummi Bears are named Gruffi, Cubbi, Tummi, Zummi, Sunni, Gusto, and Grammi.

• The double Popsicle stick was introduced during the Depression. It was designed so two people could share it.

• Five Jell-O flavors that flopped: celery, coffee, cola, apple, and chocolate.

• Twinkie inventor Jimmy Dewar ate 40,177 Twinkies in his lifetime.

• Bellysinkers, doorknobs, and burl cakes are all nicknames for doughnuts.

Calendar Information        

Happening This Week:

13-19

National Vocation Awareness Week  
National Soccer Coaches of America Week
16-26

Sundance Film Festival
17-23

National Fresh Squeezed Juice Week
18-19

Bald Eagle Appreciation Days
18-26

International Snowmobile Safety and Awareness Week  
Week of Christian Unity
Clean Out Your Inbox Week
Healthy Weight Week
Hunt For Happiness Week

Today Is                                                                      

·        National Sanctity of Human Life Day (or Pro-Life Day)

·        Polar Bear Swim(Seward, AK) 

·        Rid the World of Fad Diets and Gimmicks Day

·        Thesaurus Day

·        Winnie The Pooh Day

Today’s Events through History  

1777 - San Jose California, founded

1896 - 1st demonstration of an X-ray machine in US (NYC)

1944 - 1st Chinese naturalized US citizen since repeal of exclusion acts

1964 - Beatles 1st appear on Billboard Chart (I Want to Hold Your Hand-#35)

1974 - "$6 Million Man" starring Lee Majors premieres on ABC TV

2002 - Sierra Leone Civil War was finally declared over.

2012 - Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) blackout becomes the largest protest in the 

           history of the internet

Today’s Birthdays                                                           

Kevin Costner, actor (Fandango, Silverado, Bull Durham) is 59

Samantha Mumba, Irish singer and actress is 31

Remembered for being born today

1779 - Peter Roget, thesaurus fame/inventor (slide rule, pocket chessboard)

1782 - Daniel Webster, Salisbury NH, orator/politician/lawyer, (d. 1852)

1892 - Oliver Hardy, comedy team member (Laurel & Hardy)

1904 - Cary Grant (Archibald Alexander Leach), actor (Arsenic & Old Lace,

           North by Northwest)

1913 - Danny Kaye, Brooklyn, UNICEF/comedian/actor (Danny Kaye Show)

1921 - Robert Glaser, educational psychologist (National Assessment of 

            Educational Progress) 

1950 - John Hughes, director (Breakfast Club, 16 Candles, Weird Science)

Today’s Historical Obits                                                           

John Tyler, 10th US pres stroke in 1862 @71

Wallace Reid, actor (Birth of a Nation) morphine in 1923 @31

Rudyard Kipling, author (Gunga Din, Nobel 1907) perforated ulcer 1936 @70

Sydney Greenstreet, actor (Conflict, Maltese Falcon) diabetes 1954 @74

Carl Betz, actor (Alex Stone-Donna Reed Show) cancer in 1978 @56

Nita Krebs, actor (Munchkin-Wizard of Oz) 1991 @85

Minnesota Fats, [Rudolf Wanderone Jr], billiard hustler 1996 @82 or 95

Sargent Shriver, American politician 2011 @95

Brain Teasers

1. word Lord 2. flood stood 3. water later 4. sorry worry

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  §