1-30-14

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Flagstaff Almanac:

Week: 05 / Day: 030   

Today: L 18°…H 59°… Ave. humidity: 40%

Wind: ave:   12mph; Gusts:  21mph  

Average Low: 17° Record Low:  -19° (1979)

Average High: 44° Record High:  66° (1971)

Quote of the Day

 

Today’s Historical Highlights

1487 - Bell chimes invented

1815 - Burned Library of Congress reestablished with Jefferson's 6500 vols

1835 - 1st attempted assassination of a US President--President Andrew Jackson

1894 - Pneumatic hammer patented by Charles King of Detroit

1917 - 1st jazz record recorded (Dark Town Strutters Ball)

1922 - World Law Day, 1st celebrated

1931 - Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights" premieres at Los Angeles Theater

1933 - "Lone Ranger" begins a 21-year run on ABC radio

1935 - Ezra Pound meets Benito Mussolini, reads from a draft of "Cantos"

1946 - 1st issue of Franklin Roosevelt dime

1948 - Mahatma Gandhi assassinated by Nathuram Godse

1956 - KRMA TV channel 6 in Denver, CO (PBS) begins broadcasting

1956 - Martin Luther King Jr's home bombed

1961 - KAET TV channel 8 in Phoenix, AZ (PBS) begins broadcasting

1972 - Bloody Sunday: British soldiers fire on Catholics in Londonderry, 13 die

1989 - American embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan closes.

♫  Today’s Birthdays: ♫   

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

 

My Free Rambling Thoughts   

Turned on the old internet machine to be greeted with a high wind advisory for tomorrow. As of midnight we will have tied the record for consecutive days with no precipitation…and now we get a wind advisory…to dry the tinderbox out even more. The only good thing in the weather forecast is that we might get snow on Friday. Much needed and won’t complain unless it is more than a foot.  

I can’t figure out if I am getting more cynical or more educated. I did listen to the speech last night, and while I heard lots of good ideas, I’m not going to get excited until something actually happens. I must say, living in a border state, I am really tired of the conservatives saying that they will not talk about reforming immigration until the border is sealed. Hello? Have any of these people been to any international border anywhere in the world? No country will ever have a fully sealed border. I guess we didn’t learn that from the cold war and Germany, or the current issues in Korea.  In Africa we walked across borders, or drove across borders without even knowing it. The only places we really had to deal with borders were in airports and the Kenya Tanzania border. Even at the Kenya border, many locals walked around the fence…which would have been hard for us…as we kinda stood out as tourists. Many of these illegals are our neighbors, they are attending our schools, they are spending their under-the-table money in our stores. We need to give them a path to citizenship. We have always been a country of immigrants..except for the tribes that were here when we arrived. If those people had ‘sealed’ the border, we wouldn’t even be here.

Game  Center (answers at the end of post)

Brain Teasers

In the four sentences below, are two blanks. You must fill them in with words that are either anagrams, synonyms, antonyms, or homonyms. You can only use each of these one time each sentence. Can you figure out each word?

1. The golfer has yelled out "____," ____ times today. 2. They began to ____ scones, and drink ____. 3. She used one ____ to look down at her wrist and see her ____. 4. He ran ____ the dog in order ____ not get bitten by it.

Lifestyle  Substance:     

Found on You Tube with some relevance to today

• Famous Quotes From Mahatma Gandhi

• Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Pearl Harbor Address

• Gene Hackman winning an Oscar® for "The French Connection"

• Laugh-In Blooper - Dick Martin

• Menai Suspension Bridge

Suggested New State Mottos:

• Nebraska: Ask About Our State Motto Contest

• South Carolina: Remember The Civil War? We Didn't Actually Surrender

Remembering TV’s great shows:

"Cheers"  Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and we were always glad when we came to Boston's cheeriest bar. Weathering Coach's death and Diane's exit, the brew crew grew stronger with Woody and Rebecca. And the show spun off a classic farce, "Frasier."

Phrases Shakespeare invented:

clothes make the man Hamlet Act 1 Scene 3

Words Shakespeare invented

RadianceDefinition: A quality of brightness and happiness that can be seen on a person's face
Origin: Derived from the Latin "radiantem," meaning "beaming."
Quote: "For by the sacred radiance of the sun" - King Lear

OK Then…

 

Harper’s Index 

• Number of national governments that request user information from Facebook in the 1^st half of 2013: 71

• Minimum percentage of request whith which Facebook complied: 62

Unusual Fact of the Day

The “No animals were harmed…” disclaimer listed in film credits by the American Humane Association doesn’t just cover cute and cuddly animals; they also have strict rules regarding snakes, rats and insects.

Joke-of-the-day

On the first day of college, the Dean addressed the students:

"The female dormitory is out-of-bounds for all male students, and the male dormitory to the female students. Anybody caught breaking this rule will be fined $20 the first time. The second time you will be fined $60. A third time will cost you a fine of $180. Are there any questions?"

A male student inquired, "How much for a season pass?"  

Rules of Thumb:   

Easy shortcuts to make an ‘educated’ guess

ABOUT FRESH HERBS

When substituting dry herbs for fresh herbs, a good rule of thumb to follow is to substitute one-third the amount of the dried herb as the fresh that is specified - i.e. one teaspoon dried crushed basil OR 1 tablespoon fresh chopped basil. American Dairy Association Pamphlet #0247    

Yeah, It Really Happened

ETNE, Norway - A Norwegian man was sentenced to 14 months in prison for demolishing his brother's home with a forklift, official said. The incident happened last summer in the village of Etne. TheLocal.no reported Friday. Sturla Vik-Vestly, a lawyer for the victim, told TheLocal.no the man decided to demolish his older brother's home after hearing rumors that he planned to knock down an older house on the family property that the younger brother believed he had a right to live in. "His way of reacting was totally crazy," Vik-Vestly said. "You don't tear down a house because you hear some rumors." The older brother and his 16-year-old son were in the house when the suspect began tearing down walls with the forklift, Vik-Vestly said. Along with the jail time, the younger brother has been ordered to pay $164,000 in damages to his older brother, and received a five-year driving ban for drunken driving while fleeing the scene.

Somewhat Useless Information   

• The most watched television event in the United States is the Super Bowl. Though football games usually last around 3 hours, the ball is typically in play for only 11 minutes. Around 56 percent of the game on TV is devoted to replays.

• The NFL has an annual revenue of $9 billion, with a profit of 1 billion. Compared to the NBA and MLB, NFL players are the lowest-paid players, with salaries that average to less than $1.5 million dollars.

• Just two years after finishing their careers, approximately 78 percent of NFL players go bankrupt.

Calendar Information        

Happening This Week:

26-31

Catholic Schools Week
Meat Week
National Cowboy Poetry Gathering Week
National Medical Group Practice Week

International Hoof Care Week
US National Snow Sculpting Week

Today Is                                                                      

·        Inane Answering Message Day

^^^^^

·        King's Birthday (Jordan-since 1999)

Today’s Events through History  

1798 - Rep Matthew Lyon (Vt) spits in face of Rep Roger Griswold (Ct) in US House 

     of Representatives, after an argument

1826 - The Menai Suspension Bridge, considered the world's first modern suspension

      bridge, connecting the Isle of Anglesey to the north West coast of Wales is opened.

1911 - 1st rescue of an air passenger by a ship, near Havana, Cuba

1928 - Eugene O'Neill's "Strange Interlude," premieres in NYC

1948 - 5th Winter Olympic games open in St Moritz, Switzerland

1961 - Bobby Darin is youngest performer to headline a TV special on NBC

1976 - George H W Bush becomes 11th director of CIA (until 1977)

Today’s Birthdays                                                           

Gene Hackman, actor (Bonnie & Clyde, Under Fire, Superman) is 84

Tammy Grimes, actress (Can't Stop the Music) is 80

Boris Spassky, USSR, world chess champion is 77

Vanessa Redgrave, actress (Blow-Up, Julia, Orient Express) is 77

Dick Cheney, 46th US Vice President is 73

Phil Collins, England, singer/drummer (Genesis-Against All Odds) is 63

Christian Bale, Wales, actor (Empire of the Sun, Little Women) is 40

Remembered for being born today

1615 - Thomas Rolfe, only child of Pocahontas and John Rolfe

1882 - Franklin Roosevelt, 32nd US President

1922 - Dick Martin, actor/comedian (Laugh-In, Carbon Copy)

1957 - William Payne Stewart, PGA golfer (1983 Walt Disney)

Today’s Historical Obits                                                           

Sidney Sheldon, author, playwright, and TV screenwriter 2007 @89

Betsy Ross [Elizabeth Griscom], credited with making 1st American flag 1836 @84

Mahatma Gandhi, political and spiritual leader, assassinated 1948 @78

Coretta Scott King, activist and wife of Martin Luther King Jr. cancer 2006 @78

Asa Gray, US botanist (Flora of North America), 1888 @77

Ingemar Johansson, Swedish heavyweight boxing champion pneumonia 2009 @77

Orville Wright, US aviation pioneer, 1948 @76

Osceola, chief of Seminole indians, dies in jail 1838 @34ish

Brain Teasers

1. The golfer has yelled out "FORE," FOUR times today. (homonyms) 2. They began to EAT scones, and drink TEA. (Anagrams) 3. She used one EYE to look down at her wrist and see her WATCH. (Synonyms) 4. He ran FROM the dog in order TO not get bitten by it. (Antonyms)

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  §