FYI:
Any blue text is a link. Click to check it out!
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:
National Donor Sabath: 14-16
·
• •
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…§