1-7-14

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Almanac: Week: 02 \ Day: 007 
January Averages: 43°\16°
86004 Today: H 50°\L 21°
Ave. humidity: 68%     Average Sky Cover: 0%
Wind ave:   4mph\Gusts:  18mph
Ave. High: 42° Record High:  63° (1914)
Ave. Low: 16° Record Low:  -17° (1913)

Observances Today:
Harlem Globetrotter's Day
I'm Not Going To Take It Anymore Day
International Programmers' Day
National Tempura Day
Old Rock Day
Orthodox Christmas
Observances This Week:
1-7
New Year's Resolutions Week
Celebration of Life Week 
Diet Resolution Week 
Silent Record Week
2-8

Someday We'll Laugh About This Week
4-11

Home Office Safety and Security Week
National Folic Acid Awareness Week 
National Lose Weight/Feel Great Week

6-9
International Consumer Electronics Show
7-10

Elvis' Birthday Celebration Week 
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Quote of the Day 


Historical Highlights for Today
1608 - Fire destroys Jamestown, Virginia
1714 - Typewriter patented by Englishman Henry Mill (built years later)
1784 - 1st US seed business established by David Landreth, Philadelphia
1802 - President Thomas Jefferson believes the Indians have more land than they need.
1822 - Liberia colonized by Americans
1830 - 1st US Railroad Station opens (Baltimore)
1911 - 1st airplane bombing experiments with explosives, SF
1914 - 1st steamboat passes through Panama Canal
1929 - "Tarzan," one of the 1st adventure comic strips, 1st appears
1934 - "Flash Gordon" comic strip (by Alex Raymond) debuts
1959 - US recognizes Fidel Castro's Cuban government
1968 - "GE College Bowl" quiz show premieres on NBC TV
1971 - -40°F (-40°C), Hawley Lake, Ariz (state record)
1999 - Impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton begins in the US Senate
2007 - Phil Jackson wins his 900th game as a head coach, becoming the fastest coach to reach 900 career wins
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  Birthdays Today:
How many can you identify? Answers below in Birthday’s Today 

My Rambling Thoughts
Great blue sky day with some warm weather here in Flag. Spent a little time walking around the neighborhood.
Too nice a day to get into news stuff. 
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Brain Teasers
(answers at the end of post)
Six words have had their vegetables removed. The vegetables have been placed into Group A. The remaining letters of each word have been placed into Group B. Your task is to reconstitute the words by merging each vegetable with the proper set of letters. Other than merging the two groups together, there is no rearranging of the letters. Example: sand + pne = spanned (SpANneD).

Group A: bean, beet, corn, kale, pea, radish
Group B: acdio, bning, lieb, nfi, rthig, scagot

           
Found on You Tube with some relevance to today
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Paraphernalia 4 the Brain:     
50’s Inventions…
1955
Tetracycline invented.
Optic fiber invented.

Education Facts…
<> The University of Victoria offers a course in the science of Batman.
<> Before making Finding Nemo, the animation gurus at Pixar Studios had to take a graduate class in fish biology and oceanography.

Flagstaff, AZ History…
100 YEARS AGO
J.L. Dougherty had an auto accident last Saturday. He broke two ribs and has enumerable bruises. The accident occurred near the divide on the Grand Canyon Road. He turned his head for just a moment to shove his gun under the seat, his machine swerved and turned over into the ditch. Later William Campbell came upon him and brought him into town.

Flagstaff’s Iconic 50…
The FUTS
The Flagstaff Urban Trails System (FUTS, say "foots") is a city-wide network of non-motorized, shared-use pathways that are used by bicyclists, walkers, hikers, runners, and other users for both recreation and transportation.
At present there are just over 50 miles of FUTS trails in Flagstaff. The overall master plan shows about 80 miles of future trails, to complete a planned system of 130 miles.
About half of the miles of existing trails are paved, either in concrete or asphalt, and half consist of a hard-packed, aggregate surface. FUTS trails are generally eight or ten feet in width.
FUTS trails offer an incredibly diverse range of experiences; some trails are located along busy streets, while others traverse beautiful natural places - canyons, riparian areas, grasslands, meadows, and forests - all within the urban area of Flagstaff. The system connects neighborhoods, shopping, places of employment, schools, parks, open space, and the surrounding National Forest, and allows users to combine transportation, recreation and contact with nature.
With a few exceptions, FUTS trails are operated and maintained by the City of Flagstaff.
According to the City of Flagstaff Citizen Survey 2009, 78 percent of Flagstaff residents have used the FUTS trail system in the last year.

Harper’s Index…
250,000,000
Estimated number of women worldwide who were married before the age of 15

Rules of Thumb…
SIZE MATTERS
The effectiveness of a team decreases as the size of the team increases beyond 7 members.

Unusual Fact of the Day…
New York Tribune founder Horace Greeley is best known for saying, “Go West, young man.” Problem is, he didn’t say it. The quote actually came from Indiana newspaper editor John B.L. Soule. In fact, Greeley’s own comments regarding the West were less than encouraging. In 1859, while traveling across Utah, he wrote, “The desolation seems irredeemable.” Twelve years later, he proclaimed, “This Daniel Boone business is about played out.”
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Joke-of-the-day
A cop pulls a young guy over:
"Hello officer" said the smart aleck kid.
"Young man did you see that stop sign?" asked the cop.
“Yup, but I didn't see you! 


Yep, It Really Happened
In Wisconsin a postal carrier said he simply wanted to cheer up a woman on his rounds who seemed "stressed out" so he decided to deliver her mail naked. 
He even told her he was going to do it. As a prank, I suppose. But whether she took him seriously or not, there was no doubting his sincerity when he showed up at her office wearing only a smile and his mail bag. 
Those wacky letter carriers.
The 52-year-old was arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior several days later. 
But a much more hilarious situation occurred on a commuter train in Scarsdale, New York. 
A woman named Briggs was minding her own business on the train when she noticed a man standing unusually close to her. 
When she looked down she noticed he had his penis out and was trying to rub it up against her. 
Instead of doing what a lot of women would do and just walk (or run) away, she called him out, loudly, and recruited the other passengers in the car to make sure he didn't leave until the police could be called. 
In the ensuing minutes every single passenger with a camera phone was taking video of the dumb bastard. One of the videos which made it onto youtube more than 800,000 hits before it was taken down. 
51-year-old Queens man, was sentenced to four months in jail for forcible touching. 

           

Somewhat Useless Information
Dead Poets Society, the 1989 American drama film directed by Peter Weir and starring Robin Williams, has recently garnered a lot of recent attention due to Robin Williams’ passing. 
Here are six trivia facts you may not know about the movie:
-The movie was loosely based on the screenwriter’s life.
-The main character, John Keating, was based on the two of Schulman’s teachers.
-The studio considered turning ‘Dead Poets Society’ into a musical
-Originally, Jeff Kanew, who did ‘Revenge of the nerds’, was going to direct it
-Dustin Hoffman was going to direct and star in the movie.
-In the screenpley, John Keating is dying of cancer.

Gizmos
WASHINGTON (UPI)
Researchers at NASA are working to improve the memory of the Mars exploration rover Opportunity after a series of glitches in recent weeks led to what officials are describing as "amnesia" within the its memory banks. 
The rover relies on orbital passes from the Mars Odyssey satellite to relay communications and commands to and from NASA, but when a pass does not occur between the rover's power cycles -- a relatively frequent occurrence -- the rover fails to transfer information from its temporary RAM to its permanent flash memory. The rover's repeated attempts and fails to save data to the flash memory cause it to it reboot, essentially erasing its last set of commands received. 
"Volatile memory is like the traditional RAM you have in your computer; non-volatile memory uses flash memory technology," Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News. 
"So now we're having these events we call 'amnesia,' which is the rover trying to use the flash memory, but it wasn't able to, so instead it uses the RAM ... it stores telemetry data in that volatile memory, but when the rover goes to sleep and wakes up again, all (the data) is gone. So that's why we call it amnesia -- it forgets what it has done." 
Opportunity has been working without flash memory since earlier in December, when NASA first reported the memory problems. 
"While we're operating Opportunity in that mode, we are also working on an approach to make the flash memory usable again," Callas said at the time. 
"We will be sure to give this approach exhaustive reviews before implementing those changes on the rover." 
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Today’s Events through History
1610 - Galileo discovers 1st 3 Jupiter satellites, Io, Europa & Ganymede
1618 - Francis Bacon becomes Lord Chancellor of England
1896 - Fannie Farmer publishes her 1st cookbook "The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book"
1967 - "Newlywed Game" premieres on ABC TV
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Birthday’s Today
William Peter Blatty, author/director (The Exorcist), is 87
Kenny Loggins, singer (Loggins and Messina-Footloose) is 67
Erin Gray, TV actress is 65
Katie Couric, [Katherine], Arlington VA, TV news host (Today) is 58
Rand Paul, United States Senator, is 52
Nicolas Cage, [Coppola], actor (Moonstruck) is 51
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Remembered for being born today
Millard Fillmore, Locke NY, (Whig) 13th president 1874@74  
St Bernadette (Marie-Bernarde Soubirous), 1844(?), religious visionary 1879 @35
Alan Napier, Birmingham England, actor (Alfred-Batman) 1988@85
Charles Addams, cartoonist (New Yorker, Addams Family) 1988@76
Paul Revere, pianist (Paul Revere & Raiders) 2014@76
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Historical Obits Today
Nikola Tesla, Serbian-American physicist (tesla motor), 1943, @86
Philip D. Eastman, American children's book writer and illustrator, 1986, @76
Trevor Howard, actor (Ryan's Daughter), bronchitis, 1988, @71
Allan Ramsay Sr, Scottish poet (Gentle Shepherd), 1758, @71          
Catherine of Aragon, 1st wife of King Henry VIII, cancer\poison?, 1536, @50
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Brain Teasers Answers
bean + rthig = breathing (BrEAthiNg)
beet + nfi = benefit (BEnEfiT)
corn + acdio = accordion (aCcORdioN)
kale + lieb = likeable (liKeAbLE)
pea + scagot = scapegoat (scaPEgoAt)
radish + bning = brandishing (bRAnDISHing)

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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…§


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Flagstaff, Arizona, United States
I retired in '06--at the ripe old age of 57. I enjoy blogging, photography, traveling, and living life to it's fullest.