3-12-15

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Almanac: Week: 11 \ Day: 071 
March Averages: 50°\23°
86004 Today: H 62°\L 26° Average Sky Cover: 80% 
Wind ave:   5mph\Gusts:  17mph
Ave. High: 49° Record High:  72° (1900) Ave. Low: 22° Record Low:  -1° (1917)
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Observances Today:
Alfred Hitchcock Day
Girl Scout Birthday Day 1912
Plant a Flower Day
World Kidney Day

Observances This Week:
      8-14
…Universal Women's Week
…National Agriculture Week
…Teen Tech Week
…Girl Scout Week
…Stand Up! LGBT Awareness Week
      11-17

…Turkey Vultures Return to the Living Sign
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Quote of the Day 

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US Historical Highlights for Today
 1664 - 1st naturalization act in American colonies
1664 - New Jersey becomes a British colony
1755 - 1st steam engine in America installed, to pump water from a mine
1850 - 1st US $20 gold piece issued
1860 - Congress accepts Pre-emption Bill: free land in West for colonists
1868 - US Congress abolishes manufacturer's tax
1884 - Mississippi establishes 1st US state college for women
1894 - Pittsburgh issues free season tickets for ladies on Tuesday & Friday
1894 - Coca-Cola is sold in bottles for the first time in Vicksburg, Mississippi
1904 - Andrew Carnegie establishes Carnegie Hero Fund
1933 - FDR conducts his 1st "fireside chat"
1936 - Building of Sabino Canyon Dam near Tucson begins
1945 - NY is 1st to prohibit discrimination by race & creed in employment
1947 - Pres Harry Truman introduces Truman-doctrine to fight communism
1959 - US House joins Senate approving Hawaii statehood
1970 - US lowers voting age from 21 to 18
1987 - "Les Miserables" opens at Broadway/Imperial NYC for 4000+ perfs
2003 - Elizabeth Smart, was found after having been missing for 9 months

Today’s World Events through History
1365 - University of Vienna founded
1496 - Jews are expelled from Syria
1609 - Bermuda becomes an English colony
1619 - Dutch settlement on Java changes name to Batavia
1867 - Last French troops leave Mexico
1868 - Henry O'Farrell attempts to assassinate Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh
1904 - 1st main line electric train in UK (Liverpool to Southport)
1926 - Denmark begins unilateral disarmament
1930 - Mohandas Gandhi begins 200m (300km) march protesting British salt tax
1938 - Nazi Germany invades Austria (Anschluss)
1971 - Thousands of Belfast shipyard workers march demanding the introduction of Internment for members of the Irish Republican Army
1994 - Church of England ordains 1st 33 women priests
2011 - A reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant melts and explodes and releases radioactivity into the atmosphere a day after Japan's earthquake
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  Birthdays Today:
How many can you identify? Answers below in Birthday’s Today


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My Rambling Thoughts
Overcast but no moisture most of the day.
While I was out and about I washed my vehicle as it was pretty dirty after our last snowstorm.
Another FB oddity, another former student found me. So strange, but also nice.
Our local TV station, part of the local university, did an interview last night with a police spokeswoman about the latest stats for our PD. Our cops are in line percentage wise for whites, blacks, and Latinos and are ahead of the country in female officers. All well and good, but she did not mention the Native population or the number of Native cops…odd. Nor did she mention the Asian population.
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Brain Teasers
(answers at the end of post)
What does this mean?

search

and 

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Found on You Tube with some relevance to today
• A Tribute To Lynne Thigpen            
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America Facts…
--A Native American tribe in South Dakota collects bottle caps left by campers, using them as currency. Several banks in the area now recognize the caps as legal tender.
--According to some estimates, Americans are sitting on $30 billion worth of unredeemed gift cards.

Ant Facts…
-- Queen ants have one of the longest life-spans of any known insect - typically up to 30 years. Western harvester ant queens can live up to 40 years!
--Ants have graveyards.

Car Facts…
-- Most people turn their music down in the car when finding a street sign to "see better".
--American car horns beep in the tone of F.

Charity Facts…
-- Shakira has been making music for more than 23 years, can play the guitar, drums, percussion, and harmonica, speaks 7 different languages, is the founder of a charity called Pies Descalzos, and is a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF.
--Keanu Reeves has a private cancer foundation to help children’s hospitals and cancer research, but he does not attach his name to it. He also has spent over 5 million dollars to help his sister in her fight against leukemia.

Flagstaff, AZ History…
25 YEARS AGO--1990
--On Monday a Greyhound bus bearing 30 passengers driven by a regular driver on an unfamiliar route mistook the snow-packed dirt road to A-1 Mountain for the road to Flagstaff. He had traveled 4 or 5 miles looking for a place to turn around before he high-centered and could not move further. He and two passengers walked back to Route 40, and called the Department of Public Safety, which called for a tow truck.
Mike Risen of Continental Towing came to the scene and with some difficulty extracted the bus from its situation. The passengers resumed their journey, arriving in Flagstaff a few hours later than planned.
--Having made a routine traffic stop for an improperly secured load on I-40 near Williams, DPS Officer Bernadette Korair was shot three times by the suspect. Fortunately she was protected by her bulletproof vest. She returned fire, shooting through his driver-side window. The bleeding suspect, who had been recently released from a California prison, fled. His camper fell off. He turned onto the Navajo Reservation about 22 miles north of Winslow, where his pickup overturned into ditch. He was apprehended by a DPS SWAT team in a nearby ravine, where he was trying to hide.

Harper’s Index…
68
Percentage of women worldwide, who believe that energy conservation is a ‘vital issue’
47
Of men

Unusual Fact of the Day…
The song “Always” was written by Irving Berlin for Ellin Mackay, a Western Union heiress. Berlin was Jewish, Mackay was Catholic, and her father was just plain furious. Mr. Mackay attempted to distract Ellin’s affections with a yearlong trip to Europe; when that failed, he disinherited her. Berlin responded by marrying Ellin and giving his new wife an unusual wedding gift—the royalty rights to “Always.”
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2 jokes for the day
A horse walks into a bar...
...the trainer says, "next time, jump

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Two rather old retired racehorses are in a bar getting totally drunk. After about two hours the first racehorse says "You know.... when I was a young racehorse...from one hundred starts, I won (hic) 90 races, got 5 seconds and 5 thirds.... I am without doubt the greatest racehorse that ever lived....blah blah blah..." 
In response to this and approximately a half an hour later the second racehorse responded, "Oh yeah...when I was a young racehorse...from one hundred starts, I won (hic) 95 races, got 2 seconds and 3 thirds.... I am the greatest racehorse that ever lived.... blah blah blah..." 
Now it was about this time that the bartender (a greyhound) decided that they were drunk enough so he said, "I am sick of you two telling one another how great you are, you are both drunk and I am throwing you out of the bar, but before I do I want to let you know that when I was a young greyhound, from one hundred starts, I won 100 races, no seconds and no thirds." 
The two racehorses were shocked and for 5 minutes sat with their mouths open until the first racehorse finally said, "Isn't that amazing (hic)...a talking greyhound!"    

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Yep, It Really Happened
HAMBURG, Germany (UPI)
Leaders in the "party district" of St. Pauli in Hamburg, Germany, are discouraging public urination by covering walls in paint that "pees back." The St. Pauli Interest Community released a YouTube video explaining the most frequently-soiled walls in the district are being covered in a super-hydrophobic paint that causes sprayed liquid to bounce back in the opposite direction -- causing public urinators to make a mess of their own pants and shoes. The walls treated with the paint are labeled with signs reading, "Don't pee here! We'll pee back!" "It was a real annoyance that was growing and growing," St Pauli Interest Community board member Uwe Christiansen, who owns several local bars, told The Local. "We wanted to bring people to reason." He said the move is being hailed by locals who were similarly tired of dealing with "Wildpinkler." "I've seen in Facebook and the local newspapers that the reactions were very positive. People were just tired of the peeing on walls, home entrances and playgrounds," Christiansen said. "Watch out! From now on, it's Peeback time," group member Julia Staron said in the video. 
           

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Somewhat Useless Information
--It's no secret that The Sound of Music was based on a true story, but there were plenty of differences between Maria Kutschera's 1949 memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers and the film. For one thing, Maria was brought to the von Trapp home to care for one child who had scarlet fever and was too ill to walk to school, not all seven children.
--The Sound of Music was the eighth and final musical written by Rodgers and Hammerstein, but Hammerstein never saw the movie. He died of stomach cancer nine months after the Broadway premiere.
--The original cast recording of The Sound of Music was nearly as popular as the show itself. Recorded just a week after the show's Broadway premiere and released by Columbia Records, the album was number one on the Billboard charts for 16 weeks.
--When it came to the movie, Julie Andrews wasn't the first choice for Maria! Producers wanted Grace Kelly or Doris Day to replace her. Mary Poppins (for which Andrews would win an Oscar) hadn't hit screens yet and they didn't know if she had the star power to carry the feature film. (Day ruled herself out as "too American.")
--While filming the iconic opening scene, twirling in the hills of Austria, Andrews kept getting knocked down in the mud by the gusts from the helicopter carrying the camera.
--One of Maria von Trapp's biggest beefs with the film was with the geography. Not only does Salzburg not border on Switzerland, but taking that route out of Austria would have sent them straight towards Berchtesgaden, Hitler's summer retreat.
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Birthday’s Today
86 - Edward Albee, playwright (Virgina Woolfe, Zoo Story)
83 - Andrew Young, US ambassador to UN (1977-79)/(Mayor-D-Atlanta)
82 - Barbara Feldon, actress (Agent 99-Get Smart)
75 - Al Jarreau, jazz singer (Moonlighting)
69 - Liza Minnelli, singer/actress (Sterile Cuckoo, Cabaret)
68 - Mitt Romney, 70th Governor of Massachusetts
53 - Darryl Strawberry, baseball right fielder (Mets, Dodgers, Yankees)
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Remembered for being born today
1672-1729@57 - Richard Steele, Irish writer and politician
1831-1901@70 - Clement Studebaker, automobile pioneer (Studebaker)
1862-1919@57 - Jane Delano, US, nurse/teacher/founder (Red Cross)
1890-1950@61 - Vaslav Nijinsky, Ukrainian/US ballet dancer (Petroesjka)
1921-1986@64 - Gordon MacRae, singer/actor (Oklahoma, Carousel)
1922-1969@47 - Jack Kerouac, Beat writer (On the Road, Mexico Blues)
1931-1980@49 - William "Buckwheat" Thomas, actor (Little Rascals)
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Historical Obits Today
George Westinghouse, engineer (Westinghouse Electric), heart failure-1914@67
Sun Yat-Sen, Chinese revolutionary president, liver cancer, 1925@58
Anne Frank, diarist (Diary of Anne Frank), Belsen Camp-1945@15
Charlie "Bird" Parker, US jazz saxophonist, cirrhosis-1955@34
Maurice Evans, actor (Bewitched, MacBeth)-1989@87
Lynne Thigpen, American actress (Chief-Carmen Sandiego), stroke-2003@54
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Brain Teasers Answers
Search high and low 
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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.