FYI:
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Almanac:
Week: 32 \ Day: 218
August
Averages: 78°\50°
86004
Today: H 87° \ L 51°
Average Sky Cover: 0%
Wind
ave: 5mph\Gusts: 23mph
Ave.
High: 81° Record High: 90°[1983]
Ave. Low: 51° Record Low: 36°[1953]
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Observances
Today:
Hiroshima
Day
National
Fresh Breath (Halitosis) Day
National
Mustard Day
National
Root Beer Float Day Link
Independence
Day (Bolivia-1825-from Peru)
Peace
Festival (Japan)
∞ ∞
Observances
This Week:
1-7 International Clown Week Link
National Scrabble Week
Simplify Your Life
Week Link
World Breastfeeding
Week Link
2-8 Assistance Dog Week Link
Exercise With Your Child
Week
Knights of Columbus Family Week
National Farmers' Market
Week Link
National Fraud Awareness
Week Link
National Psychic Week: 2-8 Link (First full week)
Single Working Women's Week
Stop on Red Week Link
3-8 National Bargain Hunting Week
Old Fiddler's Week
Psychic Week Link
3-9 Sturgis Rally
4-7 Rock for Life Week Link
5-8 Gallop International Tribal Indian
Powwow Link
6-9 National Hobo Week Link
∞ ∞
Quote
of the Day
∞ ∞
US
Historical Highlights for Today
1676 - Weetamoo is
the Sachem of the Wampanoag town
of Pocasset, RI. The sister-in-law of King Philip, she leads as many as 300
warriors in battle.
1774 - Founder of the Shaker Movement,
Mother Ann Lee, arrives in NY
1787 - Constitutional Convention in Phila begins
debate
1819 - Norwich University is founded in VT as the
1st private military school in US
1896 - The Black Jack
Christian gang attempted to rob the International Bank of Nogales, but were
defeated by the bank president, who held off the five armed men until help
arrived.
1901 - Kiowa land in Oklahoma is opened for white
settlement, effectively dissolving the contiguous reservation
1926 - NY's Gertrude Ederle becomes 1st woman to
swim English Channel
1945 - Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the US
B-29 Superfortress "Enola Gay"
1964 - Prometheus, the world's oldest tree, is cut
down in Nevada US
1984 - Carl Lewis wins 2nd (long jump) of 4
gold medals in Summer Olympics
∞ ∞
World
Historical Highlights for Today
1497 - Italian explorer John Cabot returns
to Bristol from North America (Newfoundland) - first European to do so since
the Vikings
1538 - Bogotá, Colombia, is founded by Gonzalo
Jiménez de Quesada
1806 - Holy Roman Empire ends; it was neither holy,
Roman, nor an empire. Francis II renounces the title, becoming Emperor of
Austria
1856 - The Great Bell is cast in the Great Clock of
Westminster (Big Ben)
1896 - France annexes Madagascar
1940 - Estonia is annexed into Soviet empire
1960 - The UN Security Council lay down rules which
would allow UN forces to enter Congo
1979 - Marcus Hooper, 12, is youngest person to
swim English Channel
1990 - President Ghulam Ishaq Kahn dismisses Prime
Minister Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan
▲▲▲▲
♫ Birthdays Today: ♫
How many can you identify? Answers below in Birthdays Today
▲▲▲▲
My
Rambling Thoughts
Monsoon has retreated for a few days. Kinda hot, but the breeze
made it bearable.
Ran some errands this morning. Picked up a script today that cost
me 23cents…gotta love my insurance. Also had to buy a pill splitter as the pill
has to be halved…so the one month script will really last 2 months. Thanks to
our wonderful pharmacy lobby and/or the patent laws, a med for allergies I used
to get for $1.25/month is now an over the counter med and costs about
$10/month. Crazy!
▲▲▲▲
Brain
Teasers
(answers at the end of post)
Assuming
you can't steal an animal's sense of hearing, or use an electrical device, what
would you need in order to hear a pin drop from over 20 yards?
▲▲▲▲
Found
on You Tube with some relevance to today
▲▲▲▲
…Flagstaff,
AZ History…
75 YEARS AGO-1940
A hundred CCC men are at work on the seven miles of Snow Bowl
Road beginning at the Leroux Springs Nursery clearing culverts and drainages,
back-sloping the 20-foot wide roadway and preparing for a 400-car parking lot.
Will Brown was adjudged the winner and received the 1st Prize of a
$1 model plane kit in the July Model Air Plane contest sponsored by Drew’s
Sporting Goods and the Comet Club.
∞ ∞
…Harper’s
Index…
1 in 3 – chance that
an American would give up at least one week of life to avoid taking a pill
every day.
∞ ∞
…Instagram
Photo of the Day…
natgeoPhone photo: @ivankphoto Project Mi Barrio – Las Humitas. A
dough made from freshly ground #corn is wrapped in corn leaves and steamed in a
big pot at a local store in #Rumihuaico, #Ecuador. #Humitas are an #Andean
#food eaten by the #indigenous since before the arrival of the Spanish.
∞ ∞
**NEW**…Foreign
Laws Tourists Need to Know…
In October 2011, France banned the use of ketchup in its
schools. It seems that authorities
in France saw ketchup as a threat to all things French and a form of American
cultural hegemony at its finest (or tastiest?).
∞ ∞
…Nelson
Mandela Inspiring Quote …
·
“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in,
he has no choice but to become an outlaw.”
∞ ∞
…USA
Facts…
Wyoming has only 2 sets of escalators in the entire state.
Al Capone's armored limousine, after being seized by the feds, was
later used to protect Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), 32nd President of the
US, after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
∞ ∞
…Unusual
Fact of the Day…
When MTV debuted on August 1st, 1981, the first music
video ever played was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles.
▲▲▲▲
2
jokes for the day
How do you fit 5 elephants into a five-seat
car?
Get a really big car.
∞ ∞
A bent-over old lady hobbled into a doctor's
office.
Within minutes, she came out again but miraculously, she was standing up as
straight as could be.
A man in the waiting room who had been watching her said in amazement; "My
goodness, what did the doctor do to you?"
The old lady replied, "He gave me a longer cane!"
∞ ∞
Yep,
It Really Happened
BOSTON -
Skinny-legged insects that quietly skate and jump across the surface of the
water, called "water striders," were the inspiration for a newly
designed robot, developed by scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute for
Biologically Inspired Engineering and Seoul National University.
Before they set out to build their robot, the researchers first used
slow-motion cameras to film water striders jump. The scientists honed in on the
slight curvature at the end of the bugs' legs; the bowed tips seem to enable
the creatures' launch, quiet and effortless.
"Water's surface needs to be pressed at the right speed for an adequate
amount of time, up to a certain depth, in order to achieve jumping,"
senior researcher Kyu Jin Cho, director of the Biorobotics Laboratory at Seoul
National University, said in a press release. "The water strider is
capable of doing all these things flawlessly."
Researchers imagine the robots, which float and jump on water, being deployed
by the dozens -- to search for flood victims, for example.
"We were fascinated by the fact that insects can actually jump on water
quite well, something that humans or any engineered system cannot not
replicate," the researchers wrote in a new paper on the feat, published in
the journal Science.
The robot is no bigger than a thumb, and its nearly six-inch vertical jump is
executed without breaking the water's surface.
"The resulting robotic insects can achieve the same momentum and height
that could be generated during a rapid jump on firm ground -- but instead can
do so on water -- by spreading out the jumping thrust over a longer amount of
time and in sustaining prolonged contact with the water's surface,"
explained Robert Wood, a Harvard engineer.
Other engineering teams have built water-walking and water-jumping robots, but
those efforts resulted in much bigger, heavier products. Researchers at Harvard
and Seoul say their work, for the first time, emphasizes the central ergonomic
principle -- the long, skinny, curve-tipped legs -- behind the water strider's
effortless water-top acrobatics.
"This is due to their natural morphology," said Cho. "It is a
form of embodied or physical intelligence, and we can learn from this kind of
physical intelligence to build robots that are similarly capable of performing
extreme maneuvers without highly-complex controls or artificial
intelligence."
∞ ∞
Somewhat
Useless Information
In
1783, the first hot air balloon was set to fly over Versailles, and a rooster,
a duck and a sheep were the first hot air balloon passengers. The balloon flew
on a tether for 8 minutes, rising 1500 feet into the air and traveling 2 miles
before being brought safely to the ground. The animals were unharmed.
Scientist Jean-Francois Pilatre De Rozier and aristocrat Francois Laurent
d'Arlandes were chosen to fly the first hot air balloon flight. On November 21,
1783, the men flew for 20 minutes, becoming the first people to experience
sustained flight.
Two years later, Rozier decided to break another record by crossing the English
Channel in a new kind of balloon, one that was half hot air, half hydrogen.
Sadly, 30 minutes after taking off, the balloon exploded. Rozier and his
co-pilot were killed, giving him an unfortunate new record: the first person to
fly in a balloon, and the first person to die in one.
As hot air balloons became a fad, French aristocracy soon learned that local
farmers didn't much like rich people setting balloons down on their land. The
aristocracy said the peasants were afraid because they thought the balloons
looked like dragons, but it seems more likely that the farmers didn't want hot
air balloons crushing their crops. In any case, champagne smoothed things over,
and a tradition was born.
Established by Abraham Lincoln, the Balloon Corps had seven balloons, at least
12 gas generators, and a flat-top balloon barge that used to be an old
steamboat. The balloons were used to spy on enemy movement from as far as 15
miles away. Not to be outdone, the Confederates made their own balloon-out of
fine dress silk-that was eventually captured by the Union army. The Balloon
Corps disbanded in 1863.
Some believe the Nazca lines were made with hot air balloons. This theory was
put forth in the 1970s by Jim Woodman, who said that ancient Peruvians drew the
giant figures in the Nazca desert with the help of hot air balloons. Woodman
referenced ancient pottery that he thought depicted ballooning, as well as
fabric fragments that could have been used as a balloon's envelope.
▲▲▲▲
Birthdays
Today
39 - Soleil Moon Frye, Glendora California,
actress (Punky Brewster)
∞ ∞
Born this day…Died in __@__
Edith
Roosevelt, First Lady\wife of Teddy Roosevelt-1948@87
Alfred
Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate of Great Britain-1892@83
Leo
Carrillo, LA CA, actor (American Empire, Cisco Kid)-1961@80
Robert
Mitchum, Bridgeport Ct, actor (Winds of War, North & South)-1979@79
Lucille
Ball, comedienne/actress (I Love Lucy, Mame)-1989@77
Alexander
Fleming, bacteriologist (penicillin; Nobel 1954)-1955@73
Hoot
Gibson, Tekamah NE, western actor (Horse Soldier, Last Outlaw)-1962@70
Andy
Warhol, pop artist\film producer (Frankenstein, Bad)-1987@58
Jon Benet
Ramsey, little beauty queen-1996@6
▲▲▲▲
Historical
Obits Today
Pope Paul
VI, [Giovanni Montini], (1963-78)-1978@80
Fulgencio
Batista y Zaldivar, Cuban Dictator, heart attack-1973@72
Harry
Reasoner, newscaster (60 Minutes), blood clot-1991@68
Marvin
Hamlisch, American composer and conductor, stroke-2012@68
Ben
Jonson, English playwright and poet, stroke-1637@65
James Springer
White, co-founder Seventh-day
Adventist Church-1881@60
Rick
James, American funk musician ("Super Freak"), heart
attack-2004@56
Ellen Axson Wilson, US 1st Lady Bright's Disease,
1914@54
▲▲▲▲
Brain
Teasers Answers
A bowling ball.
▲▲▲▲
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…▲
