November 20, 2016

Nov 21

FYI: Any blue text is a link. Click to check it out!
↨↨↨↨
11.21.16 Week: 47 \ Day: 326
November Averages: 51°\22°
86004 Today: H 64° \ L 22° Average Sky Cover: 95% 
Wind ave:   16mph\Gusts:  16mph Visibility: 10 mi
Record High: 70°[1950]   Record Low: -5°[1979]
↨↨↨↨
Quote of the Day
No man was ever wise by chance.
<Lucius Annaeus Seneca
↨↨↨↨

Observances Today                                                  
Alascattalo Day (About Alaska & humor)

World Television Day
↨↨↨↨

Observances This Week
18-24
National Farm-City Week
18-27

American Sand Sculpting Competition Link
20-26

GERD Awareness Week Link
International Bible Week

International Fraud Awareness Week Link   
National Family Week
National Game & Puzzle Week
Better Conversation Week
21-25

Church/State Separation Week
21-27

National Global Entrepreneurship Week Link  
↨↨↨↨
Today’s US Historical Highlights
Today’s World Historical Highlights 
·         164 BC During Maccabbean revolt Judas Maccabaeus recaptures Jersusalem and rededicates the Second Temple, commemorated since as Jewish festival Hanukkah
1620 Pilgrim Fathers reach America: Provincetown Harbor, Mass
1620 Mayflower Compact signed by Pilgrims at Cape Cod, [O.S. Nov 11]
·         1783 Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and Marquis d'Arlandes make 1st manned free balloon flight in a Montgolfier balloon
·         1818 Russia's Tsar Alexander I petitions for a Jewish state in Palestine
1865 Shaw University forms in Raleigh NC
1871 Moses F Gale patents a cigar lighter (NYC)
1877 Tom Edison announces his "talking machine" invention (phonograph) - first machine to play and record sound
·         1906 China prohibits the opium trade
·         1917 Maxim Gorky calls Vladimir Lenin a blind fanatic/unthinking adventurer
·         1918 The German High Seas Fleet of 5 battlecruisers, 9 battleships, 7 cruisers and 49 destroyers surrendered to the British Grand Fleet and were shepherded into the Firth of Forth
1942 Tweety Bird, aka Tweety Pie, debuts in "Tale of Two Kitties"
1946 Harry Truman becomes 1st US president to travel in a submerged sub
1946 "Best Years of Our Lives", directed by William Wyler and starring Fredric March and Dana Andrew premieres in New York (Best Picture 1947)
1959 Jack Benny (violin) & Richard Nixon (piano) play their famed duet
1974 Freedom of Information Act passed by Congress over President Ford's veto
·         1974 Birmingham pub bombings: 21 civilians killed when bombs explode at two pubs in Birmingham, England (deadliest attack in England during "the Troubles")
1976 "Rocky" directed by John G. Avildsen and starring Sylvester Stallone premieres in New York (Best Picture 1977)
1980 Dallas' "Who Shot JR?" episode (Kristen) gets a 53.3 rating (83 mill) in the US
1981 Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" single goes #1 & stays for 10 weeks
1989 Law banning smoking on most domestic flights signed by US President George H. W. Bush
·         1989 TV cameras permitted in British House of Commons
↨↨↨↨
My Rambling Thoughts
Cloudy day with forecast calling for light snow early tomorrow morning. They say some will even stick. They also say that it may rain later today. Strange fall.

I learned years ago to check the validity of any story I read on the internet machine. I recall when our very conservative state senator posted a story on Facebook that insane. I checked Snopes…a good place to check validity…and found that the post was a couple of years old and was completely false. I called her on it in a reply. She countered that Snopes was a left wing joke…it is not. I refused to argue with an idiot and told her we would have to agree to disagree. She responded that that it is hard for her to even agree to that, since I was wrong.

Now, the big news story is ‘fake’ news on the internet. Duh…it has been there since the birth of the internet. This blog has always had a disclaimer at the end. I readily admit it is much harder to verify a story on the internet machine. But, just because it is harder doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to verify it. Since I believe that ‘you should keep your friends close, and your enemies closer’, some of my FB friends are politically on another planet. So I am getting more and more ‘fake’ news stories. It is kinda like reading the Tabloids at the supermarket. I try real hard to verify before liking or sharing.

As an example of the craziness of the internet machine, the above quote about friends has been attributed to Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, or Petrarch.  The first published source found is Michael Corleone saying it in The Godfather, Part II. Hmmm.  

Finally, always remember President Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote: You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

Thanks to Saturday Night Live for its closing last night with a T-shirt that said NO #DAPL. Several people I know well are or have been at the demonstrations around the country and have visited the protest site in North Dakota. If you are not familiar with the Dakota Access Pipeline and its plan to carry oil from ND to Patoka, Ill., now is the time to start learning about it. Sending 1 million gallons of oil through that a very long  pipeline will lead to disaster somewhere.
↨↨↨↨
Brain Teasers
(answers at the end of post)
Faults of Technology
Language brain teasers are those that involve the English language. You need to think about and manipulate words and letters.

I have a common English phrase. I feed this phrase into a computer translation program. This translates it into a foreign language then back into English again. Unfortunately, because computers do not understand idiom and sarcasm, the phrase has been changed. It now reads:

BLIND, INSANITY.

What was the original phrase?


↨↨↨↨
“Contronym”—word that is its own antonym
Oversight is the noun form of two verbs with contrary meanings, “oversee” and “overlook.” “Oversee,” from Old English ofersēon ‘look at from above,’ means ‘supervise’ (medieval Latin for the same thing: super- ‘over’ + videre ‘to see.’) “Overlook” usually means the opposite: ‘to fail to see or observe; to pass over without noticing; to disregard, ignore.’
↨↨↨↨
Today’s Trivia Hive
(answers at the end of post)
What is the scientific name for the highest level of the Earth's atmosphere?
↨↨↨↨
…Harper’s Index…
93 – Percentage of the Great Barrier Reef that was bleached this year because of ocean warming
↨↨↨↨
2 jokes for the day
My girlfriend and I often laugh about how competitive we are...

But I laugh more!

↨↨↨↨
Two men sank into adjacent train seats after a long day in the city. One asked the other, "Your son go back to college yet?"

"Two days ago."

"Hmm. Mine's a senior this year, so it's almost over. In May, he'll be an engineer. What's your boy going to be when he gets out of college?"

"At the rate he's going, I'd say he'll be about thirty."

"No, I mean what's he taking in college?"

"He's taking every penny I make."

"Doesn't he burn the midnight oil enough?"

"He doesn't get in early enough to burn the midnight oil."

"Well, has sending him to college done anything at all?"

"Sure has! It's totally cured his mother of bragging about him!"

↨↨↨↨
Yep, It Really Happened
*----- You Have to Appreciate the Ingenuity -----*
A Cologne drinks vendor modified a bottle-recycling machine to swindle tens of thousands of euros from the German recycling system. The German bottle recycling system is simple enough. Place the bottle in the machine, press the button, take your receipt, and get a few cents back. But the 37-year-old drinks salesman manipulated a bottle-recycling machine in the cellar of his drinks shop to earn a lot more than a bit of spare change. Having installed a magnet sensor into the machine, the man was able to feed the bottle into the mechanism, receive the compensation, and retrieve the bottle without it being shredded. The vendor was able to extract 44,362.75 Euros from the machine by inserting the same bottle into the machine a staggering 177,451 times. He might not have gotten caught if he hadn't rigged a machine in the basement of his own business. Then again, standing around someone elses recycling machine for the days it must have taken to insert a single bottle 177,451 times might have looked suspicious too.      
↨↨↨↨
Birthdays Today
• indicates age at death
·      92- Stan Musial, MLB outfielder (St Louis Cardinal, 7 times NL bat champ), born in Donora, Pennsylvania (d. 2013)
92- Joseph Campanella, actor (Dr Steffen-The Nurses, Lou-Mannix), born in NYC
<> 
·    81- henrietta (Hetty) Green, American financier (Witch of Wall Street), born in New Bedford, Massachusetts (d. 1916)
·      83- Voltaire [Francois-Marie Arouet], French writer, philosopher and playwright (Candide), born in Paris (d. 1778)
<> 
·      67- William Beaumont, American surgeon and father of gastric physiology, born in Lebanon, Connecticut (d. 1853)
<> 
51- Bjork, Icelandic singer (Like Someone in Love), born in Reykjavik
50- Troy Aikman, NFL quarterback (Dallas Cowboys - Super Bowl 1992)
<> 
47- Ken Griffey, Jr., Donora, Pennsylvania, American baseball center fielder (Seattle Mariners, MVP 1997)
45- Michael Strahan, NFL defensive end (NY Giants), TV host
<> 
31- Carly Rae Jepsen, Canadian singer (“Call Me Maybe”), born in Mission, British Columbia
↨↨↨↨
Historical Obits Today
·         @85-2011 Anne McCaffrey, sci-fi author
<> 
·         @75-1981 Harry Von Zell, TV announcer (Burns & Allen), cancer
·        @73-1963 Robert Stroud, American convict “Birdman of Alcatraz”, in prison
<> 
·         @64-1924 Florence Harding, American First Lady, renal failure
<> 
·       @50-1959 Max Baer, American heavyweight boxing champion (1934-35), series of heart attacks
↨↨↨↨
Brain Teasers Answers
Out of sight, out of mind.
↨↨↨↨
Trivia Hive  Answers
Exosphere
The exosphere stretches up to 10,000 kilometers and represents the last official layer of the atmosphere. It's so thin that some argue it actually isn't a part of the Earth at all since it's similar to the conditions of outer space. Regardless, the exosphere is home to orbiting satellites and sits over the thermosphere, mesosphere, stratosphere and troposphere, descending in that order. The ionosphere is a separate region which reaches across the other layers. Source: NASA, UCAR
↨↨↨↨
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…☼☼☼☼

No comments:

Post a Comment