Bacon and Boobies

We all like bacon and we all like boobies. For some reason, many years ago man introduced pigs to tiny uninhabited Clipperton Island, about 800 miles off Acapulco Mexico. 

The pigs soon turned feral and began eating the eggs of the nesting Boobie sea birds. A few years ago, Ken Stager came to count the wildlife on Clipperton and brought with him a shotgun to shoot some birds for a museum. Instead, he saw what the pigs were doing to the birds and used his shotgun to kill all the pigs. True story.

Today Clipperton is host to 40,000 Masked Boobies and 20,000 Brown Boobies, among others, but no pigs and no men. Just goes to show you that if that island had been inhabited by man, who is naturally predisposed to bacon, then man, boobies, and pigs would have all lived in peace and harmony.

Wyatt Earp

There have been many stories, movies, and books about Wyatt Earp, but did you know he is buried in a Jewish Cemetery in California? We know many stories are from the old West. Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp was born about 1848, just before the Civil War and died in 1929, just before the great stock market crash.

Josephine Sarah Marcus ran away from her home in San Francisco with a friend and joined an acting company touring the country. When they played Tombstone, Arizona, she met Wyatt Earp. They fell deeply in love and were married.

It is true that he did have an extra long barrel pistol. It was given to him and a few others, including Bat Masterson by  pulp-fiction writer Ned Buntline, hence the name 'Buntline Special'. It was a Colt. Colt did not use that name until the 1950's when the TV series made it a household name. The foot-long barrels were made until the 1980s.

Wyatt, his brothers, and Doc Holliday went to trial for the famous gunfight at the OK Corral and were acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. The Clantons did not like the verdict and ambushed Wyatt and killed his brother Morgan. After that, Wyatt and Doc Holliday, along with others, raided various hideouts, killing anyone they suspected had a hand in Morgan’s death.

With the law after him for the killings, Wyatt and Josie moved to Gunnison, Colorado. They moved often and invested in mines, and real estate, and operated saloons and gambling parlors in Nome, Alaska, Eagle City, Idaho and others. For a while, they even lived with Josie’s parents in San Francisco. Later, they settled in southern California and raised racehorses and lived off gambling winnings and real estate speculation. In the 1920s, they invested in oil wells.

Wyatt Earp died in 1929 and his wife had his ashes buried in her family plot at the Little Hills of Eternity Cemetery, a Jewish cemetery in Colma, California, just outside of San Francisco. Wyatt Earp was not Jewish, but his wife was. Josie, his wife of fifty years died in 1944, and is buried next to Wyatt.

GPS Shoes

Here is a great idea for those who have someone with Alzheimer’s in the family. 5.4 million Americans are living with the disease with that figure predicted to rise to as many as 16 million by 2050, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. To make it easier for caregivers and family members to keep track, GTX Corp has partnered with comfort shoe manufacturer Aetrex to produce the GPS Shoe that allows real-time tracking of the wearer.

The company started out producing footwear for children with a miniaturized GPS chip and cellular device embedded in the sole that allowed parents to keep track via an online portal and then started offering similar shoes for long distance runners. It then realized the technology would also be beneficial in keeping track of those suffering dementia  and built its GPS technology into comfort and wellness shoes for the elderly. Sometimes technology is wizbang and practical.

Food Tidbits

Lemons contain more sugar than strawberries.
    The onion is named after a Latin word meaning large pearl.
    Potato chips were invented by a North American Indian, George Crum.
    During a lifetime the average person eats about 35 tons of food.
    Within 2 hours of standing in daylight, milk loses between half and two-thirds of its vitamin B content.
    There are about 100,000 bacteria in one liter of drinking water.
    Bakers used to be fined if their loaves were under weight, so they used to add an extra loaf to every dozen, just in case -- hence, the expression "baker's dozen.
    In France, people eat approximately 500,000,000 snails per year.
    It has been traditional to serve fish with a slice of lemon since olden times, when people believed that the fruit's juice would dissolve any bones accidentally swallowed.
    The first breakfast cereal ever produced was Shredded Wheat.
    Reindeer like to eat bananas.
    Maine is the toothpick capital of the world.
    Every year, kids in North America spend close to half a billion dollars on chewing gum.
    American's eat about 18 billion hot dogs a year.
    The oldest piece of chewing gum is 9,000 years old.
    The man who played the voice (Mel Blanc) of Bugs Bunny was allergic to carrots.
    Apples are more effective at keeping people awake in the morning than caffeine.
    Every time you lick a stamp you gain 1/10 of a calorie.
    Yams have 10 times more vitamin C than sweet potatoes.

Happy Friday

It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.
I plan to stand tall and carry on with a Happy Friday!

Satellites

If you have about ten minutes to waste, this site shows what can be seen on earth from Google earth satellite. LINK Amazing and quick paced. It is also scary with the level of detail to show someone laying out in their yard. Fascinating pictures of our earth from space. The Singularity web site occupies way too much of my time.

Chewing Gum

Gum has a long history from many countries and civilizations. For centuries the ancient Greeks chewed mastic gum, the resin obtained from the bark of the mastic tree, a shrub-like tree found on the island of Chios, Greece. Grecian women especially favored chewing mastic gum to clean their teeth and sweeten their breath.

In the Middle Ages, mastic was used in the Middle East by the Sultan's harem both as a breath freshener, cosmetics, and for its healing properties.

The Mayan people chewed chicle, which is derived from the sap of the Sapodilla tree, a tropical evergreen native to Central America. Chicle was enjoyed for its high sugar content and sweet flavor.

American Indians of New England chewed gum, made from the resin of spruce trees. The custom of chewing gum grew until the early Nineteenth Century when lumps of spruce gum, were sold commercially. Spruce gum was gradually replaced by paraffin wax-based gum. It was eventually replaced by other substance. Sweetened and flavored paraffin wax is still used in the production of novelty chewing products.

Former Mexican political leader Antonio de Santa Anna went into exile and boarded with Thomas Adams in his Staten Island home. Santa Anna brought with him a large quantity of chicle. He felt chicle would be in high demand among Americans because he believed it could be used as an additive to natural rubber, which could make rubber a less expensive material and could be used to manufacture all kinds of things, such as tires. He asked Adams to experiment with it.

Adams spent over a year trying to make rain boots, toys, masks and bicycle tires, but found chicle unsuitable as a rubber substitute. Adams decided to experiment with chicle as a gum base and found that chicle-based gum was smoother, softer and superior in taste to the paraffin gums available at that time. Adams produced a batch of chicle-based gum and persuaded a local druggist to carry it. Soon Adams opened the world’s first chewing gum factory.

By February 1871, Adams New York Gum could be found on sale in drug stores for a penny per piece. In 1888, a Thomas Adams' chewing gum called Tutti-Frutti became the first gum to be sold in a vending machine. The machines were located in a New York City subway station.

The firm was the nation's most prosperous chewing gum company and built a monopoly in 1899 by merging with the six largest and best-known chewing gum manufacturers in the United States and Canada, and achieved great success as the maker of Chiclets, named after chickle.

Also in 1899, Dentyne gum was created by New York druggist Franklin V. Canning. A few years later, in 1906, Frank Fleer invented the first bubble gum called Blibber-Blubber gum, which never sold. Still a few years later in 1914, William Wrigley, Jr. and Henry Fleer added mint and fruit extracts to a chicle-based chewing gum and created Doublemint gum.

In 1928 the first commercially successful bubble gum based on Frank Fleer’s 1906 creation was manufactured and was called Double Bubble. The Wrigley Company was a prominent user of chicle until the 1960s, when it was replaced by a less expensive material that made chewing gum cheaper to manufacture. There are only a few companies today that still make chewing gum from natural chicle and other natural gums.  That's a lot to chew on.

American Drinking

Sixty four percent of American adults drink alcohol. Of those who imbibe, 36% prefer wine, 35% beer and 23% hard liquor.

What's in a Name, Jukebox

The first Jukebox, or ‘Nickel-in-the-Slot’ was placed in service in 1889 in the Palais Royal Saloon in San Francisco, California.

Juke was a slang African word for a disorderly house, or house of ill repute, then a juke joint became a place where they had jukebox music. Now it is a name for a Chicago dance, and also means to fake, as in football. Some diners still have juke boxes

The unit, developed by Louis T. Glass and William Arnold contained an Edison tinfoil phonograph with four listening tubes. There was a coin slot for each tube. 5 cents bought a few minutes of music. After receiving a coin, it unlocked a mechanism, allowing the listener to turn a crank which simultaneously wound the spring motor and placed the reproducer's stylus in the starting groove. The new device took in $1,000 in six months.

The more modern, but still classic jukebox has buttons with letters and numbers on them that, when entered in combination, are used to play a specific selection.

Honest Abe

As election seasons go on, many like to quote the great presidents from the past. Here is something about Abraham Lincoln. He delivered his Gettysburg Address on November 19 1863. The speech was considered so insignificant at the time that coverage was not even front page news.

A few months before, the fields outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania had one of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War between the states. The Union forces held their positions against Confederate advances. The Confederates, under Robert E. Lee, retreated to Virginia, ending their attempt to invade the North. The battle was the turning point of the war.

President Lincoln traveled to the site of the battle to designate it as a national cemetery. While on the train, he wrote his speech on a small piece of paper. It only took three minutes to deliver the entire speech, which is now considered one of the greatest speeches in American history.

“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war - testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated - can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate - we cannot consecrate - we cannot hallow this ground.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people - by the people - for the people - shall not perish from this earth.”

Google+

Google(plus) is like the new Facebook. It has new and different features, like circles. Circles lets you segregate your friends, family, business associates, etc so that your postings can be sent to one or more groups, rather than everyone sees all. It reached 50 million subscribers in 88 days. Facebook took two years to reach that number. Also, since Google+ has been open to the public, it has been adding about two million new users a day.

Hand Held Super Computer

ASCI Red supercomputer, the first computer capable of doing one trillion calculations per second. Now Intel says that it can put the processing power of ASCI Red in the palm of your hand. Literally.

Intel does this with a new chip, code-named Knights Corner. It crams more than 50 general-purpose Pentium microprocessor cores onto a single chip. All by itself, Knights Corner can perform about 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second. In 1996, it took 72 cabinets of servers for ASCI Red to pull off the same feat.

In June 2011, 17 of the world’s top 500 supercomputers used these graphical processing units, but now that number has jumped to 39

Intel is building a massive 10 petaflop (10 thousand trillion calculations per second) supercomputer called Stampede, out of these next-generation Intel chips. It takes server cards that have a Xeon and Knights Corner processor and slides them into specially designed 7 inch tall server boxes. They expect to get 8 petaflops of performance from the Knights Corner chips and another 2 from the Xeons when Stampede goes live. The 4U servers hold just one card now, but they are designed to eventually hold two, which means Stampede could double its power.

When it goes online in January 2013, Stampede will have 10,000 times the processing power of ASCI Red. As Tim Allen used to say, "Arrrgh, More Power!" Isn't technology wonderful!

Rocky Musical

 I don't even know why this deserves mentioning, but I can't help thinking how odd it is. Sylvester Stalone was in Germany for the announcement that he is producing a Rocky musical to be debuted in Hamburg next year. 

Why a musical and why Hamburg are the questions that make it so strange. It might be in case it bombs, we will never hear about it in the States. Of course, you did read it here.

Flush This

I am not a greenie or enviro agitator, but this caught my eye last week. It turns an ordinary toilet into a dual flush toilet, like those costing hundreds of dollars. The article had an eight-year-old install one in a few minutes with no tools. In full disclosure, I have no financial interest in this product.

The dual-flush technology allows lower water volumes for liquids and paper. A second, full-flush uses the standard amount of water for solids. It is estimated that 80 percent of flushes do not need the full amount of water. This thing costs $19.00 on Amazon. It has a piece that replaces the flapper and an extension that replaces the handle.

Read the customer reviews. It is not a panacea, but seems like it is worthwhile to consider saving a few bucks on your water bill. It is called HydroRight. LINK