Global Belly Laugh Day

Next Thursday, January 24 is Global Belly Laugh Day. Time to celebrate the gift of laughter. On January 24 at 1:24 p.m. (local time) smile, throw your arms in the air and laugh out loud. You will scare some people, amuse others, possibly make new friends, and generally have fun laughing out loud. Laughing out loud is good for your body and your soul.

Liver Facts

Our liver does everything from filtering blood, breaking down and absorbing fats, processing cholesterol, carbohydrates, and proteins. It stores glycogen, vitamins, and minerals. It detoxifies chemicals and metabolizes drugs. It is also one of the organs that break down old or damaged blood cells.


The liver plays a central role in all metabolic processes in the body. In fat metabolism the liver cells break down fats and produces energy. The liver also makes proteins important for blood clotting and other functions. The liver is the largest internal organ and is the only organ that can regenerate itself. However, repeated damage to it can eventually injure and scar it.

Wordology, Minuscule

This is a frequently misspelled word. It is not 'mini-scule'. It bears no linguistic relation to mini or miniature, but actually comes from the Latin minus, meaning “less.” Now that you know the 'minus' origin, it should be easy to remember the spelling of minuscule.

IBM and Weather

IBM’s new Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System, or GRAF for short, is a global weather forecasting system that uses IBM supercomputers and taps into millions of previously untapped crowdsourced data to more accurately forecast weather around the world, by what IBM claims represents a nearly 200 percent improvement.
IBM owns The Weather Company. By relying on cell phone data from the Weather Channel app, in addition to traditional forms of weather data from balloons and weather station observations around the world, GRAF also draws on atmospheric data collected by planes and also ground pressure data from millions of cell phones that have the Weather Channel app.

Most smartphones have a barometer inside, which is used to help your phone’s fitness tracker figure out how many stairs you climbed. It has been useful for meteorologists for years, because pressure provides clues about storms. Using this additional phone data as a network of tiny pressure sensors opens up a world of forecast improvements. Some of this barometric work has been going on for a few years. LINK

Cheese King

Denver headquarters of Leprino Foods, sells mozzarella to Pizza Hut, Domino's, and Papa John's. It also sells cheese for ham-and-cheddar Hot Pockets, Stouffer's lasagna, and Smart Ones baked ziti, cheese cubes like pear flavor with nuts or Gorgonzola with pretzels. It even sells a dessert salted-caramel-flavored mozzarella wrapped in hot dough, rolled in cinnamon sugar. The company's lactose and whey powders are used for protein bars, Yoplait yogurt, Pillsbury Toaster Strudel, and baby formula. In fact, Leprino Foods sells more than a billion pounds of cheese a year.

Taste Bud Tidbits

The taste cells in our taste buds live for only about two weeks.

Taste buds are not visible to the naked eye; the little bumps that can be seen on the tongue are actually papillae, taste buds rest on top of the papillae.

Happy Friday

If you appreciate who you are, you will never be unhappy.

If you appreciate who you are, you will always have a Happy Friday!

Body Mass Index (BMI) Origin

Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (pronounced Ket-eh-lay) was born into a middle-class family on February 22, 1796. He was a mathematician, astronomer, statistician, poet, dramatist, and one of the founders of sociology. Quetelet believed society could be analyzed without bias using statistics. He described this new academic field as social physics, believing it would reveal important patterns in human society. In 1832, Quetelet discovered in his mountains of data a relationship between height and weight in adults. “The weights of individuals of different height are nearly like the square of their height.” In 1972, the American physiologist Ancel Keys formed the view that the Quetelet Index was the best way to identify obese individuals and gave it a new name – the body mass index.

In 1985, the U.S. National Institutes of Health adopted the body mass index or BMI as a means of identifying underweight and overweight individuals. He died age 77 on February 17, 1874.

Hardee's Frisco Burger

Hardee’s Frisco Burger, one of the first fast-food burgers served with bacon, came out during 1992 and was a hit. It revived bacon as an ingredient, and convinced other fast-food companies to bacon-ize their burgers. Bloomberg called it "a momentous event for fast food, and bacon’s fate, in America."


Incidentally, Hardees was founded by Wilber Hardee and is now owned by CKE, owner of Carl's Jr. Because of the similarity to the name of popular Canadian chain Harvey’s, all Canadian locations of Hardee’s need to be called Carl’s Jr.

Tool Tips

Synthetic wine corks are great for sealing partially used tubes of caulk. Drill a 5/16-in. hole into the cork about 1 in. deep. It makes an airtight seal and is reusable.

Used six pack holders are great for storing things, such as caulk, spray paint cans, WD40 cans, etc.
To keep pictures level, use two hangers or use small rubber feet with adhesive back on each bottom corner.
Spring is coming, so save old newspapers to spread on the ground before you mulch. It is very effective to eliminate weeds and easily poked through for planting. It also will keep moisture in and decompose over time.
Dryer sheets can be reused twice, so save them for that second load of clothes.
Egg cartons are great for keeping the odd screws, bolts, and nails separated and handy. They are also great indoor plant starters to get ahead of spring.

A soap dispenser brush is not just for the kitchen. Keep one in the shower with dish soap that also works well for a quick tile cleanup.

New Toothbrush

The Consumer Electronics Show is being held in Las Vegas this week and one interesting item is the 'Y Brush'. The info says to put toothpaste on it and hold in your mouth, press power button, and chew for five seconds, rinse then put more toothpaste on it, turn over and repeat for a full mouth brushing in ten seconds. There are four sizes for children and adults.

The ad says, "Our mouth is made up of 32 teeth with 3 visible angles for a total of 96 overall faces to be cleaned. If the recommended brushing time is 2 minutes minimum, then it means that each surface of the tooth should be brushed for 1.25 seconds at least for a total of 3.75 seconds per tooth.

With Y-Brush each of your teeth are brushed 5 seconds since all the teeth are brushed simultaneously, that is 4 times more than with a traditional manual or electric toothbrush during a brushing of 2 minutes." Price is $125 and no description about how long it will last. Will be anxious to read reviews on this one, which is due out in April, 2019. (PS - the arrow does nothing, I clipped the picture.)

Wordology, Shoes

From the annals of improbable research, we discover that 'Shoes' is a word which has many synonyms as this kind of outfit has developed in terms of its shape, which is obviously seen.


From the observation done in this research, there are 26 kinds of shoes with 36 distinctive features. The types of shoes found are boots, brogues, cleats, clogs, espadrilles, flip-flops, galoshes, heels, kamiks, loafers, Mary Janes, moccasins, mules, oxfords, pumps, rollerblades, sandals, skates, slides, sling-backs, slippers, sneakers, swim fins, valenki, waders and wedge. The distinctive features of the word “shoes” are based on the heels, heel shape, gender, the types of the toes, the occasions to wear the footwear, the place to wear the footwear, the material, the accessories of the footwear, the model of the back of the shoes and the cut of the shoes. Hmmm, this is no barefoot observation.

Free up Phone Space

If your phone response is getting sluggish or you get the message that it is getting full, there are two places to look, pictures and messages. Obviously movie files and podcasts take up the most storage. You can back up files to the cloud or your PC, then delete the largest files first to gain the most storage with the least amount of files deleted.
You should routinely delete old photos and videos anyway as good maintenance. As a side benefit, you will be able to find what you want faster. Also, if you lose your phone there is less chance of pictures hitting the internet.

To many it is not as obvious, but messages, especially messages with pictures or videos take up an enormous about of room. You can save the pictures and videos from messages into your pictures app, then delete them from messages. Many people do that, but do not realize there are duplicates taking up an enormous amount of space. Even without pictures, messages take up much space. The easy to delete messages is to check delete all, then uncheck the boxes of ones you wish to keep. Just as with photos, routinely deleting old messages is good maintenance to keep your phone from getting sluggish and from running out of space.

Robocalls

Robocall management company YouMail has been tracking the volume of calls and says that 2018 saw 48 million of them harass cell phone owners in the US last year, up 60 percent from 2017. It is easy for robocallers to spoof a local number and trick you into answering by making you think you are getting a legitimate call from your area instead of from a toll-free number you do not recognize. About 60 percent of robocalls are classified as legitimate, even if they seem annoying to you. Those would be things like automated messages from pharmacies, schools and political candidates. I think we need to renegotiate what constitutes 'legitimate robocall'.