Organic Food

Multi-ingredient agricultural products in the US “Made with organic” category must contain at least 70 percent certified organic ingredients (not including salt or water). These products may contain up to 30 percent of allowed non-organic ingredients. All ingredients – including the 30 percent non-organic ingredients – must be produced without GMOs.

Ten Interesting Tidbits of Knowledge

The word ‘ushers’ contains five pronouns: us, she, he, her and hers.

By the time a glass of champagne goes flat, two million bubbles will have popped.

People suffering from superior canal dehiscence syndrome can hear their own eyeballs moving.

A Gongoozler is a person who stares for a long time at things happening on a canal.

Britons eat 97% of the world’s baked beans.

By the time they leave high school American children will have eaten 1,500 peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

American bullfrogs’ eyes have special retinas. The top half sees in daylight, the bottom sees into the water in infrared.

The act of snapping one's fingers is called a fillip.

Tyler, Texas, USA contains the world's largest rose garden: 22 acres with over 38,000 rose bushes and more than 500 varieties of rose.

The 2004 tsunami shifted the location of the geographic South Pole by a few centimeters.

Happy Friday

"Happiness is a state of mind, and depends very little on outward circumstances." ~ Helen Keller

I always have a Happy state of mind, especially on a Happy Friday!

National Donut Day

It is celebrated on the first Friday in June. That sweet, doughy goodness that has a day set aside holey in its honor. Go out for some freebies from your favorite donut shop today.


Incidentally, the name was originally hyphenated, as in "balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called dough-nuts, or oly koeks(oily cakes): a delicious kind of cake made by Dutch families.” When  phonetic-based spelling reform came along, it was changed to donut, which was popularized by Dunkin' Donuts and has become the more popular spelling.

Gandhi Tale

This interesting bit of fiction takes place when Gandhi was studying law at the University College of London, a white professor Peters disliked him. The two had many arguments and confrontations.
Mr. Peters was having lunch at the dining room of the University, and Gandhi came along with his tray and sat next to the professor. The professor said, "Mr. Gandhi, you do not understand. A pig and a bird do not sit together to eat." Gandhi looked at him and calmly replied, "You do not worry professor. I'll fly away," and went to sat at another table.
Mr. Peters decided to take revenge on the next test paper, but Gandhi responded brilliantly to all questions. Mr. Peters asked him the following question. "Mr. Gandhi, if you were walking down the street and found a package, and within was a bag of wisdom and another bag with a lot of money, which one would you take?" Without hesitating, Gandhi responded, "The one with the money, of course."
Mr. Peters said, "I, in your place, would have taken the wisdom, don't you think?"
Gandhi shrugged and responded, "Each one takes what he does not have."
Mr. Peters wrote on Gandhi's exam sheet the word "idiot" and gave it to Gandhi. Gandhi took the exam sheet and sat down at his desk trying to remain calm while he contemplated his next move.

A few minutes later, Gandhi got up, went to the professor and said to him in a dignified, but sarcastically polite tone, "Mr. Peters, you signed the sheet, but you did not give me the grade."

Languages

According to Ethnologue, there are over 7,000 distinct languages in the world and about 40,000 dialects. Some languages, like Russian and Hindi, are written from left-to-right, while others, like Hebrew and Persian, are written right-to-left.
The nation of Papua New Guinea has the highest language diversity in the world. There are 820 languages spoken in an area the size of Spain.

There are logographic languages, like Japanese and Korean, where symbols represent words, and there are Dongba and Nsibidi which are pictographic languages where symbols represent ideas.

Incidentally, there are over 1.5 billion speakers of English globally. In 2015, out of the total 195 countries in the world, 67 nations have English as the primary language of 'official status'. Plus there are 27 countries where English is spoken as a secondary 'official' language.

TV Watching

Nielsen’s fourth-quarter Comparable Metrics Report says that adults spent 509 billion minutes viewing on TVs during the quarter and another 63.6 billion minutes viewing on TV-connected devices. Viewing video on PCs accounted for 31.7 billion minutes, smartphone video 10.9 billion, and 4.4 billion  minutes on tablets.

TV Antenna Facts

If you decide to cut the cord and use an antenna to get local TV, you do not need to worry about a special 4K antenna, because there is no broadcast 4K content - and there may never be. Just as with cables, an antenna does not know and does not care what kind of signal it receives as long as it is within the designated frequency (channel) range.

Any digital antenna will work fine for digital TV, HD, and 4K. There is nothing that would make an antenna better or worse for digital, HD, or 4K. However, broadcasters are not required to put out a 4K signal and that means that they probably will not. Current 4K content comes from cable channels and other digital operators, such as Sling TV, DirectTV Now, HULU, etc. None of them require an antenna.
Amplified vs. non-amplified antenna - If you are running a very long length of coax cable or more than one TV, an amplifier might improve your TV reception. It should be placed at the end closest to the antenna, not at the end closest to the TV. For most situations, a non-amplified antenna is equal and sometimes better than an amplified antenna. An amplified antenna may overpower some signals and you actually lose channels, because they amplify noise as well as channel signals.


Bottom line, if you want a digital antenna, buy one, but do not give in to hype about being 4K ready or any other mumbo jumbo from the salesperson. Also, using an antenna will produce a noticeably better picture on your TV, because antennas do not compress the signal as cable companies do.

Netflix

Netflix can take up almost half of US bandwidth during peak hours. Sandvine reports that Netflix accounts for over 35% of web traffic in North America, followed by YouTube at 17.5%, and Amazon Video at 4.3%. On average, Netflix customers consume 125 million hours a day. On a big day, single-day viewership hours have approached 250 million. The study concluded that viewers consume over 800,000 minutes of internet video per second each day. Netflix now has 50 million US customers and 93 million subscribers worldwide.

Chesty Tax Deduction

Every now and then something I read is so completely crazy it tickles me. Thought I would share this IRS story. If you are an exotic dancer who needs the biggest assets possible to get the biggest tips, they might be deductible. The IRS initially denied the write off, which “Chesty Love” submitted for her (56-FF) breast augmentation. However, the Court allowed her 'stage props' as depreciable assets.

Graffiti

The term graffiti referred to the inscriptions and figure drawings found on the walls of ancient sepulchers or ruins, as in the catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Use of the word has evolved to include any graphics applied to surfaces in a manner that constitutes vandalism.

Graffiti are writing or drawings that have been scribbled, scratched, or painted illicitly on a wall or other surface, often within public view. Graffiti range from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and they have existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire.

Both "graffiti" and its occasional singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word graffiato ("scratched").

Happy Friday

Even mediocre happiness is eternally better than none.

My happiness knows no bounds, especially on a Happy Friday!

Pinch Bum Day

I always chuckle when I add this holiday. May 29, also known as Pinch-Bum Day, to commemorate the return of Charles II to London on that date in 1660. Those who did not wear oak leaves could be pinched. Our ancestors were clearly over-fond of this form of retribution, but at least women could do it to men, too.

Electronic Spam

Spam is shoulder pork and ham and is also unsolicited junk email. Eighty six percent of the world's email traffic is spam. That amounts to more than 400 billion messages sent a day, according to a report by Cisco Systems.

One way to eliminate spam might be for all of us to reply to the spammer with a copy of the email. When they get 400 billion messages back, they may just understand what we deal with every day. Oh, delete your signature line, but do not worry that they will get your email address. Obviously they already have it.