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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Wednesday, June 29, 2016

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of  
Carolina Naturally
A real man ...! 
 
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Today in History

1236
Ferdinand III of Castile and Leon take Cordoba in Spain.
1652
Massachusetts declares itself an independent commonwealth.
1767
The British parliament passes the Townshend Revenue Act, levying taxes on America.
1862
Union forces, falling back from Richmond, fight at the Battle of Savage’s Station.
1880
France annexes Tahiti.
1888
Professor Frederick Treves performs the first appendectomy in England.
1903
The British government officially protests Belgian atrocities in the Congo.
1905
Russian troops intervene as riots erupt in ports all over the country, leaving many ships looted.
1917
The Ukraine proclaims independence from Russia.
1925
An earthquake ravages Santa Barbara, California.
1926
Fascists in Rome add an hour to the work day in an economic efficiency measure.
1932
Siam’s army seizes Bangkok and announces an end to the absolute monarchy.
1938
Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, and Olympic National Park, Washington, are founded.
1950
President Harry S. Truman authorizes a sea blockade of Korea.
1951
The United States invites the Soviet Union to the Korean peace talks on a ship in Wonsan Harbor.
1955
The Soviet Union sends tanks to Poznan, Poland, to put down anti-Communist demonstrations.
1966
The U.S. Air Force bombs fuel storage facilities near Hanoi, North Vietnam.
1967
Israel removes barricades, re-unifying Jerusalem.
1970
U.S. troops pull out of Cambodia.
1982
Israel invades Lebanon.

20 Heroes, Villains, Aliens, And Monsters Who Ran For President

We all have politics on the brain nowadays, but regardless of your political leanings or feelings about the candidates, it's worth remembering that it could be weirder. Here's a list of the best, the worst, and the strangest beings who tried to take residence in the White House.

60 Years Ago: The Last Packard Rolls off the Assembly Line60 Years Ago: The Last Packard Rolls off the Assembly Line

Founded in 1899, Packard was one of the last independent car manufacturers in the US. The luxury brand survived the Great Depression and two world wars. It emerged in good financial shape after domestic car production picked up in 1946. But it couldn't keep up with changing markets and its larger competitors.
In 1955, Packard merged with Studebaker--another company that would soon disappear. The following year, Packard unveiled the Patrician, an example of which is pictured above. On June 25, 1956, the last Packard came off the assembly line in Detroit. For a few more years, there would be Studebakers re-branded as Packards. But this would be the last true Packard. Blake Z. Rong writes mournfully at Road & Track:
All the things that went wrong with Packard—a move downmarket, chasing volume instead of brand image, strange styling, intense cost-cutting, defects, recalls, pissed-off dealers, model lineup bloat, the dreaded scourge of "badge engineering," a desperate merger with a tarnished car-maker just to compete with bigger companies—are still happening today. Maserati comes to mind. The last Honda Civic. Every dead GM brand that didn't survive the bailout, plagued by lost identities and muddled marketing, surviving this far only by dint of pure nostalgia. Mercury. Plymouth. The Mercedes-Benz CLA. Is Volkswagen going to follow the same route? Or Fiat-Chrysler? It's always sad when a car-maker dies, and we never wish for that to happen. Not even for Mitsubishi.

Neo-Nazis are creating bizarre dance music that mixes Hitler speeches with club beats

Neo-Nazis are creating bizarre dance music that mixes Hitler speeches with club beats

Fox 'News' Attacks LGBT Community With Disgusting Story Saying They’re After Young Children

The depths to which wingnuts will sink to demonize the LGBT community knows no bounds.

Five Wingnut Predictions About Marriage Equality That Still Haven't Come True

Sunday marked the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark marriage equality decision, which, if religio-wingnut agitators were to be believed, was to usher in a horrible tyranny that would lead to mass deaths and war. Of course, the religio-wingnuts’ doomsday predictions about what would... MORE

SCOTUSBlog Brilliantly Trolls The Trolls Who Attack Them Following Supreme Court Rulings

Following the end of every term for the Supreme Court, SCOTUSblog, which is in no way run by the Supreme Court, inevitably finds itself under attack from...

Federal Judge Rules ‘Christians’ Can’t Use ‘Religious Liberty’ To Deny Marriage Licenses To Gay People

It’s almost poetic. Just after the news broke that Mike Huckabee will have to pay $25,000 for the unauthorized use of Survivor’s “Eye...

Pro Tip: You Don't Need to ShowerPro Tip: You Don't Need to Shower

Do you bathe on a regular basis? Stop. You don't need to.
James Hamblin, a physician, explains in The Atlantic that it's unnecessary. Your body will naturally regulate its own filth if you would just leave it alone:
The odor of bodies is the product of bacteria that live on our skin and feed off of the oily secretions from the sweat and sebaceous glands at the base of our hair follicles. Applying detergents (soaps) to our skin and hair every day disrupts a sort of balance between skin oils and the bacteria that live on our skin. When you shower aggressively, you obliterate the ecosystems. They repopulate quickly, but the species are out of balance and tend to favor the kinds of microbes that produce odor.
But after a while, the idea goes, your ecosystem reaches a steady state, and you stop smelling bad.
Hamblin put the theory to the test on himself. It worked! His friends tell him that he doesn't stink:
And everything is fine. I wake up and get out the door in minutes. At times when I might’ve smelled bad before, like at the end of a long day or after working out,  I just don’t. At least, to my nose. I’ve asked friends to smell me, and they insist that it’s all good. (Though they could be allied in an attempt to ruin me.)
So knock it off with bathing. Live naturally. The people around you will appreciate it.

Scientists have found a way to get all the shampoo out of the bottle

Pizzeria Uses Robot to Prepare Pies, Bakes Them on Delivery Truck

Her name is Marta. She's the next generation in pizza chefs. Marta, who is a robot, assembles pizzas, then gives them to another robot named Bruno. Bruno loads the pizzas into an oven where they bake partially--but not all of the way.
The pizzas are then loaded onto delivery trucks. Each truck has 56 ovens. When a computer calculates that the truck is 3 minutes and 15 seconds away from the destination, it turns the oven on.
So when the customer gets the pizza, it's extremely fresh because it just came out of the oven.
This is the business model for Zume, a new startup located 2 minutes away from Google's headquaters in Mountain View, California. Bloomberg News (auto-start) investigated what may the the future of food:
"We are going to be the Amazon of food," said Zume's co-founder and executive chairman, Alex Garden. […]
Garden is confident it won't be long before he's competing with the major pizza chains. "Just imagine Domino's without the labor component," said Garden. "You can start to see how incredibly profitable that can be."

The Mysterious Origins of Sausage

What can you say about sausage? That it’s funny because of its phallic shape, that you can’t always know what’s in it (and that’s scary), and just about every culture around the world has it. Sausages vary from place to place, and in different eras, and the variety of force meat in casings means it can even be hard to define.
The ubiquity of the food makes it hard to trace its first moments on Earth; sausages were a solution to a problem that every culture was likely to come up against. “Sausages were created originally for two reasons: One, to make use of every little piece of the meat, so nothing is wasted, and two, by using salt and smoking, it was a way to preserve it,” explains Gary Allen, author of Sausages: A Global History, pointing to the rise of coordinated hunting and the ability to pull down increasingly larger game as one of the conditions that led to the birth of sausages.
Read about the development of sausage and the many different sausages of the world at Atlas Obscura.


10 Must-See Islands You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

If you go to France, you may as well skip the Louvre because it’s overrun with tourists. If you go to Italy, you may be disappointed in how commercialized the Leaning Tower of Pisa is. And if you are looking for a relaxing island getaway, you might do well to skip the most popular destinations and organized tours, and try one of the beautiful, lesser-known islands of the world. Like the volcano called Aogashima.
About 358 km away from Tokyo, Japan is the small, volcanic island called Aogashima. It is the most isolated island of the Izu archipelago, though it is inhabited by approximately 200 villagers. The island is a crater made by a volcanic eruption, and inside the crater is another volcano. Its 1780s eruption classifies it as active, because nearly half of the people living there died. For more than fifty years, nobody returned.
It is a lush tropical island in the Philippine Sea with a mysterious lure. Its serenity brings travelers to unwind in its geothermal sauna. The adventurous come to hike and cook their meals in the volcanic steam vents using pots provided at the sauna. Ferry and helicopter are the only options for reaching the island. It is a bit like Shangri La, only in the midst of the sea. It also comes with a warning that nobody knows when or if it will erupt again. The brave may reap the experience of a lifetime there.
See nine other surprising island destinations at Money Inc.

NASA rover findings point to a more Earth-like Martian past

Beware Kangaroos Claiming To Be Window WashersBeware Kangaroos Claiming To Be Window Washers

People who live in a kangaroo-less country don't realize how dangerous those muscular marsupials can be when they're mad, but there's a reason they call a group of kangaroos a mob.
And thanks to this terrifying but true video footage shared by Gem 106 we're reminded why the world is better off without a bunch of bounding brutes banging on our windows.
And you thought door-to-door salesmen were the most annoying creatures on the planet!

The Critters Are Coming!

What happens when the delicate balance of nature tips in such a way that a particular animal population spikes to unsustainable levels? Pretty much what you’d expect: chaos… famine… and critters out the wazoo.
THE 48-YEAR CURSE
The wild bamboo forests in northwest India and parts of Burma are home to an odd curse: Every 48 years, like clockwork, they produce an army of hungry rats that devour the local rice crop. The phenomenon is called mautam (which translates to “bamboo death”) and is caused by the life cycle of melocanna bamboo, the local variety. The plants live for exactly 48 years, at which point entire forests die off simultaneously. But before they die, they produce a tremendous amount of seed-filled fruit. The fruit will replant the next generation of bamboo, but in the meantime, it also provides a huge increase in the amount of food available to the local black rat community.
The sudden food surplus sets off a population boom. For as long as the good times last, the rats breed continuously. It takes only about 11 weeks for the baby rats to reach maturity. That means, during the year that the forest fruits, the rat population jumps exponentially every couple of months— from as few as 100 rats per acre to as many as 12,000 per acre. And at just about the time that the rat population is hitting its peak, the bamboo fruit runs out.  
When that happens, millions of starving rats swarm the countryside, eating everything in their path… which spells disaster for the local rice farmers. In the past, without advance planning and no ability to bring in extra food from outside the region, the rat plague could lead to famine and political upheaval. As for the rats, once they’ve decimated the rice crop, they starve to death en masse. Their population numbers crash back down, but everyone knows they’ll be back… in 48 years.
THE HOUSE MOUSE INVASION
For more than a century, Australians have been at war against what they call the “mouse plague.” Once every four years on average, somewhere in Australia, vast stretches of farmland are devastated by millions of hungry mice. Why are Australian mice so hard to control? Probably because they aren’t natives— they’re an invasive species.
The mice that cause such destruction Down Under actually belong to one of the most common mouse species in the world: the house mouse. Native to Asia, these mice abandoned foraging in the wild in favor of scavenging in human settlements nearly 10,000 years ago. And as human agriculture and civilization spread across the globe, the house mice spread too. They most likely arrived in Australia as stowaways aboard the first ships that brought settlers there in the 1780s.
House mice are among the fastest breeders in the world. A female’s pregnancy lasts just 19 days and produces five to ten baby mice. Those baby mice start having their own babies when they’re only six weeks old. Oh, yeah— and females can get pregnant again just one to three days after giving birth. This means that one female mouse can produce 500 new mice in less than six months.
THE ORIGINAL AND STILL THE WORST
Desert locusts are the granddaddy of all animal plagues. Ancient Egyptians wrote about them 3,500 years ago, and they’ve been menacing much of North Africa and the Middle East ever since. For thousands of years, no one had any idea where they came from. Most years, there were no locusts at all. In a bad year, though, they showed up by the billions, in huge clouds dense enough to blot out the sun. The clouds swept across the countryside, eating every bit of vegetation in their path and leaving farm fields stripped bare. It wasn’t until the 1920s that scientists uncovered the secret of the locusts’ mysterious appearances.
It turns out that locusts are just regular grasshoppers driven crazy by overcrowding. The desert is a harsh environment, and there’s usually not enough food to support a large grasshopper population. To ensure survival of the species, female grasshoppers lay as many as 150 eggs just under the surface of loose, sandy ground. Ordinarily, not all of the eggs hatch— and not all of the ones that hatch survive. But when a particularly wet winter comes along, two things happen: First, more of the eggs hatch. And second, the extra moisture means that extra vegetation grows, providing enough food to support the extra population… at first.
Scientists aren’t exactly sure why, but overcrowded conditions cause grasshoppers to change both their appearance and their behavior. Their color morphs from green to a yellow-and-black pattern. More importantly, their personalities change— from solitary individuals to being clustered together in an organized mob that moves across the landscape as one giant, food-frenzied unit. Weird but true.
Bonus: The swarm, American-style. For the first three or four decades of settlement on the Great Plains, American farmers regularly had their crops wiped out by the Rocky Mountain locust. In 1874, a swarm of locusts estimated at a size of 198,000 square miles— about twice the size of Colorado— swept through Nebraska. By the early 1900s, the Rocky Mountain locust had disappeared from the landscape, apparently gone extinct. The only explanation scientists have come up with for why this happened is that the settlers may have plowed up the locusts’ breeding grounds without even realizing it.

Duck and Dog Play Chase

The duck's only chance is to outwit his much faster opponent. Perhaps he could double back and catch the dog behind him Or, like Khan in Star Trek II, his opponent may be thinking in 2 dimensions instead of 3. He could fly over the rock to catch his foe from above.

9 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of a Shark Week Cinematographer

Shark Week is upon us, as it has been for 28 years. While we marvel at the awesomeness of the predators of our nightmares, you have to wonder about the folks who actually get in the water with them to get the footage. Andy Brandy Casagrande IV, in addition to having the world’s most awesome name, is a shark cinematographer. He’s the one who gets a great white shark to say "cheese" for the camera. He shares some tidbits about his job with us.
The shark-proof cage so often seen in TV specials serves a real purpose. Casagrande is well-known for diving without one, but there are times when even he prefers the security a cage can provide. “The cage protects you from sharks that might be a little more bitey than usual,” Casagrande says. “It can keep you safe from sharks that might sneak up on you, or if visibility is bad, or in the dark.”
Sharks have unique personalities just like people, according to Casagrande. “If you’re at a party or a bar and you see some dude that has bloody knuckles or a black eye, and he looks angry, that’s not the kind of guy you walk up to and stick your GoPro in his face," he says. "Often if a shark is all chewed up and looks like a brawler, that shark is not afraid to engage in conflict.” But many sharks are ambush predators, and so you may not see that brawler coming—hence the cage.
Read more about being a shark cinematographer at mental_floss.

Animal Pictures