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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.


Tuesday, July 12, 2016

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of  
Carolina Naturally
The Hammer ...! 
 
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Today in History

1096
Invaders under Peter the Hermit reach Sofia in Hungary.
1691
William III defeats the allied Irish and French armies at the Battle of Aughrim, Ireland.
1794
British Admiral Lord Nelson loses his right eye at the siege of Calvi, in Corsica.
1806
The Confederation of the Rhine is established in Germany.
1941
Moscow is bombed by the German Luftwaffe for the first time.
1954
President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposes a highway modernization program, with costs to be shared by federal and state governments.
1957
The U.S. surgeon general, Leroy E. Burney, reports that there is a direct link between smoking and lung cancer.
1974
G. Gordon Liddy, John Ehrlichman and two others are convicted of conspiracy and perjury in connection with the Watergate scandal.
1984
Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale chooses Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.

The Map That Defined the United States

John Mitchell was born in the colony of Virginia, but lived in England, where the director of the Board of Trade and Plantations commissioned him to create a map of the American colonies. Although Mitchell wasn’t trained in cartography, he produced a map, published in 1755, that was surprisingly accurate for the time. Not only that, it had “boundaries” drawn between British lands and those of the French and Spanish.
Mitchell’s map took a decidedly British view of who owned what on the continent. His boundary lines, and small notes he scattered across the map, favored British claims over those made by the Spanish and French.
In Florida, for example, Mitchell drew a southern boundary line well inside the territory claimed by Spain. In Alabama, there’s a small note that reads “A Spanish fort built in 1719 & said to be soon after abandoned,” an apparent effort to diminish any Spanish claims to the land.
Mitchell’s map had political influence far beyond anything he’d ever imagined. It played a part in sparking the French and Indian War. That war sucked up so many resources that King George III levied additional taxes on the colonies, and we know what that led to. Then in 1783, his map was used at the Treaty of Paris to define the boundaries of the new United States, after much negotiation. Read about the map that shaped the USA at Phenomena.

Freaks, geeks, norms and mores ...

What Do You Call the Corner Store?

The title of the post may be confusing, because the store its not necessarily on a corner. What they’re talking about is a convenience store, or the small shop that sells a variety of things like food, beer, toilet paper, cigarettes, soap, ice, newspapers, etc. They exist all over the world, and have wonderful names that mean many different things, often evolving from a former version of the store. Depending on where you live, it’s called a deli, sari-sari, dépanneur, packie, offy, milk bar, pulperia, konbini, bodega, mini-mart, or my favorite, misceláneas. Atlas Obscura tells us about the locations and origins of these names. Where I live, they are called “convenience stores,” because we have no imagination.

What is the world’s hottest chili?

Texas Weather

This screenshot of a weather radar image over Texas was preserved for posterity. There are plenty of possible headlines. The one at reddit said, “You know its hot when it's raining Jalapeños in Texas.” Or maybe it’s just really chili.

Three countries urge caution traveling to US amid protests, violence

Study Shows Stark Differences in How Liberals, Wingnuts See Data

Study Shows Stark Differences in How Liberals, Wingnuts See Data

Media experts: Fox 'News' is a ‘very nasty operation’ that will destroy the women who attack Ailes

Media experts: Fox 'News' is a ‘very nasty operation’ that will destroy the women who attack Ailes

Road rage flasher faces several charges

A woman filmed flashing another motorist and his family following a car accident is facing several charges. On Wednesday, the Nevada Highway Patrol (NHP) arrested 34-year-old Gina DeMarco. The arrest came six days after the unusual road rage incident. DeMarco was filmed hurling curse words and flashing the family during rush-hour traffic.
"I mean, what was she thinking? What was the point in doing that?" said Adrian Rodriguez, who was on the receiving end of the incident. Rodriguez says she became enraged after the two collided last Thursday on US 95. "She was going crazy," said Rodriguez. Two minutes later, she was gone, caught speeding away on camera.
"Clearly, this is outrageous behaviour and it has no place on our roadways," said Trooper Jason Buratczuk with the Nevada Highway Patrol. Buratczuk said that DeMarco could be facing hit-and-run and indecent exposure charges. And that's not all. As it turns out, she could be in even more trouble. "We found out that there may be something going on, beyond just a regular hit-and-run crash.

"It looks like maybe some fraud or identity theft may be involved. Investigators are still looking into that," said Buratczuk. "If she would've just stayed on scene, and waited for NHP to get there, she would've had an unsafe lane change ticket and been on her way, and now because of her actions, here we are today," added Buratczuk. DeMarco was booked into the Clark County Detention Center and faces five charges.

Man allegedly beat his elderly grandfather with his own cane for eating the last piece of pizza

Police say a 78-year-old man in Caseyville, Illinois, was beaten with his own cane, by his grandson, during an argument over who ate the last piece of pizza.
St. Clair County prosecutors on Friday charged Charles J. Trione, 27, with aggravated battery and domestic battery. Caseyville Police Sgt. Gerard Spratt said that police were called on the night of June 30 for a report of a domestic disturbance.
“The disturbance was over who ate the last of the pizza in the refrigerator at the house,” Spratt said. He said Trione pushed his grandfather to the floor in the kitchen and then beat him with the grandfather’s cane. When police arrived, the suspect was gone.
The 78-year-old had head injuries which were not life-threatening. Caseyville Police and St. Clair County sheriff’s deputies located Trione on Wednesday in Caseyville. The case was turned over to the state’s attorney’s office. Bail for Trione was set at $75,000, and he remains in custody at the St. Clair County Jail.

The Wartime Tunnels of Fan Bay Deep Shelter

Beneath the White Cliffs of Dover in southern England lies a subterranean military defense network of tunnels. The Fan Bay Deep Shelter was constructed in the 1940s, carved out of the chalk cliffs in a mere 100 days, and equipped to shelter 190 men during possible bombardment from the Axis powers.
The largest shelter of its kind in the Dover area, Fan Bay Deep Shelter was decommissioned in the 1950s and left to the mercy of vandals. The site lay abandoned for some years before one of the tunnels partially collapsed following an arson attack. As a result, the abandoned military shelter was finally infilled with earth and debris during the 1970s.
For years its remains lay entombed within Dover’s famous White Cliffs, a wartime relic lost to time. But when the National Trust accidentally stumbled across the remains of Fan Bay Deep Shelter during enabling works in 2012, what was revealed was one of the deepest surviving examples of its kind from the period.
Excavating the tunnels was a monumental task, but the National Trust set a team of volunteers to work, and now the tunnels are open to the public. If you can’t get to England to see them, take a photographic tour of Fan Bay Deep Shelter at Urban Ghosts.

The 10 Deadliest Gunslingers In The Old West

During the Old West era railroads helped connect the entire country, some of the biggest cities in America were built, and America set its sights on becoming a coast-to-coast nation.But the most famous figures of the era are still the gunslingers, the guys (and a few gals) who liked to settle their disputes with six guns rather than stern words.
Gunslingers such as Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and "Wild Bill" Hickok came to represent the Wild in the Wild West, capturing the imagination of people who lived in the civilized world back east.
And yet many of the deadliest shootists from the Old West were overshadowed by the more famous names mentioned above, despite the massive body counts they had under their belt.
John Wesley Hardin is said to be "the worst bad man that Texas ever produced", who claimed to have killed 42 men and committed his first murder when he was just 15 years old.
Hardin was so quick tempered he supposedly shot a man for snoring.
"Killin' Jim" Miller is another deadly shootist time forgot, and despite being a bit of a dandy he is thought to have gunned down close to 50 men in cold blood.
Jim's life of crime began when he blew away his sister's husband with a shotgun after a disagreement, and was known to tell folks he would kill anyone for money, including politicians, marshals and Sheriff Pat Garrett himself.

Old bones cast new light on Goliath's people

by Daphne Rousseau


US archaeologist and Harvard University professor Lawrence E. Stager sits next to skeletons at the excavation site of the first Philistine cemetery ever found, in southern Israel
With an excavation in southern Israel unearthing a Philistine cemetery for the first time, bones of the biblical giant 's people can finally shed new light on mysteries of their culture.

The cemetery's discovery marks the "crowning achievement" of some three decades of excavations in the area, the expedition's organizers say.
Some of the site's finds were going on display Sunday at the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem.
Almost three millennia since the Philistines were wiped off the face of the earth by Babylonian armies, a US archaeologist was hard at work crouched in one of their funerary chambers at the excavation in the Mediterranean city of Ashkelon.
Brush in hand he delicately extracted from the sandy soil the complete skeleton of a Philistine buried with a terracotta perfume flask, fused to the skull with the passage of time.
"This discovery is a crowning achievement, the opportunity to finally see them face to face," said archaeologist Daniel Master, in charge of the site excavated since 1985 under the Leon Levy Expedition, affiliated with Harvard University's Semitic Museum, among other institutions.
"With these 145 corpses we hope not only to understand their funeral customs, but to collect clues in the bones to understand how they lived, to bring the Philistines to life again," he told AFP.
Bone samples taken from the site are currently undergoing DNA, radiocarbon and other tests to try to shed fresh light on the Philistines’ origin.
The first graves were discovered in Ashkelon in 2013 on the site of its ancient Philistine port city, which had 13,000 inhabitants at its peak.
Today the area lies in a national park popular with Israeli families from modern Ashkelon who come for a stroll along the seaside lawns and paths.
- Sea people? -
Who were the Philistines? The origins of this "sea people" -- a term also used to describe their Phoenician contemporaries -- remain a mystery.
Their red-and-black pottery suggests they may have come from the Mycenaean civilisation of the Aegean.
"What is certain is that they were strangers in the Semitic region," where their presence between 1200 and around 600 BC is evident on a thin coastal strip running from present-day Gaza to Tel Aviv, said Master.
Traders and seafarers, they spoke a language of Indo-European origin, did not practice circumcision and ate pork and dog, as proven by bones and marks found on them in the ruins of the other four Philistine cities: Gaza, Gath, Ashdod and Ekron.
Beyond the previously scanty archaeological record, the Philistines are known mostly from the Old Testament account given by their neighbors and bitter enemies, the ancient Israelites.
The book of Samuel describes the capture by Philistine fighters of the Ark of the Covenant and the duel between their giant warrior Goliath felled by a stone from David's sling.
From these biblical descriptions of savage marauders comes the modern usage of "philistine" to mean a person without culture or manners.
- Hard lives -
A few hundred meters (yards) from the dig, at its outdoor laboratory, anthropologist and pathologist Sherry Fox told the skeletons' story.
"In their teeth, we can see that they did not have an easy life," she said.
"We see these lines that indicate a growth interruption as the teeth are forming. There were problems in childhood with either fever or malnutrition."
"We also see from their bones that they were hard workers, they practised inbreeding and they used their teeth as tools, probably in the weaving industry," she said softly, holding up a skull.
She said they were "normal size" with no evidence of any Goliath-sized giants.
Master said that, despite similar-sounding names, there is no connection between the Philistines and today's Palestinians.
"The words are similar, but not the people," he said.
"We know here in Ashkelon that these Philistines were completely destroyed by (Babylonian king) Nebuchadnezzar in December of 604 BC," he said.
"Everything that came after was very different and a very different group of people."
The 30 years of excavations at the Ashkelon cemetery come to an end this summer, when the dig will be reburied.

Ancient supernovae were close enough to buffet Earth biology

Ancient supernovae were close enough to buffet Earth biology

Zika-Carryng Misquito Repellent

Monks bought 600lbs of lobster to release them back into the ocean

More than 600 pounds of lobsters were spared from the the pot, thanks to compassionate monks on Prince Edward Island, Canada. The monks bought the lobsters from various places around the Island, said Venerable Dan of the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society in Little Sands. On Saturday, they boarded a fishing boat and released them back into the ocean off the coast of Wood Islands.
"Hopefully, we can find a spot where there are no cages waiting for them," said Dan. The purpose is to cultivate compassion not just for the lobsters, but for all beings, he said. "We respect everyone's dietary choice, so we're not doing this to convert everybody to be vegetarians or vegans," he said. "This whole purpose for us is to cultivate this compassion toward others.
"It doesn't have to be lobsters, it can be worms, flies, any animals, drive slower so we don't run over little critters on the street." Before releasing the lobsters, the monks held a 20-minute ceremony with a prayer and chant to the Buddha of compassion. Dan said you don't have to have a ceremony or be a Buddhist to practice compassion to be nicer to all the living beings around you and try to think from their point of view.
"If your loved ones were in this situation, what would they like you to do?" he said. "To give them a helping hand and put them back to where they feel comfortable and we believe if everybody's able to do that, it will become a better place, a more harmonic place." He said Islanders, including fisherman, have supported their cause. "Fishermen actually found us a better place to release the lobster so they won't be captured again," he said.

Shopkeeper surprised to find a sloth waiting outside his store

An errant sloth surprised a shopkeeper in the town of Pucallpa, Peru.
The store owner, who found the animal as he arrived to open, called the Peru Institute of Natural Resources.
They sent someone to pick the animal up and take it back to a nearby wildlife park, where it had wandered away from.

The sloth is an endangered animal, so wildlife officials say this was an important find, and it is necessary to protect the animal.

Animal Pictures