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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.


Friday, November 25, 2016

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of  
Carolina Naturally
Today also happens to be Native American Heritage Day ...! 
 
Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.   
   
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Today is - International Hat Day 
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Today in History

2348 BC
 Biblical scholars have long asserted this to be the day of the Great Deluge, or Flood.
1863
Union ends the siege of Chattanooga with the Battle of Missionary Ridge.
1876
Colonel Ronald MacKenzie destroys Cheyenne Chief Dull Knife‘s village, in the Bighorn Mountains near the Red Fork of the Powder River, during the so-called Great Sioux War.
1901
Japanese Prince Ito arrives in Russia to seek concessions in Korea.
1914
German Field Marshal Friedrich von Hindenburg calls off the Lodz offensive 40 miles from Warsaw, Poland. The Russians lose 90,000 to the Germans’ 35,000 in two weeks of fighting.
1918
Chile and Peru sever relations.
1921
Hirohito becomes regent of Japan.
1923
Transatlantic broadcasting from England to America commences for the first time.
1930
An earthquake in Shizouka, Japan kills 187 people.
1939
Germany reports four British ships sunk in the North Sea, but London denies the claim.
1946
The U.S. Supreme Court grants the Oregon Indians land payment rights from the U.S. government.
1947
The Big Four meet to discuss the German and European economy.
1951
A truce line between U.N. troops and North Korea is mapped out at the peace talks in Panmunjom, Korea.
1955
The Interstate Commerce Commission bans segregation in interstate travel.
1963
The body of assassinated President John F. Kennedy is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
1964
Eleven nations give a total of $3 billion to rescue the value of the British currency.
1986
As Reagan announces the Justice Department’s findings concerning the Iran-Contra affair; secretary Fawn Hall smuggles important documents out of Lt. Col. Oliver North’s office.
1987
Typhoon Nina sticks the Philippines with 165 mph winds and a devastating storm surge and causes over 1,030 deaths.
1992
Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia votes to partition the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, beginning Jan. 1, 1993.
2008
Sri Lanka is hit by Cyclone Nisha, bringing the highest rainfall the area had seen in 9 decades; 15 people die, 90,000 are left homeless.

The collapse of the Maya Civilization could resemble what we’re in for as Dumbass Trump steals office

Arthur Andrew Demarest draws similarities between the Maya Empire and America today.

The Invention of News

by Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
 The field of public relations is still built on a single foundational tool—the press release. Why do we still use them? Well, for the companies, they work.
Press releases are like chum for the enterprising marketer. For decades, these blurbs have been designed to draw in journalists looking for the next story, something to fill the page or make hay for their audiences. Sometimes, they’re successful—such as Nintendo of America’s cheeky press release last year that pointed out their VP of sales has the last name Bowser. But a lot of the time, they’re full of irrelevant crap. If you mixed a little bit of chum with a lot of packing peanuts, that’s kind of how they work for journalists. Today, we’re gonna talk about press releases, why they exist, and why they annoy journalists so much.
The New York Times published the first press release word-for-word
Last year, Amtrak dealt with a deadly passenger train crash by sending out an email to its customers.
“On behalf of the entire Amtrak family, I offer our sincere sympathies and prayers for them and their loved ones. Amtrak takes full responsibility and deeply apologizes for our role in this tragic event,” Amtrak President and CEO Joe Boardman wrote.
The message contained details about how the company was working to solve the problems raised by the crash, as well as how it was working to help the victims. (One of whom, by the way, is a friend of my wife’s, Seyward Darby. She wrote some powerful words about the crash over this way. You should read them.)
If you dig back in the history books, you’ll find that this Amtrak crash was far from the only passenger train disaster on the books. In fact, one such crash—with a far higher casualty toll—took place about 60 miles away from the site of the Amtrak 188 crash. Public comments from the train operators also followed that crash.
“The Pennsylvania Railroad Company is leaving nothing undone to get at the cause of the accident,” the company stated.
Those public comments, from the 1906 Atlantic City train wreck, came from the first-ever press release. It was published in The New York Times, verbatim—something that would never happen today.

The first press release, borne from a guy with a tainted reputation
That release was masterminded by a guy named Ivy Ledbetter Lee, who’s seen as the father of modern public relations by some.
Much like many journalists today, Lee came to PR from newspapers, quitting his press gigs because the pay sucked. Also like many journalists who switched sides, Lee was seen with suspicion by the industry he left behind.
The Times, for example, may have printed the first press release, but it wasn’t long before the public relations tool fell outside its “fit to print” slogan in its unadulterated form. (Journalists were quick to arch their brows at questionable information, even during the era of Yellow Journalism.)
Lee, however, was quick to defend his PR firm’s approach, writing a response, the Declaration of Principles, that emphasized the news value of the information being presented.
“In brief, our plan is frankly, and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about,” Lee explained.
Lee’s strategy was pretty solid, and he also played key roles in creating the kind of modern public relations strategies still used today. Some of his clients were even worse than the ones Aaron Eckhart had to deal with during Thank You for Smoking. In the years before his death, he was tied to Nazi Germany due to one of his public relations campaigns, leading to a Congressional investigation.
He also was associated with an effort to soften U.S. ties with the Soviet Union during the 1920s.
On the other hand, argues Northern Kentucky University professor Michael Turney, he didn’t actually know how awful either of these political forces were at the time—and that history has judged him unkindly, especially since he died before either did anything truly below reproach.
“In this context, was Ivy Lee a good guy or a bad guy? Perhaps was he just a hard-working public relations professional who suffered from bad timing and/or made a few bad choices of clients,” he wrote.
Maybe it’s a great irony of history that such an important PR flack needs a public relations campaign himself.
Press releases have multiplied
An average of 1759 press releases were sent out daily by the three largest press release services in 2013, according to an estimate by Ragan’s PR Daily contributor Lou Hoffman from August 2014—altogether more than 600,000 that year. More press releases than ever are being sent out to fewer journalists than ever, Hoffman argues.
How PR flacks built their own versions of the Associated Press
These days, if a company wants to get a message to the press or the public, they may as well tweet it. The shorter the message, the better—it’s a great way to control the conversation.
But before the age of social media, things were a bit more complicated, and at one point, news outlets had to send their press releases via the mail, which was woefully inefficient. Fortunately, a few smart folks thought of ways to get around that problem.
In 1952, the company PR Newswire began working diligently to throw a bunch of teleprinter machines into newsrooms around the country. The company worked with PR agencies to basically publish press releases verbatim on the wires.
Other companies followed suit—Business Wire put teletype machines inside of newsrooms for free, then charged their PR clients for the access to the machines.
“When I began, my one employee and I shared a 9-foot-by-12-foot room,” Business Wire founder Larry Lokey told Stanford University. “We had one phone, an electric typewriter and a clattering Teletype connected via leased line to every Bay Area daily newspaper. Each of them had a Teletype I’d installed there.”
(The company grew big time from there, and is now owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. The 89-year-old Lokey, meanwhile, is giving away his wealth, much of it earned from the Berkshire Hathaway sale, at a breakneck pace.)
From that teletype-driven history, the services kept innovating, and are now arguably more influential than ever—they don’t have to pay for ink, paper, or phone lines, but they have email instead. And goddamn, do they send a lot of emails.
The companies aren’t afraid of trying new things, either. In 2001, PR Newswire threw out a multimedia display for the Michael Bay movie Pearl Harbor—the first multimedia press release of its kind.
Considering that Pearl Harbor is something of the ultimate display of bombastic commercial film, perhaps it makes sense.
Press releases in the internet age
“I receive more than 500 emails a day. An astonishing number of them are pitching topics that neither I nor my staff has ever covered—sent by people who’ve either never read our publication, or never read our coverage, or noticed what bylines go with what stories.”
— Los Angeles Times reporter Charles Fleming, offering up a common complaint from journalists who find themselves deluged by press releases on a daily basis. Some reporters who discussed press releases with Forbes reporter Robert Wynne say they occasionally get good stuff from press releases, but TechCrunch reporter John Biggs is not one of those people. “They offer no context, no understanding of the receiver, and no story. They are literally the laziest thing a company can do,” Biggs said.
Press releases exist because, ultimately, they work. For companies and marketers, they represent a simple way to expose information that isn’t necessarily newsworthy on its own, but the definition of “work” is different for PR people than for journalists. If a company can get one person to bite on their press release, they’ve done their job.
A reporter has to parse through all the crud they find and turn it into something usable, and as a result, the signal-to-noise ratio is largely worth it for the few times there is in fact signal.
Now, there are some reporters that just hate them—and for good reason. For every reporter like Biggs who complains about press releases, there are websites that claim, excitedly, to automate the process of sending out press releases en masse—by offering search tools or ways to better target journalists. (On the other hand, this goes both ways.)
But the thing is, in 2015, you honestly don’t need a press release to get your voice heard. In fact, your company would probably be better off with a blog, a Twitter account, and a willingness to write about something other than yourself every once in a while.
A good example of this kind of mindset in action is from the popular social media startup Buffer, which publishes blog posts about every social-media-related topic under the sun basically, selling the idea of itself as a great spot to find ideas about a topic near and dear to the company’s heart.
Who needs a press release when you can build your own Gutenberg press for pennies on the dollar?

Marilyn Monroe's First Marriage

by Eddie Deezen


Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angles on June 1, 1926. The actual identity of Norma Jeane's father is unknown to this day, but she was Norma Jeane Mortenson because that was the surname of her mother Gladys's second husband, Martin Mortenson, therefore it was Gladys' name at the time. Martin had actually left Gladys before she became pregnant with Norma Jeane.
Norma Jeane's early childhood was  happy, but unfortunately, Gladys was mentally unstable (she was later to be confined to a mental institution). Because of this, and the limited income Gladys made as a studio film cutter, Norma Jeane spent several years living at various foster homes and in an orphanage.
By 1941, young Norma Jeane Mortenson's legal guardians were Grace and "Doc" Goddard. The Goddards had given her a happy Los Angeles home in recent years, but now Doc had gotten a job as head of East Coast sales at Adele Precision and the Goddards decided to move to Virginia. Unfortunately, under then-California laws, the couple couldn't bring Norma Jeane along with them.




In September of 1941, Norma Jeane had enrolled at Van Nuys high school. But a problem arose getting her back and forth to school, as she didn't have the necessary nickel to pay the bus driver.
Enter the young and virile James Dougherty, who had tannish-blonde hair and eyes such a deep blue they were almost violet. James agreed to give Norma Jeane and her best girlfriend a lift back and forth to school every day. Soon, the two had struck up a friendship and began dating.
Five years Norma Jeane's senior, James was any girl's dream "catch,"  as he'd been president of his senior class and captain of the football team. Norma Jeanne and "Jimmie," as she called him, would drive up to a trysting spot in the hills called Pop's Willow Lake, where they would romantically rent a canoe, paddle under the trees, and make out at the water's edge. The two seemed genuinely fond of each other.
After the news of Norma's guardians leaving, a "deal" arose of James and Norma Jeane getting marred. Although the two liked each other, by most accounts, it was almost entirely a marriage of convenience for the lonely Norma Jeane, who did not want to go back to an orphanage or another foster home.
On June 19, 1942, the two were married. The wedding was officiated by a minister, Norma Jeane wore an embroidered lace wedding dress with long sleeves and veil. The sixteen-year old bride (Marilyn's birthday was just two weeks days previous) was overcome with emotion at the ceremony and cried.
After they were married, Jimmie and Norma Jeane settled  into a four-room house in Van Nuys. Every furnishing in the home was chosen personally by Norma Jeane, from the kitchen cutlery right down to the doormat. Now his wife, Norma Jeane sometimes addressed her former "Jimmie" as "Daddy" instead.
Norma Jeane was a naive and endearing young housewife, albeit slightly ditzy. Once, during a rainstorm, she tried to bring a cow in out of the rain so it wouldn't get wet. She was hopeless as a cook, but loved serving peas and carrots because "she liked the colors." When told by a friend that "a pinch" of salt wold improve a cup of coffee, Norma Jeane decided to add a spoonful instead.
The young couple lived an apparently idyllic life together. On sunny afternoons, they would often drive down to Santa Monica Beach and dine on cold hot dogs and potato salad together.
Jimmie learned to ignore the stares of leering sailors as the ogled his beautiful wife in her a-bit-too-skimpy bathing suit. "She was just a housewife," remembered Jimmie, "We used to go down to the beach and have luaus on Saturday nights." The couple's favorite song was Glen Miller's "Moonlight Serenade." They would listen to it together in a parked car and dreamily hold each other in their arms.
On one eerily prescient occasion, Norman Jeane threatened to kill herself by jumping off off the Santa Monica pier, if Jimmie ever left her.
According to Jimmie, he was Marilyn's "first." He said for Norma Jeane, after the initial pain of their first coupling, she loved sex, and thoroughly enjoying their encounters.
Marilyn and her Jimmie had a near idyllic first one or two years as a married couple and seemed destined to spend their lives together in marital bliss. According to Jimmie: "We loved each other madly. I felt like I was the luckiest guy in the world." He recalled of the couple's early days, "It was like being on a honeymoon for a year."
But after Jimmie enlisted in the Merchant Marines in 1943, things were to change. He was soon called up for overseas duty. Norma Jeane would dutifully write her husband letters several times a week, but soon she became bored without him. She got a job at the Radioplane factory, inspecting parachutes and preparing planes for flight.
One day in late 1944, Marilyn met photographer David Conover, who had come to her factory to take some morale-building photos of the pretty young girls at work for the U.S. Armed Forces motion picture unit. Although the pictures taken of Norma Jeane were never used, she was "hooked."
In 1945, Norma Jeane (undoubtedly bored and looking for some excitement in her life without her man) defied Jimmie's warnings and signed up to be a model in Miss Emmaline Snivey's modeling group "The Blue Book Agency." Norma Jeane soon found she was a natural before the camera. By early 1946, she was a successful model had appeared on 33 magazine covers.
With the help of Emmaline Snively, she made some acting contacts too and even got a screen test at 20th Century Fox Studios. By mid-1946, Norma Jeane had to choose between the relative stability (and boredom) of marriage to her "Jimmie" or the inherent capriciousness of a full-time career as an actress.
Jimmie received the divorce notice from Norma Jeane when he was on duty and ready to go into Shanghai. After four years of vicissitudes, the marriage of Norma Jean Mortenson and James Dougherty came to an end.
Norma Jeane would soon change her name to the much catchier "Marilyn Monroe." Her career in show business is familiar to all, as she was to become the most famous and popular movie actress of all-time.
After their divorce, James Dougherty was to re-marry, to a woman named Pat. Aware of her predecessor, Pat would not allow her husband to ever watch Marilyn Monroe movies on television or even mention her name.
He was to recall: "I never knew Marilyn Monroe and I don't claim to have any insights to her to this day. I knew and loved Norma Jeane. I destroyed all my letters from Norma Jeane. Hundreds of them," he said (probably at his new wife's demand or possibly to placate her).
One final irony: after he finished his military service, James Dougherty got a job as a policeman. One night in 1950, in Los Angeles, he was assigned to crowd control at a movie premiere. It was a Marilyn Monroe film- The Asphalt Jungle. Mercifully, the two did not see each other at the premiere.




Marilyn Monroe aka Norma Jeane Mortenson Doughterty, died on August 5, 1962, of a fatal drug overdose. Her ex, James "Jimmie" Dougherty, died of complications of leukemia on August 18, 2005. He outlived her by 43 years.
I guess every person's life can be broken down into a series of "what if's?" And one is left wondering what would have happened to James Dougherty and his pretty wife Norma Jeane if he had never enlisted in the merchant marines on that long ago day in 1943.

How To Open A Can Of Food With A Spoon

Most people learn to rely on their can openers because it's the easiest solution, never feeling the need to learn alternate ways to crack open canned goods.But if you love to learn new ways to do basic and necessary stuff then you'll definitely want to watch this tutorial video by Dave Hax so you can see how easy it is to open a can with a spoon.
Once again the humble spoon has proven it's one of the most important tools for survival.

You Eat More When You’re Sleep Deprived

eat when you don't sleepExactly How Much More You Eat When You’re Sleep Deprived
It’s probably more than you expect…

Italy Now Has a 24 Hour Wine Fountain

Thirsty and away from home? Don't want to buy a drink? Well, up until now you're stuck drinking out of a boring old water fountain, but if you happen to be in the small town of Caldari di Ortona, Italy, you can always visit the wine fountain instead. That's thanks to the Dora Sarchese Vineyard, who wants the fountain to serve as road side attraction and filling station for thirsty religious pilgrims on the way to Ortona, where the body of the disciple Thomas is said to be kept. Something tells me it will also serve as a destination for wine pilgrims seeking to find something new and wonderful in the world of wine.

5 Reasons Why Your Chest Might Hurt When You Run

chest pain while running 5 Reasons Why Your Chest Might Hurt When You Run
It’s not necessarily a heart problem.

Model Strips Down on the NYC Subway in the Name of Body Positivity

iskra lawrence

Sexist Men Are More Likely to Have Psychological Problems

sexism mental health
Sexist Men Are More Likely to Have Psychological Problems, Science Says
This might confirm what you've always suspected...

NYC to put 3,000 landlords on notice: Comply with law or lose tax benefits

At Standing Rock #NoDAPL Protesters Face ‘Blunt Trauma and Open Wounds’

At Standing Rock #NoDAPL Protesters Face ‘Blunt Trauma and Open Wounds’
Attack dogs, mace, pepper spray, beatings, bullets, water cannons, and arrest have all been used on pipeline protesters at Standing Rock…

Cult with rapist leading worship postpones merger with second cult facing sex abuse claims

Well, we know where the sexual perverts hang out, now don't we.

North Carolina teacher reportedly attacks and assaults kindergarten student

Bullying doesn’t always have to come from fellow students. In the case of one young boy, it allegedly came at the hands of his own kindergarten teacher.
Welcome to Dumbass Trump's AmeriKKKa!

4 Times the Internet Used Its Powers For Good

poison fish4 Times the Internet Used Its Powers For Good
Twitter users recently saved a man from eating a poisonous fish. Here are 3 more times social media was more than a cesspool

Modern Hunter-Gatherers Show Value of Exercise

overlookIn a remote area of north-central Tanzania, men leave their huts on foot, armed with bows and poison-tipped arrows, to hunt for their next meal. Dinner could come in the form of a small bird, … Read more

Forest die-offs ricochet to distant ecosystems

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
El Nino, a climate cycle influenced by a mass of warm water in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, dramatically changes weather patterns every few years. But according to new study published in PLOS ONE, major forest … Read more

Why this bird is called a "turkey"

There are two theories for the derivation of the name "turkey" for this bird, according to Columbia University professor of Romance languages Mario Pei. One theory is that when Europeans first encountered turkeys in America, they incorrectly identified the birds as a type of guineafowl, which were already being imported into Europe by Turkey merchants via Constantinople and were therefore nicknamed Turkey coqs. The name of the North American bird thus became "turkey fowl" or "Indian turkeys," which was then shortened to just "turkeys".
The other theory arises from the fact that turkeys came to England from the Americas via merchant ships from the Middle East where they were domesticated successfully. Again the importers lent the name to the bird: because these merchants were called "Turkey merchants" as much of the area was part of the Ottoman Empire. Hence the name “Turkey birds” or, soon thereafter, “turkeys”.
In many countries, the names for turkeys have different derivations. Ironically, many of these names incorporate an assumed Indian origin, such as diiq Hindi ("Indian rooster") in Arabian countries, dinde ("from India") in French, Indjushka ("bird of India") in Russia, indyk in Poland, and Hindi ("India") in Turkey. These are thought to arise from the thought that Christopher Columbus had originally believed that he had reached India rather than the Americas on his voyage. In Portuguese a turkey is a peru; the name is thought to derive from the eponymous country Perú.
Several other birds that are sometimes called turkeys are not particularly closely related: the brushturkeys are megapodes, and the bird sometimes known as the "Australian turkey" is the Australian bustard (Ardeotis australis). The anhinga (Anhinga anhinga) is sometimes called a water turkey, from the shape of its tail when the feathers are fully spread for drying.

Animal Pictures