The Daily Drift

Eight Days To Go ....

Carolina Naturally is read in 194 countries around the world daily.
 

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Today is - (no special celebration today) Day
 

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Some of our readers today have been in:

The Americas

The Bottom Saba, Sint Eustatius and Saba

Britannia, Mississauga, Thunder Bay, Ottawa, Blainville, Byward Market, Winnipeg, Montreal and Ottawa, Canada

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Medellin, Colombia

Santiago, Chile

Cochabamba, Bolivia

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Buenos Aires, Argentina

atascadero, Albuquerque, Russelville and Natchitoches, United States

Willemstad, Curacao

Guayaquil, Ecuador

Polanco, Mexico

Europe 

Madrid, L'Olleria and Teo, Spain

Kista, Sweden

Slough, Bath, London and Guildford, England

Warsaw and Szcecin, Poland

Russelheim, Ottobrunn and Eschborn, Germany

Kiev, Odessa, Zhovti Vody and Kramators'k, Ukraine

Lucenec, Slovakia

Ryazin, Chelyabinsk and Vladivostok, Russia

Dublin, Ireland

Rome, Ivrea, Vicenza, Cesena and Modugno, Italy

Oslo and Slemmestad, Norway

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Salon-De-Provence, Rouen, Paris and Cerny, France

Amsterdam, Leiden and Groningen, Netherlands

Basel, Switzerland

Nigde, Ankara, Istanbul, and Sehitkamil, Turkey

Belgrade, Serbia

Prague, Czech Republic

Tbilisi, Georgia

Riga, Latvia

Maribor, Slovenia

Porto, Portugal

Asia

Bogor and Jakarta, Indonesia

Kolkata, Bilaspur, Chennai, Jodhpur, Shillong, Bangalore, Lohardaga, New Delhi, Kottayam, Lucknow, Thiruvananthapuram, Delhi, Dharwad, Vijayawada, Coimbatore and Patiala, India

Bangkok, Thailand

Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Beijing and Jilin, China

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Kuala Lumpur, Kajang, Putrajaya, Kota Kinabalu and Bayan Lepas, Malaysia

Damascus, Syria

Abdanan, Hamadan and Esfahan, Iran

Ramla, Petah Tikva and Haifa, Israel

Doha, Qatar

Islamabad, Pakistan

Baghdad, Iraq

Africa 

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Lagos, Nigeria

Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, South Africa

Cairo, Egypt

Pacific

Homebush, Australia

Sampaloc, Philippines

Today in History

1399		Tamerlane's Mongols destroy the army of Mahmud Tughluk, Sultan of Delhi, at Panipat.
1861		The Stonewall Brigade begins to dismantle Dam No. 5 of the C&O Canal.
1886		At a Christmas party, Sam Belle shoots his old enemy Frank West, but is fatally wounded himself.
1903		Near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright make the first successful flight in history of a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft.
1927		U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg suggests a worldwide pact renouncing war.
1938		Italy declares the 1935 pact with France invalid because ratifications had not been exchanged. France denies the argument.
1939		In the Battle of River Plate near Montevideo, Uruguay, the British trap the German pocket battleship Graf Spee. German Captain Langsdorf sinks his ship believing that resistance is hopeless.
1943		U.S. forces invade Japanese-held New Britain Island in New Guinea.
1944		The German Army renews the attack on the Belgian town of Losheimergraben against the defending Americans during the Battle of the Bulge.
1944		U.S. approves end to internment of Japanese Americans. U.S. Major General Henry C. Pratt issues Public Proclamation No. 21, declaring that Japanese American "evacuees" from the West Coast could return to their homes effective January 2, 1945.
1948		The Smithsonian Institution accepts the Kitty Hawk – the Wright brothers' plane.
1950		The French government appoints Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny to command their troops in Vietnam.
1952		Yugoslavia breaks relations with the Vatican.
1965		Ending an election campaign marked by bitterness and violence, Ferdinand Marcos is declared president of the Philippines.
1981		Red Brigade terrorists kidnap Brigadier General James Dozier, the highest-ranking U.S. NATO officer in Italy.
1989		The Simpsons, television's longest-running animated series, makes its US debut.
1989		Fernando Color de Mello becomes Brazil's first democratically elected president in nearly 30 years.
1990		Jean-Bertrand Aristide wins Haiti's first free election.
2002		Congolese parties of the inter Congolese Dialogue sign a peace accord in the Second Congo War, proviidn for transitional government and elections within two years.
2010		Mohamed Bouazizi immolates himself, the catalyst for the Tunisian revolution and the subsequent Arab Spring.

Non Sequitur

Xmas Countdown Xmas Stories

The Dime

Bobby was getting cold sitting out in his back yard in the snow. Bobby didn't wear boots; he didn't like them and anyway he didn't own any. The thin sneakers he wore had a few holes in them and they did a poor job of keeping out the cold. Bobby had been in his backyard for about an hour already. And, try as he might, he could not come up with an idea for his mother's Xmas gift. He shook his head as he thought, "This is useless, even if I do come up with an idea, I don't have any money to spend."
Ever since his father had passed away three years ago, the family of five had struggled. It wasn't because his mother didn't care, or try, there just never seemed to be enough. She worked nights at the hospital, but the small wage that she was earning could only be stretched so far.
What the family lacked in money and material things, they more than made up for in love and family unity. Bobby had two older and one younger sister, who ran the house hold in their mother's absence. All three of his sisters had already made beautiful gifts for their mother. Somehow it just wasn't fair. Here it was Xtmas Eve already, and he had nothing.
Wiping a tear from his eye, Bobby kicked the snow and started to walk down to the street where the shops and stores were. It wasn't easy being six without a father, especially when he needed a man to talk to. Bobby walked from shop to shop, looking into each decorated window.
Everything seemed so beautiful and so out of reach.
It was starting to get dark and Bobby reluctantly turned to walk home when suddenly his eyes caught the glimmer of the setting sun's rays reflecting off of something along the curb. He reached down and discovered a shiny dime. Never before has anyone felt so wealthy as Bobby felt at that moment.
As he held his new-found treasure, a warmth spread throughout his entire body and he walked into the first store he saw. His excitement quickly turned cold when the salesperson told him that he couldn't buy anything with only a dime.
He saw a flower shop and went inside to wait in line. When the shop owner asked if he could help him, Bobby presented the dime and asked if he could buy one flower for his mother's Xmas gift. The shop owner looked at Bobby and his ten cent offering.
Then he put his hand on Bobby's shoulder and said to him, "You just wait here and I'll see what I can do for you." As Bobby waited he looked at the beautiful flowers and even though he was a boy, he could see why mothers and girls liked flowers.
The sound of the door closing as the last customer left, jolted Bobby back to reality. All alone in the shop, Bobby began to feel alone and afraid. Suddenly the shop owner came out and moved to the counter.
There, before Bobby's eyes, lay twelve long stem, red roses, with leaves of green and tiny white flowers all tied together with a big silver bow. Bobby's heart sank as the owner picked them up and placed them gently into a long white box.
"That will be ten cents young man," the shop owner said reaching out his hand for the dime. Slowly, Bobby moved his hand to give the man his dime. Could this be true? No one else would give him a thing for his dime!
Sensing the boy's reluctance, the shop owner added, "I just happened to have some roses on sale for ten cents a dozen. Would you like them?"
This time Bobby did not hesitate, and when the man placed the long box into his hands, he knew it was true. Walking out the door that the owner was holding for Bobby, he heard the shop keeper say, "Merry Xmas son."
As he returned inside, the shop keeper's wife walked out. "Who were you talking to back there and where are the roses you were fixing?"
Staring out the window, and blinking the tears from his own eyes, he replied, "A strange thing happened to me this morning. While I was setting up things to open the shop, I thought I heard a voice telling me to set aside a dozen of my best roses for a special gift. I wasn't sure at the time whether I had lost my mind or what, but I set them aside anyway.
Then just a few minutes ago, a little boy came into the shop and wanted to buy a flower for his mother with one small dime.
"When I looked at him, I saw myself, many years ago. I too, was a poor boy with nothing to buy my mother a Xmas gift. A man, whom I never knew, stopped me on the street and told me that he wanted to give me ten dollars. "When I saw that little boy tonight, I knew who that voice was, and I put together a dozen of my very best roses." The shop owner and his wife hugged each other tightly, and as they stepped out into the bitter cold air, they somehow didn't feel cold at all.

The 50 Most Popular Toys From The Last 50 Years

Toys are as intrinsic to the holiday season as eggs are to the nog, and for the last fifty years toys have been a big deal in the consumer market, fueling a frenzy that results in over 30 billion toys being sold each year.
This year's hottest items seem to be a tossup between next gen gaming consoles xbox one and the ps4, but in years past kids went crazy for Zhu Zhu Pets, Furbys, Rubik's Cubes, Robosapiens, and a creepy guy named Elmo that really wanted to be tickled. Here's an illustrated list of the "most popular holiday toys from the past 50 years" by Abby Ryan, may you have a very nostalgiac and happy holidays!

Driver hid pot as Christmas presents

Pennsylvania State Police say they found 20 pounds of marijuana in boxes wrapped as Christmas presents inside a minivan after a traffic stop. The Centre Daily Times reports that 38-year-old Randy Jesus Valdivia, of Surfside, Fla., faces felony drug charges after the stop on Interstate 80 near State College.
Police say they became suspicious after Valdivia was stopped Thursday afternoon, and got him to agree to a search.
They say they found 20 pounds of weed vacuum-sealed inside large boxes wrapped as Christmas gifts.
Online court records say he was taken to the local jail. A defense lawyer wasn't listed.

Did you know ...

37 million dead bees found near GMO crops on Canada

The populist progressives strike back

That tea party fantasies kills kids

About the year in guns

Paul Ryan Threatens President Obama and America With the Debt Limit

 

Paul Ryan showed his true colors the other by threatening the economy, and confirming that repugicans will demanding ransom in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.
Transcript:

WALLACE: You say, and quite rightly so, and I think it’s a big accomplish, you removed the threat of government shutdowns for almost the next two years.
On the other hand, we’ve got a debt limit crisis –
RYAN: That’s right.
WALLACE: — which is going to come up in the next couple of months, February and March, people are saying.
Should repugicans risk a default crisis?
As you know, the president will say, well, you’re going to send the country into a default by demanding more progress on spending and the deficit or do you just cave there and say, hey, look, we’re going to just kick this can down the road and focus on ObamaCare?
RYAN: Look, one — one step at a time, Chris. We — Patty and I knew that we weren’t going to solve —
WALLACE: Patty Murray, your –
RYAN: Yes, Patty Murray. I’m sorry.
WALLACE: Yes.
RYAN: Patty Murray and I knew we weren’t going to solve every problem like the debt limit problem. So we sought to find common ground to solve this problem, this problem being a shutdown possibly in January and then another shutdown possibly in October.
And we got our principles established here.
(CROSSTALK)
RYAN: We’ve got cut the deficit –
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: Sir, I understand, but the question is, are you going to demand more in return for raising the deficit?
RYAN: We as a caucus, along with our Senate counterparts, are going to meet and discuss what it is we want to get out of the debt limit. We don’t want nothing out of this debt limit. We’re going to decide what it is we can accomplish out of this debt limit fight.
One of the problems or concerns I have with the debt limit is we don’t know when it’s going to hit.
Jack Lew, the treasury secretary, has ultimately discretion on when this could occur. So, the timing of this is very much in doubt.
So we’re going to meet in our retreats after the — after the holidays and discuss exactly what it is we’re going to try and get for this.

There’s the Paul Ryan that we all know. For a man who is obsessed with makers and takers, Ryan spends a lot of time dreaming of how he can get something extra for doing his job. It turns out all of the bipartisanship surrounding the budget deal was just for show. The real prize for Ryan and the House repugicans is the debt ceiling.
Rep. Ryan was doing his song and dance about our long term debt problem, which translated means Social Security and Medicare. The repugicans have already gutted food stamps, energy assistance, and much of the safety net, but it’s Social Security and Medicare that they’ve wanted to take apart all along.
Ryan and the repugicans are back to issuing threats against the economy. I am not sure what Democrats were trying to accomplish with the budget deal. Except for avoiding a government shutdown next year and getting a small percentage of the sequester lifted, they didn’t get much.
Democrats cut a deal so that they could end up back where they started. The repugicans are plotting against the economy, and President Obama will have to stand up and say no.

Man Fills out Job Application at a Store, Shoplifts on His Way out, Gets Arrested When He Comes in for an Interview

Last month, a man walked into a Sports Page sporting goods store in Marshalltown, Iowa. He asked for a job application, filled it out and turned it in. Then, according to police, he felt entitled to a five-fingered pay raise: he shoplifted $153 of clothes and left the store.
Managers reviewed security camera footage and recognized the suspect. So they called him in for a job interview. The police were waiting and arrested him for the theft.
The moral of the story: don't go to job interviews.

Most web traffic not human-driven

Nearly one in three visits to a website is from a computer up to no good according to a newly-published study.
The figures come from Incapsula, a website security firm. It gathered statistics from 90 days’ worth of visits to 20,000 sites belonging to its clients, with the relevant traffic including visits from every country in the world.
The company carried out a similar survey last year that found 51 percent of visits to websites came from some form of bot: a computer accessing the site itself rather than a human user intentionally visiting through their browser.
This year the balance has shifted further towards bots, which made up 61.5 percent of visits to the measured sites.
According to Incpasula, the total breakdown had 38.5 percent of visits coming from humans and 31 percent from what it classified as “good bots”. Most of this traffic was search engines crawling sites and increased activity of this type was a major reason for the change in the human-bot ratio. That increases the costs borne by site operators, though in theory this helps increase the accuracy of search engines and will increase the exposure of high-quality, relevant sites.
The remaining 30 percent of visits was made up of 5 percent being scrapers (computers effectively cutting and pasting content to reuse without permission), 4.5 percent being some form of automated hacking tool, 0.5 percent being automated spam such as computers leaving bogus comments on sites (something that has fallen significantly as a proportion of total traffic, if not necessarily in absolute terms), and 20.5 percent being “other impersonators.”
Incapsula believes much of this last category is made up of more sophisticated malware activity that poses as a search engine or a human user running a particular browser, in an attempt to bypass security measures on websites. It also points to a change in the specific tactics used by those carrying out DDoS attacks.

America's Bipolar Climate Future

A Tale of Two Cities

by Marc Hujer and Samiha Shafy

New York City and New Bern, North Carolina both face the same projected rise in sea levels, but while one is preparing for the worst, the other is doing nothing on principle. A glimpse into America's contradictory climate change planning. More... 

• Photo Gallery: US East Coast's Watery Future

The Island Nation Doomed to Disappear Within Half a Century

For hundreds if not thousands of years, the I-Kiribati have lived on their island paradise, but now their home is being slowly submerged under rising sea levels. More

Random Photos

Is Affluenza a Real Condition?

Is Affluenza a Real Condition?

Could being wealthy lead to a disconnect between bad behavior and consequences?

The U.S. ranks near bottom in efficiency of health care spending

U.S. ranks near bottom in efficiency of health care spending

A new study by researchers at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and McGill University in Montreal reveals that the United States health care system ranks 22nd out of 27 high-income nations when analyzed […]

How Did We Kill Smallpox?

How Did We Kill Smallpox?

Only two diseases in the world have ever been declared "eradicated." And of those two, only one affects humans. That disease is smallpox. Trace explains how the smallpox eradication effort worked, and how it might be applied to other illnesses.

Ten Incredible Real-Life Mad Scientists

Extreme intelligence often comes with extreme eccentricity, as you are well aware. After all, the archetypical mad scientist of the movies has its real-world precedents. Any list of mad scientists has some that you are familiar with, but you may not be familiar with all ten of these crazy creatives. Did you know about the work of Ilya Ivanov?

In 1924 the Bolshevik government granted Ivanov permission to leave the country for the express purpose of breeding hybrid ape-humans. In the summer of 1926, Ivanov, by now in Paris, grafted a woman’s ovary into a chimp named Nora and tried to fertilize her with human sperm. In November that year, he travelled to Africa and inseminated a trio of chimps with yet more human sperm. Then when none of the animals fell pregnant, he changed tactics and instead tried to find Soviet women who would willingly be inseminated with chimp sperm – something for which he acquired no less than five volunteers. However, before the experiments could get properly underway, a Stalinist removal of scientists resulted in him being sent away to Kazakhstan, where he died within two years of his arrival.

Believe it or not, that's not the craziest of the bunch. Read more horror stories in the list 10 Incredible Real-Life Mad Scientists. 

In 1814, This Massive Warship Cruised Lake Ontario

This is painting of HMS St. Lawrence. With 112 guns, it was the largest warship ever seen on the Great Lakes and the largest Royal Navy vessel to ever sail entirely on fresh water.
After Napoleon abdicated, the British government offered the famous Duke of Wellington the command of its forces in North America. For several reasons, Wellington declined. Among them, Wellington stated that what Britain needed in the war against the United States was not a huge army, but naval control over the lakes between the United States in Canada. These waters alone were the highways that could carry British armies into the United States.

(Map from Mahan's Sea Power and Its Relations to the War of 1812)

Early in the War of 1812, Britain gained control over Lake Huron. The Americans eventually gained superiority on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain. But Lake Ontario was different and this huge warship is one reason why.
Niagara Falls blocked Lake Ontario from Lake Erie and rapids at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River limited the size of vessels that could travel from the sea onto Lake Ontario. Thus it was necessary to build large vessels on-site.

(Model of HMS St. Lawrence at the Hamilton Military Museum. Photo by John R. Grodzinski.)

Commodore James Lucas Yeo (left), the Royal Navy commander on the Great Lakes, oversaw construction of a vessel that he thought would ensure British naval supremacy on Lake Ontario. When finished and fully outfitted, HMS St. Lawrence carried a crew of 837 men and held 112 guns. It was larger than Horatio Nelson’s own HMS Victory.
The United States Navy on Lake Ontario had nothing that could possibly counter it.
HMS St. Lawrence launched on September 10, 1814. The next day, the United States defeated the Royal Navy on Lake Champlain. Four days later, it stopped the British attack at Baltimore (which inspired The Star-Spangled Banner). The war was winding down as both sides were exhausted and willing to take peace talks seriously.
Yeo took the St. Lawrence on its maiden voyage on October 16. He considered attacking the naval installation at Sackets Harbor, New York. But it was too late in the year for a sustained offensive, so Yeo shut down the St. Lawrence for the winter. In December, the diplomats signed a peace treaty, ending the war.
The massive HMS St. Lawrence never saw combat. It was promptly decommissioned. In 1831, it was cut down and sunk as a wharf in Kingston harbor.
(Portrait of Yeo by Henry Richard Cook)
Bonus item: one of the American defenders of Sackets Harbor was a teenage soldier named Hiram Cronk. Cronk lived to the age of 105, dying in 1905. He was the last American veteran of the War of 1812.

Medieval funeral poetry inscribed on an ostrich egg

Archaeologists have uncovered a 500-year-old ostrich egg covered in Arabic poetry. The verses mourn the death of a loved one.

The egg was found in the Red Sea port of Quseir, Egypt. In the fifteenth century, Quseir was a hub for trade between the Middle East and India, and a stop on the pilgrim route between North Africa and Mecca...

The shell is covered with quotations from the Koran and poetry: "It describes the soul's journey from death to life," says historian Dionisius Agius, of the University of Leeds, who is analysing the text.

Eggs bearing Arabic writing are rare, although another was found in Quseir 20 years ago. The ancient Egyptians used ostrich eggs for perfume containers and drinking cups, and the country's Coptic christians hung them as lanterns in their cult halls.

Ziggy