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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.


Thursday, June 11, 2015

The Daily Drift

Indian Corn Is Great ...!
 
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Hot Buttered Corn  ... !
Today is - Corn On The Cob Day

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Today in History

1346 Charles IV of Luxembourg is elected Holy Roman Emperor.
1509 Henry VIII of England marries Catherine of Aragon.
1770 Captain James Cook runs aground on the Great Barrier Reef.
1798 Napoleon Bonaparte takes the island of Malta.
1861 Union forces under General George B. McClellen repulse a Confederate force at Rich Mountain in western Virginia.
1865 Major General Henry W. Halleck finds documents and archives of the Confederate government in Richmond, Virginia. This discovery will lead to the publication of the official war records.
1895 Charles E. Duryea receives the first U.S. patent granted to an American inventor for a gasoline-driven automobile.
1903 King Alexander and Queen Draga of Belgrade are assassinated by members of the Serbia army.
1915 British troops take Cameroon in Africa.
1927 Charles Lindbergh, a captain in the US Army Air Corps Reserve, receives the first Distinguished Flying Cross ever awarded, for his solo trans-Atlantic Flight.
1930 William Beebe, of the New York Zoological Society, dives to a record-setting depth of 1,426 feet off the coast of Bermuda, in a diving chamber called a bathysphere.
1934 The Disarmament Conference in Geneva ends in failure.
1940 The Italian Air Force bombs the British fortress at Malta in the Mediterranean.
1943 The Italian island of Pantelleria surrenders after a heavy air bombardment.
1944 U.S. carrier-based planes attack Japanese airfields on Guam , Rota, Saipan and Tinian islands, preparing for the invasion of Saipan.
1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is arrested in Florida for trying to integrate restaurants.
1967 Israel and Syria accept a U. N. cease-fire.
1987 Margaret Thatcher wins her third consecutive term as Prime Minister.

Prehistoric Vegas

Long before Las Vegas, people were apparently gambling in what might be America's first casino -- a cave on the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake.
Archaeologists exploring a cave on the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake have unearthed hundreds of carved sticks, hoops, dice and darts dating back to about 700 years ago.

'Wonder Woman' Found

The scene of a Greek male about to be lassoed by a powerful foreign warrior woman was exotic and also subversive for its time.

Doctors warn that text neck can cause serious damage to teenagers

A new physical ailment is affecting the tech-savvy generation. Some youngsters are spending as much as 5,000 hours a year reading their cellphones, leading to chronic pain known as "text neck" and doctors say it could cause serious damage." Sarah Atchison texts with the best of them, but looking down at her smart phone, often for hours at a time, left the 14-year-old with a pain in her neck.
"It was mostly just achy. And it made it really hard to concentrate,” Sarah said. Dr Chad Cotter, of HealthSource Chiropractic in Littleton, Colorado, who says his patients are getting younger and younger, said: "Text neck is where the proper curve in the cervical spine actually gets reduced and can even move forward”. A good curve is ideally 40 degree but Sarah's x-rays showed a different story.
"This should be shaped like the red line. But this girl has lost that neck curve and it has moved to a classic reverse curve or text neck,” Cotter said. Cotter is helping Sarah reverse damage that used to take decades to develop. "Tension across the shoulders, generalised neck pain, migraines. It can even be numbness and tingling down the arms that we're seeing in high schoolers,” he said. “It's alarming. It's setting those kids up to have major problems as adults.

"Kids don't know how to explain it to their parents. They don't know how to express it correctly. And so parents discount what their kids are saying until it becomes a big problem." Using head-weights, shoulder exercises, resistance bands and re-adjustments, Dr Cotter, and his team are working to strengthen Sarah's neck and back muscles and he said the treatments, if done properly, can quickly counteract the symptoms of smart phone use and alleviate texting tension.

Doctors Complete Rare 9-Way Kidney Transplant


The event is called a kidney transplant chain. It's a sequence of carefully-timed transplants that match donors and recipients for compatibility. UCLA Health explains:
It starts with an altruistic donor - someone who wants to donate a kidney out of the goodness of his or her heart. That kidney is transplanted into a recipient who had a donor willing to give a kidney, but was not a match. To keep the chain going, the incompatible donor gives a kidney to a patient unknown to him or her who has been identified as a match, essentially "paying it forward." A specialized computer program matches donors and recipients across the country.
For 2 days, doctors in San Francisco completed 18 surgeries carrying out 9 kidney transplants, all of which were successful. It was an unusually complex kidney transplant chain. The Orange County Register explains the challenges involved:
Adding to the logistical hurdles of so many surgeries, kidneys had to be ferried back and forth between the two hospitals. On Friday, two kidneys were sent from California Pacific to UCSF via a special organ transport service and two kidneys were sent from UCSF to California Pacific for a total of four, 3-mile trips. Two trips were made Thursday.
“Everything went as planned,” said Noel Sanchez, spokesman for Donor Network West. The Oakland company specializes in packaging and transporting organs.

Mark Up Exceeds 1,000 percent

Fifty U.S. hospitals charge 10 times what's allowed by Medicare to the uninsured and out-of-network patients.

KFC employee set fire to trees after he thought he was going to be fired

A 28-year-old Kentucky Fried Chicken employee is facing charges after allegedly setting trees on fire behind the fast food restaurant because the thought he was getting fired. The incident happened on Wednesday in Garfield Township Michigan.
Grand Traverse County Sheriff's deputies say the disgruntled KFC employee was asked to leave the restaurant after arriving at work. Deputies say the female manager asked the employee to leave due to 'employee related issues' and for causing a disturbance.
Deputies say the employee believed he was being fired. After speaking with his manager at around 11am, the man allegedly set fire to several cedar trees behind the restaurant and then left the property. The man returned to KFC at around 1:30pm where he allegedly pushed the manager.
He then went into his manager's unlocked vehicle in the parking lot and took some items, deputies report. The suspect was later found walking around the area and was arrested on charges of arson, breaking and entering into a vehicle as well as assault. Grand Traverse Metro Fire Department was called to put out the fire.

Angry man who threw Cadbury's Creme Eggs around store wanted by police

Police have released a CCTV image of a man who lost his temper and vandalised a supermarket using Creme Eggs.
The man pictured was initally suspected by staff of shoplifting at Tesco Express in Chingford, east London, after he started acting suspiciously.
When he was challenged by staff, he became angry and threw a number Cadbury's Creme Eggs around the store.
During the outburst, on March 24 at around 7.45pm, he also destroyed £200 worth of flowers. Anyone with information is asked to call police.

Flybe flight forced to return to airport due to bee


A plane operated by airline Flybe was forced to turn back after a bee became stuck in one of its instruments. The drama began when flight BE384 began experiencing trouble while airborne from Southampton to Dublin.
Concerned for the safety of passengers, the pilot turned and made a return to Southampton Airport. Back on the ground, engineers found that the cause of the engine trouble was a bumble bee. With the bug removed from harm's way the plane again took off, safely landing in Dublin after a two-hour delay.
Passenger Noel Rooney tweeted: "Well, that's not happened to me before. A bumble bee got stuck in the wind instrument thingie on #flyBe flight BE384. Yep, that FlyBEE." A Flybe spokesman said: "Flybe can confirm that flight BE384 travelling to Dublin returned from airborne to Southampton following a suspected technical issue.
"The aircraft landed without incident and all passengers disembarked as normal. Upon inspection, Flybe engineers did discover that the cause of the issue was a bee that had become lodged in an item of instrumentation on the outside of the aircraft. The safety of its passengers and crew is the airline’s number one priority and Flybe regrets any inconvenience experienced as a result of the delay to this flight."

The History of Godzilla


Still image from Godzilla 1956 
 In pop cultural news out of Tokyo this week, it was announced that none other than the city conquering nuclear metaphor himself — Godzilla — is to become a citizen of Japan. As these marketing headlines tend to be layered, the announcement came upon the heels of another, which informed loyal fans of the monster that the first Japanese Godzilla movie in ten years will be released in the summer of 2016. Timeline.com has assembled a look at the history of Godzilla, tracing the inception of the movie franchise in 1954 to its current-day interest. From the nuclear horrors fresh in the minds of the character's Japanese creators to its eventual worldwide popularity, have a look at Godzilla's interesting evolution.

Fungi

Photographer Steve Axford captures amazing, sometimes eerie, views of mushrooms and other fungi.

Destiny ...

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How Did Land Animals Evolve?

At one point, life on Earth came out of the ocean and moved onto land. When did this happen? 

Man tried to sell live shark on pavement outside store

A South Florida man had plans to turn a catch into cash, as he attempted to sell a live shark outside a Publix store on Thursday evening. Shoppers in Fort Lauderdale said the man hauled in the five-foot nurse shark, dropped it on the sidewalk and tried to sell it.
Patrick Lanier, the man who tried to sell the live shark, said he had reeled in the marine predator on the Intracoastal Waterway. "I felt like a leprechaun, like I struck gold," he said. Lanier said he was hoping to make about $100 from selling the shark, but no one seemed interested.
The shark remained on the pavement and up for sale as potential customers passed by. "Every so often I'd throw some water on it," said Lanier. "It was nice to see the people's faces light up, excited to get to touch it and really experience what it is," added Lanier. According to Publix officials, once managers figured out what Lanier was doing, they asked him to leave, and he did so politely.

With no takers. Lanier said he released the shark back into the water on the Intracoastal, where it swam away. It it not legal in the state of Florida to sell a shark you have caught without a commercial license, something Lanier said he figured out while trying to find a buyer. He said he's learned his lesson, and it's unlikely he'll ever do it again.

Man's pet gull sentenced to death

A man in Nora, central Sweden, who captured a herring gull as a chick and kept it in his bathroom for two years, has been told that the bird must be killed.
The bird was discovered in the man's dark, tiny bathroom when an animal welfare inspector made an inspection following a complaint.
The man said that he had captured the bird as a chick and had since fed it fish and vitamins, and also let it fly in his apartment.
According to the inspector, the herring gull will be unable to fend for itself in nature, as it has not learned to forage for food itself and has never flown outdoors. Since it is prohibited to catch and care for wild birds without a permit, the decision was taken to destroy the bird.

Dog rescued after driving car into a pond

A man from Warren, Vermont, left his dog in the car for just minutes, when he says the dog drove the car into a pond. “Normally I always pull up the emergency brake, it's a stick shift. So I had it in gear but I guess I didn't have it in gear or she knocked it out. And when she knocked it out of gear, she drove it into the lake,” said Nick Hayer of his 2-year-old dog Lucy.
He says the English bulldog, who works as a therapy dog, had tagged along on a trip to Killington for the day while Hayer was attending a conference. “At lunchtime they said do you want to come in for lunch really quick and I said, 'Okay I'll come in for 10 minutes. That's it.' So I rolled the windows down halfway, opened the sunroof. Put her in the car I went inside,” Hayer said.
He said it was just going to be a quick trip, but it didn't take long. “About a minute later some guy came up to me and said your car is in the pond but we rescued your dog,” Hayer said. When he made it outside, Hayer found his Volkswagen Jetta submerged in the water, totaled.

Lucy was running around safe. Hayer says the man who rescued Lucy was an employee at the hotel. He says he is grateful to have his beloved pet safe. “He got her out and she's fine. But she would have died. She could have died I think because these dogs can't swim,” Hayer said. Following her adventure, Hayer says Lucy took a long nap.

Animal Altruism

Cooperation within and between different animal species has its advantages for all parties involved.

Animal News

The deluge that flooded parts of Texas over the past week has created a strange sight on a patch of the state's highways: clumps of worms along the center line. Why does this happen?
None of the seven new species found in Brazil's cloud forests are bigger than an adult thumbnail.
The massive fish, Leptostyrax macrorhiza, would have been one of the largest predators of its day.
Fear is growing over an incredibly strong invasive fish that can climb on land, live for extended periods outside of water, and choke its predators to death.

Animal Pictures