CAROLINA NATURALLY: Oct 15, 2015

Thursday, October 15, 2015

The Daily Drift

Welcome to the Thursday Edition of Carolina Naturally.

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Today in History

1529		Ottoman armies under Suleiman end their siege of Vienna and head back to Belgrade.
1582		The Gregorian (or New World) calendar is adopted in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal; and the preceding ten days are lost to history.
1783		Francois Pilatre de Rozier makes the first manned flight in a hot air balloon. The first flight was let out to 82 feet, but over the next few days the altitude increased up to 6,500 feet.
1813		During the land defeat of the British on the Thames River in Canada, the Indian chief Tecumseh, now a brigadier general with the British Army (War of 1812), is killed.
1863		For the second time, the Confederate submarine H L Hunley sinks during a practice dive in Charleston Harbor, this time drowning its inventor along with seven crew members.
1878		Thomas A. Edison founds the Edison Electric Light Co.
1880		Victorio, feared leader of the Minbreno Apache, is killed by Mexican troops in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico.
1892		An attempt to rob two banks in Coffeyville, Kan., ends in disaster for the Dalton gang as four of the five outlaws are killed and Emmet Dalton is seriously wounded.
1894		Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, is arrested for betraying military secrets to Germany.
1914		Congress passes the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, which labor leader Samuel Gompers calls "labor’s charter of freedom." The act exempts unions from anti-trust laws; strikes, picketing and boycotting become legal; corporate interlocking directorates become illegal, as does setting prices which would effect a monopoly.
1924		German ZR-3 flies 5000 miles, the furthest Zeppelin flight to date.
1941		Odessa, a Russian port on the Black Sea which has been surrounded by German troops for several weeks, is evacuated by Russian troops.
1945		Vichy French Premier Pierre Laval is executed by a firing squad for his wartime collaboration with the Germans.
1950		President Harry Truman meets with General Douglas MacArthur at Wake Island to discuss U.N. progress in the Korean War.
1964		Nikita Khrushchev is replaced by Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union.
1966		Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale establish the Black Panther Party, an African-American revolutionary socialist political group, in the US.
1969		Rallies for The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam draw over 2 million demonstrators across the US, a quarter million of them in the nation’s capital.
1987		The Great Storm of 1987 strikes the UK and Europe during the night of Oct 15-16, killing over 20 people and causing widespread damage.
1989		Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky makes his 1,851st goal, breaking the all-time scoring record in the National Hockey League.
1990		Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, receives Nobel Peace Prize for his work in making his country more open and reducing Cold War tensions.
1997		Andy Green of the UK becomes the first person to break the sound barrier in the Earth’s atmosphere, driving the ThrustSSC supersonic car to a record 763 mph (1,228 km/h).
2003		China launches its first manned space mission, Shenzhou I.
2007		New Zealand police arrest 17 people believed to be part of a paramilitary training camp.
2008		Dow Jones Industrial Average plummets 733.08 points, the second-largest percentage drop in the Dow’s history.
2011		Protests break out in countries around the globe, under the slogan "United for Global Democracy."

People Who Wore the Perfect Shirts for Their Celebrity Encounters

T-shirts that reference film, television and other bits of popular culture are everywhere. On occasion, many of us walk around wearing an image of a celebrity or media presentation that we're enthusiastic about.
The people in these photos happened to have just the right shirt on at the right time. Whether they were at a convention in which the celebrity at hand was expected or they happened upon the star in a completely random encounter, these celebrity sightings give new meaning to the phrase "dress for success."
See a collection of these encounters with famous people on Imgur.

Woman Uses Medieval Combat Skills and Ninja Sword to Beat up Home Invader

Karen Dolley, 43, of Indianapolis woke up in the middle of the night to find a strange man in her bedroom. She's a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism--an organization that, among other things, practices medieval martial arts. She knows how to hurt people the good, old-fashioned way.
She immediately began punching him, landing about 10 blows and sending him reeling back into a corner of the room. Then she reached into a nightstand drawer for her gun. But, in the confusion of the encounter, she couldn't find it.
So Dolley reached for her backup weapon: a ninja sword. With her ninjato, she held the intruder at sword-point until police arrived to arrest him.
Dolley described her training to the Indianapolis Star:

Dolley would don armor and engage in unchoreographed fights using rattan swords, which are safer than steel. She fought against men who stood taller than 6 feet and had 20 years experience.
In the beginning, her opponents could guess her moves because she was afraid she was going to hurt someone, she said, so an early lesson was to move confidently and aggressively after someone.
Now Dolley is using those lessons to help in roller derby, where she's a new recruit known as Foul Morguean with Naptown Roller Girls.
The lessons helped during Thursday’s break-in too, she said.
“I definitely don’t need to work on my aggression, I guess,” Dolley said.

Vintage Halloween Photos

They say death rides a white horse, but we really can’t be sure of the color when the horse is wearing a Halloween costume! If you were trick-or-treating in a rural area where the houses were miles apart, you’d want a ride, wouldn’t you? And if you’re going to dress as a skeleton, you may as well dress up your horse, too! These youngsters are part of a collection of 30 vintage Halloween photos at The Post-Mortem Post. The images are from back in the days when the whole point of dressing up for Halloween was to be scary, and the homemade costumes were even creepier than the store-bought masks.

Gruesome Halloween Display Has Neighborhood Kids Running Scared

When it comes to decorating for Halloween there's a fine line between suitably scary and downright disturbing, and sometimes we Halloweenies have to reel in our morbid imaginations a bit so we don't scare off all the trick-or-treaters.

But, as the Barrett household in Parma, Ohio discovered, you should use even more discretion when you live a block away from an elementary school or prepare to incur parental wrath.

Kids and parents alike feel that the decorations, which include an impaled body, a body wrapped in plastic hanging from a tree and a figure crucified upside down, are too disturbingly realistic to have up around children.

The decorations seem perfect for a haunted house or an area with fewer kids, but a display that gruesome is guaranteed to keep kids from trick-or-treating at their house of horrors, and where's the fun in that?!

Mel Brooks’ High-Quality Low Comedy

There will never be another filmmaker like Mel Brooks. He filled his movies with puns, double entendres, vulgarity, and parody, and still managed to tackle big ideas with the finished product. He made comedies out of subjects that were not to be made fun of, and got away with it because he was so good at turning the tables on the way those subjects were normally approached. The musical number “Springtime for Hitler” from the movie The Producers got away with portraying nazis as joyous and even sexy, but that was because it was satire that was purposefully offensive within the fictional story, then mistaken for genius satire in that fictional framework. Taken out of context, it’s just baffling.

Brooks would push this kind of taboo-breaking even further in Blazing Saddles (1974), a comedy that still feels daring for its bomb-throwing at some of America’s touchiest subjects.
Saddles is Brooks’ first movie spoof, but rather than sending up a specific film, as he would do later, he takes aim at the underlying themes of the Western genre. Watch a classic oater and you’ll likely encounter a lot of cringe-worthy racism and scenes of white men mowing down non-white characters on their path to manifest destiny. In a fairly radical move for a Western, let alone a comic one, Saddles makes the cowboys and government the enemy because of their racism. And Brooks makes it clear that his critique doesn’t just apply to the Old West, but to modern society as well. (Richard Pryor was a co-writer.)

Brooks' genius can be hard to parse for those who weren’t there in the context of the times, but the A.V. Club deconstructs his filmography with some recommendations for a newbie to enjoy. And for older fans, it’s an excuse to watch Young Frankenstein again.

Which Languages Will Thrive in the Future?

Which Languages Will Thrive in the Future?

Will English still be a dominant language 100 years from now? We take a look at what the landscape of language might look like in future generations.

Do We All Hallucinate?

Do We All Hallucinate?

Even healthy people hallucinate, reports a new study. We think we see things based on our prior experiences.

In females, childhood head injury could lead to alcohol abuse later in life

In females, childhood head injury could lead to alcohol abuse later in life

Girls who suffer a concussive bump on the head in childhood could be at increased risk for abusing alcohol as adults, a new study suggests. The research in mice found that females with a mild closed-head brain injury were more likely to misuse alcohol later in life...

The Great Kentucky Hemp Experiment

As demand for tobacco diminishes, the state’s farmers are turning to growing cannabis—but not the kind you smoke.

Food Chain Collapse Predicted in World's Oceans

Food Chain Collapse Predicted in World's Oceans

Rising carbon dioxide emissions could cause a collapse in the marine food chain from the top down.

How El Niño Could Threaten Millions With Starvation

According to Oxfam, this year's forecasted El Niño could cause trouble for agriculture around the world, leading to extreme food insecurity in some countries.

Earth's Frozen Center Formed a Billion Years Ago

Earth's Frozen Center Formed a Billion Years Ago

Earth's inner core formed between 1 billion and 1.5 billion years ago, and this freezing heart of the planet powers its protective magnetic field.

B.C.

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Bacteria Is Literally Everywhere

Bacteria Is Literally Everywhere

In us, on us, and everywhere around us is something that's guaranteed to make you squirm just thinking about it: bacteria. In fact, we each trail our own personal microbial cloud of it wherever we go.

Genes linked with malaria’s virulence shared by apes, humans

Genes linked with malaria’s virulence shared by apes, humans

The malaria parasite molecules associated with severe disease and death–those that allow the parasite to escape recognition by the immune system–have been shown to share key gene segments with chimp and gorilla malaria parasites, which are separated by...

Birds and T-rex share common past

Birds and T-rex share common past

The rapid extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago gave rise to a stunning variety of bird species over the next few million years, according to Florida State University researchers. A study published in the journal Nature in coordination with Yale University...