The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of  
Carolina Naturally

Today also happens to be Walk To School Day ...! 

 

Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.   

  
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Today in History

1762		The British fleet bombards and captures Spanish-held Manila in the Philippines.
1795		The day after he routed counterrevolutionaries in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte accepts their formal surrender.
1813		The U.S. emerges victorious at the Battle of the Thames, in Ontario, breaking Britain’s Indian allies with the death of Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, and making the Detroit frontier safe.
1821		Greek rebels capture Tripolitsa, the main Turkish fort in the Peloponnese area of Greece.
1864		At the Battle of Allatoona, a small Union post is saved from Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood‘s army.
1877		Nez Perce Chief Joseph surrenders to Colonel Nelson Miles in Montana Territory, after a 1,700-mile trek to reach Canada falls 40 miles short.
1880		The first ball-point pen is patented by Alonzo T. Cross.
1882		Outlaw Frank James surrenders in Missouri six months after hist brother Jesse’s assassination.
1915		Germany issues an apology and promises for payment for the 128 American passengers killed in the sinking of the British ship Lusitania.
1915		Bulgaria enters World War I on the side of the Central Powers.
1921		The World Series is broadcast on radio for the first time.
1931		Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon complete the first heavier than air nonstop flight over the Pacific. Their flight, begun October 3, lasted 41 hours, 31 minutes and covered 5,000 miles. They piloted their Bellanca CH-200 monoplane from Samushiro, 300 miles north of Tokyo, Japan, to Wenatchee, Washington.
1938		Germany invalidates Jews’ passports.
1943		Imperial Japanese forces execute 98 American POWs on Wake Island.
1947		US President Harry S Truman delivers the first televised White House address.
1948		A magnitude 7.3 earthquake near Ashgabat in the USSR kills tens of thousands; estimates range from 110,000 to 176,000.
1962		The first James Bond film, Dr. No starring Sean Connery, debuts.
1965		U.S. forces in Saigon receive permission to use tear gas.
1966		A sodium cooling system malfunction causes a partial core meltdown at the Enrico Fermi demonstration breeder reactor near Detroit. Radiation is contained.
1968		Police attack civil rights demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland; the event is considered to be the beginning of “The Troubles.”
1969		Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuts on BBC One.
1970		The US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is established.
1970		Members of the Quebec Liberation Front (QLF) kidnap British Trade Commissioner James Cross in Montreal, resulting in the October Crisis and Canada’s first peacetime use of the War Measures Act.
1986		Britain’s The Sunday Times newspaper publishes details of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons development program.
1988		Brazil’s Constituent Assembly authorizes the nation’s new constitution.
2000		Slobodan Milosevic, president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, resigns in the wake of mass protest demonstrations.

Tax demand sent to dead woman's grave

Authorities in France have sent a demand for property duties to a dead woman, addressed to her grave in a small town in Brittany. The mayor of the seaside town of Sarzeau said he had received a letter from the public finance offices to a dead resident, addressed to “Grave 24, Row E, Cemetery Road.”
His office withheld the woman’s surname but said her Christian name was Jacqueline. The town's treasurer Christophe Libre said it was a demand for property taxes. "Unfortunately it's not the first time we've had this sort of letter from the public finance center," Libre added.
He said it could be “a joke by someone who registered the change of address online,” suggesting that it may have been “one of the heirs who didn't want to pay the property tax”. French taxpayers are allowed to change their addresses online provided they give the correct reference number.

20 Fastest Growing U.S. Cities in 2016

John Oliver Blows the Whistle on Glaring Police Misconduct in America

John Oliver Blows the Whistle on Glaring Police Misconduct in America 

Video Shows Cops TRYING To Run Over Black Man With Cruiser

And people wonder why black people don’t trust the cops.

Continue Reading 

New Orleans Police Chief Instructs Citizens on How Not to Get Shot by a Cop

Massage Therapists and Manicurists Need Training—but Not Gun Carriers?

When prions don’t cause Mad Cow disease they can pass on beneficial traits

When prions don’t cause Mad Cow disease they can pass on beneficial traits

Researchers have found nearly 50 helpful prions in yeast and comparable proteins in humans, suggesting that this dreaded protein type can boost survival and plays a role in evolution. Prion proteins, best known as the agents of deadly brain disorders like mad cow...

Fake Food

The decades during and after World War II were an exciting time to be a food chemist. The field was wide open for big, scientific improvements: new artificial colors and flavors to invent, longer shelf lives, and, in some cases, if a natural disaster wiped out an entire crop, a scientist could just invent a substitute. It was an exuberantly naive time, when the slogan might well have been “If life hands you chemicals, make lemonade anyway.” Up and down the food chain, the old way of doing things— growing food on farms with manure and crop rotation— gave way to a brave new world of synthetic fertilizers and miracle pesticides like DDT. Pigs, cows, and chickens that once ran wild were now safely contained inside a food factory where they could be managed efficiently, with no wasted feed or space. Today it all sounds a little like a dystopian nightmare, but back then, food chemists thought they were using science to solve big problems like world hunger, malnutrition, and too much waste.
Into that environment strode a superman of creativity: William A. Mitchell, who received 70 patents for fake foods between 1941 and 1976. Here are four of his biggest contributions to American cuisine:  
1. ARTIFICIAL TAPIOCA
Shortly after Mitchell was hired at General Foods in 1941, he received his first assignment: save tapioca pudding. During the Great Depression, tapioca became a popular dessert, a lumpy, sweet comfort food that was cheap and easy to make. The problem was that cassava, the starchy root that was its main ingredient, came from Java, Indonesia. When the Japanese invaded the island, the supply was cut off. Mitchell saved the day by figuring out that a combination of food starches mixed with gelatin made a pretty convincing substitute.
2. POP ROCKS
Not all of Mitchell’s inventions were soft and squishy; some were granular and full of carbon dioxide. Pop Rocks were a wonderful mistake— they were originally designed to be mixed with water to make a carbonated soft drink.
3. TANG
Contrary to popular opinion (which was helped along by a misleading ad campaign), the powdered artificial orange drink Tang wasn’t developed for the space program. Mitchell created it, General Foods introduced it in 1959, and… it flopped. Tang limped along for a few years, until NASA, looking for something to mask the unpleasant flavor of space capsule water, selected it for John Glenn’s 1962 space mission. That did it. With a “breakfast of astronauts” advertising campaign, Tang zoomed to success.
4. COOL WHIP
Although it now contains (a little) milk and cream, Mitchell’s original 1967 Cool Whip recipe was made up of water, hydrogenated vegetable oil, sugar, corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors and colors, and a bunch of other chemical stuff. It didn’t taste like whipped cream, but it also didn’t require as much refrigeration as the real stuff, making it ideal for picnics and cult potlucks.

Glitch in the Matrix

Is the same guy time-traveling and trying to avoid meeting himself? Or did the replicator stop sorting people into different spaces properly? Just how did three bald white guys in bright blue polo shirts and glasses end up catching up on work at the same cafe? My theory is that it’s a hot place, so they all shaved their heads (which is right, it’s Bangkok), and they work at the same nearby company that has a dress code and won’t give their tech guys a private office. This eerie image was snapped by redditor oldmontgomeryflange, who did not mention his hairstyle or what he was wearing at the time

Irish to the aid!

The Irish are always the first ones to come to the aid of their fellow man…passengers, in this case!
Shortly after take-off on an outbound, evening Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Boston, the lead flight attendant nervously made the following painful announcement in her lovely Irish brogue:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m so very sorry, but it appears that there has been a terrible mix-up by our catering service. I don’t know how this has happened, but we have 103 passengers on board, and unfortunately, we received only 40 dinner meals. I truly apologize for this mistake and inconvenience.”
When the muttering of the passengers had died down, she continued, “Anyone who is kind enough to give up their meal so that someone else can eat, will receive free and unlimited drinks for the duration of our 10 hour flight.
Her next announcement came about 2 hours later:
“If anyone is hungry, we still have 40 dinners available.”

Florida Man Accidentally Marries His Granddaughter

Just three months into their marriage, a Florida couple got the surprise of their lives after discovering that the bride was the groom’s biological granddaughter.

According to the Florida Sun Post, the couple - who have requested to remain anonymous - came to the startling discovery while looking through the 68-year-old’s photo albums, which included pictures of his first wife and their children. His 24-year-old wife instantly recognized one of the children as her estranged father, who she says kicked her out of the house when she was a teenager after she’d accidentally gotten pregnant.

As the husband explained to the Florida Sun Post, he and his first wife had gone through a terrible split, and when she left him, she took their kids with her and moved to an undisclosed location. Despite his many efforts to find them, he was never able to, and eventually, he got remarried and started a new family with his second wife. However, that marriage also ended messily - but in a stroke of luck two years later, the 68-year-old ended up winning “several million dollars” in the lottery.

He soon decided he was ready for love again, and after signing up for a dating website, he came across his future wife’s profile.

“I just felt strange when I saw her photos,” the man said. “It was like a sense of déjà vu, but at the time I couldn’t figure out why she seemed so familiar.“

Despite finally figuring it out, however, the couple have decided to stay together, and have no plans of getting divorced.

“If we’d never found out, we would’ve lived out lives happily together, and us being related shouldn’t change that,” the 68-year-old said.

"Every couple is different and special in their own ways,” his wife added.

Residents unhappy about house blocking road

Some residents in Travis Heights in South Austin, Texas, are frustrated after a house that was set to be moved on Thursday night is now stuck in the middle of their neighborhood. The house was being moved to a new destination, but only made it a short distance before getting stuck.
The roads are now barricaded and will stay that way until the moving company, Austin Home Movers can get a temporary road block permit from the City Transportation department. The company plans on getting the permit and having the house moved out of the area by Tuesday evening.
Cheyenne Krause, public information specialist for the Austin Transportation Department, said the city did not put up the barricades, the moving company was required to pay for them and put them up themselves. Krause said the company was cited for blocking the roadway without a permit.

YouTube link.

“We apologize to everyone for the inconvenience,” said Austin Home Movers in a statement. “We are doing everything we can to alleviate the situation.” Ed Sapir says it’s blocking his driveway. He thought it was a fool’s errand in the first place. “Well leave it where it is, fix it up, and make it nice, rather than taking it outside the city,” said Sapir.

The Secret Cave In Central Park That Has Been Sealed Up Since The 1930s

Central Park is known for many things- muggings, picnics, ice skating, the turning of the leaves and the finest horseback riding in NYC, but it was built to be a place for big city folk to keep in touch with nature.
So when Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux designed and oversaw construction of Central Park in the 1860s they included natural elements such as waterfalls, ponds, and lots and lots of trees.
But there was one natural element which was there from the very beginning- a narrow cave, believed to be partly carved out by humans, which they discovered while excavating for The Ramble.

Olmstead and Vaux decided to blend the cave into their carefully constructed "wilderness" park and even added a flat stone staircase leading to one of the cave's entrances.

The cave was a big hit with visitors, especially kids, but by the early 1900s it had become a den of iniquity:

In 1904, a man attempted suicide (not the first to take place in the Ramble) on the stone steps—though some believed it was actually attempted murder.
In 1922, artist Alexander MacArthur was sentenced to three months in a workhouse for “behaving improperly” inside the cave, and in 1929, about 335 men were arrested in Central Park for “annoying women”—and the Ramble Cave was one of the preferred spots to do so.

Park authorities sealed off the cave in the 1930s, blending it nicely into the surrounding ramble on one side and bricking it up on the other, and now park visitors walk by Central Park's secret cave unaware it's even there.

See The Secret Cave in Central Park- And Why It Was Sealed at mental_floss

The Ghost Farms Of Colorado

Water rights is a complicated subject in places where water is not plentiful. Does anyone have the right to unlimited water? Cities have more people to serve, but farms grow crops for many people to consume. In Colorado, the water falls on the mountains as snow, then flows down the Colorado River. Meanwhile, the desert east of the Rockies is where more people live, in Denver and other towns.

Ever since the state became a state, its government and our federal one have grappled with how to redistribute the bounty—bankrolling dams, reservoirs, and massive transmountain diversion tunnels, up to 23 miles long. In Colorado, water itself is treated like private equity. Due to the particulars of an antiquated law, the first people to put water to “beneficial use” get dibs. And because pioneers predate almost everybody else, today’s farmers and ranchers control 85 percent of the available water supply. Sustained droughts, depleted aquifers, global warming, and a rapidly growing population have made scarcity the norm. As a result, farmers find themselves sitting on a commodity worth far more than their crops or land.
During the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, nearly all of the farmers in Crowley County, southeast of Colorado Springs, participated in what are known as “buy and dry” deals, selling their water rights to growing municipalities and retaining the land, albeit unirrigated and unable to support crops. Once farming tapered off, production at the local cannery ground to a halt. Feedlots closed. Mills shuttered.

You could say, tough, you sold those water rights. But unused farmland is not the best use of land. The failure of farms affects the economy of nearby towns. Together, they affect the overall health of the state. Learn about the water rights dilemma in Colorado at Modern Farmer.

Ancient global cooling gave rise to modern ecosystems

Ancient global cooling gave rise to modern ecosystems

Around 7 million years ago, landscapes and ecosystems across the world began changing dramatically. Subtropical regions dried out and the Sahara Desert formed in Africa. Rain forests receded and were replaced by the vast savannas and grasslands that persist today in...

Guess who helped mow the lawn ...

Pet insurer says that dog injuries from 'jumping, running, slipping, tripping or playing' not covered

Jamie Richardson, from Yukon, Canada, says she's "more than a little angry" that the pet insurance company she's paid monthly for four years refused to cover her dog's injury. "It just felt really shocking to know that this company was not there for me, when I needed them the most," she says. Richardson's dog Muddy is a seven-year-old Akita breed. While running in the woods near Whitehorse, Muddy tore a ligament in a hind leg.
A vet told Richardson that's a common injury in Yukon, where dogs can get their paws caught in a rabbit or fox hole, and twist their knees. But when Richardson filed a claim to get reimbursed 80 per cent of her $4,200 vet costs, Canada's largest pet health insurance provider denied her claim. Petsecure pointed to a clause in her policy denying coverage if a dog is injured while "jumping, running, slipping, tripping or playing."
"It takes away from him being a dog," says Richardson. "I think it defeats the principle of pet insurance." However, Petsecure have now reviewed the file and has agreed to pay Richardson's claim. In a letter sent to Richardson, the company says it decided to provide compensation because "Muddy has been a part of the PetSecure family for a long time." A Vancouver lawyer who specialises in animal rights law says Richardson's policy has "one of the craziest clauses" she's ever come across.
"Basically, what that policy says is, the dog can't be a dog," Rebeka Breder says. Richardson had to borrow from friends and family to cover Muddy's vet costs. She's now cancelled her policy with Petsecure, and will tuck away money for any future incidents. Despite the experience, Richardson says she's still going to allow Muddy to "be a dog." "But every time he runs into the woods, chasing a squirrel, I just think, oh, please, please ... be careful. Watch your step. Don't do it again!"

Animal Pictures