The Daily Drift

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Carolina Naturally

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Today in History

49 BC		Julius Caesar leads his army across the Rubicon River, plunging Rome into civil war.
1843		Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” dies in Baltimore.
1861		Alabama secedes from the Union.
1862		Lincoln accepts Simon Cameron’s resignation as Secretary of War.
1887		At Fort Smith, Arkansas, hangman George Maledon dispatches four victims in a multiple hanging.
1904		British troops massacre 1,000 dervishes in Somaliland.
1916		Russian General Yudenich launches a WWI winter offensive and advances west.
1923		The French enter the town of Essen in the Ruhr valley, to extract Germany’s resources as war payment.
1934		The German police raid the homes of dissident clergy in Berlin.
1941		Adolf Hitler orders forces to be prepared to enter North Africa to assist the Italian effort, marking the establishment of the Afrika Korps.
1940		Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., becomes the U.S. Army’s first black general, his son would later become a general as well.
1942		Japan invades the Dutch East Indies at Borneo.
1943		The Soviet Red Army encircles Stalingrad.
1948		President Harry S. Truman proposes free, two-year community colleges for all who want an education.
1949		Negotiations in China between the Nationalists and Communists open as Tientsin is virtually lost to the Communists.
1964		A collection of previously unexhibited paintings by Pablo Picasso are displayed for the first time in Toronto.
1980		Honda announces it will build the first Japanese-owned passenger-car assembly plant in the United States–in Ohio.
1994		The Irish Government announces an end to a 15-year ban on broadcasting by the IRA and its political branch, Sinn Fein.
2003		Illinois Gov. George Ryan commutes the death sentences of 167 prisoners on the state’s death row in the wake of allegations that Chicago police detective and commander Jon Burge tortured confessions from some 200 suspects over a 19 year period.

8 Simple Ways You Can Increase Your Metabolism

8 Simple Ways You Can Increase Your Metabolism

Transfusions of ‘old’ blood may harm some patients

The oldest blood available for transfusions releases large and potentially harmful amounts of iron into patients’ bloodstreams, a new study by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) has found. Based on the new findings, … Read more

Snow White's Cottage For Sale

A home in Olalla, Wasington, was built in 1982 to resemble Snow White's cottage, and it can be yours! This fairy tale home has four bedrooms and 4.5 baths, and sits on 7.5 acres. The property just oozes charm.

A cobblestone driveway and fountain greet guests as soon as they make their way towards the house. As you’d expect, this home has many quirks in its design – one being that there are no square corners. According to Elle Decor, “The original builders cared little for convention, so not a single square corner exists in the place, and hardly anything was built to a standard size. The doors might be the quirkiest (and most adorable) part of the whole package — they’re practically oval-shaped, after all.”

See plenty of pictures of the Snow White house at Housely.

The Cryptographic Capability of the Barbie Typewriter

In 1998, Mattel began selling the electronic Barbie Typewriter to replace the earlier mechanical typewriter in the Barbie line, thus continuing the toy industry habit of introducing young children to technology that is 30 years out of date. Nonetheless, it could keep children busy learning to read and write away from your word processor. But the typewriter had a secret. It was manufactured by Mehano in Slovenia, which already made other children's typewriters. Mehano took an older model and made it pink and purple for Mattel. The base model they used had a wonderful secret capability that was sadly never included in Mattel's marketing.  

Apart from a range of typesetting features, such as letter-spacing and underline, this children's toy was capable of encoding and decoding secret messages, using one of 4 built-in cipher modes. These modes were activated by entering a special key sequence on the keyboard, and was explained only in the original documentation.          
When the E-115 was adopted by Mattel as an addition to the Barbie™ product line, it was aimed mainly at girls with a minimum age of 5 years. For this reason the product was given a pink-and-purple case and the Barbie logo and image were printed on the body. As it was probably thought that secret writing would not appeal to girls, the coding/decoding facilities were omitted from the manual. Nevertheless, these facilities can still be accessed if you know how to activate them.

As a former girl, I can assure you that secret writing would have been the main draw of this toy if customers had known about it. If you happen to have one of these typewriters sitting around, you can find the instructions for using the crypto codes at Crypto Museum.

Inside The Canadian Cult Of Staring

Cults have been known to do some pretty strange things, and when we take a look at their activities we're left wondering what could possess people to take part in such odd activities.

In Canada this odd cult activity comes in the form of staring at a screen featuring video footage of a blue eyed cult leader named John de Ruiter for hours at a time.

John's strange staring cult has thousands of members, who have moved to Edmonton just to be a part of his College of Integrated Philosophy and worship their messiah by staring deeply at his face for three-hour-long "meetings".

(YouTube Link)

John was once a humble preacher and orthopedic shoemaker before he discovered there's a lot more money in commanding a flock of followers who are susceptible to suggestion, and now he's the man with the million dollar stare.

Read about The Canadian Man Who Commands A Cult With His Gaze here

Ruth Bader Ginsburg pens heartwarming letters to young girl who dressed like her for 'superhero day’

Ruth Bader Ginsburg pens heartwarming letters to young girl who dressed like her for 'superhero day’

Groom and His Groomsmen Dress Up As McDonald's Food

In Singapore it is traditional for grooms to show up at their bride-to-be's house before a wedding and participate in silly tasks at the request of the bridesmaids. Chen Guanyou must not have thought that didn't sound quite exciting enough on its own, so he decided to show up with his groomsmen all dressed in McDonald's costumes. Maybe it was a last hurrah for his fast food fandom because his bride, Joanna Tan, actually hates fast food -at least she was a good sport about the whole thing.

Customers rally around beloved waitress stiffed by white couple who ‘don’t tip black people’

Customers rally around beloved waitress stiffed by white couple who ‘don’t tip black people’

Ft. Lauderdale Airport Shooter Did Everything Legally Until He Pulled The Trigger

Guns are the problem, not the people who have them.

Woman arrested after framing husband's ex-girlfriend in Craigslist 'rape fantasy' scam

Woman arrested after framing husband's ex-girlfriend in Craigslist 'rape fantasy' scam

This Small Town Refused to Settle for Wal-Mart When Its Last Local Grocery Store Closed

This Small Town Refused to Settle for Wal-Mart When Its Last Local Grocery Store Closed

How We Narrowly Avoided a Nuclear War in America, as Explained by Those Who Saved Us

How We Narrowly Avoided a Nuclear War in America, as Explained by Those Who Saved Us

Short-lived greenhouse gases cause centuries of sea-level rise

Even if there comes a day when the world completely stops emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, coastal regions and island nations will continue to experience rising sea levels for centuries afterward, according to a … Read more

We might get to watch a new star explode into the sky in 2022

We might get to watch a new star explode into the sky in 2022

R.I.P. Pioneer Cabin Tree

Several huge sequoia trees were made into "tunnel trees" in the 19th century, to highlight how big they are and to encourage motorists to visit California parks. It was good for tourism, but carving a hole through the trunk was not good for the individual tree. Now the last known sequoia tunnel tree in California has fallen. The Pioneer Cabin Tree in Calaveras Big Trees State Park, with its formerly drive-through (and recently walk-through) tunnel, fell under the force of a weekend winter storm, which brought flooding and mudslides. The tree was estimated to be at least a thousand years old.

The iconic tree was one of just a few tunneled-through sequoias in California. The most famous was the Wawona Tree, in Yosemite National Park; it fell during a winter storm in 1969 at an estimated age of 2,100 years. The other remaining sequoia tunnels are dead or consist of logs on their side, the Forest Service says.

However, there are still three coastal redwoods (taller and more slender than sequoias) with tunnels cut through them. They're all operated by private companies, the Forest Service says, and still allow cars to drive through — one appeared in a recent Geico ad.

Park volunteer Jim Allday, who reported the tree's demise, said it shattered on impact with the ground

Cities Are Driving Rapid Evolutionary Changes to Plant and Animal Species

Cities Are Driving Rapid Evolutionary Changes to Plant and Animal Species

Ghost Shark Filmed Alive In The Ocean For The First Time

They're strange looking relatives of sharks and rays, they're elusive and live 2600 meters or more below the surface, and they have retractable sex organs on their foreheads.They're Chimaeras, or ghost sharks or pointy-nosed blue ratfish, and they've never been captured on video before 2016, when a remotely operated vehicle deployed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute caught this swim-by on camera.

(YouTube Link)

Chimaeras are normally thought to inhabit the waters around New Zealand and Australia, but the remote vehicle captured the Chimaera swimming in the Northern Hemisphere, which researchers found interesting.
What you might find interesting are these strange physical traits of the Ghost Sharks, via National Geographic:

Unlike those more well-known sharks, chimaeras don’t have rows of ragged teeth, but instead munch up their prey—mollusks, worms, and other bottom-dwellers—with mineralized tooth plates.

A pattern of open channels on their heads and faces, called lateral line canals, contain sensory cells that sense movement in the water and help the ghost sharks locate lunch.

And perhaps most fascinating, male chimaeras sport retractable sex organs on their foreheads.

Animal Pictures