CAROLINA NATURALLY: Jan 19, 2017

Thursday, January 19, 2017

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally

Most Definitely ...!

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Robert ... !

Today is - Robert E. Lee Day

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Today in History

1523		In Switzerland, Ulrich Zwingli publishes his 67 Articles, the first manifesto of the Zurich Reformation which attacks the authority of the pope.
1783		William Pitt becomes the youngest Prime Minister of England at age 24.
1847		New Mexico Governor Charles Bent is slain by Pueblo Indians in Taos.
1861		Georgia secedes from the Union.
1902		The magazine “L’Auto” announces the new Tour de France.
1915		The first German air raids on Great Britain inflict minor casualties.
1923		The French announce the invention of a new gun that has a firing range of 56 miles.
1931		The Wickersham Committee issues a report asking for revisions in the dry law, but no repeal.
1937		Howard Hughes flies from Los Angeles to New York in seven hours and 22 minutes.
1937		In the Soviet Union, the People’s Commissars Council is formed under Molotov.
1945		The Red Army captures Lodz, Krakow, and Tarnow.
1947		The French open a drive on Hue, Indochina.
1949		The Chiang Government moves the capital of China to Canton.
1950		Communist Chinese leader Mao recognizes the Republic of Vietnam.
1968		Cambodia charges that the United States and South Vietnam have crossed the border and killed three Cambodians.
1981		The United States and Iran sign an accord on a hostage release in Algiers.
1983		The new catholic code expands women’s rights in the cult.

3 Big Ways the Summer of Love Is Still with Us

50 Years Later, Here Are 3 Big Ways the Summer of Love Is Still with Us

A History of Pepsi Cola

by Eddie Deezen

Pepsi Cola was originally called "Brad's Drink" and marketed in Bern, North Carolina in the early 1890's by pharmacist Caleb Bradham. Bradham = "Brad's Drink," get it?
By 1898, the name Pepsi was officially adopted. The name "Pepsi Cola" is derived from the pepsin and cola nuts in the recipe. Pepsi was originally marketed as a cure for stomachaches or dyspepsia.
A cult across the street from Bradham's drugstore claimed the name Pepsi Cola was an anagram for "Episcopal." But Pepsico, the company that manufactures Pepsi, discounts this theory. (And remember, just because Britney Spears is an anagram for Presbyterians, it doesn't mean this fact has any other significance.)
Pepsi actually fared better than its main rival, Coca-Cola, in its early days. (Coca-Cola was invented a few years earlier, in 1886.) It sold briskly until 1923, by which time Coke had built a huge empire.
Pepsi, meanwhile, went broke. Sugar prices had gone up as result of World War I, and the company couldn't pay to make it's own beverages. Eight years later, the company went bankrupt again.
Ironically, the Great Depression did not bankrupt it a third time. If anything, it helped. Pepsi introduced a 12-ounce bottle in 1934 at the height of the depression. Coke bottles were only half that size, a fact Pepsi capitalized on. Its marketing team wrote the words to the world's first jingle to go on the radio:

Pepsi Cola hits the spot,
Twelve full ounces- that's a lot,
Twice as much for a nickel too,
Pepsi cola is the drink for you,
Nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel.

(YouTube link)

The catchy song caught on like wildfire. It became a hit record and was recorded in 55 languages.

The saddest and ugliest chapter in Pepsi history occurred with its new owner, Walter Mack, in the 1940s. Mack was a very broad-minded man for the times. He maintained that Pepsi either completely ignored the African-American market or used blacks as ethnic stereotypes in their ads. Mack believed he could gain marketing shares by targeting blacks in advertising. He hired an all-black marketing team. They came up with more broad-minded ads, such as an ad with an African-American mother holding a six-pack of Pepsi and handing one over to her son.
But at the time, racial segregation and Jim Crow laws were still very prevalent in America. The black marketing team faced complaints and insults from many Pepsi workers, as well as threats from the Ku Klux Klan. The idea being spread was that with the new African-American focus on Pepsi, many of their white customers would be pushed away. Many of the Pepsi investors complained too.
In a meeting with 500 Pepsi affiliates at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1947, Mack tried to ease the tension and upset. To the 500 bottlers, Mack announced that he didn't want Pepsi to "become known as a nigger drink." The African-American ad team was disbanded. Walter Mack was to leave as Pepsi's president in 1950.
In the meantime, the famous Coke-Pepsi rivalry was to continue on, as it does to the present day. But, as was to become the usual pattern, Coke won the "cola wars" by catering to American GIs in World War II.
In 1959, Pepsi debuted at the Moscow Fair. Pepsi gained enormous publicity as Soviet Premier Khrushchev drank a Pepsi cola with Vice President Richard Nixon.

In 1964, Pepsi introduced America's first national diet soft drink, Diet Pepsi.
Pepsi focused it's campaigns on youth in the 1960's with famous slogans "Come alive- you're in the Pepsi generation!" and "It's Pepsi -for those who think young!"
Many celebrities have been associated with Pepsi over the years. Pepsi was the favorite drink of Elvis Presley, who always kept his refrigerator at Graceland fully stocked. Baseball's last 30-game winner, Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain claimed he was "addicted" to Pepsi. He drank a case every day. McLain's weight ballooned to over 300 pounds. Joan Crawford married to Pepsico president Alfred Steele from 1955 until Steele's death in 1959. She was a Pepsi advertising executive and board of executives member from 1955 to 1973.
In 1984, Michael Jackson signed a contract with Pepsi and produced many commercials and many world tours through 1993.

(YouTube link)

In the early 1990's, Ray Charles starred in a diet Pepsi commercial campaign called "You got the right one, baby." Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Beyonce, the Spice Girls, and quarterback Drew Brees have all been Pepsi spokespersons.
The famous "Pepsi Challenge" was introduced in 1975. This was a blind taste test, in which the blindfolded consumers were asked to choose which cola they preferred: "Coke or Pepsi?" A majority did, in fact, select Pepsi. This type of one-on-one competition was revolutionary at the time and gained tremendous publicity.
To this day, Coke and Pepsi rival each other as the number one soft drink. Nationally, the rivalry is close, with arguments about superior sales in various corners of the U.S. For whatever reason, Coke is much more popular in northern states, while Pepsi wins in popularity in the southern states. But globally, it is no contest, as Coke consistently far outsells Pepsi globally.

Arab and Berber pirates abducted and enslaved Icelanders

Events from the 17th century that are generally not known, and do not enter discussions of the history of slavery:

In 1627 Barbary corsairs from Algiers and Salé descended on Iceland in two separate raids, taking around 400–900 prisoners (Iceland's population at the time has been estimated to have been about 60,000). This event is popularly known in Iceland as Tyrkjaránið – the 'Turkish Raid', as it was launched from areas under Ottoman sovereignty, although no North African Turks (Kouloughlis) are known to have been involved. Most pirates were Arabs and Berbers, a large part - the Dutch and other Europeans, who converted to Islam... Those captured were sold into slavery on the Barbary Coast.

Why books sometimes have blank pages at the front or back

Two explanations from the Explain Like I'm Five subreddit:

"Imagine I took a standard piece of paper. I could fold it into 4 pieces, then cut the top and bottom a bit, staple it, and have a small book. This is called a signature. They can be as small as 4 pages, or much larger. A book is typically made up of several signatures.
The result is, I can take two 4 page signatures and make an 8 page book, but I have no way to make a 9 page book. If I add one page, I have no way to attach it. You can imagine if I stick the page in and just glue the end, it will easily fall out. I might be forced to make it fit in a 7 page book, or maybe print a 12 page book with some blank pages (some print methods can use 2 page signatures).
The short answer is that when making books its usually easiest to make them a certain way, and blank pages may be the result. A children's book might be 30 pages, but the publisher finds that one 32 page signature is the cheapest method of production. So they might add something to the pages, or maybe they leave them blank." (credit Travis83) "Different reason depending upon if the book is machine or hand bound. I'll mention the handbound reason, which is the original reason for having these blank pages. The opening blank pages are called fly leaves. The pages with writing/art is called the textblock. These pages, if loaded with art (illuminated) sometimes took days to create. The "pages" were vellum (calf skin) and as you can imagine were expensive to make. You want to protect this investment. When books were bound in leather, the tanned leathers would leak and damage the textblock, so the fly leaves were to protect the writing/art from damage. You would use the minimum amount to protect the text block because vellum was expensive to produce. With the advent of fiber paper, you could increase the number of fly leaves. Depending upon on the binding technique used there would a different number of these fly papers. Also, fly leaves are constructed to add structural strength to the book. A book opens and closes and making the hinge strong and durable are important, especially when you consider a town would save up just to buy one book. So there are numerous different construction methods in hand binding that is reflected on the type and number of fly leaves." (credit rtfminc)

And here's the Wikipedia page on endpapers (inside covers + flyleaves),

School Lunches Across the U.S. May Be Moving Towards Healthy Organic Food

School Lunches Across the U.S. May Be Moving Towards Healthy Organic Food

Devastating CBO Report On ACA Repeal Leaves Wingnuts Scrambling

Devastating CBO Report On ACA Repeal Leaves Republicans Scrambling

It confirms what we've all been saying -- healthcare policy is hard!

Every "plan" they have leads to an unmitigated disaster of biblical proportions this report finds.

More than 1,600 factory workers are being fired after Dumbass Trump said he’d save their jobs

More than 1,600 factory workers are being fired after Dumbass Trump said he’d save their jobs — here’s what they have to say

Dumbass Trump swept into Indianapolis as a job-saving hero. He announced before a packed house of employees and news media that more than 1,100 jobs would stay in the Carrier plant. But the numbers Dumbass Trump announced don’t add up.

Ransomware taken to the next level

Krebs on Security reports that now paying ransom to cybercriminals does not ensure that the database will be restored:

Tens of thousands of personal and possibly proprietary databases that were left accessible to the public online have just been wiped from the Internet, replaced with ransom notes demanding payment for the return of the files. Adding insult to injury, it appears that virtually none of the victims who have paid the ransom have gotten their files back because multiple fraudsters are now wise to the extortion attempts and are competing to replace each other’s ransom notes.
At the eye of this developing data destruction maelstrom is an online database platform called MongoDB. Tens of thousands of organizations use MongoDB to store data, but it is easy to misconfigure and leave the database exposed online. If installed on a server with the default settings, for example, MongoDB allows anyone to browse the databases, download them, or even write over them and delete them...
Merrigan and Gevers are maintaining a public Google Drive document (read-only) that is tracking the various victims and ransom demands. Merrigan said it appears that at least 29,000 MongoDB databases that were previously published online are now erased. Worse, hardly anyone who’s paid the ransom demands has yet received their files back...
For now, Merrigan is advising victims not to pay the ransom. He encouraged those inclined to do so anyway to demand “proof of life” from the extortionists — i.e., request that they share one or two of the deleted files to prove that they can restore the entire cache.

What an unholy hell of a situation.

6 Catastrophes Caused by Sleep Deprivation

Dumbass Trump Brags About Not Sleeping Much: Here Are 6 Catastrophes Caused by Sleep Deprivation

Times That People Destroyed a Priceless Attraction

People are people as the old saying goes and that means sometimes people do stupid things and on rare occassion, those stupid things result in priceless pieces of art, historical artifacts and amazing natural formations being destroyed. This Travel.alot artilce details 10 such tales, ranging from people making totally understandable mistakes to mindblowingly stupid behaviors that make you just hate people. For example:

Goblin Valley State Park is named for its goblins or "hoodoos"—rock formations that look like enormous boulders sitting atop tiny perches. The rock itself is 170 million years old, and it took some 25 million years of erosion to carve the shapes as they appear today. Boy Scout leaders Dave Hall, Glenn Taylor, and Dylan Taylor filmed themselves toppling one over, claiming it was a "safety hazard." The three men were kicked out for violating the Scouts' "Take only pictures, leave only footprints" precepts, and were given a year's worth of probation and fines.

A year's probation? That's nothing for destroying a priceless natural formation!
So check out the full list here.

Massive ice shelf fracture forces closure of Antarctic research station

Massive ice shelf fracture forces closure of Antarctic research station

Surfing Under the Northern Lights

Photographer and filmmaker Chris Burkard records surfers and other extreme adventurers. Surfing in Iceland is definitely an extreme adventure. In this video from The Big Story, Burkard talks about what he does and about how a severe storm in Iceland led to an amazing opportunity to photograph a surfer under the Aurora Borealis.

(YouTube link)

Burkhard's Iceland trip is the subject of the upcoming documentary Under an Arctic Sky.

Pictures reveal a curved line on Venus' surface

Pictures reveal a curved line on Venus' surface for four days

Scary photo of an Indian tea plantation

Don't know why it's scary?

More info here.

This 19th-Century Book Chronicles Victorians' Strange Cat Fears And Fascinations

Cats, as a group, had a bad reputation in the 1800s. There were so many superstitions centered around cats that many people saw them as downright evil. English cartoonist Charles Henry Ross noticed that books about cats were obviously written by people who didn't know much about them, since they repeated the superstitions. So he wrote one himself: The Book of Cats. A Chit-Chat Chronicle of Feline Facts and Fancies, Legendary, Lyrical, Medical, Mirthful and Miscellaneous, published in 1868. In it, he promotes cats in many ways, including confronting the superstitions head on.

The Book of Cats addresses the wild, popular fears regarding cats—rumors flying that their scratches were venomous and that their breath sucked the life out of infants. In comparison to the smooth cut left from a knife, the thin scratch from a cat’s sharpened nail often festered, leading people to believe their claws were venomous, Ross explains. In addition to avoiding their claws, some would lose their wits at the mere sight of a cat. Conrad Gesner, a 16th-century botanist, documented men losing their strength, perspiring, and fainting when they saw a cat. A few have reportedly fainted after seeing a picture of a cat.

Read about The Book of Cats at Atlas Obscura, where you can see a selection of illustrations, or you can read the whole book at the Internet Archive.