Link Dump

Niceballs Help You Relieve Stress

Lifehacker – Essential Windows Apps

What $30 in food buys you around the world

How Much Being The President Ages You 

iPhone 7 and 7 Plus Release Announced

15 Co-Stars Who Absolutely Hate Each Other

28 Brilliant Garage Organization Ideas

Body Cam Shows Cop Being Shot During Arrest

25 logical reasons to vote for Donald Trump

Flying over America The Beautiful

40 American Towns You Haven’t Heard of But Should Visit ASAP

Roman "livewell"

In an era long before refrigeration, wealthy Romans built holding tanks beside their coastal villas so they could eat fresh fish whenever they wished. Sluice gates positioned with their tops eight inches above the high-water mark let seawater in and out, flushing the tanks with the natural ebb and flow of the tides. To work, they had to be built at a precise level relative to high tide. "Livewell" is a modern term for the tank on fishing boats designed to keep fish alive until the crew returns to shore.  Very clever, those Romans.

Interconnectedness

YouTube link.

Devils Hole is a geothermal pool within a limestone cavern in the Amargosa Desert in the Amargosa Valley of Nevada, east over the Amargosa Range and Funeral Mountains from Death Valley. Its waters are a near constant salinity and temperature (92 °F or 33 °C). The cavern is over 500 feet (150 m) deep and the bottom has never been mapped...
The pool has frequently experienced activity due to far away earthquakes in Japan, Indonesia and Chile, which have been likened to extremely small scale tsunamis. It's fascinating to watch the activity in this video as the water responds to an earthquake in Mexico.  People have disappeared after diving in this location.

"Matryoshka" fossil

Forty-eight million years ago, a snake ate a lizard with a bug in its belly, and all three fossilized... That fossil, recently described in Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments, is only the second of its kind ever found, revealing three levels of an ancient food chain nested one inside the other in paleontology’s version of Russian nesting dolls—or its culinary equivalent, a turducken. Details (and explanation of the image) at National Geographic.

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of  
Carolina Naturally

Today is also Banana Day ...! 

 

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

  
Now, that's weird ... !

Today is - Wonderful Weirdos Day

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The Americas
Antigua - Argentina - Aruba - Bahamas - Barbados - Belize - Bolivia - Brazil - Canada - Chile  Colombia - Costa Rica - Dominican Republic- Ecuador - El Salvador - French Guiana - Haiti  Honduras - Jamaica - Mexico - Nicaragua - Paraguay - Peru - Puerto Rico - Sint Eustatius and Saba  Sint Maartin - Trinidad and Tobago - Turks and Caicos - United States - Uruguay - Venezuela
Virgin Islands
Europe
Albania - Armenia - Austria - Belarus - Belgium - Bosnia and Herzegovina - Bulgaria - Croatia  Cyprus -  Czech Republic - Denmark - England - Estonia - Finland - France - Georgia - Germany Greece -  Hungary - Iceland - Ireland - Isle of Mann - Italy - Jersey - Latvia - Lithuania - Macedonia  Malta - Monaco - Montenegro - Netherlands - Northern Ireland - Norway - Poland - Portugal  Romania - Russia - San Marino - Scotland - Serbia - Slovakia - Slovenia - Spain - Sweden  Switzerland - Turkey - Ukraine - Wales
Asia
Afghanistan - Azerbaijan - Bangladesh - Brunei - Burma - Cambodia - China - Hong Kong - India  Indonesia  Iran - Iraq - Israel - Japan - Jordan - Kazakhstan - Korea -  Lebanon - Malaysia - Mauritius
Mongolia - Nepal - Oman - Pakistan - Saudi Arabia - Singapore - Sri Lanka - Taiwan - Thailand  Tibet - United Arab Emirates - Uzbekistan - Vietnam - Yemen
Africa
Algeria - Chad - Congo - Egypt - Ethiopia - Ivory Coast - Kenya - Libya - Madagascar - Morocco  Mozambique - Nigeria - South Africa - Sudan - Tunisia - Zambia - Zimbabwe
The Pacific
Australia - French Polynesia - Guam - Marshall Islands - New Zealand - Philippines

Don't forget to visit our sister blogs Here and Here.

Today in History

337		Constantine’s three sons, already Caesars, each take the title of Augustus. Constantine II and Constans share the west while Constantius II takes control of the east.
1087		William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy and King of England, dies in Rouen while conducting a war which began when the French king made fun of him for being fat.
1513		King James IV of Scotland is defeated and killed by English at Flodden.
1585		Pope Sixtus V deprives Henry of Navarre of his rights to the French crown.
1776		The term “United States” is adopted by the Continental Congress to be used instead of the “United Colonies.”
1786		George Washington calls for the abolition of slavery.
1791		French Royalists take control of Arles and barricade themselves inside the town.
1834		Parliament passes the Municipal Corporations Act, reforming city and town governments in England.
1850		California, in the midst of a gold rush, enters the Union as the 31st state.
1863		The Union Army of the Cumberland passes through Chattanooga as they chase after the retreating Confederates. The Union troops will soon be repulsed at the Battle of Chickamauga.
1886		The Berne International Copyright Convention takes place.
1911		An airmail route opens between London and Windsor.
1915		A German zeppelin bombs London for the first time, causing little damage.
1926		The Radio Corporation of America creates the National Broadcasting Co.
1942		A Japanese float plane, launched from a submarine, makes its first bombing run on a U.S. forest near Brookings, Oregon.
1943		Allied troops land at Salerno, Italy and encounter strong resistance from German troops.
1948		Kim Il-sung declares the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
1956		Elvis Presley makes his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show; cameras focus on his upper torso and legs to avoid showing his pelvis gyrations, which many Americans—including Ed Sullivan—thought unfit for a family show.
1965		US Department of Housing and Urban Development established.
1965		Hurricane Betsy, the first hurricane to exceed $1 billion in damages (unadjusted), makes its second landfall, near New Orleans.
1969		Canada’s Official Languages Act takes effect, making French equal to English as a language within the nation’s government.
1970		U.S. Marines launch Operation Dubois Square, a 10-day search for North Vietnamese troops near Da Nang.
1971		Attica Prison Riot; the 4-day riot leaves 39 dead.
1976		Communist Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung dies in Beijing at age 82.
1990		Sri Lankan Army massacres 184 civilians of the Tamil minority in the Batticaloa District of Sri Lanka.
1991		Tajikistan declares independence from USSR.
1993		The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) officially recognizes Israel as a legitimate state.
2001		Two al Qaeda assassins kill Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
2001		A car bomb explodes outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta, killing 10 people.

The perfect car, according to science

The perfect car, according to science

Released on Sept. 4, 1957, Ford dubbed its Edsel “the car of the future.” It was designed to stand out, but most people didn’t like the way it looked. Add “ugly” to a laundry list of problems from poor performance to a high price tag and...

13th century Maya codex proves genuine

13th century Maya codex, long shrouded in controversy, proves genuine

The Grolier Codex, an ancient document that is among the rarest books in the world, has been regarded with skepticism since it was reportedly unearthed by looters from a cave in Chiapas, Mexico, in the 1960s. But a meticulous new study of the codex has yielded a...

Six new groups of molecules could be the key to delaying aging

Six new groups of molecules could be the key to delaying aging

Hearing loss, brittle bones, sagging skin, a deteriorating mind: these are just some of the issues associated with growing old. For millennia, humans have fought the process of aging using everything from fountains of youth to pricey face creams, all to no avail. But...

Texas teachers are rebelling against a new racist textbook that portrays Mexicans as lazy drunks

Texas teachers are rebelling against a new racist textbook that portrays Mexicans as lazy drunks

Texas college and high school teachers say a textbook that has been proposed for Mexican-American Studies high school class is chock-full of errors and omissions. If that isn’t enough, it’s also racist.

Post disaster consumers value off brand, low cost goods

Post disaster consumers value off brand, low cost goods — even 50 years later

Traumatic events have lasting influence on what products people desire and purchase. When rebuilding and restocking an area that has been affected by conflict or natural disaster, what traumatized individuals value most is what is most practical and quick–even...

Remembering the Whig party and the Know Nothings

Before the creation of the wingnut cabal, the two-party system centered around the Democrats and the Whigs.  When the Whigs collapsed, they were replaced by the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings:

At one point or another, Presidents John Quincy Adams, and Benjamin Harrison, and Chester Arthur and Rutherford B. Hayes and Abraham Lincoln, at some point, in all of their careers, all of those American presidents were all members of the Whig Party.  William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Miller Fillmore, they were all Whig Party members while they were president...
The Whigs were riven by internal divisions dealing with emerging things as the nation grew and changed. A lot of the division had to do with the issue of slavery and some other principled issues. But the Whig party, it had been a huge deal, and then it fell apart.
And political parties back then weren`t exactly what they are today. But when the Whig Party fell apart, the two-party system at the time fell apart as well. You have two parties and one collapses. It doesn`t just mean good news for the other party, it mean that is two-party system that counts on tension between the two parties, that falls apart if one party ceases to function.
And then the two-party system fell apart because the Whigs fell apart, when that two-party system rocked by them collapsing as a major party, what was left behind in American politics, for a while, at least, turned incredibly nasty – a little bit violent, but also nasty.
One of the things that happened in American politics at that time is that we got a series of secret societies that formed, basically to try to drive catholics out of this country. One of them was a secret Order of the Star Spangled Banner. There was also a Secret Order of United Americans...
When the movement embodied by the societies spread out of the cities of the East Coast and spread out of New England and went big nationwide, it did go big nationwide, the movement, it was interesting, it morphed a little bit depending on where it was. It was very strikingly anti-catholic in, say, Massachusetts.
By the time that movement was ready to spawn its sort of offspring or offshoots in California – well, in California, it didn`t that that much sense to be rabidly anti-catholic. In California, the version of it became rabidly anti-Chinese, because those were the immigrants they had out there...
This movement in American politics around the time that the two-party system collapsed because the Whigs fell apart, it was nativism. They hated immigrants. They blamed everything wrong in the country on immigrants. And it started as disparate movements and disparate secret societies.
But eventually, they got a name. They became known as the Know Nothing movement, which is also a funny name. People remember it to this day in part because it`s a strange thing to call some sort of political movement... Their origins were in secret societies, if you were a member of the movement, you`re supposed to say, oh, I know nothing...
But for a brief period in our history, around the collapse of Whigs before the civil war, the Know-Nothings got really big and fast and they did that in the waste land of this two-party system getting rattled. The Whigs collapsed, two major party democracy fell apart for a time because of that, and so, we got these Know-Nothing politicians, this know-nothing movement across the country. They`re very successful.
The know-nothing mayor of Chicago declared there will be no city job for any immigrant of anywhere. The know-nothing mayor of Philadelphia said there would be no political appointments for any immigrant. Native born Americans only.
And they took over major cities. They took over the legislature in Massachusetts. They spread nationwide and they had more than a million members. Know-nothings were a big deal in American politics for a couple of years, as the normal party system broke itself down and stopped to function. But then they collapsed...

The rest of the essay is here.  And here's the Wikipedia summary of the Know-Nothings:

The movement arose in response to an influx of migrants and promised to "purify" American politics by limiting or ending the influence of Irish catholics and other immigrants, thus reflecting nativist and anti-catholic sentiment. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by German and Irish catholic immigrants, whom they saw as hostile to republican values and as being controlled by the pope. Mainly active from 1854 to 1856, the movement strove to curb immigration and naturalization but met with little success. Membership was limited to protestant men. There were few prominent leaders, and the largely middle-class membership was divided over the issue of slavery.

Sheriff's Bold Suggestion: Don't Take Loaded Gun To Dentist

So this 72 year old guy in Ohio goes to the dentist and gets gassed-up on Nitrous Oxide.

Wingnut Florida official defends not charging man for raping teen girl

Wingnut Florida official defends not charging man for raping teen girl: ‘She flew to see him’

"Consent is not an issue ... I know the facts of the case," said Hillsborough County State Attorney Mark Ober.

Judge who questioned why rape victim didn’t ‘keep her knees together’ insists he shouldn’t be fired

Judge who questioned why rape victim didn’t ‘keep her knees together’ insists he shouldn’t be fired

The judge acquitted a man of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old girl after deciding that the man’s version of events was more credible, telling the alleged victim that “pain and sex sometimes go together.”

Oregon woman accuses prison guard of sexual abuse but she’s thrown in jail until his trial

Oregon woman accuses prison guard of sexual abuse but she’s thrown in jail until his trial

Both state and federal law says that sex between inmates and corrections staff is never consensual. However, it didn’t stop Balzer.

Woman called police to report theft of her pet rock

A Florida woman called police to report that her pet rock had been stolen. The rock was taken from a table on her porch, according to Niceville Police Department.
She told officers she was going to see if she could get increased security at her unit due to the theft.
She added that she didn’t know when she had last seen her rock, which is valued at $8.

'Shakespeare's ghost' chased after jewelery store raiders

A Shakespeare street performer chased armed raiders through the historic town of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, after they had robbed a jewelers. Staff inside Christopher Poel jewelers watched as three men, two armed with sledgehammers and one with a crowbar, smashed windows and stole watches. They fled when shopkeepers threw chairs at them, with "Shakespeare's ghost" performer John Jarvis in pursuit.

He said he brought one man to the floor but the trio eventually escaped. The robbery happened at about 11:15am on Wednesday in Meer Street. Shop owner Christopher Poel said: "Apparently there were three men, two with sledge hammers and one with a crowbar. They were attacking the window in unison. They badly damaged the glass. They got a number of high-value watches but I don't know how many yet. We're talking tens of thousands of pounds.
"Luckily everyone was inside, they only attacked from the outside. There are a couple of staff here and they're really shaken. It's the shock of it." Mr Jarvis, 62, who dresses in a white costume for his street performance in the town, said he saw three lads "whack" the shop's window "grab a few bits" then run and he gave chase. "One of them was swinging a crowbar - I took a whack at him, because I don't like having a crowbar swung at me," he said.
"He went down there. They carried on running." He said a "young lad" then also gave chase and Mr Jarvis carried on in case anything happened to him. "But I ran out of steam and so did the boy and we came back." Mr Poel said he was grateful to fellow shopkeepers who threw the chairs to try to foil the robbery. Warwickshire Police, which deployed the force helicopter, said two men had been arrested.

Quiver Tree Forest

The Quiver Tree Forest is located north-east of the town of Keetmanshoop in southern Namibia. Here grows, on a private farm, about 250 specimens of the quiver tree, or aloe dichotoma, which is a tall, branching species of aloe.
The unusual look of aloe dichotoma has made this area a popular tourist attraction.
The quiver tree is not really a tree, rather a plant of the genus aloe. It has a stout stem that is covered with beautiful golden brown scales with sharp edges.

The Last Thylacine

The thylacine, more popularly known as the Tasmanian tiger, was an apex predator in Australia and Tasmania before its extinction in the early 20th century. The last known specimen died in Hobart Zoo during the night of 7th September, 1936. It was the last extant member of its family.

Researchers name a new species of reptile from 212 million years ago

Researchers name a new species of reptile from 212 million years ago

An extinct reptile related to crocodiles that lived 212 million years ago in present day New Mexico has been named as a new species, Vivaron haydeni, in a paper published this week by Virginia Tech’s Department of Geosciences researchers. Leading the paper that...

Crab from the Chinese pet market turns out to be a new species of a new genus

Crab from the Chinese pet market turns out to be a new species of a new genus

Shimmering carapaces and rattling claws make colorful freshwater crabs attractive to pet keepers. To answer the demand, fishermen are busy collecting and trading with the crustaceans, often not knowing what exactly they have handed over to their client. Luckily for...

Living together in mud ...

Living together in mud: New bivalve species dwelling on a sea cucumber discovered in Japan

Most bivalves live in sand or mud or attached to rock surface. However, a new bivalve species described from Japan lives on a sea cucumber. Ryutaro Goto, postdoctoral fellow in Museum of Zoology and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of...

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of  
Carolina Naturally

Books are powerful destroyers of ignorance ...! 

 

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

  
Literacy is fun ... !

Today is - International Literacy Day

 You want the unvarnished truth?

Don't forget to visit: The Truth Be Told
Some of our readers today have been in:
The Americas
Antigua - Argentina - Aruba - Bahamas - Barbados - Belize - Bolivia - Brazil - Canada - Chile  Colombia - Costa Rica - Dominican Republic- Ecuador - El Salvador - French Guiana - Haiti  Honduras - Jamaica - Mexico - Nicaragua - Paraguay - Peru - Puerto Rico - Sint Eustatius and Saba  Sint Maartin - Trinidad and Tobago - Turks and Caicos - United States - Uruguay - Venezuela
Virgin Islands
Europe
Albania - Armenia - Austria - Belarus - Belgium - Bosnia and Herzegovina - Bulgaria - Croatia  Cyprus -  Czech Republic - Denmark - England - Estonia - Finland - France - Georgia - Germany Greece -  Hungary - Iceland - Ireland - Isle of Mann - Italy - Jersey - Latvia - Lithuania - Macedonia  Malta - Monaco - Montenegro - Netherlands - Northern Ireland - Norway - Poland - Portugal  Romania - Russia - San Marino - Scotland - Serbia - Slovakia - Slovenia - Spain - Sweden  Switzerland - Turkey - Ukraine - Wales
Asia
Afghanistan - Azerbaijan - Bangladesh - Brunei - Burma - Cambodia - China - Hong Kong - India  Indonesia  Iran - Iraq - Israel - Japan - Jordan - Kazakhstan - Korea -  Lebanon - Malaysia - Mauritius
Mongolia - Nepal - Oman - Pakistan - Saudi Arabia - Singapore - Sri Lanka - Taiwan - Thailand  Tibet - United Arab Emirates - Uzbekistan - Vietnam - Yemen
Africa
Algeria - Chad - Congo - Egypt - Ethiopia - Ivory Coast - Kenya - Libya - Madagascar - Morocco  Mozambique - Nigeria - South Africa - Sudan - Tunisia - Zambia - Zimbabwe
The Pacific
Australia - French Polynesia - Guam - Marshall Islands - New Zealand - Philippines

Don't forget to visit our sister blogs Here and Here.

Today in History

1504		Michelangelo’s 13-foot marble statue of David is unveiled in Florence, Italy.
1529		The Ottoman Sultan Suleiman re-enters Budapest and establishes John Zapolya as the puppet king of Hungary.
1565		Spanish explorers found St. Augustine, Florida, the first permanent European settlement in what is now the United States.
1628		John Endecott arrives with colonists at Salem, Massachusetts, where he will become the governor.
1644		The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam surrenders to the British fleet that sails into its harbor. Five years later, the British change the name to New York.
1755		British forces under William Johnson defeat the French and the Indians at the Battle of Lake George.
1760		The French surrender the city of Montreal to the British.
1845		A French column surrenders at Sidi Brahim in the Algerian War.
1863		Confederate Lieutenant Dick Dowling thwarts a Union naval landing at Sabine Pass, northeast of Galveston, Texas.
1903		Between 30,000 and 50,000 Bulgarian men, women and children are massacred in Monastir by Turkish troops seeking to check a threatened Macedonian uprising.
1906		Robert Turner invents the automatic typewriter return carriage.
1915		Germany begins a new offensive in Argonne on the Western Front.
1921		Margaret Gorman of Washington, D.C., is named the first Miss America.
1925		Germany is admitted into the League of Nations.
1935		Senator Huey Long of Louisiana is shot to death in the state capitol, allegedly by Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Jr.
1944		Germany’s V-2 offensive against England begins.
1945		Korea is partitioned by the Soviet Union and the United States.
1951		Japanese representatives sign a peace treaty in San Francisco.
1955		The United States, Australia, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Thailand sign the mutual defense treaty that established the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).
1960		Penguin Books in Britain is charged with obscenity for trying to publish the D.H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
1960		President Dwight Eisenhower dedicates NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
1971		The Kennedy Center opens in Washington, DC with a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass.
1974		Ford pardons Nixon for any crimes arising from the Watergate scandal he may have committed while in office.
1988		Wildfires in Yellowstone National Park in the US, the world’s first national park, force evacuation of the historic Old Faithful Inn; visitors and employees evacuate but the inn is saved.
1991		Macedonian Independence Day; voters overwhelmingly approve referendum to form the Republic of Macedonia, independent of Yugoslavia.
1994		USAir Flight 427 crashes on approach to Pittsburgh International Airport, killing all 132 people aboard; subsequent investigation leads to changes in manufacturing practices and pilot training.

America Has a National Religion, and It Ain't Christianity

America Has a National Religion, and It Ain't Christianity, Says Leading Theologian

Comcast’s new scheme ...

Comcast’s new scheme is grossly inflating some customers’ bills — and the company can’t explain why

For the past year or so, Comcast has been experimenting in select markets with a new data cap scheme where users get charged overage fees if they use more than an allotted amount of data each month.

EpiPen Price Hike Can Only Happen in a Hijacked Democracy

EpiPen Price Hike Can Only Happen in a Hijacked Democracy

Ailes Hires Lawyer Who Destroyed Gawker to Go After New York Magazine

Roger Ailes Hires Lawyer Who Destroyed Gawker to Go After New York Magazine

Fox 'News' Settles With Gretchen Carlson For $20M...And An Apology

They admitted fault. Wow. AND Greta Van Susteren is leaving....

Fox 'News' Is Imploding As Greta Van Susteren Leaves Network In Wake Of Settlement With Gretchen Carlson

Fox 'News' Is Imploding As Greta Van Susteren Leaves Network In Wake Of Settlement With Gretchen Carlson

Fox 'News' is crumbling.

Aw, and it could not be happening to such nice folks as them either! (insert sarcasm)

Fox 'News' Is So Bored They're Playing Doctor With Each Other

After all, they can't report on the big settlement with Gretchen, so why not concern-troll over Clinton's cough?

Fox 'News' Is So Bored They're Playing Doctor With Each Other

'Christian' Religio-Wingnuts' Sex Hangups Turn Zika Into a Bigger Crisis

How the 'Christian' Religio-Wingnuts' Sex Hangups Turn Zika Into a Bigger Crisis

Child porn convict confesses to 1989 killing of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling

Child porn convict confesses to 1989 killing of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling

Danny Heinrich made his confession on Tuesday as he pleaded guilty to receiving child pornography in a separate case. His admission came a year after he was named a person of interest in the case

Man suspected of angling for discarded drugs

Just after midnight on Sunday, a Santa Barbara Sheriff's Sergeant observed a suspect stealing items out of a Operation Medicine Cabinet kiosk.
A man was using a homemade cord and fishing hook to remove discarded medications and other controlled substances that were inside the cabinet, located in front of Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office in Carpinteria, California.

The suspect was contacted and identified as being 46-year-old Christian Kulbe of Santa Barbara. He was taken into custody. Stolen medications and syringes along with his "fishing" device were seized as evidence.
Kulbe was booked into the Santa Barbara County Jail on charges which included possession of stolen property, petty theft, possession of burglary tools, prowling and possession of controlled substances. His bail was set at $2,500.

Man who flagged down police officer to charge phone arrested for possessing stolen bank cards

Brendan J. Duffy flagged down a police officer in St. Petersburg, Florida, early on Saturday, asking if he could charge his phone in order to call Uber, according to an affidavit.
Duffy, 31, sat on a bench and spoke with the officer, then pulled several bank cards out of his pocket and started going through them, the affidavit said. The officer noticed that one of the cards had a picture of an African-American on it. Duffy is Caucasian.
The officer contacted the owner of the card, who said he didn't want to pursue charges, but the owner of another card he was carrying did. The card's owner said she didn't give Duffy the card and didn't know him. Jerrica May hadn't realized that she had lost her debit card until a police officer called her.

YouTube link.

"They told me that they had my card in custody and they wanted to know if Mr Brendan Duffy was authorized. And I said he most certainly is not!" May couldn't help but laugh whey she found out how Duffy was caught. Duffy said he didn't know how he got the card, police said. He was arrested on a theft charge and is being held on $150 bail.

In This Food Desert, Kids Learn to Farm Veggies

In This Food Desert, Kids Learn to Farm Veggies—Out of the Back of a Truck

Food of the Gods

Let's talk about chocolate!

Chocolate comes from the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao. It’s a fitting name because theobroma comes from the Latin words for “food of the gods.”

Mayan emperors were often buried with jars of chocolate.

The average American consumes approximately 11.7 pounds of chocolate each year, but only 29 percent choose dark chocolate over milk.

Chocolate comes from the ivory-colored seeds of the cocoa tree’s fruit. Each melonlike fruit contains 20 to 50 seeds. About 400 seeds are required to make a pound of chocolate.

In 1974 a Pepperidge Farm employee in a Downington, Pennsylvania, plant died after falling into a vat of chocolate. His name: Robert C. Hershey.

The chemical theobromine is what makes chocolate fatal to pets— many animals don’t metabolize it well. Generally, the darker the chocolate, the more theobromine.

People who are depressed eat about 55 percent more chocolate than people who aren’t.

The Mars Candy Company is not named for the planet, but for its founder, Frank Mars.

Cocoa butter liquefies at a temperature slightly below 98.6 ° F, which is why it melts in your pocket. M&Ms were invented to provide sugar shells that had a higher melting temperature.

The Aztecs discovered and named chocolatl, but they used it as a beverage for its feel-good effects, not its flavor. In fact, chocolatl meant “bitter water.”

British candy maker Cadbury made the world’s first heart-shaped box of chocolates in 1861.

White chocolate has all the fat and sugar of chocolate, but none of the healthy flavonoids… and no solid cocoa. It does contain cocoa butter, though.

In 2004 interviewers asked British office workers if they would reveal their computer passwords in exchange for a chocolate bar— 71 percent said they would.

Cocoa usually starts losing flavor after about six months.

Yellowstone Owes Its Early Success To Public Bear Feeding

We know that feeding wild bears is a dangerous thing to do, because bears will always want more. We may have felt sorry for Yogi and Boo Boo when they’d steal a pic-a-nic basket and Mr. Ranger Sir would take it back, but that scenario in Jellystone Park just followed what was happening in the real Yellowstone National Park. In the early years of the public park, park employees drew tourists by making sure they saw bears. And they did that by feeding the inn’s garbage to the bears -every night!

Today, it's strange to think of having to sell the idea of Yellowstone to anyone. But back when the park first opened, it needed to justify itself. Here was an enormous swath of prime Western land, set aside only for pleasure and recreation, paid for with American tax dollars. It sank or swam based on public opinion. For it to survive, people had to come, and they had to have the kind of good time they couldn't get anywhere else.
The park's superintendents were busy building infrastructure in the institution's first few decades, fighting poachers, and encouraging trains to come near enough that visitors could actually visit. But things improved, and when conservationist Horace Albright took the helm in 1919, he began turning human-animal interaction into a deliberate priority. The National Park Service, he said, had “a duty to present wildlife as a spectacle” for parkgoers.

The feeding of the bears eventually turned into a bear show with a circus-like atmosphere. Dozens of wild bears ate and cavorted close to huge crowds of people. Read about those shows at Atlas Obscura.

Pythons caught fighting for mating rights

The strength of two male carpet pythons was on display last week as they fought, initially hanging from the roof of a home in south-east Queensland, Australia, battling it out for the affections of a nearby female. Snake catcher Max Jackson said it was an amazing display of strength that indicated the start of breeding season.
"Most snakes, particularly pythons, begin to move around a bit more to search for females at the start of breeding season," he said. "When two males cross paths during this time, it is common for them to have combat, it is pretty gentle, just wrestling, it is a simple matter of overpowering the other one. This is a particularly impressive one .
"They were using so much stretch using their tails to hang there." Mr Gilbert said that a female was probably relatively close by. "The female puts out a pheromone trail and the male follows the trail," he said. Mr Jackson said it was easy to tell the pythons, who he estimated weighed about 15 kilograms each, were males fighting because of how much they were moving around.

YouTube link.

"You can tell they are two males - when they mate they don't twist away like they are," he said. "When two snakes mate, they can crawl up each other. They can stay still for up to two days, it is a pretty minimal movement for that period of time. There is lots of effort going into this." Mr Jackson said he had never seen footage like it before. The snakes later dropped onto the veranda and continued their battle.

Rescued baby elephants enjoy their bottled milk

Young calves, Moyo and Sizi are brought milk by their dedicated and caring handlers from the ZEN project at the Elephant Orphanage Nursery in Greater Harare, Zimbabwe. The elephants are doing extremely well and progressing nicely in the first stage of their rehabilitation process.

Silly husky struggles to understand screen doors

Navi the husky still hasn't got the hang of how screen doors work.

YouTube link.

Animal Pictures