Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Therapy Donkey Helps A Special Needs Girl Speak Again
In 2011 Amber was born prematurely and couldn't breathe, so doctors gave her a tracheotomy that left her mute due to vocal chord scarring. Amber was also born with cerebral palsy, making the first few years of her life a struggle for the poor little girl.
But then she met Shocks the donkey, who changed her life with his gentle charm:
"She struggled to sit up and showed no signs of crawling 'til very late on," Julian Austwick, Amber's father, told The Dodo. "A friend mentioned The Donkey Sanctuary to Tracy [Amber's mother] and told her the donkeys can give therapy to additional needs children, so we decided to try it."
It was Amber's first time meeting a therapy animal — and, as it happened, Amber was Shocks's first patient. And when he met Amber, the connection was instantaneous.
"It was fairly immediate to see they had a bond together, as they were both so gentle with each other," Austwick said. "Shocks would lower his head to her and would allow her to hold him around his neck. It was scary for us, as parents, as he was so big compared to little Amber, but they really seemed smitten!"
Finally, when Amber turned 3, she was old enough for another surgery to make it possible for her to talk — but it would take practice.
She still hadn't said a word when she went to visit Shocks one day in November 2013. After taking a ride with him and getting ready to leave the sanctuary to go home, she hugged the donkey and said, "I love you, Shocky."
Monday, April 24, 2017
The Daily Drift
Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.
Verily ... !
You want the unvarnished truth?
Don't forget to visit: The Truth Be Told
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Today in History
| 858 | St. Nicholas I begins his reign as Catholic Pope. | |
| 1519 | Envoys of Montezuma II attend the first Easter mass in Central America. | |
| 1547 | Charles V’s troops defeat the Protestant League of Schmalkalden at the Battle of Muhlberg. | |
| 1558 | Mary, Queen of Scotland, marries the French dauphin, Francis. | |
| 1792 | Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composes “La Marseillaise”. It will become France’s national anthem. | |
| 1800 | The Library of Congress is established in Washington, D.C. with a $5,000 allocation. | |
| 1805 | U.S. Marines attack and capture the town of Derna in Tripoli from the Barbary pirates. | |
| 1833 | A patent is granted for the first soda fountain. | |
| 1877 | Russia declares war on the Ottoman Empire. | |
| 1884 | Otto von Bismarck cables Cape Town, South Africa that it is now a German colony. | |
| 1898 | Spain declares war on United States, rejecting an ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba. | |
| 1915 |  |
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| 1916 | Irish nationalists launch the Easter Uprising against British occupation. | |
| 1944 | The first B-29 arrives in China, over the Hump of the Himalayas. | |
| 1948 | The Berlin airlift begins to relieve the surrounded city. | |
| 1953 | Winston Churchill is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. | |
| 1961 | President John Kennedy accepts “sole responsibility” for the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. | |
| 1968 | Leftist students take over Columbia University in protest over the Vietnam War. | |
| 1980 | A rescue attempt of the U.S. hostages held in Iran fails when a plane collides with a helicopter in the Iranian desert. | |
| 1981 | The IBM Personal Computer is introduced. | |
| 1989 | Thousands of Chinese students strike in Beijing for more democratic reforms. |
Pastor Finds Massive 706-Carat Diamond In Sierra Leone Mine
According to The Guardian, the government said that Emmanuel Momoh found the gem in an artisanal mine in the village of Koyadu within the diamond-rich Kono region. It weighs in at 706 carats. The stone was presented on Thursday and will be sold in a government-held transparent auction in the Sierra Leone to benefit the community."I have to help the government and my people, so all of us can benefit," presidential spokesman Abdulai Bayraytay quoted Momoh as saying.The diamond still needs to be analyzed by experts, but it's probable that it's among the largest, behind the 3,106-carat Cullian diamond and a 1,111-carat diamond discovered in 2015. Diamond expert Paul Zimnisky told the AFP news agency that it could possibly rank "between the 10th and 15th largest dem-diamonds ever recovered."
Bustles Were a Pain in the Behind
Women's
fashions in the 19th century went through many changes, as different
designers tried out the ways they could make a woman look the way she
should. The crinolines of the Civil War era didn't really work in cities
that were becoming more and more crowded, but heaven forbid that a lady
could dispense with overly-engineered undergarments that sculpted her
into the latest fashionable silhouette. The bustle was patented in 1857
and became all the rage until about 1888.
Read about the rise and fall of the bustle and other 19th-century undergarments at Smithsonian.An 1888 anonymous writer to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal voiced concerns about the fashion of the time in a letter headed simply “Bustles.”
The writer reels off the numerous health problems they see with everyday women’s fashion: corsets squeezing organs, shoes too small and pointed at the toe deforming the foot and particularly the bustle. “The woman with a bustle can never sit down in a natural position,” the letter records. “It is absolutely impossible for her to rest her back against the back of any seat of ordinary construction. I have no doubt some of the severe backaches in women whose duties keep them seated all day are due to, or at least aggravated by, this disability.”
The Creators of "Spinal Tap" Still Haven't Been Paid
Sometimes it takes a malcontent to disturb something as intractable as Hollywood accounting practices. By the terms of the contract they signed in 1982 with Embassy Pictures, the four creators of Spinal Tap are entitled to a portion of income from the film, including merchandise and music, provided certain benchmarks are hit. Given the wild afterlife of This Is Spinal Tap, it seems impossible that anyone with a piece of the movie hasn’t made money. And yet this is Hollywood, where studios have claimed that some of the highest-grossing films—hits such as Return of the Jedi, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy—somehow haven’t turned a profit. As David Zucker, one of the creators of Airplane!, once said of his own sleeper hit, “It made so much money that the studio couldn’t hide it fast enough.”An investigation into the film's accounting showed that the four were owed $81 in merchandizing income and $98 in album income. Smelling a rat, Shearer filed a $125 million lawsuit last year. In 2017, Reiner, McKean, and Guest joined the lawsuit and raised the amount to $400 million, plus reversion of the copyright to the name Spinal Tap.
With Embassy out of business, the theatrical rights to Spinal Tap bounced around from Coca-Cola to De Laurentiis Entertainment Group to a L’Oréal property named Parafrance to, around 1990, Studiocanal, a subsidiary of the French company Vivendi SA. The home-video rights followed a separate path and landed with Sony Music Entertainment. None of those companies paid the four creators, and no one did anything about it until Shearer finally lost his patience. “We were approaching the 30th anniversary,” he says, “and this low-burning lightbulb begins to go off—‘Hey, wait a minute, what’s going on here?’ ”
Vivendi, in its response to the lawsuit, argued that the creators made the film as a work for hire, and were hence not entitled to the copyright. It seems crazy, given that there’s plenty of evidence the four of them invented the band years before making their deal with Embassy, but calling a contribution work-for-hire is fairly common in copyright cases. In Shearer’s latest filing, he calls Vivendi’s position on the copyright a threat to scare him away from pressing his profit case. He also says it’s hypocritical for the company to cling to a film’s copyright while suggesting, based on what it claims is the film’s poor performance, there’s no money to be made with it.You can read the details of the story, and some background on Hollywood accounting, at Bloomberg. -
Cringe-worthy Stories of Men Breaking Their Penis During Sex
If this article doesn’t make you wince at least three times, we haven’t done our job
Secrets to Pooping, Having Sex In Space
Mankind’s most pressing questions have finally been answered
This NSFW TV Show Is Kid-Proofing Their Sex Scenes
It’s been called one of the most graphic shows in TV history
Fox 'News' execs forced black women to arm wrestle for ‘amusement and pleasure of white superiors’
“Forcing a black woman employee to ‘fight’
for the amusement and pleasure of her white superiors is horrifying.
This highly offensive and humiliating act is reminiscent of Jim Crow era
battle royals,” the document states.
Sunday, April 23, 2017
The Daily Drift
Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally
Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily.
Verily ... !
You want the unvarnished truth?
Don't forget to visit: The Truth Be Told
Today happens to be Movie Theater Day!
Today in History
| 1348 | The first English order of knighthood is founded. | |
| 1500 | Pedro Cabral claims Brazil for Portugal. | |
| 1521 | The Comuneros are crushed by royalist troops in Spain. | |
| 1661 | Charles II is formally crowned king, returning the monarchy to Britain, albeit with greatly reduced powers. | |
| 1759 | British forces seize Basse-Terre and Guadeloupe from France. | |
| 1789 | President George Washington moves into Franklin House, New York. | |
| 1826 | Missolonghi falls to Egyptian forces. | |
| 1856 | Free Stater J.N. Mace in Westport, Kansas shoots pro-slavery sheriff Samuel Jones in the back. | |
| 1865 | Union cavalry units continue to skirmish with Confederate forces in Henderson, North Carolina and Munford’s Station, Alabama. | |
| 1895 | Russia, France, and Germany force Japan to return the Liaodong peninsula to China. | |
| 1896 | Motion pictures premiere in New York City. | |
| 1914 | The Federals defeat Kansas City 9-1 in the first major league game to be played in Chicago’s Weeghman Park, later renamed Wrigley Field. | |
| 1915 | The ACA becomes the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics (NACA), the forerunner of NASA. | |
| 1920 | The Turkish Grand National Assembly has first meeting in Ankara. | |
| 1924 | The U.S. Senate passes the Soldiers’ Bonus Bill. | |
| 1945 | The Soviet Army fights its way into Berlin. | |
| 1950 | Chiang Kai-shek evacuates Hainan, leaving mainland China to Mao Zedong and the communists. | |
| 1954 | The Army-McCarthy hearings begin. | |
| 1966 | President Lyndon Johnson publicly appeals for more nations to come to the aid of South Vietnam. | |
| 1969 | Sirhan Sirhan is sentenced to death for killing Senator Robert Kennedy. | |
| 1971 | The Soviet Union launches Soyuz 10, becoming the first mission to the Salyut 1 space station. |
Why Are You Always Tired?
There are a lot of things that can affect your sleep, and you might have to work on every one of them to get sufficient rest. Our friends from AsapSCIENCE have some facts about sleep and how we can get not only more sleep, but better quality sleep.
Stop Worrying That You Worry Too Much
How
much time do you spend worrying about things? Do people tell you that
you worry too much? That's not really useful, because that feeling of
impending doom (or even just a little discomfort) is difficult to turn
off. But are you worrying too much? Maybe, but you shouldn't worry about
it. Worrying might actually be a good sign.
In other words, worry means you are being mindful about things that need solving or improvement. The key is to turn that worry into a plan to change what you are fretting about. If it's a problem you cannot change, some stress relief might be in order, or you can turn to worrying about something else that you can change. The Science of Us has more on the positive side of worrying.Well, maybe because — sometimes, in small doses — worrying can actually be good for you. In one study, for example, worrying was linked to recovery from trauma and depression, as well as increased “uptake of health-promoting behaviors,” like getting regular cancer screenings or resolving to kick a smoking habit. Others have found that worriers tend to be more successful problem-solvers, higher performers at work and in graduate school, and more proactive and informed when it comes to handling stressful events that life throws their way.
The Harp Twins Do "Iron Man"
In case you're wondering about the fascinating backdrop, this was recorded at the Sanfilippo Estate in Barrington, Illinois. See more videos from the Harp Twins.
Does Iceland Really Have the Best Hot Dog in the World?
It felt weird to prioritize a hot dog, to our credit, a thing I maybe only otherwise prioritize if I’m at a baseball game, but yeah, our final morning of the trip we went to Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur—Bæjarins Beztu for short, obviously—which translates to “the best hot dog in town.” It’s just a little stand right in the center of ReykjavÃk, the capital city of Iceland, that’s been open since 1937. It’s also not just a tourist trap: The day we went the line was full of a healthy mix of tourists and locals trying to get their dog on.Read their impressions and review of the famous Icelandic hot dogs at the A.V. Club.
The Myth of the White Lighter
Even in 2017, it’s not uncommon to encounter smokers who not only won’t purchase white lighters, but won’t use them to light things even if they belong to someone else. Some people don’t even like being in the room when one is being used. But how did this legend get started in the first place?There are a couple of other possibilities for the origin of this superstition, one that even makes sense, that you can read about at Atlas Obscura. The article is part of their series on luck running all this week.
The most common origin story behind this myth is actually tied up with another popular urban legend. The so-called “27 Club” includes young artists and musicians—Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix—who all died at the age of 27. A number of superstitions revolve around the 27 Club, one of which being that those musicians, as well as a later addition to the club, Kurt Cobain, had white lighters on them when they died. They didn’t.
American Airlines Crew Hits Woman With Stroller, Challenges Passenger To Fight
Dumbass Trump Kentucky campaign chair charged with human sex trafficking of a minor
A judge who served as a campaign
chair for Dumbass Trump has been charged with three felonies
including human trafficking of a minor, inducing a minor to engage in
sex and giving alcohol to a minor.
***
Wingnuts, they love them some minors!
Iceberg Star
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