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Eleven Things We No Longer See in Movie Theaters

Odds and Sods

Once upon a time, movie theaters offered a "fancy night out" experience. You no longer see 50¢ tickets, but back then you got an awful lot for your money, whatever the price. Remember when almost all theaters had uniformed ushers?

Those gallant men and women who escorted you to your seats at the cinema used to dress in more finery than a decorated soldier. But that was at a time when movie ushers did much more than tear tickets and sweep up spilled popcorn; they kept an eye out for miscreants attempting to sneak in without paying, offered a helpful elbow to steady women walking down the steeply inclined aisle in high-heeled shoes, and were quick to “Shhh!” folks who talked during the movie. Ushers carried small flashlights to guide patrons who arrived after the movie had started, and they were also the ones who maintained order when the film broke and the audience grew ornery.

Most of us are only familiar with uniformed ushers only because they are depicted in classic films and cartoons. But there are some modern theaters that go all out to recreate those memories with ushers and the other theater amenities on the list here.

Okay, Zippy

Daily Comic Relief

Thermopylae remembers the 300 Spartans

Historical Things

A ceremony marking the last stand of the 300 Spartans and their Greek allies against the Persian hordes of King Xerxes at the Pass of Thermopylae, a gallant battle that helped save Western Civilization, was marked on Aug. 8.

Some 2,493 years ago, an alliance of Greek city-states fought the invading Persian Empire at the pass of Thermopylae in central Greece. Vastly outnumbered, the Greeks held back the Persians for three days in one of history’s most famous battles.

A small force led by legendary King Leonidas of Sparta blocked the only road through which the massive army of Xerxes I of Persia (Xerxes the Great) could pass. After three days of battle, a local resident named Ephialtes betrayed the Greeks by revealing a mountain path that led behind the Greek lines.

Dismissing the rest of the army, King Leonidas stayed behind with 300 Spartans and 700 Thespian volunteers. Despite the fact the the Persians succeeded in taking the pass, they sustained heavy losses, extremely disproportionate to those of the Greeks.

The fierce resistance of the Spartan-led army offered Athens the invaluable time to prepare for a decisive naval battle that would come to determine the outcome of the war.

The subsequent Greek victory at the Battle of Salamis left much of the Persian Empire’s navy destroyed and Xerxes was forced to retreat to Asia, leaving his army in Greece under Mardonius, who was to meet the Greeks in battle one last time.

The Spartans assembled at full strength and led a pan-Greek army that defeated the Persians decisively at the Battle of Plataea, ending the Graeco-Persian War and with it the expansion of the Persian Empire into Europe.

Believe It Or Not

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What 7 Million Skulls Looks Like

Interesting Stuff

The Paris Catacombs

When in Paris, one of the highlights was a self-guided tour through the Catacombs of Paris.

 

The Catacombs doors open at 10 AM, and there is always a long line so plan to be there earlier than that. After buying your tickets, one has to descend a long circular staircase to reach the beginning of the tunnels, which were over 60 feet underground.

 

These tunnels lead to massive limestone quarries that supplied the building materials to construct Paris. They were actually started in the first century A.D. by Gallo Romans to build Lutetia (the forerunner of what is now known as Paris). The tunnels run for over 250 km below the city, but only 2 km are open to the public.

 

This is a carving of a palace by a quarry inspector who had served time in a prison situated across from a palace in the Balearic Islands. He started the carving in 1777 and finished it in 1782, using only his memory as a reference. According to the sign next to the sculpture he died from a "cave-in while trying to build an access stairway at this location."

 

A little farther along the tunnel, the famous ossuary appeared. A sign above the entrance reads, Arrête, c'est ici l'empire de la mort (Halt, this is the realm of Death). The rest of the tour was through an 800-yard-long gallery stacked high with human bones. In fact, The catacombs hold the remains of 7 million people, which were transferred here in the 18th and 19th centuries because Parisian cemeteries were so overcrowded that they constituted a health hazard.

 

The bones we saw were completely unsupervised. You could touch them if you felt like it. Don't, though. If this were in the United States, the walls would be lined with thick plastic.

 

Some of the arrangements were artistic, such as this big urn-shaped collection of skulls and bones.

 

It is overwhelming to think that every one of these skulls was once a living person with friends, a family, a job, and a reason to live. Who is this? We'll never know.

 

At the end of the ossuary gallery one walks up a very long circular staircase and exits through this nondescript door. Directly across the street is a privately run Catacombs gift shop, which has a free restroom, delicious espresso, free Wi-Fi, lots of skull-themed items for sale, and friendly staff!
Catacombs of Paris

 

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Today in History

Today in History

1521		Cortes captures the city of Tenochtitlan, Mexico, and sets it on fire.
1630		Emperor Ferdinand II dismisses Albert Eusebius van Wallenstein, his most capable general.
1680		War starts when the Spanish are expelled from Santa Fe, New Mexico, by Indians under Chief Pope.
1704		The Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Austria defeat the French Army at the Battle of Blenheim.
1787		The Ottoman Empire declares war on Russia.
1862		Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest defeats a Union army under Thomas Crittenden at Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
1881		The first African-American nursing school opens at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.
1889		The first coin-operated telephone is patented by William Gray.
1892		The first issue of the Afro American newspaper is published in Baltimore, Maryland.
1898		Manila, the capital of the Philippines, falls to the U.S. Army.
1910		British nurse Florence Nightingale, famous for her care of British soldiers during the Crimean War, dies.
1932		Adolf Hitler refuses to serve as Franz Von Papen's vice chancellor.
1948		During the Berlin Airlift, the weather over Berlin becomes so stormy that American planes have their most difficult day landing supplies. They deem it 'Black Friday.'
1961		Construction begins on Berlin Wall during the night.
1963		A 17 year-old Buddhist monk burns himself to death in Saigon, South Vietnam.
1978		Bomb attack in Beirut during Second Lebanese Civil War kills more than 150 people.
1989		The wreckage of a plane that carried U.S. congressman Mickey Leland and others on a humanitarian mission is found on a mountain side in Ethiopia; there are no survivors.
1993		US Court of Appeals rules Congress must save all emails.

Non Sequitur

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Jim DeMint Says the repugican cabal Will Destroy America To Stop Obamacare

Lunatic Fringe

DeMint's remedy for Obamacare is like burning down your house to stop a leaky pipe from flooding your bathroom.…

The repugicans seem to be aware that their obsession with killing the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, is unpopular and damaging to their cabal. Certainly, most everyone else is. Forty votes to repeal a healthcare overhaul based on a repugican healthcare overhaul and not a single jobs bill since 2008. Former Sen. Jim DeMint (r-SC), whom you might remember dropping out of politics in April to go into…a more lucrative, seven figure form of politics with the Heritage Foundation, told Newsmax TV  that the repugican cabal should be willing to destroy America if that is what it takes to get rid of medical care for the American people.
Interestingly, DeMint says Obamacare is more damaging to America “than anything I’ve seen pass in my lifetime.”
Obamacare apparently being more damaging than a repugican destruction of America itself. So what he is saying is that the repugican cabal must be willing to do more damage to America than the most damaging thing they’ve seen so far, in order to stop the second-most damaging thing done to America.
That’s like burning down your house to stop a leaky pipe from flooding your bathroom.
Yes, Jim DeMint is a lackwit and he thinks Americans are lackwits too. And he’s right about some of them. Those we call the tea party.
Listen to what he had to say to Newsmax:

The key to saving our country, to turning things around and really putting the government on the right track, is getting people informed, engaged all over the country. If Americans decide that they want to stop this unfair and unaffordable bill called Obamacare, they can do it, but the congressmen and senators themselves will not do it. They’ll not take that kind of risk unless the American people rise up and effectively tell them that’s what they want to do.
I’ve been to about 45 cities, meeting with a lot of advocates, a lot of tea party folks, independent groups, just talking about what we need to do as a people to turn our country around, but we’re going to focus on this Obamacare bill, which increasingly people know is unfair. Congress is getting special favors — big unions, big corporations are getting waivers, and it looks like it’s the little guy that’s going to get stuck with the bill.
People are getting notices that they’ll either lose their insurance or it’s going to cost more. We tell people that if the House passes a government funding bill that doesn’t include Obamacare, we can stop this bill in its tracks.

Oh, well, tea party folks…yeah, there’s a meaningful constituency. These are the people who hurled racist slurs against Obama recently in Arizona. These are the people who wave Confederate flags and send postcards of the White House surrounded by a watermelon patch. They hate Obamacare, DeMint says.
The problem is that they hate black people, even black people they themselves say are only “47 percent Negro.”
That’s Jim DeMint’s constituency at the Heritage Foundation. The problem isn’t Obamacare and it was never Obamacare. The problem for these crackers is that Obama is a black man in a big white house.
But DeMint, like his fellow bigots, tries to make it all about Obamacare and he has a problem with any repugican who thinks the cost of stopping Obamacare is too high, not only for the repugican cabal but for America:

Since when do Americans not fight for what is right because they’re afraid they might lose?
We all know this is a terrible bill, and the more we learn about it the more we understand it’s going to hurt people, it’s going to hurt our country. This may be our last chance to stop it, and the only way to stop it when Republicans control only the House is to fund the government but not to include any funding for Obamacare.
Now if the president decides he’s not going to accept government funding and allows the government to shut down, then it’s going to become apparent that he’s letting the government shut down because he wants to save this failed bill.
So this is an argument that we can win with the American people. If we tell people the truth about the bill, more people are going to blame the president when all is said and done.
If Americans don’t see repugicans fighting for something they promised to fight for, that’s going to do much more damage than the risk of possibly taking on the president and not getting everything we want.

That’s actually kinda funny. The repugicans said they were going to fight for jobs too, but they’re too busy trying to repeal and defund Obamacare to create one single job for Americans. Too busy robbing women of the rights to their own bodies to create one single job for Americans. Too busy disenfranchising minority voters to create one single job for Americans.
These fiscally responsible clowns didn’t even keep their budget promises!
Yeah, we can see promises mean quite a bit to the repugican cabal.

One of the primary things they were tasked to do is to stop Obamacare. That’s the issue we hope that Speaker [John] Boehner and Mitch McConnell will focus on right now — recognizing we made a promise to the American people to stop this very destructive bill. That’s what we need to do before it’s implemented in October.
If Obamacare is not worth fighting for and risking losing a battle for, I don’t think there is anything worth fighting for anymore. This bill will do more damage to America, hurt more people personally, than anything that I’ve seen pass in my lifetime.

Of course, none of this is true. Obamacare is helping Americans. But having invested so much in fear-mongering, the repugican cabal can hardly take a step back now and say, “Ooops, we were wrong.”
No, they have doubled down on the rhetoric, getting louder as the evidence against their case grows, and they are willing – almost eager – to take America down with their party, as though to say, if we can’t have America, you won’t have it either.

The repugican cabal in meltdown ...

Lunatic Fringe 

  ... as repugican strategist tells immigrant hating Steve King to get therapy

The repugican cabal is in full meltdown mode over immigration reform as repugican strategist Ana Navarro told repugican Steve King (r-IA) to get therapy for his racist immigrant bashing.Transcript:

KING: This proposes to legalize a lot of people that will include the people who are drug smugglers up to the age of 35. You cannot do a background check on people that don’t have a legal existence in their home country…
NAVARRO: First of all, I think Congressman King should get some therapy for his melon fixation. I think there might be medication for that. I think he’s a mediocre congressman with no legislative record and the only time he makes national press is when he comes out and says something offensive about the undocumented or Hispanics…. There are other voices who are the adults in the room and who are working hard towards a reform. and I think it’s going to happen. I’m more optimistic than most.
GREGORY: Before I let him go, he just heard that. Congressman King, do you want to respond to that in terms of what actually is going to get accomplished?
KING: Well, I would say this. First of all, I spoke only of drug smugglers. If Ana understands the language, she should know that. I didn’t insult her or other repugicans and I didn’t -
NAVARRO: I’m not undocumented. I vote, Congressman.
KING: So we should look at this from the big picture. There are people in America who are dying today because of our immigration policy and our open border. They’re part of this debate, too. where’s your compassion for the families who have lost their children and family members that are buried today because we didn’t enforce immigration law? You understand that 80% to 90% of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico. Terrorists infiltrate through that border. We need to secure the border first, restore the rule of law. Then we can have this discussion you want to get to without insulting people in the process.
NAVARRO: You’re going to talk to me about insulting people, congressman?

The repugicans like Ana Navarro are trying to paint King as a bad apple who doesn’t represent the views of the rest of the repugican cabal, but the truth is that King’s views are how a sizable number of repugicans view Hispanics. Many repugicans automatically assume that every Hispanic they see is an undocumented immigrant. The repugicans like Navarro are the minority in their own party.
King’s views are nothing new. The exact same things that King is saying today were being said by a majority of his party when the shrub tried to get comprehensive immigration reform passed in 2007. The repugicans can trot out Marco Rubio and pretend that the overt racism of Steve King is an isolated incident, but these sorts of attitudes have been dominating the repugican position on immigration for years.
What this dispute between Navarro and King was really centered around was the question of how to win elections. Navarro is a repugican strategist who sees reaching out to Hispanic voters as the key to taking back the Senate and White House. King sees the path to victory as continuing to court the white only vote, while suppressing the votes of all others.
Steve King was flat out promoting racism, and he probably does need therapy, but King can say horrible things about Hispanics because their is a huge group of repugicans that share his point of view.
The repugican cabal is once again coming apart at the seams over immigration reform. There is no party unity on this issue. If Democrats keep pushing immigration reform, I suspect the repugican cabal will be in complete disarray by the 2014 election.