The Daily Drift

The Daily Drift

Today's horoscope says:
The folks that you're associating with have been truly enjoying your company -- and truly learning from you.
They've decided to act on what you've taught them, too -- so however subtle their message is, and however subtly they're portraying it, rest assured that you'll recognize it and that you won't be the only one to pick up on it.
You may, however, need to ask them to tone down their rhetoric.
Just a touch.

Some of our readers today have been in:

Perth, Western Australia, Australia

Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Florence, Toscana, Italy

Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan, Malaysia

Kemaman, Terengganu, Malaysia

Hilversum, Noord-Holland, Netherlands

Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

London, England, United Kingdom

Santander, Cantabria, Spain

as well as Hungary, Finland, Indonesia, Argentina and in cities across the United States such as Los Angeles, Hurricane, Franklin, Parkville and more.

Today is:

Today is Sunday, September 12, the 255th day of 2010.

There are 110 days left in the year.

Today In History September 12

Today's unusual holiday or celebration is:

Video Games Day

It is also National Grandparent's Day

Don't forget to visit our sister blog!

The gods love Carolina Naturally

When the gods were asked where they wanted to live they said Carolina Naturally

Upping the cute factor

Rock Balancing as Art

Canadian photographer Peter Riedel balances rocks atop each other as art. It’s not easy, and the results are fascinating. The precarious sculptures don’t last long at the seashore, but are captured in photographs. 

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Spain On The Edge

image credit

For many, Spain is and forever will be associated with its beautiful coastline and beaches and that is certainly where most tourists head. However, there is an altogether steeper side to this 'larger than you might have thought country' on the Iberian Peninsula. This is Spain on the edge, where geography meets history head on.

Historic hotel's contents for sale

One painting said to portray young girl who became hotel's ghost; many items there since 1922 opening.

This photo is displayed in the Vance Hotel lobby each fall before Halloween.

The stately, five-story Vance Hotel in downtown Statesville welcomed millions of visitors from 1922 to 2008. It also served for a time as a retirement home, hosted several major movies and, according to some local folklore, may have been haunted.

But now, with new plans on the horizon, the unique contents of the now-vacant building - which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places - are up for sale.

Thomas Wilson, the owner of the 72,000-square-foot building, will offer restaurant and banquet room furniture, paintings, kitchen utensils, tapestries and many other items in a massive liquidation sale from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. each day next Sunday through Sept. 24.

From 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. today there is a pre-sale walk-through to allow inspection of the many items. Virtually everything that's been inside the hotel will be on display.
Proceeds of the sale will be split between Wilson and a church in south Statesville.

Wilson acquired the hotel in 2008 from its former owner, Cecil Stallard, who bought it in 2003 and kept it open until fall 2006. Caretaker Wade Ikard said the hotel is under contract for sale.
Stallard and Ikard have both heard that a bar, restaurant and banquet facility are among the new owner's planned uses. Both declined to identify the new owner or provide other information on future plans for the old hotel at Front and Center streets.

Ikard spent most of Labor Day weekend doing an inventory of what's inside.
The list shows more than 1,000 items for sale. Among the more valuable and historic pieces are the paintings that adorned the hotel lobby and hallways since it opened 88 years ago.

One painting, portraying a small girl, has played a role in a strange story about the hotel.
According to some local historians, late one night many years ago, a young girl got into a dispute with her mother and bolted from their hotel room. Wearing an expensive, beaded dress, the girl went to sit by the hotel's swimming pool, to have a moment by herself. Then she decided to dive in. The weight of the dress pulled her to the bottom, and she drowned.

Since then, people have reported seeing a young girl near the hotel, dripping water from head to toe.
Since the drowning, Ikard said, visitors would come to the hotel around Halloween to check things out. The staff would move the painting, which is for sale, to the lobby to "add to the atmosphere," he said.
Ikard could not verify that the girl in the picture was the one who drowned, but he confirmed that a drowning occurred at the pool years ago.

And the legend lives on.

"When the movie crew was here with George Clooney in 2008 shooting the movie 'Leatherheads,'" local historian Nancy Davis said, "there were phone calls for me, the librarians and other historians, because the crew swore they kept seeing this wet girl in the hotel."

Iredell County's 2007 property revaluation listed the hotel's market value as $926,000. Some of the artifacts inside, however, may be priceless, Stallard said.
"Quite a few of the items, such as pictures, mirrors and kitchen utensils, stem from the original opening in 1922," Stallard said.

Shakespeare and Company

One of the most photographed bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, located in Paris’ Left Bank. The bookstore houses young writers, known as “tumbleweeds,” who earn their keep by working in the shop for a couple of hours each day. How delightful would it be to sleep in a bed surrounded by all these lovely old books?

Beautiful college campuses

World's most beautiful college campuses

You'll need to go outside the Ivy League to find most of these architectural marvels.  

Midwest school on the list 

Also: 

• Best U.S. colleges ranked
• Degrees that lead to jobs
• Most beautiful buildings

Non Sequitur

WTC Ship Gives Up Lucky Coin

WTC Ship Gives Up Lucky Coin

Since the 2nd century B.C., shipbuilders have been slipping a coin into the structure of their vessels.

The Ground Zero mosque that used to exist

Business Insider:

It turns out there was a Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center, where Americans and other traveling Muslims prayed every day.

On September 11th, 2001, when a handful of terrorists flew planes into the towers, some of the folks who used the room evacuated in time. Others probably didn't.

In other words, there already was a "ground zero mosque"--used by Muslim Americans who were murdered just like everyone else.

Poverty rate growing rapidly

And you can thank the repugicans for it.

Poverty rate on pace for record increase

The ranks of poor Americans are approaching levels not seen since the 1960s, experts say. 

Hardest-hit cities 

Also: 

• U.S. poverty levels
• Signs of economic life
• New top economist

British MPs feared Murdoch's newspaper so never called CEO for investigation

This is stunning news about Rupert Murdoch's News of the World newspaper. British politicians failed to call the newspaper's CEO because they feared their lives would be turned upside down with more attacks. It really does make you wonder about the power of Murdoch's media empire in the UK as well as the US. The Guardian:

A cross-party committee of MPs abandoned plans to force the News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, to testify last year after they were warned that their private lives would be investigated, a former member alleged last night.

Adam Price, a former Plaid Cymru MP, told Channel 4 News that a group of committee members shied away from the "nuclear option" of issuing a warrant for Brooks to attend after a senior Tory warned that News International would "go for us".

Adrian Sanders, a Liberal Democrat member of the committee, said that the Tory chairman of the committee, John Whittingdale, had issued the warning. "The chairman himself had made some sort of allusion towards what could happen were we to go down this route. But there was no surprise in that because it was sort of, 'Well, yeh, we knew that from that beginning'."

The truth be told

Cancer-Fighting Foods

Cancer-Fighting Foods: Facts and Fiction

The Price of Happiness

Seems to be $75,000.

Whoever said that money can’t buy happiness turned out to be flat wrong. Researchers have now proven that indeed money *can* buy happiness … up to a point.

In the study, researchers tried to evaluate the effect of money in two ways: One was on how people think about their lives and the other was on the feelings they have as they experience life. Responses from more than 450,000 Americans, gathered in 2008 and 2009, were evaluated.
The study found that people’s evaluations of their lives improved steadily with annual income. But the quality of their everyday experiences — their feelings — did not improve above an income of $75,000 a year. As income decreased from $75,000, people reported decreasing happiness and increasing sadness, as well as stress. The study found that being divorced, being sick and other painful experiences have worse effects on a poor person than on a wealthier one.
"More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain," the authors wrote. "Perhaps $75,000 is a threshold beyond which further increases in income no longer improve individuals’ ability to do what matters most to their emotional well-being, such as spending time with people they like, avoiding pain and disease, and enjoying leisure."

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Everything Your Parents Told You About Studying Is Wrong

Everything you’ve learned about how to study is wrong. Did you think that having a study room, sticking to a homework schedule and intensely focusing on a single thing are good study habits? Think again:

In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics. [...]
Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.

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Why does your tummy growl?

Tummy growls are really just internal farts, according to Indiana Public Media's "A Moment of Science."
Basically, the involuntary muscle movements that push food through your digestive tract keep working even after most of that food has moved on down the line. Eventually, gas bubbles are all that's left to be squeezed, and you get a rumbling sound as they pop. It's part of how your intestine keeps itself cleansed—no expensive pills or powders required!

The same contractions that cause your stomach to growl also clean out the GI tract. To see how this cleaning movement works, picture a long hose made of a pliable material. If there were an object, say an egg, at one end of the hose, you could push it from that end to the other by squeezing all along the length of the hose. ... In order to push out bits of food particles left over from a meal, your gastrointestinal tract creates waves of contractions all along the length of the intestines at a rate of two or three per minute.

Bizarre Business Ideas That Made Millionaires

An affair website for married people, a dog poop-scooping business, goggles for dogs. 

Here are ten bizarre business ideas that made their inventors millionaires.

Shoe