CAROLINA NATURALLY

Sunday, November 18, 2012

The Daily Drift

1957 Oldsmobile Super 88 Holiday by Railroad Jack on Flickr.

Those were the days, my friend ...

Some of our readers today have been in:

Warsaw, Poland

Skopje, Macedonia

Malang, Indonesia

Durban, South Africa

Kiev, Ukraine

Riga, Latvia

Bekasi, Indonesia

Cape Town, South Africa

Karachi, Pakistan

Lagos, Nigeria

Chisinau, Moldova

Ankara, Turkey

Lahore, Pakistan

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Hanoi, Vietnam

Doha, Qatar

Bangkok, Thailand

Montevideo, Uruguay

Lille, France

Johannesburg, South Africa

Jakarta, Indonesia

Lenina, Ukraine

Paris, France

Istanbul, Turkey

Athens, Greece

Sialkot, Pakistan

Mkati, Philippines

Krakow, Poland

Don't forget to visit our sister blog!

Today in History

1477		William Claxton publishes the first dated book printed in England. It is a translation from the French of The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosopers by Earl Rivers.
1626		St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome is officially dedicated.
1861		The first provisional meeting of the Confederate Congress is held in Richmond, Virginia.
1865		Mark Twain's first story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is published in the New York Saturday Press.
1901		The second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty is signed. The United States is given extensive rights by Britain for building and operating a canal through Central America.
1905		The Norwegian Parliament elects Prince Charles of Denmark to be the next King of Norway. Prince Charles takes the name Haakon VII.
1906		Anarchists bomb St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
1912		Cholera breaks out in Constantinople, in the Ottoman Empire.
1921		New York City considers varying work hours to avoid long traffic jams.
1928		Mickey mouse makes his film debut in Steamboat Willie, the first animated talking picture.
1936		The main span of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is joined.
1939		The Irish Republican Army explodes three bombs in Piccadilly Circus.
1949		The U.S. Air Force grounds B-29s after two crashes and 23 deaths in three days.
1950		The Bureau of Mines discloses its first production of oil from coal in practical amounts.
1968		Soviets recover the Zond 6 spacecraft after a flight around the moon.
1978		Congressman Leo Ryan is announced missing on a visit to Jonestown, Guyana.
1983		Argentina announces its ability to produce enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.
1984		The Soviet Union helps deliver American wheat during the Ethiopian famine.

Chrysler investing and adding more jobs in Michigan

So basically, the fear-mongering by Mitt Romney about Chrysler moving production to China was an even bigger lie than we thought.Reuters:

Chrysler Group LLC will invest $238 million in two plants in Michigan to boost engine production to meet U.S. demand for smaller, more fuel-efficient engines, the U.S. automaker majority owned by Fiat SpA said on Thursday.
Chrysler is spending $198 million to make by early 2014 its Pentastar V6 engine at the Mack I Engine Plant in Detroit, which now makes a larger engine for the Ram 1500 truck. The automaker is also working on several variants of the 3.6-liter V6 engine, including a smaller 3.2-liter version.
The No. 3 U.S. automaker is also spending $40 million to install a flexible production line — its first ever — at its Trenton North plant in Trenton, Michigan, to build both the V-6 engine and the Tigershark four-cylinder engine.

Shhhh! SEX Killed the repugicans in 2012

Instead of examining their idiotic wingnut ideology that favors only the rich and punishes the middle-class, they've decided they're just not good at persuading voters to vote against their own interests.

House repugicans retract copyright paper in less than 24 hours

It took less than 24 hours for the entertainment industry's lobbyists to bully the House repugican Study Committee into retracting its eminently sensible copyright position paper. They did it with a mealy-mouthed apology, claiming the paper "was published without adequate review."

Here's Mike Masnick on the subject:

The idea that this was published "without adequate review" is silly. Stuff doesn't just randomly appear on the RSC website. Anything being posted there has gone through the same full review process. What happened, instead, was that the entertainment industry's lobbyists went crazy, and some in the repugican cabal folded.
Frankly, if they wanted to win back the youth vote, this was exactly how not to do it. If you just look through the comments on our post on the original, or through the Twitter response to this report, there were tons of people -- many of whom were lifelong Democrats -- claiming that they would switch parties if the repugicans stuck with this. Instead, they folded like a cheap card table in less than 24 hours.

Here's a mirror from KEI, and another from the MD Pirate Party.

The repugicans Retract Report On Copyright Reform

Ziggy

Twinkie R.I.P. (1930-2012)

How did such a small snack cake grow to mean so much to so many Americans?

Read more

Don't wash your turkey!

Don't wash your turkey!
And other food safety tips

You don't need to wash your turkey before you roast it, and doing so can be dangerous.

Take a look ,,,

...at life from a different perspective

Did you know ...

It may come as a surprise to you but not news to us: human intelligence is slowly declining

Random Celebrity Photo

Marilyn and Elvis by Railroad Jack on Flickr.

People Who Lived To Read Their Own Obituaries

You might think that the death of a famous person would be relatively easy to double check before reporting it - but you would be wrong. For hundreds of years, the news has been jumping the gun on the deaths of some of our most celebrated personalities, so these 11 all had the surreal experience of reading their own obituaries.

The Chamber Horse

A Nineteenth Century Exercise Machine Chamber Horse

Before there were elliptical trainers and stairclimbers, wealthy people in Britain exercised on chamber horses:

[...] the user sat on the seat and bounced up and down on the concertina springs as if trotting on a horse. Horse riding was considered a form of healthy exercise.