Beautiful Summer day.
"Perched on the loftiest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our own behind.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
01. Solving Cold Cases
Dorothy Haber has written: The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are solving America's Coldest Cases.
For some time now, amateur detectives have been matching online coroner files to missing-person databases. So far, they have found information to solve around a dozen murders. With a backload of many thousands of unidentified human remains, the civilian help is much appreciated.
02. Magic Opera
Last Saturday, I listened to the Los Angeles Opera version of Mozart's The Magic Flute. This is more of a visual treat than an audio one.. the stage is filled with fantastic videos, everyone is in white face makeup, there is no dialogue, and artists put their heads through cut-outs in illustrations. For instance, the Queen of the Night is shown as a big spider with the diva's head shown. I'll bet Mozart would have liked this rendition of his most popular work.
03. Typo time
The local newspaper had this sentence on the front page:
"On this morning, the Carroll County Sheriff's Office became the first lawn enforcement agency to..." (Baltimore County does have a lawn mowing enforcement agency, but I don't think that is what this sentence meant to convey.)
04. Did Extra Terrestrials teach this to us?
Professor Miodownik of University College, London reveals: "The discipline of material sciences may be recent, but our efforts to transform materials into useful forms are ancient. Dislocating crystals by heating malachite and getting copper was a spectacular growth in human technology.' the pyramids were built using 300,000 copper chisels." (I have never heard this before.)
05. Funny Presidents
Conservative columnists are complaining that President Obama has a sense of humor like Abraham Lincoln, who always had a joke ready... probably, "at the drop of a hat".. have you ever read about all the things that President Lincoln carried in his hat? Speech notes, letters, newspaper articles, etc. He would have loved to have had a smart phone.
06. Accents
Elaine likes to watch Bachelor and Bachelorette TV shows, and I can't help but listen in sometimes while I'm nearby. One of the bachelors was named Juan Pablo.. when I first heard him, he had an amazing Spanish accent, later, he seemed to be speaking Spanglish a lot.. and the last time I heard him, at was hard for me to detect an accent at all. Was he fooling us all this time?
When I spoke German in Germany, I was told that I did not have the usual American German accent.. this was probably because I grew up in Massachusetts, where that accent sounded to me a lot about the way German sounded where I was first, in the Schnee Eiffel.
06. Some stories that I apparently missed
a. A new APP automatically texts messages to your girlfriend.
b. North Korea Kim Jong Something or Other has his uncle killed, and became leader at age 19.
c. A cat held a family hostage.
d. Someone reported that King Edward liked corsets. (huh?)
07. I know nothing
The Rwandan ex-intelligence chief testified at a genocide trial in France that he never saw any dead bodies around his country. Well, somebody did see 800,000 machete-hacked bodies lying everywhere in Rwanda. Perhaps the chief has a very serious case of "massacre degeneration."
08. Cultural Sleep Over
The American Museum of Natural History has offered "sleep overs" for families since 2008. Last Friday, they held the first one for adults only. For $375, adults could buy a ticket that allowed them to lay down on cots under the flukes of the blue whale in the hall of ocean life. They also got a 3 course meal with booze... and "the run of the place."
09. Luck of the unlucky
How can this be? Last Friday, at our AARP meeting, Louise Miller won the free dinner and then picked her own number to win the 50-50. Then, for some reason, they asked me to pick the number for the gold dollar. I picked my own number.
10. Dog Food
James Spratt of Ohio invented the dog biscuit in 1860.. dogs were not too enthused, but they did eat them. Carlton Ellis decided in 1907 to improve on the product and started making the biscuit in the shape of a bone. Dogs loved it! Ellis also invented margarine, varnish and paint remover.
11. Café Wha'
Manny Roth, former founder of the Greenwich Village basement nightclub called "Café Wha'" died in California last week at 94. A number of big names got their start at that locale in the 1960's:
Bob Dylan
Jimi Hendrix
Bruce Springsteen
Bill Cosby
Richard Pryor
Wood Allen
Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary began her entertainment exposure there as a waitress.
Manny gave the club up in 1968, but it reopened sometime later, and is still going strong.
12. Immigrant Children .. Let's get it Straight
An editorial in the Progressive Populist for August 15, 2014, said the following, in part:
"...Speaker Boehner blamed the administration for the flood of children immigrants from Central America: 'The administration's actions only serve to encourage more illegal crossings. It's another situation that appears to have caught the administration flat-footed.'"
Not so fast, big boy!
"The administration followed the requirements of the Trafficking Victims Protection
Reauthorization Act of 2008, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush. The law provides a process to consider asylum applications of young refugees from nations that are not contiguous to the United States - such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras."
.......................................................................................................................................
2 comments:
I thought copper was too soft to work stone, so I did some research. This is indeed part of the leading theories of how the pyramids were built. Copper has a hardness between 2.5 and 3.5 (depending - I guess - on its purity) on the Mohs scale. Limestone is a calcite rock, and has a hardness around 3 on the Mohs scale, so a hard copper variant would be able to work it (although there must have been a lot of frustration in finding "good" copper.) Many kinds of rock were used in constructing the pyramids, but limestone seems to have been the most abundantly used, so I guess it's plausible. Now that I've said this, I vaguely remember seeing a science program (NOVA?) where they were testing something along these lines.
Here's a link with more information about how the pyramids may have been built:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/explore/gizahistory2.html
Post a Comment