"All music is folk music.
I ain't never heard a horse sing a song."
Louis Armstrong
Let's see if I can get another dozen weird things in again:
01. Good news? Forget it! (The Week)
A reporter for the Russian website tried to report only positive news stories for a day. This resulted in a dramatic drop in people who accessed the site and they had to go back to the usual tripe.
02. Caffeine (Bottom Line Health)
The FDA advises getting no more than 400 mg of caffeine a day. (Consumer Reports says that most adults can safely consume up to 400 mg per day; pregnant women up to 200 mg.)
The average US adult drinks about three cups of coffee a day, with up to 200 mg in an 8 ounce cup. (Decaf has about 12 mg per cup!)
Generic green tea has 67 mg in an 8 ounce cup of black tea and 43 mg from the equal amount of decaffeinated green tea.
Dark (yummy) chocolate has about 20 mg per ounce.
Excedrin provides 65 mg per tablet.
Hey.. good news: coffee drinkers get fewer gallstones. However, if you consume too much caffeine, you may suffer jitters, insomnia, rapid heart rate, abnormal heart rhythm and increased blood pressure.
03. Rich Folks (The Week)
There are 62,800 super wealthy persons in the US.. with a net worth of more than $50 million each, compared with other nations, such as China, at 7,600 and 5,500 in Germany. (Would it spoil some vast eternal plan, if I were a wealthy man?)
04. Baltimore's German Heritage Hero (German Society of Maryland)
Gutenberg's printing press needed a man to set type by hand and it was done that way for 400 years. Then Ottmar Mergenthaler, a member of the German Society of Maryland invented the linotype machine. With the linotype, newspapers swelled to hold lots more news. A school in Baltimore is named in his honor.. but I'll bet a majority of the students there haven't the faintest idea who Mergenthaler was.
05. Soporific (New Yorker)
I've mentioned in this blog before how a fellow worker at SSA let me borrow his favorite book Tristram Shandy, and how I tried to read it many times, and how it put me completely to sleep. I just learned that it was the basis for the movie of the same name, appearing in 2005. I think that I will try to download that movie and watch it very carefully, to honor the memory of my book loving friend.
06. Loud Ads? (Consumer Reports)
The Commercial Advertising Loudness Mitigation Act (CALM Act) took effect at the end of 2012 and requires that commercials have the same average volume as the show they accompany. If you think a broadcaster is violating the law, you can report them to the FCC at www.fcc.gov/complaints.
07. How unlucky can you be? (German Society of Maryland)
At one minute before 11 am on the day set for the end of World War I, Sgt. Henry Gunther attacked a German machine gun nest and was killed. He was the last American killed in World War I, and because he was a German American Marylander, he has been honored for years by German descendants in the Baltimore, Maryland area. The German who shot him, carried his body on a stretcher to the American lines and apologized for his unavoidable death.
Well.... that is enough for now, my friends.
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