Fact of the Day

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - GOLD PROSPECTING

Did you know.... that gold prospecting is the act of searching for new gold deposits. Methods used vary with the type of deposit sought and the resources of the prospector? Although traditionally a commercial activity, in some developed countries placer gold prospecting has also become a popular outdoor recreation. (Wikipedia)

 

Prospecting for placer gold
Prospecting for placer gold is normally done with a gold pan or similar instrument to wash free gold particles from loose surface sediment.[1] The use of gold pans is centuries old, but is still common among prospectors and miners with little financial backing.  Deeper placer deposits may be sampled by trenching or drilling. Geophysical methods such as seismic, gravity or magnetics may be used to locate buried river channels that are likely locations for placer gold. Sampling and assaying a placer gold deposit to determine its economic viability is subject to many pitfalls. Once placer gold is discovered, the gold pan is usually replaced by sluices or mechanical devices to wash greater volumes of material. Discovery of placer gold has often resulted in discovery of hardrock gold deposits when the placers are traced to their sources.

 

Prospecting for hardrock gold deposits
Prospectors for hardrock, or lode gold deposits, can use many tools. It is done at the simplest level by surface examination of rock outcrops, looking for exposures of mineral veins, hydrothermal alteration, or rock types known to host gold deposits. Field tools may be nothing more than a rock hammer and hand lens.

 

Hardrock gold deposits are more varied in mineralogy and geology than placer deposits, and prospecting methods can be very different for different types of deposits. As with placer gold, the sophistication of methods used to prospect for hardrock gold vary with the financial resources of the prospector. Drilling is often used to explore the subsurface. Surface geophysical methods may be used to locate geophysical anomalies associated with gold deposits. Samples of rocks or soil may be collected for geochemical laboratory assay, to determine metal content or detect geochemical anomalies. Hardrock gold particles may be too small to see, even with a microscope.

 

Most gold today is produced in large open-pit and deep underground mines. However, small-scale gold mining is still common, especially in developing countries.  A recent study by Australian scientists found that termites have been found to excrete trace deposits of gold. According to the CSIRO, the termites burrow beneath eroded subterranean material which typically masks human attempts to find gold, and ingest and bring the new deposits to the surface. They believe that studying termite nests may lead to less invasive methods of finding gold deposits. 

 

Recreational gold mining

Recreational gold mining and prospecting has become a popular outdoor recreation in a number of countries, including New Zealand (especially in Otago), Australia, South Africa, Wales (at Dolaucothi and in Gwynedd), in Canada and in the United States especially. Recreational mining is often small-scale placer mining but has been challenged for environmental reasons. The disruption of old gold placer deposits risks the reintroduction of post gold rush pollution, including mercury in old mining deposits and mine tailings. (Wikipedia)

 

Just because we're long past the days of the 49ers and old-time prospectors, don't think mining for gold has been relegated to the dustbin of history. Interest in small-scale mining is booming, thanks in part to a deluge of reality TV shows. That rising viewership has sifted into beginner classes in places like Denver and all around the country. The pre-eminent group for enthusiasts, the Gold Prospectors Association of America (GPAA), now has 17 chapters in California alone.

 

Even if you've never seen a burro, raised a pickaxe, or poked around on a riverbed, taking a shot at panning for gold is well within reach. Union soldiers from California found some near Washington D.C. during the Civil War, and Gold flakes continue to wash up on beaches immediately south of downtown Chicago. Although it's a prized metal throughout the world, it can be found in the most unlikely of places.

 

 

Golden Beginnings

Gold is among the few valuable minerals, gems, and gemstones that show up looking beguiling upon first discovery—no need for polish to dazzle. It's mined on every continent except Antarctica. North Carolina started the American crazy in the early 1800s with the discovery of single nuggets weighing up to 28 pounds. Yes, pounds. Two centuries later, and there are still plenty of public lands open to hand-powered prospecting. You can even search for the coordinates of gold mining operations online, and that's not the only convenience that makes gold panning more feasible.

 

Lightweight gear makes panning possible even on vacation, finding gold, along with garnets and platinum—swirling in black dirt at the bottom of your plastic pan. These pieces of equipment date back to the massive influx of individual miners and corporate interests during rushes in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

 

At under $50, streamlined pans, screen, and optional sluices isn't quite the sticker shock it used to be for our Gold Fever predecessors, and you can buy everything you need online while watching reruns of Gold Rush, Bering Sea Gold, Yukon Gold and Gold Fever.

 

A fast start

A 1/4-inch metal screen turns tons of river gravel and smooth stones into concentrates worth panning.
 

Unlike many pastimes, panning for gold is a small investment for a potentially large reward. At about $10, the Garrett 14" Gold Trap Pan is the only pan you'll ever need. With inside ridges on one side, it traps more viable material faster and easier. Pick up a full pound of pre-bagged pay dirt from California, Colorado, the Bering Sea, or Alaska at under $20 so you can learn to pan at home. Then, siphon up the gold with a squeeze bottle or get an entire kit for under $40.

 

A little suction draws up flakes and gold flour granules that remain after panning.

 

Next, fire up the grill, pour a favorite sip-worthy beverage, and have at it. The best bet is to check out the GPAA's online tutorials about how to start panning for gold. These videos will teach you helpful hints like making sure you keep the pan in the water at a minimum 45-degree angle to wash away larger material. If those few, flashing specks of gold justify the effort and minor expense, move on to taking a beginner class through an Association chapter or one of many searchable enthusiasts groups. For these experts and enthusiasts, teaching potential panners is as important as continued access to the public waterways needed to mine for gold.

 

Know your river

Running buckets of concentrates through a purpose-built sluice accelerates the process.
 

Rivers go through seasonal cycles from spring flood stage to reduced flow rates in late summer and fall. Gold breaks loose from streamside banks and bottoms with each high-water cycle, landing in places where the water slows down. That's why pools and eddies behind rocks are usually high-probability mining locations.

 

Gold, at 19 times heavier than water, sinks anytime it slows down, so mining relies on gravity to do most of the work. Deposits of nuggets, flakes, and smaller grain "flour" gold commonly occur from 6 to 24 inches below water level. River bottoms and banks can both be productive places to dig out pannable material, recognizing the importance of refilling on-shore holes as part of mining etiquette.

 

Going from a mixture of dirt and minerals to gold-bearing sands, called "pay dirt," is a sifting and sorting process. Screening plastic buckets of what's been dug out with a simple ¼-inch metal mesh, called the "classifier," is the fastest and easiest way. Then panning takes over, using a single 14-inch green plastic pan to work down to the good stuff.

 

Spotting success

 

"People return to the shop with lots of shiny material, wondering if any of it is gold," offered Louise Smyth of well-regarded Gold-N-Detectors, a local mining outfitter, so it's worth knowing how gold behaves as well as its appearance. Most of what appears as glistening rocks may be alluring, but it's not the "Au" you're looking for.

 

The ability to identify your quarry leads to an important realization early in the process. Mining is a volume proposition. Even if the first pan shows some "color" (small flakes or grains of gold), patient miners generally are more successful. Once a solid deposit is located, it often continues to yield gold as the persevering prospector continues to dig, classifies and pans for several hours or more.

 

Garnets take on a ruby-red glory once they're

processed in a rock tumbler.

 

But in the end it all comes down to panning technique. In fact, national championships hinge on how fast a miner finds seeded gold in pre-measured pay dirt. A combination of wrist rotation and finger tapping, the spiraling motion that leads to success becomes nearly hypnotic even to a beginner as gold, garnets and other riches are revealed. While Fool's Gold (minerals like iron pyrite and mica flakes) will sparkle in the pan, gold is the only one that stays truly golden when the pan is shaded by a miner's hand.

 

Platinum and garnets frequently accompany gold deposits as byproducts of the miner's labors. While the value of platinum has dropped significantly when compared to gold, the cloudy red gravel in the stream can well be garnets worth polishing up in a rock tumbler for use in custom jewelry.

 

Freedom right off the freeway

Dredge piles left behind by commercial operators still have gold to give up.
 

With gold panning even possible near metro locations, there's something that happens with the first step into the rushing water. As with many pursuits that require rapt attention, the rest of the world vanishes as the hunt for this timeless treasure becomes all-consuming.

 

Excepting remote locations where miners live off their labors, there's little to fear from fellow participants. In fact, where there's plenty of streambank and river bottom to explore, mining within 10 ft. of others is acceptance at busier locations. As most fellow miners are plenty busy with their own efforts, there's no reason not to dive right in. But be sure to fill open holes, also known as "coyote holes," or replace rocks dislodged while digging so you don't attract advisory commentary from those nearby.

 

After learning basic skills and seeing some minor success, some prospectors decide they want to go deeper into the activity. With a pan, screen, small bucket, and snuffer bottle in hand, the next step is to plan trips where there's been gold mining in the past. If time is short, simply book a half or full-day outing with a local mining guide who knows the territory. When the time comes to up the volume of material being processed, purchasing a metal or plastic sluice multiplies throughput by almost 10x for less than $200.

 

"I'VE GOT EVERY FLAKE AND NUGGET I'VE EVER FOUND. LOOKING AT THEM AND REMEMBERING THE PLACES I'VE BEEN IS ENOUGH FOR ME."

 

"Being the first one to see a flake or nugget is an incredible feeling," Jim Long, president of Gold Prospectors of the Rockies, told Popular Mechanics during a recent tutorial season together in the shadow of Denver's Interstate 70. "I've got every flake and nugget I've ever found. Looking at them and remembering the places I've been is enough for me."

 

It's a sentiment echoed by many miners met along a stretch of Clear Creek on a sunny morning in April. "This gets me up and out instead of staying home, watching TV and getting fat," one fellow miner said as he scrambled across a string of slippery boulders to cross the creek. Glancing around, the solo miners and sluice-filling duos up and down the river seemed intent on extracting the most from every shovelful.

 

What may have started by watching a reality TV show has become something more to the crew lining the creek bank. For a few dollars, they've left behind life's worries, if only a few hours, as the low din of snarled traffic rumbles behind them. Right here and now, it's the Gold Rush all over again with the possibility of finding something beautiful in every pan of black sand.

Source: Popular Mechanics Peter Reese

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BLACK BEARS

Did you know... that the American black bear is a medium-sized bear native to North America? It is the continent's smallest and most widely distributed bear species. American black bears are omnivores, with their diets varying greatly depending on season and location. (Wikipedia)

 

Black bears are the smallest bear species in North America. These solitary omnivores are quite adaptable. Roughly 600,000 black bears range from Canada to Mexico. This most definitely includes the mountains of Montana and Big Sky Country.

 

 

It's not uncommon to spot a black bear in or around Big Sky. These animals are quite tolerant of humans. They may be spotted in forests, fields, tundra, campsites, or right in the town of Big Sky. Keep your head on swivel because you never know where you might spot a black bear.

 

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT BLACK BEARS:

• The scientific name for a black bear is Ursus Americanus.
• Black bear are the smallest of bear species in North America - grizzly and polar bears are larger.
• Black bears stand 2 to 3 feet at shoulders and 4 to 7 feet long from nose to tail.
• In Montana, black bears weigh between 180 to 400 pounds. The heaviest black bear ever weighed roughly 900 pounds.
• On average, black bears live 20 years in the wild.
• Black bears are omnivores that eat grasses, plants, fruits, insects, honey, small mammals, herbs, fruit, and fish.

• Black bears have five toes on their front and rear feet.
• They have long, non-retractable claws that allow them climb trees.
• Black bears can run up 40 to 50 km/hour.
• Black bears do NOT have the large hump that grizzly bears have.
• They hibernate from roughly October to April, but if you disturb a hibernating black bear, it will wake up.
• Black bears do not eat, drink, urinate, or defecate during hibernation.
• They breath once every 45 seconds during hibernation and drop their heart rate to 8 to 21 beats per minute.
• There are estimated to be 600,000 black bears in North America.
• A black bear has a home range of 15 to 80 square miles.
• Females can give birth to up to 6 cubs every other year - 2 cubs is the average.
• Gestation is 63 to 70 days. Cubs stay with their mom for up to 18 months.
• Black bears can be hunted in 27 states - including Montana during the spring and fall.

When you're in Big Sky Country, always be bear aware. Carry bear spray and know how to use it. If you encounter a black bear in the wild, stand your ground. Speak firmly and slowly back away. The National Park Service says that if you are attacked by a black bear, you should NOT play dead. Use your bear spray and fight back.

 

As long as you are bear aware in Big Sky country (or anywhere) encounters are rare. Just remember that all black bears are wild creatures and should be treated with respect at all times.  Source: Visit Big Sky.

 

Folklore: Perhaps no other animals have so excited the human imagination as bears.  References to bears are found in ancient and modern literature, folk songs, legends, mythology, children stories, and cartoons.  Bears are among the first animals that children learn to recognize.  Bear folklore is confusing because it is based on caricatures, with Teddy Bears and the kindly Smokey on one hand and ferocious magazine cover drawings on the other.  Dominant themes of our folklore are fear of the unknown and man against nature, and bears have traditionally been portrayed as the villains to support those themes, unfairly demonizing them to the public.  A problem for black bears is that literature about bears often does not separate black bears from grizzly bears.

 

General Description: The black bear is approximately 4 to 7 feet from nose to tail, and two to three feet high at the withers.  It has small eyes, rounded ears, a long snout, a large body, a short tail, and shaggy hair.  It differs from grizzly bears in being smaller with a smaller shoulder hump, a furred rear instep, a less concave facial profile, smaller claws that are more tightly curved, and longer, smoother, and more tapered ears.

 

Classification of Ursus americanus, the American black bear:  Kingdom: Animal, Phylum: Chordata, Class: Mammalia, Subclass: Theria, Infraclass: Eutheria, Order: Carnivora, Suborder: Fissipedia, Family: Ursidae, Subfamily: Ursinae (all bears except the giant panda and the spectacled bears), Genus: Ursus, Subgenus: Euarctos, Species: americanus.

 

Names: Some black bear subspecies go by different names, like Kermode bear, Cinnamon bear, or Glacier bear, but they are all black bears.  We prefer calling male and female bears simply males and females, but many people call them boars and sows, like pigs.  Although pigs and black bears are both omnivores, they are not related.  A group of bears is sometimes called a sloth of bears after the Middle English slowthe, meaning slow.  The term is inaccurate because bears are not slow, lean bears can run in excess of 30 mph and few people use the term anymore.

 

Range: The American black bear is found only in North America.  The population is estimated at 750,000.  They live in forests as far south as Florida and northern Mexico and as far north as forests grow in Alaska and Canada.  In northern Labrador, where grizzly bears no longer live, black bears range out onto open tundra where there are no trees to escape into.  People are becoming more tolerant of black bears as we learn more about them.  Many people are enjoying having bears live close to them where the bears were once feared and killed.

 

Color: Body fur usually black or brown but occasionally blonde, or rarely white as in the Kermode subspecies of coastal British Columbia.  Brown muzzle.  White chest patch is uncommon in most populations.  Eyes brown (blue at birth).  Skin light gray.

 

Adult Weights: Wild male black bears of breeding age usually weigh between 125 and 500 pounds, depending upon age, season, and food.  Very well fed bears can be heavier. The heaviest bear was claimed be a male shot in 1972 in New Brunswick that weighed 902 pounds after it had been dressed, estimated to be over 1,000 pounds in life.  Wild females usually weigh between 90 and 300 pounds with the heaviest known female weighing 520 pounds in northeastern Minnesota on August 30, 1993.  Black bears in captivity may exceed these records.

 

Adult Length: 50 to 80 inches long, nose to tail, with males being larger than females.

 

 

Mating Season: Usually from late May to early July.  In the eastern deciduous forest, mating season can extend into August.

Implantation: Delayed until November.

• Birth: January or early February.
• Number of Cubs: The number of cubs in a litter is usually 2 in the western United States and 3 in the eastern United States.  First litters are often only 1 or 2.  Litters of 6 have been reported in several eastern states.
• Birth Weight: Cubs weigh 1/2 to 1 pound at birth.
• Fall Weight of Cubs: By their first fall, cubs may weigh as little as 15 pounds or more than 165 pounds, depending on food supply.
• Parental Care: Cubs usually stay with their mother for 16-17 months (rarely 29 months).  One to six days before the mothers are ready to mate in late May or June, they force their yearlings to stop traveling with them.
• Age at Production of First Cubs: 2 to 11 years, depending upon food supply.  Typically 3 to 7 years.

Want to read more on Black Bears?  Source: North American Bear Center

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - SELMA TO MONTGOMERY MARCH

 

Did you know... that Southern state legislatures had passed and maintained a series of discriminatory requirements and practices that had disenfranchised most of the millions of African Americans across the South throughout the 20th century? The African-American group known as the Dallas County Voters League launched a voter registration campaign in Selma in 1963. Joined by organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, they began working that year in a renewed effort to register black voters. (Wikipedia)

 

Selma March, also called Selma to Montgomery March, political march from Selma, Alabama, to the state’s capital, Montgomery, that occurred March 21–25, 1965. Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., the march was the culminating event of several tumultuous weeks during which demonstrators twice attempted to march but were stopped, once violently, by local police. As many as 25,000 people participated in the roughly 50-mile (80-km) march. Together, these events became a landmark in the American civil rights movement and directly led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

Selma March.  Arm in arm, Martin Luther King Jr., and his wife Coretta Scott King (in light-colored suit), leading the voting

rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March 1965.

 

Voter Registration In Selma
In 1963 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) endeavoured to register African American voters in Dallas county in central Alabama. The focus of those efforts was the county seat, Selma, where only about 1 or 2 percent of eligible black voters were registered. Not only was the registration office open just two days per month, but cumbersome four-page forms and arbitrarily applied literacy tests were used to deter and prevent African Americans from obtaining the vote. In late 1964, as SNCC intensified its registration campaign in response to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, local law enforcement—led by the county’s militant segregationist sheriff, Jim Clark (who wore a button that read “Never!”)—resisted with increasing violence (including the use of electric cattle prods against demonstrators). When the Dallas County Voters League, the principal local civil rights organization, requested help from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and its leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., Selma’s recently elected mayor, Joseph Smitherman, sought to prevent local law-enforcement officers from employing violence, fearing that bad publicity would work against his attempt to lure new industry to Selma.

 

Clark, however, failed to heed Smitherman’s directive. By early February 1965, with the SCLC’s organizing efforts in full swing, police violence had escalated and at least 2,000 demonstrators had been jailed in Dallas county. In January and February King pointed to the situation in Selma when he sought to persuade Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson to push for a voting rights act. Johnson, however, remained largely noncommittal. He hoped that court enforcement of the Civil Rights Act would bring about the necessary change, he doubted that there would be sufficient congressional support for a voting rights bill, and he was hesitant to further provoke white Southerners who were already up in arms over desegregation legislation.

On February 18, 1965, in Marion, the county seat of Perry county, near Selma, a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young African American man, during a nighttime demonstration. After Jackson died of his wounds just over a week later in Selma, leaders called for a march to the state capital, Montgomery, to bring attention to the injustice of Jackson’s death, the ongoing police violence, and the sweeping violations of African Americans’ civil rights. On March 6, George C. Wallace, Alabama’s segregationist governor, forbade the march and ordered state troopers to “take whatever means necessary” to prevent it.

 

Bloody Sunday
In unilaterally scheduling the action for Sunday, March 7, King alienated a number of SNCC leaders, who resented the lack of a joint decision. Ultimately, they allowed their members to participate in the march as individuals, led by SNCC chairman John Lewis. When King’s father persuaded him to preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church (his home church) in Atlanta on Sunday, King initially rescheduled the march for Monday, March 8. He then chose to allow it to take place as originally planned so as not to discourage those who had already arrived on Sunday. His intention was to join the march later.

 

Edmund Pettus Bridge

Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of Bloody Sunday (March 7th, 1965), Selma, Alabama, 2006

 

Before departing Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma on Sunday morning, marchers were reminded of their nonviolent tactics—that if they were halted, they should sit and pray until tear gassed or arrested. Led by Hosea Williams, one of King’s SCLC lieutenants, and Lewis, some 600 demonstrators walked, two by two, the six blocks to the Edmund Pettus Bridge that crossed the Alabama River and led out of Selma. At the east end of the bridge, the demonstrators encountered a force of sheriff’s deputies, deputized “possemen” (some on horseback), and dozens of state troopers. The marchers were told that they had two minutes to disperse. Williams asked to speak with the officer who had given the command. The officer responded that there was nothing to talk about, and moments later he ordered the state troopers to advance. In the tear-gas-shrouded melee that followed, marchers were spat upon, overrun by horses, and attacked with billy clubs and bullwhips. More than 50 marchers, including Lewis, were hospitalized.

 

Television cameras recorded the brutal assault and brought it into millions of American homes. Significantly, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) interrupted its telecast of Judgment at Nuremburg (1961), a film about the prosecuting of Nazi war criminals, to show the events in Selma, which became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Over the next 48 hours, demonstrations were held in some 80 U.S. cities in support of the marchers.

 

civil rights movement: "We March with Selma!"

Demonstrators carrying a banner reading "We march with Sema!" in the Harlem section of New York City, 1965.

 

Turnaround Tuesday
King called on Americans of conscience to go to Selma to join the protest and restart the march. Thousands answered his call. Meanwhile, lawyers for the SCLC went to court in an attempt to prevent Wallace and the state from intervening again in the demonstration. While U.S. District Court Judge Frank Johnson, Jr., agreed to hear the petition, he also issued a restraining order forbidding any further demonstrations in the interim. On March 9 King led more than 2,000 individuals on a march to the bridge. Reluctant to violate the restraining order, however, he turned the procession around, after leading it in prayer, when state troopers ordered it to halt. That was not the last dramatic event of “Turnaround Tuesday.” That night three white clergymen who had traveled to Selma to join the protest were assaulted. One of them, Massachusetts Unitarian minister James J. Reeb, died of his wounds.

 

“We Shall Overcome”: LBJ And The 1965 Voting Rights Act
On March 15, just over a week after Bloody Sunday, Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson introduced voting rights legislation in an address to a joint session of Congress. In what became a famous speech, he identified the clash in Selma as a turning point in U.S. history akin to the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the American Revolution. Invoking the protest song that had become the unofficial anthem of the American civil rights movement, Johnson said:

 

Lyndon B. Johnson

U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson speaking at the signing ceremony for the Voting Rights Act, August 6yh, 1965

 

 

"What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.

Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

And we shall overcome."

 

Members of Congress interrupted Johnson’s speech with applause some 40 times. In Selma King wept.

 

“How Long, Not Long”: Selma To Montgomery
On March 17, after several days of testimony, Judge Johnson ruled in favour of the protestors, saying,

"The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups…and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways."

 

Under the terms of the ruling, an unlimited number of people would be permitted to begin and finish the march (which was required to be completed in five days), but only 300 marchers were to be allowed to cover the 22-mile (35-km) two-lane portion of U.S. Highway 80 that passed through Lowndes county.

 

In the days before the start of the renewed march, Governor Wallace indicated (or at least implied) in a phone call with President Johnson that the Alabama National Guard would protect the marchers. Then, addressing the state legislature, the governor announced that he expected the federal government to “provide for the safety and welfare of the so-called demonstrators.” Ultimately, Wallace sent a telegram to the president saying that Alabama could not afford to provide protection for the marchers and asking the federal government to do so. On March 20 a furious President Johnson responded by federalizing the command of elements of the Alabama National Guard and dispatching the U.S. Army.

 

On March 21 King led marchers (estimates of their number vary but generally fall between 3,000 and 8,000) out of Selma, over the Pettus Bridge, and on the road to Montgomery. En route protection was provided by more than 1,800 Alabama National Guardsmen and about 2,000 soldiers, as well as federal marshals and FBI agents. The marchers, whose numbers swelled to about 25,000 along the way, covered the roughly 50 miles (80 km) to Montgomery in five days, arriving at the state capital on March 25.

 

Selma March, Alabama, March 1965

 

There King addressed the crowd, delivering what would become known as his “How Long, Not Long” speech, which culminated in his recitation of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:

 

Martin Luther King Jr., delivering his "How Long, Not Long" speech in Montgomery, Alabama, March 25th 1965

 

I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?…How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?”

…How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.

How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

 

Once adopted by Congress and signed into law (August 6), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended literacy tests, provided for federal approval of proposed changes to voting laws or procedures (“preclearance”) in jurisdictions that had previously used tests to determine voter eligibility, and directed the attorney general of the United States to challenge the use of poll taxes for state and local elections.

In 1996 an act of Congress created the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. An interpretive centre operated by the National Park Service is located in Lowndes county at roughly the halfway point between Selma and Montgomery.

Sign marking the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail

 

Source: Jeff Wallenfeldt (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - MOST DANGEROUS ANIMALS

 

Did you know... that from the terrifying and the cuddly, the massive and the miniscule, all animals have evolved natural strengths and defences to keep themselves fed and keep themselves safe, from the incredible girth and razor claws of the grizzly to the spines and toxic poison of the wee pufferfish? (Factinate)

 

Komodo Dragon

Growing up to 3 metres in length and weighing up to 150 lbs, the Komodo dragon is an Indonesian monster lizard leftover from the Pleistocene era. With a single bite, they latch serrated teeth into their prey and rip back with their powerful neck muscles, leaving a gaping wound. Their massive size is due to their status as the only carnivores in their niche on the Indonesian islands where they live.

 

Box Jellyfish

Who’d have thought that one of the world’s deadliest creatures doesn’t have a single bone in their body? The box jellyfish might be squishy, but don’t venture too close—their venom is one of the most deadly in the world. Their stingers are activated not by touch but by chemicals found in the skin of prey. As a result, swimming while wearing full-body pantyhose, while it may look a bit silly, can completely protect you from the deadly sting of the box jellyfish.

 

Crocodile

The saltwater crocodile can grow up to 23 feet long and weigh upwards of 1 ton, and has no qualms about considering humans as prey. Aggressive and quick in water, the saltwater croc’s jaws are lined with razor-sharp teeth, and hold the record for the strongest bite ever recorded: 3,700 pounds per square inch (psi). That’s comparable to a T. Rex!

 

The Cone Snail

When you’re a slow-moving invertebrate, you need fast-acting venom lest your prey swim away. In response, the geographic cone snail has evolved venom that paralyzes instantly. Their bright and patterned shells make them attractive to humans, but stay away: there is no known antivenin, and “treatment” is limited to just keeping a person stung by the cone snail alive until the symptoms pass. Even so, their venom may end up being of more good than harm to humans: a pain reliever potentially 10,000 times more powerful than morphine has already been found in the proteins in the venom of the cone snail.

 

Hippopotami

Despite their bulbous shape and average weight of 3,000 lbs, hippopotami can run up to 30 km/h over short distances. They kill approximately 500 people per year in Africa, mostly by overturning boats and drowning or crushing their victims. Its name means “river horse” in Ancient Greek, but maybe it would be better to call the hippo a “charging bull.”

 

Black Mamba

The world has many ferocious and poisonous snakes, but the black mamba stands out because of its speed: this snake can slither up to 12.5 miles per hour, making escape almost impossible. Their bite, called the “kiss of death,” contains enough venom to kill 10 healthy adult humans. If antivenin isn’t administered within the first 20 minutes, the bite of the black mamba is almost 100% fatal.

 

Piranha

A single piranha may not be too scary on its own, but a horde of hungry piranhas have been reported to strip a whole cow down to its skeleton in minutes—one famous report comes from none other than American President Theodore Roosevelt, who visited Brazil in 1913!’

 

Moose

It’s a common saying in Canada that a car accident involving a moose will leave the driver dead while the moose will simply walk away. Moose are a definite danger to motorists travelling through their territory, as the bulk of their mass is above the hood of most passenger cars. At up to 7 feet tall, their gawky long legs and formidable antlers are also a danger, as an angry or protective moose may charge humans who cross their paths.

 

Asian Giant Hornets

Like the piranha, the Asian giant hornet isn’t deadly on its own. Because they live in hives and travel in swarms, however, they can easily overwhelm and incapacitate a human. Asian giant hornets killed 42 people and injured more than 1,500 in 2013 alone.

 

Poison Dart Frog

Animals who don’t possess stingers or fangs, but instead carry their poison on their skin, have evolved ways to signal to predators that they are unappetizing. Poison dart frogs have evolved brightly coloured skin to let predators know that while they may be small, they can kill up to 20 adults with their poisonous toxins. The frog’s poison glands are located beneath the skin, so a mere touch is all it takes to kill.

 

Cape Buffalo

Huge, cranky, and wearing a set of horns like a helmet, Cape buffalo have been known to attack moving cars, and keep charging even if they’re injured. They’re nicknamed “Black Death,” and have racked up a hunter death toll higher than any other creature in Africa. Buffalo tend to live a slow-moving life in large herds, grazing close to watering holes, but if threatened—or especially if a calf is threatened—they can be quick to earn their nickname by charging at speeds up to 35 mph.

 

Want to read more on Most Dangerous Animals?  Click here.

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - STAN LEE

 

Did you know... that Stan Lee was an American comic book writer, editor, publisher, and producer? He rose through the ranks of a family-run business to become Marvel Comics' primary creative leader for two decades, leading its expansion from a small division of a publishing house to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics industry. (Wikipedia)

 

In collaboration with others at Marvel—particularly co-writer/artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko—he co-created numerous popular fictional characters, including superheroes Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow, the Fantastic Four, Black Panther, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch and Ant-Man.

 

 

The superheroes he created seemed more meaningful and realistic. In doing so, he pioneered a more naturalistic approach to writing superhero comics in the 1960s, and in the 1970s he challenged the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority, indirectly leading to changes in its policies. In the 1980s he pursued the development of Marvel properties in other media, with mixed results. Following his retirement from Marvel in the 1990s, he remained a public figurehead for the company, and frequently made cameo appearances in films and television shows based on Marvel characters, on which he received an executive producer credit. Meanwhile, he continued independent creative ventures into his 90s, until his death in 2018.

 

(Marvel Movies: All Stan Lee's Cameos)

 

Lee was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1995. He received the NEA's National Medal of Arts in 2008.

 

(National Medal of Arts)

 

With the help of his uncle Robbie Solomon, Lee became an assistant in 1939 at the new Timely Comics division of pulp magazine and comic-book publisher Martin Goodman's company. Timely, by the 1960s, would evolve into Marvel Comics. Lee, whose cousin Jean was Goodman's wife, was formally hired by Timely editor Joe Simon.

 

His duties were prosaic at first. "In those days [the artists] dipped the pen in ink, [so] I had to make sure the inkwells were filled", Lee recalled in 2009. "I went down and got them their lunch, I did proofreading, I erased the pencils from the finished pages for them". Marshaling his childhood ambition to be a writer, young Stanley Lieber made his comic-book debut with the text filler "Captain America Foils the Traitor's Revenge" in

Captain America Comics #3 (cover-dated May 1941), using the pseudonym Stan Lee (a play on his first name, "Stanley"), which years later he would adopt as his legal name.[44] Lee later explained in his autobiography and numerous other sources that because of the low social status of comic books, he was so embarrassed that he used a pen name so that nobody would associate his real name with comics when he some day wrote the Great American Novel. This initial story also introduced Captain America's trademark ricocheting shield-toss.

 

He graduated from writing filler to actual comics with a backup feature, "'Headline' Hunter, Foreign Correspondent", two issues later. Lee's first superhero co-creation was the Destroyer, in Mystic Comics #6 (August 1941). Other characters he co-created during this period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books include Jack Frost, debuting in U.S.A. Comics #1 (August 1941), and Father Time, debuting in Captain America Comics #6 (August 1941).

 

When Simon and his creative partner Jack Kirby left late in 1941, following a dispute with Goodman, the 30-year-old publisher installed Lee, just under 19 years old, as interim editor. The youngster showed a knack for the business that led him to remain as the comic-book division's editor-in-chief, as well as art director for much of that time, until 1972, when he would succeed Goodman as publisher.

 

Lee entered the United States Army in early 1942 and served within the US as a member of the Signal Corps, repairing telegraph poles and other communications equipment. He was later transferred to the Training Film Division, where he worked writing manuals, training films, slogans, and occasionally cartooning. His military classification, he said, was "playwright"; he added that only nine men in the U.S. Army were given that title. In the Army, Lee's division included many famous or soon-to-be famous people, including three-time Academy Award-winning director Frank Capra, New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams, and children's book writer and illustrator Theodor Geisel, later known to the world as "Dr. Seuss." Vincent Fago, editor of Timely's "animation comics" section, which put out humor and funny animal comics, filled in until Lee returned from his World War II military service in 1945. Lee was inducted into the Signal Corps Regimental Association and was given honorary membership of the 2nd Battalion of 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord at the 2017 Emerald City Comic Con for his prior service.

 

(Lee in the Army, early 1940s)

 

While in the Army, Lee received letters every week on Friday from the editors at Timely, detailing what they needed written and by when. Lee would write, then send the story back on Monday. One week, the mail clerk overlooked his letter, explaining nothing was in Lee's mailbox. The next day, however, Lee went by the closed mailroom and saw an envelope with the return address of Timely Comics in his mailbox. Not willing to miss a deadline, Lee asked the officer in charge to open the mailroom, but he refused. So Lee took a screwdriver and unscrewed the mailbox hinges, enabling him to get at the assignment. The mailroom officer saw what he did and turned him into the base captain, who did not like Lee. He faced tampering charges and could have been sent to Leavenworth Prison. However, the colonel in charge of the Finance Department intervened and saved Lee from disciplinary action.

 

In the mid-1950s, by which time the company was now generally known as Atlas Comics, Lee wrote stories in a variety of genres including romance, Westerns, humor, science fiction, medieval adventure, horror and suspense. In the 1950s, Lee teamed up with his comic book colleague Dan DeCarlo to produce the syndicated newspaper strip My Friend Irma, based on the radio comedy starring Marie Wilson. By the end of the decade, Lee had become dissatisfied with his career and considered quitting the field.

 

MARVEL COMICS

Marvel revolution
In the late 1950s, DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz revived the superhero archetype and experienced a significant success with its updated version of the Flash, and later with super-team the Justice League of America. In response, publisher Martin Goodman assigned Lee to come up with a new superhero team. Lee's wife suggested that he experiment with stories he preferred, since he was planning on changing careers and had nothing to lose.

 

Lee acted on that advice, giving his superheroes a flawed humanity, a change from the ideal archetypes that were typically written for preteens. Before this, most superheroes were idealistically perfect people with no serious, lasting problems. Lee introduced complex, naturalistic characters who could have bad tempers, fits of melancholy, and vanity; they bickered amongst themselves, worried about paying their bills and impressing girlfriends, got bored or were even sometimes physically ill.

 

The first superheroes Lee and artist Jack Kirby created together were the Fantastic Four. The team's immediate popularity led Lee and Marvel's illustrators to produce a cavalcade of new titles. Again working with Kirby, Lee co-created the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and the X-Men; with Bill Everett, Daredevil; and with Steve Ditko, Doctor Strange and Marvel's most successful character, Spider-Man, all of whom lived in a thoroughly shared universe. Lee and Kirby gathered several of their newly created characters together into the team title The Avengers and would revive characters from the 1940s such as the Sub-Mariner and Captain America. Years later, Kirby and Lee would contest who deserved credit for creating The Fantastic Four.

 

 

Comics historian Peter Sanderson wrote that in the 1960s:

 

"DC was the equivalent of the big Hollywood studios: After the brilliance of DC's reinvention of the superhero ... in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it had run into a creative drought by the decade's end. There was a new audience for comics now, and it wasn't just the little kids that traditionally had read the books. The Marvel of the 1960s was in its own way the counterpart of the French New Wave... Marvel was pioneering new methods of comics storytelling and characterization, addressing more serious themes, and in the process keeping and attracting readers in their teens and beyond. Moreover, among this new generation of readers were people who wanted to write or draw comics themselves, within the new style that Marvel had pioneered, and push the creative envelope still further."

 

To know more about Comic legend Stan Lee, click here.

 

 

Edited April 15, 2020 by DarkRavie

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - TIME DILATION

Did you know.... that time dilation is a difference in the elapsed time measured by two clocks, either due to them having a velocity relative to each other, or by there being a gravitational potential difference between their locations. (Wikipedia)

 

Time dilation is the idea that when you go up in space you come back to earth younger than you would have been if you had stayed on earth. Time dilation moves at the speed of light and moving at the speed of light makes you travel faster into the future.

 

According to the theory of relativity, time dilation is a difference in the elapsed time measured by two observers, either due to a velocity difference relative to each other, or by being differently situated relative to a gravitational field.

 

Time passes more quickly further from a center of gravity, as is witnessed with massive objects (like the Earth)

 

As a result of the nature of spacetime, a clock that is moving relative to an observer will be measured to tick slower than a clock that is at rest in the observer's own frame of reference. A clock that is under the influence of a stronger gravitational field than an observer's will also be measured to tick slower than the observer's own clock.

 

Illustration of spacetime curvature

 

Such time dilation has been repeatedly demonstrated, for instance by small inconsistencies in a pair of atomic clocks after one of them is sent on a space trip, or by clocks on the Space Shuttle running slightly slower than reference clocks on Earth, or clocks on GPS (Global Positioning System) and Galileo satellites running slightly faster.

 

Discovery lifts off at the start of STS-120.

 

Time dilation has also been the subject of science fiction works, as it technically provides the means for forward time travel.

 

Theoretically, time dilation would make it possible for passengers in a fast-moving vehicle to advance further into the future in a short period of their own time. For sufficiently high speeds, the effect is dramatic. For example, one year of travel might correspond to ten years on Earth. Indeed, a constant 1 g (gravity) acceleration would permit humans to travel through the entire known Universe in one human lifetime.

 

With current technology severely limiting the velocity of space travel, however, the differences experienced in practice are minuscule: after 6 months on the International Space Station (ISS) (which orbits Earth at a speed of about 7,700 m/s) an astronaut would have aged about 0.005 seconds less than those on Earth. The cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Sergei Avdeyev both experienced time dilation of about 20 milliseconds compared to time that passed on Earth.

 

Source: Kiddle Encyclopedia

 

Time dilation, in the theory of special relativity, the “slowing down” of a clock as determined by an observer who is in relative motion with respect to that clock. In special relativity, an observer in inertial (i.e., nonaccelerating) motion has a well-defined means of determining which events occur simultaneously with a given event. A second inertial observer, who is in relative motion with respect to the first, however, will disagree with the first observer regarding which events are simultaneous with that given event. (Neither observer is wrong in this determination; rather, their disagreement merely reflects the fact that simultaneity is an observer-dependent notion in special relativity.) A notion of simultaneity is required in order to make a comparison of the rates of clocks carried by the two observers. If the first observer’s notion of simultaneity is used, it is found that the second observer’s clock runs slower than the first observer’s by a factor of Square root of√(1 − v2/c2), where v is the relative velocity of the observers and c equals 299,792 km (186,282 miles) per second—i.e., the speed of light. Similarly, using the second observer’s notion of simultaneity, it is found that the first observer’s clock runs slower by the same factor. Thus, each inertial observer determines that all clocks in motion relative to that observer run slower than that observer’s own clock.

 

A closely related phenomenon predicted by special relativity is the so-called twin paradox. Suppose one of two twins carrying a clock departs on a rocket ship from the other twin, an inertial observer, at a certain time, and they rejoin at a later time. In accordance with the time-dilation effect, the elapsed time on the clock of the twin on the rocket ship will be smaller than that of the inertial observer twin—i.e., the non-inertial twin will have aged less than the inertial observer twin when they rejoin.

 

time dilation
An informal overview of time dilation in special relativity, as elucidated by Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman.

 

The time-dilation effect predicted by special relativity has been accurately confirmed by observations of the increased lifetime of unstable elementary particles traveling at nearly the speed of light. The clock paradox effect also has been substantiated by experiments comparing the elapsed time of an atomic clock on Earth with that of an atomic clock flown in an airplane. The latter experiments, furthermore, have confirmed a gravitational contribution to time dilation, as predicted by the theory of general relativity.

 

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Edited April 16, 2020 by DarkRavie

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - CHARACTER QUIRKS

Did you know... that writing great characters is a constant balancing act — you want each one to have certain quirks and flaws, but you don’t want them to be SO zany that they’re off-putting to readers? So how can you come up with realistic traits that humanize your characters, without falling into cliché?

 

 

What are character quirks?

A character quirk is an unusual feature that sets your character apart from others. Many of the most famous figures in literature have distinctive quirks, from Harry Potter’s lightning scar to Hercule Poirot’s mind-blowing detective abilities.

 

To clarify, “quirk” doesn’t just mean any descriptive quality — for example, having brown hair does nothing to make your character special. Having blue hair, however, is a different story. Basically, for something to be a quirk, it has to stand out from the pack; it has to be, well, quirky.

 

This might be a physical feature or something about your character’s personality. It might be a special talent (like heightened intelligence) or a paralyzing fear (like arachnophobia). But whatever it is, it should be unusual enough that readers remember it and associate it with whichever character possesses that trait.

 

How to use character quirks
You might think that deploying a character quirk is pretty simple — just think of one, add it to a description, and you’re done! But it’s actually a bit more nuanced than that. Here are a few ways to ensure that these quirks work effectively in your story.

 

Make them important to the plot

Some of the best quirks are those that end up aiding the character or contributing to the plot in some major way. For instance, one of Katniss’ traits in The Hunger Games is that she’s an exceptional hunter, and her skill with a bow and arrow ultimately helps her survive the games. Or think about the example above of Harry’s scar — not only is it a unique physical feature, but it also lets him know when Voldemort is nearby.

 

Don’t overuse them 

Avoid making any of your characters too quirky. You don’t want any of them, especially female characters, to cross the line from unique to unbelievably idiosyncratic.

 

Also avoid describing these quirks in too much detail, as this can lead to overly ornate descriptions that make readers cringe. If you find yourself writing a paragraph in your YA romance about “her freckled face that looked like constellations of hazel, shimmering dots practically leaping off her countenance,” stop and reevaluate. Even when introducing a quirk, a brief mention is enough: “A puzzled expression spread across her freckled face.”

 

Be consistent, with occasional exceptions
Some of these traits should define how your characters act most of the time, but rules are made to be broken — which is why it’s okay to let people go against their quirks every once in a while. For example, a notoriously unfunny person might crack a decent joke, or somebody super-stoic sheds a tear. After all, if a character doesn’t defy their typical traits every once in a while, they’re at risk of becoming flat.

 

Try to stay original
As you’re figuring out which quirks to give your characters, do your best to be as innovative and original as possible. While almost every quirk in the book has been used at one time or another, your characters’ traits should function in different ways and create a totally unique dynamic in your story.

 

That being said, here are some ideas to get the ball rolling on various quirks you might use. They’re divided by physical features, personality traits, and strengths and weaknesses, for your perusing convenience. There’s also a list of clichéd quirks at the very end, so you know exactly which ones to avoid. Enjoy!

 

 

These traits have to do with someone’s looks or physical mannerisms.

 

• Unique eye or hair color
• Extremely short or tall
• Some discerning physical mark — birthmark, freckles, mole, or scar
• Wears unusual glasses
• Has braces and headgear
• Large feet — may mean they’re clumsy
• Bites their nails/lips or chews on their hair
• Constantly fidgeting and can’t sit still
• Acne, eczema, or other skin problems
• Many tattoos or piercings
• Often sick or has allergies (constantly sniffling/blowing their nose)
• Talks very loudly or quietly
• Says everything like it’s a question
• Terrible breath — may be a coffee drinker
• Gets sweaty easily (especially when nervous)
• Unusually hairy arms or legs
• Very long painted nails
• Always wears a faceful of makeup
• Has a stutter or other speech impediment
• Often tucks their hair behind their ears
• Constantly chews gum
• Always picking their teeth
• Smokes and has a raspy voice
• Breathes heavily or snores
• Is extremely muscular
• Walks very slowly or quickly
• Left-handed or ambidextrous
• Constantly scratching themselves
• Has some noticeable physical tic, like a twitch
• Always wears a distinct item of clothing or accessory — a favorite pair of socks, a lucky jersey, or even a particular shade of lipstick

 

If you choose to assign a specific physical quirk to character, remember to be consistent! It can be distracting to readers if someone keeps alternating between eye colors, or if they’re supposed to be extremely short, but have no trouble reaching a high shelf.

 

Of course, these can be some of the hardest details to remember, since physical appearance isn’t an inherent part of your character’s personality and won’t necessarily affect how they act. Try using a character profile template to keep track of these quirks so you don’t accidentally contradict yourself!

 

Personality

 

These qualities describe how someone acts and what they’re like.

• Very introverted, quiet and reserved, keeps to themselves
• Highly extroverted, loves socializing and meeting new people
• Mega control freak who has to have everything their way
• Neat freak (often coincides with control freak)
• Total slob who never knows where anything is
• Super stubborn and will never admit when they’re wrong
• Brutally honest and can’t lie to save their life
• Extremely judgmental of other people
• Short-tempered, especially when irritated
• Always patient, even when frustrated
• Hilarious or odd sense of humor
• Very hard to make them laugh
• Loves to eat and is obsessed with food
• Loves to drink and is constantly partying
• Constantly complains about everything
• Extremely loyal and will do anything for their friends/family
• Adventurous and willing to try anything
• Cautious and careful no matter what
• Energetic, hardly ever needs to rest
• Sleeps all the time and still gets tired during the day
• Horrible sense of direction and constantly gets lost
• Overachiever who loves school/structure
• Really modest and won’t ever brag about themselves
• Extremely emotional and will cry at the drop of a hat
• Stoic and detached, rarely shows emotion
• Wildcard whose behavior is unpredictable, even to their friends
• Notoriously two-faced and will betray anyone
• Charismatic and can convince anyone to do their bidding
• Very proper and always polite to others
• Dates tons of people and has a new boyfriend or girlfriend every week
• Obsessive personality — whether it’s a TV show, brand, musical artist, or even another person, they’ll get attached and think/talk about it constantly

 

Some of these clearly match up with each other (like being adventurous and energetic), while some are opposites (like being short-tempered vs. patient). However, some might overlap even if they don’t seem like they should — for example, someone with a great sense of humor might still be hard to make laugh because they’d have very high standards for what’s funny. As you’re creating characters, think carefully about these traits and how they might relate to each other.

Want to read more about Character Quirks? Click here.

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - FLAMINGOS

Did you know... that flamingos or flamingoes are a type of wading bird in the family Phoenicopteridae, the only bird family in the order Phoenicopteriformes? Four flamingo species are distributed throughout the Americas, including the Caribbean, and two species are native to Africa, Asia, and Europe. (Wikipedia)

 

Flamingos are a familiar sight even to those who have never seen one in real life. The tropical wading birds have long legs with backward-bending knees, long curvy necks, and most noticeably, they are pink. We can admire flamingos or laugh at them (and often both), so we may as well learn something about them.

 

1. There are six distinct species of flamingo, but it takes a trained eye to distinguish them.

 

2. Adult flamingos are four to five feet tall, but only weigh between four and eight pounds. That’s the kind of astonishing body density (or lack of) needed for flight.

 

3. Flamingos tend to congregate in mudflats or lagoons, where they can find shallow saltwater prey. These habitats are also difficult for predators to negotiate.

 

4. Flamingos feed by stirring up mud with their feet. Then they reach down and scoop up a beakful of mud and water. Their beaks are designed to strain animals out of the mud, and the muddy water is expelled. This happens as the flamingo’s head is upside-down.

5. The American flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) is the only flamingo species native to North America, but is rarely seen in the United States anymore. It is generally more brightly colored than the Greater flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus) that inhabits the coasts of Africa, Asia, and southern Europe. Although the Greater flamingo is the most widespread species, the most numerous is the Lesser flamingo (Phoenicopterus minor).

 

6. The color pink comes from beta-carotene in the crustaceans and plankton that flamingos eat. Zoo flamingos will turn white if their diet is not supplemented with live shrimp or flamingo chow containing carotenoid pigments.

 

7. The feathers under their wings (flight feathers) are black. You only see them when the birds are flying.

 

8. Flamingos flock in groups of up to several hundred birds. They often perform their mating displays together, like this flamingo flamenco. However, different species and even different flocks will put a slightly different spin on their communal rituals. Read about some of the individual mating dance moves. 

 

9. The male and female of a mating pair build a nest together, and both sit on the egg while it incubates for about a month.

 

10. Some flamingos find it easier to steal a nest that’s already been built, so mating pairs must guard a nest from other flamingos as well as predators.

 

11. When a flamingo chick hatches, both parents take turns feeding it: first with a special liquid baby food they produce in their throats called crop milk, then with regurgitated regular flamingo food as the chick ages.

 

12. Flamingo chicks are born with grey and white feathers. They do not turn pink for a year or two. Their beaks are straight, and begin to curve as they grow and mature.

 

13. A variety of land predators will eat flamingos and their eggs, but since their nests are built on swampland or mudflats, the most common predators for flamingos are other birds.

 

14. Flamingos are not endangered; they are classified as “least concern” as their numbers are fairly stable. Whether they stay stable will depend on what happens to their habitats and breeding grounds in the future. There is one related species that is declining, however…

 

15. Plastic lawn flamingos (Phoenicopterus plasticus) are an American cultural icon that was introduced in 1957 by artist Don Featherstone. In the 21st century, they are considered endangered. Efforts are underway to revive the art form, and in 2009, Madison, Wisconsin, named the plastic pink flamingo the city’s official bird.

 

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BEER FACTS

Did you know... that Japanese sake is actually a type of beer, not a wine?

• Your tongue has about 10,000 taste buds, so put them to good work and try a new beer!
• 85 to 90% of beer consumed in Canada is manufactured in Canada. How many industries can say the same thing?
• Canada has one of the highest beer taxes in the world.
• In Canada, beer has 3 times the economic impact of wine and spirits combined.
• The Canadian brewing industry has reduced its energy consumption by 58% since 1990, which is beneficial to the environment and saves costs.

Beer Ingredients:
Beer is fat-free.

 

Barley

Local breweries annually purchase 300,000 tonnes of Canadian malting barley.
 

Malting is a process where the precious parts of a grain of cereal are awakened and used to create flavour, colour and mouthfeel in beer. The malting process begins by soaking the grains in water for several days. This process (soaking) is designed to replace nature by providing the water and oxygen needed for the grain to grow. After several days, the grain is allowed to grow naturally under controlled conditions of temperature and humidity (germination). The last step in malting is warming the grain to reduce moisture, create a colour and flavour and stabilize the malt.
 

Brewing barley in Canada is about 20% Of all the barley produced here and is considered a speciality crop. Other grains that can be used include wheat, rye, oats and sorghum. Each of them has advantages, but barley continues to be the majority of all grains used in the brewery.
 

Even in wheat beer, the proportion of barley is generally higher than 50%. This is due to the reality that other grains are malted without pods and are difficult to filter on their own. Malt provides a spectrum of beer colour that goes from pale straw to black. The pale malt creates the lighter colour and flavours observed in the easier beers to drink and soak thirst while the dark malts are responsible for richer and more robust colours in wearers and stouts.
 

A variety of caramel coloured malts use to have an impact on colour, but more so to create complex aromas and aromas in beer. Kilning is the source of almost all malt flavours in beer. Maillard Chemistry is the science of caramelization and explains the colour, flavour and aroma of malt.

 

Water

Beer is 90% water.
All waters are not created equal: the origin and treatment of water have an impact on the finished beer, both at the molecular and sensorial levels.
 

Brewery masters often consider that the water used in the beer is "soft" or "hard". Hard water has higher levels of mineral content (usually calcium and magnesium) while fresh water is largely free of minerals. The fresh water allows a beer to gently enter the mouth and also extends the finish. Hard water, on the other hand, can increase the characteristics of the hop, arrive with distinct clarity and come out of your mouth quickly.
Burton-upon-Trent in England is renowned for having the toughest brewing water in the world and due to its impact on the creation of Pale Ales and India Pale Ales has also created a unique word for re-mineralization. Burtonisation is now an accepted term in infusion for the addition of calcium sulphate and magnesium sulphate to the brewing water. In Canada, there are many places where water is hard.
 

Many brewers filter their water before brewing. It is very important to remove chlorine, fluoride and any other component that can negatively affect the flavour of the beer.

 

Hop

Hops must be boiled vigorously to extract the bitterness.
 

Hops are cultivated between the 35th and 55th parallel in the northern and southern hemispheres because they require specific summer day lengths to produce cones.
 

Hop plants can grow up to 6 meters in a year and quite often 30cm in a day.
 

Most of the hops that are used in the brewery are grown and grown in the United States or Germany, but many other countries, including Canada, contribute to the overall world hops agriculture.
 

Hop varieties were transported from Europe to the New World and planted by settlers. Descending strains of some of these plants can still be found wild in the countryside in climates where hops bloom.
 

Low alpha acid hops are generally used to create fine flavours and are added very late in the brewing stage. Hops with higher alpha acids are considered bittering hops and are added very early in the kettle during boiling.
 

Modern brewers often refer to IBUs as a measure of bitterness in beer. The International Bittering Unit (IBU) measures the remaining alpha-acids after boiling. The scale is normally from 0 to 100. Lighter beers will generally measure between 6-17 IBU, while North American APIs can often reach IBU over 60. Although this is a scientific measure, it does not measure perceived bitterness. For example, a high-malt beer may have an IBU of 80, but it can only be perceived as 40 because of the balance between malt and hops.
 

The flavours and aromas of hops are largely determined by terroir (impact of soil, water, time and sun). Brewers choose the type of hop they want based on the style of beer and whether the flavors and flavors will attract the interest of the beer drinker.

Yeast

Most of the brewed yeasts belong to a family called Saccharomyces.
 

Ale yeasts work best at warmer temperatures and therefore take longer to ferment. Lager (a German word for aging) yeasts are best used at colder temperatures and fermentations take almost twice as long as ales. While many small brewers buy their yeast from reputable suppliers, large brewers actually propagate their own exclusive strains of pure yeast.
 

Yeast is remarkably temperature sensitive and can create completely different beers with only a small temperature variation in the brewing process.

 

Other Ingredients

Any carbohydrate (other than malt) is considered an adjunct in the brewing terms. This word is defined as an alternative source.
 

Ingredients like dried fruits and spices have been used for centuries to create flavor and aroma in beer. Examples include orange, coriander and non-malted wheat.
 

Some beers use other grains such as rice and maize as a complement to malt. The goal behind these lighter flavored cereals is to create a beer with a lighter body and a softer taste. This brewing mode is designed to produce beers that are light and easy to drink.

 

Tasting and serving beer:

When experimenting with taste-testing, try to take notes with a mechanical pencil, as the smell of a wood pencil can affect your perceptions of the beer in question.
 

The head on the side of your glass? That is called "lacing" and is a sign of a clean glass and a good brew. 
 

Professional tasters may prefer their beer be presented in stemmed white wine glasses because of the shape: by holding the stem, the beer is not warmed up by the judge's hand, while the upward lip of the glass allows the beer's aromas to flow freely. 
 

Amber glass bottles provide excellent protection against light (natural and artificial) that interacts with hop compounds and can cause the beer to have a "skunky" taste. Beer with this quality is sometimes called "light struck" beer.

 

A little history:

• In history, the brewing of beer emerged around the same time that communities of nomadic tribes took up agriculture, growing cereals for subsistence.
• Brewing was a domestic art, practised mainly by women in their own homes for personal enjoyment and special occasions.
• Sumerians, the first great civilization of Mesopotamia, are well documented in their love of beer and the importance of beer in their ancient culture.
• There is documentation of diet beer brewed in ancient Sumer. It was called eb-la, which translates as "lessens the waist".
• The first brewer registered in Canada is the Jesuit brother Ambroise, who began making beer in 1646 after the founding of New France.
• A few years later, the Grand Intendant Jean Talon founded Quebec's first commercial brewery in Quebec City to reduce the colony's dependence on imported brandy. The brewery, inaugurated in 1688, was so successful that its beers were sold in the West Indies, making it the first Canadian beer ever exported.
• Louis Pasteur published "Beer Studies" in 1876, an essential document describing the causes of the spoilage of beer and suggestions for avoiding it.
• Beer was so important at the beginning of Canadian culture that at the time of Confederation in 1867 there was already a tradition of brewing established in the colonies.
• During the period of settlement in Canadian history, the tavern served as a place to have a pint, a meal and perhaps a bed to stay the night. But they also served as a gathering place for the community: where judges would hear complaints, politicians would ask for votes and preachers would convey their message.
• The first Canadian drinkers would have thought that the term "social drinking" was redundant: having a pint meant being among compatriots in a public drinking establishment.
• Canned beer gained consumer popularity with soldiers who had returned from World War II, familiar and comfortable with cans of their time abroad.
• The increased use of glasses has allowed bar guests to have a good overview of what they drank, a luxury not offered by old tin and terracotta cups. This has led to the decline in the popularity of the porter and to an increase in the popularity of pale ales and other varieties of  light coloured beer.
• The historical dominance of beer in western Canada is partly explained by the influence of German-American brewers immigrating north to the prairie towns with the intention of serving thirsty customers.

Source: Beer Canada

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - VINYL RECORDS

Did you know... that a phonograph record or vinyl record, often simply record, is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The groove usually starts near the periphery and ends near the center of the disc. (Wikipedia)

 

The First Vinyl Record

Phonograph records were made from shellac which was noisy and didn’t last very long. In 1931 RCA Victor released the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra performing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony under the direction of Leopold Stokowski on 12’ vinyl – making it the first vinyl record. Why the Philadelphia Symphony? RCA Victor’s headquarters and main factory were right across the Delaware River in Camden, NJ. Later that year RCA introduced the vinyl 33 1/3 RPM LP, but in the midst of the Great Depression the product was a dismal failure.

 

 

Thirty-three and A Third

Seventeen years later, Columbia Records released the first commercially available “microgroove plastic, 12-inch, 33-1/3 LP.” This new technology extended playback time to nearly 22 minutes and was much quieter than shellac. The dawn of the Age of Hi-Fi had come. 

 

Why 33 1/3?

Antique 78 rpm speed gramophone record on turntable

Thomas Edison’s first Victrola’s were hand-cranked – so playback speed varied and the joy of listening to music wore off as soon as your arm got tired. Electric motors were eventually introduced around the turn of the 20th Century and the 78 RPM speed became the standard simply because 3600RPM electric motors with a 46:1 ratio were the most affordable and available motors. At this speed only about five minutes of audio was available per side.

Edison Victrola

 

In the 1920s when the first Hollywood movies with sound were released the ten-minute audio platter wasn’t practical to use for motion picture soundtracks. The Vitaphone recording system was introduced which still employed the same 3600RPM motor but with a new gear ratio of 108:1 which resulted in the now-standard 33 1/3 RPM disk.

 

Vitaphone
 

By the early 1930’s on-film "optical soundtracks" replaced the Vitaphone system for movies, but radio stations loved the new platform for music, so it became the standard in the audio industry.

 

Optical Soundtrack

 

The Inside Sounds Worse Than the Outside
Have you ever noticed that the best songs on an album are usually reserved for the first one or two track on either side? There’s a reason for this that goes beyond getting your attention: Songs closer to the center of a record sound worse than those on the outside. On the outside of the LP the audio signal is cut across a relatively long section of vinyl resulting in a higher quality sound. Toward the center the grooves get shorter and the music is cut into a much smaller section of vinyl – the smaller the section the lower the fidelity. The needle also changes its angle as it moves inward, making tracking less accurate. That’s why your favorite LPs generally keep the quiet stuff on the inside and the loud stuff on the outside.

 

Jumping Out of the Groove
Mastering a vinyl record is an arcane art all onto itself. Mastering engineers need to adjust the groove pitch to account for musical dynamics but there are minimum and maximum depths that can be used. If there is too much low frequency information and a lot of other information spread across the stereo field (i.e. both sides of the groove) the stylus is forced out of the out of the groove. If the groove is too shallow and narrow the music loses its stereo image and volume.

 

 

 

Fancy Vinyl

Some vinyl lovers claim that records cut on color vinyl sounds worse than records cut on black vinyl. Some also claim that records on colored vinyl skip in sections where there is no skip on the black copy. This is typically an issue with lower quality turntable and cartridges, but even though the groove cut is the same regardless of the color of the vinyl there is some truth to this claim. Standard black vinyl is the quietest in terms of surface noise, followed by transparent colors and opaque colored vinyl. Recycled vinyl, multi-colored or vinyl with designs on it, glow in the dark, and glitter records are much noisier. Since surface noise can tend to make a needle jump the groove there is some merit to the claims.

 

The Beatles

The best-selling album of 1967 was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles which sold 250,000 copies in the first week in the UK alone. Fifty years later the best-selling vinyl album was Blurryface by Twenty-One Pilots which shifted 49,000 units. The fourth best-selling album in 2016 was The Beatles’ Abbey Road which shifted 39,000 units.

 

Across the Universe

Voyager I and II are carrying record albums made of copper that are analog time-capsules from the late 1970s (when the spacecraft were launched). The albums contain greetings in fifty-five languages, musical selections from different eras and cultures, and information about where the records came from. Voyager 1 is 12 billion miles and Voyager 2 is 10 billion miles from Earth, making those two records arguably the most widely distributed albums of all time.

 

The Most Expensive Album That Wasn’t Sent Into Space

A single acetate test pressing of The Velvet Underground & Nico recorded at Scepter Studios in 1967 fetched $25,000 at auction.

You Probably Don’t have the Largest Vinyl Collection on the Planet
In spite of how proud you are over the size of your vinyl collection, a Brazilian billionaire has you beat. His personal collection has over 6,000,000 albums and is growing – he buys out the entire stock of stores that go out of business and he has a staff of buyers that regularly travel to Europe and the United States to buy close-out stock and attend auctions.

Source: KEF.com

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - "ANNIE" (1982)

Did you know... that Little Orphan Annie has been a part of American pop culture for nearly a century now—first as a comic strip which made its debut in the summer of 1924, then as a popular radio show in the 1930s, which spun off into a couple of film productions later in that decade and a hit Broadway musical in 1977? Though the musical version has been adapted to the big-screen a few times over the years, most recently in 2014, the 1982 version—starring Aileen Quinn as the titular orphan—is the best known big-screen version.

 

1. AT THE TIME, IT WAS THE MOST EXPENSIVE MUSICAL EVER MADE.

Though the final budget varies from source to source, most agree that it cost about $40 million to produce Annie, with a large part of that budget (about $9.5 million) spent on buying the rights to the popular 1977 Broadway play the film was based on. There were also the not insubstantial costs of advertising the film and producing prints, which, according to a 1982 edition of the Los Angeles Hollywood Examiner, were around $9 million. Unfortunately, the movie’s revenue didn’t even come close to recouping its expenses.

 

2. THE CREATOR OF THE ANNIE MUSICAL HATED THE MOVIE.

Martin Charnin

 

Martin Charnin, conceiver, director, and lyricist of the Broadway hit, had nothing good to say about what producer Ray Stark and director John Huston did to his play. When he sold the rights, he relinquished all creative control. The result, Charnin told the Hartford Courant, was this: “Warbucks, played by Albert Finney, 'was an Englishman who screamed.' Hannigan, played by Carol Burnett, was 'a man-crazy drunk.' And Annie was 'cute-ed up.' Worse, the emotional relationship between Annie and Warbucks was distorted. They even downplayed the hit song "Tomorrow'' because 'Stark thought it was corny.'"

 

3. JOHN HUSTON WAS HIRED TO DIRECT BECAUSE OF HIS SIMILARITIES TO DADDY WARBUCKS.

If you wanted darkness, grit, and intrigue in your film, you got John Huston to direct it. The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, Beat the Devil, ... Annie? Huston was an odd choice, but producer Stark insisted. To Stark, the grizzled, then-76-year-old director was the embodiment of Daddy Warbucks, the gruff billionaire who shouts, “I love money, I love capitalism! I do not and will not ever love children!” (Of course there is also the rumor that Huston only agreed to do such a far-flung project because he was desperate for money.)

 

4. ALBERT FINNEY WAS HARDLY THE FIRST CHOICE TO PLAY DADDY WARBUCKS.

While Bette Midler was the first choice to play Miss Hannigan (a role that went to Carol Burnett), there were many actors ahead of Albert Finney on the Daddy Warbucks lineup. Finney had Hollywood experience, but the stage was more his realm. Reportedly, Sean Connery was approached, but didn’t want to appear bald. Even Cary Grant, who would have been in his late 70s at the time and hadn’t made a movie since 1966, was asked.

 

5. “EASY STREET" WAS ORIGINALLY A HUGE, OUTDOOR NUMBER.

 

The first incarnation of the show-stopping “Easy Street” was literally performed in a street, with the three enthralling villains of the film—Miss Hannigan (Burnett), Rooster (Tim Curry), and Lily (Bernadette Peters), displaying their joyous greed against a backdrop of dozens of dancing street vendors. After it was shot, Huston decided it wasn’t intimate enough and, more importantly, the setting distracted from the three enormous personalities at the center of it. Burnett, Curry, and Peters were more interesting to watch just by themselves than in a whole studio full of performers. (You can see some grainy bits from the original version here.)

 

6. THE RE-SHOOT OF "EASY STREET" WAS MILDLY COMPLICATED BY BURNETT'S CHIN SURGERY.
After primary shooting, Carol Burnett underwent surgery to correct her overbite and align her jaw. When she was called back to re-shoot “Easy Street,” she had a new face.  As quoted in the Chicago Tribune, she told her director about her concerns. "Mr. Huston," she remembered saying, "Two months ago, when I went into the closet, I didn't have a chin."

 

"Dear," he responded, "just come out looking determined."

 

7. NEW JERSEY'S GOVERNOR SIGNED A LAW TO ALLOW CHILDREN IN THE CAST TO WORK AT NIGHT.
Annie’s climactic scene was partly shot on the Passaic River’s NX railroad drawbridge, which had been abandoned in the raised position in 1977. The scene called for Annie to climb the bridge like a ladder with Rooster following in a murderous rage. All of this took place in the dead of night, and New Jersey's child labor laws prohibited children employed in making films from working after 11:30 p.m. and before 7 a.m. More night hours would be needed to complete the shoot, and the state government was accommodating, with Governor Brendan Byrne helicoptering to the set to sign a bill amending the law, which now allows the Commissioner of Education “the authority to amend the hours of the day during which a minor may work but not the total hours.”

 

8. THERE WERE AROUND 500 DIFFERENT PRODUCT TIE-INS FOR THE FILM.

 

Annie’s merchandising began three years before the film was released. Producer Ray Stark knew that the whole world was anticipating his movie, and he intended to use that interest toward a licensing boom. Tie-ins included contracts with Crayola, Random House, Marriott hotels, Sears Roebuck & Co., Knickerbocker Toys, Procter & Gamble, and Ken-L-Ration dog food. The products would include umbrellas, wigs, lunch boxes, dog accessories, a Parker Brothers board game, a line of Marvel Comics, Annie ice cream, Annie cookies, Annie designer jeans, and hundreds more.

 

9. AROUND 8000 GIRLS AUDITIONED TO PLAY ANNIE.
Two years before the film version, Aileen Quinn was in the Broadway production of Annie. She was a “swing orphan,” meaning she was trained to play any of the orphans except Annie (who, at the start of Quinn’s tenure, was Sarah Jessica Parker). Auditions for the film began in 1980 and took an entire year.

 

The casting director had a clever way to speed the process along, according to PBS's “Lights, Camera, Annie!” Annie hopefuls lined up and each girl sang a part of “Tomorrow,” with the next girl picking up where the last left one off. Quinn was called back eight times until the production team was totally convinced she was the perfect combination of grit and sweetness. “I was completely in shock," Quinn remembered. "I didn’t believe it until the casting agent showed me the production schedule, and I was scheduled to appear on The Today Show at 7:00 a.m. the next morning. That’s when I believed it!"

 

10. FINNEY HAD LITTLE EXPERIENCE WITH SONG AND DANCE.

Finney was a trained Shakespearean stage actor and widely regarded for his dramatic roles. He’d only ever sang and danced once before in a performance, in the 1970 musical Scrooge. As a crotchety Scrooge, his singing and dancing came out more like cleverly inflected growls and splay-footed leaps. Annie didn’t require him to become Baryshnikov with the voice of Pavarotti, but it did call for ballad singing and a tap dance routine.

 

"One of my favorite memories of him is [Albert] learning to really sing for the first time," Quinn said. "He did that beautiful version of 'Maybe' ... As he was taking singing lessons on the set, I can remember him with a cigar out of his mouth and going 'la la la la la la la,' pause, 'la la la la la la la.'" This, plus Finney’s habit of putting bottle caps under his loafers to practice his tap routine, thoroughly charmed the 10-year-old Quinn. "He was, like, in it to win it ... so adorable."

 

11. THE WARBUCKS MANSION WAS A REAL HOUSE, BUT ONLY BRIEFLY.

 

It was hard to find the right place for Oliver Warbucks to call home. Many of the grandest homes of the Gilded Age had been turned into museums, and the others had been overly featured in other movies and on television. Then Huston found Shadow Lawn, a 130-room New Jersey palace built in 1927 for Hubert Templeton Parson, the then-president of Woolworths. It was designed by Horace Trumbauer and his assistant Julian Abele, considered by some to be the first African American architect in America.

 

Within 10 years, Parson went broke and his home was appropriated by the city. After that, according to The New York Times, it served as a military academy, a military hospital, and a school for girls, but never again as a private home. In the 1950s, Monmouth College bought the mansion and its 108 acres, and it remains a part of the school's campus today.

 

12. AILEEN QUINN USED TO TEACH AT THE UNIVERSITY THAT OWNS THE “WARBUCKS” MANSION.
Years after filming her performance in Annie, Quinn returned to the scene of her childhood stardom when she began teaching at Monmouth University. According to a 2012 interview with Entertainment Weekly:

 

"A couple years before I started teaching, I went there for a big fundraiser to help them raise money for education. So I went back for the first time and actually got very emotional. It’s that staircase that does it. After I gave my speech they had me go up the stairs and I sang “Tomorrow." That was so surreal. I was walking down that staircase again, and even though they had tables set up for the gala, I couldn’t help but think, “Oh my god, that’s where I karate chopped and that’s where I was on his shoulders.” I actually was flashing back, and that got our wheels spinning: this is an obvious match. There were some conversations afterwards and they asked if I would be interested in teaching, and I said I would actually love that. Next thing I knew, I was teaching a theater course. 

 

 

13. THE "ORIGINAL" ANNIE MOVIE WAS NOT THE FIRST BIG-SCREEN INCARNATION OF THE LITTLE ORPHAN.
As even the most casual fan of A Christmas Story knows, Annie was a radio program before it was a movie (and she wanted you to drink your Ovaltine). But that wasn’t even close to the beginning of America’s relationship with the sassy Little Orphan Annie. The original Annie as we know her appeared in a comic strip started in 1924 by Harold Gray. It was going to be “Little Orphan Otto,” but a friend convinced Gray to change it based on James Whitcomb Riley’s even older 1885 poem “Little Orphant Annie,” which in turn was based on a real orphan child living with the Riley family, Mary Alice Smith.

 

The comic strip ran for decades and limped along for about 40 more years after Gray’s death. Annie of the comics was Nancy Drew crossed with Dick Tracy; she spent a lot of her time fighting Nazis and uncovering communist plots. And those round, empty eye sockets? Those were on purpose, according to Gray. “The blank eyeballs served to enhance reader involvement with the strip: not seeing what is going on in the eyes of the characters, readers could impose their own fears and concerns into the narrative.”

 

In the 1930s, two Annie adventure movies were made. The Broadway play released in 1977 was the most successful incarnation of Annie since her days of being shot at by gangsters. It was followed by the 1982 movie, a made-for-television remake in 1999, and a 2014 reboot.

 

 

14. 10-YEAR-OLD AILEEN QUINN WON BOTH A RAZZIE AND A BEST YOUNG ARTIST FILM AWARD FOR HER PERFORMANCE.

 

It is indicative of how puzzled people were with Annie that they couldn’t decide if its tiny star was a prodigy or a freckle-faced misery. She was awarded the Razzie for Worst Actress in a lead role, but took home a Best Young Artist Award, too. She also received a Golden Globe nomination.

 

15. TIM CURRY SIGNED ON FOR THE PART OF ROOSTER BECAUSE MUSICALS WERE SOME OF THE ONLY MOVIES HE WAS ALLOWED TO WATCH GROWING UP.
Tim Curry was the son of a Royal Navy Chaplain and a school secretary. He described his childhood as “strict,” and that fact might have had an effect on his career choices. During this unedited interview, a very bored, jet-lagged looking young Curry describes his desire to be in Annie.  “Long time ambition really, to do a Hollywood musical. [They] were one of the movies I was allowed to see. I had a very strict childhood, but Hollywood musicals were all right.” But wait, if you want to see a tiny flash of the man who brought Pennywise, Frank-n-Furter, and Darkness to life, skip to 3:30, where he describes his character, Rooster.

 

Source: Hard-Knock Facts about Annie

 

 

 

Edited April 21, 2020 by DarkRavie

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - DIVING HORSE

Did you know... that a diving horse is an attraction that was popular in the mid-1880s, in which a horse would dive into a pool of water, sometimes from as high as 60 feet? The shows received very strong criticisms of animal welfare abuses, which contributed to the decline of its popularity.

 

 

William "Doc" Carver "invented" the idea of horse diving exhibitions. Allegedly, in 1881 Carver was crossing a bridge over Platte River (Nebraska) which partially collapsed. His horse fell/dived into the waters below, inspiring Carver to develop the diving horse act. Carver trained various animals and went on tour. His partner, Al Floyd Carver, constructed the ramp and tower and his rider Lorena Carver was the first rider. Sonora Webster joined the show in 1924. She later married Al Floyd Carver. The show became a permanent fixture at Atlantic City's very popular venue, Steel Pier. There, Sonora, Al and Lorena continued the show following his death.

 

 

In 1931, Sonora and her horse "Red Lips" lost their balance on the platform. Sonora survived the fall, but was blinded (caused by detached retinas in both eyes). She continued horse-diving while blind. In 1991, the film Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken based on Webster's life and her memoir A Girl and Five Brave Horses was released.

 

 

The shows received very strong criticisms of animal welfare abuses, which contributed to the decline of its popularity after World War II. The horses sometimes dove four times a day, seven days a week. There were allegations of using prods, electrical jolts, and trap doors to get unwilling horses to dive. A recent attempt to revive the shows at Steel Pier was halted when animal welfare advocates petitioned the owners not to hold the shows. The president of the Humane Society of the United States stated: "This is a merciful end to a colossally stupid idea."

 

A horse is seen in this file photograph as it makes a

plunge into a pool of water on the Steel Pier in Atlantic

City, N.J., on June 25, 1993. Amid the objections of

animal-rights activists, the diving horses act has been

scrapped.

 

This is just a small glimpse in the sport of diving horses.  From what I've read no horse was ever harmed, but the riders sometimes were. One that lost his life in a dive on Feb. 17, 1907,  was 18-year-old rider Oscar Smith. 

 

 

Click to know more about about the High-Diving Horses that risked death to entertain people.

 

Source: Tattini Riding 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - IMPERIAL SYSTEM

Did you know... that the imperial system of units, imperial system or imperial units is the system of units first defined in the British Weights and Measures Act 1824 and continued to be developed through a series of Weights and Measures Acts and amendments? (Wikipedia)

 

Imperial units, also called British Imperial System, units of measurement of the British Imperial System, the traditional system of weights and measures used officially in Great Britain from 1824 until the adoption of the metric system beginning in 1965. The United States Customary System of weights and measures is derived from the British Imperial System. Imperial units are now legally defined in metric terms.

 

Early Origins
The British Imperial System evolved from the thousands of Roman, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and customary local units employed in the Middle Ages. Traditional names such as pound, foot, and gallon were widely used, but the values so designated varied with time, place, trade, product specifications, and dozens of other requirements. Early royal standards established to enforce uniformity took the name Winchester, after the ancient capital of Britain, where the 10th-century Saxon king Edgar the Peaceable kept a royal bushel measure and quite possibly others. Fourteenth-century statutes recorded a yard (perhaps based originally on a rod or stick) of 3 feet, each foot containing 12 inches, each inch equaling the length of three barleycorns (employed merely as a learning device since the actual standard was the space between two marks on a yard bar). Units of capacity and weight were also specified. In the late 15th century, King Henry VII reaffirmed the customary Winchester standards for capacity and length and distributed royal standards (physical embodiments of the approved units) throughout the realm. This process was repeated about a century later in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. In the 16th century the rod (5.5 yards, or 16.5 feet) was defined (once again as a learning device and not as a standard) as the length of the left feet of 16 men lined up heel to toe as they emerged from church. By the 17th century usage and statute had established the acre, rod, and furlong at their present values (4,840 square yards, 16.5 feet, and 660 feet, respectively), together with other historic units. The several trade pounds in common use were reduced to just two: the troy pound, primarily for precious metals, and the pound avoirdupois, for other goods sold by weight.

 

Weights and measures being tested during the reign of Henry VII.

 

Establishment Of The System
The Weights and Measures Act of 1824 and the Act of 1878 established the British Imperial System on the basis of precise definitions of selected existing units. The 1824 act sanctioned a single imperial gallon to replace the wine, ale, and corn (wheat) gallons then in general use. The new gallon was defined as equal in volume to 10 pounds avoirdupois of distilled water weighed at 62 °F with the barometer at 30 inches, or 277.274 cubic inches (later corrected to 277.421 cubic inches). The two new basic standard units were the imperial standard yard and the troy pound, which was later restricted to weighing drugs, precious metals, and jewels. A 1963 act abolished such archaic measures as the rod and chaldron (a measure of coal equal to 36 bushels) and redefined the standard yard and pound as 0.9144 metres and 0.45359237 kg respectively. The gallon now equals the space occupied by 10 pounds of distilled water of density 0.998859 gram per millilitre weighed in air of density 0.001217 gram per millilitre against weights of density 8.136 grams per millilitre.

 

Only Three Countries in the World (Officially) Still Use the Imperial System

 

While the British were reforming their weights and measures in the 19th century, the Americans were just adopting units based on those discarded by the act of 1824. The standard U.S. gallon is based on the Queen Anne wine gallon of 231 cubic inches and is about 17 percent smaller than the British imperial gallon. The U.S. bushel of 2,150.42 cubic inches, derived from the Winchester bushel abandoned in Britain, is approximately 3 percent smaller than the British imperial bushel. In the British system, units of dry and liquid capacity are the same, while in the United States they differ; the liquid and dry pint in Britain both equal 0.568 cubic decimetre, while the U.S. liquid pint is 0.473 cubic decimetre, and the U.S. dry pint is 0.551 cubic decimetre. British and American units of linear measure and weight are essentially the same. Notable exceptions are the British stone of 14 pounds, which is not used in the United States, and a divergence in definition of the hundredweight (100 pounds in the United States, 112 in Britain) that yields two different tons, the short U.S. ton of 2,000 pounds and the long British ton of 2,240 pounds. In 1959 major English-speaking nations adopted common metric definitions of the inch (2.54 cm), the yard (0.9144 metres), and the pound (0.4536 kg).

 

Common conversions from English units to SI

 

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

 

 

 

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - THE FLINTSTONES

 

Did you know... that The Flintstones: Pebbles was originally going to be a boy until a toy company said that a girl would make more money because they could sell Pebbles dolls? According to Flintstones creator Joseph Barbera, the dolls made around $3 million in the first two months.

 

Pre-dating The Simpsons by almost 30 years, The Flintstones was the first primetime animated show on TV and, until 1997 when The Simpsons stole the crown, The Flintstones aired the most episodes of any animated show in primetime, with 166 episodes between 1960 and 1966. The show was so successful, it established Hanna-Barbera as the largest producer of animated films.

 

Fred and Wilma Flintstone and their neighbors, Barney and Betty Rubble, live in Bedrock during 10,000 B.C. Fred and Barney work at a quarry, and Betty and Wilma are homemakers who are constantly at odds with their husbands. In the third and fourth seasons, respectively, kids Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm joined the cast.

 

Akin to other Hanna-Barbera-produced shows like Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones reappeared in many other series and specials throughout the decades, including two live-action theatrical movies and several spinoff series, including 20 episodes of The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, featuring the kids as teenagers. Nearly a dozen TV specials aired, including The Flintstone Kids’ “Just Say No” Special, a couple of Flintstones holiday specials, and a made-for-TV Jetsons/Flintstones mash-up. Along with all of the shows, The Flintstones launched multi-million dollar merchandising with Fruity Pebbles cereal and Flintstones vitamins. Here are 15 brontosaurus-sized facts about one of the greatest animated families of all time.

 

 

ORIGINALLY, THE FLINTSTONES WERE THE FLAGSTONES.

 

Joe Barbera thought about calling the show The Gladstones, then decided on The Flagstones until he realized there was a comic strip with the same name. In 1959, they filmed a 90-second pilot. Daws Butler provided Fred’s gruff voice and June Foray played Betty. Unfortunately for her, the part eventually went to Bea Benaderet. “I was terribly disappointed, and when my agent talked to Joe Barbera, he said they wouldn’t even let me come in and retest for the part or any of the others,” Foray told Hogan’s Alley.

 

The pilot didn’t air, and the name got changed to The Flintstones. But in 1993, Cartoon Network unearthed the pilot, found in a New York storage warehouse. “It was this mythological sort of thing animators had heard of it, but nobody had actually seen it,” Mike Lazzo, the Cartoon Network’s head of programming, told Entertainment Weekly. “So we sent out teams of researchers to look for it all over. It was like the search for the Holy Grail.” The pilot finally aired on TV in May of 1994.

 

BARNEY AND FRED WERE DRAWN TO RESEMBLE CAVE PEOPLE.

 

Ed Benedict was one of The Flintstones’ designers. He told Hogan’s Alley that he sketched the characters to look like “cave people wearing long beards, with scraggly, unkempt hair and in slightly distorted, hunched-over shapes.” Barbera didn’t like the designs, so Benedict “straightened them up” and made them more “clean-cut.”

 

“Barney, as originally designed, had a strap over one shoulder, and when he turned he had a bare shoulder,” Benedict said. “It just didn’t look right, so we had to correct that. I was told they had a pet, so a dinosaur seemed appropriate, and that’s all Dino is: a small dinosaur. I had six spots on Fred’s loincloth and remember exactly that it was reduced to four. I continued to add little things, like the necktie on Fred and the stone necklace that Wilma wears. Joe just continued making very small changes, bit by bit. Joe was going more for a neat, cute look, but not cute for its own sake.”

 

ALAN REED INVENTED “YABBA DABBA DOO.”

 

 

Flintstones source WebRockOnline says the origin of Fred’s iconic “Yabba dabba doo” catchphrase came from Alan Reed, who voiced Fred, and reportedly used the line during a recording session. Reed’s mother apparently used to say, “A little dab’ll do ya,” which inspired Reed. “Alan said, ‘Hey, Joe, where it says yahoo, can I say yabba-dabba-doo?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ God knows where he got it, but it was one of those terrific phrases,” Barbera said.

 

THE FLINTSTONES DIDN’T COPY THE HONEYMOONERS.
It’s true that Fred was based on Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners character Ralph Kramden, but Joe Barbera made him different. “So many people say, ‘Did you copy The Honeymooners?’ I said, ‘Well, if you compare The Flintstones to The Honeymooners, that’s the biggest compliment you can give me,” Barbera told Emmy TV Legends, “but The Honeymooners don’t have all the gags that we had in there,” including a Stoneway Piano and the Polarrock Camera.

 

HANNA-BARBERA DID HIRE A FORMER HONEYMOONERS WRITER FOR THE FLINTSTONES.
As Barbera relayed to Emmy TV Legends, he hired a guy who had written for The Honeymooners. “We paid him $3000 and he was terrible,” Barbera recalled. “And the reason being is, he just wrote words. It was all dialogue. He had no visual gags, no nothing. Yak, yak, yak, yak. The Honeymooners had a lot of dialogue, but it was their expressions and [Art] Carney’s attitude that made it work. When you’re doing an animation, you better go beyond that. You can’t just have people making faces at each other. You have to move them.”

 

THE FLINTSTONES HELPED SELL CIGARETTES.

 

 

In the 1960s, Winston cigarettes sponsored The Flintstones. At the end of the show, Fred and Barney would be animated to smoke the cigarettes. In one black-and-white spot, Barney and Fred avoid yard work. “Let’s take a Winston break,” Barney says, as he and Fred light up. Wilma and Betty catch them in the act and throw yard equipment at them, and Fred says the tagline, “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.”

 

The smoking was short-lived: Enacted in 1970, the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act required stricter health warnings on cigarette packs, and it also banned cigarette ads on TV and radio. Later on, The Flintstones started shilling the healthier Welch’s grape juice.

 

PEBBLES WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A BABY BOY.
In 1962, during the show’s third season, the producers decided Fred and Wilma should have a child. Barbera told Emmy TV Legends the plan was for their child to be a boy, until Ideal Toy Company (the company that created the Rubik’s Cube and Betsy Wetsy) changed his mind. One day, Barbera received a call from the guy in charge of Flintstones merchandising. “He said, ‘Hey, I hear you’re having a baby on the show.’ I said, ‘Yeah,’” Barbera said. “He said, ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ ‘What else, a boy. A chip off the old rock.’ He says, ‘That’s too bad. I have the ideal toy. If it was a girl, we could’ve made a hell of a deal.’ I said, ‘It’s is a girl.’” They sold three million dolls within the first couple of months.

 

MEL BLANC KEPT VOICING BARNEY DESPITE A HORRIBLE CAR ACCIDENT.

The Man of a Thousand Voices portrayed Barney Rubble, even following a devastating head-on car collision in 1961. Blanc didn’t let a 70-day hospital stay deter him too much, and when he got out of the hospital, the cast and crew came to his home to record episodes. Blanc recounted the experience in his book, That’s Not All Folks, writing: “Tangles of wires were scattered all over the floor, and chairs and microphones were arranged around my hospital bed.”

 

The cast gathered around Blanc, and the producers talked to him through a built-in speaker. “Every couple of hours Joe would ask if I was too tired to carry on, but I insisted on completing the show,” Blanc wrote, saying that they recorded about 40 episodes in that manner. “Thankfully, by September, my doctors allowed me to sit up a bit, elevated by way of a pulley-cable system, to a semi-sitting position. It was no more than a few inches difference, but as I laughingly told my colleagues, ‘How nice is it to be able to look at your faces instead of at the damned ceiling.’”

 

 

THE VOICE OF WILMA THINKS SHE AND FRED “REALLY LOVED EACH OTHER.”

 

Jean Vander Pyl supplied the voice of Wilma Flintstone from the show’s beginning to the day she died, in 1999. Though Wilma and Fred argued a lot, they did have a rock-solid relationship. “I loved the bum,” Pyl told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “Sure, Fred was a yahoo and I got mad at him all the time. But we really loved each other. Our romance was one of the things that made us so popular. We were real.”

 

Pyl also voiced Rosie the Robot and Mrs. Spacely on The Jetsons, but it’s Wilma who made her famous. “I know I’m going to get killed for saying this, but Wilma had a great ‘housewife whine’ to her voice,” Pyl said. “She commanded enough authority to run the house but kept an equal amount of warmth. Wilma is a communicator and a lot of women relate to that, at least I know I do. I think there’s a lot of me in Wilma, and even though she’s just a cartoon, I think my voice is one of the things that made her so human.”

 

ACCORDING TO HARVEY KORMAN, THE GREAT GAZOO IS WORTH MONEY.

 

 

The actor provided the voice of the “superior and arrogant and elite” Great Gazoo, a green alien, for 13 episodes, from 1964 to 1966. Korman told Emmy TV Legends that he didn’t realize how popular—and lucrative—the character was until he attended conventions. “Some years back, I traveled for Hanna-Barbera,” Korman said. “They had these huge conventions and seminars where collectors collect cels, and the cels with The Great Gazoo on it are worth lots of money. Collectors on eBay and stuff want my autograph.”

 

IT TOOK NINE YEARS (AND 32 WRITERS) TO BRING THE LIVE-ACTION FLINTSTONES MOVIE TO THE BIG SCREEN.
Even though the 1994 film grossed $341,631,208 at the worldwide box office, the film was in development hell for years. According to an article in Entertainment Weekly, producers Keith Barish and Joel Silver commissioned Steven E. de Souza to write a script for a Flintstones movie in 1985. Steven Spielberg, who had directed John Goodman in Always, recommended Goodman for the role of Fred. In 1993, eight writers wrote a new draft of the script, but only three writers were credited. Richard Donner was once attached to direct but Brian Levant took over (he also directed the sequel, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas).

 

The plot of the final film centers around a work scheme and kidnapping, but an earlier version had a Grapes of Wrath-like plot. “I don’t even remember it that well, but Fred and Barney leave their town during a terrible depression and go across the country, or whatever that damn prehistoric thing is, looking for jobs,” Mitch Markowitz, one of the earlier writers, said. “They wind up in trailer parks trying to keep their families together. They exhibit moments of heroism and poignancy.”

 

THE FLINTSTONES ARE COMIC BOOK HEROES. 

 

On 2016, DC Comics turned America’s favorite modern Stone Age family into comic book heroes with The Flintstones #1. The summary reads, “Welcome to Bedrock, where Paleolithic humans head to dinner for a taste of artisanal mammoth after shopping at Neandertall & Big Men’s Clothing … Join Fred and Barney as Mister Slate sends them on a mission to show some Neanderthals a night on the town in hopes of luring them into this new system called ‘working for a living’—in Slate’s Quarry, of course.”

 

THE FLINTSTONES AND WRESTLING CAME TOGETHER IN 2015.

 

 

In 2015, The Flintstones and WWE: Stone Age SmackDown was released direct-to-DVD. It features Fred and Barney hanging around with animated versions of wrestling stars like John Cena (John Cenastone), Rey Mysterio Jr. (Rey Mysteriopal), and Daniel Bryan (Daniel Byrock). “We recorded it at SummerSlam 2013,” Bryan told IGN. “The weird thing that happens when you go from kind of being a nobody to being in a new type of position is that all these crazy things happen to you. Like, ‘Wow, I’m a toy.’ And now ‘Wow, I’m a Flintstone.’ It’s really strange to see yourself animated like that, with the little caveman outfit and those feet. It’s borderline surreal.”

 

FRED AND WILMA WERE ONE OF THE FIRST TELEVISION COUPLES TO SLEEP IN THE SAME BED.

 

It seems strange now that married couples weren't allowed to share a bed on American television, but watch enough old TV shows and you'll see that, indeed, husbands and wives usually slept in separate beds. While many sources claim that Fred and Wilma were the very first couple to share a bed on American television, that title actually belongs to Mary Kay and Johnny, a sitcom that ran from 1947 to 1950. Still, Fred and Wilma were one of the first—and definitely the first animated couple. Pretty progressive for a Stone Age family.

 

A NEW FLINTSTONES PROJECT HAS BEEN IN THE WORKS FOR A FEW YEARS.
The Flintstones last appeared on TV in 2001’s The Flintstones: On the Rocks. In 2011, it was reported that Seth MacFarlane wrote an animated Flintstones TV pilot for Fox, which they rejected. Gilmore Girls’ Dan Palladino and Family Guy’s Kara Vallow were supposed to produce the show. Earlier this month, MacFarlane finally said that he was giving up on the project. In 2014, Warner Bros. revived the idea of a theatrical animated Flintstones movie, the first since the box office failure of 2000’s The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas. Chris Henchy was scheduled to write the script, with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay executive producing. Since then, the project has been quiet.

 

Source: Mental Floss

Edited April 24, 2020 by DarkRavie

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - AMELIA EARHART

Amelia Earhart

 

Did you know... that Amelia Mary Earhart was an American aviation pioneer and author? Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. (Wikipedia)

 

Amelia Earhart may be best-known for her numerous aviation records, but it is Amelia's legacy of unfaltering determination and her can-do attitude for equal treatment of women that lives on. 

 

She was born in 1897, but Amelia didn’t board a plane until 1920. Then, when the pilot flew her just a couple hundred feet in the air, Amelia knew she had to fly. In 1923, Amelia became the sixteenth woman to receive a pilot’s license. 

 

On June 17, 1928, she departed from Newfoundland with pilots Wilmer "Bill" Stultz and Louis E. "Slim" Gordon. When her team landed in Wales 21 hours later, she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, a record that was just one of many. Later, the pilot became the first woman and the second person to fly solo across the Atlantic. She also became the first person to fly solo across the Pacific. Then, shortly after her flight across the Pacific, Amelia became the first to fly solo from Mexico City to Newark.

 

On June 1, 1937, Earhart left Miami for her final flight. She hoped to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Sadly, Amelia would never complete this flight. On July 2, her radio lost contact and a rescue attempt began immediately. Although it became the most extensive air and sea search in naval history, Amelia was never found. In a letter to her husband, Amelia wrote, "Please know I am quite aware of the hazards." She said, "I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others."

 

We celebrate Amelia Earhart to not only honor her life and career, but also Amelia's courage and strength. Children's Museum Indianapolis

 

 

Amelia defied traditional gender roles from a young age. Earhart played basketball, took an auto repair course and briefly attended college.

 

During World War I, she served as a Red Cross nurse’s aid in Toronto, Canada. Earhart began to spend time watching pilots in the Royal Flying Corps train at a local airfield while in Toronto.

 

After the war, she returned to the United States and enrolled at Columbia University in New York as a pre-med student. Earhart took her first airplane ride in California in December 1920 with famed World War I pilot Frank Hawks—and was forever hooked.

 

In January 1921, she started flying lessons with female flight instructor Neta Snook. To help pay for those lessons, Earhart worked as a filing clerk at the Los Angeles Telephone Company. Later that year, she purchased her first airplane, a secondhand Kinner Airster. She nicknamed the yellow airplane “the Canary.”

 

An oil painting of Amelia Earhart and her first plane, a Kinner Airster -

she called it The Canary - hangs in the hallway on the second floor of

the home in Atchison where she was born. It now is the Amelia Earhart

Birthplace Museum.

 

Earhart passed her flight test in December 1921, earning a National Aeronautics Association license. Two days later, she participated in her first flight exhibition at the Sierra Airdrome in Pasadena, California.

 

Earhart’s Aviation Records
Earhart set a number of aviation records in her short career. Her first record came in 1922 when she became the first woman to fly solo above 14,000 feet.

 

In 1932, Earhart became the first woman (and second person after Charles Lindbergh) to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She left Newfoundland, Canada, on May 20 in a red Lockheed Vega 5B and arrived a day later, landing in a cow field near Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

 

Upon returning to the United States, Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross—a military decoration awarded for “heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight.” She was the first woman to receive the honor.

 

Later that year, Earhart made the first solo, nonstop flight across the United States by a woman. She started in Los Angeles and landed 19 hours later in Newark, New Jersey. She also became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the United States mainland in 1935.

 

The Ninety-Nines

Ninety-Nines International Organization of Women Pilots

Earhart consistently worked to promote opportunities for women in aviation.

 

In 1929, after placing third in the All-Women’s Air Derby—the first transcontinental air race for women—Earhart helped to form the Ninety-Nines, an international organization for the advancement of female pilots.

 

She became the first president of the organization of licensed pilots, which still exists today and represents women flyers from 44 countries.

 

1937 Flight Around the World

 

On June 1, 1937, Amelia Earhart took off from Oakland, California, on an eastbound flight around the world. It was her second attempt to become the first pilot ever to circumnavigate the globe.

 

She flew a twin-engine Lockheed 10E Electra and was accompanied on the flight by navigator Fred Noonan. They flew to Miami, then down to South America, across the Atlantic to Africa, then east to India and Southeast Asia.

 

twin-engine Lockheed 10E Electra

 

The pair reached Lae, New Guinea, on June 29. When they reached Lae, they already had flown 22,000 miles. They had 7,000 more miles to go before reaching Oakland.

 

What Happened to Amelia Earhart?
Earhart and Noonan departed Lae for tiny Howland Island—their next refueling stop—on July 2. It was the last time Earhart was seen alive. She and Noonan lost radio contact with the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, anchored off the coast of Howland Island, and disappeared en route.

 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized a massive two-week search for the pair, but they were never found. On July 19, 1937, Earhart and Noonan were declared lost at sea.

 

Scholars and aviation enthusiasts have proposed many theories about what happened to Amelia Earhart. The official position from the U.S. government is that Earhart and Noonan crashed into the Pacific Ocean, but there are numerous theories regarding their disappearance.

 

Crash and Sink Theory
According to the crash and sink theory, Earhart’s plane ran out of gas while she searched for Howland Island, and she crashed into the open ocean somewhere in the vicinity of the island.  Several expeditions over the past 15 years have attempted to locate the plane’s wreckage on the sea floor near Howland. High-tech sonar and deep-sea robots have failed to yield clues about the Electra’s crash site.

 

Gardner Island Hypothesis
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) postulates that Earhart and Noonan veered off-course from Howland Island and landed instead some 350 miles to the Southwest on Gardner Island, now called Nikumaroro, in the Republic of Kiribati. The island was uninhabited at the time.

 

A week after Earhart’s disappeared, Navy planes flew over the island. They noted recent signs of habitation but found no evidence of an airplane.

 

TIGHAR believes that Earhart—and perhaps Noonan—may have survived for days or even weeks on the island as castaways before dying there. Since 1988, several TIGHAR expeditions to the island have turned up artifacts and anecdotal evidence in support of this hypothesis.

 

Some of the artifacts include a piece of Plexiglas that may have come from the Electra’s window, a woman’s shoe dating back to the 1930s, improvised tools, a woman’s cosmetics jar from the 1930s and bones that appeared to be part of a human finger.

 

In June 2017, a TIGHAR-led expedition arrived on Nikumaroro with four forensically trained bone-sniffing border collies to search the island for any skeletal remains of Earhart or Noonan.

 

 

Other Theories About Earhart’s Disappearance
There are numerous conspiracy theories about Earhart’s disappearance. One theory posits that Earhart and Noonan were captured and executed by the Japanese.

 

Another theory claims that the pair served as spies for the Roosevelt administration and assumed new identities upon returning to the United States.

 

Source: History.com

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - ANALOG

 

Did you know... that analog links real-world senses like hearing, touching and seeing to the digital world. A typical electronic design can have 15-20 analog chips for every embedded processor. An estimated 96 billion analog ICs will be sold in 2013.

 

An analog or analogue signal is any continuous signal.

 

The difference from a digital signal is that also very small fluctuations in the signal are meaningful. When one speaks of analog one often means an electrical context, however mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic, and other systems may also convey analog signals.

 

An analog signal uses some property of the medium to convey the signal's information. Any information may be conveyed by an analog signal, often such a signal is a measured change in physical phenomena, such as sound, light, temperature, position, or pressure.

 

For example, in sound recording, changes in air pressure (that is to say, sound) strike the diaphragm of a microphone which causes related changes in a voltage or the current in an electric circuit. The voltage or the current is said to be an "analog" of the sound.

 

1. Analog Devices was founded in 1965 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Ray Stata, currently Chairman of the Board for ADI, and Matthew Lorber, his classmate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Their first product was the Model 101 general-purpose operational amplifier, a hockey puck sized module used in test and measurement equipment.

 

2. ADI was the first semiconductor supplier to establish an IC manufacturing presence in Ireland in 1977. Today, ADI operates Ireland’s largest semiconductor R&D center in Limerick. Our global presence includes over 50 design, development, FAE, sales, and manufacturing centers worldwide.
 

3. During ADI’s 50-year history, only three CEOs have led the company. The current president and CEO, Vincent Roche, is a 27-year veteran of ADI who has held senior positions covering products and technologies, market segments, sales, and marketing. The previous president and CEO, Jerald G. Fishman, was a 41-year veteran of ADI who succeeded Mr. Stata as CEO in 1996.
 

4. ADI has 100,000 customers and a portfolio of more than 20,000 products.
 

5. ADI ships greater than 96% of all of our products to our customers in less than six weeks. This is a testament to our superior supply chain agility, which gives us and our customers a competitive edge.
 

6. ADI has generated more than $9 billion in cumulative profits over 50 years, an outstanding average of 19% of sales in profits.
 

7. ADI has invested over $9 billion in signal processing research and development over the past 50 years. The company holds over 2200 patents and has nearly 800 patents pending.
 

8. ADI is the market leader in data converters and high performance amplifiers. These signal conversion and conditioning technologies comprise the critical bridge between real-world signals and electronics. More than 70% of company revenues derive from these technologies and a significant portion of R&D is focused here.
 

9. On July 22, 2014, ADI completed the $2 billion acquisition of Hittite Microwave Corporation, representing the largest acquisition in ADI’s history. This results in a portfolio offering of over 2000 RF and microwave products, making ADI the broadest supplier to cover the entire signal chain, across the frequency spectrum up to 110 GHz.
 

10. By some estimates, less than 0.01% of companies last 50 years. We are proud. (Analog Devices)

 

What is analog technology?

People accept digital things easily enough, often by thinking of them as electronic, computerized, and perhaps not even worth trying to understand. But the concept of analog technology often seems more baffling—especially when people try to explain it in pages like this. So what's it all about?

 

What does analog actually mean?

If you have an analog watch, it tells the time with hands that sweep around a dial: the position of the hands is a measurement of the time. How much the hands move is directly related to what time it is. So if the hour hand sweeps across two segments of the dial, it's showing that twice as much time has elapsed compared to if it had moved only one segment. That sounds incredibly obvious, but it's much more subtle than it first seems. The point is that the hand's movements over the dial are a way of representing passing time. It's not the same thing as time itself: it's a representation or an analogy of time. The same is true when you measure something with a ruler. If you measure the length of your finger and mark it on the surface of a wooden ruler, that little strip of wood or plastic you're looking at (a small segment of the ruler) is the same length as your finger. It isn't your finger, of course—it's a representation of your finger: another analogy. That's really what the term analog means.

 

 

Analog measurements
Until computers started to dominate science and technology in the early decades of the 20th century, virtually every measuring instrument was analog. If you wanted to measure an electric current, you did it with a moving-coil meter that had a little pointer moving over a dial. The more the pointer moved up the dial, the higher the current in your circuit. The pointer was an analogy of the current. All kinds of other measuring devices worked in a similar way, from weighing machines and speedometers to sound-level meters and seismographs (earthquake-plotting machines).

 

Analog information
However, analog technology isn't just about measuring things or using dials and pointers. When we say something is analog, we often simply mean that it's not digital: the job it does, or the information it handles, doesn't involve processing numbers electronically. An old-style film camera is sometimes referred to as example of analog technology. You capture an image on a piece of transparent plastic "film" coated with silver-based chemicals, which react to light. When the film is developed (chemically processed in a lab), it's used to print a representation of the scene you photographed. In other words, the picture you get is an analogy of the scene you wanted to record. The same is true of recording sounds with an old-fashioned cassette recorder. The recording you make is a collection of magnetized areas on a long reel of plastic tape. Together, they represent an analogy of the sounds you originally heard.

 

Which is better, analog or digital?

Photo of analog computer c.1949 by NASA

machines like this represented numbers with analog dials,

levers, belts, and gears rather than (digital) numbers stored
in electronic memories. Picture courtesy of NASA on the Commons.

 

Just because digital technology has advantages, that doesn't mean it's always better than analog. An analog watch might be far more accurate than a digital one if it uses a high-precision movement (gears and springs) to measure time passing, and if it has a sweeping second hand it will represent the time more precisely than a digital watch whose display shows only hours and minutes. Surprisingly, analog watches can also keep time better than quartz ones: the day-to-day variations in a mechanical, analog watch tend to cancel one another out, while those in an electronic quartz watch tend to compound one another (here's why). Generally, the most expensive watches in the world are analog ones (of course, that's partly because people prefer the way they look), though the world's most accurate atomic clocks show time with digital displays.

 

One interesting question is whether information stored in digital form will last as long as analog information. Museums still have paper documents (and ones written on clay or stone) that are thousands of years old, but no-one has the first email or cellphone conversation. Open any book on the history of photography and you'll see reproductions of early photos taken by Niepce, Daguerre, and Fox-Talbot. But you won't see any pictures of the first digital photo: even though it was much more recent, probably no-one knows what it was or who took it! Lots of people own and cherish plastic LP records that are decades old, but no-one attaches the same importance to disposable MP3 music files. A lot of information recorded on early computer memory devices is completely impossible to read with newer computers; even floppy disks, commonplace as recently as the mid-1990s, are impossible to read on modern computers that no longer have built-in floppy drives.

 

That's why, though the future may be digital, analog technology will always have its place!

Source: ExplainThatStuff

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - FIREWORKS

 

Did you know... that fireworks are a class of low explosive pyrotechnic devices used for aesthetic and entertainment purposes? The most common use of a firework is as part of a fireworks display, a display of the effects produced by firework devices. (Wikipedia)

 

Fireworks are one of the most spectacular outdoor shows. They produce amazing bursts of colors that take a variety of shapes.

 

The word “firework” comes from the Greek word pyrotechnics, which means, very appropriately, “fire art” or “fire skill”; there’s certainly no shortage of art and skill in modern firework displays!

 

The earliest forms of such pyrotechnics can be traced to around 2,000 years ago in China. During the Han Dynasty in 200 B.C., people are said to have roasted bamboo stalks until they would turn black and sizzle, and the air inside the hollow stalks would explode. “Baozhu” is a Mandarin word for firecracker that translates directly to “exploding bamboo.”

 

At some point between 600 and 900 A.D., Chinese alchemists—perhaps hoping to discover an elixir for immortality—mixed together saltpeter (potassium nitrate, then a common kitchen seasoning), charcoal, sulfur and other ingredients, unwittingly yielding an early form of gunpowder. The Chinese began stuffing the volatile substance into bamboo shoots that were then thrown into the fire to produce a loud blast. The first fireworks were born.

 

 

As the ingredients for gunpowder spread to the West after the Silk Road opened up trade and the Mongols made their way to Europe in the 13th century, so did fireworks.

 

In 1377 fireworks accompanied a religious mystery play by the bishop’s palace in Vicenza, and were soon used to add sparks to figures of doves, representing the Holy Spirit, or angels, made to ascend and descend from the heavens on ropes.

 

The first recorded fireworks in England were at the wedding of King Henry VII to Elizabeth of York in 1486. Queen Elizabeth was so fascinated with fireworks that she created an honorary title, “Fire Master of England” for the individual who created the best fireworks.

 

 

By the time of the Renaissance (14th-17th century), pyrotechnic schools were training fireworks artists across Europe, particularly in Italy, which became famous for its elaborate and colorful displays.

 

It was the Italians who in the 1830s became the first to incorporate trace amounts of metals and other additives, creating the bright, multihued sparks and sunbursts seen in contemporary fireworks shows. For example, calcium produces the color orange, sodium makes yellow, and barium makes green.

 

Fireworks become popular in the United States during the 19th century, initially as a way of celebrating Independence Day on July 4th. The cities of Boston and Philadelphia both included fireworks displays as part of the celebrations of Independence Day in 1777.

 

 

Fireworks can be quite complex and different types (rockets, Catherine wheels, and so on) work in different ways. Simply speaking, though, aerial fireworks (ones designed to fire up into the sky) have four parts. The container consists of pasted paper. The fuse allows the shell to reach the desired altitude before exploding. A bursting charge made of black powder is at the center of the shell. Stars (sparkler-like substances shaped into small spheres) are mixed throughout the interior of the shell.

 

The pattern that an aerial shell paints in the sky depends on the arrangement of star pellets inside the shell. For example, if the pellets are equally spaced in a circle, with black powder inside the circle, you will see an aerial display of smaller star explosions equally spaced in a circle.

 

Types of fireworks effects include Cake, Crossette, Chrysanthemum, Dahlia, Diadem, Fish, Horsetail, Kamuro, Mine, Palm, Peony, Ring, Spider, Time Rain, and Willow.

 

The Walt Disney Company is the largest consumer of fireworks in the world and the second largest purchaser of explosive devices, right behind the U.S. Department of Defense.

 

 

 

In 2004, Disneyland in California starting launching fireworks using compressed air rather than gunpowder. Electronic timers were used to explode the shells. That was the first time the launch system was used commercially, allowing for increased accuracy in timing (so shows could be put to music) and reducing smoke and fumes from big displays.

 

To this day, a deep, vibrant blue is still beyond reach, despite the fact that fireworks were invented more than a millennium ago. It’s the holy grail for pyrotechnic experts.

 

China is the largest manufacturer and exporter of fireworks in the world; 90% of all fireworks originate from there.

 

Enthusiasts in the United States have formed clubs which unite hobbyists and professionals. The groups provide safety instruction and organize meetings and private “shoots” at remote premises where members shoot commercial fireworks as well as fire pieces of their own manufacture.

 

There is a World Fireworks Championship, where international teams compete to produce the best fireworks display.

 

The largest firework display consists of 810,904 fireworks and was achieved by Iglesia Ni Cristo (Church of Christ) (Philippines), at the Countdown to 2016 New Year Celebrations, in the Philippine Arena, Ciudad de Victoria Bocaue Bulacan, Philippines, on 1 January 2016.

 

Iglesia Ni Cristo New Year's event in the Philippines confirmed as largest firework display ever

 

The most firework rockets launched in 30 seconds is 125,801, in an attempt organised by Pyroworks International Inc. (Philippines), in Cebu, Philippines, on 8 May 2010. 16 stacks with 8,000 rockets in each were used for the attempt. All successful rockets were launched within 17 seconds.

 

Chinese people originally believed that the fireworks could expel evil spirits and bring about luck and happiness.

 

Kovtapyroergasoiphobia – is the fear of fireworks.

 

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise campaigned against the use of fireworks. They helped create the first fireworks laws in the U.S.

 

Elvis Presley’s idea of an exciting game was that it should be as dangerous as possible, such as the game that involved fireworks. “Some of the Memphis Mafia would buy up to $15,000 worth of fireworks in today’s money, including skyrockets, baby giants, firecrackers, and … chasers, which moved rapidly and unpredictably until they exploded. Since the emphasis was on large and potentially lethal fireworks, everyone had to wear air force jumpsuits plus gloves, helmets, and goggles.

 

Source: JustFunFacts

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - ADA LOVELACE

 

Did you know... that Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine? She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is widely regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of computers and one of the first computer programmers. (Wikipedia)

Ada Lovelace has been called the world's first computer programmer. What she did was write the world’s first machine algorithm for an early computing machine that existed only on paper. Of course, someone had to be the first, but Lovelace was a woman, and this was in the 1840s. Lovelace was a brilliant mathematician, thanks in part to opportunities that were denied most women of the time.

 

 

Ada Byron was a teenager when she met Cambridge mathematics professor Charles Babbage, who had invented the Difference Engine, a mechanical computer designed to produce mathematical tables automatically and error-free. Babbage never built the actual machine due to personal setbacks and financing difficulty. By 1834 he had moved on to design his Analytical Engine, the first general purpose computer, which used punch cards for input and output. This machine also lacked financing and was never built. (Babbage's Difference Engine was finally constructed in 1985–2002, and it worked.)

 

An original model of part of the Analytical Engine. Photograph by Bruno Barral (ByB)

 

Babbage was impressed with the brilliant young woman, and they corresponded for years, discussing math and computing as he developed the Analytical Engine. In 1842, Babbage gave a lecture on the engine at the University of Turin. Luigi Menabrea, a mathematician (and future Italian prime minister), transcribed the lecture in French. Ada, now in her late 20s and known as Countess of Lovelace, was commissioned to translate the transcript into English. Lovelace added her own notes to the lecture, which ended up being three times as long as the actual transcript. It was published in 1843. 

 

Lovelace's notes made it clear that she understood the Analytical Engine as well as Babbage himself, and furthermore, she understood how to make it do the things computers do. She suggested the data input that would program the machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers, which is now considered the first computer program. But more than that, Lovelace was a visionary: she understood that numbers could be used to represent more than just quantities, and a machine that could manipulate numbers could be made to manipulate any data represented by numbers. She predicted that machines like the Analytical Engine could be used to compose music, produce graphics, and be useful to science. Of course, all that came true—in another 100 years. 

 

 

Ada Lovelace Was the First Person to Understand the Real Potential of Computers

The Victorian mathematician's legacy goes beyond the first published computer program.

 

How did a young woman get the opportunity to show the world her talents in the 19th century? Mathematical intelligence was not the only thing Ada Lovelace had going for her. Her potential for intelligence probably came genetically, as she was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and his first wife Anne Isabella Noel Byron. Both were privileged members of the aristocracy, and both were gifted and well educated. The marriage broke up shortly after Ada was born.

 

Lady Byron, who studied literature, science, philosophy, and, most unusual for a woman, mathematics, was determined that Ada not follow in her father's footsteps. Instead of art and literature, Ada was tutored in mathematics and science. Ada excelled in all her studies, and her interests were wide ranging. Ada became a baroness in 1835 when she married William King, 8th Baron King; the two had three children. In 1838, she became Countess of Lovelace when her husband was elevated to Earl of Lovelace. Her pedigree and peerage alone would have landed Lovelace in the history books, but her accomplishments in mathematics made her a pioneer of not only computing, but of women in science.

 

 

Lovelace died of cancer in 1852, when she was only 36. More than 150 years later, we remember her contributions to science and engineering in the celebration of Ada Lovelace Day on October 13. First celebrated in 2009 (in March), it is a day set aside to learn about women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - DAY CARE

 

Did you know... that child care, otherwise known as day care, is the care and supervision of a child or multiple children at a time, whose ages range from six weeks to thirteen years? Child care is the action or skill of looking after children by a day-care center, nannies, babysitter, teachers or other providers. Child care is a broad topic that covers a wide spectrum of professionals, institutions, contexts, activities, and social and cultural conventions. Early child care is an equally important and often overlooked component of child development. Child care providers can be children's first teachers, and therefore play an integral role in systems of early childhood education. Quality care from a young age can have a substantial impact on the future successes of children. The main focus of childcare is on the development of the child, whether that be mental, social, or psychological. (Wikipedia)

 

Child Care History

 

In the United States today, most mothers of preschool and school age children are employed outside the home. American mothers have invented many ways to care for their children while they work. Native Americans strapped newborns to cradle boards or carried them in woven slings; Colonial women placed small children in standing stools or go-gins to prevent them from falling into the fireplace. Pioneers on the Midwestern plains laid infants in wooden boxes fastened to the beams of their plows. Southern dirt farmers tethered their runabouts to pegs driven into the soil at the edge of their fields. White southern planters’ wives watched African American boys and girls playing in the kitchen yard while their mothers toiled in the cotton fields. African American mothers sang white babies to sleep while their own little ones comforted themselves. Migrant laborers shaded infants in baby tents set in the midst of beet fields. Cannery workers put children to work beside them stringing beans and shelling peas. Shellfish processors sent toddlers to play on the docks, warning them not to go near the water.

 

Mothers have left children alone in cradles and cribs, and have locked them in tenement flats and cars parked in factory lots. They have taken them to parents, grandparents, co-madres, play mothers, neighbors and strangers. They have sent them out to play with little mothers – siblings sometimes only a year or two older. They have enrolled them in summer camps and recreation programs, taken them to baby farms, given them up to orphanages and foster homes, and surrendered them for indenture. They have taken them to family day care providers and left them at home with babysitters, nannies, and nursemaids, some of them undocumented workers.

 

Mothers have dropped off infants and youngsters at pre-school facilities of various size and quality dressed in tatters, with smudged cheeks and stringy hair, and picked them up garbed in starched smocks, rosy-cheeked, smelling of soap. Children have been turned away because they had fevers or runny noses or lice; mothers have left their jobs in the middle of the day to pick up children with ear infections, chicken pox, temper tantrums. They have parted from offspring who were howling, whimpering, whispering in the corner with friends, and found them later giggling, hungry, cranky, half-asleep. They have walked out feeling guilty, sad, anxious, fearful, with their hearts in their mouths, without a care in the world.

 

Random preschool somewhere

 

Mothers have left babies dozing in carriages parked outside movie palaces, at department store day nurseries, and parking services in bowling alleys and shopping malls. Some mothers have placed their children in the care of others and never come back.

 

At the end of the nineteenth century, then, American child care had come to consist of a range of formal and informal provisions that were generally associated with the poor, minorities, and immigrants and were stigmatized as charitable and custodial. This pattern of practices and institutions provided a weak foundation for building twentieth-century social services. As women’s reform efforts picked up steam during the Progressive Era, however, child care became a target for reform and modernization.

 

The Beginnings of Child Care Reform

Josephine Marshall Jewell Dodge

 

To draw attention to the need for child care and to demonstrate “approved methods of rearing children from infancy on,” a group of prominent New York philanthropists led by Josephine Jewell Dodge set up a Model Day Nursery in the Children’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and then went on to found the National Federation of Day Nurseries (NFDN), the first nationwide organization devoted to this issue, in 1898.

 

In the meantime, reformers began to formulate another solution to the dilemma of poor mothers compelled to work outside the home: mothers’ or widows’ pensions. In the view of prominent Progressives such as Jane Addams, day nurseries only added to such women’s difficulties by encouraging them to take arduous, low-paid jobs while their children suffered from inadequate attention and care. Thus she and her Hull House colleagues, including Julia Lathrop, who would go on to become the first chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau when it was founded in 1912, called for a policy to support mothers so they could stay at home with their children.

 

Julia Lathrop

 

Unlike child care, the idea of mothers’ pensions quickly gained popular support because it did nothing to challenge conventional gender roles. Indeed, some reformers argued that mothers, like soldiers, were performing a “service to the nation” and therefore deserved public support when they lacked a male breadwinner. Pensions “spread like wildfire” (quoted in Theda Skocpol, “Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States,” Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992, p. 424) as several large national organizations, including the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National Congress of Mothers, mounted a highly successful state-by-state legislative campaign for such a benefit. By 1930, nearly every state in the union had passed some form of mothers’ or widows’ pension law, making this the policy of choice for addressing the needs of low-income mothers and pushing child care further into the shadows of charity.

 

The U.S. Children’s Bureau

Despite the rhetoric, however, mothers’ pensions could not fully address the problems of poor and low-income mothers, and many women had no alternative but to go out to work. In most states, funding for pensions was inadequate, and many mothers found themselves ineligible because of highly restrictive criteria or stringent, biased administrative practices. African American women in particular were frequently denied benefits, in the North as well as the South, on the grounds that they, unlike white women, were accustomed to working for wages and thus should not be encouraged to stay at home to rear their children. Because pension coverage was sporadic and scattered, maternal employment not only persisted but increased, adding to the demand for child care. Philanthropists were hard put to meet this growing need using private funding alone. With mothers’ pensions monopolizing the social policy agenda, however, they had no prospect of winning public funding for day nurseries.

 

This pattern continued into the 1920s, as the U.S. Children’s Bureau (CB) conducted a series of studies of maternal and child labor in agriculture and industry across the country. Although investigators found many instances of injuries, illnesses, and even fatalities resulting from situations in which infants and toddlers were either left alone or brought into hazardous workplaces, the CB refused to advocate for federal support for child care; instead, it worked to strengthen mothers’ pensions so that more mothers could stay at home. CB officials were influenced, in part, by the thinking of experts such as the physician Douglas Thom, a proponent of child guidance who argued that “worn and wearied” wage-earning mothers who had no time for their children’s welfare stifled their development.  At the same time, the reputation of day nurseries continued to slide as efforts to upgrade their educational component flagged due to lack of funds, and nursery schools, the darlings of Progressive-Era early childhood educators, began to capture the middle-class imagination.

 

The New Deal’s Effect on Child Care

 

The Depression and then World War II had a mixed impact on the fortunes of child care. On the eve of the Great Depression, fewer than 300 nursery schools were in operation, compared to 800 day nurseries, but as unemployment rose, day nursery enrollments fell sharply and charitable donations also declined, forcing 200 day nurseries to close down between 1931 and 1940. Meanwhile, at the urging of prominent early childhood educators, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a key New Deal agency, established a program of Emergency Nursery Schools (ENS). Primarily intended to offer employment opportunities to unemployed teachers, these schools were also seen as a means of compensating for the “physical and mental handicaps” caused by the economic downturn. Nearly 3,000 schools, enrolling more than 64,000 children, were started between 1933 and 1934; over the next year, these were consolidated into 1,900 schools with a capacity for approximately 75,000 students.  The program covered forty-three states and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Unlike the earlier nursery schools, which were largely private, charged fees, and served a middle-class clientele, these free, government-sponsored schools were open to children of all classes. Designed as schools rather than as child care facilities, the ENS were only open for part of the day, and their enrollments were supposedly restricted to the children of the unemployed. They did, however, become a form of de facto child care for parents employed on various WPA work-relief projects. Unlike that of the day nurseries, the educational component of the ENS was well developed because of early childhood educators’ strong interest in the program.

 

Organizations such as the National Association for Nursery Education, which was eager to promulgate the ideas of progressive pedagogy, even sent in their own staff members to supervise teacher training and to oversee curricula. The educators were frustrated, however, by inadequate facilities and equipment and by difficulties in convincing teachers with conventional classroom experience to adopt a less-structured approach to working with young children. By the late 1930s, the ENS also began to suffer from high staff turnover as teachers left to take up better-paying jobs in defense plants. Between 1936 and 1942, nearly 1,000 schools were forced to close down.

 

Child Care and World War II

Although the approach of World War II reduced the unemployment crisis in the United States, it created a social crisis as millions of women, including many mothers, sought employment in war-related industries. Despite a critical labor shortage, the federal government was at first reluctant to recruit mothers of small children, claiming that “mothers who remain at home are performing an essential patriotic service.” Gaining support from social workers, who opposed maternal employment on psychological grounds, government officials dallied in responding to the unprecedented need for child care. In 1941 Congress passed the Lanham Act, which was intended to create community facilities in “war-impact areas,” but it was not until 1943 that this was interpreted as authorizing support for child care.

 

In the meantime, Congress allocated $6 million to convert the remaining ENS into child care facilities. The organization of new services bogged down in interagency competition at the federal level and in the considerable red tape involved when local communities applied for federal funding. According to the government’s own guidelines, one child care slot was required for every ten female defense workers; however, when the female labor force peaked at 19 million in 1944, only 3,000 child care centers were operating, with a capacity for 130,000 children—far short of the 2 million places that were theoretically needed. Public opinion was slow to accept the dual ideas of maternal employment and child care. The popular media frequently reported on the spread of “latchkey children” and on instances of sleeping children found locked in cars in company parking lots while their mothers worked the night shift. Such stories served to castigate “selfish” wage-earning mothers rather than to point up the need for child care. At the same time, children’s experts warned parents that children in group care might suffer the effects of “maternal deprivation” and urged them to maintain tranquil home environments to protect their children from the war’s upheaval.

 

Latchkey child

 

What child care there was did little to dispel public concerns. Hastily organized and often poorly staffed, most centers fell far short of the high standards early childhood educators had sought to establish for the ENS. One exception was the Child Service Centers set up by the Kaiser Company at its shipyards in Portland, Oregon. Architect-designed and scaled to children’s needs, they offered care twenty-four hours a day (to accommodate night-shift workers), a highly trained staff, a curriculum planned by leading early childhood experts, and even a cooked-food service for weary parents picking up their children after an arduous shift. Despite its inadequacies, federally sponsored New Deal and wartime child care marked an important step in American social provision. Congress, however, was wary of creating permanent services and repeatedly emphasized that public support would be provided “for the duration only.”

 

Soon after V-J Day, funding for the Lanham Act was cut off, forcing most of the child care centers to shut down within a year or two. But the need for child care persisted, as maternal employment, after an initial dip due to postwar layoffs, actually began to rise. Across the country, national organizations like the Child Welfare League of America, along with numerous local groups, demonstrated and lobbied for continuing public support. These groups failed to persuade Congress to pass the 1946 Maternal and Child Welfare Act, which would have continued federal funding for child care, but they did win public child care provisions in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. and in California. During the Korean War, Congress approved a public child care program but then refused to appropriate funds for it.

 

After World War II

Finally, in 1954, Congress found an approach to child care it could live with: the child care tax deduction. This permitted low- to moderate-income families (couples could earn up to $4,500 per year) to deduct up to $600 for child care from their income taxes, provided the services were needed “to permit the taxpayer to hold gainful employment.” The tax deduction offered some financial relief to certain groups of parents, but reformers were not satisfied, for such a measure failed to address basic issues such as the supply, distribution, affordability, and quality of child care. In 1958, building on the experience they had gained in lobbying for postwar provisions, activists formed a national organization devoted exclusively to child care, the Inter-City Committee for Day Care of Children (ICC, later to become the National Committee on the Day Care of Children). The organization was led by Elinor Guggenheimer, a longtime New York City child care activist; Sadie Ginsberg, a leader of the Child Study Association of America; Cornelia Goldsmith, a New York City official who had helped establish a licensing system for child care in that city; and Winifred Moore, a child care specialist who had worked in both government and the private sector. Unlike its predecessor, the National Federation of Day Nurseries (which had been absorbed by the Child Welfare League of America in 1942), the ICC believed that private charity could not provide adequate child care on its own; instead, the new organization sought to work closely with government agencies like the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the U.S. Women’s Bureau to gain federal support.

 

Elinor Guggenheimer

 

The ICC experimented with a number of different rationales for child care, generally preferring to avoid references to maternal employment in favor of stressing the need to “safeguard children’s welfare.” In 1958 and 1959, the ICC helped mobilize grassroots support for several child care bills introduced into Congress by Senator Jacob Javits (R–New York), but to no avail. The ICC did succeed in convincing the CB and WB to cosponsor a National Conference on the Day Care of Children in Washington, D.C., in November 1960. At that conference, several government officials pointed to the growing demand for labor and to what now appeared to be an irreversible trend toward maternal employment, but many attendees continued to express ambivalence about placing young children in group care. Guggenheimer, however, noted that mothers would work “whether good care is available or not. It is the child,” she emphasized, “that suffers when the care is poor.” Guggenheimer did not call directly for government support for child care, but she made it clear that private and voluntary agencies could no longer shoulder the burden.

 

The CB and WB, under the direction of chiefs appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, were reluctant to take the lead on this issue, but the president-elect, John F. Kennedy, in a message to the conference, expressed his awareness of the problem, stating, “I believe we must take further steps to encourage day care programs that will protect our children and provide them with a basis for a full life in later years.” Kennedy’s message, along with subsequent statements, implied that his administration sought a broad-based approach to child care. In a widely circulated report, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women acknowledged that maternal employment was becoming the norm and pointed out that child care could not only help women who decided to work outside the home but also serve as a developmental boon to children and help advance social and racial integration. But the Kennedy administration could not muster sufficient political support to push through a universal child care policy.

 

To read more on this topic, click the link below 

 

Source: Social Welfare History Project

 

Edited April 29, 2020 by DarkRavie

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - SOCIAL MEDIA

 

Did you know... that social media are interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks? (Wikipedia)

 

Every digital marketer knows that social media is constantly evolving.

 

Every month, there are new tools, platforms, and features being developed which completely change the way we use and view social media. It can get overwhelming. This is what makes it such a challenge – keeping up with one of the most rapidly changing fields of technology. Learning won’t simply cut it. We need to be flexible so we can easily adapt to emerging trends.

 

So, how do we stay ahead of the curve? How can we work smarter? How can we be strategic with the social media channels we use?

 

We know that change can be frustrating, but it doesn’t have to be. We need to embrace the challenges so we know how to capitalize on them.  We should make use of social media facts and incorporate social media management tools in our marketing strategy. 

 

Before we get to the social media facts and statistics, here’s an updated number of active users as of August 2017 on the most popular social media network sites worldwide:

 

Facebook: 2.47 billion users
YouTube: 1.5 billion users
Messenger: 1.2 billion users
Instagram: 800 million users
Tumblr: 357 million users
Twitter: 328 million users
Skype: 300 million users
Pinterest: 175 million users
LinkedIn: 106 million users

 

Source: Statista

 

Adults ranging from 18 to 34 years old are most likely to use social media when following brands that they support and love. 
(Source: MarketingSherpa)

 

When creating social media campaigns, think about what will generate the most clicks and engagement from this demographic. And since older generations are less likely to use social media, you can think of ways how you can encourage them to follow you online.

 

 

Customers are likely to spend 21% more if they receive good customer service via social media.
(Source: Ambassador)

 

This suggests that if you have an engaged workforce or a great support team that can quickly resolve customer issues, your business has the potential to turn those complaints into future revenue.

 

 

Consumers would rather or prefer to contact a company 33% through social media than by telephone. 
(Source: Ambassador)

 

If you have the budget, it’s good to hire a dedicated team to manage your social media accounts and answer customer messages. However, if you don’t have the luxury to do so, it’s highly recommended to look for a social media management platform that can automate these tasks for you. This will also make your brand easily accessible by customers.

 

More than half of the world’s web traffic now comes from mobile phones and one in five of the world’s population shopped online in the past 30 days. 
(Source: We Are Social)

 

Consumers expect a seamless experience when making transactions online via mobile hence it’s important to optimize your website for mobile users. You should also launch mobile-specific advertisements as it yields the highest click-through rates.

 

 

80% of consumers are likely to purchase an item based on suggestions made by their friends and family.
(Source: Forbes)

 

 

Invest in brand advocates and create an advocacy program with them (check out this blog we wrote on How To Set Up A Social Media Advocacy Program). These are influencers who love to talk and are probably already talking about your brand without an incentive. They are also consumers who love connecting to people with others of similar interests. Since they are more likely to seen as a source of reliable information, they can influence the opinions and purchases of their friends and family.

 

YouTube has better reach than any other cable networks in the U.S. for audiences aged 18 to 34 years old.
(Source: Jeff Bullas)

 

If you are launching a video campaign, it’s best to upload it on YouTube. According to Jeff Bullas, you will have more luck reaching your desired market through YouTube especially if you are targeting people aged 18 to 34 years old living in the U.S. Social media marketers utilize YouTube’s wide user base because they know they could potentially reach thousands or even millions of viewers with their video.

 

LinkedIn has a lower user activity rate than Pinterest, Google+, Twitter and Facebook despite the increase of users joining the social network. 
(Source: Fast Company)

 

Although LinkedIn continues to grow every second, it would be wise to put your focus and invest your marketing efforts on platforms where your audience is most active and engaged. This doesn’t necessarily mean you should not have your own company page on LinkedIn. You still need to build your social media presence online.

 

Instagram now has 800 million users and 500 million daily active users. It was also mentioned that it now has 2 million advertisers on the platform.
(Source: Tech Crunch)

 

This statistic encourages every brand to invest more on Instagram than on Facebook. With 500 million active users and a 70% higher engagement rate than Facebook’s, there is clearly a huge marketing potential on the platform. So, if you want to achieve good organic engagement, you must post consistently, do cross-promotions and add hashtags on your captions to boost discoverability and visibility.

 

Facebook’s highest traffic occurs during mid-week between 1 to 3 in the afternoon and a post will get more clicks on average when posted around 7 pm.
(Source: Zephoria)

 

Have a consistent posting schedule with the help of a social media scheduling tool. You can effortlessly plan, organize and manage your social content and campaigns the way you want as it gives you full control of the publishing interface. You can set your publication time across social media networks and never run out of things to say.

 

Twitter hashtags had no effect on engagement rates. In fact, tweets without hashtags outperformed tweets with hashtags.
(Source: Adweek)

 

A study by Locowise revealed that adding hashtags in tweets had no effect in engagement, hence the importance of quality in content. It’s better to focus on what you put out there for your audience rather than looking for hashtags to boost your visibility on the platform.

 

Pinterest users are predominantly female and 30% of all U.S. social media users are using Pinterest to market their brand or business.
(Source: Omnicore)

 

Pinterest has demonstrated the power of visual content when it comes to influencing people on their buying or purchasing decisions. According to Millward Brown Digital, 87% of users confirmed that Pinterest engagement has helped them decide what to purchase. 

 

While Facebook is still the leading social media network online, it’s good to know the numbers and statistics of other social media platforms and what they can do for your marketing campaigns. Take some time in examining these numbers to learn how you can harness the power of these social networks to its fullest potential.

Source: Anna Dievendorf