SEEING THE UNIVERSE ON 5 ALTARIAN DOLLARS A DAY SINCE 1837.
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The snow is 90% gone from my yard.  The only place that I still have any significant snow is part of the drive way and the sidewalks.  At least I can now tell where the sidewalks are.
Every year I pick a day that I decide that I have officially survived winter.  Last year it was in early February, this year it is Saturday the 6th of March.  I declare winter over.  Any problems you have from now on are your own delusions.
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Today I am not listening to music but old time radio.  Right now I am listening the radio series, "A Date With Judy".  This is a light comedy about Judy Foster and her boyfriend Oggie.  These were performed live, in front of a studio audience.  They were recorded as they were broadcast so the commercials (which were performed live during the show) are still in.  This episode's title is 'A New Dress For the Dance' and the sponsor was TUMS and in those days TUMS were 10 cents a roll or 25 cents for a three pack and they were available at every Drug Store (or at least that is what the advertising copy said).

For tons of Funs, Drama, Mystery, Sci Fi or Horror goto:
http://www.radiolovers.com
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DO NOT GET SCAMMED

Census forms will be sent by mail, March 15 to 17.

Census workers will go to homes that did not return the form, from April to July.

The forms will not ask for a Social Security number or financial information, such as bank-account numbers.  If they do they are a scam.

The Census will not contact you by email and you can not respond on-line.

Workers will have ID badges with expiration date and a Department of Commerce watermark.

You can request contact information for a supervisor or the local Census office for ID verification.

Census takers should not ask to come inside the house they are told to stay outside.
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If you are interested in the Medieval times, heraldry, the ballads of the days, the holy days, medicine and just all things Medieval then goto 'Mostly Medieval' at:

http://www.mostly-medieval.com/explore/gnwintro.htm
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The second week of March is:
Music in Our Schools Week - No that does not mean you can wear your IPod during Math class.

American Camp Week - Are we talking about tents or fashion statements?

National Procrastination Week - This was last week but got put off.

Bubble Gum Week - This reminds me of a song 'Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On the Bedpost Overnight?'.  It is a cute song, goto:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2jMqV0dHeM

All the old Novelty songs are on YouTube.

Chocolate Week -  My list also claims next week and the next week after that are also Chocolate Week.  Even if it is wrong I am sticking to it.

Newspaper in Education Week - Prefect for Papier-mâché.

National Professional Pet Sitters Week - ???  You hang out with people's pets and get paid for it and you need an entire week???  Heck all regular working people only get a Monday for Labor Day.  Be gone, I said away with you!
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Now to the reasons to be happy this week
(or at least civil).
Here goes:

I have to warn you that I think I have a bit more negative tone than usual.  For some reason not a lot of wonderful (and interesting) things seem to have happened in early March.  It must be the weather.

===========================================
monday 8 march
***The Official NoButtonButton*************
***
*** Fashions have done more harm than
*** revolutions.
***
*** - Victor Hugo
*******************************************
birthdays:
1700 – Anne Bonny Irish-American pirate.  She was a wild child, stabbing a servant when she was 13, a few years later she marries a Pirate and sets a fire on her father's South Carolina Plantation.  She left her husband and joined John "Calico Jack" Rackham's band of Pirates.  Calico Jack, Anne, Mary Read and crew plundered the seas around the southern US and Caribbean, for a few years.  Anne was not a shy girl and fought along side of the rest of the crew and earned her spot on Calico Jack's crew.

After being captured and being sentenced to hang, her history gets murky.  She "pleaded her belly' (pregnant) and as was custom, the execution was stayed until the birth of the child.  There is some indication that the extra time she had gave her rich father time to buy her out of jail and take her back to South Carolina.  There is some evidence that she married another man, had 8 children and lived to the ripe old age of 80, as a proper lady, but oh to live the life of a Pirate.  Arrr!

1804 – Alvan Clark, US telescope maker and astronomer.  One of his accomplishments was the creation of the largest successful refracting telescopes ever.  It has a 40 inch lens.  The refracting telescope are long tubes with lens on either end and light travels straight through.  They do not capture much light and light is what really determines what you can see with a telescope. 

Since then a better way of making telescopes has been developed.  The new telescopes have folded optics.  Light enters a short, wide tube, the larger width allows more light and increases what the telescope can resolve.  The shorter the tube and the fewer lens that the light travels through, the less light (information) is lost.  Folded optics scopes take the light that enters and reflects it by a parabolic mirror which focuses on a second (smaller) mirror that sends the focused light to the eye piece or sensor.  This is the principle that the greatest telescope ever built, the Hubble, is based on. 

Very few astronomers do serious work by direct viewing through a telescope.  Computers allow telescopes to move at exactly the same rate that the stars appear to move across the sky.  This allows telescopes to take very long exposures and makes impossibly faint object to be photographed.  Hubble has taken photos of galaxies so far away that their light took 13 Billion years to get here.  Some of these galaxies might not even exist now.

1899 - Elmer Keith was an Idaho rancher and firearms enthusiast. Keith was instrumental in the development of the .357 Magnum, as well as the later .44 Magnum.  Without him Dirty Harry would have been shooting a .45 cal but no hand cannon like the .44 (which is no longer the most powerful handgun on Earth but it used to be).  For all you non-gun people out there, basically the magnum is bullet that has  a large volume cartridge.  The larger volume of the shell has more gun powder and gives more force to the projectile.

Since .44 mag is no longer the most powerful handgun then what is?  How about a S&W Model 500 revolver firing a 450 grain, .500 S&W Magnum bullet thru a 10-inch barrel.  This throws a bullet, 80% heavier than a .44 mag, at almost 1,000 miles per hour (1411 FPS).  It only comes as a 5 shot revolver and the violence of the explosion coming out of the barrel is so powerful that you MUST wear ear and eye protection to keep from being injured.  If you are not an expert and a strong person to boot, this gun is more dangerous to you than it is to anybody down range.  I have seen one and I thought it was a gag.  They are huge.  The projectile is more than half the weight of a .50 cal machine gun round.

events:
1655 – John Casor becomes the first legally-recognized slave, for life, in what will be the US.  The irony is that his master (Anthony Johnson) was an African-American.  Anthony Johnson was a Black colonist (maybe from Angola).  He was one of the original 20 Africans that came to Jamestown in 1620. By 1623, Johnson had worked off his indenture and was considered a "free Negro".  All 20 of the original Black colonist exchanged periods of indentured servitude for the cost of the passage to America.  Anthony acquired about 250 acres of land and imported 5 people to help him work it.  John Casor tried to go work for a white farmer with whom he could eventually work off his indenture.  Johnson went to court to get his property back and won.  John Casor died a slave.  With all the appalling things that people do to each other, in real life, I could never understand the popularity of horror films.  Isn't real life scary enough?

Historically slavery (in Christian society) did not depend on the color of a person's skin but on their religion.  A Christian could not keep another Christian as a life long slave (an indentured servant for seven years was okay).  The exceptions to the rules were prisoners and infidels.  Several hundred years ago the Knight's rules of chivalry even called for infidels to be put to death.  Later they were seen as slave material.  A slave could eventually gain their freedom if their master released them.  This usually involved the slave converting to Christianity, first. 

So this case of John Casor set the business model for large land owners (in the US) for the next 200 years.  The aftermath still poisons our society and we have forgotten that not all Blacks came here unwillingly but had to work hard to get here.  We also forget that many of the first English settlers did not come here of their own free will but because they were transported for crimes committed in England.  History is much more interesting when you get past the boring little scraps they teach in school.

Read more about it (more than just Wikipedia) at:
http://seriouspost.blogspot.com/2007/04/unfortunate-and-ironic-story-of-john.html

and at:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/johnson.html

1817 – The New York Stock Exchange is founded.

1936 – Daytona Beach Road Course holds their first oval stock car race.

1978 – The first-ever radio episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, is transmitted on BBC Radio 4.  This is the finest humorous Science Fiction Radio Show ever.  The original six, 30 minute, episodes were so popular that the BBC frantically made six more episodes.  Brilliant.  The radio show was followed by a "Trilogy of Five  Books (and a short story)" (a sixth book, written by somebody else was released in 2009), a TV series, three Plays, two computer games, a movie, Radio adaptations of the third, fourth and fifth books and various other related things. 

TV series absolutely sucked and the movie was much better funded but not much better.  The books were wonderful since they carried the story further than the radio show.  The computer games were okay but nothing special.  I never saw the plays so who can tell.  The Radio show is available on Records (yep, good old vinyl), cassette and CD.  Once in a while you can find a huge .MPEG file on the Internet.  Worth the effort.  Skip the movie. 

I started watching the movie again (on the Internet) and I was wrong.  The movie is not bad, it is horrible.  The casting of Aurthur Dent and Ford Prefect were so wrong and the way that Marvin the Paranoid Android was portrayed sucked.  The way that Zaphod Beeblebrox's second head and third arm were presented were really bad.  The movie lost the story's whimsical appeal. 

You really should check out the Wikipedia article on the Hitchhiker.  There are eight other related articles in Wikipedia that have links at the end of the first article.

May 25th is 'Towel Day' (read the book) in honor of Douglas Adams and for some strange reason it is also 'Geek Pride Day'.  I think both days are perfect for me since Zaphod Beeblebrox (a main character in the Hitchhiker) has been added to my spell checker.

1979 – Phillips demonstrates Compact Disc publicly for the first time.  Now you can not get away from them. 

holidays:
Be Nasty Day - I think this one was created for Janet Jackson.

Tar & Feather Day - Nothing good can come of this.

National Peanut Cluster Day - Random food day.

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tuesday 9 march
***The Official NoButtonButton*************
***
*** Just because nobody complains doesn't
*** mean all parachutes are perfect.
***
*** - Benny Hill
*******************************************
birthdays:
1887 – Phil Mead, English cricketer.  I just have not had a cricket reference lately, so here it is.

1959 – Barbie's birthday.  The Barbie doll makes its debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York.  There are some people that blame Barbie as one of the root causes of American women's obsession with being thin.

Nestle should get a Barbie Doll, Hersey did.  To see the Hersey Barbie goto:
http://zomgcandy.com/2009/04/14/hersheys-barbie-doll-giveaway/

Also that website has links to 17 other candy blogs.

Joan Jett, Heidi Klum and Cyndi Lauper are all special edition Barbie dolls.

1934 – Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut and the first human in space.  I don't care what his politics are, this man is a hero.  To ride a fireball into an airless void, at over 16,000 miles an hour requires courage that is out of my league.

1942 – Mark Lindsay, American musician (Paul Revere & The Raiders).  Paul Revere & The Raiders was the first Rock Band I was crazy about.  They actually bumped The Beatles out of the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100.  Compared to other bands at the time The Raiders were VERY heavy and Mark Lindsay was their lead singer. 

When Columbia records decided they needed a rock band for their label, they never had a rock band record for them.  They tried to get the Rolling Stones.  Failing that they grabbed Paul Revere and they became Columbia's rock act.  Yes that is his real name, Paul Revere. 

The band appeared in 520 TV episodes of 'Where the Action Is' (produced by Dick Clark).

The latest version of Paul Revere & the Raiders can be seen at the Epcot Center (in Florida) on March 12, 13 and 14.

Also they will be at the 'Moondog Coronation Ball', in Cleveland, on March 27 (888-894-9424).

Most of May thru August they will be at the Andy Williams Moon River Theater in Branson, Missouri (800-666-6094).

The official website for The Raiders is:
http://www.paulrevereandtheraiders.com/

To see The Raiders, live on the Smothers Brothers show goto:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioufyn6j3cU
Paul Revere is the blond guy.

Or the big hit 'Kicks':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jcXaJaJgok&NR=1&feature=fvwp

The Raiders were not a fan of drugs or excessive partying as the lyrics to 'Kicks' show.

Girl, you thought you found the answer
on that magic carpet ride last night
But when you wake up in the mornin'
the world still gets you uptight
Well, there's nothin' that you ain't tried
To fill the emptiness inside
But when you come back down, girl
Still ain't feelin' right

Kicks just keep gettin' harder to find
And all your kicks ain't bringin'
you peace of mind
Before you find out it's too late, girl
You better get straight

No, but not with kicks
You just need help, girl

Well you think you're gonna find yourself
a little piece of paradise
But it ain't happened yet, so girl,
you better think twice
Don't you see no matter what you do
You'll never run away from you
And if you keep on runnin'
You'll have to pay the price

No, you don't need kicks
To help you face the world each day
That road goes nowhere
I'm gonna help you find yourself another way

events:
1276 – Augsburg becomes an Imperial Free City.  If the city was wealthy enough this meant they basically were a country.  Augsburg was rich and they made alliances with other cities and countries and were a independent country for years.  Now they are just another city in Germany.

1841 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules that captive Africans who had seized control of the ship (Amistad) carrying them had been taken into slavery illegally.  Yes this is the incident that the movie 'Amistad' is based on.

1910 – The Westmoreland County Coal Strike, involving 15,000 coal miners represented by the United Mine Workers, begins.  Workers lived in company provided houses and were often paid in script, so they were forced to buy everything from the company store regardless of the brand or price.  Pay was based on the weight of coal you mined each day.  Coal carts were different sizes so it was easy for the company fiddle with the tonnage.  All the work required (besides the actual mining of coal) was unpaid.  In 1910 the coal companies in the area lowered wages then dictated that all miner had to have new safety equipment, which they had to buy at the company store.  They also changed the type of explosives used in the mine and each miner was now going to be charged for the explosives he used.  So the miners went on strike, as many as 15,000.

Miners were beaten and some killed.  Women were raped and miner's wives that protested the coal company's tactics were arrested and put in jail, with their children.   Men that decided to just quit and move away were forcedly prevented from doing so.  The Coal and Iron Police were brutal but the worst were the Pennsylvania State Police, who were recruited for their ability to fight and barely pretended to be actual police.  Pennsylvania did this to try to stop the coal companies from hiring private armies of goons to fight the Unions.  After a year the Union ran out of money and called the strike off.  Both sides spent vast sums of money and almost nothing was solved, but the Union remained and grew stronger and in the future they started winning.  Mining is still a dirty, dangerous job but it is much more safe and better paying than 100 years ago.

Be thankful that your job does not require you to go underground.

holidays:
Panic Day - I don't know what it is about but I get a warm and fuzzy feeling about it.

Absolute Total Nihilists Bang Clang Day (Los Angeles) - This is one of the weirdiest days I have heard of but it seems to fit with Panic Day.

Festival of Primal Ooze - This has got to be cool whatever it is.

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wednesday 10 march
***The Official NoButtonButton*************
***
*** An expert is a person who has made all
*** the mistakes that can be made in a very
*** narrow field.
***
*** - Niels Bohr
*******************************************
birthdays:
1880 – Broncho Billy Anderson, American actor.  He was the first Cowboy movie star.  He made about 300 silent films and 148 of them were Westerns (Including the classic 'Great Train Robbery').

1940 – Dean Torrence, American singer (Jan and Dean).  Jan and Dean were pretty hot back in the late 50s to mid 60s.

1957 – Shannon Tweed, Canadian actress and model.  You can see her on TV on the reality show "Gene Simmons Family Jewels" where she plays herself, the life partner of Gene Simmons.  You know, the Demon bass player from KISS.

After a Canadian wish-fulfillment TV series 'Thrill of a Lifetime' arranged for her to pose for Hugh Hefner's Playboy, she became Miss November 1981 and eventually the Playmate of the Year for 1982.  She has made lots of movies (none of which I have ever seen) and done lots of daytime TV (none of which I have ever seen) and a smattering of other projects (none of which I have ever seen).  Also she has taken her clothes off for Playboy both by herself and with her sister (yeah I missed that too, darnit).  

1972 – Matt Kenseth, American race car driver.  Okay here is one for all you NASCAR fans.  Matt lives with his wife Katie, his son Ross, his daughter Kaylin Nicola and four cats, Lars, Charlotte, Miley and Sulley.

events:
1804 – In St. Louis, Missouri, a formal ceremony is conducted to transfer ownership of the Louisiana Territory from France to the United States.

1830 – The KNIL also known as the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army is created.  The Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger) was the army of the Netherlands in its former colony of the Netherlands East Indies (also known as the Dutch East Indies, and later known as Indonesia). The Royal Netherlands East Indies Army Air Force was its air arm. Along with the Royal Netherlands Navy, it comprised the Dutch armed forces in the Netherlands East Indies.

1977 – Astronomers discover rings around Uranus.  NO JOKES PLEASE!

1980 – Formation of the Irish Army Ranger Wing.  Irish Special Forces.

2006 – The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrives at Mars.  It's initial orbit is very uneven (this was expected) with the apogee being far greater than the perigee.  Eight months of careful breaking (flying close to the upper Martian atmosphere) place it in a near circular orbit and the science began.  At the time, the Orbiter, became the 5th operating spacecraft on or orbiting Mars.

holidays:
Festival of Life in the Cracks - HUH?

National Blueberry Popover Day - Random food holiday

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thursday 11 march
***The Official NoButtonButton*************
***
*** Dream as if you'll live forever.
*** Live as if you'll die today.
***
*** - James Dean
*******************************************
birthdays:
1738 - Benjamin Tupper was a soldier in the French and Indian War, and an officer of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, achieving the rank of brevet brigadier general. Subsequently, he served as a Massachusetts legislator, and he assisted Gen. William Shepard in stopping Shays' Rebellion. Benjamin Tupper was a co-founder of the Ohio Company of Associates, and was a pioneer to the Ohio Country, involved in establishing Marietta, Ohio as the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory.

1916 - Ezra Jack Keats was an artist and one of the most important children's literature authors and illustrators of the 20th Century.  

Keats is best known for introducing multiculturalism into mainstream American children's literature.  So that means there are a large group of people that dislike him, because their is a large group of people that do not believe in multiculturalism.  I do not understand that.  Any decent sized city in this country has Chinese, Japanese, Italian, German, Mexican, Indian and French restaurants.  Little old Johnstown has even has Sushi.  And of course there are also Vietnamese, Greek, Middle Eastern, Thai, Ethiopian places and the list just goes on.  The people that started them, came from those places.  They grew up with different folktales, different languages, different customs and religions and they make us a richer, more interesting place to be.  Yes some groups cause problems but that has happened to every group. 

In the early 1700s a significant portion of the settlers of the New World were soldiers bent on getting Aztec gold (in Latin America) or English and Irish convicts (in North America).  We were so rowdy we started a Revolution.

We need more multiculturalism.  There are almost seven billion people on planet Earth and only about 5% of them are US citizens.  I applaud Ezra Jack Keats.

Keats illustrated 85 books for children, also writing the stories for 24 of them. He was one of the first children’s book authors in the English-speaking world to use an urban setting for his stories.

Keats' works have been translated into 19 languages, including Japanese, French, Danish, Norwegian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, German, Swedish, Thai, Chinese, and Korean.

events:
1702 – The Daily Courant, the UK's first national daily newspaper is published for the first time.  Well they might be the first.  Some sources say the Norwich Post started publishing in 1701.  Who knows?

1927 – In New York City, Samuel Roxy Rothafel opens the Roxy Theater.  For those of you that do not know The Roxy was a movie theater at 153 West 50th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. It opened with the silent film 'The Love of Sunya', produced by and starring Gloria Swanson.  What made it stand out is that it had almost 6,000 seats.  Can you imagine the popcorn fights?

1990 – Lithuania declares itself independent from the Soviet Union.

1999 – Infosys becomes the first Indian company listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.  Infosys is the largest IT company in India, but a lot of the company is in 21 other countries (including the US).  Their company email has over 100,000 addresses.  Last year they made $1.28 billion dollars profit on $10.66 billion dollars income.  It has been rated the best company to work for (in India), three time in the last 10 years but your  resume had better be good.  In 2007 they hired 30,000 people but 1.3 million applied.

Their 'campuses' are gorgeous.  Goto the following link and scroll all the way down and you are going to see some stunning architecture.  We are talking about open, airy, unusual but totally modern buildings with gardens, swimming pools and fountains.  Their site in Bangalore, India has the largest TV screen in Asia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infosys

Their website is at:
http://www.infosys.com/

holidays:
Worship of Tools Day (India) - In the US we call this Boss Day.

Debunking Day - One day is not enough time to even read a list of what needs to be debunked.

Camp Fire Girls Day - Girl Scouts Lite (not as many cookies).

Johnny Appleseed Day - An Ohio boy gone to seed.

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friday 12 march
***The Official NoButtonButton*************
***
*** There is no cure for birth and death
*** save to enjoy the interval.
***
*** - George Santayna
*******************************************
birthdays:
1832 – Charles Boycott, British land agent and source of the term to boycott.  He was the one that was boycotted.  He was a land agent in Ireland who tried to undermine a local effort for a more equitable treatment of the local farmers who had to rent land.  The town shunned him.  They would not talk to him, sell to him, work for him or even deliver the mail.  The British government had to bring in 50 laborers to harvest Boycott's potato crop valued at £350 pounds sterling.  Oh yes there were the 1000 soldiers they brought in to protect the laborers.  It cost the British Government £10,000 pounds sterling to rescue those £350 of potatoes.  The ensuing wackiness turned Boycott into a verb.


events:
1664 – New Jersey becomes a colony of England.

1894 – In Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA, Coca-Cola is sold in bottles for the first time.  They were filled, by hand, one a a time. 

1912 – The Girl Guides (later renamed the Girl Scouts of the USA) are founded in the United States.  It is a good thing they renamed them since 'Girl Guide Cookies' just does not sound as good.

1993 – The Blizzard of 1993 – Snow would begin to fall across the eastern portion of the US with tornadoes, thunder snow storms, high winds and record low temperatures. The storm would last another 30 hours before it left the US.  Makes me cold just thinking about it.

2003 – Missing teen Elizabeth Smart is found in Sandy, Utah.  The amazing thing was that she was found alive.  She had been kidnapped 9 months earlier.  Brian Mitchell and Wanda  Barzee kept the 14 year old girl tied up.  She was raped and abused, but she survived.

NEVER GIVE UP. 

She is a senior in college and has campaigned for legislation designed to protect other children through stiffer punishment for perpetrators.  Elizabeth says look to the future, it does no good to dwell on the past. 

NEVER GIVE UP.

Wanda Barzee was sentenced to 15 years in prison and last week (March 1, 2010) Brian David Mitchell was found competent to stand trial for the kidnapping and sexual assault charges.  David has not competent to stand trial when he was captured and has spent the last 7 years in an asylum.

holidays:
National Cocoanut Tort Day - Random food day

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****joe722****