My LaDy AnGeLFaCe's blog: "INTERESTING"

"In the long run, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is stupidity. In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools are producing artificial stupidity, in the sense of ideas and attitudes far more foolish than young people would have arrived at on their own. ...Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of an avowed enemy can destroy many Americans, but they cannot destroy America, because we are too strong and too capable of counterattack. Only Americans can destroy America. But too many of our schools have for years been quietly undermining the values and abilities that are needed to preserve any society — and especially a free society." —Thomas Sowell

A rumor, sometimes the quickest way to achieve U.S. Government action. What begins as a rumor in the federal government, often times, will become fact. The reason for this phenomenon is unclear, but speculation persists that it is a method employed to avoid embarrassment. Akin to the saying, "They say it's so, so it must be so." Classically, rumors spread from person to person by word of mouth, as in gossip. Cheap postage rates and then telephone services fomented the pace and range of the swirling of rumors. With the advent of the Internet many rumors have started to spread via email and more recently through blogging, as also occurs with various hoaxes and urban legends. While many rumors begin or continue to spread as a part of natural human communication that occurs when people discuss something they find funny or interesting, some are started in an intentional attempt to disseminate specific information. Viral marketing campaigns often depend on rumors, as do many political endeavors. Some people in very public positions find rumors very troublesome, annoying or embarrassing, when real or imaginary details about the personal lives they would prefer to keep private start to spread among people who are interested in them. Rumors can have a powerful motivational aspect on those who believe in them – among stock traders, for example, hearing a rumor from a trusted source can lead one to believe that one now has inside information. As rumors spread without corraborating evidence, it's not unusual for those who have heard the rumor to look for some on their own – a rumor about a celebrity's sexual preferences, for example, may cause those who hear it to start judging the celebrity's behavior against known stereotypes. Some rumors can be particularly outlandish or bizarre, such as the persistent claims that the singer Elvis Presley still lives or that the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had but a single testicle (there is in fact some evidence for this; see Adolf Hitler's medical health). Rumors in plays are also a popular means of introducing a play, often called an Induction. In Henry IV, Part 2, one of Shakespeare's histories, rumor is used to twist and complicate the plot, to narrate in a way that does not have to state truth nor fact within the play, but lie and concoct the characters' whereabouts and their actions. Poets have personified rumor as an abstract, demi-god-like figure, Rumor, since at least Roman times. "She" is the source of endless trouble in Virgil's Aeneid. In the financial markets rumour is rife with unfounded statements such as the dollar is going to crash or the price of gold will explode or the price of oil will explode. These are usually all based not on scientific information but on speculation and hype that various events will occur and so forth thus approximating to rumour. These type of rumours should not be used to make important financial decisions if uninformed. It could be said that economic science is based on false premises and thus promotes such nonsense.

In our appetite for gossip, we tend to gobble down everything before us, only to find to late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts but only diminished. > > >

The Motown female group The Supremes, which dominated the pop charts in the 1960's, was originally called The Primettes. According to Margaret Jones, author of a Patsy Cline biography, there are a dozen places in Virginia that could claim to be the hometown of the nomadic Cline. Her family moved 19 times before she was 15. When the Yardbirds broke up in 1968, Jimmy Page was left to honor the band's commitments, performing as The New Yardbirds. The group eventually evolved into Led Zeppelin. At age 47, the Rolling Stones' bassist, Bill Wyman, began a relationship with 13-year old Mandy Smith, with her mother's blessing. Six years later, they were married, but the marriage only lasted a year. Not long after, Bill's 30-year-old son Stephen married Mandy's mother, age 46. That made Stephen a stepfather to his former stepmother. If Bill and Mandy had remained married, Stephen would have been his father's father-in-law and his own grandpa. The brass family of instruments include the trumpet, trombone, tuba, cornet, flügelhorn, French horn, saxhorn, and sousaphone. While they are usually made of brass today, in the past they were made of wood, horn, and glass. Most toilets flush in E flat. The rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd took their name from a high school teacher named Leonard Skinner who had suspended several students for having long hair. According to Beatles producer George Martin, Neal Hefti's catchy composition of the 1960's "Batman" Emmy-winning theme song inspired George Harrison to write the hit song "Taxman." At the tender age of 7, the multi-award-winning composer and pianist Marvin Hamlisch ("The Way We Were," "The Sting") was one of the youngest students ever admitted to the renowned Juilliard School of Music in New York City. In the band KISS, Gene Simmons was "The Demon", Paul Stanley was "Star Child", Ace Frehley was "Space Man", and Peter Criss was "The Cat. The song "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" was written by George Graff, who was German, and was never in Ireland in his life. The famous Russian composer Aleksandr Borodin was also a respected chemistry professor in St. Petersburg. In 1992, Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon, better known to country music fans as singer/comedienne Minnie Pearl, was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President George Bush. In 1994, Minnie became the first woman to be inducted into the Comedy Hall of Fame. She was too frail and sick to attend the ceremony, and so good friend and comedian George Lindsey ("Goober") accepted the award for her. She died in 1996 at age 83. Bill Haley and the Comets, one of rock and roll's pioneer groups actually began their career's as Bill Haley's Saddle Pals - a country music act. The voice of Tony the Tiger is Thurl Ravenscroft, who also sang the "Rotten Mr. Grinch" song in the movie, "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas". He was also narrator for Disney's "A Spooky Night in Disney's Haunted Mansion" album. He performed for many Disney attractions including: voice of Fritz the parrot in "The Enchanted Tiki Room, " lead singer in "Grim Grinning Ghosts" in the Haunted Mansion, narrator on Monorail. He was the voice for the Disneyland LP based on the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride. The flip side of this LP contained a number of sea chanties he sang. In 1939 Irving Berlin composed a Christmas song but thought so little of it that he never showed it to anybody. He just tossed it into a trunk and didn't see fit to retrieve it until he needed it for a Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire movie, HOLIDAY INN 10 years later. Bing Crosby was a staunch Catholic and at first refused to sing the song because he felt it tended to commercialize Christmas. He finally agreed, took eighteen minutes to make the recording, and then the "throw-away" song become an all-time hit. Crosby's version has sold over 40 million copies. All together, this song has appeared in 750 versions, selling 6 million copies of sheet music and 90,000,000 recordings ,just in the United States and Canada. You might not recognize the song from the movie HOLIDAY INN...or from the composer's name of Irving Berlin. But you're bound to know it because it's on everyone's list of Christmas favorites: WHITE CHRISTMAS. Dark Side of The Moon (a Pink Floyd album) stayed on the top 200 Billboard charts for 741 weeks! That is 14 years. Brian Setzer, of the Brian Setzer Orchestra, started out in a garage band called Merengue. "Mr. Mojo Risin" is an anagram for Jim Morrison. The horse's name in the song Jingle Bells is Bobtail. No one knows where Mozart is buried. The Beatles featured two left handed members, Paul, whom everyone saw holding his Hoffner bass left handed, and Ringo, whose left handedness is at least partially to blame for his 'original' drumming style. Tommy James was in a New York hotel looking at the Mutual of New York building’s neon sign flashing repeatedly: M-O-N-Y. He suddenly got the inspiration to write his #1 hit, 'Mony Mony' Tickets for Frank Sinatra's first solo performance at the Paramount Theatre in New York City in 1942, sold for 35 cents each. Jim Morrison found the name "The Doors" for his rock band in the title of Aldous Huxley's book "The Doors of Perception", which extolls the use of hallucinogenic drugs. The Granny Smith apple was used as the symbol for the Beatles' Apple Records label. Verdi wrote the opera Aida at the request of the khedive of Egypt to commemorate the opening of the Suez canal. Warner Communications paid $28 million for the copyright to the song "Happy Birthday". John Lennon named his band the Beatles after Buddy Holly's 'Crickets.' The Beatles played the Las Vegas Convention Center in 1964. Some 8,500 fans paid just $4 each for tickets.

By DON BABWIN, Associated Press Writer Mon Dec 11, 3:28 AM ET CHICAGO - Squirrels hit the genetic lottery with their chubby cheeks and bushy tails. It's hard to imagine picnickers tossing peanuts and cookies at the rodents if they looked like rats. ADVERTISEMENT But good looks alone don't get you through Chicago winters. Nor do they help negotiate a treacherous landscape of hungry cats, cars and metal traps. So how do they do it? And why do they search, huddle, dart, and sometimes forget where they hid their nuts? Joel Brown aims to find out. "We're trying to get a glimpse of what your life is like if you are a city squirrel," said Brown, a biologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He and a team of students will trap squirrels in Chicago and its suburbs this winter, taking skin samples for DNA analysis. They'll strap collars on them and watch what they do. And they'll attach threads to acorns and hazelnuts, then see where the squirrels take them and when they eat them. While the methods aren't unlike those used to study animals in exotic lands, little attention has been paid to those in human neighborhoods. It is, after all, a lot sexier to track gorillas in Africa than a squirrel on Main Street. "Our appreciation is least in our own backyard," said Brown, who is part of a small brethren of scientists around the country who've made it their business to figure out how squirrels go about theirs. What they've discovered is that the critters are downright crafty. Start with their attitude toward other squirrels' food. They want it and won't hesitate to steal it. To ward off thieves, squirrels engage in a shell game: They go through the motions of digging and pretending to jam acorns into the ground, even smoothing out the grass to make it appear as if they're covering their hiding spot, before running off with the acorns still in their mouths. "What possible purpose could that be for other than fake out somebody watching them bury it?" said Peter Smallwood, a University of Richmond biologist. Squirrels figure out how to outsmart devices designed to keep them away from food — something naturalist Howard Youth learned the hard way. Squirrels broke into four types of bird feeders in his Maryland yard before he found one that they couldn't penetrate. So far. "They will try something new and eventually, if one gets it, the other ones will notice and they will figure out a way to thwart the bird feeder," Youth said. Brown hopes to get into his subjects' little heads. One way is by setting out hazelnuts that have been shelled alongside those that haven't. "If they pick hazelnuts with shells it means they're looking more toward the future and not in need of food right now," he said. If they pick shelled hazelnuts, "it means they're living paycheck to paycheck." Squirrels know the difference between acorns that can be stored for a long period and those that can't. If they only have access to those that can't, "they will scrape out the tiny embryo and that kills the seed (so) it stores well," said Michael Steele, a wildlife biologist at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania. But squirrels have their shortcomings. Sometimes they forget where they buried their nuts, although Brown said their sensitive noses allow them to sniff out ones hidden by their neighbors. And while someone once swore to Brown that squirrels look both ways before crossing the street, they're apparently looking for something other than cars. Robert McCleery, who completed his dissertation at Texas A&M on urban and suburban squirrels, outfitted squirrels with radio transmitter collars and found that 80 percent of them died under the tires of a car or truck. Still, who cares about squirrel habits besides a small band of scientists? Lots of people. Search for "squirrels" on the Internet and Web sites like "Squirrel Lover's Club" and "Scary Squirrel World" pop up. There are sites that allow readers to comment on stories like the one from Russia about a "pack of furious squirrels" that reportedly tore a dog to pieces. Another site, "The Campus Squirrel Listings," judges colleges by their squirrel populations. The U.S. Naval Academy and the University of California, Berkeley, are among the top schools. None of this squirrel fascination surprises Brown. "They are the clowns in your backyard," he said.