.... waiting ....
Just chillin'!
staying put. There is about 20 songs in each one of these, plenty to choose from.... | |||
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There are over 60 communities throughout the United States that have their own form of local currency. California has the most communities with their own currency, including many popular colleges like Berkeley and Santa Barbara.
A quarter has 119 grooves on its edge, one more than a dime. The reason the mint started using ridges was to prevent counterfeit and devaluing of the coin.
A penny weighs 2.5 grams, which is the average weight of a humming bird. A can of soda has four pennies worth of sugar.
America once issued a 5-cent bill during the civil war to combat the coin shortage at the time.
There is more Monopoly money printed in a year, than real money printed throughout the world. The amount of money in a Monopoly game is $15,140.
The United States Government used to keep its supply of silver at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. It now only keeps on hand enough for minting purposes.
New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was founded in 1792 on Wall Street in New York City. It is the largest stock exchange in the world by dollar value.
The first publicly traded security in the U.S. consisted of $80 million in U.S. Government bonds that were issued in 1790 to refinance Revolutionary War debt.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is an index of the stock prices of 30 of the largest and most widely held public companies in the United States and is compiled to gauge the performance of the industrial sector of the American stock market.
A bull market tends to be associated with increasing investor confidence, motivating investors to buy in anticipation of future price increases and future capital gains. A bear market is a steady drop in the stock market over a period of time.
There have been a number of famous stock market crashes like the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the stock market crash of 1973–4, the Black Monday of 1987, the Dot-com bubble of 2000.
In short selling, the trader borrows stock then sells it on the market, hoping for the price to fall. The trader eventually buys back the stock, making money if the price fell in the meantime or losing money if it rose.
1803 - The Marbury v. Madison case gave the Court a greater degree of power as it was the first time a law passed by Congress was declared unconstitutional. This decision established the Court's right to overturn acts of Congress - something that was not explicitly granted by the Constitution.
1819 - McCulloch v. Maryland is significant because it allowed for a loose construction of the Constitution. The Court upheld the right of Congress to create a Bank of the United States, ruling that it was a power implied but not enumerated by the Constitution.
1954 - Racial segregation in schools was invalidated in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case. The Court declared “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” and contending that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
1963 - In the Gideon v. Wainwright case, a defendant's right to legal counsel was guaranteed after the Supreme Court overturned the Florida felony conviction of Clarence Earl Gideon, who had defended himself after having been denied a request for free counsel. The Court held that the state violated the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause by failing to provide Gideon with counsel.
1973 - The Court ruled in the groundbreaking Roe v. Wade case that a woman has the right to an abortion without interference from the government in the first trimester of pregnancy, contending that it is part of her “right to privacy.” The Court did, however, grant states the right to intervene in the later trimesters of pregnancy.
1978 - In the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case, the Court ruled that affirmative action was unfair if it lead to reverse discrimination. The case involved the University of Calif., Davis, Medical School and Allan Bakke, a white applicant who was rejected twice even though there were minority applicants admitted with significantly lower scores than his. A closely divided Court ruled that while race was a legitimate factor in school admissions, the use of rigid quotas was not permissible.
Memorial day was first celebrated on May 30, 1868. It was observed by placing flowers on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers during the first national celebration. Gen. James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, after which around 5,000 participants helped to decorate the graves of the more than 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who were buried there.
Since the late 1950’s on the Thursday just before Memorial day, around 1200 soldiers of the 3d U.S. Infantry place small American flags at each of the more than 260,000 gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery.
On Memorial Day, the flag should be at half-staff until noon only, then raised to the top of the staff.
Moina Michael came up with an idea of wearing red poppies on Memorial day in honor of those who died serving the nation during war. She was the first to wear one, and sold poppies to her friends and co-workers with the money going to benefit servicemen in need.
In the year 2000 the National Moment of Remembrance Resolution passed. At 3pm on Memorial Day all Americans are asked to voluntarily and informally observe in their own way a moment of remembrance and respect by pausing from whatever they are doing for a moment of silence or listening to Taps.
The south refused to honor the dead on Memorial Day until after World War I when the meaning of Memorial Day changed from honoring civil war dead to honoring Americans who died fighting in any war.
The first barbecuers may well have been prehistoric cavemen. Anthropologists say they may have started roasting meat some 1.4 million years ago.Language development didn't occur until 200,000 B.C. or later.Other sources say this originated in the Caribbean where the native Indians used wood gratings over a slow fire to cook strips of meat.
According to the Indiana Propane Company, the most common barbecue items (beside ribs) are: hamburgers, steaks, hot dogs, and chicken breasts.
Three out of 4 American households own a grill and they use it on average of 5 times per month.
Lexington, North Carolina is known as the Barbecue Capital of the World. October is Barbecue Month there, with a month-long Annual Barbecue Festival. The city's first barbecue restaurant opened in 1919; there are currently over 20 barbecue restaurants.
People in the Northeast U.S. are the heaviest barbecuers in the nation. The next most frequent barbecues are in the North Central region of the U.S., followed by the South and then the Western U.S.
The word "barbecue" may have come from the French phrase "barbe a queue" (from whiskers to tail-The term refers to the original method in which a whole animal was cooked on a spit over an open fire), or the Taino Indian word for their method of cooking fish over a pit of coals (barbacoa).
This pot has 2 Heat Wave Tomatoes, a clump of peppermint (Mojitos!!!), and a Better Boy Tomato.
This little pot has two clumps of cilantro. I love cilantro in so many dishes. I just love cilantro!
This pot has 2 Beefsteak tomatoes, a clump of dill (love dill on my fish) and a clump of chives (Potatoes!! Cottage cheese!!).
I "fenced" them in with $10 of wire fencing. I could only get chicken wire by 100 feet bundles, and I couldn't think of anything I'd use it for. This was a little more expensive per foot, but I don't have something to store that I may never use. And I'm glad I bought it, because in retrospect, it is much sturdier.
Jazi demonstrates for you. I can't keep these dogs out of plants!
Magician Harry Houdini left the rabbits he pulled out of his hat to the children of friends. His wife was given a secret code - ten words randomly chosen that he would use to contact her from the afterlife. She held annual seances on Halloween for ten years after his death, but Houdini never appeared.
Animal lover Jonathan Jackson's will stipulated that his money be used for the creation of a cat house -- a place where cats could enjoy comforts such as bedrooms, a dining hall, an auditorium to listen to live accordion music, an exercise room, and a specially designed roof for climbing.
American hatmaker S. Sanborn left his body to science, bequeathing it to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., (then a professor of anatomy at Harvard Medical School) and one of Holmes's colleagues. The will stipulated that two drums were to be made out of Sanborn's skin and given to a friend on the condition that every June 17 at dawn he would pound out the tune "Yankee Doodle" at Bunker Hill to commemorate the anniversary of the famous Revolutionary War battle. (Eeewwwuuu!!)
Vermont tanner John Bowman believed that after his death, he, his dead wife, and two daughters would be reincarnated together. When he died in 1891, his will provided a $50,000 trust fund for the maintenance of his 21-room mansion and mausoleum, even requiring servants to serve dinner every night just in case the Bowmans were hungry when they returned from the dead.
Just two days before her death of an overdose in 1970, singer Janis Joplin changed her will to set aside $2,500 to pay for a posthumous all-night party for 200 guests at her favorite pub in San Anselmo, California, "so my friends can get blasted after I'm gone." The bulk of her estate reportedly went to her parents.
Eleanor E. Ritchey, heiress to the Quaker State Refining Corporation, passed on her $4.5 million fortune to her 150 dogs when she died in Florida in 1968. The will was contested, and by the time it was finally settled, only 73 of the dogs were still alive to recieve the established $14 million. When the last dog died in 1984, the remainder of the estate went to the Auburn University Research Foundation for research into animal diseases.
The Titanic was designed to hold 32 lifeboats, though only 20 were on board; White Star management was concerned that too many boats would sully the aesthetic beauty of the ship.
Survivors were rescued by the Carpathia, which was 58 miles southeast of the Titanic when it received the distress call.
The Titanic boasted electric elevators, a swimming pool, a squash court, a Turkish Bath, and a gymnasium with a mechanical horse and mechanical camel.
Lillian Gertrud Asplund, the last American survivor of the Titanic tragedy, died in Massachusetts on May 6, 2006, at age 99. Her mother and a brother also survived, but her father and three other brothers perished.
Eleanor Shuman, who was the inspiration for Kate Winslet's Rose, died on March 7, 1998, at age 87.
The wreckage of the Titanic was located in 1985, 12,500 feet down, about 350 miles (531 km) southeast of Newfoundland, Canada.
Bet you didn't know these books were banned...
Where's Waldo? Series by Martin Hanford: Schools in Michigan and New York put a ban on Waldo books because "on some of the pages there are dirty things", including a topless lady on the beach.
The American Heritage Dictionary: The whole dictionary was banned by a school district in Anchorage, Alaska in 1981 because they didn't approve of the inclusion of certain slang usage for words like bed and knockers.
The Complete Fairy Tales of The Brothers Grimm by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: The fairy tales we were told as kids are actually watered down versions of the Grimm stories like Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel. The original works featured a great amount of blood and not-so-happy endings.
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank: It wasn't the subject matter that got this literary work banned from a school in Alabama. Their reason - they just felt the book was "a real downer."
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: Libraries in New York and Colorado banned Mark Twain's adventurous tale soon after the book came out, claiming Tom Sawyer was a protagonist of "questionable character."
Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman: Stores around the United States wouldn't carry this book for fear the title would encourage customers to shoplift. However, had it been carried it probably would have been banned anyway for Hoffman's descriptions of how to make a pipe bomb, steal credit cards, and grow marijuana.
