~★~♥~♥~★~ El Morno! ♥~★~★~♥ ~
May 31, 2011

★~ Today’s Quote: Be curious, not judgmental. Walt Whitman

★~ National Tobacco Day:

Don’t smoke. If you do smoke, quit. The World Health Organization started No Tobacco Day in 1987 to draw global attention to the risks of tobacco.

★~ Complete Sentences Day:

Somewhere amidst instant messages, texting, tweets, status updates and the modern trend of reducing human interaction, traditionalists are worried that we are forgetting how to use complete sentences. WTH! Linguists warn that if we don’t do something about it soon, the complete sentence is going to be FUBAR. And that’s no RFLOL matter. So do your best today to speak and write in complete sentences. K?

★~ What You Think Upon Grows Day:

Today is Normal Peale’s birthday. Peale was a champion of positive thinking. Our thoughts are very powerful; they are our mental magic wands. What we dwell upon becomes our reality. Just for today, or even half of today (this is hard work), watch your thoughts — how often do you talk about what you want to happen opposed to what you don’t want to happen? How often do you let the media define your reality? Just yesterday, I heard a college student say, “I will never get a job the economy is so bad, nobody is hiring.” Funny, another college student I know just had two job offers.

★~ National Macaroon Day:

The Macaroon, a flourless cookie. Traditional macaroons are made with flour ground from almonds and leavened egg whites. These cookies are popular among Jewish families, especially during Passover when they cannot cook with flour. It is believed that macaroons originated in Italy. In fact, the word “macaroon” comes from the Italian word for paste, “maccarone.” In 1533, macaroon cookies were brought to France by Italian monks and nuns. Two Benedictine nuns, Sister Marguerite and Sister Marie-Elisabeth, baked and sold the cookies in order to pay for their housing. They became known as the “Macaroon Sisters,” and their cookies became famous throughout Europe.

To celebrate National Macaroon Day, munch a macaroon. Really easy macaroon recipe

★~ Today in History:

♥~ 1057 – Lady Godiva (1040-1080 A.D.) went horseback riding through Coventry. Seems it all started when the Godiva’s husband, Leofric, came up with a plan to stop her constant protests about the high taxes he was charging the citizens of Coventry, England (there was even a tax on manure). He told his wife that he would gladly reduce taxes on one condition: that she ride naked on horseback at high noon through the town’s crowded marketplace.

♥~ 1884 – Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan, patented “flaked cereal.

♥~ 1943 – The comic strip “Archie Andrews” debuted on the Mutual radio network. Archie, Veronica, Betty, Jughead, and the gang lasted on radio about five years.

♥~ 1976 – Ear doctors didn’t have to drum up business this day. There were plenty of walk-ins as The Who put out a total of 76,000 watts of power at 120 decibels at the Charlton Athletic Football Club in Charlton, South London. They played the loudest concert anyone had ever heard, making it into The Guinness Book of World Records.

♥~ 1990 – A little summer replacement TV show named Seinfeld debuted. It ran only through July, but the ‘show about nothing’ returned in January 1991 to become a full-blown smash, running through May 14, 1998.

♥~ 1999 – A huge mock cigarette stuffed with balloons accidentally exploded and caught fire while it was being chopped into during a No-Tobacco Day ceremony in Bangkok. No one was seriously hurt, but there were several singed eyebrows.

♥ ~ 2007 – The Dutch news agency ANP reported that almost half of Rotterdam’s coffee shops would be forced to stop selling marijuana because the shops were too close to secondary schools.

★~Born Today:

♥ ~ 1819 – Walt Whitman poet: Leaves of Grass, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, Passage to India, O Captain! My Captain!; died Mar 26, 1892

♥ ~ 1898 – Dr. Norman Vincent Peale clergyman: radio ministry; author and syndicated newspaper column: The Power of Positive Thinking; died Dec 24, 1993

♥ ~ 1930 – Clint Eastwood actor: Whether you picture him as the young cattle driver, Rowdy, in the seven-year-long television series, Rawhide; the silent, man with no name in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly); the fatally attractive DJ in Play Misty for Me; the death-defying rock-hard cop, Dirty Harry; or the sexy, mature photographer who stole the heart of an Iowa farm-wife in The Bridges of Madison County, Clint Eastwood has somewhere, sometime, made your day.

♥ ~ 1938 – Peter Yarrow singer: group: Peter, Paul and Mary: Leaving on a Jet Plane, Puff the Magic Dragon, If I Had a Hammer, Blowin’ in the Wind, I Dig Rock ’n’ Roll Music; songwriter: Torn Between Two Lovers

♥ ~ 1941 – Johnny Paycheck (Donald Eugene Lytle) country singer: Take This Job and Shove It, The Lovin’ Machine, [Don’t Take Her] She’s All I Got, Someone to Give My Love To, Mr. Lovemaker, Song and Dance Man, For a Minute There, Slide Off Your Satin Sheets, Friend, Lover, Wife, Heartbreak Tennessee, Motel Time Again, Jukebox Charlie, The Cave; songwriter: Apartment No. 9, Touch My Heart; died Feb 18, 2003

♥ ~ 1943 – Sharon Gless Emmy Award-winning actress: Cagney & Lacey [1985-1986, 1986-1987]; Revenge of the Stepford Wives, Tales of the Unexpected

♥ ~ 1943 – Joe Namath ‘Broadway Joe’: Pro Football Hall of Famer: quarterback: New York Jets: AFL’s Rookie of the Year [1965], Player of the Year [1968], Super Bowl III MVP; pantyhose and ointment spokesperson

♥ ~ 1965 – Brooke Shields model: Ivory Snow baby; actress: The Blue Lagoon, Pretty Baby, Brenda Starr, The Seventh Floor, Backstreet Dreams, Stalking Laura, Suddenly Susan

★~ Did You Know:

♥~ Cigarettes are the single-most traded item on the planet, with approximately 1 trillion being sold from country to country each year. At a global take of more than $400 billion, it’s one of the world’s largest industries.

♥ ~ Contrary to popular social belief, it is NOT illegal to smoke tobacco products at any age. Parents are within the law to allow minors to smoke, and minors are within the law to smoke tobacco products freely. However, the SALE of tobacco products is highly regulated with legal legislation.

♥ ~ The U.S. states with the highest percentage of smokers are Kentucky (28.7%), Indiana (27.3%), and Tennessee (26.8%), while the states with the fewest are Utah (11.5%), California ( 15.2%), and Connecticut (16.5%).

♥ ~ Smokers often smoke after meals to ‘allow food to digest easier’. In fact, this works because the bodies priority moves away from the digestion of food in favor of protecting the blood cells and flushing toxins from the brain.

♥ ~ The American brands Marlboro, Kool, Camel and Kent own roughly 70% of the global cigarette market.

♥ ~ In 1845, the sixth US President, John Quincy Adams, wrote a letter to Rev. Samuel Cox in Brooklyn, who was in the process of writing a book about tobacco and smoking. Adams told Cox that when he was a young man, he had been addicted to both smoking and chewing tobacco. When he decided to quit it took him three months.

♥ ~ The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer. So did the first “Marlboro Man.”

Today’s Silly:

Two old ladies were outside their nursing home, having a smoke when it started to rain. One of the ladies pulled out a condom, cut off the end, put it over her cigarette and continued smoking.
Lady 1: “What’s that?”

Lady 2: “A condom. This way my cigarette doesn’t get wet.”

Lady 1: “Where did you get it?”

Lady 2: “You can get them at any drugstore.”

The next day … Lady 1 hobbles herself into the local drugstore and announces to the pharmacist that she wants a box of condoms. The guy looks at her kind of strangely (she is, after all, over 80 years of age), but politely asks what brand she prefers.

Lady 1: “It doesn’t matter as long as it fits a Camel.

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Hope everyone has a terrific Tuesday.  Long weekends make for short weeks! Drop me a comment if you have a chance and let me know your random and fascinating El Morno thoughts because Odd loves company!

♥