~★~♥~♥~★~ El Morno! ♥~★~★~♥ ~
January 25,2012

★~ Today’s Quote: Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. Robert Burns

★~ Opposite Day: 

Today isn’t National Opposite Day, so don’t celebrate by doing the opposite of what you mean to do and saying the opposite of what you mean to say. Then again, if you don’t want to do something, you shouldn’t do just because it’s the opposite of what you should do, and then consider that you don’t want to do the thing that you do want to do; then you won’t do what you don’t want to do…and you will do what you do want to do and everything should work out fine. We think.

Wishing you an un-Opposite Day.

★~ Irish Coffee Day:

It’s coffee, but with whiskey. Can you think of a better way to start your morning? Guess it depends on the morning. America’s first Irish coffee was purportedly concocted in 1952 at San Francisco’s Buena Vista. I know…you think it would be at an Irish-sounding place, but life’s full of surprises. The Buena Vista recipe was carefully perfected to replicate the popular drink served at the Shannon airport in Ireland.

Let’s toast Irish Coffee Day: May we have the hindsight to know where we’ve been, the foresight to know where we’re going and the insight to know when we’ve gone too far.

♥~ 1870 – G.D. Dows patented the ornamental soda fountain. The marble fountain featured a double stream draft arm and sold for $225!

♥~ 1905 – The world’s largest cut diamond, The Cullinan (3,106 carats, 621.2 grams or 1 and 1/4 pounds) was discovered in the Premier Mine, near Pretoria, South Africa.

♥~ 1915 – Alexander Graham Bell in New York spoke to his assistant (Thomas Watson) in San Francisco, inaugurating the first transcontinental telephone service.

♥~ 1964 – The Beatles reached the #1 spot on the music charts, as their hit single, I Want to Hold Your Hand, grabbed the top position in Cash Boxmagazine, as well as on the list of hits on scores of radio stations. It was the first #1 hit for the Beatles.

♥~ 1984 – Apple’s Macintosh computer went on sale. Price tag: $2,500.

★~Born Today:

♥~ 1759 –  Robert Burns beloved Scottish poet (“Oh wad some power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!” ). Every year on the anniversary of his birth, people all across the world pay tribute to his legacy with a traditional Burns Night Supper. Robert Burns rose from humble beginnings, wrote his first poem at the age of fifteen, and published his first book of verses, “Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect,” at the age of twenty-seven. He became instantly popular among the upper classes and was also celebrated as the poet of the common man. Perhaps one of his most famous contributions to modern-day culture is the song, “Auld Lang Syne”! Some of the more colorful Burns Night traditions include: a bagpipe procession in honor of the haggis, men dressed in kilts, a designated whisky-bearer, recitations of Burns’ poetry, and a toast to the lassies.

♥~ 1882 – Virginia Woolf author: Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, Golven;

♥~ 1938 – Blues, soul, and gospel singer Etta James, )born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles (1938) to a single mom who was 14 years old. Etta sang in gospel choirs in Los Angeles, moved to San Francisco, sang doo-wop, and was discovered there by the famous Johnny Otis when she herself was just 14 years old. He asked her to sing a song with him called “Roll With Me Henry,” and he was so impressed that he took her down to Los Angeles to record with him — without telling her mom. They renamed the song “The Wallflower,” and she nailed it perfectly on the first take in the recording studio. It became a big hit, shooting to the No. 1 spot on the R&B charts in 1955. It was in 1960 that she first sang the song she’s now most famous for: “At Last.” The song was written 20 years before, and it had been performed by the Glenn Miller Band in the 1940s, but her version is by far the best known, and it’s considered her signature song. Etta James had been a star singer for more than 40 years when she won her first Grammy, in 1995, for an album of Billie Holiday covers called Mystery Lady. In the last decade, she’s won several more Grammys. She wrote about her musical career, struggles with drug addiction, and her mysterious young mother who loved Billie Holiday in a highly praised memoir, co-authored with David Ritz, called Rage to Survive (1995).

★~ Did You Know: 

♥~ The first words spoken through a telephone were “Watson come here, I want you!” The phone call was made by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson.

♥~ Alexander Graham Bell thought instead of answering the phone “Hello,” that the recipient should say “Hoy, Hoy.”

♥~ Mark Twain was one of the first people to have a phone in his home.

♥~Telephones grew quickly, from one phone in 1876 to 11 million phones nationwide by 1915.

♥~ When Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922, all telephones stopped from ringing for one full minute as a tribute to the creator.

♥~ The first transatlantic telephone cable was used in 1956. A telephone cable was run across the ocean floor and lies as deep as 12,000 feet. The cable runs across the Atlantic Ocean from Canada to Scotland.

♥~ In 1879, telephone subscribers began to be designated by numbers rather than names the result of a measles epidemic. A Massachusetts doctor, concerned about the inability of replacement exchange operators to put calls through because they would not be familiar with the names associated with all the jacks on the switchboards, suggested the alphanumeric system of identifying customers by a two-letter and five-digit system.

♥~ There are roughly 150 million telephone lines in the world, a number that increases by thousands daily.

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I know a blogger, who has a British friend who celebrates Burns Day with a  B-U-M-S night supper–if you are interesting in more fascinating details click over and give the post a read…It is riveting I PROMISE!

Please don’t be oppositional…If you have a morn moment…leave a comment. Odd Loves Company!

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