★~♥~♥~★~ El Morno! ♥~★~★~♥ ~
December 28, 2013

★~ Today’s Quote: “Stop cheating!” the dealer told the card player. “I’m not!” claimed the player. “You must be,” said the dealer. “That is not the hand that I dealt you.” (unknown)

★~ Card Playing Day: 

Card Playing Day is easy to celebrate, just grab a pack of cards and play your favorite card game solitaire or in in a group.

★~ Chocolate Candy Day:

Didn’t we just celebrate Chocolate Day? Well, never mind, chocolate can never be celebrated too often, and this one is easy for us to celebrate (tomorrow’s food of the day, pepper pot, is more of a challenge). My brother-in-law sent us home Christmas Day with his “so wonderful” homemade chocolate, my mother sent her “world’s best” fudge along with truffles and turtles, and several friends gave us boxes of chocolates. We also have chocolate-covered pretzels and cherries. We are rich in chocolate and my only wish is I could share a piece with you! Not my mother’s fudge, of course…I don’t share the fudge. Ever. Sorry.

★~ Today in History:

♥~ 1846 – Iowa joined the union as  the 29th state. The name Iowa is an American Indian word meaning ‘the beautiful land’.  Des Moines, the state’s largest city, and capital. The Iowa state bird is the eastern goldfinch, the state flower, the wild rose, and the state motto: “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.”

♥~ 1912 – The first municipally-owned street cars took to the streets of San Francisco, California. The first car was named, RICE-A-RONI.

♥~ 1964 – Principal filming of the movie classic, Doctor Zhivago, began on location near Madrid, Spain. When completed, the film was 197 minutes long and so spectacular that it received ten Oscar nominations, winning five of the Academy Awards, including Best Original Score.

♥~ 1981 – WEA Records (Warner-Elektra-Atlantic) raised the price of its 45 rpm records from $1.68 to $1.98.

★~Born Today:

♥~ 1922 – Stan Lee artist, writer: creator of Marvel Comics. Stan Lee,  popularized the saying, “With great power there must also come — great responsibility” from the Spider-Man comic. He also helped create the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and the X-Men.

♥~ 1954 – Denzel Washington Academy Award-winning actor: Glory [1989]; Malcolm X, St. Elsewhere, The Pelican Brief, Crimson Tide, Courage Under Fire, The Hurricane,Remember the Titans

★~ Did You Know: Good News

 

♥~ Peace: Even with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the first decade of the 21st century saw the number of annual battle deaths at its lowest ever in history. Professor Joshua Goldstein put it best:

“If the world feels like a more violent place than it actually is, that’s because there’s more information about wars — not more wars themselves.” Overall, we’re in the midst of an unheard of “long peace,” as no major powers have clashed since World War II, replacing them with smaller wars that historically would count as skirmishes — the U.S. lost 3,400 soldiers in Afghanistan, which is terrible, but during the American Civil War, 4,700 troops were killed on one side of one single battle.

OK, so maybe this is just a temporary breather after the bloodbath that was the previous century? Nope — it’s part of a long-term trend. As crazy as it seems to suggest it, the past couple of hundred years have been the most peaceful in world history. That’s including the world wars.

Yes, in absolute numbers, more people died violently in the 20th century than in any other century — but that’s because there are so many more people now. The chances that a person living in the 20th century would die violently were about 3 percent. That’s a historically low number — it was five times higher in prehistoric societies. In tribal societies, war was a daily occurrence — just the process of everyone settling down into large-scale governments, even violent ones, was an improvement. If our hunter-gatherer ancestors could see us now, they’d be confounded by the complete lack of annual head smashing and face stabbing.

♥~Teen Are Less Likely to Smoke, Drink, or Do Drugs Than Ever:  The National Institute on Drug Abuse has been surveying tens of thousands of high schoolers for almost four decades, and not only is drug use down, but almost every form of substance abuse is down. The big exception is marijuana; otherwise usage of illicit drugs by high school students has been steadily falling for seven years.  And not only are the kids not injecting hardcore narcotics any more, they’re also consuming alcohol at record lows, as binge drinking continued its five-year decline right into 2012.  Oh, and as of 2012, teen smoking was at its lowest rate in history.

♥~Literacy Is at an All-Time High: We live in the most literate world ever. Currently, about 99 percent of American adults can read and write. But that’s America — a better question would be how the rest of the world is doing. The answer is also pretty impressive. Take India, for example, and its 1.2 billion people. Fifty years ago, only 18 percent of them could read. Today, that figure is  over 60 percent; worldwide as a whole, that figure is 84 percent.

♥~Worldwide, Poverty Is Dropping at a Shocking Rate:  Even though lately it seems like the whole world is in a race to the bottom, the poorest of the poor are actually climbing out of financial poverty. From 1990 to 2012, the number of the world’s extreme poor was cut in half. This is the first significant global decline in extreme poverty. Ever.  And these aren’t just statistical tricks here — when they calculate this, they’re not just counting income, they account for total living conditions — infrastructure, schools, access to clean water, everything. A billion people have that stuff for the first time. And what’s really encouraging is that this all happened three years ahead of the official estimates, which pegged 2015 as the soonest such a lofty goal could be achieved. So how did this happen? International aid helped, but the big jump has been in the increased participation of previously isolated countries in international trade.

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As a balloon lover this year’s Nobel Prize winners with balloons amused me. . .

I’m still trying to get Odd fixed so that error messages don’t appear when you visit. Customer Service around the holidays is a challenge.

A deer antler customer is upset that both her dogs want to chew on the same antler despite the fact that she bought two identical antlers. She wants them each to chew their own antler when they watch television together at night. Switching/sharing antlers is not hygienic. Any ideas of how to respond? I’m struggling. . .Time for a cuppa and a Chocolate sucker.

Odd Loves Company!

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