~★~♥~♥~★~ El Morno! ♥~★~★~♥ ~
December 1, 2013 

 

★~ Today’s Quote:  How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon? Dr. Seuss

★~ Red Apple Day:

“The taste for apples is one of the earliest and most natural of inclinations,” according to Botanical.com. Today we honor the simple red apple with a heartfelt crunch.

Apples have high nutritional value and make for an extremely healthy snack — unless, of course, you’re a certain raven-haired beauty living with seven tiny men, in which case maybe you should lay low today.

The Kitchen Witch has a wonderful apple butter recipe that I spread on my popovers!

★~ Aids Awareness Day:

The first World AIDS Day was on December 1, 1988, and every year since, it’s served as an opportunity to increase awareness, educate, raise money, and fight prejudice. It is estimated that over 33.4 million people are currently living with HIV, and countless others are affected by it. The 2013 theme for World AIDS Day is “Shared Responsibility: Strengthening Results for an AIDS-Free Generation.”

★~ Today in History:

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♥~ 1891 – James Naismith was a physical education teacher at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, MA. To create an indoor sport that could be played during the winter months, he nailed up peach baskets at opposite ends of the gym and gave students soccer balls to toss into them and basketball was born.

♥~ 1913 – The first modern gas station opened in Pittsburgh on December 1, 1913. Gas sold for 27 cents per gallon — $6.39 in today’s dollars.

♥~ 1929 – The game of Bingo was invented by New York toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe.

♥~ 1945 – Burl Ives made his concert debut. He appeared at New York’s Town Hall. We lovingly listen every year for the voice of this old-time radio personality as the narrator and banjo-pickin’ snowman in TV’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

♥~ 1963 – The Beatles’ first single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” was released in the United States.

♥~ 1976 – The Sex Pistols used profanity on the British Today show, and became branded as “rotten punks.”

♥~ 2009 – A rare, 5-carat pink diamond was auctioned off for a record $10.8 million in Hong Kong. The stone, of a ‘vivid pink’ hue and considered near perfect, triggered brisk bidding at Christie’s in Hong Kong

★~Born Today:

♥~ 1847 – Julia A. Moore, She grew up on a Michigan farm, dropped out of school at the age of 11, bore 10 children, and is famous for writing really bad poetry — so famous for it, in fact, that Mark Twain modeled a character after her in The Adventures of Huck Finn, and he wrote a parody of Moore’s bad poetry for that character, Emmeline Grangerford, to recite.

She’s sometimes referred to as a “poetaster,” which the Oxford English Dictionarydefines as “a petty or paltry poet; a writer of poor or trashy verse; a rimester.” This distinction usually entails things like the use of awkward meter, painfully sappy sentimentality, words that rhyme in an unpleasant way, or poor taste in subject matter. Other poetasters famous enough to be anthologized include J. Gordon Coogler, William McGonagall, and James McIntyre.

As for Moore, her favorite topics included abstinence, temperance, sudden death, terrible destruction, obituaries of small children, and big disasters, such as train wrecks or fires. One of her most famous poems is about the Chicago Fire. She wrote:

The great Chicago Fire, friends,
Will never be forgot;
In the history of Chicago
It will remain a darken spot.
It was a dreadful horrid sight
To see that City in flames;
But no human aid could save it,
For all skill was tried in vain.

♥~ 1935- Woody Allen, born Allen Stewart Konigsberg, director and screenwriter. His parents wanted him to become a doctor or a dentist. Woody Allen said, “I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school.”

As a teenager, he started reading classics by Faulkner and Nietzsche because he was embarrassed when he took girls on dates and they asked him about writers whom he’d never read. But he also told them jokes. When he was 15, he started submitting his best jokes to gossip columnists. He went to NYU, but he got an F in English and a C-plus in film, and he was expelled because he never went to class.

After leaving college he decided to teach himself about making movie and bought the rights to a Japanese spy film, inserted all new dialogue, and released the film as What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966). It’s about a man trying to find to the recipe for the world’s greatest egg salad.

Woody  kept making movies, but when he was 40, he felt like a failure. He thought his films were too goofy. So he made a more serious film, filled with scenes from his own life. It was called Anhedonia, it was several hours long, and it had almost no plot. Allen played the main character. He cut it down, and ended up cutting out almost everything except scenes with Diane Keaton, who played the love interest. So they named the movie after her character, and it became Annie Hall (1977), winning the Academy Awards for best picture, best director, and best actress.

♥~ 1761 – Marie Tussaud (Grosholtz) museum curator and creator of wax figures: Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in 1834

♥~ 1933 – Lou Rawls (Louis Allen) Grammy Award-winning singer

♥~ 1940 – Richard Pryor comedian, actor

♥~ 1945 – Bette Midler Grammy Award-winning singer:

★~ Good to Know:

With as many as 200 million drivers expected to fill up over the long Thanksgiving Day weekend, a significant anniversary affecting them will not go  unnoticed by El Mornor’s: t he 100th anniversary of the modern gas station.

While fueling stations existed before 1913 — after all, Karl Benz is credited with inventing the first gasoline-powered automobile in 1885 — fueling was far from convenient a century ago. Early fueling sites were a patchwork collection of pharmacies or even ramshackle sheds and blacksmiths’ shops where fuel was usually dispensed from a container, as opposed to being directly pumped into a vehicle’s tank.

That all changed 100 years ago when Gulf Refining Company opened the nation’s first drive-up service station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, designed and built specifically to sell fuel. On December 1, 1913, the station opened and sold 30 gallons of gasoline — less than one percent of the daily sales volume of a fueling station today.

Customers at that first station would not recognize today’s fueling outlets. Gasoline retailing has evolved from full-service attendants with crisp, white uniforms to modern, state-of-the-art convenience stores offering self-service gasoline (except for New Jersey and Oregon where self-serve is prohibited). In addition, today’s gas stations sell far more than auto-related products like motor oils, lubricants and batteries, and are known as much for their in-store snacks, drinks and food — such as the latest trend of “gas station gourmet” outlets — as for their fueling.

And of course gas prices have changed. Despite the higher posted prices of today, gasoline is a relative bargain. Back on December 1, 1913, gas cost 27 cents a gallon — which equates to $6.39 per gallon in today’s dollars.

Convenience stores, which today sell more than 80% of the gasoline purchased in the country, began entering the gasoline retailing business in the 1960s when a combination of new technologies and the lifting of state self-serve bans allowed stores to reduce labor costs and pass on savings to customers.

“That first gas station did much more than define fueling for the next century — it redefined retail and ushered in the era of convenience,” said Jeff Lenard, vice president of strategic industry initiatives for the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS). “The emphasis was squarely on service — and speed of that service, concepts that are even more important today.”

When Gulf opened that original service station in 1913, there were approximately 500,000 vehicles navigating almost exclusively dirt or gravel roads. Today, there are more than 250 million vehicles traveling on the nation’s 3.98 million miles of paved roadways.

Here are a few statistics regarding today’s fueling industry:

♥~ There are 152,995 retail fueling sites in the United States. This is a steep and steady decline since 1994, when the station count topped 202,800 sites. This count includes 123,289 convenience stores selling fuel, plus grocery stores, truck stops, traditional gas stations and low-volume fueling locations like marinas. (Source: National Petroleum News’ MarketFacts; NACS/Nielsen Convenience Industry Store Count)

♥~ The average convenience store sells roughly 128,000 gallons of motor fuels per month, or approximately 4,000 gallons per day. (Source: NACS State of the Industry 2012 data)

♥~ U.S. gasoline demand is an estimated 8.7 million barrels per day in 2013, or about 40 million fill-ups per day. (Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Short-Term Energy Outlook)

♥~ Americans travelled 8.04 billion miles per day in 2012. (Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Short-Term Energy Outlook)

♥~ While about half of the convenience stores selling gasoline are “branded” outlets that sell a specific refiner’s brand of fuel, less than 0.4% are owned by the major oil companies. Chevron Corp. (406 stores), Shell Oil Products US (23 stores), and ConocoPhillips Inc. (1 store) still own and operate retail locations; ExxonMobil Corp. and BP North America do not own any locations. (Source: Nielsen data)

♥~ Small light-duty vehicles consume an average of 453 gallons of fuel per year, which equates to 1.24 gallons per day or 8.7 gallons per week. (Source: Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics)

♥~ The retail gross margin (or markup) on gasoline in 2012 was 18.4 cents/gallon, or 5.1% of the price of gas. Over the past five years, gross margins averaged 16.9 cents per gallon. (Source: Oil Price Information Service)

♥~ Gasoline taxes averaged 49.5 cents per gallon in October 2013; diesel fuel taxes averaged 54.8 cents per gallon in October 2013. (Source: American Petroleum Institute)

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RABBIT! RABBIT!  Welcome to El Morno December!

I  love apples and sharp cheddar cheese together—the perfect pairing! Apple cider is so tasty and makes the house smell so good! Or what about the kindergarten treat of apples and Graham crackers? YUM! And of-course there is apple art  – Cole craves apple puzzles and Swans.

I’m off to make a sausage, eggs, and toast a left over brown and serve. We’ll spend the day close to home with our campers, many of which will be returning to their happy homes. Wishing everyone a wonderful day!