Stuff That Interests AL904

How 'bout them Apples

That's me!

Thanks to CagleCartoons! 

My Forty-Fourth Super Bowl

My Forty-Fourth Super Bowl

   Okay, this will give away how old I am. Except for a couple of years that I was at sea with the Navy, I have watched every Super Bowl on TV. (While at sea, we caught radio broadcasts of the Super Bowls.) I remember the excitement of the first Super Bowl game that matched the NFL champion against the upstart AFL champion for the first time. All of us who considered ourselves 'experts' thought that the NFL's Green Bay Packers would blow away the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs. After all, the Green Bay Packers had been in existence since the early 1920's competing in the National Football League, while the Chiefs and the new AFL were established in 1960.

   On January 15, 1967, Helen and I were in front of our black and white 15" TV to watch the "First World Championship Game," as it was called. Although, Kansas City lost 35-10, they played a respectable game. We were also there in front of our now larger 18", but still black and white TV in 1969, to see the Jets beat Baltimore for the first ever win by an AFL team.  The rest, as they say, is history.

  Needless to say, Helen and I were delighted when, in 1993, Jacksonville (our home since 1970) was awarded an NFL franchise.

  We owned season tickets for the first seven years. Now, we continue to be Jags fans, never missing a game on television. We long for the day that they make their first Super Bowl appearance. Being lifelong Red Sox fans, we are very patient, and have complete confidence that next year will be "the year."

2011 Toyota

I love my Toyota, but,,,,

Thanks to Cagle Cartoons! 

Apache Wingsuit

Most Dangerous Object in the Office: Wingsuit

Wired.com by Steven Leckart, January 25, 2010

Corporate bigwigs get golden parachutes to ease their exits. We’ve got the silicone-coated Apache wingsuit and UC-3 BASE jumping rig. It won’t help pay off the mortgage, but if a meeting gets really awkward, we can suit up, shout, “Later, suckaz!” and leap from the third-story window. Trouble is, we’d be about 960 feet short of the recommended 1,000-foot minimum for a jump. Maybe we can persuade the brass to hold meetings on the roof. 

Watch the Wingsuit in action!

The Father of Television

Jan 29, 1901: DuMont Will Make TV Work

 from Wired.com By Hugh Hart  January 28, 2010:

1901: In Brooklyn, a boy is born who will himself give birth to a revolution in home entertainment. Allen B. DuMont will be called by many the Father of Television.

DuMont contracted polio as a child. Bedridden for a year, he became obsessed with disassembling and reassembling a crystal-radio set. By 13, he’d built his own two-way radio from scratch and soon began spending his summer vacations working as a licensed wireless operator on trans-Atlantic ships.

DuMont then went to work at a radio company, where he failed in his early attempt to capture sound and picture through the use of spinning disks, so-called mechanical television. Realizing that cathode-ray tubes and a fully electronic system offered a more promising solution, he quit his day job in 1931.

Working in his garage, the incessant tinkerer figured out how to extend the life of the cathode ray tube from just a day to 1,000 hours. Armed with the innovation, DuMont showed off the first CRT television receiver to the public at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

The engineering breakthrough propelled the television medium from an interesting experiment to a practical reality. DuMont introduced his own line of then-revolutionary TV sets that used CRTs as picture tubes.

Like Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison, DuMont was a shrewd businessman. He became one of the TV industry’s first millionaires.

Figuring that entertainment content would accelerate demand for the TV sets manufactured by his company, he launched the DuMont Television Network after World War II. The net was home to early sci-fi series Captain Video and His Video Rangers and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. It also broadcast Jackie Gleason’s first “Honeymooners” sketches on its Cavalcade of Stars variety show.

But DuMont finished a perennial fourth to ABC, CBS and NBC. In 1955, DuMont shut down the network that bore his name.

Even if he fell short as a network exec, DuMont’s tech-head virtuosity ensures him a permanent niche in broadcasting history as a father of television, along with Philo T. Farnsworth, John Logie Baird, Vladimir Zworykin and David Sarnoff.

Grumpy People May Be More Evolved

This article explains a lot!

 from Asylum for All Mankind by Jeremy Taylor: 

Our happy hour fact to amaze your drinking buddy with.

Being intolerant and short-tempered could be a sign of evolutionary superiority.

Researchers at Harvard gave chimpanzees and bonobos, two species of apes that are among the closest living relatives to humans, a variety of reward-based tasks. Chimpanzees, who can be quite grumpy, especially as they age, consistently outperformed the bonobos, who maintain a childlike playfulness throughout their lives.

Victoria Wobble, the project's leader, believes the chimps' ability to put aside their sociability is one of the reasons they are more intelligent andcivilized than their genetically similar great ape cousins. She also thinks the evolutionary development of chimpanzees and bonobos could provide insight into our own species.

As for our buddy Oscar, we're pretty sure the well-known grouch is more intelligent than the average green Muppet, but he clearly loses evolutionary points for his squalid living conditions.

From "Life With Elizabeth" to "Hot In Cleveland!"

I can remember getting home from school in the early 1950's finding my mother watching a young Betty White in  "Life With Elizabeth" on television. Over the years we have seen her in the "Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Golden Girls," and numerous TV guest appearances as well as a supporting actress in many movies. It is nice to see Hollywood honor Miss White with a lifetime achievement award.

'Golden Girl' Betty White Shines

By George Christy

 - FOXNews.com

Just a week after her 88th birthday, Betty earns lifetime achievement award.

"Queen of the Hop she was at the 16th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, and Betty White rewarded the crowd at the Shrine Auditorium with the best acceptance speech when she was honored with their Lifetime Achievement Award.  She should give lessons.

"Honored with standing ovations for her six-decade career, Queen Betty, who's of German and Greek ancestry and graduated from Beverly Hills High, sighed that with so much attention she "may not be fit to live with these next few years."  Funny and wickedly clever, describing herself as an "old broad," she made no bones about being 88 years old.  Presenter Sandra Bullock zinged that she finds Betty "annoying, having appeared in four TV series."   Betty didn't miss a beat, firing back, "Isn't it beautiful how far a plain girl as she is can go?"  Betty then recalled that she began her acting career by singing in what then was an experiment:  "Television."

"Backstage, Betty praised Sandra for "being gorgeous and talented and the most down-to-earth human being … the epitome of what a movie star should be."

"But Betty didn't deny that she's star struck, never having met one of her idols, Robert Redford.  

"Acknowledging her age, she reminded that she celebrated her 88th a week before the  awards, and added that she has "a lot of stuff to do," championing animal health advocacy and working with the Los Angeles Zoo Association."

Apparently, Betty White isn't ready to call it quits yet. According to The Internet Movie Database, she is currently in pre-production for a 2010 TV series, "Hot In Cleveland."

  

A Dip in the Ocean

Those of us who grew up in New England and moved to Florida, (I have lived in Florida for nearly forty years now) love to keep in touch with the hometown newspaper to see what the crazies folks back there are up to. It's nice to see that this was all for a good cause. I remember swimming at Nantasket Beach and being cold in August!

From The Patriot Ledger (Quincy, Mass.)

Hull Selectman Dennis Blackall walks out of the water after taking his turn in the Drowned Hogs event at Nantasket Beach in Hull on Saturday, Jan. 30, 2010. Cathleen Jeffrey/Wicked Local Hull

HULL —"My wife thinks I'm crazy, but that has nothing to do with going swimming today," Hull Selectman Dennis Blackall joked, while standing in the 20-degree chilly air on the boardwalk at Nantasket Beach Saturday afternoon, minutes before he took a plunge into the icy Atlantic Ocean.

If he's crazy -- he's not alone -- as dozens, if not hundreds, took the dip alongside Blackall at the 15th Annual Drowned Hogs Plunge this afternoon -- with one woman wearing her actual wedding dress.

The water was so cold that a thin layer of ice over the Atlantic Ocean caused the event organizers to delay the start by one hour, in order to let the high-tide recess a bit from the ramp, so no one would be hurt going in and out of the water.

The director of Wellspring, the local multi-service agency the dip is a fundraiser for, said about 300 people had signed up beforehand to take the plunge, but he was unsure with cold temperatures how many would actually take part.

He said between the plunge and the Nantasket Soup & Chowder Festival, which place across the street at the Clarion Hotel after the plunge, the day normally rasies between $20,000 to $25,000 -- and he said he was hoping they'd stay on target.

"The more we raise, the more we spend on the population that we serve," Harte said, explaining the demand for services at his agency has increased by over 25 percent in the past year or so.

"We're just trying to keep everyone safe and warm in their homes," Harte said about his Hull agency, which in addition to helping people with their heat and electricity bills, also has a food pantry, adult education program, counseling services, computer classes, a thrift shop, as well as transportation and housing programs.

At the chowder festival, where many chefs from local eateries competed for the top honor of having the best soup and chowder, one woman who said she had sampled them all and found them all to be delicious, refused to tell who she was voting for, explaining she is friends with one of the chefs, so she is biased.

Congratulations Miss America 2010, Miss Virginia Caressa Cameron

Miss Virginia Caressa Cameron being crowned Miss America by Miss America 2009 Katie Stam 

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"How come we choose from just two people for President, and fifty for Miss America?"

Alfred E. Neuman

Alfred E. Neuman is the fictional mascot and iconic cover boy of Mad magazine. The face had drifted through  American pictography for decades before being claimed and named by Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman.

 

Thanks to Doug Gilford's Mad Cover Site!

So this password manager walks into a bar…

During a recent password audit, it was found that a <insert favorite moronic social group> was using the following password for her computer:

MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofy

When the auditor asked why she had such a big password, she said, “Hellllooooooooo! The tech support guy said that it had to be at least eight characters long.”

My thanks to Marc at Ilium Software for this!