Man, I haven’t “done the news” on this site since March 7, 2012! So let’s get it on!
– Valerie Eliot, widow of poet T.S. Eliot, has died. Although I was a huge Eliot fan in high school, I didn’t really know much about his personal life. Needless to say, I was shocked to read that his widow had died… until I read the linked article. Eliot married a woman named Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, but the marriage wasn’t a happy one (you may remember the play and movie, Tom & Viv, about their flawed relationship). The two separated in 1932, but remained married until her death in 1947. In 1957, Eliot, then 68, married Valerie, who was 30 at the time. Eliot died in 1965 at age 76, but Valerie lived on until November 9, 2012.
– Remember the Daylight Saving Time change last week? I bet Niles Gammons of Urbana, Ohio does. Gammons was arrested for DUI last Saturday night at 1:08 AM. He was released shortly thereafter with a simple court summons. A little while later, the same arresting officer, in the same patrol car, saw Gammons’ car on the road again. He pulled the car over and found Gammons drunk behind the wheel. Thanks to the time change, Gammons was arrested for DUI at 1:08 AM… again! Two DUI arrests on the same day, at the same time? Awesome!
– Reasons to hate liberals: a) the £80 million school in London that has an indoor swimming pool, glass walls showing off a panoramic view of the city, a wait staff to bring tea and coffee to teachers, custom-made £300 chairs for students; b) Our Dear Leader and his looming $136 billion bill coming due in December; c) Driverless cars are the wave of the future… but not in Washington DC; d) despite the stereotype of religious folks as knuckle-dragging morons who believe the earth is 6,000 years-old and flat, liberals can be anti-science, too. In fact, I wrote about it back in March. But now Fred Pearce, an environmental consultant for New Scientist magazine, wants to know why so many in the green movement are taking anti-science positions; and e) back in March, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg banned food donations to homeless shelters… not because the food might be tainted, or open shelters to legal liabilities… but because New York “can’t assess their salt, fat and fiber content”. This has come up again in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
– Britain has, over the years, invaded 90% of all the countries on the planet. In fact, just 22 countries have not been invaded by Britain at one point or another. But guess who Britons consider their greatest foe? According to a survey conducted by Britain’s National Army Museum, that would be George Washington! (Runners-up, in order: Ireland’s Michael Collins, France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, Germany’s Erwin Rommel and Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk).
– Hats off to Microsoft! IT security firm Kaspersky has released its quarterly IT Threat Evolution report, and for the first time no Microsoft product appears on the “10 most vulnerable apps” list. Adobe apps account for five entries into the top ten (good job, guys!) while Oracle’s Java appears twice. WinAMP, iTunes and Quicktime appear once each.
– Journalists from The Sporting News recently asked 103 football players from 27 teams which coach, other than their own, they’d like to play for. The winner, in a landslide, was Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, with 31% of the vote. The runner-up, Bill Belichick of the Patriots, could only snag 10% of the vote. WOOT! GO STEELERS!
– Guess what the Voyager 1 spacecraft has detected at the edge of the solar system? Strangeness. Oh, astronomers have found starless galaxies, too.
– The word of the day is chamfer. A chamfer is “a beveled edge connecting two surfaces”. Although the word is most often used in woodworking, architecture and circuit board design, the word has also come to mean “the beveled dents in the side of electronic devices that help you open the device”. If you have a laptop or phone with little “dents” in the side which help you open the device, you have chamfers.
– Lastly… there’s no way Christy Turlington is 43 years-old:
Yes, this is a new picture from her upcoming campaign for Esprit.
