BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S

Working women unite!  Making arrangements for silver mining leases WAS MY ACTUAL JOB at the Congress, so of course I was willing to help out Tiffany's on that, they're AMERICAN after all. 

People act like digging a hole in the ground to get some minerals and ores that are already THERE is stealing or something, geesh.   I was a very good customer of Tiffany's after that!  And zero percent interest was no skin off the store's teeth.  Tiffany's was just being nice.  Trust me, if we'd actually been charged $105,000 interest on my jewelry, Newtie might never have been able to pay off the principal, and where would THAT have left Tiffany's, huh?

MEMORIAL DAY ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETARY 2011

Almost four million people a year visit the national cemetery across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., where a constant vigil is maintained at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Arlington National Cemetery is the site of the changing of a military guard around the clock daily. On Veterans Day 1921, a coffin bearing the body of an unidentified soldier of World War I was entombed adjacent to the Memorial Amphitheater and a monument weighing more than 100 tons placed atop it in 1932. Nearby crypts bear the remains of unknown American service members of World War II and the Korean War. The remains of a previously unknown Vietnam service member were exhumed on May 14, 1998, identified as Air Force 1st Lt. Michael Joseph Blassie, and removed for burial.

Each Memorial Day and Veterans Day, a presidential wreath is placed at the tomb. This may explain why Arlington is America’s most well-known national cemetery, even though it is not the largest or the oldest. Some 230,000 veterans and dependents are buried on the cemetery’s 612 acres. From Pierre L’Enfant, George Washington’s aide during the American Revolution, to American service members killed during Operation Desert Storm, Arlington holds the remains of veterans representing every military action the United States has fought.

ODORAMA INTRODUCED

TODAY IN HISTORY:“Polyester” Premieres: 1981. The John Waters film Polyestermade its debut on the silver screen. Divine once again stared, this time as Francine Fishpaw, a suburban housewife whose world is thrown into chaos when her pornographer husband declares he’s been unfaithful, her daughter becomes pregnant, and her son’s accused of breaking local women’s feet as part of his fetish. Nineteen-fifties heartthrob Tab Hunter appeared near the end as lounge-suit-wearing Todd Tomorrow who swept Francine off her sweep and proposed marriage — only to plot with Francine’s mother to embezzle her divorce settlement and drive her insane. The film was notable for a unique technological breakthrough: it was presented in “Odorama,” in which theatergoers were handed scratch-and-sniff cards so they could smell along with the action. It remains a scandal that Polyester earned no major cinematic awards.

112 YEAR OLD MARVEL

AFTER THE GOLDRUSH

PSYCHEDELIC ART ?

Because of the absence of gravity, fuels burning in space behave very differently than they do on Earth. In this image, a 3-millimeter diameter droplet of heptane fuel burns in microgravity, producing soot. When a bright, uniform backlight is placed behind the droplet and flame and recorded by a video camera, the soot appears as a dark cloud. Image processing techniques can then quantify the soot concentration at each point in the image. On the International Space Station, the Flame Extinguishing Experiment examines the combustion of such liquid fuel droplets.

This colorized gray-scale image is a composite of the individual video frames of the backlit fuel droplet. The bright yellow structure in the middle is the path of the droplet, which becomes smaller as it burns. Initial soot structures (in green) tend to form near the liquid fuel. These come together into larger and larger particles which ultimately spiral out of the flame zone in long, twisting streamers. 

Image Credit: NASA

RIGHT TO THE POINT

A FRENCH ICON

Trailer #1
L'amour fou at MOVIECLIPS.com

SAN FRANCISCO PARKING TRICK #98

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An Alamo Square Park neighbor's secret trick to avoid a street sweeping ticket without abandoning a valuable parking spot:

As the Department of Public Works was doing street sweeping on my block, some woman was just idling her car on the sidewalk. DPW just drove right by without even giving a notice to this lady, ticketed the car parked on the street directly in front of her, and continued on. Then the sweeper passed, she backed her car onto the street, parked it and left. 

http://uptownalmanac.com/

EL CINCO DE MAYO

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Las armas nacionales se han cubierto de glia 

"The national arms have been covered with glory"

Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín (March 24,1829 – September 8, 1862) was a general in the Mexican Army, best known for defeating invading French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862 (the Cinco de Mayo).

Zaragoza was born in la Bahía del Espíritu Santo, in what was then the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, now the city of Goliad, Texas,

The first important engagement of the campaign took place, on April 28, on the heights of Acultzingo, from which the Mexicans were dislodged. They retreated to Puebla, and their commander, General Ignacio Zaragoza, fortified the hills of Guadalupe and Loretta to resist the attack of the invaders. The battle took place on May 5, 1862, and the French and their allies, the conservatives, to the number of more than six thousand men, were repulsed and defeated.

The Mexicans had only four thousand men, and their triumph was so complete that El Cinco de Mayo is one of their greatest national feast days. "In appreciation of his brilliant victory and defence of the city, General Zaragoza was appointed Military Governor of Vera Cruz, his name was inscribed in letters of gold upon the walls of the Hall of Congress, and the official name of Puebla was changed to 'Puebla de Zaragoza.'" The French retired to Orizaba, and the Mexicans under Zaragoza were defeated at Cerro del Borrego in an attack upon the invaders. Shortly, afterwards the victor of El Cinco de Mayo died at Puebla of typhus fever.

UNQUESTIONED HEROISM

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The United States Navy SEa, Air and Land (SEAL) Teams, commonly known as Navy SEALs, are the U.S. Navy's principal special operations force and is a part of the Naval Special Warfare Command (NSWC) as well as the maritime component of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). Today's SEAL (Sea, Air, Land) teams trace their history to the first group of volunteers selected from the Naval Construction Battalions (SeaBees) in the spring of 1943.

These volunteers were organized into special teams called Navy Combat Demolition Units (NCDUs). The units were tasked with reconnoitering and clearing beach obstacles for troops going ashore during amphibious landings, and evolved into Combat Swimmer Reconnaissance Units.

The Naval Special Warfare Command was commissioned April 16, 1987, at the Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado, Calif. Its mission is to prepare Naval Special Warfare forces to carry out their assigned missions and to develop special operations strategy, doctrine, and tactics.

SEALs (Sea, Air, Land) teams go through what is considered by some to be the toughest military training in the world. Basic Underwater Demolition/ SEAL (BUD/S) training is conducted at the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado. Students encounter obstacles that develop and test their stamina, leadership and ability to work as a team.

SIZE MATTERS

Spider attack from Ahmet Ozkan on Vimeo.