It's the Bloody Moon

The Blood Moon showed it hunter face to parts of the world this past Tuesday. For those of us on the east coast, as well as Europe and Africa, we pretty much missed it. Those in Eastern Australia had the best view, as the eclipse occurred at 8 PM in clear skies.

Here are some amazing pictures of the moon from around the world, courtesy of new.com.au. For more info on this amazing phenomenon, go here or here.

Where in the World Is?

I recently bought the coolest world map from Amazon. It now hangs in my office and I study it everyday in attempts to overcome "Dumb American" syndrome.

To test my recent cramming, I visited this site. Sadly, the only quiz that I achieved a 100% on was Australia, and that is due only to my Australia magnet courtesy of Nad. Damn those Aussies for only having 6 states and 2 territories!!!

Check it out and see how well you do!

60 Second Rule?

Turns out we have more than the standard 5 seconds to eat our dropped food off the floor!

The Chicago Tribune reports:

Dropping a piece of food on the floor and then picking it up and dining on
it is a germaphobe's nightmare.

Streptococcus. Staphylococcus. E. coli. Oh, my!

But how bad is it?A college professor and her students have challenged the
prevailing wisdom of the so-called 5-second rule, which for generations has
governed how long little morsels can remain on floors uncontaminated.

The window, the Connecticut team has concluded, is really 30 seconds.

...

"The students wanted two different types of food sources: a wet source and
one that was a dry food source, to test any differences," [Anne Bernhard,
assistant professor of biology at Connecticut College in New London] said. "You
would think that a wet food source would be more likely to attract bacteria very
quickly."

Each food item was dropped in triplicate for specific intervals that ranged
from 5 seconds to 5 minutes.

"We did this experiment in the main dining area, and about 2,000 students
traffic through that area," [student Nicole Moin] said Wednesday. "So you'd
think there would be a multitude of bacteria on the floor."

In the first set of tests, moist apple slices were dropped.

And what researchers saw after 5 seconds were pristine morsels. Not until
the 1-minute interval did they find bacteria developing on the apple slices. It
took 5 minutes for organisms to colonize a Skittle.

The conclusion, Bernhard said, is that instead of a 5-second rule for moist
foods that have fallen, the standard should be 30 seconds: As long as you eat a
moist food within 30 seconds of its fall, you're very likely to be in a zone of
safety.

For dry, less porous foods, she added, you might be safe even if you allow
them to stay on the floor for 1 minute.

For the full story, go here.

It was 40 years ago today

Sgt. Pepper taught the band, and the world, to play:


Parade Magazine reports:

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ completion of Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a tour de force that elevated the rock album
to art form and taught generations of bands to play.

The 13 tracks on Sgt. Pepper’s were conceived in a magical span of 700 hours
over five months. The Beatles began recording on Dec. 6, 1966, and finished
the album on April 21, 1967, when they created the final track, an avant-garde
seconds-long pastiche of sounds—including a high-pitched tone inaudible to
humans put there solely to annoy your dog—that was later dubbed “Inner
Groove” for its bizarre placement within the concentric circles of the LP.

“When Sgt. Pepper's came out, it was an album that surprised people on every
single level,” says Mark Lewisohn, author of The Complete Beatles Recording
Sessions. “The vast majority of the millions who bought it had never seen a
gatefold sleeve, they’d never seen lyrics on the cover, they’d never seen a
cover like that—a real piece of art—and they never heard music like this. The
combination was so dynamic that it’s still being talked about 40 years later.”

Lewisohn wrote the booklet for Sgt. Pepper’s CD release and is currently
writing a three-volume biography of the Beatles, to be completed by 2016.

“Sgt. Pepper's was the last time there was a real collective sense of purpose
among the Beatles that they all wanted to achieve something very special,”
Lewisohn says. “After that there began to be other agendas in the way they
functioned. And by the summer of ’69, they were splintered.”

Sgt. Pepper’s won four Grammy Awards in 1967, including Album of the Year and
Best Album Cover. In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it No. 1 of the 500 Greatest
Albums of All Time.

Rolling Stone reported:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll
album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover
art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time.
From the title song's regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral
seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of "A Day in the Life," the
thirteen tracks on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are the pinnacle of the
Beatles' eight years as recording artists. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George
Harrison and Ringo Starr were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit
of magic and transcendence.

Issued in Britain on June 1st, 1967, and a day later in America, Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is also rock's ultimate declaration of change.
For the Beatles, it was a decisive goodbye to matching suits, world tours and
assembly-line record-making. "We were fed up with being Beatles," McCartney said
decades later, in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles' McCartney biography. "We
were not boys, we were men . . . artists rather than performers."

At the same time, Sgt. Pepper formally ushered in an unforgettable season of
hope, upheaval and achievement: the late 1960s and, in particular, 1967's Summer
of Love. In its iridescent instrumentation, lyric fantasias and eye-popping
packaging, Sgt. Pepper defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of psychedelia
and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern spirituality and electric
guitars around the globe. No other pop record of that era, or since, has had
such an immediate, titanic impact. This music documents the world's biggest rock
band at the very height of its influence and ambition.

...

Yet Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Number One album of the RS
500 not just because of its firsts -- it is simply the best of everything the
Beatles ever did as musicians, pioneers and pop stars, all in one place. A 1967
British print ad for the album declared, "Remember Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band Is the Beatles." As McCartney put it, the album was "just us doing a
good show."

The show goes on forever.

Dumb American…

…no more? Hardly. But in an effort to help others, who like me, are trying to rid ourselves of the ignorance that comes with being an egocentric American, I would like to share some of the wisdom I acquired while abroad…

The Union Jack

This…

… is not the flag of England. It is the national flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and is properly referred to as the Union Flag, not Jack.

The flag of England is this…


… in honor of St. George, England’s patron saint.

The Union Jack has quite a history, but briefly, here is how the Union Flag is made up:

Cool, huh?

Beefeaters

Turns out the term “Beefeater” is not just a crazy name for a high quality gin. It’s an actual term for the Yoeman Warders who are the ceremonial guarders of the Tower of London. They were instated at the tower back in 1485, responsible for guarding the prisoners and the crown jewels. Today they serve as tour guides. For more, go here.