News of the Force: Wednesday, December 21, 2016 - Page 3

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News of the Force: Wednesday, December 21, 2016 - Page 3

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The parting shots

    On this date in 1620, the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth, Mass. In 1784, John Jay became the first U.S. secretary of State. In 1788, Hue Tay Son became Emperor Quang Trung of Vietnam. In 1803, the Middlesex Canal opened to connect the Merrimack River with Boston Harbor. In 1829, the first stone-arch railroad bridge in the U.S. was dedicated in Baltimore, Md. In 1884, the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers opened a small grocery store, which started the food cooperative movement. In 1909, the first junior high school in the U.S. opened in Berkeley, Calif.  In 1913, the first cross-word puzzle, with 32 clues, was printed in The New York World. In 1914, the first feature-length silent film comedy, "Tillie's Punctured Romance" was released, starring Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and Charles Chaplin. In 1919, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover anarchist/feminist Emma Goldman to Russia. In 1921, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that labor injunctions and picketing were un-constitutional. In 1925, Eisenstein's movie, Potemkin, premiered in Moscow. In 1932, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers appeared in their first movie together, Flying Down to Rio. In 1932, dried human blood serum was first prepared at the University of Pennsylvania, and Fox Pictures signed Shirley Temple - then 5 years old - to a movie contract. In 1937, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" was released - it was the first feature-length animated film. In 1939, Adolf Hitler named Adolf Eichmann as he leader of "Referat IV B." In 1941, Allied forces sank the German U-boat U-567 in the Atlantic Ocean. In 1946, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life premiered. In 1952, the Broadway Tunnel opened in San Francisco, Calif.In 1959, Tom Landry accepted the coaching job with the Dallas Cowboys - where he remained until 1988. In 1961, JFK and the British prime minister met in Bermuda. In 1962, an accord between the U.S. and Cuba led to the release of prisoners held in Cuba captured in the Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1970, singer Elvis Presley met with U.S. President Richard M. Nixon to discuss the war on drugs. In 1972, the Soviet Union signed a separate peace deal with East Germany. In 1973, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, the U.S. and the USSR met for talks in Geneva. In 1984, the USSR launched Vega 2 on a fly-by of Halley's Comet.  In 1991, the Soviet Union formally dissolved 11 of 12 republics by signing a treaty forming the Commonwealth of Independent States. In 1994, a bomb exploded on the No. 4 train on Fulton St., in New York City. In 1997, Barry Sanders was the third NFL player ever to rush for over 2,000 yards in one season. In 1998, in a terrorist act, a Pan American jumbo jet bound for New York City was bombed and exploded in mid-air over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 258 people aboard. And in 2012, the Mayan Calendar ended.  

    Actress "Hanoi Jane" Fonda is 79-years-old today. Actor Samuel L. Jackson is 68; Actor and comedian Ray Romano is 59; and Actor Kiefer Sutherland is 50.

    If you suspect your partner has a wandering eye, there is a 95% chance you are right, says a U.S. private investigator.

    Radical dentistry was on display in November in London's Science Gallery, where installations offered "art-science collaborations" - including Taiwan artist Kuang-Yi Ku's "Fellatio Modification Project." Former dentist Ku, complaining that textbooks on mouths tragically underregard their value in sex, created (the ordinary way) a custom retainer for the client's mouth, but then added rubber "bumps" and "cones" and "ribs" and "ripples" that might be pleasing to a partner.

    Evolution, according to scientists, likely explains why some "prey" develop defense mechanisms to avoid "predators," i.e., the prey who fail to develop them are unable to procreate (because they're dead), but a team of scientists from Sweden and Australia recently concluded that something similar happens in a species of fish in which males mate basically by huge-appendaged rape.
Growing nine generations of the species in the lab, the researchers concluded that the females who can avoid the "rapist" evolve larger brains than those who fall victim. Researchers, loosely speaking, thus concluded that as males grow bigger penises, females grow bigger brains to outsmart them.

    Long-time Mississippi environmental activist Tennie White is 27 months into a 40-month sentence for "falsifying" three $150 tests in her laboratory, but
high-ranking executives at the Kerr-McGee chemical conglomerate made millions on the case White helped expose: leakage of cancer-causing creosote into communities, including the White's Columbus, Miss., neighborhood. A detailed investigation by TheIntercept.com in November noted the executives' brilliant response to the 25,000 creosote lawsuits nationwide: put all the liability into one outlying company (eventually going bankrupt) but selling off, highly-profitably, the rest of the firm.

    Texas is among the most enthusiastic states for jailing low-income arrestees who cannot pay a money bail especially during devastating family hardships, and the four Houston, Texas, bail magistrates are particularly harsh, according to a recent report of the Texas Organizing Project. After hearing one financially overwhelmed woman beg sarcastically that $1,000 bail is "nothing" next to her other bills, unsympathetic magistrate Joe Licata shrugged, "It's nothing to me, either. It's job security."

    When police in Port Orange, Fla., arrested Anthony Coiro, 76, in November, he admitted that he had a stash of "crazy" pornography, some featuring children. However, he adamantly insisted, "I'm not a pedophile. I'm just a pervert," adding, "a law-abiding pervert." He faces 52 counts.

    In November in Osaka, Japan, an unnamed arrestee apparently had his sexual molestation charge against a woman on a crowded train dramatically downgraded. "Actually," the man indignantly told the judge, he is not a pervert -but just a pickpocket (a lesser crime). The victim had testified that the man had brushed against her for "3 seconds" and not the "30" she originally told the police.

    Weird quantities: The price tag for one round of a 155-mm projectile shot from the U.S. Navy's USS Zumwalt: $800,000; Trees killed in California by
the now-five-year-old drought: 102,000,000; Recent finding of "water" farthest from the Earth's surface: 621 miles down (one-third of the way to the Earth's "core"; Odds that Statistics Lecturer Nicholas Kapoor, of Fairfield University, in Fairfield, Conn., said he played against in buying a $15 Powerball ticket: 1 in
913,129 - but he won $100,000; Speed police calculated Hector Faire, 19, reaching in an Oklahoma police chase: 208 mph - but they got him, anyway. And the number of different languages spoken by children in Buffalo, N.Y.'s public classrooms: 85.

    Michelle Keys, 35, among those joyously caught up in Iowa's upset win over highly-ranked Michigan in football in November and celebrating that night in Iowa City, was slurring and incoherent and told police she was certain she was standing in Ames, Iowa (120 miles away), and had just watched the "Iowa State"-"Arizona" game - a matchup not played since 1968. She registered .225.

    A 38- year-old woman was arrested in Springwood, Australia, in November when police stopped her car at 3 a.m., at an intersection - with a children's swing set wedged onto the roof of her SUV. She had shortly before mistakenly driven through someone's back yard and through the swing set. (.188.).

    "Sexually-based offenses," a TV show intones, are "particularly heinous," but to the small Delaware liberal arts Wesley College - according to the U.S. Department of Education - even an accusation of sexual misconduct is so heinous that there was no need even to interview the alleged wrongdoer before expelling him. An informal meeting did occur, but only after the investigation was completed. The expulsion occurred even though the victim herself had not originally accused that particular student. The expelled student's offense was to have helped set up video for a consensual sex encounter that was, without consent, live-streamed. The Department of Education accepted a settlement in which Wesley agreed to revamp its code of student rights.

    Alarming headlines: "Man Mixing LSD and Cough Syrup Saves Dog From Imaginary Fire" (WNYT-TV, Albany, N.Y.), 10-15-2016). Panicked, he had
first sought help from neighbors who were unpersuaded by the sight of a fireless fire; "Santa Claus Speaks Out Against North Pole Ban of Marijuana Sales" (KTUU-TV, Anchorage). Cannabis is legal in Alaska unless towns ban it, and the legally-named Mr. Claus needs it for cancer pain; "Dog On Loose Causes Sheep To Have Sex With Their Sisters in Walton On The Hill": The wild dog has wrecked a planned mating program, leaving female sheep to
canoodle with each other. (Surrey Mirror, Redhill, England, 9-22-2016).

    Apparently the plan by a 33-year-old unlicensed, un-car-registered driver in Perth, Australia, in November to keep from being stopped by police was to print "POLICE" in large, "official"-looking letters on the sides of her white Hyundai, using a blue dry-erase board marker. She was, of course, was quickly stopped by the real police.

    A woman in a quiet north Minneapolis neighborhood told reporters she became fearful after seeing a large swastika spray-painted on a garage door down a nearby alley just after election day. Problem: The base "X" of the correct design has "hooks" that should always extend to the right, clockwise; three of the Minneapolis "artist"'s awkwardly hook left.

    The Charity Commission of the United Kingdom has ruled that Jediism, drawing from the Star Wars franchise, is not a​n official​ religion.

    In November, a court in Christchurch, New Zealand, ordered the local police to "un-do" the 493 bottles' worth of liquor they had recently poured down the city's drain after raiding an unlicensed bar. The court said the police must pay a pumping company to recall the hooch because of environmental regulations.

    Britain's Queen Elizabeth will step down as patron of 25 national organizations at the end of this year, says Buckingham Palace. The patronages, including the NSPCC, Save the Children, and the Barnardo's and Battersea Dog's Home, will be passed on to other members of the Royal Family.

    Dreaming of a white Christmas? Weather history - and a warm, rainy forecast - suggests that you would be better off looking somewhere besides Kansas City, Mo. The Polar Vortex may have been a week early. If you thought the recent Arctic blasts increased your chances for a white Christmas, you may be sorely disappointed.

    In November, the Littleton, Colo., city government, faced with the need to "blot" sticky tar on 120 streets whose potholes it was filling, bypassed expensive "detackifiers" in favor of stuffing toilet paper over the tar, causing the streets to have a post-trick-or-treat look.

    And in the latest update from snopes.com: Though it’s since been deleted, Donald Trump's budget director, Mick Mulvaney, did pose this question in a Facebook post in response to a scientific study casting doubts on the role of the Zika virus in causing infant microcephaly: "Do we really need government-funded research at all?"; Are tooth cavities contagious? Misinformation abounds about whether dental caries are contagious, based largely on a since-deleted press release; Will tonight be the darkest night in 500 years? A 2010 article about the imminent occurrence of the "darkest night in 500 years" and a lunar eclipse was circulated as new in 2014 and again this year. A tweet in which Donald Trump threatened to arrest actor Alec Baldwin was a fake. A Satanic pentagram display placed in a Florida city park's free speech area has been vandalized multiple times. Unnamed sources in a media report claim that Trump's team is having trouble getting celebrities to perform at his inauguration. Are bandits posing as gas company workers? Some social media users may have been too young to get a somewhat obvious joke about "bandits" attempting home entries by posing as gas company workers. And an undated, unverified surveillance video supposedly showed former "The Voice" star CeeLo Green falling to the ground when a mobile phone exploded in his face.

 

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