Happy New Year!

Wishing everyone a very Happy New Year! 

You Know How I Feel About This!

For Sure!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all of you!  Hope your wishes come true! 

Real-Life Trivia

Last night The Stationary Bikers rode to victory!  We had some old and new members on our team and split off from the Smart Aces since we had eight.  More than that makes it hard to communicate.  We were in the noisy room sandwiched between the Budweismen (former Smart Aces, Sylvia Plath's Oven Mitt, Amelia Earhart's GPS, & Bell Jars, which was the name a couple of friends and I began) and the Frying Pans (formerly Nobody Likes a Smart Ace, etc.)  The noise level was horrendous!  The tables on each side of us had loud laughers and drinkers.  You know how it is when you aren't drinking and others are?  Well no, some of you don't, *cough* David and Maddie!  :-)

Anyway, Tim the Moderator plays loud music after he asked the question, so we can discuss our answers before writing them on the little papers provided to turn in to him.  We write ours down to show each other and agree or not, even though it's generally too loud to hear each other, much less understand what people at the other tables are saying.  My ears were still ringing for a while after I got home to my silent house.  I also had the added experience of Brendan talking constantly to me and hanging on my arm.

Despite all this, we managed to get our answers turned in.  Paige and Carl, Brian and Brendan, my brother Butch, Jennifer and Eric were the team, which made us heavy on the history side of things with a couple of English majors thrown in.  Carl, the engineer, came through on the 20-point question at the end, which asked in what city is the main street O'Connell, which put us comfortably in first place.  Somehow we came up with 4 out of 5 Katy Perry songs that tied her with Michael Jackson to have five #1 hits from the same album.  I even knew one of them from when I was keeping up with the Billboard charts.  Those were regular questions for a while.  It was a good night for asking things we knew.

Brain Blast Trivia has a page HERE on Facebook for those of you on there who might want to check it out.  We post our progress and comments now and then.  We had a great time but will not sit there again!  I enjoy the friendly competition and camaraderie.  Winning is a bonus for sure!

R.I.P Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens lost his battle with cancer, and we lost a brilliant mind.  There's an article about him HERE and this is an excerpt from The Sydney Morning Herald:

Vanity Fair's website reported that he died at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas, surrounded by friends, whom he described this year as "my chief consolation in this year of living dyingly". He wrote last year that "cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic".

Hitchens was known for his heroic intake of alcohol and cigarettes. He wrote in 2003 that his daily intake of alcohol was enough to "stun the average mule".

He said he had given up smoking in 2008, but journalist and author Peter FitzSimons, who interviewed him for his appearance at the 2010 Sydney Writers' Festival, said Hitchens had still been smoking as of last year.

Hitchens was a columnist for Vanity Fair and online magazine Slate and the author of The New York Times bestselling book God is Not Great.

His most recent book was Arguably, a collection of his essays.

He was a famous iconoclast and wrote critically of Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Winston Churchill.

Hitchens took a third-class degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Mr Clinton.

He later wrote about his gay experiences at Oxford in Hitch-22, including a dalliance with two unnamed future members of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet.

He left university and joined the Times Higher Education Supplement but was fired within six months, and went on to write for New Statesman magazine, working alongside novelists Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.

His brother Peter is a conservative columnist for the the Daily Mail in London.

- with James Robertson

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/celebrity/christopher-hitchens-dead-20111216-1oyc4.html#ixzz1gg9IMfMF

Made in America

If you haven't finished your Christmas shopping and/or would like to have a list of companies and brands made in America, look HERE.  There are also other places to find them as well as on the boxes and labels.  And HERE is Diane Sawyer's report about it.  Pennsylvania makes Crayola Crayons and Slinkies.  I try to buy locally first and American second, but it's not easy to find things.  Wouldn't that solve many of our unemployment and financial problems to bring work back here?  I saw a report about how many companies have sham offices in other countries so they can say that's where their home office is in order to avoid taxes, etc.  They made an effective case for it.  Some kind of compromise needs to be worked out, so people can work!

Rip-Off Trivia

Japan’s Buddhist establishment has been under attack over the practice of charging bereaved, vulnerable relatives huge fees for afterlife names given to the dead at their funerals. The tradition is centuries-old, and began with names being conferred only on Buddhist priests. When temples began granting afterlife names to common people, the names became something akin to a ranking system, reflecting the deceased’s noble actions during life. The highest rank, called ingo, costs more than $8,300. Of the average $5,300 paid to temples for Tokyo funeral fees, about $3,300 goes for the posthumous name. Talk about making a killing!

German Trivia I Like

In ancient Germany, Heidenwerfen was the popular word for bowling. It means "strike down the heathens"

Sponsor Trivia

In March 1996, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell cancelled their $5.4 million sponsorship of ABC’s new The Dana Carvey Show after some of Carvey’s humor "went too far." One sketch that offended the sponsors featured a dancing taco that kept telling Carvey that he was a "whore" for pushing the sale of Pepsi products.

Flashing Trivia

Early handheld lights used carbon-zinc batteries that did not last very long. To keep the light burning required that the user turn it on for a short time and then turn it off to allow the battery to recover. That’s how they originally became known as a flashlight.

Statistics

I started my first blog in 2002 (Joy's Updates: Straight from the Horse's Mouth) and now have this one.  In that time, I've logged 3540 posts, not counting this one, in 9 years.  That averages to 394/year and 1.08/ day.  It's those .08 posts that make the difference, I think.  This is one of them.

Did Not Know This About Richard Cœur de Lion

The average life span of London residents in the middle of the nineteenth century was 27 years. For members of the working class, it was 22 years. Berengaria, queen of England and wife of Richard the Lionhearted, never set foot in England. She lived in Italy most of her life while her husband was off on adventures and crusades.

According to what I've read, he was called Richard the Lionheart, not Lionhearted.

FeLiNe

This explains why they're at once strong, calm and luminous.