Saving Energy

It’s spring and following these tips about saving energy will help you clean the environment.

1) Keep filters on furnaces or air conditioners clean. Many systems are recommended to have the filters replaced or clean once a month.

2) Clear dirt and dust from the coils of refrigerators and freezers. Having them clean allows them to cool more efficiently.

3) Use fluorescent instead of incandescent lighting. Florescent uses less energy to supply the same amount of light, they last longer and burn cooler. Turn lights off when not being used.

4) Turn off computers at night, and use sleep mode as often as possible. Reminder, screen savers do not save energy. When not in use turn off televisions, radios and other entertainment equipment.

5) Unplug devices that use a transformer when not in use. Example; battery chargers. Whenever these devices are plugged in they consume minor amounts of energy. Many devices such as TV and DVD players still use energy when not in use. Unplug them when they won’t be used for a long period of time.

6) Wash only full loads of clothes. Consider using cold water instead of hot or warm. If using a dishwasher, wait until you have a full load and air dry instead of using the heating cycle.

The Chesapeake Bay

The Chesapeake Bay is a large body of water located on the Atlantic coast of the United States. The States of Maryland and Virginia border the Chesapeake Bay and the bay has a major economic impact on both of those states.

The Chesapeake Bay is 200 miles long with its widest point being 35 miles and its narrowest being 3.5 miles. The average depth of the Chesapeake Bay is 21 feet with a few points being as much as 174 feet deep. It’s estimated that the Bay holds 18 trillion gallons of water.

Many streams and rivers flow directly or indirectly into the Chesapeake Bay. These streams and rivers make up part of the large Chesapeake Bay watershed. A watershed is an area of land where all of the water drains off into the same place. Parts of six states, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia, New York and all of the District of Columbia is part of the Chesapeake Bay’s 64,299 square mile watershed with Sixteen Million people live within it.

There are 130 estuaries in the Unites States and the Chesapeake Bay is the largest. An estuary is a place where the salt water of an ocean meets fresh water of streams and rivers.

The 444 mile long Susquehanna River is the largest of the rivers and streams of the Chesapeake Bay. Half of the fresh water that flows into the Chesapeake Bay comes from the Susquehanna. The Susquehanna Rivers begins in New York and empties into the northern Chesapeake Bay.

The Potomac River, which has historically been the border between Maryland and Virginia, is another large river that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The Potomac is 383 miles long beginning in West Virginia.

The website ChesapeakeBayUSA.com is one of the many Web sites dedicated to the Cheasapeake Bay and its region. This site has Calendar of Events for regions of the Bay Area and other information.

Irish Traditions

St. Patrick is considered the Patron Saint of Ireland, but he was born in Britain. He was born near the end of the 4th Century to wealthy parents and was abducted by Irish Raiders and held in captivity in Ireland for 6 years. During this captivity he became a devote Christian.

He is believed to have died on March 17, 460 AD and it is on this day that the Irish and those once a year Irish celebrate St. Patrick Day.

Even before St. Patrick, who is credited as banishing all snakes from the island, there weren’t any snakes so he couldn’t have banished any. He was a converted Christian and helped transform the island from their pagan beliefs to Christianity.

St. Patrick Day has a celebrated history of parades. The first St. Patrick Day parade was not in Ireland, but in New York City. On March 17, 1762 Irish soldiers serving in the English military marched through the city.

Leprechauns and St. Patrick are classic symbols of Ireland. Now a natural combination. Leprechauns have their origins from old Celtic folklore and were cranky souls known for their trickery to protect their much-fabled treasure.
Until Walt Disney and the film Darby O’Gill & the Little People which introduced a cheerful, friendly leprechaun, they were not really a part of the Irish celebration.

Many of us will have Corn Beef and Cabbage on St. Patrick day, but this too is a fairly recent invention. Cabbage has long been a Irish food, it was usually served with bacon. That was until around the beginning of the 20th century when immigrants in New York City substituted corned beef to save money. The idea came from their Jewish neighbors.

Flowers – Myth or Fact

The leaves of a Poinsettia are poisonous.

Myth. There has never been a death that has been proven to have occurred due to ingestion of the leaves or any other part of the flower. The myth began in 1919 when the child of an army officers died and the poinsettia was thought to have been the cause. A study bu the Ohio State University fed high doses of ground poinsettia leaves to rats with no side effects to the rats.

Eating poppy seeds can cause a false positive in a drug test.

Fact: The poppy seeds on your favorite bagel or bread comes from a similar type of poppy seeds as the opium poppies, the raw material of drugs such as heroin and morphine.

The Texas bluebonnet, the State flower of Texas, can not be picked legally in Texas.

Myth: As long as you have permission of the owner of the property to pick the flower there isn’t a law making it illegal to pick. However that is not true for all state’s and their state flowers. In Minnesota it is illegal to pick the pink-and-white lady’s slipper.

Tulips are native to Netherlands (Holland).

Myth: The origin of the tulip is believed to have been in Asia with their introduction to Europe being in the 16th Century.

The Daisy were at one time called ‘Day’s Eye’.

Fact: Since the daisy will close at night and open during the day, it was originally called a ‘Day’s Eye’, with over time the pronunciation being contracted to the current daisy.

Flowers in a Hospital room will consume all of the oxygen in the room.

Myth: Over the course of a 24 hour period flowers can actually give off 10 times more oxygen than they consume. More oxygen is actually used by visitors than flowers.

The State of Maine

On March 15, 1820 the State of Maine was admitted to the union of the United States as its 23rd State.

The first European settlement in Maine was in 1604 by a French party that included Samuel de Champlain. The first English settlement in Maine was established by the Plymouth Company at Popham in 1607. This was the same year as the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia.

The Popham Colony was abandoned after only one year. This may have been mostly due to changes in the leadership ranks than lack of success. The loss of life of the colonists in 1607 and 1608 at Popham was fewer than that at Jamestown. Even with its failure the first ship built by the English in the New World was completed in Popham Colony and was sailed the colonist back to England.

The City of Portland is Maine’s largest city and until 1832 it was the state’s capital. It was moved to Augusta which is more central within the state.

The town of York, located in South East Maine was chartered in 1641. This may be the oldest Chartered town in America.

US Route 1 ends at Fort Kent, Maine near the Canadian border. The route is the major north–south Highway serving the East Coast of the United States and runs south to Florida and the Florida Keys ending at Key West.

Springing Ahead

For those who don’t know the rhyme we spring ahead an hour in the spring and fall backward one hour, in the fall. Some people mistakenly call it Daylight Savings Time, but it is Daylight Saving Time. There is not ‘S’. In 2007 with the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that President George Bush signed into law in 2005, the new dates for Daylight Saving Time will begin on the second Sunday of March and end the first Sunday of November.

Daylight Saving Time is not a modern idea. Benjamin Franklin first mentioned it in a letter to the Journal of Paris in 1784. He didn’t really say that the clocks should be changed, but that to take advantage of the extra daylight, one should arise from bed earlier.

It wasn’t put into practice until the German government put it in place in 1916 between April 30 and October 1. In the same year the United Kingdom adopted it from May 21 to October 1.

The U.S. Congress established it at the same time they formally adopted the Rail Road Time Zones in 1918, observing it for seven months in 1918 & 1919 It became so unpopular that the law for DST was repealed in 1919.

In 1942, during World War II, DST was reinstated in the U.S. although from the end of the war in 1945 until 1966, there wasn’t a Federal Law that addressed DST.

In 1966 DST was established and has been in place since, although the law gave states the capability to exempt themselves and a few, such as Arizona and Hawaii have. Many countries follow some sort of DST plan.

Millard Kaufman

Two days after his 92nd birthday, Millard Kaufman died. Kaufman was a screen writer beginning in the late 1940s and into 1970s. He was the co-creator of Mr. Magoo.

Born March 12, 1917, in Baltimore, Kaufman spent two years as a merchant seaman after high school. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Johns Hopkins University in 1939. After graduation he moved to New York City and worked as a newspaperman.

In 1942 he enlisted in the marines and served on Guadalcanal, landed at Guam with the 1st Marine Brigade (Provisional) then participated in Okinawa with the 6th Marine Division. While serving in the Pacific, Kaufman was stricken with malaria and dengue fever. He returned to New York only to discover he couldn’t tolerate the climate changes. He and his wife moved to Los Angeles.

In 1949, Kaufman wrote the screenplay for the short film Ragtime Bear, the first appearance of Mr. Magoo. He followed this up in 1950 with another Mr. Magoo film, Punchy de Leon. Quincy Magoo is a wealthy, short-statured retiree who gets into a series of sticky situations as a result of his nearsightedness.

Kaufman shared an agent with Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo, also a screenwriter, was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Trumbo co-wrote the screenplay for Gun Crazy, but it was Millard Kaufman’s name that was on the credits.

A writer for most of his life it wasn’t until he was 90 that Kaufman published his first novel. Bowl of Cherries was released in October 2007. A second novel, Misadventure, is scheduled for publication in April 2010.

Mysterious Disappearances

Since people have been keeping records there have been reports of mysterious vanishings. While some may never been fully explained many of them could have simple explanations. Here is the story of six unexplained vanishings.

In 1587 a small company made up of 90 men, 17 women and 9 children colonized the island of Roanoke just off the coast of North Carolina. John White, the governor of the second colony, went back to England to gather more supplies. He intended to return to Roanoke Island right away, but war between England and Spain delayed him. Three years later when returning with supplies the colony was gone. The only clue the word “Croatan” was carved on a tree.

On November 5, 1872 the Mary Celeste set sail from New York for Italy. A month later on December 5th it was discovered as a derelict. The ship was in perfect order with no sign of trouble and still carried ample supplies. The captain, his family and its 14-member crew have never been found.

In 1913 author Ambrose Bierce joined the army of Pancho Villa as an observer of the Mexican Revolution. It is known that he accompanied Villa’s army as far as Chihuahua since a letter to a close friend was sent from there on December 26, 1913. Afterward he vanished and investigations into the disappearance provided no answers.

On August 6, 1930 New York Supreme Court associate justice Joseph F. Crater was seen walking out of a New York restaurant. He entered a taxi after waving goodbye to some friends and was never seen again. In October, a grand jury began looking into the case and ended up calling 95 witnesses and amassing 975 pages of testimony. Some of the evidence uncovered was that a safe-deposit box had been emptied and two briefcases missing. The conclusion was: “The evidence is insufficient to warrant any expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead, or as to whether he has absented himself voluntarily, or is the sufferer from disease in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of crime.”

On March 4, 1983 13-year-old Shannon Lee Potter of Parkville, Maryland climbed out of her bedroom window to attend a party. She has not been seen since.

While not a disappearance, the Legend of the Lost Dutchman’s mine in the Superstition Mountain of Arizona has caused a few disappearances with people lost trying to discover its location. In the 1870’s Jacob Waltz is said to have located a mine that he worked with his partner Jacob Weiser. Waltz was German, mistaken for Dutch, and he is the Dutchman where the name originated. Most stories place the mine in the vicinity of Weaver’s Needle, a well-known landmark in the mountains.

19th Century People

On March 7, 2010 Mary Josephine Ray died. To her friends and family Mary Ray was a special person. And had it not been for the fact that she was the oldest person living in the United States, she would still be unknown to many of us. When she died she was considered to be the 2nd oldest person in the world.

Now the oldest living American is now Neva Morris, of Ames, Iowa. When this post first appears on March 09, 2010 she is 114 years, 217 days.

The oldest person in the world is Japan’s Kama Chinen at age 114 years, 302 days.

As the days past it is becoming more obvious that very few people are still alive that lived in the 19th Century, or to be more precise born on or before December 31, 1899. Any one born in the 19th century would now be over 110 years of age.

The oldest man in the world and also the United States is Walter Breuning, who was born on September 21, 1896. Presently he is the 7th oldest verified person in the world.

Daisy Bailey also died on March 7, 2010. Not that March 7th was any special day for deaths. Only Daisy Bailey was also born in the 19th Century, March 30, 1896.

Alice of Wonderland

There is a lot of buzz about the new Alice in Wonderland movie. The film directed by Tim Burton, written by Linda Woolverton, and stars Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Michael Sheen and others is not a retelling of the original books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, but an extension.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was originally published in 1865. Lewis Carroll was the name listed as the author, but that was a pen name for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Along with his writings Dodgson was mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon. Nearly all of his writings are considered to be in the genre of literary nonsense.

During the late 1850’s and early 1860’s while working at Christ Church, one of the largest constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England, he became friends with the Liddel family. Henry George Liddell was the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and Dean of Christ Church. Dodgson would spend many hours with the children of Liddel, including their daughter, Alice.

One day while taking a boat ride in 1862, he told a story of a girl named Alice who followed a white rabbit down a rabbit hole and into an amazing adventure. Alice asked for him to write it down. He presented to her a illustrated manuscript entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in November 1864.

Alice Pleasance Liddell was born on May 4, 1852 and died on November 16, 1934. She was the fourth child of Henry Liddell and his wife Lorina Hanna Liddell. At the age of 28 she married Reginald Hargreaves on September 15, 1880.

There has been much debate on whether Alice was based on her. Dodgson, Lewis Carroll, said that iAlice wasn’t based on any real person. The two girls were not alike, however they did share some common elements. The name Alice, of course, as well as birth date. He dedicated the book to “to Alice Pleasance Liddell”. And the poem in Through the Looking Glass commonly known as “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky” which spells her name when taking the first letter of each line.