I did not realize how tall Julia Childs was. I saw a short about her on YouTube and it said she couldn’t enlist in the WAC’s or WAVE’s in WWII because of her height. She did work for the military though in a science department though and is credited with cooking up a shark repellent substance. Her husband encouraged her later, to go to cooking school.
And here’s a random new thing I just stumbled across.
If you do a Google image search for a make and model of car, then click on one of the results, when the picture loads, a sort of glare reflection effect moves across the image of the car. Not the whole picture, just the car, as though someone swept a light across it.
(Chrome browser on a Samsung Android tablet.)
I noticed this too, and its not just cars. It seems to do it to pretty much any picture with large areas of similar or uniform colors. I was trying to identify an actor who’s name I couldn’t place so was doing a Google image search and it the did weird glare effect on several of the images I found – usually across the person’s jacket or coat or shirt.
Google browser on a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra.
My iPad does that on images in the Photos app, doing a fairly good job of selecting related content, which can then be dragged into some other app that can handle (insert and/or edit) image data. Sadly, it is a one-shot deal that does not support adjusting the selection.
Not sure if this is an actual fact (the link is cagey), but it is amusing. A man was so fond of his tree that he bequeathed it to itself. The tree was treated like a person, with rights and 200 square feet of land to stand on. When a storm took it down in 1942, its acorns were collected and a successor was planted on the site, which is treated with the same respect as the original.
Whether the bequest happened is uncertain, but the locals act as though it did.
There is actually a town in Alaska called Fishhook. That’s part of the old joke about the bus driver announcing that the bus goes to Fishhook. When a passenger asks “Where’s Fishhook?”, the driver replies “At the end of the line.”
If there isn’t really a Coldernell Alaska, there ought to be.
It should be a sister city with Hell, Michigan.
I came across this quote by Emily Hobehouse, as a message to the dedication ceremony for a monument to the 26,000 South African women and children who died in British captivity
“forgive for you can afford it, the rich who were greedy of more riches, the statesmen who could not guide affairs, the bad generalship that warred on weaklings and babes”
That was 1913, the year before it only became worse; including the greed and bad guidance and bad generalship of the Middle East.
I recently read about the railway accident at Steglitz (now part of Berlin), on the Berlin-Potsdam line, shortly before 22 o’clock on 2 September 1883.
That accident was a major impetus for German railway stations doing away with level pedestrian crossings between platforms, replacing them with tunnels or bridges. German railway stations look different mainly because of that accident.
A crowd of 800 Sunday excursionists from Berlin were anxious to catch the local train back to Berlin. As the local train was delayed the stationmaster decided to let an express train (not stopping at Steglitz) pass first, then open the level crossing to let the passengers access the platform for the local train.
The local train arrived at the platform shortly because the express was due (unknown to the crowd), and the crowd overran the railwaymen at the barrier, walked over the level crossing to their train, only to have the express plow into them.
The result was: 39 dead people (many of them dismembered), 8 gravely injured, numerous slightly injured.
Article (German language) in a railway journal, 8 September 1883
Now, the interesting random fact (source: 2nd paragraph on page 322):
The express train was stopped, checked for safe function (and presumably a stray limb or two removed), then resumed its course and arrived at its destination with 13 minutes’ delay.
After 15 minutes of removing corpses and parts of them from the line, the local train was boarded by the remaining excursionists and also was dispatched towards Berlin.
It is hard to conceive today of such a cold-blooded course of action by a railway operator today. Even a single rail suicide shuts down a line for hours, be the line ever so important (the victim sometimes has to be picked up piecemeal over hundreds of meters of line). I often had such delays over the last decade, commuting on the Stuttgart-Tübingen line. If a train drove into a crowd and killed 39 people, the scene would be closed to traffic for days to pick up all pieces. Anything else would be considered grossly irreverend to the victims.
Times were different then. Of course, there were no omnibuses then to carry off stranded travelers when a station were shut down for a long time.
OMG, that IS a story I’ve never heard. How terrible.
An Amtrak car attendant told me a train was held for over an hour after hitting a shopping cart, as they combed the area to make sure there had not been a person involved.
And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs
–Robert Frost
And I suspect, more redundancy/ flexibility built into the rail system, so that one disaster doesn’t have a ripple effect that ends up paralyzing the entire network.
We have one of these:
No ice involved; it utilizes an insulated bowl with some gel substance contained in its walls. Freeze the bowl overnight or so and it’s good for ice cream the next day.
And of course, the best way to make homemade ice cream requires no ice, nor special equipment, not even a freezer. Just half-and-half, flavorings, a bowl, and a wooden spoon. And liquid nitrogen, stirred into your other ingredients.
In Chile there is a village/town by the name Peor es Nada (nothing is worse)
That’s how I was doing it until someone went down in the basement and noticed that Uncle Ted wasn’t quite as frozen as he was supposed to be.
Definitely not everywhere. I commute via train from NJ to NYC, and they will shut down the whole northeast corridor (including Amtrak trains running between Boston and DC) if they even suspect a person was hit. I once waited on an NJ Transit train for 2 hours because they couldn’t find the person that the train hit.
ETA: by “shutting down”, I mean no trains pass the point of the impact and have to wait until the investigation is complete. There aren’t any ways to bypass the impact point.
I would translate this as “it would be (even) worse to have nothing” or, more idiomatically: “better than nothing”. To express that “nothing is worse (than this)” I would reverse the order of the words: Nada es peor. Wikipedia agrees with this interpretation.
That would indeed be our modern times reaction, after having accumulated experiences in more and more cases over the years. But his seems to have been a first for Germany and perhaps in Europe, there was no established protocol for such cases. I guess the train personnel were under shock and reacted mechanically: from Steglitz to Berlin Central (perhaps Anhalter Bahnhof?) it only takes five minutes, I can imagine the driver thinking that he better keep going, leaving the mess behind is a simple coping strategy. Does not work, we know that now, but back then? Must have been terrible, nobody knew about PTSD then and all help must have been awfully inadequate. I would not call the railway operator cold-blooded, that is judging them anachronistically.