What Would Jimmy Do?

Rainbows are pretty cool — you can almost never see one without pointing it out to others around you. Of all the places I’ve been, Hawaii is the place I’ve seen the most rainbows — you can pretty much count on seeing one every day when you’re there. Once when on a cruise, a rainbow seemed to follows us for several days — we kept seeing it in various ports, as well as while we were at sea.

Rainbows are more than just pretty arches in the sky — they’ve been a part of mythology, science and art for I don’t know how long. 
In the bible, the rainbow is an integral part of the story of Noah’s Ark and the great flood. After 40 days and nights of continuous rain, the world was flooded. Only Noah, his family, and an ark filled with pairs of animals survived. When the waters subsided, the ark came to rest and when Noah and his family emerged from the ark, they were met with a rainbow. It’s written that God made Noah a promise that he would never again flood the Earth and He created the rainbow as a symbol of His promise to humankind.

Rainbows are (usually) symbols of luck and hope in most cultures. 
Maybe the best-known rainbow story comes from the Irish. It’s about how the rainbow leads to a Leprechaun’s pot of gold safely tucked away at the other end. One version of the story tells how faeries placed a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow and commanded Leprechauns to safeguard it.
In Asian cultures, rainbows are generally viewed as good luck omens. In Feng Shui, a double rainbow signifies meaningful and great things coming your way.
In Norse mythology, Bifröst is a rainbow bridge. The colored arc connects the Earth and Asgard (the realm of Nordic gods.) The gods travel to Earth on this bridge and Earthly warriors will eventually join the gods during Ragnarök (apocalypse) in the final battle.

But not everyone sees rainbows as good luck — some cultures view them as bad omens. Locations that suffer from periodic floods or cyclones don’t necessarily agree that rainbows are symbols of good luck. And some people believe that you should never point at a rainbow or you’ll have bad luck.

Rainbows are formed from water — whenever light (usually sunlight) hits a rain droplet, it creates a rainbow. If you have enough rain droplets, you can see a rainbow lighting up the sky. This is why rainbows often/usually form after a storm.
Rainbows are technically an arch of light. If you view a rainbow from an airplane, it looks like a circle of light. From land, you only see half of the rainbow’s arch — so rainbows really have no end….

The ingredients needed to make a rainbow are light and water. Since no planets that we know of has liquid water, Earth is (probably) the only planet in our solar system with rainbows.
Light has to be reflected twice to create a double rainbow, so you usually see double rainbows when the sun is low in the sky. The band between the rainbows in a double rainbow is called Alexander’s band — named after Alexander of Aphrodisias.

Aristotle had a theory on rainbows as part of his color theory. He thought the colors were related to the four elements — and — because Aristotle was a pretty smart guy, his theory was widely believed until Issac Newton came along. During an experiment with prisms, Newton discovered that a rainbow had sever colors in it —red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Actually, these are the only colors the human eye can see, and they are colors that make up a rainbow.

Just about everyone likes rainbows and there’s been a lot of songs written about rainbows…. I think one contains lyrics something like, somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and dreams that you dream really do come true…. so I guess it wouldn’t hurt to make a wish next time you see a rainbow.
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Today is election day. A few blogs back I mentioned that “Election Day” has become part of the month of November — and — the reason, surprisingly, is because of the farmers. I found that interesting, so I thought that today — election day — might be a good time to explore other interesting things about elections and Election Day.
Although elections are held on other days, “Election Day” is the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November.

Why a Tuesday in November? In 1792, a law officially designated this day as Election Day each year because this guaranteed that no more than 34 days could pass between the first Wednesday in December, which is when the Electoral College met to vote on the President  and Vice President. An early November date was also considered a wise idea because it enabled more voters to go to the polls. Back then, most Americans were farmers, so this date ensured that farmers weren’t trying  to find time to vote during the busy harvest season, but the date wasn’t so late in the year that voters needed to battle winter storms while they walked, rode horses or drove buggies to the polls.

America’s early elections didn’t resemble the ones we have today…. In 1758, a young candidate in Virginia for the House of Burgesses footed a huge liquor bill to woo voters on Election Day. George Washington spent his entire campaign budget — 50 pounds — on 160 gallons of liquor served to 391 voters. Buying votes with booze was already a custom in England, and Washington was also following a Virginia tradition where barrels of liquor were rolled to courthouse lawns and polling places on Election Day.

In years when federal elections aren’t held, not all states feel the need to have an election on a traditional Election Day. In 2015, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Louisiana held elections later in the month.
Felons in both Maine and Vermont are allowed to vote and have had the privilege since those states were founded in 1820 and 1872, respectively.
The legal voting age across the United States was once 21 but in 1943, Georgia became the first state to lower the legal voting age to 18. This became an official part of the U.S. Constitution when the Twenty-Sixth Amendment was ratified in 1971.
The Nineteenth Amendment was adopted in 1920, giving women the right to vote, and since 1964, more women voters have gone to the polls than male voters — during presidential election years. 
And while on the subject of elections, Gerald Ford is the only person who served as president and vice president without having been elected to either office.

So the history of elections in the U.S. is interesting, but the important thing is that today is Election Day. Go vote!! A lot of people in the world don’t have such a privilege.
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Happy Birthday to my most favorite grandson.
Locke, I hope you have the kind of birthday you deserve, with lots of presents, cake, ice cream. You make me proud every day. 
Love you lots!!!!
Poppi
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Last night is the night we “fell back” an hour. It was time for Daylight Saving Time to exit, so we can get back to Standard Time. Daylight Saving Time (DST) is the practice of moving the clocks forward one hour from Standard Time during the summer months and changing them back again in the fall. The general idea — that’s much disputed — is that changing the clocks allows us all to use natural daylight better. Moving the clocks forward one hour in the spring gives us more daylight during summer evenings, while moving the clocks back one hour in the fall gives us more daylight during winter mornings. 

Daylight Saving Time begins on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November.
Contrary to popular opinion, farmers did not/do not favor Daylight Saving Time — in fact, farmers were its strongest opponents, and as a group, stubbornly resisted the change from the beginning.

The current daylight saving period was established with the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which went into effect in 2007. Most farmers’ organizations continue to lobby Congress against the practice. They prefer early daylight to tend to their fields and a standard time sunset for ending their work at a reasonable hour. 

So the argument goes on and like most things, no solution will ever please everyone. Lots of people have offered various solutions to the problem — depending on which side you’re on…
Maybe to make those unhappy with keeping Daylight Saving Time all year, we could try this… On the second Sunday of March change all schedules — church, business, schools, etc. ahead one hour. For example a business that opens at 8:00 AM and closes at 5:00 PM standard time would open at 7:00 AM standard time and close at 4:00 PM standard time. Then on the first Sunday of November they would revert to opening at 8:00 AM and closing at 5:00 PM.
Or, maybe we could….. oh never mind. Just be sure you set your clocks back an hour before you went to bed last night.
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Today is Will Rogers Day — well, not really, I guess, but it is his birthday. He was born on November 4, 1879 in what is now Oklahoma. About the only place that’s it’s really “Will Rogers Day,” is in Claremore, Oklahoma. Claremore kind of claims Will Rogers, and in fact he is probably it’s most famous resident. In 1938, Claremore opened the Will Rogers Memorial and has celebrated his birthday every year since. This year, like always, the Will Rogers Museum will host Will Rogers Days from November 1 through 4. The festivities include the Will Rogers Motion Picture Festival, whiskey tasting, wreath laying, parade and birthday party.

Will Rogers was known as “American’s Cowboy Philosopher,” or maybe “The Cherokee Kid.” He was a trailblazing actor, radio personality, author, and public speaker who, still today, is regarded as “an unofficial ambassador for the United States.”

Will Rogers was a Cherokee Indian. He left home five years before his homeland became a state and was renamed Oklahoma. He later wrote, “We spoiled the best Territory in the World to make a State.” He’s noted for his famous quote, “My ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.”

In addition to his film career, Rogers was famous for his humor and concise phrases, like “I never met a man I didn’t like” and “A man that don’t love a horse, there is something the matter with him.” His writings were published in six books, over 3,600 newspaper columns and many magazine articles.

Will rogers died in 1935, at the age of 55, in a plane crash on the way to Alaska. The plane was piloted by Wiley Post — another Oklahoma native. 
Happy birthday Will.
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We’ve all heard something to the effect, it’s just Murphy’s Law. Well, that got me to thinking — who the heck is this Murphy and how did he get his own law?
“Murphy’s Law” states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. So is this a real law, or only a superstition? 
In the UK, Murphy’s Law is more popularly known as Sod’s Law. A “poor sod” is a term that dates back to the Middle Ages and means “an unlucky fellow.” I found along with Sod’s Law listed a corollary called Finagle’s Law that says that bad things will always happen, perhaps especially to good people, at the most inconvenient times. 

But back to Murphy’s Law….. in 1948 the Air Force was working on a research project at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The project, codenamed MX981, involved high speed rockets and deceleration to determine their effects on humans. One of the experiments was to propel a rocket sled attached to a 1.9 mile track to speeds of 200 mph and hit the brakes to stop the sled in seconds. The team of data collectors was led by Capt. Edward Murphy. Murphy was a West Point graduate and World War II veteran . Murphy assigned an assistant to wire four electronic strain gauges, or transducers, to shoulder straps to measure the G-forces on various parts of the body. When the experiment was run, all the sensors came back with zero readings — no data. When the team investigated, they discovered that each sensor had been wired backward. Cant. Murphy, disgusted at the lack of attention to detail said, “If there’s any way these guys can do it wrong, they will.”

The overall commander of the MX981 project, Lt. Col John Stapp, told a reporter during an interview that when working on projects like this, his crew operated under “Murphy’s Law, if anything can go wrong, it will.” He was explaining that the Air Force anticipated possible failures, assuming a worst-case scenario, an to address those possibilities before they happened. 

Stapp actually coined many “laws” while working on aerospace tests. Before Murphy’s Law, his most well known was “Stapp’s Law,” which was similar to Murphy’s — “The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle.”
So Col. Stapp didn’t coin Murphy’s Law, but he was most instrumental in making it a popular expression, and it was eventually engraved on a plaque at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. 

Murphy wasn’t happy at the misinterpretation of his new “law.” Murphy intended the saying to be a way to approach experimentation with the utmost defense and preparedness for something to go wrong, in order to achieve the highest caliber of safety and success. 
Even today, Murphy’s Law is widely misunderstood and can be interpreted many ways.
But if we take a positive look at it, “anything” can be both the good and the bad.
Murphy’s Law can certainly be a catchphrase for open-minded preparedness. 
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Happy Tenth Anniversary to Locke, Rory and Ellie’s parents — and — my favorite son and his wife.Happy Anniversary, Dave and Chassie.
Love you guys!!!!
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Yesterday, the day after Halloween, was All Saints’ Day — it’s celebrated on November 1. In the Eastern Orthodox Church and some others, it is observed on the first Sunday after Pentecost. Today is a day when all the saints are honored, especially those who do not have a day of their own. It’s also  a family day to honor the memory of family members by visiting the resting place of deceased relatives and lighting candle in remembrance. 

As the Roman Empire spread across Celt-occupied lands in the 1st century A.D., the Romand incorporated many of the Celtic traditions, including Samhain, from which the Halloween holiday developed. About 800 years later, the Roman Catholic Church further modified Samhain, and designated November 1 as All Saints’ Day.

All Saints’ Day isn’t the same as All Souls Day — Saints are those who are believed to have reached heaven. All Souls’ Day is dedicated to those who still have not reached heaven, and is celebrated today, November 2.

All Saints’ Day is often observed with a reading of the blessings listed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount — among the eight blessing, probably the best known is “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.”

Besides a day to commemorate the martyrdom of the saints in Heaven, it also serves an important day to bring people together….
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Welcome to November. November is often referred to as a transitional month — say goodbye to fall, because winter is coming. Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women, put a line in that book that November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year. That may be true, but we seem to have turned it into a social month with community suppers and feasts of thanksgiving — and — the “election” month. 

The month gets its name from the Latin word novem, which means “nine, because November was the ninth month of the early Roman calendar. 
November’s full Moon is traditionally called the Beaver Moon because in the Colonial Era, this was the month to set beaver traps, before the swamps froze and beavers retired to their lodges, so the colonists could ensure a supply of warm winter furs. 
This month’s full Moon occurs on Monday, November 27.

The Anglo-Saxons knew November by two names — the first was Wind Month because the wind would start to chill the bones. It was also known a Blood Month, because the cattle went to slaughter in November.
In Finland, the word for November is Marraskuu, meaning the month of the dead. But the name is misleading — the reason for the name is because all the seasonal trees and plants lose their leaves or die in the month of November.
November is the only month that Shakespeare never mentioned in all of his plays and sonnets…. I don’t know why.
November is the month when we turn the clocks back and we get an extra hour of sleep. A lot of people aren’t happy about this practice and there is a growing consensus that changing the clocks twice isn’t necessary.

A significant event happened in the month of November in 1957. The first living creature launched into space wasn’t a human, but a dog. On November 3rd, 1957 Russia launched Sputnik II into space with Laika, a dog, on board. The sad part about the mission — even sadder if you’re a dog lover — is that the trip was one way.
Another sad, or tragic, event that occurred in November was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.

November is probably best known, in the US at least, for Thanksgiving. Since 1621, the fourth Thursday in November has served as a holiday to gather with friends and family and give thanks for the blessings in our lives — and — eat turkey.
In addition to Thanksgiving, November has many special food days… November 3rd is Sandwich Day, November 6th is Nacho Day, the 14th is Pickle Day, the 28th is French Toast Day, and November 29th is Lemon Cream Pie Day.
November 11th is a very important day — we remember the veterans we have lost in past wars and thank the military of today for protecting out country.

In preparation for Christmas, I guess, two of the most popular toys were released in November — the board game Monopoly (1935) and the Easy-Bake Oven in 1963. 
And I should mention that the first x-ray machine was invented in Germany in November, 1895 and King Tut’s Tomb was discovered on November 4th, 1922.
As I mentioned earlier, November has become knows as election month in the US. Why November? The farmers. Not wanting to disturb the planting, growing, or harvest seasons, the month of November was chosen as the most logical month for everyone to be able to vote.

There’s no doubt that November is a special month — it ushers in the holiday season and encourages us to focus on our important core values….. and don’t forget to vote — it’s a privilege, not everyone has.
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Here it is Halloween already. Halloween, traditionally called “All Hallows Eve,” is celebrated on the evening before the  Christian holy day of All Hallows’ Day, or as most of us know it, All Saints Day. All Saints Day is November 1, so Halloween is always on October 31. In England, saints or holy people were called “Hallowed,” therefore the name “All Hallows Day.” 

The holiday was once tied to farming and astronomy. It marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, or the “darker half” of the year. The origin of Halloween can be traced to an ancient festival called Samhain (pronounced Sow-in, that rhymes with cow-in,) meaning summer’s end. This was a sacred festival celebrated by the ancient Celts and Druids in the British Isles and it marked the end of the harvest and the start of a new year.

The ancient Celts believed that the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was at its thinnest during Samhain. That had positive benefits — it was an ideal time to consider the dead, communicate with the deceased, and also divine the future. Since Samhain was considered the death-night of the old year, it came to be associated with ghosts and graveyards. 

Halloween has lots of customs and practices associated with it — some are just innocent fun, but some deal with reminders of death and concepts of good and evil. 
Halloween was once known as “Nutcracker Night” in England — it was a time when the family gathered around the hearth to enjoy cider and nuts and apples.

You see Jack-O- Lanterns all over the place this time of the year — a tradition that comes from Ireland. The Irish used hollowed-out candlelit turnips carved with a demon’s face to frighten away evil spirits. The name “Jack-O-Lantern” comes from an Irish folktale about a man named Stingy Jack who invited the Devil to have a drink with him but wouldn’t pay. Jack tricked the devil and made a deal in which the devil couldn’t claim his soul — but God didn’t want Jack in Heaven either. Now Jack is stuck roaming the Earth as an evil spirit with his lantern shining the way. 

The Irish carved scary faces into turnips or potatoes and placed them near doors or windows during Halloween Eve to frighten away Stingy Jack and evil spirits. When the Irish immigrants couldn’t find many turnips in the United States, they used pumpkins instead.

So get all that candy ready and be sure your doorbell is working — there’ll probably be lots of witches and goblins out tonight…..
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