Happy New Year, Everyone !
Coffee in the kitchen!
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Mailing Kids...!
Did you know that mailing kids was once legal? It's true!
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was legal to mail children through the Post Office in the US. Even though the postmaster general tried to put an end to the practice with an official declaration, it continued until the mailing of a three-year-old (via parcel post) from her grandmother to her mother prompted an investigation. Suffragettes in England also tried to take advantage of English postal laws to mail themselves to the Prime Minister, but unfortunately for them, they were simply marked “Return to Sender.”
It’s 1913, and little Jimmy and little Dolly want to go visit Grandma and Grandpa a few towns over. Mother and Father don’t have the time to drive them out there or pick them up later. So what’s a family to do?
Why not buy some stamps and just pop the kiddos in the mail?
The first family to think of transporting their children via the US Postal Service were the Beauges of Glen Este, Ohio. They mailed their son off to see his grandmother, which gets even stranger when you know that she only lived about a mile away from the family. It cost them 15 cents, which is the equivalent of about $3.50 in 2014. He made the trip in the company of a rural mail carrier, who was presumably careful not to damage him—he was insured for $50 ($1,165 in 2014).
The longest postal journey ever made was by six-year-old Edna Neff, who was mailed from her mother’s Pensacola, Florida, home to her father’s Christianburg, Virginia, home. According to Google Maps, that’s about a 1,175-kilometer (730 mi) journey. There’s surprisingly little information on the trip. That is, aside from the fact that the child’s weight of 23 kilograms (50 lb) meant that her mother was charged a mere 15 cents for her parcel post trip. (Makes you wonder why the mile-long journey of the little Beauge boy cost the same amount.)
There are a few other instances of children being sent through the mail, usually from one relative to another via parcel post. In 1914, Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson issued the very clear directive that postal workers in the states were not allowed to accept children as mail items.
Because some people think rules exist merely to be broken, the practice continued for at least another year. The last case of children traveling by post was that of three-year-old Maud Smith, who was mailed from her grandparents back to her parents. She traveled in the post section of a train, and the Railway Mail Service got an investigation started by alerting higher authorities to the fact that someone had allowed a three-year-old girl to be accepted as a parcel post package.
It wasn’t just in the United States that it was legal to mail people, either. It was a thing in England, too, and there was a certain part of the population that didn’t agree with the idea. The suffragettes of the early 20th century saw the postal system as a far-reaching hand of the ever-present and very male-dominated government.
Getting the ear of the prime minister was high on their list of things to do, so suffragettes Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClellan decided to take advantage of the system and mail themselves to the prime minister in an attempt to present their thoughts in person. In February 23, 1909, they were delivered to 10 Downing Street by a telegraph messenger.
Their plan was, unfortunately, quickly foiled. When they were received at the door, the official that met them simply refused to sign for the delivery, and the women were returned to the sender—in this case, they were escorted back to the office of the Women’s Social and Political Union.
Now, I thought I'd heard everything. This put's the icing on the cake!
Coffee in the kitchen this morning!
When Putting Children In The Mail Was Legal
By Debra Kelly on Tuesday, December 29, 2015
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was legal to mail children through the Post Office in the US. Even though the postmaster general tried to put an end to the practice with an official declaration, it continued until the mailing of a three-year-old (via parcel post) from her grandmother to her mother prompted an investigation. Suffragettes in England also tried to take advantage of English postal laws to mail themselves to the Prime Minister, but unfortunately for them, they were simply marked “Return to Sender.”
It’s 1913, and little Jimmy and little Dolly want to go visit Grandma and Grandpa a few towns over. Mother and Father don’t have the time to drive them out there or pick them up later. So what’s a family to do?
Why not buy some stamps and just pop the kiddos in the mail?
The first family to think of transporting their children via the US Postal Service were the Beauges of Glen Este, Ohio. They mailed their son off to see his grandmother, which gets even stranger when you know that she only lived about a mile away from the family. It cost them 15 cents, which is the equivalent of about $3.50 in 2014. He made the trip in the company of a rural mail carrier, who was presumably careful not to damage him—he was insured for $50 ($1,165 in 2014).
The longest postal journey ever made was by six-year-old Edna Neff, who was mailed from her mother’s Pensacola, Florida, home to her father’s Christianburg, Virginia, home. According to Google Maps, that’s about a 1,175-kilometer (730 mi) journey. There’s surprisingly little information on the trip. That is, aside from the fact that the child’s weight of 23 kilograms (50 lb) meant that her mother was charged a mere 15 cents for her parcel post trip. (Makes you wonder why the mile-long journey of the little Beauge boy cost the same amount.)
There are a few other instances of children being sent through the mail, usually from one relative to another via parcel post. In 1914, Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson issued the very clear directive that postal workers in the states were not allowed to accept children as mail items.
Because some people think rules exist merely to be broken, the practice continued for at least another year. The last case of children traveling by post was that of three-year-old Maud Smith, who was mailed from her grandparents back to her parents. She traveled in the post section of a train, and the Railway Mail Service got an investigation started by alerting higher authorities to the fact that someone had allowed a three-year-old girl to be accepted as a parcel post package.
It wasn’t just in the United States that it was legal to mail people, either. It was a thing in England, too, and there was a certain part of the population that didn’t agree with the idea. The suffragettes of the early 20th century saw the postal system as a far-reaching hand of the ever-present and very male-dominated government.
Getting the ear of the prime minister was high on their list of things to do, so suffragettes Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClellan decided to take advantage of the system and mail themselves to the prime minister in an attempt to present their thoughts in person. In February 23, 1909, they were delivered to 10 Downing Street by a telegraph messenger.
Their plan was, unfortunately, quickly foiled. When they were received at the door, the official that met them simply refused to sign for the delivery, and the women were returned to the sender—in this case, they were escorted back to the office of the Women’s Social and Political Union.
Now, I thought I'd heard everything. This put's the icing on the cake!
Coffee in the kitchen this morning!
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Caught In The Act...!
How embarrassing for the government to get caught doing a nasty deed!
It wasn't the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last. Funny how that works out, isn't it?
Long before Edward Snowden exposed the NSA, there was William Davidon. A college professor and antiwar activist, Davidon was convinced the FBI was spying on the so-called New Left. That’s when Davidon assembled a crew of protesters to invade an FBI office, steal all the documents, and turn them over to the media.
It was 1971, and William Davidon was angry. A physics professor at Haverford College, Davidon was a member of the antiwar movement, n 1971, there was a whole lot to protest. US troops had invaded Cambodia, four students were shot dead at Kent State, and Davidon suspected the FBI was spying on members of the New Left—the men and women opposed to the Vietnam War. Convinced J. Edgar Hoover was tapping phones and hounding protesters, Davidon decided it was time to strike back, Ocean’s 11 style.
Davidon wanted to prove the FBI was abusing its power, and what better way to expose the feds than raiding an FBI office, stealing all the documents, and sharing the info with the media? But what office should he hit? At first, Davidon considered raiding the FBI’s main office in Philadelphia, but after thinking it over, he decided the security was probably too tight. He then turned his attention to a smaller office in Media, Pennsylvania.
Of course, Davidon couldn’t raid an FBI office on his own. Like any good mastermind, he needed to build a team. So the physics professor assembled a group of seven people (not including himself), and the group set about staking out the Media office. They made maps of the area and plotted getaway routes. They took note of who went in and out and when the FBI agents left for the day.
Plus, every member had their own special job. For example, Keith Forsyth (a 20-something taxi driver) took correspondence classes on locksmithing so he could pick the door lock. And Bonnie Rains (a mother and daycare worker) actually went undercover inside the FBI office. Posing as a student who was doing a little research into the FBI’s hiring policies, she got a good look at the filing cabinets, saw there was no alarm, and realized there weren’t any security guards.
The group finally struck on the evening of March 8, 1971. If that date sounds familiar, sports fans, that’s because March 8 was when most Americans were crowded around their TV sets to watch the “Fight of the Century.” Davidon and his crew knew that if the police were distracted by Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, they might have a better chance of getting in and out of the building without being detected. And for the most part, the plan went off without a hitch.
After Forsyth successfully opened the door, the rest of the thieves—all wearing business suits—marched inside, stuffed almost all the documents into suitcases, and sped away to a Pennsylvania barn. Once inside, the crew started sorting through papers, looking for the good stuff.
And they found some pretty damning information.
Equipped with enough ammo to bloody J. Edgar Hoover’s nose, they sent the documents to major newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Obviously, the government was not happy to learn about the break-in. Around 200 FBI agents were put on the case, and when they learned the newspapers had received sensitive information, the Nixon administration demanded the media scrap the stories. Fortunately, the newspapers ignored the government’s pleas and published several of the documents.
So when Americans opened their newspapers, they learned how the FBI was trying to “enhance” paranoia among the New Left by spying on protesters, infiltrating their groups, setting up interviews with activists to make them nervous, and keeping tabs on black students. But the biggest coup for Davidon and Co. was a little slip of paper they’d found which contained the mysterious word “Cointelpro.” At first, nobody knew what this meant, but a few years later, NBC reporter Carl Stern got to the bottom of that mysterious phrase.
As it turns out, “Cointelpro” referred to the Counterintelligence Program, and when Stern dug deeper, he found some pretty horrifying stuff. Under Cointelpro, the FBI had threatened everyone from high-ranking sports figures to diplomats with blackmail and violence. They’d bugged offices, gone through mail, and committed numerous burglaries.
Even worse, Stern revealed the FBI had actually sent a letter to Martin Luther King Jr., demanding the civil rights leader commit suicide or else the government would reveal his numerous affairs to the public.
Thanks to Davidon and his gang, Congress took action against the FBI by forming the Church Committee (which exposed even more federal corruption) and the FISA Court (which grants warrants for federal departments to spy on American citizens). And as for the thieves, they totally escaped prosecution. The FBI never found out who broke into their building, and in 1976, the statute of limitations for burglary finally expired. Still, the eight thieves kept silent until 2014 when journalist Betty Medsger—who published some of the original documents in The Washington Post—revealed the names of several people involved in the operation.
I've heard it said that all is fair in love and war I think I believe it!
Coffee out on the patio this morning/
It wasn't the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last. Funny how that works out, isn't it?
How A Few Protesters Exposed The FBI
Nolan Moore on Friday, December 25, 2015
Long before Edward Snowden exposed the NSA, there was William Davidon. A college professor and antiwar activist, Davidon was convinced the FBI was spying on the so-called New Left. That’s when Davidon assembled a crew of protesters to invade an FBI office, steal all the documents, and turn them over to the media.
It was 1971, and William Davidon was angry. A physics professor at Haverford College, Davidon was a member of the antiwar movement, n 1971, there was a whole lot to protest. US troops had invaded Cambodia, four students were shot dead at Kent State, and Davidon suspected the FBI was spying on members of the New Left—the men and women opposed to the Vietnam War. Convinced J. Edgar Hoover was tapping phones and hounding protesters, Davidon decided it was time to strike back, Ocean’s 11 style.
Davidon wanted to prove the FBI was abusing its power, and what better way to expose the feds than raiding an FBI office, stealing all the documents, and sharing the info with the media? But what office should he hit? At first, Davidon considered raiding the FBI’s main office in Philadelphia, but after thinking it over, he decided the security was probably too tight. He then turned his attention to a smaller office in Media, Pennsylvania.
Of course, Davidon couldn’t raid an FBI office on his own. Like any good mastermind, he needed to build a team. So the physics professor assembled a group of seven people (not including himself), and the group set about staking out the Media office. They made maps of the area and plotted getaway routes. They took note of who went in and out and when the FBI agents left for the day.
Plus, every member had their own special job. For example, Keith Forsyth (a 20-something taxi driver) took correspondence classes on locksmithing so he could pick the door lock. And Bonnie Rains (a mother and daycare worker) actually went undercover inside the FBI office. Posing as a student who was doing a little research into the FBI’s hiring policies, she got a good look at the filing cabinets, saw there was no alarm, and realized there weren’t any security guards.
The group finally struck on the evening of March 8, 1971. If that date sounds familiar, sports fans, that’s because March 8 was when most Americans were crowded around their TV sets to watch the “Fight of the Century.” Davidon and his crew knew that if the police were distracted by Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, they might have a better chance of getting in and out of the building without being detected. And for the most part, the plan went off without a hitch.
After Forsyth successfully opened the door, the rest of the thieves—all wearing business suits—marched inside, stuffed almost all the documents into suitcases, and sped away to a Pennsylvania barn. Once inside, the crew started sorting through papers, looking for the good stuff.
And they found some pretty damning information.
Equipped with enough ammo to bloody J. Edgar Hoover’s nose, they sent the documents to major newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Obviously, the government was not happy to learn about the break-in. Around 200 FBI agents were put on the case, and when they learned the newspapers had received sensitive information, the Nixon administration demanded the media scrap the stories. Fortunately, the newspapers ignored the government’s pleas and published several of the documents.
So when Americans opened their newspapers, they learned how the FBI was trying to “enhance” paranoia among the New Left by spying on protesters, infiltrating their groups, setting up interviews with activists to make them nervous, and keeping tabs on black students. But the biggest coup for Davidon and Co. was a little slip of paper they’d found which contained the mysterious word “Cointelpro.” At first, nobody knew what this meant, but a few years later, NBC reporter Carl Stern got to the bottom of that mysterious phrase.
As it turns out, “Cointelpro” referred to the Counterintelligence Program, and when Stern dug deeper, he found some pretty horrifying stuff. Under Cointelpro, the FBI had threatened everyone from high-ranking sports figures to diplomats with blackmail and violence. They’d bugged offices, gone through mail, and committed numerous burglaries.
Even worse, Stern revealed the FBI had actually sent a letter to Martin Luther King Jr., demanding the civil rights leader commit suicide or else the government would reveal his numerous affairs to the public.
Thanks to Davidon and his gang, Congress took action against the FBI by forming the Church Committee (which exposed even more federal corruption) and the FISA Court (which grants warrants for federal departments to spy on American citizens). And as for the thieves, they totally escaped prosecution. The FBI never found out who broke into their building, and in 1976, the statute of limitations for burglary finally expired. Still, the eight thieves kept silent until 2014 when journalist Betty Medsger—who published some of the original documents in The Washington Post—revealed the names of several people involved in the operation.
I've heard it said that all is fair in love and war I think I believe it!
Coffee out on the patio this morning/
Monday, December 28, 2015
Gotta Love A Mystery,,,!
Gruesome or not, you have to love the mystery. The old questions of who, what, when, where and why!
James Gilmore Jr., nicknamed “Jimmy,” was a tough, 14-year-old boy from Baldwin Park who bullied other children and ran around with a teenage motorcycle gang. His parents were separated, and the family was well-known by the local police. The neighbors considered Jimmy a nuisance, and even his own mother and siblings didn’t particularly like him.
While home alone on the night of January 7, 1962, Jimmy and his younger brother, Wayne, heard a knock on the back door while they were watching TV. Jimmy told Wayne that he was going outside and would be back in a little while.
When Jimmy hadn’t returned after three days, his mother reported him missing to the police. She told them that her son was “vicious” and had probably run off with some friends. Although Jimmy’s father expressed skepticism about the story, suggesting that his son might not have left the house, authorities never considered the family to be involved in Jimmy’s disappearance.
In March 1985, more than a decade after the Gilmores moved out of the house where Jimmy had lived, a worker helping to renovate the home found Jimmy’s skeleton buried beneath the building in a shallow grave. Even though Jimmy’s remains had been lying under the house for more than two decades, neither the Gilmores nor the man who lived in the house after them had ever reported smelling anything.
The police gave lie detector tests to Jimmy’s brother and parents, but all three family members passed. As of late 2015, no one has been arrested for Jimmy’s murder, and most of the people connected to the case are no longer alive.
Strange little mystery, isn't it? Strange and mysterious!
Coffee out on the chilly patio this morning!
The Murder Of James Gilmore Jr.
James Gilmore Jr., nicknamed “Jimmy,” was a tough, 14-year-old boy from Baldwin Park who bullied other children and ran around with a teenage motorcycle gang. His parents were separated, and the family was well-known by the local police. The neighbors considered Jimmy a nuisance, and even his own mother and siblings didn’t particularly like him.
While home alone on the night of January 7, 1962, Jimmy and his younger brother, Wayne, heard a knock on the back door while they were watching TV. Jimmy told Wayne that he was going outside and would be back in a little while.
When Jimmy hadn’t returned after three days, his mother reported him missing to the police. She told them that her son was “vicious” and had probably run off with some friends. Although Jimmy’s father expressed skepticism about the story, suggesting that his son might not have left the house, authorities never considered the family to be involved in Jimmy’s disappearance.
In March 1985, more than a decade after the Gilmores moved out of the house where Jimmy had lived, a worker helping to renovate the home found Jimmy’s skeleton buried beneath the building in a shallow grave. Even though Jimmy’s remains had been lying under the house for more than two decades, neither the Gilmores nor the man who lived in the house after them had ever reported smelling anything.
The police gave lie detector tests to Jimmy’s brother and parents, but all three family members passed. As of late 2015, no one has been arrested for Jimmy’s murder, and most of the people connected to the case are no longer alive.
Strange little mystery, isn't it? Strange and mysterious!
Coffee out on the chilly patio this morning!
Sunday, December 27, 2015
After Christmas Cartoons...!
I reckon we could all use a few laughs after Christmas, right? Maybe some Daffy Duck will help.
OK... that's enough for today! Time to get back to the leftovers and some fresh coffee.
Coffee in the kitchen this morning. Rain outside. Any pie left?
OK... that's enough for today! Time to get back to the leftovers and some fresh coffee.
Coffee in the kitchen this morning. Rain outside. Any pie left?
Saturday, December 26, 2015
The Memory Door Myth...!
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one this happens to!
Somehow I feel vindicated a tad, ya know? All this time I figured it was just me. See? I told ya I wasn't going crazy. No Dementia just yet!
It’s called the doorway effect, and it’s what happens when you walk into a room and completely forget why you’re there in the first place. Work from a handful of different researchers has been pieced together to help explain what’s going on. It’s likely that the parts of our brain that we rely on to process navigational and spatial information are regularly wiped of information when it’s no longer relevant. Walking through a door is a good indication that our environment is now different, and old information gets dumped in favor of new surroundings.
We’ve all been there. We’ve all walked into a room and completely forgotten why we’re there. We’ve probably all wondered, too, if it was a sign of old age sneaking up on us. Thankfully, it isn’t (necessarily). There’s a scientific explanation for forgetting why we’ve gone into a certain room, and it’s actually stranger than old age.
It’s called the doorway effect, and it seems to be quite real. To really explain what it is and how it works, we have to back up a bit to work done by researchers from University College London and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
They were looking into how our brains process information about where we are in the world and what’s around us. That includes everything from navigating your morning commute to recognizing your own desk in a row of a dozen desks.
It all comes down to specific cells in the bran called grid cells and pyramidal place cells. When the neurons in our brain fire, they create very specific patterns based on what’s around us. That’s translated into what the researchers described as a sort of internal GPS system, which allows us to not only keep track of where we are at the moment, but likely play a part in letting us figure out how to navigate from A to B.
For some reason, walking through a doorway interrupts the brain’s ability to do what it does best.
Navigational memory is an odd sort of memory. It’s thought that in order to keep processing, the information that’s stored in these systems wipes itself every once in a while. (Have you ever gotten home from work with little to no memory of what happened on your uneventful commute?) Old information leaves, and new information about our current environment replaces it.
Researchers from Notre Dame looked at just what kind of impact doors had, and they think that it’s likely our brains use doorways as a sort of cue that it’s a good time to wipe memory because we’re entering into a new environment.
Weirdly, it’s not just real-life doorways, either. The team from Notre Dame ran some studies on the memory skills of people who were running through a video game setting. They were tasked with picking up an object from a table, then going into another room and putting it down on another table. The object became invisible after being picked up. As soon as people stepped through the virtual door, they were much less likely to remember what it was they were holding than if they went from table to table with no doorway in between.
Going back into the original rooms doesn’t usually help people remember, until they see something that refreshes the situation, getting rid of the theory that it’s a contextual thing.
Walking though a doorway seems to quite literally cause us to glitch—along with other interruptions like a phone ringing or someone interrupting our thoughts. A system that’s likely built to help us streamline our thinking has a design flaw: the door.
I'm glad the folks over at Knowledgenuts cleared this all up for me! Kinda like an after Christmas present, ya know?
Coffee back on the patio this morning! Good coffee and warm temps!
Somehow I feel vindicated a tad, ya know? All this time I figured it was just me. See? I told ya I wasn't going crazy. No Dementia just yet!
Walking Through The Door Really Is Making You Forget Things
By Debra Kelly on Tuesday, December 22, 2015
It’s called the doorway effect, and it’s what happens when you walk into a room and completely forget why you’re there in the first place. Work from a handful of different researchers has been pieced together to help explain what’s going on. It’s likely that the parts of our brain that we rely on to process navigational and spatial information are regularly wiped of information when it’s no longer relevant. Walking through a door is a good indication that our environment is now different, and old information gets dumped in favor of new surroundings.
We’ve all been there. We’ve all walked into a room and completely forgotten why we’re there. We’ve probably all wondered, too, if it was a sign of old age sneaking up on us. Thankfully, it isn’t (necessarily). There’s a scientific explanation for forgetting why we’ve gone into a certain room, and it’s actually stranger than old age.
It’s called the doorway effect, and it seems to be quite real. To really explain what it is and how it works, we have to back up a bit to work done by researchers from University College London and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
They were looking into how our brains process information about where we are in the world and what’s around us. That includes everything from navigating your morning commute to recognizing your own desk in a row of a dozen desks.
It all comes down to specific cells in the bran called grid cells and pyramidal place cells. When the neurons in our brain fire, they create very specific patterns based on what’s around us. That’s translated into what the researchers described as a sort of internal GPS system, which allows us to not only keep track of where we are at the moment, but likely play a part in letting us figure out how to navigate from A to B.
For some reason, walking through a doorway interrupts the brain’s ability to do what it does best.
Navigational memory is an odd sort of memory. It’s thought that in order to keep processing, the information that’s stored in these systems wipes itself every once in a while. (Have you ever gotten home from work with little to no memory of what happened on your uneventful commute?) Old information leaves, and new information about our current environment replaces it.
Researchers from Notre Dame looked at just what kind of impact doors had, and they think that it’s likely our brains use doorways as a sort of cue that it’s a good time to wipe memory because we’re entering into a new environment.
Weirdly, it’s not just real-life doorways, either. The team from Notre Dame ran some studies on the memory skills of people who were running through a video game setting. They were tasked with picking up an object from a table, then going into another room and putting it down on another table. The object became invisible after being picked up. As soon as people stepped through the virtual door, they were much less likely to remember what it was they were holding than if they went from table to table with no doorway in between.
Going back into the original rooms doesn’t usually help people remember, until they see something that refreshes the situation, getting rid of the theory that it’s a contextual thing.
Walking though a doorway seems to quite literally cause us to glitch—along with other interruptions like a phone ringing or someone interrupting our thoughts. A system that’s likely built to help us streamline our thinking has a design flaw: the door.
I'm glad the folks over at Knowledgenuts cleared this all up for me! Kinda like an after Christmas present, ya know?
Coffee back on the patio this morning! Good coffee and warm temps!
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