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March 02: One week from today, after any chat(s):

trivia

Oops. Today's story was written for the March 01, 2012 "heart for a while" theme phrase, but he was actually born on March 2, whose theme word was "trivia". It's a bit of a mix-up in the themes that led to the wrong types of stories for March 01, 2012 and March 02, 2012.)

On March 02, 2012 (Today's story is the person who took his parents' Yaohan supermarket chain around the world and then just as quickly caused its collapse, although he blamed his brother for over-expanding. The "Oshin" [On-air in Japan from April 4, 1983 - March 31, 1984.] Japanese television melo-drama show that proved a hit in Iran among other countries was said to be based on this person's mother because of the similarities, although the Oshin story author claims that Oshin is based on the woman who started Jusco supermarket chain -- see the story on Jusco on the September 19, 2011 slot. It was not written from the woman's perspective because his wife didn't suffer anything.)

Happy birthday to 1929: Kazuo Wada, the second-generation Yaohan supermarket chain owner who took his parents' supermarket chain around the world before causing its bankruptcy. His mother was Katsu, born on December 6, 1906 as the first daughter to the fresh greenery store owner of the Yaohan in Odawara city in western Kanagawa province in the Kantou region of Honshuu island of Japan. Because her parents worked seven days a week, 365 days a year with no holiday, she grew-up on her own without relying on her parents. She hated her parents' occupation and studied furiously to enroll in the Odawara High School for Girls. Her ideal husband was a company worker or a bank clerk who graduated university and wearing a jacket to work. But when she turned 20, her parents told her to marry the Yaohan store worker three years her senior, Ryouhei Wada. Wada was so upset that she contemplated running-away from home, but eventually married him in April 1928 when she was 21 years old. Believing that she was the unhappiest woman in the world, they opened their own fresh greenery shop in the city of Atami on the east-side of the Izu peninsula in eastern-most Shizuoka province, next to Kanagawa province. One year after they were married on this chat date in 1929, Kazuo was born, and Katsu decided that she was going to live for Kazuo and raise him into a respectable adult who graduates university. Toward that goal, she began working in the store, getting up at 5 AM to go to the whole-seller with her rear-cart to select the fresh produces to sell, through 12 midnight when the store closed. Just as the regular store customers became numerous and life was starting to become easy, Kazuo's father collapsed from pulmonary tuberculosis in 1935. He survived, but couldn't get-up for at least three months. Then their third child and eldest daughter, Yoshie, came down with acute catarrh of the colon. (Feeling of fullness in the abdomen, with occasional pain and diarrhea that may number from two to 20 bowel movements in 24 hours, at first looking like regular fecal matter but steadily becoming fluid and then yellow to gray liquid with undigested food matter. It can come from infected food, excess ice drink, unripe fruit, raw food with worms, eating excessive otherwise good food, injestion of toxins such as lead, copper, arsenic, mercury etc. In other words, "catarrh" is a cover-all word for anything that causes these symptoms, just like cold and flu, pleurisy, or cancer.) 29 years old Katsu blamed herself when Yoshie died at age two in 1937, and her unhappy feelings were being imparted onto her two sons. How long did it go-on? Then one day, Katsu finally realized that her sons were no longer smiling, and it dawned on her that she was acting just like her own parents whom she despised. Starting on that date, she began playing with her sons, help with their homework, observe their good-points so that she can praise them, and they finally began to smile again. It finally dawned on her that happiness isn't having everything going her-way, but to cry with her sons, laugh with them, and solve problems with them. Then it also dawned on her that she wasn't being a good wife to her sick husband either, ignoring him to care for himself while she cared for her sons. 15 years into their marriage and during the Pacific War of World War II in early 1943, she got down on her knees to apologize to her husband whom she was mistreating. Then they became a happy couple who supported each other like two sides of a balance. At least until October 1943 when he died from lung cancer. Then the day after his funeral was over, dysentery struck the area, and the source was identified to a produce sold at her store. Forced to stop operating her store, she went to the home of each of her customers who was affected by dysentery. After her store was sterilized and polished clean, the next day, her customers came back in droves to buy her fresh produces. As the price of fresh produce rose during the War, she cut-down on the price-margin between the whole-sale price and the retail price to the bone, following the philosophy that the store isn't there to earn a profit but to make the regular customers happy. During the post-War reconstruction and the rapid economic growth that followed the Korean War, Yaohan became famous for selling fresh produces at lower cost than any other store. When they expanded it into a supermarket, it was still not enough, and they expanded into a chain of supermarkets throughout Shizuoka province. As for Kazuo, he graduated the private (Private means paying high tuition every year, but students with relatively poor marks can enroll, as opposed to provincial university which is cheaper, and the federally funded universities such as the University of Tokyo and Waseda University which have cheap tuition but very difficult entrance exams.) Nihon University in the Chiyoda district of Tokyo in 1951 with a degree in economics before he began working for his mother's Yaohan Supermarket and department store chains. He married Kimiko in 1953. By 1968, Kazuo became the president of the Yaohan Department stores. In 1971, he expanded the chains over-seas, beginning with Brazil. (Brazil has the largest number of Japanese immigrants outside of Japan, and hence familiar with Japanese vegetables and fruits, as well as other Japanese products.) In 1989, his mother stepped-down and Kazuo became the chairman of Yaohan. Because company take-overs were so rare in Japan, company stocks were often uncontrolled, but to guard against unfriendly take-overs, he also established the holding company, Yaohan International and became its chairman and chief executive officer or CEO later that same year. In order to lower operating costs, he also moved the Yaohan headquarter from super-high-tax Japan to low-tax haven of Hong Kong. (Japanese tax rate is among the highest in the world, which led to an indignation many years ago when one famous US business magazine's reporter accused the Japanese companies operating in US of sending all profits to Japan rather than keeping it in US and investing in US, and the Japanese replied that because of the high taxation rate in Japan, they send only enough money to Japan to pay payroll and other operating expenses. Until the March 11, 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and 25 meters high triple tsunamis that destroyed much of the Japanese companies which were located in the low-operating cost Fukushima and surrounding provinces which became radioactive, there were calls to lower this high taxation to make the Japanese companies more competitive, but afterward, the Japanese government decided against lowering it because of the need for money to rebuild Japan, which led more Japanese companies to fire Japanese workers and flee to Thailand, where even small Japanese companies fled to lower costs. At least until a huge flood flooded most Thai provinces and that ended almost all Japanese exports, because the Japanese products depended on the Thai parts and components. In comparison, Hong Kong taxation rate is less than half of Japan: Worker tax is 15%, corporate profit tax is 16.5%, unincorporated profit tax is 15%,and there's no capital gains tax for anything whose value appreciated. Estate tax went down to a big-fat zero in 2005. There's no withholding tax on stock dividend or bank interest or anything.) In 1990, Kazuo's family also moved to Hong Kong. Getting back to Katsu who found out that her "store is for the customer and not for one's own greed", surrounded by 21 of her children and grand-children, she went over-seas to visit these far-flung Yaohan stores. She died on April 28, 1993, leaving behind an empire that was very prosperous in the care of her two sons. During that bubble era, Kazuo and his kid brother expanded until they had 28,000 people in 450 stores in 16 countries, with gross annual sales of over five billion dollars. But they expanded, not by plowing their net profits from existing stores to fund the opening of new stores, but by borrowing heavily from banks on the presumption that everyone will go to a Yaohan. And boy were they expensive in US. Whatever happened to cutting-down on the price-margin between the whole-sale price and the retail price to the bone, following the philosophy that the store isn't there to earn a profit but to make the regular customers happy? I admit that it was clean, nothing like new, clean, very-popular Chinese supermarkets which are nonetheless infested by mice and flies but never forced to close and fumigate the place, or Costcos with wild birds which feed on the produce and give back bird droppings. But they were far more expensive than neighboring regular US supermarkets for the same or comparable produce. Didn't they send spies to compare prices like Wal-marts? Every customer with a bit of free time is comparison shopping, weighing the benefits of freshness or trustworthiness of the supermarket to the price. The Yaohans of US were not left in the care of managers who were following Katsu's philosophy, but on Kazuo's crazy notion that all Yaohan manager must be acquainted with a neo-religion called Seichou no Ie (Started in 1930 and incorporates a bit of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Hebrew among others. Of the over two million followers, there were about 850,000 followers in Japan. Crazy Kazuo thought that dumping everything that his mother taught him about taking care of the customers and believing in this religion will make his company succeed.). By 1997, Kazuo couldn't finance the 1.6 billion dollars of debts and Yaohan filed for bankruptcy and forced to evacuate back to Japan in September 1997, as Kazuo admitted that he lost the desire to take care of the customers. At least Kazuo remembered what her mother told him before she died; "What to leave the children? It's not wealth nor honor, but an inheritance of what's left behind in the soul: If you fail, start all over again." Rare for him to break with his family, Kazuo put the blame squarely on his brother for insisting on expanding rapidly over-seas with borrowed money, rather than with the profit of existing Yaohan stores. In 2000, Kazuo went to live in a basement apartment in Iizuka City in Fukuoka province in Japan, commuting to his small rental office as business consultant and part-time lecturer of economics at the Fukuoka University. In 2004, he moved back to Shanghai as advisor to Chinese companies and China-related projects. (Kazuo had a very strong connection with Chinese Communists. Hence there are two stories on why Yaohan failed: The business in China collapsed and Yaohan failed, or the business in Japan collapsed and those in China and others were going well. I can tell you that Yaohan was not following Katsu's philosophy in US and was awfully expensive with no interesting weekly sales to draw customers into the store.) The remaining Yaohan stores in Japan were taken over by the Aeon Group which turned them into MaxValu Toukai, while Yaohan outside Japan were eliminated. (Jusco, now called Aeon took over Yaohan on October 6, 1997 and operations over-seas were dismantled on December 18, 1997. The reorganization of Yaohan was submitted for approval in December 1999 and approved on March 2, 2000. In this process, Yaohan issued new stocks that Jusco bought for 50 million dollars in July 2000 and all the Yaohan stores became 100% Jusco owned subsidiary. Yaohan International Holdings was acquired by China Cheonan in February 2002 which now operates stores under the Yaohan name but unrelated to the original Yaohan. Similarly, the New Yaohan Department store in Macao are also unrelated. The reorganization proceedings was terminated by the Shizuoka District Court on February 22, 2002. The Yaohan stores in Japan became MaxValu on March 1, 2002.)

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trivia

Researchers at the Saitama Medical University, University of Tokyo, University of Hyogo, and Konica Minolta Medical and Graphic made a new type of X-ray imager that's a thousand times more sensitive that can see not only muscles and cartilage, but even skin wrinkles. Spotting cancer is now a trivial matter when it can see better than ultra-sound or MRI, and you don't even have to take a contrast dye to show all this. How does it work this magic? X-ray passing through the body or a finger bends slightly, and this new machine creates an image by looking at this changed index of refraction. Who needs all these other fancy machines, when good, ol' X-ray can do better?

On March 02, 2011 (trivia)

1976: This morning at 9:02 AM is the Hokkaido Provincial Building Bombing Incidence when a 5.2 liter fire extinguisher bomb exploded in the first floor elevator lobby, killing two people and wounding 95 others in this northern most main island of Japan. The explosive used was an herbicide (sodium hypochlorite) mixed with sulfer and charcoal powders which was detonated with an industrial electric detonator, while the timer was a Citizen brand traveler's alarm watch. The fire extinguisher was a large model DP10 style made by Hatsuda. The fire extinguisher bomb was inside a sports bag whose pocket had a Nikkei ("Japan Economy") newspaper. Three and a half hours later at around 12:40 PM, the bomber telephoned the Hokkaido Newspaper Company and said to look in a coin locker in the underground subway station. Printed with a tape writer in katakana was a letter taking responsibility for the bombing, claiming to be the work of the "Anti-Japanese Armed Front for East Asia" (AJAFEA) that said: "To all the friends: We Japanese imperialist Citizens must crush the rule of Japanese imperialism over the Ainu, Okinawan, Korean, Taiwanese, Burakumin, and the Asian tribal people. We must respond to their anti-Japanese front and abandon all opposing thoughts and expand the anti-Japanese Armed Front ... Support Ainu revolution ... The Maoists of China that supports Japan's position is committing a big crime. Anti-Japanese Armed Front for East Asia." (Ainu is the native Caucasianoid people of Japan. They/another/other Caucasian/Caucasianoid people populated all of Japan from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south until the Chinese/Korean invaders/immigrants in two waves formed Japan's upper class, and the lower class copied the upper class, including their straight black hair by developing air dyes, although all the Japanese are still hairy, unlike the hairless Chinese. There are some indications that the northern half of Japan was occupied by Ainu and Hebrew tribes before the Japanese -- a mixture of the Causasian/Causasianoid people that includes Russians and Turks with Chinese/Korean among others -- drove them north to Hokkaido, although 1889 this chat date is the enactment date of the law protecting the Ainu in Hokkaido. Current Okinawans aren't Ainu or such and came from China, so it may not be that the Chinese general Xu Fu from the Chinese country of Qin who went to look for the elixir of immortality in Mount Fuji, but went to Okinawa, where his people ruled with little opposition from the sparce population, which will explain why Okinawans are beautiful people, since the 500 to 3,000 virgin boys and girls who accompanied his voyage were chosen for their handsomeness and beauty. As for the suppresion of Koreans, the ones who suppressed them most were the ethnic Koreans in Kyuushuu, who have a great many in number but rare surnames because their surnames are derived from Korean, including the author of Dragon Ball, whose name "Toriyama" which means "Bird mountain" is a rare name in Japan because his surname is the Japanized version of a Korean location. In any case, the Koreans know that the current "Japanese Emperor" is actually a Korean lineage because the original Japanese lineage died-out, which is why the ultra-rightist Yakuza whose Yakuza language is Korean are pro-Emperor, versus the ultra-leftist Japan Communist Party whose core is also Koreans and ethnic Koreans. Since most Japanese are awful singers, many "Japanese" singers are Okinawans and ethnic Koreans. Taiwan was originally occupied by many different head-hunter tribes; as mentioned, the Chinese Emperor was the one who originally claimed that Taiwan wasn't part of the Chinese Empire which led the Meiji Restoration Government of Japan to occupy the island and then suppressed the natives from hunting heads and detoxifying their narcotic addiction. Burakumin are the traditional ethnic Koreans of Japan who did things that Buddhism followers aren't allowed to do; such as butcher and leather good maker including leather shoes [Although classic Japanese are depicted as wearing woven-grass sandles or wooden shoes, that was only a couple of centuries ago. Before that, the Japanese wore leather shoes with pointed tips which look just like those worn by Europeans.], because they involve killing living creatures and making things from those dead animals, although mybookshop already noted that humans are among those living creatures, and the samurai clans had no problem killing each other or making pills from executed humans that were sold as medicine, just as they were also sold as such in Europe. The letter rambles nonesense and claims that the Maoist Chinese support the Japanese suppression.) The first time that this AJAFEA was named was the August 30, 1974 Mitsubishi Heavy Industry Explosion Incidence in Tokyo that the AJAFEA's "Wolf" squad took credit. "Wolf", "Fang of bigland", and "Scorpion" exploded many bombs from 1974 to 1975 (October 14, 1974 at Mitsui Building that injured 17. November 25, 1974 at the Teijin Central Research Laboratory that caused no harm. December 10, 1974 Daisei Construction Head Quarter in Ginza, Tokyo that injured nine. December 23, 1974 at Kajima Construction Warehouse. February 28, 1975 Magumi Head Quarter building explosion that injured five, including the fire fighters. Also a simultaneous explosion in the Magumi Oomiya Factory in Saitama province that caused no harm, because 20 minutes before the 8:05 PM explosion, someone called the next-door Japan Transport Oomiya branch store to warn about a bomb and everyone evacuated. April 19, 1975 South Korean Industrial Financial Research Institute's Oriental Metal building with no harm. April 28, 1975 Magumi Kyousei Edogawa Factory that injured one person. May 4, 1975 Magumi Kyousei Edogawa Bridge Factory that caused no harm.) but the eight people who were company workers by day who were tailed to gather evidences were arrested by the police on May 19, 1975 and charged with the South Korean incidence; they turned out to be anarchists and Communists or jilted lovers with the Wolf squad consisting of four company workers all 26 years old; Fang was a 24 years old female investigator and 27 years old waiter who died by swallowing a cyanide capsule that he swallowed just before the arrest but the others didn't swallow their cyanide capsules; Scorpion was a 27 years old company worker; also arrested was 24 years old Mariko Arai of Sendai city; Mariko's 26 years old distraught sister who was horrified to learn that her sister was a terrorist killed herself by flinging herself from a train on May 28, 1975, shortly before her worried family was to take her into protective care; two other university students who were also members of Scorpion were placed on the WANTED list because a large amount of sodium hypochlorite, travel watches and other bomb making parts were found in their apartment; other unrelated groups who called themselves as the World Red-army Japanese Squad, World Revolution Front-line Pig of Bigland, and others also bombed various places until November 1977. At the time, the police thought they caught everyone, but two months later on June 19, 1975, there was an explosion in the third floor of the Hokkaido Police Head Quarter. A coin locker had a message written with a tape writer and was thought to be the work of a sympathizer, although the 500 investigators who searched for the bomber couldn't find any trace. Because of that incidence, when this chat date bomb killed two people, 600 police investigators began looking for clues and to find suspects who sympathize with the AJAFEA, who turned out to be Katsuhisa Oomori (Born September 7, 1949 in Tajimi City in Gifu province. When he was in elementary school, he wanted to become a professional baseball player, but as his eye-sight went down in middle school and couldn't distinguish the ball, he began to concentrate on improving his grades. Since his parents weren't interested in politics, he also had no interest by the time he graduated Tajimi North High School in March 1968. But a year after enrolling in Gifu University's Department of Education for a degree in mathematics in April 1968, by 1969, he was influenced by the university demonstrations and began to embrace leftist ideologies and participate in demonstrations with a black helmet which designated himself as a non-sect radical. By the fourth year in the univesity, he was influenced by Ryuu Oota's radical revolutionism, so that after he graduated university in March 1972 and was offered a position as a middle school mathematics teacher in the Gifu province, he suddenly declined it and instead choosing to become a manual day laborer in Kamagasaki and elsewhere. While working as a day laborer in Minokamo city in southern Gifu province, he made contact with Saburou Katou who was working on the new leftist movement and lived together for three months. To further radicalize his mind, he quit his job and took to the road and headed for the flophouse area in Nagoya city and the Airin district of Kamagasaki in Osaka city. In 1972, he heard of the Kamagasaki Fighting Coalition and overwhelmed by the biennial battle. He then took to the road in April 1973 to visit the town of Hidaka in Saru county in the northern most main island of Hokkaido and elsewhere to read about the oppresion of the Ainu tribes in history books. He then went back home to raise fund for various activities by working as a day laborer again. By the end of June 1974, he had enough money and went to live in the city of Tomakomai in Hokkaido. Just before he lived in Hokkaido on May 19, 1975, all the members of AJAFEA were arrested by the police. By his admission, he went about purchasing the terrorist bomb making materials in May, but he claim that by the time he tried to purchase the sodium hypochlorite herbicide, it was already half-a-year later in the winter of 1972 when the stores no longe sold herbicide. Unable to make the bombs, he passed the winter with everything needed to make the bombs except the herbicide when he claim that this chat date in 1976, someone else exploded a bomb at the Hokkaido Provincial Police Building. After this chat date Incidence, it became difficult to purchase this herbicide. On July 2, 1976, his friend Saburou Katou was arrested by the police for possessing a large quantity of this herbicide (Remember that this is all Katsuhisa's statement which doesn't explain why Katsuhisa could gather everything to make the terrorist bombs except the herbicide that his friend possessed in large quantity, that his friend didn't bother to give to him.) for which Saburou was arrested, but who wasn't charged because he didn't possess anything else to make bombs and hence there was insufficient proof that Saburou made this chat date bomb. Katsuhisa was just about to leave Hokkaido at Tomakomai Port when he was arrested on August 2, 1976. A search of his home found that he had a relationship with the AJAFEA and he possessed equipments and all the chemicals except the herbicide for making bombs which violated the article 3 of the explosives Control Act for which he was charged and arrested on August 10, 1976. But these were circumstantial evidences that did not directly tie him to planting the bomb at the Hokkaido Provincial Building, and because he didn't possess the herbicide that his dear friend had kept. Katsuhisa refused to talk under police interrogation and insisted that he was innocent at the first trial, yet while claiming to be innocent, he said that he supported the Ainu revolution and other subjects which were mentioned in the tape writer printed letter that the bomber left behind in the coin locker and stating that if another person hadn't planted the bomb, then he would have done so. During the trial, he was also in support of the various AJAFEA bombings that took place throughout Japan which were later proven to be planted by his friend Saburou Katou. In the first trial that ended in March 1983 at the Sapporo District Court, based on the testimonies from witnesses and his own admission of planning to make the bombs, and the confiscated items for making bombs, Katsuhisa was handed-down the death sentence, that he appealed to the Sapporo High court. During this period in 1985, he married a female supporter who believed his claim that he was innocent while in prison and kept seeing her every day. Meanwhile, the Sapporo High Court dismissed the appeal, so his lawyers then appealed to the Supreme Court which also dismissed the final appeal and the death sentence was confirmed on July 15, 1994. In July 2002, Katsuhisa's lawyers requested a retrial to the Sapporo District Court, claiming that the deciding factor that led to the original arrest was manufactured by the Hokkaido provincial police. Judge Yasushi Handa (Born October 29, 1956) dismissed the appeal on March 19, 2007 that Katsuhisa's lawyers immediately appealed, but the Sapporo High Court's judge Hiroshi Yamura (Born October 27, 1947) also dismissed the appeal, so the lawyers filed a special appeal to the Supreme Court. By now, Katsuhisa had a change of thought, and went from ultra-leftist, to anti-Communist, and insisting that Japan must possess nuclear weapons to protect itself, and proclaiming Russia (No longer Communist since it fell in 1991.) and mainland China as totalitarian states which must be fought with a Second Cold War. Normally, the condemned prisoner's communication with the outside world is restricted, but with the help of outsiders such as his wife who kept seeing him every day, he began publishing his new ultra-rightist propaganda in magazines and started his own web site (http://1st.geocities.jp/anpo1945/jikoshoukai.html) that claimed that he was innocent without offering any proof nor detail to explain himself which led Amnesty International Japan to regard him as one of the top seven condemned prisoners likely to have been falsely accused for a crime that he didn't commit. How does he sound to you?

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Symbiotic stars? It's a binary star in which one is small and hot, while the other is a big and cool star. When materials from the big and cool giant accretes into the small and hot star, it may cause intense brightening as the matter falls into the small star. The nearby symbiotic star CH Cygni is being studied by astronomers Margarita Karovska, Terrance Gaetz, John Raymond, and Nicholas Lee by using the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Very Large Array. But so what? No matter how they try to study this symbiotic star pair, they can't even figure out how one small and hot star can form along with a large and cool star. But you know how it formed, right? mybookshop has been stating that a primary star without a neutron core will barfs and vomits matter while heavy elements keep falling back into the core until it finally explodes, and spew matter which gravitationally get sieved, causing mainly hydrogen and helium to be spewed into the area which coalesces into planets like Jupiter, or if enough hydrogen explodes away, it forms a big and cool star, like this symbiotic star CH Cygni, while the neutron cored star remains as a small and hot star.

Giant George is 2.2 meters tall or seven feet and three inches. That's Giant George's height from nose to tail. Measured from its paw to shoulder, it's 1.09 meters or 43 inches, because it's a Great Dane, a dog, in Tucson, Arizona state, US, which was just declared as the tallest dog in the world. It weighs 111 kilo-grams or 245 pounds and eats 50 kilo-grams of food a month. It's about two centi-meters bigger than Titan, the previous biggest dog in the world from San Diego, California state, US. Interesting trivia, but I have a question to ask you; now what was the strain of giant dog that was fed run-away slaves to make them talk about the details of their fellow run-aways' fortifications?

trivia

On March 02, 2010 (I thought today's trivia story was on the 1815 signing of the Kandyan treaty between the British conquers and the Sri Lankan King to add Sri Lanka into another Asian slave colony for Britain, but something else was already slated for today. Today's "trivia" is on the Japanese naval jinx on the number '3', and why Japanese submariners hate the number three and multiples of three like '6' and '9'. Normally, the Japanese hate the numbers '4' and '9' because '4' can be orally pronounced as "shi" which can be written with the Chinese character for "death", and because '9' can be orally pronounced as "ku" which can be written with the Chinese character for "suffer". It's just a stupid word-play that's fit for comedians. And yes, the international bar-code merchandize price number for anything that's "Made in Japan" or at least are Chinese counterfeits that pretend to be Japanese all begin with "49". Incidentally, I was seeing episodes of "FlashForward", a 2009 Fall television show in which everyone on Earth sees a two minutes and 17 seconds or 137 seconds flash of what they will do six months in the future. Since their minds were not aware of what's happening to their bodies during this period, people who were driving cars smash their cars, a helicopter pilot blacks-out and crashes into a building, surgery patient dies, and so forth for a total of 20 million deaths around the world with the most deaths taking place in US. One such episodes mentioned that the Japanese flower-of-death is the sweet pea. Really? REALLY?!? I didn't known that, although it is toxic when consumed in quantity. In comparison, in many parts of Europe, chrysanthemum is the flower-of-death, even though it's medicinal and can save people's lives when consumed in quantity. Chrysanthemum is also the flower that's offered on Japanese graves, not sweet pea which isn't even mentioned in any Japanese comic book or television show or anything else, aside from one song by a female singer that was called by this name.

1943: It was this date that the the 'I' class submarine 33 was towed by Nippo Maru from Truk Island (Now called the island of Chuuk in the province of Chuuk in Micronesia in the south-western part of the Pacific Ocean. That's not the alphabet letter 'I' that's pronounced "ai", but the 'I' sound of "intel" or "ignore". Actually, it's not the alphabet letter at all, but a Japanese katakana syllable in which the top horizontal line is actually slanted like this '/' which by coincidence is pronounced like the 'I' of "inside". That name of the ship above isn't a typgraphic error for "Nippon" but is really "Nippo".) It was constructed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industry ("mitsu" here isn't "honey", but is short for "mittsu" meaning "three quantities", and "bishi" means "rhombus", since it's three rhombus shapes that form the Chinese character for "person".) Kobe Shipyard on June 10, 1932, and was designated as a first-class submarine. It entered the Truk island lagoon harbor on September 25, 1942, and then hit a coral reef on September 26, 1942, damaging the number six bow torpedo tube's apparatus. To repair it at-sea without having to drydock it, it went alongside the special workshop ship Urakami Maru, but it lost balance during the repair, causing it to take-in water from the aft hatch that flooded it and sunk in 33 meters of water, taking the 33 crew members including the captain to their watery grave. The special workshop ships Urakami Maru and Tachiyama Maru raised the submarine on December 29, 1942. Emergency repairs were made at Truk and it was towed by Nippo Maru from the Truk lagoon harbor on this chat date in 1943 to Kure harbor in Hiroshima province for major repairs. On June 13, 1944, she was undergoing high-speed emergency dive test at Iyo-nada in the western part of the Seto Inland Sea when water flooded into the engine room, sinking in 60 meter water off the coast of Yuri island. (It's now a tiny two-island chain with only 450 square meter of surface but a large amount of Yayoi -- Roughly 1,000 BC to 300 AD -- era pottery shards are dug out from here. It was even called "Yuri 1,000 homes" because so many people lived here until the 13th cnetury when an earthquake or a tsunami that came following the earthquake caused the island chain to sink into the sea. Up till World War II, several hundred fishermen lived here during the summer, but the larger of the two island was used as a military observation post during the War. By 1960, there were only six people living on the island and they were gone by 1965. In case someone was shipwrecked on the island, a special red telephone was installed, but since it wasn't used, and due to the popularity of the mobile cellular telepone, the red telephone was removed in 1993. It's now used as a fishing site and a camp site, although you can still see the remains of the original harbor and wells.) The cause of the accident is thought to be a piece of wood that was stuck in the fore valve. Only two crew men got out alive from the escape hatch, and the remaining 92 to 102 others perished. On July 23, 1953, Hokusei Marine Industries floated I-33. From the front torpedo room that still had air, 13 crew members whose corpses hadn't rotted were recovered, while last wills were recovered from the electric room. The submarine was towed to the Hitachi Shipyard at the Ino-shima Factory where it was dismantled, but during that period, three former naval engineering officers died from gas poisoning in the front torpedo room. Ever since, the number '3' and multiples of three are regarded as jinxed numbers in the Japanese navy.

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trivia

On March 02, 2009 (What sort of trivia? There was the 1899 enactment of the law for the protection of the natives in Japan -- the Ainu -- after centuries of battles to take their lands from northern main island of Honshu in Japan. By the close of the 19th century, the Ainu tribes were herded into the northern most main island of Hokkaido, aside from those who inter-married and just become part of the regular Japanese whom themselves are a mixed-blood -- just like the Akita dogs -- of various backgrounds as mentioned in Asian, Caucasian, and Polynesian legends. By this act, they were giving medicines and lands to farm, although if they failed in the agricultural ventures, the land was taken-away from them. Since Hokkaido was too cold for much farming, most of them lost the land and they were absorbed into the Japanese society so that there is no longer any Ainu of pure blood, if there ever was such people for the past few centuries. Although it's known that fair-skinned and fair-haired people originally inhabited Japan before the Chinese and Koreans came through the Korean peninsula to form Japan's upper class, it's not known if the original people of Japan were the same as Ainu or not, because their tales and stories were lost a long time ago when they were storing data in knots in strings like the ancient Russians and Polynesians.

But all of that got dumped because Chrysler is failing and is likely going to disappear soon, which means it's the right time to talk about it. But, uh-oh. This wasn't his birthdate. Mr. Mueller? It's not his birthday either. Some calendar dates got mixed up, which meant a comment on a recent event is forthcoming.)

2009: Starting on this date, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) said that its members will start to abide by "truth in advertising". You probably saw a television advertisement in which a man who's dressed in white laboratory coat like a doctor with a stethoscope around his neck who might be wearing glasses asks a question to the television audience such as "What do you take when you have a headache?" and then answers it himself with a "80% of doctors recommend this for effective relief." MAD magazine had one such gag comic strip where the "doctor" answers the question with a "How should I know? I'm only an actor paid to dress like a doctor." Didn't it? Or a toothpaste maker says that 4/5 of dentists recommend their toothpaste, not telling the audience that they did a telephone survey on dentists, asking them what brand of toothpaste they use or recommend. And they often reply "Baking soda crystal's abrasive action is highly recommended, but if I have to pick a brand name toothpaste, maybe Crest, Colgate, or Sunstar." And they take that to mean that their brand was recommended by dentists. Or they take that part about the baking soda and proclaim that their new and much more expensive toothpaste must be better, because it contains the dentist recommended cheap baking soda, which incidentally has no abrasive action because it's mixed into a paste. Or take Uncle Ben's converted rice and others that toot how it's great, because it's not "sticky and yucky" without telling you that it's the cheap and no-taste Indicus -- not that there's anything wrong with Indicus to those accustomed to eating it -- rice or that once the cooked sticky rice is allowed to go stale and bad, it's no longer sticky like these converted rice. Or take toilet paper. Those rolls used to be tightly packed and wound-up. Then as they went cheap on paper, they began making them fluffy so that they can make it look about the same radius but with much less paper, and they have beautiful women tooting that it's good, because it's "quilted" and saying "please don't squeeze it". Some super cheap toilet paper rolls are so loosely wound that not only is there less paper, but you can clearly see across the width of that roll. (White Swan does make a non-quilted, tightly-wound, single-layer toilet paper with 1,000 sheets per roll, versus the quilted 425 double-layer varieties.) It's something that has been going-on ever since televisions were first sold, but that down-sizing and increased price became very pronounced since the sudden increase in the price of the corn, wheat, and soy beans which are the source of everything from dairy products to medicines, thanks to Georgie W. Bushie's order to turn all food into bio-ethanol. But the complaints about misrepresentations of foods were not endangering people's lives, but they were something else with medicines that make misleading claims. (Aspirin advertisements that showed pounding heads were said to induce headaches in the television audience which led them to take aspirin.) While most people took a light-hearted approach when the medicine wasn't something that they needed, when doctors told them to take a prescription medicine, they had to take it, even though the doctors themselves were induced to recommend one drug over another because of advertisements in medical journals, salesmen pitching one drug over another, free samples, or even free trips to an exotic tropical paradise for an informal "business" meeting by the corresponding pharmaceutical firms and other perks that can easily look like illegal bribe. But they have a few dire reasons for doing it. Although most drugs are actually discovered in a university laboratory or some medical research institute, the Food and Drug Administration demands that unless there's a desperate need for the drug, the pharmaceutical firm has to spend up to a billion dollars and 20 years to document the lethal dosages for various ages and now-a-days by ethnic backgrounds, along with all the side-effects that may arise from using them -- you can thank Paracelsus who was already discussed for pushing the use of highly toxic minerals and chemicals in sub-lethal dosages over herbal extractions for the change-over that forces the government to demand such an expensive and prolonged testing period. Since many hopeful drugs prove to be useless after all that money and time is spent, the few drugs which proved useful are milked for all they're worth, which is why they cost so much, that neither you nor your health insurance firm nor government can afford them. Yet right after the ephemeral patent protection period ends, anyone else can manufacture the same drug for next to nothing, since the toxic studies were already done. But the issue of impurity has always being around; remember the transparent crystal monosodium glutamate that Ajinomoto of Japan used to make? Once the Chinese began making their own cheap knock-off counterfeits that came in assorted colors from urine-yellow, to excrement-brown, to ground-ash gray color, that Chinese restaurants bought and used, people began complaining of headaches that they attributed to monosodium glutamate, even though it's found in huge amount in every human baby's brain, because it's put there by human breast milk. What does stinky counterfeit MSG has anything to do with drugs? Pharmaceutical firms don't have to declare that they use Chinese ingredients for their drugs, and the finished products were only checked against a legally prescribed sets of toxins, not unusual adulterants such as melamine or toxic triglycerides. These are issues which must be addressed, but consumer groups and some politicians alike have been complaining about the wordings of aggressive advertisements that the pharmaceutical firms are using to promote their drugs as a cure-all for everything under the Sun, and pushing drugs meant for adults in children's shows. But the phaceutical firms do it because US and New Zealand allow pharmaceutical firms to design advertisements that are custom-tailored and targetted at a specific group of audience, and the firms are going to do anything immoral because churches aren't going to boycott them, as long as it's permitted by law because then they can't be sued. Some people want actors to be clearly mentioned as actors, rather than playing the role of satisfied users of the drug, or ban celebrity endorsements, or attempts to over-crowd the mention of side-effects with other sensory stimulations to make people ignore them. For good or bad, PhRMA is going to introduce their new guide-lines on what their member firms should follow by this chat date. But they're all missing the major point: What's needed are drugs that cure. In the quest for ever higher profits that incorporate the fad of the day, all research on drugs with potential to cure are dumped, and all the money and time are spent on blue-sky hopes on genomics and proteomics that claim that because such-and-such genes are associated with a certain disease, let's alter the genes or alter something else to cure the disease, pretending that the disease is a static board that won't mutate and adapt to the new environment, and worse; pretending that every disease is caused by one, and only one specific strain of one specie of an infection. In the attempt to put "science" behind their works, everyone pretends that computers have solved all the problems, and all that's needed is faster computers to find the cure for every disease, and that everything that can be discovered was already discovered, and all that's needed to be known are the details. It's a big change from the era of the aspirin and penicillin, when researchers didn't match the symptoms of a disease to a specific stereo-isomer of a chemical structure and declare something must work because it was logically deduced. Back then, they just made whatever cured, and worried about how they worked, afterward. Is it any wonder that pharmaceutical firms are producing new and expensive drugs that are no better than the old tried and tested and cheap drugs? They need to spend big money on propaganda advertisements to recover some of their costs when that happens too often. When can computers ever design drugs? Never. Calculating behaviors of atoms in a drug to an atomic level representation of a human cell is so difficult that it's better to use a real radio-isotope tagged drug and stick it into a real cell to see what happens. But even then, a cellular level testing is not very useful because the tissue doesn't behave like a cell, and an anatomic system doesn't behave like a tissue, and a body doesn't behave like an anatomic system, and the body reacts in a billion different manners when it's fed all the different foods and bugs. To do an emulation of that process at an atomic level is only possible with a real body and a real environment.

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trivia

On March 02, 2008 (What "trivium" for today? One option was the 1998 this date when the Galileo space probe indicated that Jupiter's moon, Europa, may have thick layer of water ice covering a liquid sea water ocean. On Earth, wherever there's liquid water, there's always life, which implied that it's possible that so does Europa. The moon was discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei and Simon Marius. About 3,000 kilo-meters in diameter, it's a bit smaller than Earth's Moon. Like Earth, it's thought to have an iron-nickel core that's surrounded by silicate rock. Seen from the outer layer of Europa and going down, it seems to have a very thin atmosphere composed of oxygen, an unusually reactive chemical that cannot be made on Earth except by autotrophic life-forms. Below the atmosphere is the land composed of water ice, although it's extremely smooth and wrinkled, as if it's a relatively thin water ice no more than a few kilo-meters thick on average, and because it's gravitationally locked to Jupiter in orbit, the tidal wave is heating Europa to keep it warm enough for Earth-type life-forms, so that there may be a few places where the water ice is exceptionally thin. The total ice water and salty liquid water may be 100 kilo-meters thick. Galileo space probe did detect a magnetic field that's interacting with Jupiter's magnetic field, which means that liquid water conducts electricity because it's salty. Even at its equator, it's so far away from the Sun that the surface temperature is about -163 degrees Centigrade. Various theories hold the ice water to be a few hundred meters to 30 kilo-meters thick, with the other 70 kilo-meters thick liquid water. For this size moon, that's roughtly twice as much as water as exist in Earth's oceans, in case you're wondering where mybookshop will get enough water for its "Puffy Earth" that can support trillions of people as well as all the other life-forms of Earth. Although the surface is water ice, it's actually covered in red streaks which are thought to be either magnesium sulphate or sulphuric acid with various sulphur compounds to account for the red color. Just for your reference, the radiation on the surface of Europa can kill Earth's higher life-forms, but it won't kill Dinococcus radiodurans, a red pigmented bacteria that can grow in an environment far colder than inside Europa. (Nor will it kill black mold which can also grow in Europa with no difficulty.) You can hit Dinococcus with almost three million rads of radiation that fragments its DNA into hundreds of pieces, but its repair mechanism is so good that in 24 hours, it's stitched back together again. Why is this bacteria designed to withstand so much radiation? It's thought that the DNA repair mechanism was setup so that it can survive in a dessicated state for a long time and being able to tolerate radiation was an accident. But what if it evolved on Europa? Like the black mold that can live on ionizing radiation, the red pigment may actually make the Dinococcus radiodurans into an autotrophic plant cell back on Europa that higher organisms such as the 1.5 centi-meters long by 0.5 milli-meters diameter black pigmented ice worm, Latin name Mesenchytraeus solifugus, could eat when they fall into the ice.

That was the prolog for discussing Otto Friedrich Mueller who was born on this date in 1730. He's a "trivium" because he was the first major person to confirm what Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632 - 1723) of Holland saw under the crude microscopes of the era which was still a major improvement since Anton's era. Because some optic lens grinders were inconsistent in reproducing quality products that were reproducible, so many people misinterpreted the crude images they saw, such as thinking that the blood cells were tiny worms in the blood. [Because the magnification levels were often crude if accurate and they haven't learned that dyes can be used to contrast them, it's possible that those who reported seeing worms were looking at nematodes and other parasites. It's also possible that the sample dried and the dried plasma or ruptured blood cells formed string-shapes.] Otto's microscope was of sufficient clarity to classify what he saw into baccilum and spirillum, depending on whether they were nearly spherical in shape or elongated into twisting string. He also had the bright idea that rather than going into the deep see, he can use a strong net that can dredge the sea in a mesh and examine them on dry land. It was this idea that first led him to describe diatoms in 1773. In that era, all the tiny things that were in ponds and swamps were called infusoria. This included everything from protozoa to single cell algae, as well as those that had cilia, flagellum, and other means of locomotion. Because they were often seen to be moving, they were all believed to be animals. Otto was the first to question that these diatoms were animals, because they seem to be stationary and they were green like plants. It was to be used as another in a set of examples to illustrate how once researchers generalize one word to describe everything, then everyone was expected to believe it without question. It's why the vulgar cancer researchers can't find any synthetic chemical that kills all the diverse types of cancer, and why most refuse to acknowledge the existence of nano-bacteria, let alone that free-roaming life can be far simpler and smaller than anyone ever imagined possible. Otto died on December 26, 1784, but not much of his biography existed, and his famous books have already become obsolete in describing micro-organisms. It lacks anything emotional to report.

Speaking of emotionless, whatever happened to Wink? It's a Japanese singing pair who was active from 1988 to 1996 when they stopped singing together around this March date in 1996 and they went their separate ways, mostly into drama acting. They were both beauty contest winners who always looked at a decade younger than their true age so that there were charges that anyone who like them were paedophiles, even though they were past their teenage years. Their choreographed dances were like robotic music box dolls with faces that looked like dolls, and they always wore the types of costumes worn by dolls -- they also didn't smile, although they said it was all they could do to remember the choreographed moves and were too nervous to smile. Their original group name was "Twinkle", but it was deemed too hard for the Japanese who find it too hard to pronounce "spaghetti western" that they call "macaroni western", and since they can't pronounce nor write their own currency unit of "yen", they call it "en". That was to go with the 1973 birth of Wakako Shimazaki, a Japanese singer-actress whose given name, Wakako, is spelt as "Japan sing child". Not much of a story in that. She loved pig's knuckle as her snack, and she was a slim, beautiful child as a high schooler, but all those knuckles are making her bigger, at least by Japanese model standards that demand skinny runts. In one episode of "Bari Bari Value" where one rich and single Japanese man was looking for a bride of a certain age, she appeared as a guest and assured others that she's in that age range, although the television station gave her real age as beyond that. Oh well.

Really trivial, but that could have been used to mention that this was the birthdate of Ei'ichi Nakamura in 1947. He's an animator who was responsible for the Japanese television animation of Doraemon from 1979 to 2005, as well as four Doraemon movies.

Not as trivial was the "Meireki no Taika". As you recall, every time a new Japanese emperor took the seat, a new era was dubbed, and one such era was the era of Meireki, third year, first month, 18th day. Why not say it's January 18? It's because in the western calendar, it corresponds to today in the year 1657 -- the Shouwa and Heisei eras by chance happen to begin in January. From that date for three days, a huge fire consumed the city of Edo -- now called Tokyo. Next to the phosphorus bombing of Tokyo and the Kanto Earthquake, this was said to be the third biggest event that struck Tokyo, with an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 dead. Why didn't the church keep a record of the dead? The fire started on this date at 2 PM in the Honmyou church in the district of Hongou when a priest's loose sleeve was blown by a sudden gust of wind into a fire that spread to the church and then to nearby homes and buildings. It hasn't rained for over 80 days prior to the fire which left all the buildings in a tinderbox dry state when a strong north-west wind began blowing on this date to spread the fire everywhere. The fire fighters tried to contain it, but by the time they thought it was contained next day, another fire started on March 3, 1657 at 10 AM at a hotel in another district. And when the fire fighters rushed to extinguish that fire, another fire started on the same day at 4 PM in homes in still another district. After the fire ended after having burning down over half the city, the shogunate government began re-constructing the sporadic and unplanned city with a new central plan meant to make the city more centrally organized and easily defended from military attacks. Although all indications were that the three fires were accidental fires, those who saw the significant central planning of the re-construction accused the shogunate government of deliberately setting the fire to burn the city down to make it into an organized city -- if they wanted to burn the city down, they would have set fire to all the buildings everywhere, rather than only setting three isolated fires, but people keep looking for scape-goats.)

2007: The House of Councillors Budget Committee is the Japanese government group that decides how much to budget the federal spendings, and on this date, they brought up a subject that was written as a series of articles in the Yomiuri newspaper's business section since January 2007. Unlike North American paid newspapers which are very thick, the Japanese paid newspapers were never much thicker than some free newspapers that are distributed in some bigger North American cities. The articles were titled "Shigen Soudatsu" meaning "Struggle (for Natural-)resources". Although Japan has reduced its external energy reliance to 48% by constructing nuclear reactors and importing oil through Japanese companies, it still imports 99.6% of its crude oil. With the loss of Russian oil well rights and mainland Chinese competition for oil, the articles were concluding that Japan was now in a desperate situation with no where to run. Although China gets most of its energy from its vast domestic coal fields, it still demands a vast amount of low-grade oil because its population is over 10 times as big as Japan, of whom about 1/3 is urbanized. Among Japan's losses, China has obtained 29 oil field developing contracts from 15 African countries, the Japanese control of the Sakhalin-2 project in Russia was lost, the Khafji oil field development in land situated between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait was contracted but lost the renewal, and the Azadegan oil field development right in Iran of which Japan had 75% right is now down to 10% since October 2006. The articles blamed all these oil right losses to the Japanese government's lack of a comprehensive energy policy ever since circa 1991 when the oil went down to nearly $10 a barrel and Japan also entered its depression that further reduced its need for oil which led the government to stop buying oil field rights and contracts. Leaving the oil market was sound advice until recently when the price of oil suddenly began to rise as speculators began pushing it up to $100 a barrel for the sweet, light green crude oil without much sulfer. (It's not relevant for China which has a very loose pollution policy which allows its companies to purchase heavy, high sulfer oil that developed countries don't permit, hence is sold cheap, which is how they can sell their fuel far cheaper to domestic Chinese consumers. "Heavy" in this case refers to actual weight per volume and low hydrogen versus high carbon content which is more appropriate for production of diesel fuel which has a high carbon content. By the way, a gallon of gasoline has less energy content than a gallon of heavy diesel fuel, because gasoline molecules are far apart but occupy more volume, while heavy diesel contains far more number of carbon atoms closely packed next to each other, meaning diesel engines aren't all that much more efficient when you calculate the caloric content. As a good analog, take a "gallon" of very light uncompressed natural gas. It does occupy one gallon of volume, but there are far less number of carbon and hydrogen atoms in one gallon of natural gas than one gallon of gasoline.) After commenting that the newspaper articles made sense, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy announced that they will start forming a national energy policy to secure energy supplies as a national strategy. mybookshop begs to differ. The Chinese machines are extremely energy inefficient, but the Japanese machines are so energy efficient that there is no need to panic. Since Japan began making nuclear reactors in 1966, its 55+ nuclear reactors provide about 30% of its electric demand, rising to 37% in 2009 and 41% by 2014. Nuclear disasters are still a possible albatross around this industry, but Japan is hard at work with their regenerative methods to burn plutonium and other wastes produced from the even more abundant uranium-238 stocks. And if no safe depository for other radioactive wastes is ever found, they have the option to throw it away into the 8.5 kilo-meter deep Japan Trench, where it subducts under Japan for millions of years while the radioactivity disappears. Japan's own cellulose and lignin to ethanol production and single-celled algae to diesel fuel productions are also progressing fine. Besides battery-powered vehicles, Japan's ethanol burning vehicles are also on sale. While there's no guarantee that Japan's high efficiency ethanol production methods can match all the land in US/Brazil that allows for lower efficiency but lower over-all cost ethanol production. For these reasons, the Japanese energy consuming industries aren't panicking over the loss of securred oil rights. Japan's domestic food producing industries from eggs to pre-packaged ramen are panicking that they have to raise their prices for the first time in 20 to 30 years, but those are not going to collapse Japan's economy. If anything, every energy-crunch hardship that Japan suffers is an opportunity for Japan to develop another clever method of becoming far more energy efficient by selling new appliances that make it possible. The washing machines that use the clean bath-tub hot-water waste, and the toilet cistern tank filler that doubles as a water faucet for washing your hands are just two surviving examples. In fact there are still many ways for Japan to become even more energy efficient. Many Japanese homes used to have roof-top solar hot-water makers that lost favor when those natural-gas powered instant hot-water makers appeared (Now in every Japanese homes and in many European homes, but regarded as too expensive for North America, where the always-on but cheap basement hot water tanks that waste energy still rules.). High energy costs from unsecured oil rights will encourage the installation of those hot-water makers that will supplement the instant hot-water makers, as well as more renewable energy sources such as solar, tidal, wind, and energy efficient biofuels. It's not much different from Japan's development of artificial intelligence robots to supplement its industrial work force, as well as the care of its elder population. The ultra-compact ultra-sound motors and tiny myo-electric sensors make for light-weight robot suits for its elder farmers and its disabled patients which will become the testing bed to perfect their robotic technologies that are cheap, reliable, powerful, and flexible. With the addition of encryption-secured tele-robots that are operated from a distance, they're the perfect workers inside nuclear reactors, deep sea exploitations, fire-fighters, soldiers, space-walking outside repair robots, and anywhere hazardous. Even a surgeon can get help from a very dexterious robot that can suture each artery and even tiny veins, fast and efficiently, which in time can do all the work of a surgeon. It sounds like science fiction, and science fiction movies do depict them, but it's also true that Japan is planning to make a real Gundam robot, minus the super gundanium alloy that can only be made in gravity-free outer space -- it's no fanciful fantasy, because without gravity, you can mix very dissimilar metals such as aluminum-titanium with carbon-boron nanotubes. It doesn't mean that US and other countries will be waiting on the side-line while Japan perfects them, but necessity is the mother of invention, and Japan has always arisen to meet the challenge whenever there was a necessity, even if it's driven by children who grew-up into adults who wanted to make their animation into animated reality.

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trivia

Sloan Digital Sky Survey is announcing that a cluster of over 4,000 quasars over 10 billion light years away, and they're surrounded by a halo of dark matter ("gravity"). Big deal. What a bunch of slow-pokes. It's a trivial story that mybookshop has been saying for years. As the dark energy ("anti-gravity") push those quasars away from each other and they form galaxies, they start looking like any other typical spiral galaxies, before they turn into globular galaxies. It's because of these mundaneness that mybookshop decided it's not going to keep saying the same thing over and over again. (Which is also why articles from at least the year 2000 are kept.)

Amazon.com is a pity. It used to claim 1.5 million books, but now it's more like 0.15 million books, with the other 1.35 million consisting of car parts and other non-biblio stuff. It's really going down.

Philippe Collas et al at the University of Oslo in Norway are at the EuroSTELLS meeting "Exploring

Chromatin in Stem Cells" in Montpellier, France, and is talking about using the liposuctioned fat stem cells to repair bodies. It's like that Japanese doctor who used stem cells to increase women's bust size by two letters. But it reminds me of an article in the Asahi Geino magazine about a woman who underwent liposuction, and then had her fat stuffed into her breasts to make them J-cup, and then worked for Misa Ogatsu, an agency that hire big breasted women. She did photo-shots, DVD and all the stuff, occasionally stumbling because she can't see anything in front of herself, and bruising her breasts in the process. Then eventually, one of her breasts shrunk down flat as a fiddle. What appeared to be bruises were actually her body reacting to the foreign substance. A trivial case, but people should tread carefully before using stem cells from liposuctioned fat. If it contained even a trivial amount of foreign substance, what happened to one woman may be a fate which awaits others.

Bob Yamamoto at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is celebrating the new 67 kilo-watt solid state heat capacity laser, which is just a bit below the 100 kilo-watts for a battle field use. (It's actually made of a big bundle of the light emitting diodes like those bicycle lights that I bought a few days ago at a dollar store.) He thinks that this can be used for battle, because it can puncture a big hole through steel. What a bunch of bull for a trivial laser. Once you know the wavelength (one micron), everyone who make those hidden land-mines and missiles are going to electro-plate their wares with some noble metal that not only reflect it but make it more resistant to the elements, although it might increase the price of their wares somewhat. Some of them are even going to use multiple protections, such as multiple metals with glass beads on top and a good amount of silica insulation below this skin to make their wares as survivable as possible. After all, you're not fighting stupid and trivial rodents, but thinking humans.

Do you remember an apartheid-experienced person who wrote a letter to someone in US that Israel is practicing apartheid with the Palestinians, which was mentioned here some years ago? Now an independent report that the United Nations (UN) commissioned reported that what Israel is doing is just like apartheid in former South America. It took them how many years and how many millions of dollars to come up with the same conclusion? With idiots like that running the UN, it's no wonder that the world is becoming more unstable every year. (mybookshop is certainly sympathetic to the Jews, but also highly critical of its current policy of Nazism and attempt to create more "breathing space" for themselves at the expense of the Palestinians who have more ancestrial rights to be living in what's now called Israel. It's how Nazi Germany initially treated the Jews, that Jews in turn are enforcing upon the Palestinians.)

Well, it seems that humans aren't the only hunters after all. Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University in Ames, US, observed savannah chimpanzees in the Fongoli area of Senegal hunting bushbabies with spears that they made. How long will it be, before we find them making ropes and weaving things? (It's in reference to mybookshop which insists that humanity's first "written language" is knots in ropes and strings. There's an article or two in the coming weeks which touch on that subject.)

On March 02, 2007 (trivia in a big thing)

Happy birthday to 1913: Georgii Nikolaevich Flerov, the Russian scientist who found that uranium will undergo spontaneous fission without having to be bombarded with neutron (Published in Physical Review in 1940.), and also realized early-on that Germany, US, and Britain were constructing a uranium bomb because all western journals stopped publishing articles on nuclear fission, leading him to urge Joseph Stalin to construct it also in April 1942, that Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov (1903 - 1960) did lead the research. Georgii was born in Rostov-on-Don and graduated Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1938. As did many other physicists around the world in his era, he was also tantalized by the realization that it may be possible to cause a chain reaction and create an atom bomb -- although the smarter physicists realized what dreadful effects the radiation will have on human survivors and refused to participate in the effort. But it was still theoretical work that was discussed at Igor's laboratory which hasn't completed the cyclotron when World War II began. Many of Igor's brilliant physicists and those in other institutes and universites were either recruited into the Russian army or volunteered into the army, abandoning the research on the atom bomb. Georgii was sent to the Leningrad Air Force Academy as an engineer to work on the bombers, which later moved to Ioshkar-Ola in east central European Russia. Although the May 5, 1940 New York Times had an article titled "Vast Power Source in Atomic Energy Opened by Science" that was sent by Russian spies who sent it to their government, the Uranium Commission that was established by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in June 1940 to study the feasibility of the "uranium problem" was disbanded and only the Radium Institute that was moved to Kazan still worked on the production of uranium compounds for use in the isotopic separation on a very small laboratory scale. Most Russian physicists already gave-up on the atom bomb, but not Georgii. Georgii was still enthusiastic about making the atom bomb and requested permission to travel from Ioshkar-Ola to Kazan, 120 kilo-meters away, to enthusiastically push for the construction of the atom bomb in December 1941 when the German army was just outside Moscow. His argument that the western publications stopped mentioning nuclear fission was carrying weight, but it was not enough to divert precious war supplies for a theoretical atom bomb when Germany was attacking Moscow. Georgii went back to his Air Force Academy on December 22, 1941, and then immediately wrote a 13 page letter to Igor about the unfeasibility of using slow-neutron to cause a chain reaction, while uranium that's enriched with fissile uranium-235 or natural uranium with moderator would be too expensive. But that a fast-neutron chain reaction can produce an atom bomb with the explosive power of 100,000 tons of TNT. Taking into account the number of neutrons released and the cross-section and density, he thought that uranium-235 and protactinium-231 can be used with half-a-kilo-gram to 10 kilo-grams. To prevent stray neutron emissions, the material has to be compressed to super-critical state. He also sketched two hemispheres of the material that's brought together with explosive to achieve the critical mass. Igor did read it, but he was just recovering from his congenital pneumonia and didn't reply. By early 1942, Georgii was stationed at Voronezh as it was about to be evacuated from the advancing German army. The university library had the latest US physic journals that he browsed. To his surprise, there was no response to his own contributions, and no western authored article on nuclear fission. It was also obvious that US physicists weren't simply working on something else, because their names were no longer in the journals. Georgii correctly concluded that US was now constructing an atom bomb. But what worried him most was that Germany also stopped contributing, and they not only had the best physicists, but also large amount of uranium ore, heavy water plant, technology for separating fissile uranium-235 from the non-fissile uranium-238, and the technology to make metallic uranium. (As it later turned-out, Germany did have everything, but its physicists weren't smart and physicist Werner Heisenberg thought that rare heavy water has to be used as a moderator for the chain reaction experiment which severely curtailed it on top of the use of 1% uranium-235 -- natural uranium is 0.7% and even these were destroyed over and over by carpet bombings. It was the opposite of Japan that also started in 1940 with smart physicists but Asia -- besides Australia -- was lacking uranium ore, and lack of government support meant that their idea of centrifugal separation used their own personal rations of sugar.) Alarmed, Georgii quickly wrote to Sergei Kaftanov, the former head of the Committee on Higher Education who became the State Defense Committee's plenipotentiary for science, and the chairman of the Scientific Technical Council that evaluated all research and engineering proposals that were relevant to the war. Georgii pointed out to Sergei that US hasn't stopped working on nuclear fission, and that it would be wise to ask US and Britain about what results on fission they've obtained recently to probe them. When Sergei didn't respond back to his letter and five telegrams, he decided that he wasn't a scare-monger who was exaggerating the threat and decided to directly write to Joseph Stalin in April 1942. He frankly admitted that uranium will not revolutionize the civilian technology, but that it will revolutionize military technology. Georgii also added that to prove that he wasn't exaggerating the threat to avoid serving on the nearby front-line, a meeting of all the great Russian physicists should take place to address the "uranium problem", and have them write down their assessment of the probability that it can be made. Whether Joseph Stalin saw the letter, Joseph did not call for a meeting to assess the feasibility of constructing the atom bomb. But Georgii's suspicion that Britain and US were working on the atom bomb was correct. As it turned out, while the German physicists over-estimated the quantity of uranium-235 which was required as so many tons and hence unfeasible, in February 1940, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham in Britain under-estimated the quantity of uranium-235 for critical mass as only a pound or two (half-a-kilo or one) with almost all of it undergoing fission before it blows away. Seeing it as a relatively simple and cheap bomb, the Maud Committee began meeting on Apil 10, 1940. By June 1940, gaseous diffusion for isotopic separation was determined to be the best option and Franz Eugen Simon was put in charge of working out the detail. (1893 - 1956. Later called Francis Simon, he was a Jewish German who moved to Britain and developed the uranium hexafluoride gas for diffusion that was later transferred to the Manhattan Project in US. Although he fled Nazi Germany because he was Jewish, he was constantly viewed as a security threat for being a German, just like all other Germans in the allied side.) Franz finished the plan in December 1940, including the cost and the specification for the plant that enriched uranium-235. By now, the funds for everything was starting to be allocated when in March 1941, the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism measured the fast cross section of uranium-235. With this new figure, Rudolf calculated that at least 18 pounds of pure uranium-235 was required, but 10 pounds if something to reflect the neutron flux can be used. At the same time, the Maud Report also said that thermal diffusion, electromagnetic separation, and centrifugal separation were not viable. (Remember how long ago ultra-centrifuge was invented? And the evolving technology for tough but ultra-thin stainless steel sheets required for the job?) and opted for gaseous diffusion. The Maud Committee prepared a report on the uranium bomb and uranium power generation before disbanding on July 15, 1941 and publishing the report on September 25, 1941. The uranium bomb will contain 12 kilo-grams of uranium-235 at a cost of five million pounds (British currency "pound") per kilo-gram when producec at a rate of one kilo-gram per day. The bomb was estimated to have the explosive power of 1,800 tons of TNT. The estimate was that it will take two to five years to make the bomb, hence it can probably be made before the war ended. It also noted that plutonium-239 will have properties similar to uranium-235. Glenn Seaborg et al at Berkeley had already identified plutonium-239 in February 1941. At first, US was supposed to collaborate with Britain, but US quickly pulled ahead in the construction, and also decided that because Britain is falling behind, there's no need to inform Britain. The authorization to make the bomb in US came in June 1942. After the graphite pile was made at the university of Chicago in December 1942 to prove that a chain reaction does occur, the plutonium and uranium-235 bomb designs were quickly made. The Russian spies were getting US nuclear research since September 1941, but back then, US didn't have the knowledge but had the money. Britain had the knowledge but didn't have the money. The Russian spies obtained the Maud Committee report, and Joseph had decided that Russia has to make it also by the end of 1942, although the Russian physicists didn't agree. Back in April 1942, a Russian colonel went to Sergei's assistant with a captured German officer's notebook from the Taganrog Bay. The notebook had information on what's needed to make the bomb and the amount of uranium-235 required. Based on the analysis, the recommendation was that it will take 10 to even 10 years to make it, and it's just a waste of money. Sergei had a meeting with Joseph, at which point Sergei admitted that the bomb may not work, and it will cost 20 million to 100 million rubles to make. Short time later in mid-July 1942, Georgii was recalled fron the front-line to Moscow. From that time to the autumn, other Russian physicists were recalled to determine the likelihood that Nazi Germany constructed one, and the feasibility of making one for Russia. Sergei recommended Igor for the job. Igor couldn't concentrate on just one project but was deemed the most competent. Although Igor wasn't sure if the Germans have made the bomb, he supported Georgii's view that Russia should work on constructing one also, and Igor also decided by July 1943 that a graphite moderated natural uranium reactor is best for producing plutonium. But the immediate defense of Russia was overwhelming, and it soon became apparent that Germany was going to lose the War and the need to make the bomb was rapidly diminishing in importance. British physicists also realized from 1942 to 1943 that Britain won't be making the bomb before the War ended, leading about 50 physicists and engineers to move to US to help complete the Manhattan Project, while psy-ops used delaying tactics to prevent Japan from surrendering before the bombs can be used on them. (Remember that Howard Hughes had to face an inquiry for the money wasted constructing the spruce wood airplane that cost US government only a few million dollars and far more of Howard's own money, even though Howard did fly one, because it didn't add any new weapon to US arsenal. Although the uranium bombs and plutonium bomb added a new category of weapon to the arsenal, unless it was used against Japan to justify the Project, the disproportionately staggering sum of money that was eventually spent to develop it may have led to far more severe punishments.) After the Pacific War ended, Lavrenti Beria was put in charge of the Russian atom bomb project, while Igor became its scientific director. The situation had changed in the summer of 1945 when Russia could suddenly get all the remaining German physicists and engineers who weren't whisked away by the allies, as well as uranium ore and uranium mine in Saxony. Since Lavrenti didn't trust his own physicists, but Karl Fuchs provided the information on the Fat Man bomb design from US, they got right to work copying the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The experimental Russian nuclear reactor went critical on December 25, 1946 at 6 PM at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, producing 10 watts at first. Other plutonium reactors at Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains provided enough metallic plutonium for the first Russian atomic detonation on August 29, 1949 at 7 AM at Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. It was called RDS-1, with "RDS" consisting of three randomly selected letters. It yielded 22 kilo-ton TNT equivalent. As for Georgii, in 1957, he founded and became the director of Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions where he stayed until 1989. Here he bombarded uranium and similar heavy elements with heavy ions to synthesize new trans-uranic elements. He announced that he synthesized element 104 in 1965 and element 106 in 1974, but US claimed to have made it first, and called them rutherfordium and seaborgium. Georgii died on November 19, 1990, having made several trivial contributions to Russian nuclear developments. For a while, US electrocuted anyone who gave away the nuclear secret but who denied it, while those who admitted were simply sent to jail. Since that era, US went out all-wild, giving the nuclear secret to everyone who wanted it, with the reasoning that the more people knew about it, the safer the world became. It did become safer for the likes of North Korea which can now threaten mighty US, while US targets countries less likely to rain nuclear missiles on US, such as Iran.

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Odd->1 yr ago trivia->trivia

The following chats were not informed that the theme for today is March 02's "odd", and were assumed to be the March 03's "trivia" theme.

It turned out that not all birds lack teeth. Researchers of the Universities of Manchester and Wisconsin found that a natural chicken mutant called Talpid have teeth like crocodiles (The mutant was known for at least 50 years, but no one bothered to look at its teeth until now, since these mutants die young and were regarded as nuisances.), as mentioned in the latest issue of Current Biology. Since all chickens have the dormant genes for teeth, they can even turn it ON, and give all chickens, teeth.

Here's an odd news out of Britain: Driver licenseless, uninsured 26 years old Mohammed Aqueel Hussain stole a VolksWagon Golf that he plowed into three years old Levi Bleasdale who was crossing the road with her mother Kirsty Bleasdale. And all that Mohammad got was a 12 weeks jail sentence. So if you're mad as hell at someone and you feel like killing someone in Britain, just steal a Golf, and ram into that person. You'll be out of jail before that person's ashes are scattered into the winds. If you get anything more, tell the judge that he/she is biased against you because you're not a mad Muslem and demand a new trial.

Odd. Google.com is facing an injunction from an adult entertainment site for searching through their images. Every web site operator who doesn't want his/her/their web site searched by google.com's spiders simply includes a short hypertext markup language coding that prevents the spiders from going through the site. What went wrong here?

The latest issue of Nature journal page 949 ~ 952 reports researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who tried making a quantum computer that uses the Zeno effect involving bouncing a photon between mirrors as it interacts with the program that it must solve. And it can produce the answer without feeding it any power. Computation while the computer is turned, off.

The following chats were informed of the correct chat theme or corrected in time.

Glass metal is an odd material. Hiroshi Shintani and Hajime Tanaka of the University of Tokyo made a model of how a molecule can go from a crystal, to plastic, to glass with crystalline clusters. As these developments continue, will we have plastic crystal, and metal glass, as well as glass metal and other odd behaving materials?

San Francisco is planning to convert all those dog feces on its streets into methane to make power. It was a common sight in England during World War II when there was a restriction on the gasoline useage: People carrying a big tank of cow dung or coal/wood burning reactor on top of their car that provides the methane to power their cars.

The protests over the cartoon depiction of the Prophet Muhammed is still continuing. Meanwhile, Catholics are protesting the bleeding Virgin Mary that will appear in a new South Park episode. Those newspapers which kept reprinting the Prophet Muhammed cartoon -- including a Saudi tabloid newspaper that reprinted it after consulting with their country's highest religious authority -- should now defend this South Park episode for the same freedom of expression, right? South Park does really disgusting stuff from time to time, including a very early episode about police discussing the act of digging-up a corpse and making love with the corpse by knifing-open orifices. Those Muslems who feel like retaliating may use this opportunity to depict Jesus knifing-open orifices in some dead corpse and making love. It is really repugnant. (Actually, I thought the illustrations of Mr. Spock as a woman making love to the Enterprise's Captain James T. Kirk was disgusting also, but that's Leonard Nimoy's art works in his quest for completely novel and unique works, according to one interview that I saw.) It's a tit-for-tat act of revenge that only escalates a trivial cartoon, unless everyone simply stop trying to one-up everyone else, and just let it die-out.

This date celebrates the very old King Kong movie, and you know something? I saw the new version of King Kong movie that's something like three hours long, and they spend the first hour just talking about how US is in a depression and a young woman who wants to do comedy theater was directed into burlesque that she refused, but being hungry, she tries to steal a fruit and was caught by the store owner, only to be picked-up by a broke movie producer who almost hijacks a ship with a worthless $2,000 check that will bounce, to go to the uncharted Skull Island (Rather than going to Singapore that he claimed they were heading.) where they meet the natives. Was that boring. I almost wanted to just get the hell out and stop, because it was so melancholy and unentertaining. Even when the natives tied the woman by her hands and she somehow seemed to have no trouble dangling in the air like that, they had the scenery so dark that I couldn't see anything. (Not as bad as "Alien versus Predator" which was filmed almost entirely in absolute, pitch-blackness. And the heroine of the show was a black-skinned African-American. Mind you. I have nothing against using an African-American as the main character in a movie, but I have everything against it when you cannot see what's happening in the pitch darkness. Couldn't she at least give a narration on what was happening, or something?) After King Kong appears, the actions started, and it wasn't as bad. But they should have simply cut-off most of that first boring, trivial hour and turned it into a two hour movie. Don't the producers know that we want to be dazzled once every 15 minutes?

On March 02, 2006 (Well, it looks as if mybookshop is becoming desperate for any article, since it's now starting to permit more articles on people who are still alive, even though a person who still lives may do something completely unexpectedly that will change how the public perceives him/her/them/it. That happened with Michael Jackson who went from admired, to viled, although he had to be covered here while he was still alive, because he's simply too big in the entertainment field to keep ignoring. With lesser people, there was the option to keep ignoring them, but desperation appears to be permitting the restriction to be lifted for today's "trivia".)

Happy birthday to 1931: Tom Wolfe, a writer not related to writer Thomas Wolfe. Tom was born as Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Junior in the city of Richmond, Virginia state. Around 1940, he tried to write Napoleon's biography and a comic book on Mozart. By 1948 or so, he was copying Ernest Hemingway's writing style, before copying other styles. After graduating elite (snob) private St. Christopher's School in Richmond, by 1953, he also graduated Washington and Lee University with a Bachelor of Arts, where he also wrote for the Shanandoh Review. Although he had aspirations of becoming baseball player, he was not talented in that field. In 1957, he received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University with a thesis on the Communist Organizational Activity among American Writers, 1929 - 1942. Then he quickly became a reporter for the Springfield Union in Massachusetts. By 1959, he was a reporter for the Washington Post on Latin America. By 1962, he was working for the New York Herald Tribune and wearing his trademark white suit. While the New York newspapers were on strike in 1963 and he had no job, he went to editor Byron Dobell of the Esquire Magazine to write about customized cars in southern California, but had trouble writing it in the journalistic rules of the era. Byron suggested that he simply write everything that he wanted to say, and they'll work on the article. So he wrote everything that he wanted to say as a simple letter, Byron took it, removed the "Dear Byron:" in the beginning, and published it as is, under the heading: "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmm)...". This was the beginning of what was called New Journalism, that allowed associative thinking, exclamations marks, and anything-goes. (Ha! That's nothing compared to mybookshop articles which have the quirky requirement that all the sentences and paragraphs and explanations be stuck together into one, while maintaining legibility, and avoiding phrases that cannot be passed through linguistic translation softwares, not to mention having to write articles that cannot be touched once it's sealed, so you have to predict whether some unexpected event will cause the article to become a lie, while maintaining integrity with other articles from the past, present, and future like a huge 3-D map of information. The predictive nature also necessitates writing mundane articles as a prelude to explaining something else much later. And the articles must be innovative in idea and must contain new discoveries not found anywhere else.) In 1965, he published all the new articles he wrote under this new style, titled as: "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby". Although Tom was personally conservative, his words were, like, man, a hippie. (Using "man" was common in the 1960's US without any reference to any male adult human in particular, and "like" is still used now in US to mean "as if similar to" or just "akin to" in US.) His "Radical Chic & Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers" (1971) said African-American radicals were controlling rich snobs, although mybookshop says that it was the rich snobs at Carnegie who manipulated the African-Americans into becoming radical Black Panthers, since historically, radicalism is the only accepted way for anyone treated as inferiors to gain equality in US. As proof, the African-Americans throughout US history was very docile, except to remove the chains of slavery from themselves and the Filipino boys aged 10 and above. The African-Americans still don't have that equality, because Carnegie stopped funding the radicalism, and the African-Americans haven't contributed to scientific discoveries and technological innovations like the Japanese. (The African-American who began draining marshes and swamps which were turned into rich farming lands stopped gaining fame once it turned-out that those water sheds were nature's waste detoxification sites, habitats & breeding-grounds for endangered fauna and flora.) His second collective works on all the new articles since then was published in 1974. His "The Painted Word" (1975) said New York art world was junk, and how true it was, although unlike mybookshop that demands a solution, he didn't provide any solution to turn the art world creative and fruitful; after all, any dummy can criticize without understanding why something is junk, but you need to study it in depth and width to explain why it's junk and how to make it right. In 1978, he married Sheila Berger (And a good thing that her parents didn't call her Ham), who gave birth to Alexandra in 1980 and Tommy in 1985. He then published "The Right Stuff" (1979) on how pilots became the first US astronauts (Those pilots who fled the selection process after seeing all the failed rockets that exploded probably thought it should have been spelt as astro-nuts.) which also earned him the American Book Award later that year, which was also made into a movie by the same name in 1983. Tom stuck to non-fiction until he began writing "The Bonfire of the Vanities" as a biweekly from 1984 to 1985 in the Rolling Stone magazine, before it was published as a collected work book in 1987, that eventually sold three million copies as hardcover and paperback. When that was made into a movie, he got $5 million. It's a fiction that has corrupt New York City politicians, racism and social-castism, yellow journalism reporters, and, and,... that's a fiction? It's just a history of New York City in the early 20th century that was covered at mybookshop already! His next boring book was "A Man in Full" (1998) which sounded like a re-hash of the previous book involving a failing real estate developer Charlie Croker and others talking about a rape case, that had the critics raving enough to sell-off the initial 1.2 million copies. After he collected more of his short articles as "Hooking Up" (2001), he followed with his third novel; "I am Charlotte Simmons" (2004) on the sexual going-on in universities. He's still tapping on his typewriter without thinking about how to solve the problems that he discussed.

Happy birthday to 1956: Mark Evans, rock and role group AC/DC's bass guitarist, born in Melbourne, Australia. The AC/DC group's origin began when Malcolm Young was born on January 6, 1953 in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, and his brother Angus Young was born on March 31, 1955 in Glasgow. In the 1960's, their parents moved the family to Australia. Their older brother George was already a member of Easybeats, so the younger ones joined another Australian band, Velvet Underground, that disbanded in 1973, leading Malcolm and Angus to begin doing guitar with vocalist Dave Evans who was born on July 20, 1953 in Carmarthen, Wales, Britain. At first Colin Burgess was on the drums, while Larry Van Kriedt was on bass when they first did their gig on New Year's Eve 1973 in a Sydney club called Chequers Club. The members drifted in and out, so that by February 1974, Peter Clack was on the drums and Neil Smith on bass. By April 1974, Rob Bailey was on bass when they recorded their first single "Can I set next to You, Girl" in June 1974. It was on a 45 rotations per minute vinyl record, with the other side with "Rockin' in the Parlour", that the Young brothers' older brother George helped cut. It was good enough that they can now tour Australian clubs, with Michael Browning as their manager. By September 1974, their chauffeur, Bon Scott, was doing the vocal when Dave refused to go on-stage. (Born on July 9, 1946 as Ronald Belford Scott in Kirriemuir, Scotland. Moved to Australia in 1951, and was in the Perth Pipe Band as a drummer. He was with the Spectors from 1965, and then the Valentines from 1966 to 1968 and Fraternity from 1970 to 1974 before he was chauffeuring AC/DC. Bon was the voice in the AC/DC's first two albums, "High Voltage" [February 1975] and "T.N.T." [February 1976] that proved a hit in Australia, that led Michael to find Atlantic Records of Britain to move the band to London, England, in January 1976. By the time they moved to London, their songs were played on the air and they were a hit sensation. Bon died on February 19, 1980 in London, England.) Dave himself formed another band, Rabbit, that released two albums before Dave joined the Hot Cockerel in 1984. By January 1975, Larry was back on bass and drums was by Phil Rudd (Born as Phillip Hugh Norman Witschke on May 19, 1954 in Melbourne, Australia.) On a fateful night in March 1975, Mark and friends (Australians refer to "friends" as "mates", which is alright as it begat from the nautical term, "mate", but you can't use it on land-lubber US, where "mate" refers to your spouse or the person with whom you share the bed at night.) had a fight at the Station Hotel in the city of Melbourne which led the Hotel bouncers to kick them out and told to never come back. Mark still sneaked into the Hotel the next night to see AC/DC. Mark was spotted, but AC/DC persuaded the bouncers to let Mark remain. Two weeks later, Mark was playing the bass. Mark said he no longer wanted to tour in June 1977, leaving it up to Cliff Williams to take-over the bass as they began their first tour of US. (Born on December 14, 1949 in Romford, Essex, England.) Mark thought he was good enough to form his own rock group with Owen Orford as vocalist and Peter McFarlane on the drums to form the Contraband, recording the album "Nothing to Hide" (1978), which also had nothing to show, for their effort. After two more albums proved to be all bums (play-on-word, which can mean a "stinker" when used as a noun and "very poor quality" when used as a adjective.) Mark tried joining other music bands in Australia which all turned out to be bums, except for maybe the Heaven band, whose vocalist Allan Fryer was seen as a replacement for Bon after Bon choked and died on his own vomit after a night of heavy drinking. Since then, Mark has been bumming around here and there and not much happening. As for AC/DC, they released "Powerage" in April 1978, which was good enough for them to open the show for better known groups like Aerosmith and Alice Cooper. Then they released "If You Want Blood, You've Got it" (October 1978). Then they did a play-on-word to Led Zepjpelin's "Stairway to Heaven", by making the album "Highway to Hell" (July 1979) that proved to be an international hit. On February 19, 1980, Bon and friend Alisdair Kinnear went out drinking and Bon died from his own vomit in Alisdair's car. After Bon died, AC/DC's future appeared threatened with red ink, but vocalist Brian Johnson from the Geordie band turned out to be just as good as Bon. (Born on October 5, 1947 in Dunston, England.) Brian's voice was in the album "Back in Black" (July 1980), which did put the band in black ink, going to number four in US and number one in Britain, having eventually sold 12 million copies in as many years. "For Those About To Rock We Salute You" (November 1981) was also a hit, which led them to tour the world in 1982. Their next album, "Flick of the Switch" (August 1983) that they decided to produce on their own wasn't very good, and that lacklaster performance continued till 1988, which they can only survive because the group was famous. In 1983, Simon Wright joined with the drums. (Born on June 19, 1963 in Alden, England.) because Phil wanted to become a helicopter pilot. "Blow up Your Video" (1988) did well. Simon left to join the Dio band in 1989, so that Chris Slade took over the drums in 1990. (Born on October 30, 1946 in Pontypridd, Wales.) Their "Razor Edge" (July 1990) was another hit. Since 1994, the two brothers used Phil on the drums, Cliff on bass and Brian as vocalist to make the hit album "Ballbreaker" (September 1995). The next album was "Stiff upper Lip" (February 2000) that was also a hit. They were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in March 2003. Since bands are inducted into the Hall when they're expected to have already reached the epitome of their success and has no where to go but down, is that insinuating something?

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trivia from a year ago

It's not a trivia from a year ago, but more like October 2004. ChoicePoint personal information company of Alpharetta in the state of Georgia in US is telling 145,000 people that their credit card information, Social Security number and everything else required to steal a person's identity was stolen from their database. ChoicePoint claims that 35,000 Californians are affected, but Californian authorities say that the number of theft is more like half-a-million. ChoicePoint also claimed that the problem hasn't spread to other states. I got news for you buddy: It better not have spread: I'm not in California, but while I was away, my answering machine recorded a call from ChoicePoint a few days ago. But I didn't know what ChoicePoint was, and assumed that it was some sort of a junk message that doesn't need to be kept, of the sort I get constantly. Fortunately, I do check my statements and I don't think I was affected by that 41 years old Nigerian, Olatunji Oluwatosin, who was arrested for buying things in other people's names. But he only got 16 months in jail, so in less than a year: He's going to be buying cars in your name, even though you're 89 years old and suffering from glaucoma, macular degeneration, and cataract on top of the fact that you don't even have a driver's license; he's going to buy men's underwear in your name, even though you're a 16 years old girl and your mother who was about to pay your bill found out that you've been buying men's underwear, going to a strip-club, and paying female prostitutes with the credit card; he's going to buy machine guns and ammunitions that ends up used to shoot presidents.

It was about a year ago that mybookshop insisted that half of Mars appears to be water and the other half was land, based on the altitude difference between the two hemispheres, and the fact that one pole appears to be covered in water ice due to the lower altitude, but the other pole appears to be covered in dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) due to the higher altitude. Now the High Resolution Stereo Camera on the Mars Express is showing peculiarities on the Elysium plates that looks like water ice near the equator covered by a bit of volcanic dust to preserve it, according to a new agreement by scientists who are observing it. Based on the size of the craters and the smoothness of the land, John Murray et al at the Open University in Britain figures that this one alone may be a small sea up to 900 kilometers in size with an average depth of 45 meters, and it may have been a liquid sea just five million years ago -- based on the average distance of Mars from the Sun that should allow for liquid water, there have been some speculations in the 1990's that just as Earth went through its Ice Age, Mars may currently be in its own Ice Age. (mybookshop did mention a few years ago that the Martian yearly fluctuation in the Mars polar ice shows a gradual but progressively increase in melting, indicative that Mars appears to be warming-up and possibly coming out of its Ice Age in another century or two.)

It was more like trivia from years ago than just a year ago, but remember "The Mask", starring Jim Carey? It was a hit. Now they have "The Son of the Mask", and it's so darn dead. The original one with that jade mask giving Jim super-human powers, but this one? It stars James Kennedy as Tim Avery (seems to be based on the old animation guy Tex Avery) who was a cartoonist who had a baby with wife Tonya, played by Traylor Howard. Then everyone but Tonya get their turn with the mask. It may do better on the small screen with a DVD player, but it looks like another trivial dud on the big screen. (Doesn't Jim demand $30 million per movie? With prices like that, the producer and the director has to get the best writers who does the best story-lines, but with someone like James who's paid a pittance in comparison, they could afford to go with a trivial writer, and the result was just that.)

IGR J00291+5934, located about 9,800 light years away rotates once in 1.7 milli-seconds. It's about as fast as it can rotate, because the rotational speed is limited by the gravitational wave radiation speed through time-space. Why not use this as the unit of time? mybookshop isn't crazy about the use of "year" or "day" or "second", because they're so terrestrial.

On March 02, 2005 ("Trivia from a year ago". For example, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service ["CSIS", comparable to CIA in US] produced a 22 pages long report titled "Threats to Canada's National Security" dated October 10, 2003 that showed that almost all known terrorist organizations from around the world are still using Canada as their base of operation where they send their operatives as "refugees" and source of fund/people, two years after the Canadian Parliament should have given the Canadian police enough new legal powers and fund to destroy them. All that this report did was to confirm what US has been saying all along, that Canada's lax immigration laws allow terrorists to easily enter Canada, and even when they're discovered, they're ordered deported, but can remain untouched for years or even decades before they're actually deported, if any. Once deported, they can easily go back into Canada again and again, and the very light jail terms means that they can do whatever they like. The easy welfare system also means that they can live off welfare and solicit funds from others from their country by pretending to be collecting money for a well-known charity organization. The Canadian legal system is so easy-going, that even people who openly admit on national television news that they and their family members all trained at al Qaeda terrorist camps for years still demand protection from US prosecution or from their former native country's police (US would prosecute anyone who even set foot in a terrorist training camp, let alone come to the aid of someone whose family has generations-long training). That's the reason why so many terrorist groups promise not to intentionally harm Canadians as long as they stay in Canada, because doing so cripples their own organization. It's not a matter of luck that Canada hasn't been hit by acts of terrorism. It's basically not even a tiny secret, because all Canadians assumed for years that everyone else knew all about this, but one Canadian newspaper called "National Post" obtained a copy of this report which was classified as for viewing by Canadian eyes only, under the Access to Information Act and reported it in Canada on this chat date in 2004. After 9-11, US suddenly began imposing strict immigration/visitor restrictions against anyone from Muslem country or just plain dark skin, but Canada continued to welcome anyone of all faith and skin color, forgiving anyone of murky background, giving them free reign to do whatever they wanted once they enter Canada, even as a visitor with a fake passport. But so what? It wasn't until this chat date in 2004 that US Senate voted 52-47 to extend the 1994 ban on the sale of assault weapons, and 53-46 to close the gun-show loophole that allowed anyone of unknown origin and purpose to buy any weapon without a criminal background check when they purchase them at a gun show. The National Rifle Association in US want anyone to be allowed to buy a teflon coated bullet that can pierce through bullet-proof vest without the armor platelets, and sell the guns in the shape of cellular telephone or anything else. As long as the ban isn't made permanent, it's just a matter of time before people are once more allowed to buy machine guns, missile launchers, germ sprayers, portable atom bombs with plastic laminate shielding that prevents radiation from leaking outward, and anything else that's needed to kill millions of people without any help from Canada.)

2004: Park Se-pill et al of Maria Biotech Limited in Seoul, South Korea announced that they developed a method to harvest seven human embryonic stem cell lines from 20 frozen human embryos which were slated to be discarded after they were used for in-vitro fertilization. They also claim that it's superior to announcement from Hwang Woo Suk et al of Seoul National University because that involved harvesting of stem cells after they cloned human embryos, since this method does not involve any controversial cloning. The announcement was made on this chat date, but the results were published in the March 2004 edition of the Human Reproduction journal. Along with "genomics" and "proteomics" which tries to explain all diseases and even human behavior in the genes and their expression, stem cell research is the current research fad that's supposed to solve all the degenerative problems. Unfortunately for the South Korean ressearchers, if they used the standard culture medium to grow the cells, then Ajit Varki from the University of California at San Diego announced that all the human embryonic stem cells are contamined with a type of sialic acid called N-glycolylneuraminic acid that is not present in human cells and against which antibodies will be produced, compromising the potential use. Even when the cells were grown in human serum which had very low concentration of antibodies against this chemical, the immune response still manifested itself.

2004: Do you have HIV and don't know it? Director Ray Yip of US Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced on this chat date, a $15 million campaign to make people aware of HIV. At this time, mainland China assumed that there were no more than 840,000 Chinese who have HIV, although experts elsewhere, including Ray, think that the number is likely 10 times as high, and will easily cross through the 10 million threshold by 2010. Many Chinese provinces which assumed that no one had HIV in their province were often surprised to find that there are villages and towns where the infection rate is 30%, which is about right for the country as a whole, since a third of all Chinese feel that they're always sick for unknown reason. On top of the tainted blood problem that used to spread HIV to everyone, the Chinese are not the sexually reserved and conservative people they are depicted as. Many people have multiple sex partners and flings and extra-marital affairs that quickly spread any disease fast and wide. Yet the Chinese media refuse to air public service announcements to make people more aware of HIV unless they're paid for airing it. Individuals are also fearful to have themselves tested, since that could bring on discrimination. Local authorities are also unwilling to test people or inform them if they test positive, because the current mainland China no longer provides free medical care for everyone, and even for those select elites who still have free medical care, there isn't enough anti-HIV drugs available to treat all of them.

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NEC of Japan made a super-computer to simulate Earth for weather research to predict the weather and save Earth. On the other side of the real Earth, US army asked the game maker there to make a simulated Earth to learn how to destroy scattered enemy combatants around the globe. US army's simulated Earth emphasizes how to plan patrols and such over the landscapes, although the only part that's completed is Kuwait city. Eventually, they should be able to walk anywhere they want, weather permitting. (What good is it when the road becomes muddy from a rain storm, a hurricane is preventing helicopters from assisting an attack, or a typhoon is keeping the aircraft carrier and its tomahawks moored far from the scene of the battle? You have to combine the power of the Japanese super-computer with the simulated terrain that There is making to do anything worthwhile.)

The latest issue of Journal of Cell Biology has an article by Gerard Karsenty et al that mentions that the same patch of cells that make insulin makes amylin that adds to calcium in the bone and prevent osteoporosis (amylin was mentioned in passing in an insulin article as something that exists whose functions were not known, so may decades ago; it took until now to figure out what its function is?). It also explains why people suffering type one diabetes also have brittle bones.

This week's "60 Minutes" expose on the South American shop-lifters who are now stealing from stores by using special metal foil-lined bags to neutralize the anti-theft tags is an interesting story that also touched me. Once when I was in a large department store, my mother asked me what time it was. I was carrying a pill-minder; a digital clock with two separate timers with memory, and a rotatory sliding cover to store two types of pills or capsules. So I took it out of my coat pocket and showed it to her so that she can see the time. Surprisingly, I suddenly felt someone intensely glazing down upon me from above. That powerful glaze came back when I went to the check-up counter. It was the powerful glaze of security cameras and the person who was trying to determine if I stole anything. They naturally went back through their tapes and didn't see any proof that showed that I stole that pill-minder, since the store doesn't sell them -- it was bought at an anything for a buck or two store. Shortly thereafter, I noticed that the pill-minder disappeared. I merely consoled myself into saying that the store security person must have taken it out of belief that I stole it. Then as mysteriously as it disappeared, it reappeared inside one of my coats; when(?), I do not know, nor care; nor care if it was stolen nor simply misplaced, as long as it came back. Since that time, my body and mind underwent several changes, and I wonder; do I still have that power to sense when someone is glazing so powerfully at me that I can see the person staring at me? Or did I lose that power? It's almost tempting to act suspiciously like that South American shop-lifter, just to see if that intensely powerful glaze comes back. (Meanwhile, over in the city of Toronto in Canada, there's a current report that a black man was caught shop-lifting baby-food with his girl-friend, and the shop security guards and store clerks stomped on top of him as his girl-friend screamed that he has asthma and they kept stomping on top of him as he began to throw-up blood from his mouth and subsequently died, even while he remained handcuffed. Toronto has many crimes committed by and upon its black people with reports that black criminals are treated much harsher than white criminals, that its police force vehemently deny, although you don't read of many white criminals treated that badly.)

On March 02, 2004 (Let us see. Pioneer 10 was launched this chat date in 1972 [but March 3, 1972 at 01:49.00 UTC] from Cape Canaveral to become the first Earthly space-craft that was to survey Jupiter and then go on beyond the solar system. Like any space-craft that was not heading for Mars, it traversed the orbit of Mars with no problem, then it went through the asteroid belt with no problem to be by Jupiter on December 3, 1973 when it was a distance of about 200,000 kilometers away. Those up-close photographs of swirling gases are very colorful. Did the primary Sun look like that shortly before it ignited its nuclear fire? Once it passed Jupiter, the nuclear powered transmitter continued to send telemetry of its surrounding despite having NASA ending the project on March 31, 1997 due to budgetary constraints. It still got an occasional notice via the funding from the Lunar Prospector project at NASA Ames Research Center until January 23, 2003 when it was told to turn off the last working instrument, the Geiger Tube Telescope, although it was no longer sending any data back. When it was last checked from February 6, 2003 till February 7, 2003, it was silent, so it was deduced that the combination of its distance and decaying radiation level in the four SNAP-19 radioisotope thermonuclear generators meant that it can no longer send anything back. It's heading toward the eye of the Taurus constellation and will fly by the star, Ross 246, at a distance of three light years around the year 34,600, before it reaches the red star Aldebaran in two million years. On the tiny hope that it may be found by intelligent life forms with advanced civilization that can visit Earth, Carl Sagan stuck on it a gold anodized plaque with a drawing of a naked man raising a hand and a naked woman, as well as information mentioning the Pioneer 10's flight path and a star map to indicate where the Sun is located. Some women objected that the naked woman was shorter than the naked man, although that's an accepted stereotype that holds true in all human societies. Some others feared that an aggressive civilization may use the information to conquer Earth, although Earth technology will be far more advanced by the year 34,600 to defend against it, or no sign of any intelligence on Earth in two million years. But what does Earth have that interstellar travelers would want? Surely not metals and gases. Some asteroids between Earth and Mars are made of solid lumps of non-oxidized metal with more metal than can be mined from the surface of Earth while other planets are full of various gases without the bother of having to destroy life to take it. Super-heavy isotopes of hydrogen or He3 to power their space ships and worm-hole generators? Those won't be found on Earth. Slaves or human meat sandwich? Anyone who can make interstellar space ships can make smarter robots that won't rebel and artificial meat from cell cultures that are genetically programmed to happily cook and baste itself in the oven. About the only thing that Earth have that's unique to Earth is its DNA basket. Tweak it a bit and it makes smart people whose wild and unbound imagination is the perfect fire to kindle their science to make magical items. We can't make our imagination come true because our science isn't advanced enough to be magical.

Speaking of power, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced on January 9, 2004 a significant cut on money that's handed out to its cities and towns, as well as a California state-wise cut on health care and education because of excessive spendings by previous Democrat governor Gray Davis. He doesn't plan on raising taxes that have already driven many businesses away to the boundary states and people who earn what would be decent wages in any other state into the working poor, but he also has a $15 billion bond on the ballot on this chat date in 2004 to reduce the deficit. If rejected, he foresees dire consequences on top of the currently proposed tuition increase at universities, user fee for various recreational facilities. There may be some increase in revenue from the previously tax-free native casinos for half-a-billion dollars in exchange for which the casinos get to expand their operations. But that's nothing compared to the $14 billion deficit for the coming fiscal year beginning on July 1, 2004. This chat date's fund will be used to pay for that deficit and others. In the end, it still means that the poor children and elderly must pay more for medical and health services. A fine mess this turned out to be, but what do you expect from an inexperienced movie star who's more famous for brawn than for his... come to think of it, has he ever done any movie that shows if he has any brain or not? If he has so many famous economists and lawyers and such on his side, how come they didn't show case a rating system so that doctors who are sued for malpractice and sexual inpropriety are paid only a fraction of those who don't on a tapering system so that insurance costs will plunge. The same thing for drivers who keep having accidents that increase the cost for the good drivers. Apartment owners who charge excessively for poor accommodation should have that excess subtracted from them as fines. The same goes for gasoline price hikers and everyone else who raises the cost of living in California. Land speculators and housing speculators who buy and then sell properties in under three years must be forced to pay that gain as heavy tax. The same goes for gas guzzling car buyers like Arnold. As for companies that enjoy all the highways, water&sewage and other infrastructures that California has to offer while hiring workers in India and elsewhere? They should impose a "differential tax", which is the difference between the infrastructure that they enjoy and the foreign workers who don't so that it amounts to price gouging. As well, a product-to-wage fee, whereby if a Nike shoes is retailed for $150 but the Mexican workers are only paid $2 plus $18 in for materials, local Mexican tax and other expenses, that's $130 or 130/150, which is high enough to pay a penalty tax because they're charging way more than how much it costs to make and sell them. In other words, these are all "efficiency tax". The difference between what they charge for their product or service, versus how much they pay to offer them. Or to put it to a historic perspective, any company that can charge excessively for cheap things are monopolies, so any company that use cheap foreign workers but charge a lot to US customers are a form of monopolies which must be forced to break-up or face fines. All fines and punitive damages to be paid retroactive to when they began operation with staggeringly higher fines for those companies that contest the claims in a court of law to recover legal fees and interest. As for criminals caught for anything beyond simple traffic tickets? They must pay all legal costs for anything beyond a one week of public defendant costs and no more of these legal cases that last years and costing millions of dollars. If it cannot be made efficient, then it has to be scrapped. No more of these $50,000 per prisoner upkeep costs when their victims are suffering on minimum wages or even worse. If they can't pay for their room and meal, then ship them off to a far-away and dangerous underground mine, while regular miners become supervisors up on terra firma. Why should the honest people risk their lives when killers don't have to? Let the rapists shovel radioactive wastes so that they become sterile. They forfeited their own civil rights when they forfeited other people's civil rights. If Arnold's friends are as smart as they claim and not just evil legal loop-hole manipulators, then they can find a way to pass all of the above as legally binding constitutions. Along the way, force any California Supreme Court judge who opposes such drastic changes into early retirement by finding some psychiatrist who'll certify that the judge is insane. And Arnold, while it's ok to get all the Hollywood productions back to California from up there in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, it's not a bad idea to get those filming crew to stop-by at the local drug stores to get all the cheap drugs before heading back south. Either that, or let the poor and weak innocents suffer through the budget cuts, while the criminals get all the benefits that this tax revenue is paying. If the not-quite 2/3 Democrat caucus is unwilling to listen to Republican Arnold, then have them shoveled through the gauntlet of the psychiatrists to judge if they're insane or too low on intelligence quota to be in office.

Britney Spears is starting her tour "In the Zone" on this chat date in 2004 in San Diego, although now that she's an elderly divorcee, grandpa Hugh Heffner is willing to accept her as his girlfriend and maybe even the centerfold.

No article for today again? The article for today was to be the 1896 Battle of Aduwa in Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as it was known back then, when the 100,000 strong African blooded Ethiopians under Menilek defeats the 14,500 white Italian soldiers under Italian governor of Eritrea, General Oreste Baratieri, in the first Italo-Abyssinian War of 1895 - 1896 known as the Battle of Adwa, or also alternatively Adowa or as the Italians like to call it, Adua in north-central Ethiopia. Tiny Ethiopia was ruled by emperor Yohannes IV until his death in 1889 led to turmoil in the power vacuum. The Italians decided to put up Menilek ((1844 - 1913) of Shewa as their easy-to-control puppet. Menilek was eager to take up the western ideas by making a newspaper, hospitals, schools, bank, bridges, money and everything else from the west. With the backing of Italy, Menilek made himself emperor on March 25, 1889, and then signed the Treaty of Wichale ("Ucciali" to Italians) on May 2, 1889. Menilek understood that Italy got Eritrea, while given trade rights in the rest of Ethiopia, but the Italian version of article XVII was interpretable by Italian Premier Francesco Crispi as stating that Italy controlled Ethiopia's dealings with other countries, so that Ethiopia was subservient to Italy and hence part of Italy. The copy that Menilek received in Amharic language stated that Italy's foreign services were available for Menilek to deal with other countries. The rest of Europe declared the Italian version as the legally binding version. When Menilek found out that the Italian version of the Treaty was not the same as his version, he denounced the article XVII in September 1890, after the Italians, with the help from Britain and France, had occupied the town of Adowa in January 1890. At first Menilek sought diplomacy to regain independence, but starting in September 1891, he denounced the entire Treaty and began gathering ivory, gold, slaves and anything else he could get to buy western weapons and ammunition from France and Russia in preparation for a war. The Italians did win battles at first. By the end of 1895, two seasons of bumper crops have filled their tummies and their storage bins, so Menilek figured that this was the perfect time for his war of independence. Oreste thought that 35,000 of its modern army can conquer any primitive African's army, so that although he first spotted Menilek's soldiers on February 7, 1896, Oreste didn't do anything. This news went back home to Italy, where Francesco sent back a furious telegram on February 28, 1896 to wipe them out. With no preparation of even maps of the region, the Italian force was quickly decimated by noon. Oreste wiped out 15,000 of Menilek's men to only 9,000 loss for itself, but it was nothing like what Oreste expected. Menilek bided his time, and on October 26, 1896, he signed the Treaty of Addis Ababa that canceled the Treaty of Wichale. As the first win of Africans over Europeans, Menilek went on to conquer lands around his tiny Ethiopia to make it bigger, while playing off the animosities between Italy, Britain and France to maintain his country's independence. An analysis of the way Italy treated the Ethiopians goes like this: Those Italians were just too kind and generous to the Ethiopians. Britain, Germany, Belgium and the rest of the European powers were taking no chances with the Africans by wiping them out at the slightest excuse of an offense to cower the survivors into submission, while taking their crops to keep them to starved to think of rebelling. No education nor newspaper and other mass media was allowed to prevent the Africans from organizing or work for a cause. Italy was just too generous to a fault to rule Africa in the modern era. Interesting story, except the battle appeared to have taken place on March 1, not March 2, and it's powerless to do anything about it any more.

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Acccording to an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics volume 118, issue 7, page 3102, ultrafast, supersonic detonation in which the explosion can move faster than a shock wave is possible, says James B. Anderson and Lyle N. Long. I thought these things were no longer supposed to be published anymore because of the terrorism threat? Naturally the uneducated terrorists who don't have enough background in physics can't make head nor tail out of the significance of this, but a country like North Korea can figure out that this means that an even more powerful explosive can be made -- the compound with even more nitrogen than was previously possible was already made and mentioned some years ago, and that would fit this category quite nice thank you (Not the nitrogen only one but the other one). It doesn't mean that North Korea can only make an explosive with more punch: The critical size of a plutonium bomb is dependent on how powerful an explosive you can synchronously implode around the plutonium. Meaning if an even more powerful explosive is possible, then instead of say one kilogram of plutonium, you may be able to make do with only a 100 grams. Oh, it won't be more than a kiloton bomb, but it means that instead of exploding just one 15 kiloton bomb in the center of three cities, you can attack 30 cities with one bomb each. The impact on each city won't be as strong but it means less intact cities which can spare resources to help the affected cities even though North Korea can use its current missiles to extend the range with these lighter nuclear plugs. With a more powerful missile, it also means that each tiny bomb can be given a generous shell of deuterium-tritium compounds surrounded by inert uranium-238 so that many more tiny but powerful thermonuclear bombs are possible with a limited quantity of plutonium-239. With 30 thermonuclear bombs instead of just the three or so that North Korea was thought to have, it means that North Korea can now afford to sell 10 or 15 of them to Iraq, Iran, Usama bin Laden and the rest while still keeping enough to prevent US from bombing its nuclear facilities which can now make hundreds of thermonuclear bombs in a short while and then thousands of thermonuclear missiles shortly thereafter. No wonder Japan pondered before rejecting the idea of making its own only eight years ago (That's about when CIA estimated that Japan can quickly make conventional plutonium plugs and launch them from its rockets in a matter of a few weeks, if not days. It's also about the time that Japan began considering the merits of making underground cities, and the underlying law infrastructure is going well: Elsewhere where you buy land, the angular piece of land till the center of Earth is your's unless you don't have underground mineral rights and such, but in Japan, you only have rights till so many meters down -- already mentioned -- below which is anyone's land so that it's possible to make an underground city regardless of who owns the land above. But that won't be possible until the technology to make the giant cavities which can resist the ubiquitous earthquakes can be made. Once that is possible, then Japan can send its citizens down under during a nuclear war.)

On March 02, 2003 ("Misplaced Power" is still good enough for today's article.)

1969: Henry Kissinger's assistant, General Alexander Haig's outline mentions destroying Cambodia in a memorandum dated this chat date. According to the National Security Archive which was just declassified around Christmas 2002, Richard M. Nixon was not a crook, but a madman. When the North Vietnam side kept-up with its aggressive maneuvers, he told General Alexander Haig to tell National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to accelerate the bombing of North Vietnam in the hope of cowering North Vietnam so that they would be willing to let the weak and incompetent South Vietnamese government to stay in place. That secret bombing began on March 17, 1969 with "Operation Breakfast" on Cambodia to try to destroy Nort Vietnamese bases in Cambodia but with no effect at all on the North Vietnamese side which did not see it as so devastating that it's better to surrender than continue (Remember: France had already demonstrated with Algeria how to utterly prevent such trans-border movements). By summer, Richard decided to act out how he behaved by ordering a preparation for a nuclear annihilation called "Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test" which will so frighten one of North Vietnam's ally and weapon supplier, Russia, that Russia will pressure North Vietnam into surrendering (Richard saw the progress in the Paris meeting as a "peace" accord, but that's not how the North Vietnamese saw it because Richard demanded that North Vietnam must follow the strict terms that Henry Kissinger dictated, which was tantamount to a conditional surrender. Richard also didn't try to pressure North Vietnam's other ally, China, into forcing North Vietnam to surrender, making it easy for North Vietnam to just rely more on China than Russia for all its supplies). From October 13, 1969 to October 25, 1969, US forces around the globe were to implement periods of radio silence and heightened surveillance of Russia ships to indicate that something big was about to occur. On October 27, 1969, the Strategic Air Command began operation "Giant Lance" over Alaska with its B-52 bombers readied to deliver its nuclear cargo into Russia. It was to be so secretive that not even all the commanders in chief knew what it was for (until just January 2003, all the generals in charge of their forces out there in the field were commanders in chief, but George W. Bush decided for the second Gulf War that he's the only one who can be called by that designation). So few people knew the reason for this activity that the Russians didn't know what it was for (and with the kinds of things they did, even mybookshop's subtle diplomatic view would not have guessed what it was for) but Russia realized that something was about to occur and readied their own forces by October 30, 1969 when Defense Secretary Melvin Laird saw it and ordered this operation to stop. When nothing came out of it, mad Richard still continued withdrawing US forces in South Vietnam and leaving South Vietnam defense in the hand of the incompetent President Nguyen Van Thieu (US of the bygone era could have sent its vast army into North Vietnam and massacred all North Vietnamese women, children and babies while destroying the food supply to demoralize the men the way so many untold millions of native American tribes were wiped clean from the face of Earth, but the extensive news media network of the 1960's meant that such an act of genocide would have received instant media attention and hence world-wide condemnation, so Richard couldn't carry through on his mad plan). As it happened, Richard became so caught-up in the Watergate scandal which so debilitated him that North Vietnam decided to invade South Vietnam with impunity. As a bonus, US-friendly Cambodian government was so devastated by US bombings of its territory that the mad fringe group took over Cambodia and killed so many millions of Cambodians that North Vietnam, now the united Vietnam, had to invade Cambodia and save the Cambodians from the madness that Richard inflicted upon it. Richard didn't deserve to be forced to step down from office for the minor glitch of Watergate, but he should have been forced into facing the World Court and then hanged on a noose slowly until his tongue drooled out to his shoulder for his war attrocity that led to the genocide of Cambodians. (Remember: France's Algeria.) But US didn't care. Cambodians were dark-skinned Asians, and as far as US of the 1960's were concerned, those Cambodians were just intelligent pigs whose destiny it was to be slaughtered and disposed of as any domesticated animals are treated. George W. Bush feels the same way toward Afghanis, which is why he's not cutting off the supply-line from Pakistan in order to encourage a mad fringe group in Pakistan to take over and start another genocide in Pakistan. As for Iraq? You don't see George cutting off supplies from Turkey and the rest of the neighboring countries, even though France has already demonstrated how cheaply and effectively that can be achieved in a short time. But then, since the first Gulf War, US weapon makers have improved on the Patriot missiles, made a new air-borne maser that wipes out entire ground installations in one power burst and have began the initial work for the Boeing based laser (Right, sure, international law on the conduct of war prevents it from being used to blind people, but a loop-hole in the law allows for the iodide-powered weapon to be directed toward an installation to destroy ground-based missiles and other legitimate targets and "accidentally" blind everyone in the vicinity.) and all of these weapons must prove their worth by being tested on real targets before they can get further funding to keep US workers happily employed.

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On March 02, 2002 ("Power" is no longer an option after so many years, so the theme is just "left-over", although the "power" theme is still holding for an article or two, depending on how many make it.)

1819: US passed its first immigration law. Until January 1, 1820, there was no need for ship captains to hand over the passenger list to customs so that there was no record of who was coming or going, except those landing in New Orleans, for which records exist going back to 1813 and Philadelphia back to 1800. To keep track on the people for statistic reports, the Act was passed on this chat date which stipulated that the captain or the master of the ship must submit a passenger list to customs beginning on January 1, 1820, with quarterly reports sent to the Secretary of the State. As the number of people began to increase, the Office of Superintendent of Immigration was created within the Department of the Treasury on March 3, 1891 to take charge. This is also the one charged with preventing Chinese from immigrating into US. In 1903, the Office moved to the Department of Commerce and Labor and in 1906 the name also changed to the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. In 1933, it moved under Department of Labor before it moved to the Department of Justice in 1940.

1896: Battle of Aduwa when Emperor of Ethiopia, Menelik II (1844 - 1913)'s 80,000 men defeat the 20,000 Italians to become the first and only time that an African nation won over a white nation. The rulers of various regions within what is now Ethiopia all claim their ancestor as the offsprings of the Jewish King Solomon and Sheba (Note that the Jewish lunar calendar is more typical of dark-skinned Africans to the south where there is no season so that a solar calendar is useless. There are many indications to show that the original Jews were black-skinned and little to show that they were lighter-skinned like the current Jews.) Anyone who claim to have blood link to King Solomon can claim to be an Emperor so that there were many wars and squabbles in the regions. Among the squabbling ancestors of King Solomon was Lij Kasa (1818 - 1868), a common warrior who rose in power in his territory of Kawara in north-west Ethiopia until he began to seize power in 1842 to become Emperor Tewodros II. While Lij was originally working for the good of all by eliminating slavery and expanding his territory, in 1868, he had British prisoners and the British army which came to rescue them under Robert C. Napier defeated his army, leading to his suicide. At the time, Menelik II was the ruler of tiny Shoa in what is now central Ethiopia, but in the power-vacuum created by the death of Lij, Menelik expanded his influence over Lij's territory with Italy's help. After another Emperor Johannes IV (1832 - 1889) died to leave a power-vacuum in his territory of Kasai, Menelik concluded the Treaty of Uccialli in 1889 with Italy in the belief that the Italians helped make him the Emperor of Ethiopia -- at least half of current Ethiopia. But it turned out that there were two versions of the same treaty: In the one which Menelik understood, it gave the impression that Menelik had become the Emperor of Ethiopia, but in the Italian version which Menelik signed but which he assumed was the same as the other one that he signed, Menelik allowed his empire of Ethiopia to be conquered by Italy and it was now a territory of Italy. Once he found out about the discrepancies, he renounced the treaty, leading Italy to send an army to conquer Ethiopia in 1895. Yet the technologically inferior Menelik's soldiers were still ferocious enough to conquer the numerically inferior Italian soldiers on this chat date, forcing Italy to pay an indemnity to conclude the armistice and the signing of the Treaty of Addis Ababa by which Italy recognized Ethiopia's independence. But knowing that Italy had many more soldiers with more sophisticated weapons, he gave Eritrea to Italy in the hope of placating and satisfying Italy's conquest of territories. In order to ensure his hold on power, Menelik made a railway, made Addis Ababa as the capital and continued his war of conquest of neighboring Muslem region to the south to double the size of his country to that of the current size of Ethiopia. He was succeeded as emperor by Lij Yasu and then Haile Selassie since 1930. For a while, Italy was satisfied in ruling over Eritrea as it took on an Italian touch. But then Italy's hunger for conquest was not satiated, so Italy came and conquered Ethiopia in 1935, until the British conquered it from the Italians in 1941. Britain then gave Eritrea to Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie in 1950 against the vehement opposition from the Eritreans and made the joined Ethiopia into a new country. Then in 1974, the Marxists had a coup d'etat and another power-struggle continued amongst the Marxists until Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam became the head. Starting in 1975, he began following the Communist philosophy by nationalizing various industries and commerce. Then various groups began their own wars of independence, including Eritrea and Tigre. Due to the Marxist regime which was trying to stop these division, Russia became its resource provider. In 1987, Ethiopia became the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia to switch from a military Communist government to a civilian Communist government, although Mengistu continued in power to become its first president. Ethiopia then went into the western news following the major famines in the 1970's and 1980's which are thought to have killed 200,000 people. By 1991, the Eritrean and Tigrean rebels were claiming to be in control of seven provinces. With no money to stabilize the economy or pay the army, Mengistu fled the country. With another power-vacuum in place, the country began to fall apart until Meles Zenawi formed an interrim government in August 1991. In the election which followed in 1993, Eritrea voted for and received independence in the referendum of Apirl 1993. While Eritrea promised Ethiopia free access to the Red Sea, Ethiopia is still mired in the conflict to gain power.

1933: Premiere of the $650,000 35 mm, black and white, monoaural sound, 103 minutes long "King Kong" at Radio City Music Hall and RKO Roxy in New York city which together had a seating capacity of 10,000 and shown 10 times every day, so that even though tickets were 15 cents each, they earned $89,931 in four days and $100,000 in the first week to save both Radio City Music Hall and RKO Roxy from bankruptcy. Directed by Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, produced by David Selznick, written by James Creelman and Ruth Rose, optical effects by Linwood G. Dunn. Robert Armstrong starred as Carl Denham, Fay Wray starred as Ann Darrow, Noble Johnson was the native head and Steve Clemento as the witch doctor. As everyone has likely seen a few times on television, it's based on Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" in which a dinosaur is captured and then exhibited in London before it escapes, destroy the London Bridge and then swim back home; in this modern reincarnation, the story is about a movie producer who goes to Skull island onboard Venture, the natives offer the blond woman as the bride to a "god" which turns out to be a big ape some 18 feet tall. The woman is rescued and the ape is taken back to the Depression plagued New York city before it escapes, climbs up the Empire state building and fight some airplanes before the ape falls and is killed. The original script called for the movie to be called "Kong", Malaysian for "gorilla", but David Selznick of RKO decided that it sounded too oriental, so it was retitled to "King Kong". King Kong himself was single-frame stop-motion shots as you can see from the jerky movements and large hand scenes where King Kong grabbed the blonde woman was a big motorized hand. The movie was released for everyone in US on April 10, 1933. It was then released again in 1938, 1942, 1952, 1956 and 1971. The black and white movie was released on the 12 inches in diameter laserdisc in 1984, while the VHS release in 1993 was colorized, and included short segments which were censored before -- some of the scenes in which King Kong was eating the islanders or the New Yorkers were darkened out but the VHS version shows it clearly, since the modern audience can easily tell that the scenery is fakish. The DVD version was released in April 2001. Incidentally, Linwood who did the opticals died in 1998 at age 94. "RKO" stands for "Radio Corporation of America Keith Orpheum" which is abbreviated to "RCA Keith Orpheum".

Happy birthday to 1935: Al Waxman, born as Albert Samuel Waxman in the city of Toronto in the province of Ontario in a country called Canada, located north of US, actor best remembered for "Cagney & Lacey" in US but as the Canadian sitcom of "King of Kensington" in Canada. Among his television shows, the best remembered one is "King Of Kensington" (1975 - 80) where he was a comedic husband, "The Littlest Hobo" (1979) where he directed, since the "Hobo" was a German shepherd dog that wander and save people from one town to the next, "Cagney & Lacey" (1981 - 85) detective show where he was neither Cagney nor Lacey. He also did an episode of "Murder, She Wrote" in 1984, directing "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" in 1985, "The Return of Ben Casey" in 1988, "I Still Dream of Jeannie" in 1991 and "Cagney & Lacey: The Return" in 1994. Among the earliest movies he appeared in was "The Hired Gun" (1961) and "The War Lover" (1962). More recent movies includes "Meatballs III" (1987), "The Hitman" (1991) "and Critical Care" (1997). Al died on January 18, 2001 at 1:20 AM in Toronto while doing an elective heart bypass surgery while also in the process of filming the television series "Twice In A Lifetime" where he played the 3,000 years old Judge Othniel. He is survived by his "The Toronto Sun" newspaper restaurant critic wife Sara and sons Tobaron and Adam.

Rest In Peace to 1987: Randolph Scott, actor in "Gung Ho!" (1943), "Jesse James" (1939) and others, dead at age 89 in beverly Hills, California. He was born as George Randolph Crane Scott to George and Lucy Crane on January 23, 1898 in Orange County, Virginia. After growing up in Charlotte in North Carolina, he went to Georgia Institute of Technology. But like Dean Cairn and others who went into acting, George was also injured while playing football, so he went to the North Carolina University with a degree in textile engineering and manufacture. In California, Howard Hughes hired him to do some small parts starting with "Sharp Shooters" (1928), then "The Far Call" (1929) as Helms, "The Black Watch" (1929), "The Virginian" (1929, where George taught Gary Cooper to speak with a Virginian accent) and "Dynamite" (1929). Afterwards, he began receiving names as in "Women Men Marry" (1931) where he played Steve Bradley, "A Successful Calamity" (1932) where he played Larry Rivers and "Hot Saturday" (1932) where he played Bill Fadden. While he continued various roles in the 1930's, his fame began to peak circa 1940 with westerns, starting with "Jesse James" (1939) where he played Marshal Will Wright, "To the Shores of Tripoli" (1942) as sergeant Dixie Smith, "Gung Ho!" (1943) as Colonel Thorwald, "The Desperadoes" (1943) as Steve Upton, "Captain Kidd" (1945) as Adam Mercy and so on among 102 movies that he appeared in. After he appeared in "Ride the High Country" (1962) as Gil Westrum and too old to play the good guy, he retired, having invested his earnings to build a fortune of several hundred million dollars. After playing golf, he died on this chat date and was buried in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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On March 02, 2001 (Let's see what can be mentioned under "power", even though there were really nothing of much interest today.)

1877: Republican US presidential candidate Rutherford Birchard Hayes is declared president, even though Democrat Samuel J Tilden is chosen by more voters, because he was just one electoral vote short. Rutherford was born in Delaware, Ohio on October 22, 1822, three months after his father died of malaria to mother Sophia Birchard and Sophia's brother Sardis Birchard. (The February 2001 issue of "International Journal for Parasitology" mentions that triclosan, an antiseptic used in deodorants, toothpaste, mouth-wash and such since the 1960's kills both malaria and toxoplasmosis at negligible concentration by blocking the FabI enzyme which is needed by bacteria to make its cell membrane. Incidentally, toxoplasmosis is usually the reason why people suffering terminal-stage AIDS and likely mad-cow disease go insane and then die with swiss-cheese-like holes in their brains.) Rutherford was a sick child but excelled in school marks, so that he graduated Kenyon college with top marks in his class of 1842. He then went to Harvard Law which he graduated in 1845 to practice law. Meanwhile, his uncle who provided for his sister's family was becoming a rich banker who was accumulating lots of land. When the southern states declared their independence from the northern states, he fought the northern Union army. After the ware, he became a congressman and then the governor of Ohio. In 1873, he quit his job to live in his uncle's house, which he left to Rutherford when he died in 1874. By 1875, he was again the governor of Ohio, but by a margin of only 5,500 votes out of the almost 600,000 votes. Then he ran for the presidency in 1876 against Samuel, the governor of New York. When the tedious chore of counting all the votes were finished and the results tallied, it turned out that of the 8,320,592 votes cast, Samuel had 247,448 more votes than Rutherford. But it's not the number of voters which count, but the number of electoral votes which counts (meaning the number of voters in each region gets one electoral vote and the number of electoral votes for one person wins.). Similar to the Al Gore versus George Bush conflict, both Samuel and Rutherford claimed to have won the electoral votes despite the irregularities which were reported at various places. As a result, by 1877, the Electoral Commission was setup and on this chat date, the Commission declared that Rutherford had 185 electoral votes, while Samuel had 184, resulting in Rutherford's inauguration on March 5, 1877. It means that in some districts, most voters voted for Samuel, while in other districts, a very small minority of the voters voted more for Rutherford than for Samuel. So in those districts, a very few voters held the real power to elect one candidate over another. He died on January 17, 1893 at his home in Fremont, Ohio from a heart attack.

1939: Massachusetts Legislature finally have a vote to ratify the Bill of Rights. One of the major contributor to the Bill of Rights was written by George Mason in 1776 who was born in 1725, delegate to the Virginia Legislature from 1775 to 1781, and died in 1792. Except he didn't sign the Constitution and was against ratifying it because he felt that it gave too much power to the government and not enough power to the people, including the Africans destined to become slaves. Of the 12 original Amendments which were to be included, the first two on how to divide the representation by the people and compensation for congressmen were not ratified at first. As a result the original 10 Amendments which were ratified were

Amendment I. "Religious establishment prohibited. Freedom of speech, of the press, and right to petition. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Amendment II. "Right to keep and bear arms. A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Amendment III. "Conditions for quarters for soldiers. No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."

Amendment IV. "Right of search and seizure regulated. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Amendment V. "Provisions concerning prosecution. Trial and punishment -- private property not to be taken for public use without compensation. No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

Amendment VI. "Right to speedy trial, witnesses, etc. In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence."

Amendment VII. "Right of trial by jury. In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law." (Chinese and natives were generally excluded from this Amendment throughout the course of US history.)

Amendment VIII. "Excessive bail or fines and cruel punishment prohibited. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

Amendment IX. "Rule of construction of Constitution. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Amendment X. "Rights of States under Constitution. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

New Jersey ratified them on November 20, 1789. Then Maryland ratified it on December 19, 1789, then North Carolina on December 22, 1789, South Carolina on January 19, 1790, New Hampshire on January 25, 1790, District of Delaware on January 28, 1790, New York on February 27, 1790, Pennsyvania on March 10, 1790, Rode island on June 7, 1790, Vermont on November 3, 1791, Virginia on December 15, 1791, Massachussetts on this chat date, Georgia on March 18, 1939 and Connecticut on April 19, 1939.

Note the 150 years time-span it took to ratify the Amendments, but if you recall the January 31 chat, that 13th Amendment prohibited any lawyer from becoming politicians in US, with one of the arguments being that it's not valid being made that there were more states by the time that 13th Amendment was ratified and that it took took too long to ratify. But these 10 Amendments took 150 years to be ratified and there were many more states by the end of the 150 years. As a result, if that 13th Amendment prohibiting lawyers from becoming US politicians hold, then these Amendments are also null and void. Conversely, if these 10 Amendments are legal, then the current US politicians are all illegally proclaiming to be politicians since they were and are still all lawyers. Hence all the increases in taxes which were demanded since time immemorial are all unconstitutional and illegal. (And all those bankrupt farmers holding sherriffs at bay with their rifles with their claim to be independent countries which do not have to pay taxes and such are justified in not having to pay taxes.)

Then comes the next Amendment which was originally proposed at the third Congress on March 4, 1794.

Amendment XI. "Judicial powers construed. The judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another State, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state."

New York ratified it on March 27, 1794, then Rhode island on March 31, 1794, Connnecticut on May 8, 1794, New Hampshire on June 16, 1794 and so on till the 12th state, North Carolina ratified it on February 7, 1795 so that Amendment XI became part of the Constitution. But the president of US didn't know that yet because these news traveled slowly on horseback. However, before the president was officially informed, Tennessee became the 16th state on June 1, 1796 so that Tennessee or another state must ratify this Amendment for it to become part of the Constitution. But the governor of Tennessee, John Sevier (born 1745, died 1815, governor from 1796 - 1801) did not receive a certified copy of the Amendment until October 16, 1797 to decide whether to ratify it or not. However, on January 8, 1795, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering (1797-1800) received word that 12 states -- out of the required 13 states -- ratified it and told the second president of US (1797 to 1801), John "Atlas of Independence" Adams that it was ratified -- even though it was still missing one ratification -- so that John the president then informed the Congress that Amendment XI was ratified on January 8, 1798, even though it wasn't ratified by the required number of states. Tennessee heard that it was ratified and hence never bothered to ratify it, even though it had to ratify it in order for it to become part of the Constitution. But South Carolina did ratify Amendment XI on December 4, 1797 so that muddies the water even more as to whether any law made by lawyers are enforceable, or to use the theme word for today, have any power at all. (John the president also passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which suppressed freedom of speech when criticizingn the government and which was used to punish a score of journalists who criticized the government. While it was not used as a totalitarian whip in practice, it did in theory allow for an omnipotent totalitarianism.)

Amendment XII which was proposed on December 9, 1803 and ratified on June 15, 1804 was the procedure to follow when choosing the president and the vice president.

1949: US air force B-50 Superfortress, Lucky Lady II, ended its 23,452 miles around-the-world in 94 hours trek by landing back at Carswell, Texas. On February 26, 1949, captain James G. Gallagher and his 13 men took off from Carswell, Texas and then landed back here four days later on this chat date. This was not the first time that an airplane had went around the world without refueling: In November 1923, the DT-2 airplane which was the basis for the Douglas World Cruiser was already test-flying as part of the secret US military project to build the first airplane which can fly around the world (50 feet wide by 35.5 feet long by 13.5 feet high, capable of flying at 103 miles per hour with 420 horsepower Liberty engines.). On March 17, 1924, four of the airplanes took off from Santa Monica in California. While one was lost over Dutch Harbor in Alaska and a second went down in mid-Atlantic ocean, the other two, "Chicago" and "New Orleans" went around the world a distance of 27,553 miles and landed at Seattle on September 28, 1924 after six months and six days by landing and then having maintenances done at designated locations around the world. What was special about this flight was that this was a time when US -- and only US -- had atom bombs, but no intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver those bombs to Russia or China, so the only mean to deliver those bombs was by airplane. But in order to do so, it was necessary to fly the airplanes the long distances from US to Russia, which meant mid-air refueling was necessary. But that technology was only tried in 1929 when Major Carl A. Spaatz's Fokker C-2, "Question Mark", tested it to fly continuously over California for 150 hours. It was not yet tried on a large warplane and there were no miniaturized computers with sensors to reliably refuel in mid-air back then. As a result, General Cutis E. LeMay, who headed the Strategic Air Command in October 1948 had B-29 bombers modified into tankers and dispatched them to Lajes base in the Azores, Dharan base in Saudi Arabia, Clark base in Philippines and finally Rogers base in Hawaii. The two B-50 bombers selected for the trek was the Global Queen and the backup airplane, the Lucky Lady II. The Global Queen took off on February 25, 1949 and headed east, but it had to land at the Azores due to engine problems. As a result, Lucky Lady II took off on February 26, 1949 with the normal compliment of weapons it would carry in war. But it was kept secret during the four day trek and the airplane's tail numbers were switched with that of the tanker's tail number on the flight plans which had to be recorded -- mainly so that if the around-the-world experiment failed, the general won't have to report what a big disaster it was. As a result, all who saw the flight plans could see were different airplanes taking relatively short hops. By February 27, 1949, Lucky Lady refueled over the Azores, then over Saudi Arabia on February 28, 1949. Then on to the Philippines, where the tanker crashed after transferring the fuel and everyone onboard the tanker died. Then on to Hawaii the next day and then on this chat date at 9:22 AM, Lucky Lady II landed. It was not only a display of power and endurance of US warplanes, but a show of power to Russia that US has the option to nuke Russia whenever it likes from whichever bases around the world.

Rest In Peace to 1971: Charles W. Engelhard Junior, US silver multi-millionaire, dead at age 54. In 1902, Charles W. Engelhard Senior bought the Charles F. Croselmire Company in Newark, Ne Jersey, followed by American Platinum Works (1903), Baker & Co. (1904, a platinum smelting and refiner) and other companies until his company became the world's biggest and most powerful producer, refiner and user of platinum group metals, gold and silver (sole supplier of gold bullion for London, England). As a result, both Senior and Junior became powerful men who knew politically powerful John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson (Now, "F" here stands for "Fitzgerald", but what did the "B" here stand for? That quizz was mentioned in a "Wheel of Fortunes" television quizz show episode of about a month ago by the time you read this.) as well as literal powers such as Ian Fleming, who decided to model his "Goldfinger" after this character, so it was tempting to see if either Charles was an evil character who had access to atom bombs or could manipulate stocks and bonds to artificially raise the price of precious metals, but no such luck. Senior died in 1950, so Junior took over the business with various consolidations and mergers including the consolidation of its holdings into Engelhard Industries Inc. Junior's company also initiated the use of the platinum group metals based car catalytic converters to reduce unburned hydrocarbon emission. (Since the platinum group metals are poisoned by lead, it also necessitated that all gasoline sold had to be unleaded. Without lead to lubricate the engines and enhance its performance, it required the development of tougher engines and new anti-knock agents and others which are now raising controversies due to toxic effects and other cascading troubles.). Junior died on this chat date, and the company was split in 1981 and then realigned in 1984 and has been expanding or acquiring other companies ever since and are continuing to metamorphose, although there's none of that "goldfinger" evil genius at work. Incidentally, Junior owned the race horse, Nijinsky II, which had a total earnings of $677,117. (Now, was there a race horse sketch in the "Goldfinger" movie?)

Selections from 2000:

On March 02, 2000 (Power)

1933: In local time, the most powerful earthquake in 180 years hit Japan at magnitude 8.9. But while the September 1, 1923 earthquake had a magnitude of 8.3 and the fire which ravaged Tokyo killed 143,000 people, this even more powerful earthquake caused a tsunami which killed 2,990. The reason for the discrepancy was that the epicenter of this earthquake was about 1,000 miles (or 1,600 km) to the west of Japan in the Japan Trench caused by a fracturing of the Pacific plate subducting under the Eurasian plate. So the destructive effect of this earthquake was modulated by distance. Even the Septermber 1 earthquake actually killed a few thousands and the rest died only because the hot inferno from broken gas lines burned down the inflammable wooden structures which was used in Japan. Beyond 180 years, there was no accurate instruments to measure the power of the earthquakes in Japan.

1974: Grand jury concludes that the US President Richard M. Nixon is involved in Watergate cover-up, accusing the most powerful person on Earth who is literally above the law. (It would have caused an outcry, but it was within Rich's legal power to parol himself and declares himself innocent, although that automatically meant that Rich did commit an illegal act and hence guilty of a crime. But the president of US is given this omnipotency to do whatever he or she wants to do and is legally above the mere laws of mortals, literally. Such absolute power encourages absolute corruption.)

1989: 12 European nations agree to ban chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) production by 2000 (that's this year). In 1974, Mario Molina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Sherwood Rowland of the University of California at Irvine first claimed that chlorofuorocarbon compounds were powerful catalytic compounds which destroy the ozone layer, a tri-oxygen molecule layer at 10 to 30 miles above the surface of Earth which blocks ultra-violet light. While ozone is naturally broken down, they argued that these chemicals were destroying them faster than they are being produced. At the time, no one believed it because unknown to them, the US satellites which were monitoring the conditions of the atmosphere were programmed to ignore the thinning of the ozone layers. Once that fact was known, it resulted in the Montreal Protocol of 1987, in which the industrialized countries will cut down and eliminate the use of CFC. Unfortunately, while US is among the countries which is supposed to eliminate the CFC, the US is also the country with the most demand for the older refrigeration units and air conditioners which require the older CFCs. And since the developing countries are allowed to make CFCs, they are making more than they are ever going to consume internally, so that the excess is sold at high profit to the US. It also doesn't help that American-made air conditioners are very leaky and need to be recharged with CFCs every couple of years. As the most powerful concentration of CFC users in the world, the US bears the most responsibility for the destruction of the ozone layer.

1997: Said to be the date when Saudi billionaire Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal first began his plan to buy 5% of Apple stock over a course of several weeks for $115 million, even though Apple was in its desperate and seemingly futile attempt to regain its lost market shares from the IBM PC clones. In the beginning of February, there was rumors that Apple will begin laying off 3,000 out of 13,400 people because Apple has lost $867 million over the past year and has seen its share of the microcomputer market shrink to 5% as ex-loyal fans shifted to the IBM PC clones. By March 14, 1997, Apple announced that 4,100 will be let go. By March 27, 1997, even as Apple Chairman Gilbert F. Amelio accused Oracle Corporation chairman Larry Ellison of trying to drive down Apple stock prices to take over Apple, the price of the shares rose by 11% as Al-Waleed bought two million Apple shares for $19 a and 1.3 million for various prices up to $19 a share. The financial market was told on April 2, 1997 (it would have been seen as a joke if it was announced on April 1) that Saudi billionaire Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal was the one behind the purchases. When interviewed, he stated that after he revlewed 10 technology companies, he believed that Apple had an "incredible franchise, loyal customers and actually a very cheap price." and when questioned if he was worried that his move into Apple might be a bad investment, he said "Look, don't forget that in 1991 they said the same thing about Citibank and about my other investments like Canary Wharf and Disneyland. I am hoping to prove these predictions are wrong." And it's true; Al-Walled paid $800 million for his shares in Citicorp which was then believed to be near insolvency and a hopeless basket case, but it turned around and added to Al-Waleed's wealth which is estimated at over $12 billion. While he never holds a majority stake in any company, he holds stake in Eurodisney, Saks Fifth Avenue, Donna Karan, Norwegian Cruise Line, London's Canary Wharf, 6% of the South Korean chaebol Daewoo and so on. The US financial magazine Forbes called Al-Waleed as the world's second most creative businessman, next to Bill Gates III of Microsoft for his uncanny ability to find depressed good companies just about to make a turnaround and invest in them. His power is so great that any rumor that he is about to invest in a company is enough to raise the price of stakes in the company. (These are collective informations from various business magazines. After all, mybookshop has a strong interest in business as is seen from the list of business books mentioned here, right?)

In local time, birthday to 1955: Shoko Asahara (real name Chizuo Matsumoto), born in Yatsushiro-city, Kumamoto prefecture ("prefecture" is equivalent to a province, state or department). Because of his weak eye-sight from infantile glaucoma, he entered the school for the blind. But due to his ability to discern objects better than many other students, he first learned what it was like to have power over others. In April 1978, his wife to-be said (abridged) "I don't love you, but I will marry you, if you will become the kind of person I can love". He soon started a drugstore in Funabashi city, Chiba prefecture, but is arrested in June 1982 for breach of the Cosmetics and Medical Instruments Act by selling placebo drugs at exorbitant prices. In February 1984, he forms the Aum Shinsen no Kai because there was no need to obtain a degree, and religious groups don't have to pay taxes. By August 25, 1989, Tokyo did recognize the group as a religious corporation, and hence under the Japanese Religious Corporation Law, authorities are not permitted to investigate its "religious activities or doctrine" and gave them de facto immunity from any official oversight or prosecution. While there were many critics of the group, on November 4, 1989, the most prominent and vocally hostile lawyer, Tsutsumi Sakamoto, and his family disappeared never to be seen again. By February 1990, he and 24 of his members run for the House of representatives, but they all lost (How badly? The number of votes which Chizuo Matsumoto got was less than the number of his members.). Even as normal people shunned him, he collected people who were dissatisfied with the moribund and stagnant Japanese society and preached his concept of the end of the world. It played out well since Japan has historically went through one catastrophic event after another and arose from the ashes to become a stronger nation, and Japan was in one such stagnant state. (But to be perfectly fair, there were many times more Russian than Japanese members who knowingly or unwittingly participated in his attempt to ignite Armageddon in Japan says that Russians were likely more willing to see Japan destroyed than the Japanese.) In June 27, 1994, seven people died and 52 people were injured from an unknown cause in Matsumoto. At the time, traces of what appeared to be sarin gas was detected, but it was thought that someone may have tried to make his own pesticide or such. Eventually, the police began tracing the chemicals to the Aum Shinrikyo group as it was known by then, but the extremely large margin of legal protection afforded to legally recognized religious group prevented them from taking any action based on suspicions. Then, on March 20, 1995, based on a news that the police finally gathered enough evidences to make arrests, Aum Shinrikyo decided to make an improvisional pre-emptive attack on the Tokyo subways: Based on the punctual and on-time subway trains, vials of liquid sarin were left at several trains so that they will release their deadly cargo when the trains stop at the central station. People began to realize that something was wrong before the trains went to the central station and began pressing the emergency stops, but the train operators refused to stop their trains (not knowing what was happening, they wanted to go to the next brightly lit station and to avoid possible collision with the next train which will come after their's. It's a standard procedure followed by every subway around the world, even the European Chunnel.) It resulted in 11 dead and 5,502 injured -- more may eventually die. While it was gruesome in its own rights, the fast action of the disposal crew, the doctors and the poor quality of the liquid sarin prevented it from becoming worse. (Sarin is easy to manufacture by anyone with a college/university degree in chemistry, but it must be dispersed as a gas to be effective.) While the police was still hampered by the laws which protect religious groups, they began harassment tactics such as arresting members who rode two to a bicycle. Eventually, the police gathered enough solid evidences to search their buildings and realized that the group was making both chemical and biological weapons, as well as atomizers to disperse the chemical and biological toxins in the gaseous and vaporous states. As it turned out, the original plan was to manufacture 70 tons of sarin and to use a helicopter to disperse the gaseous sarin in November to kill everyone (US president Bill Clinton was scheduled to visit Japan between November 16 - 19). They were also trying to acquire an atom bomb from their Russian members. In hindsight, they also used biological agents nine times in Japan, including the Parliament, the emperor's Imperial Palace and others, spraying both live germs and germ toxins from buildings and convoys of trucks, but in all those cases, no one died and hence no one realized that they were dispersing biological weapons (There were supposed to be excellent scientists among their members who were capable of correctly making the biological and chemical weapons so that some people thought that they were either incompetent or they intentionally sabotaged the production step to prevent it from killing people.). Despite the mountain of documented proofs of their wrong-doings, the religion law still give them de facto immunity from just about everything. So, why did the law gave religious groups such omnipotent power to do whatever they wanted? US pushed it through Japan in 1947 to protect religious groups from the Japanese government interference, which is the reason why there are 200,000 such groups in Japan. In fact, Aum Shinrikyo used high pressure tactics and expensive lobbying via local politicians and even picketing the office which approves it to get its legal protection which also raised their worth from only $4.3 million in 1989 to one billion dollars by the time of the sarin attack. In hindsight, the anti-Japan, anti-US and even anti-Jew view the group took was something Russian extremists would have liked. Update for 2002: Keiji "Duke" Oda began the Japanese chapter of New York's Guardian Angels in 1996 shortly after the sarin gas event when Keiji (pronounced "kay-ji") became frustrated by the slow response of the Japanese police in catching the culprits. Since then, the dozen or so members have grown to over 300 around the country (mostly Tokyo, Osaka and Hiroshima) to patrol the streets, sweeping the streets and just talking with people -- but as with all Japanese and Japanese media, they don't seem to mention that aside from crimes committed by frustrated Japanese who see the stagnation and unable to escape from it, the other rising violent crimes are committed by foreigners like the Taiwanese gangs. Only foreign media is willing to discuss that part of the criminal activities.

Search Ethiopia, King Kong, Tom Wolfe, Randolph Scott, AC/DC, Al Waxman

Listing Ethiopia, King Kong, Tom Wolfe, Randolph Scott, AC/DC, Al Waxman

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