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Monthly Archives: December 2013

Friday Poll: Reselling Stolen Meat?

In Canada’s Charlottetown, a man pled guilty to stealing high-priced chicken and steaks from a supermarket. The market, however, wasn’t about to take that loss:

Jeffery Arthur Feehan, 29, appeared before provincial court Chief Judge John Douglas in Charlottetown Tuesday, where he pleaded guilty to six charges, including stealing from two Superstore grocery stores in Charlottetown and failing to attend court.

Douglas sentenced him to a combined 94 days in jail on top of the 28 he already served while in custody awaiting sentencing.

During one incident, Feehan went to a Superstore where staff watched him put food in a basket, then take it into the bathroom where he stuck it down his pants.

The food included chicken breasts, bacon and steaks worth $71.32.

Crown attorney Valerie Moore said the store was able to recover the food for resale.

“That sounds strange. They must have been well wrapped in plastic given that they were down his pants,” she said.

So, should the market have resold the meat? Although it must have been wrapped in plastic, I’ll say no (if for no other reason than bad inevitable publicity about reselling it).

What do you think?


Daily Bread for 12.13.13

Good morning.

We will have a slight chance of snow after 5 PM, but a likelihood after 9 PM, with a high of twenty-four for the day. Accumulations, if any, are forecast at around an inch.

On this day in 2000, Vice President Al Gore concedes defeat:

Vice President Al Gore reluctantly concedes defeat to Texas Governor George W. Bush in his bid for the presidency, following weeks of legal battles over the recounting of votes in Florida, on this day in 2000.

In a televised speech from his ceremonial office next to the White House, Gore said that while he was deeply disappointed and sharply disagreed with the Supreme Court verdict that ended his campaign, ”partisan rancor must now be put aside.”

“I accept the finality of the outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College” he said. “And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”

Puzzability’s Bitter End series comes to an end today:

This Week’s Game — December 9-13
The Bitter End
It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter out there. For each day this week, we started with a word and added the sound “brrr” to the end to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the “brrr” word.
Example:
Saloon employee who cuts men’s hair
Answer:
Bar barber
What to Submit:
Submit the two-word phrase, with the “brrr” word second (as “Bar barber” in the example), for your answer.
Friday, December 13
The roughage that constitutes one of the last letters of the Greek alphabet

Daily Bread for 12.12.13

Good morning.

We’ll have a partly sunny Thursday with a high of seventeen. Southwest winds of ten to twenty miles per hour will produce windchill values well below zero.

People sometimes wonder what it would be like to fly. An eagle in Chamonix shares its bird’s-eye view:

On 12.12.1901, Guglielmo Marconi sends a radio transmission a long distance:

Guglielmo_Marconi_1901_wireless_signal

‘Electrical engineer/inventor Guglielmo Marconi operating apparatus similar to that used by him to transmit first wireless signal across Atlantic’ via Wikipedia.

Italian physicist and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, disproving detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. The message–simply the Morse-code signal for the letter “s”–traveled more than 2,000 miles from Poldhu in Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada.

Puzzability‘s series on cold weather has been surprisingly apt. Here’s Thursday’s puzzle:

This Week’s Game — December 9-13
The Bitter End
It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter out there. For each day this week, we started with a word and added the sound “brrr” to the end to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the “brrr” word.
Example:
Saloon employee who cuts men’s hair
Answer:
Bar barber
What to Submit:
Submit the two-word phrase, with the “brrr” word second (as “Bar barber” in the example), for your answer.
Thursday, December 12
Shuteye in a rundown neighborhood

Visualizing Bad Policy

One doesn’t experience the mistakes of bad policy or planning only for a moment.  

Like a series of collisions, the harmful effects come one after another, each made more likely – and often worse – by those that came before.  

What’s bad policy like?

One could, reasonably, think of it like this —

Daily Bread for 12.11.13

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be a day of gradual clearing, with the temperature falling to around three by late afternoon (by which wind chill values will be between five an fifteen below).

NASA’s Juno spacecraft used the moon’s gravity to gain a slingshot boost on the way to Jupiter (with an expected arrival at that distant planet on 7.4.2016). As the craft passed the Earth and moon, it recorded video of the moon’s orbit around Earth – apparently the most complete video recording yet made of Earth’s satellite orbiting our planet:

When NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew past Earth on Oct. 9, 2013, it received a boost in speed of more than 8,800 mph (about 7.3 kilometer per second), which set it on course for a July 4, 2016, rendezvous with Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. One of Juno’s sensors, a special kind of camera optimized to track faint stars, also had a unique view of the Earth-moon system. The result was an intriguing, low-resolution glimpse of what our world would look like to a visitor from afar.

On this day in 1901, an incorporation makes Whitewater’s spooky reputation formal:

1901 – Morris Pratt Institute Incorporated
On this date spiritual leader Morris Pratt gained incorporation for his school of spiritualism located in Whitewater, Wisconsin. Many people of this time embraced spiritualism to try to reach friends and family who had died in the Civil War. As a result, Whitewater became known as the “mecca of modern spiritualism.” Pratt built his institute in 1888, which was initially used as a meeting place for public seances.

Pratt decided to turn his institution into an educational school for spiritualists, focusing on science, literature, morality, and communication, as well as spiritualistic instruction. The institute was closed for a few years during the Depression, and then in 1977 relocated to Waukesha [now in Milwaukee] , where it remains one of the few institutes in the world that is dedicated to the study of spiritualism. [Source: Wisconsin Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes]

Puzzability‘s Bitter End series continues:

This Week’s Game — December 9-13
The Bitter End
It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter out there. For each day this week, we started with a word and added the sound “brrr” to the end to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the “brrr” word.
Example:
Saloon employee who cuts men’s hair
Answer:
Bar barber
What to Submit:
Submit the two-word phrase, with the “brrr” word second (as “Bar barber” in the example), for your answer.
Wednesday, December 11
Mend clothes with absolutely no alcohol in your system

Daily Bread for 12.10.13

Good morning.

There’s a chance of snow his morning, with only slight accumulation expected, and then gradual clearing with a high of sixteen. Wind chill values will be between five and fifteen below.

Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets this afternoon at 5:30 PM.

On 12.10.1901, the first Nobel Prizes are awarded:

The first Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. The ceremony came on the fifth anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and other high explosives. In his will, Nobel directed that the bulk of his vast fortune be placed in a fund in which the interest would be “annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” Although Nobel offered no public reason for his creation of the prizes, it is widely believed that he did so out of moral regret over the increasingly lethal uses of his inventions in war.

On this day in 1935, scarlet fever strikes Janesville, and on 12.10.1967, Otis Redding dies in a blame crash:

1935 – Scarlet Fever in Janesville
On this date an outbreak of scarlet fever quarantined 25 Janesville residents. [Source: Janesville Gazette, December 10, 1935, p.5]

1967 – Otis Redding Dies
On this date a twin-engine Beechcraft carrying Otis Redding crashed into Lake Monona in Madison, killing Redding and four members of his touring band, the Bar-Kays. Otis Redding was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. [Source: OtisRedding.com]

Here’s the Puzzability entry for Tuesday:

This Week’s Game — December 9-13
The Bitter End
It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter out there. For each day this week, we started with a word and added the sound “brrr” to the end to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the “brrr” word.
Example:
Saloon employee who cuts men’s hair
Answer:
Bar barber
What to Submit:
Submit the two-word phrase, with the “brrr” word second (as “Bar barber” in the example), for your answer.
Tuesday, December 10
Factory manpower needed to manufacture flower garlands

Daily Bread for 12.9.13

Good morning.

We’ll have gradually clearing skies this Monday, with a high of seventeen (wind chill values being between five and five below).

There are three municipal meetings scheduled for today. At 5:00 PM, there’s a special meeting of the Community Development Authority. At 6 PM, the Planning Commission meets, and at the same time (6 PM) there’s a meeting of the Fire and Rescue Task Force.

Of these meetings, one may say that there never was and never will be anything special about lapping up crony-capitalist checks from the WEDC, it’s a sign to the city of how serious the Planning Commission is by how much they focus on sign regulations, and the task of the Fire and Rescue Task Force should be to do more than ponder whether – scathing report now public – one should be “in the process of implementing any recommendations if there is a need to do so.”

If one doesn’t see a need now, then one will never see any need, for anything.

Well, we have a definitive answer to the poll question, FW Friday Poll: Whitewater’s first accumulated snowfall in the 2013-14 season? It was December 8th. I picked a date too soon (December 4), but some of those 26.19% who picked a date between 12-1 to 12-15 may have had 12.8 in mind.

Of the most recent FW poll, an overwhelming number (86.36%) answered the question of whether to sell or discard a returned engagement ring by voting to sell.

grace-hoppers-107th-birthday-5447077240766464.4-hp
Google’s Doodle celebrates the birthday of Grace Hopper (she would have been 107 today):

WERE SHE alive today, Grace Hopper would surely be too busy and focused to dwell on her own Google Doodle.

Too much to do, and discover, and understand. Throughout her long career, Hopper the naval officer, like time, marched on.

“Amazing Grace” Hopper would have been 107 today, and Google pays tribute with a home-page cartoon of the young computer pioneer at work. The Doodle prompts us to celebrate the great woman and mathematician and trailblazing programmer, even if she wasn’t the type to make a fuss over such things.

Puzzability‘s new puzzle series for the week of 12.9-12.13 is about the cold:

This Week’s Game — December 9-13
The Bitter End
It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter out there. For each day this week, we started with a word and added the sound “brrr” to the end to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the “brrr” word.
Example:
Saloon employee who cuts men’s hair
Answer:
Bar barber
What to Submit:
Submit the two-word phrase, with the “brrr” word second (as “Bar barber” in the example), for your answer.
Monday, December 9
Integer too cold to feel anything

Daily Bread for 12.8.13

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will bring a near-certainty of afternoon snow, with accumulations of about an inch. The high for today will be twenty-five. A second snowfall is likely overnight, again with an accumulation of about an inch.

On this day in 1941, America followed the attack on Pearl Harbor with a declaration of war.

What’s it like to live in state-capitalist, heavily-planned and dictatorially-managed China? One can see the air.

On December 8, 1917, a Wisconsin agricultural inventor passes away:

1917 – Inventor John F. Appleby Dies
On this date the inventor of the twine-binder, John F. Appleby died. Appleby was raised on a wheat farm in Wisconsin and searched for an easier way to harvest and bundle grains. His invention gathered severed spears into bundles and bound the sheaves with hempen twine. His invention, which was pulled by horses, was a great success. In 1878 William Deering, a farm machinery manufacturer secured the right to use Appleby’s patent and sold 3,000 twine harvesters in a single year. In 1882 the McCormicks (of the McCormick reapers) paid $35,000 for the privilege to manufacture Appleby’s invention. Appleby spent the rest of his life in his shop trying to create additional successful machinery. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes]