Good morning, Whitewater.

Midweek in town will be partly sunny, with a high of sixty-three, and a one-third chance of afternoon showers.  Sunrise is 5:50 and sunset 7:53, for 14h 02m 47s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 80.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

About twenty years ago, on this day in 1992, America saw riots in Los Angeles even more destructive than the recent one in Baltimore. Here’s how the New York Times covered the news of acquittals in the beating of Rodney King, and its aftermath:

Los Angeles Policemen Acquitted In Taped Beating

By Seth Mydans

Special to The New York Times

RELATED HEADLINES
Storm of Anger Erupts — National Guard is Called Into City

Simi Valley, Calif., April 29 — Four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted of assault today in the videotaped beating of a black motorist that stunned the nation. The verdicts immediately touched off a storm of anger and scattered violence in the city.

As residents set scores of fires, looted stores and beat passing motorists in the downtown area and pockets of predominantly black south-central Los Angeles, Mayor Tom Bradley declared a state of emergency, and Gov. Pete Wilson said he would send in the National Guard.

After hearing seven weeks of detailed testimony and studying the 81-second amateur videotape of the beating, the jury concluded that the policemen, all of whom are white, had not broken any laws when they clubbed and kicked the mostly prone motorist, Rodney G. King.

It was deadlocked on one of the 11 charges, and the prosecution said it might seek a new trial on that charge, which affected only one defendant.

The beating last spring, with its kicks and its 56 baton swings, was shown over and over on television. It immediately became one of the most visible uses of force by police in this country’s history and put the issue of police brutality on the national agenda.

Immediately after the verdicts, an unusually impassioned Mayor Bradley appeared on television to appeal for calm in a city where the videotape has come to symbolize complaints about police brutality, racism and street violence.

‘Today the system failed us,’ the Mayor said.

Here’s Wednesday’s game from Puzzability, in its Giving Away the Ending series:

This Week’s Game — April 27-May 1

Giving Away the Ending

You’ll need to do a little detective work this week. For each day, we started with the title of a well-known mystery book and replaced all the letters in each word—except the last letter—with asterisks.

Example:

A  ****Y  *N  ******T

Answer:

A Study in Scarlet

What to Submit:

Submit the book title (as “A Study in Scarlet” in the example) for your answer.

Wednesday, April 29

**E  ***L  ***H  **E  *****N  *****O

Good morning, Whitewater.

Tuesday in the Whippet City will be sunny with a high of sixty-three. Sunrise is 5:52 and sunset 7:52, for 14h 00m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets this afternoon at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl begins the Kon-Tiki Expedition:

The Kon-Tiki expedition was a 1947 journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl. The raft was named Kon-Tiki after the Inca sun god,Viracocha, for whom “Kon-Tiki” was said to be an old name. Kon-Tiki is also the name of Heyerdahl’s book; the Academy Award-winning documentary film chronicling his adventures; and the 2012 dramatised feature film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. Although most anthropologists as of 2010 had come to the conclusion they did not,^[1][2][3] in 2011, new genetic evidence was uncovered by Erik Thorsby that Easter Island inhabitants do have some South American DNA,^[4] lending credence to at least some of Heyerdahl’s theses. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.

The Kon-Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard facilities provided by the Peruvian authorities, they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in an indigenous style as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began on April 28, 1947. Heyerdahl and five companions sailed the raft for 101 days over 6900 km (4,300 miles) across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947. The crew made successful landfall and all returned safely.

Thor Heyerdahl’s book about his experience became a bestseller. It was published in Norwegian in 1948 as The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas, later reprinted as Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft. It appeared with great success in English in 1950, also in many other languages. A documentary motion picture about the expedition, also called Kon-Tiki was produced from a write-up and expansion of the crew’s filmstrip notes and won an Academy Award in 1951. It was directed by Thor Heyerdahl and edited by Olle Nordemar. The voyage was also chronicled in the documentary TV-series The Kon-Tiki Man: The Life and Adventures of Thor Heyerdahl, directed by Bengt Jonson.^[5]

The original Kon-Tiki raft is now on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Bygdøy, near Oslo.

Here’s Puzzability‘s Tuesday game in this week’s Giving Away the Ending Series:

This Week’s Game — April 27-May 1

Giving Away the Ending

You’ll need to do a little detective work this week. For each day, we started with the title of a well-known mystery book and replaced all the letters in each word—except the last letter—with asterisks.

Example:

A  ****Y  *N  ******T

Answer:

A Study in Scarlet

What to Submit:

Submit the book title (as “A Study in Scarlet” in the example) for your answer.

Tuesday, April 28

**D  ***N  ****E  ***E  ***E

Good morning, Whitewater.

Monday in town will be sunny with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 5:53 and sunset 7:51, for 13h 57m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 64.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1667, John Milton sells low:

Blind poet John Milton sells the copyright to his masterpiece Paradise Lost (1667) for a mere 10 pounds.

Milton was born and raised the indulged son of a prosperous London businessman. He excelled at languages in grammar school and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he took a bachelor’s and a master’s, which he completed in 1632. He then decided to continue his own education, spending six years reading every major work of literature in several languages. He published an elegy for a college classmate, Lycidas, in 1637 and went abroad in 1638 to continue his studies.

In 1642, Milton married 17-year-old Mary Powell, who left him just weeks later. Milton wrote a series of pamphlets arguing for the institution of divorce based on incompatibility. The idea, however mild it seems today, was scandalous at the time, and Milton experienced a vehement backlash for his writing.

Milton’s wife returned to him in 1645, and the pair had three daughters. However, he continued espousing controversial views. He supported the execution of Charles I, he railed against the control of the church by bishops, and he upheld the institution of Cromwell’s commonwealth, for which he became secretary of foreign languages.

In 1651, he lost his sight but fulfilled his government duties with the help of assistants, including poet Andrew Marvell. His wife died the following year. He remarried in 1656, but his second wife died in childbirth. Four years later, the commonwealth was overturned, and Milton was thrown in jail, saved only by the intervention of friends. The blind man lost his position and property.

He remarried in 1663. Blind, impoverished, and jobless, he began to dictate his poem Paradise Lost to his family. When the poem was ready for publication, he sold it for 10 pounds. Once printed, the poem was immediately hailed as a masterpiece of the English language. In 1671, he wrote Paradise Regained, followed by Samson Agonistes. He died in 1674.

Here’s the Monday game in Puzzability‘s new weekly series, Giving Away the Ending:

This Week’s Game — April 27-May 1

Giving Away the Ending

You’ll need to do a little detective work this week. For each day, we started with the title of a well-known mystery book and replaced all the letters in each word—except the last letter—with asterisks.

Example:

A  ****Y  *N  ******T

Answer:

A Study in Scarlet

What to Submit:

Submit the book title (as “A Study in Scarlet” in the example) for your answer.

Monday, April 27

**E  **G  ****P

Good morning, Whitewater.

Sunday in the Whippet City will be pretty, with a high of fifty-nine and sunny skies. Sunrise is 5:54 and sunset 7:50, for 13h 55m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 54.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Recent weather events color our perception of trends, and television hysteria over single events does, too:

Today is the anniversary, from 1986, of the Chernobyl Disaster:

The Chernobyl disaster … Chornobylska Katastrofa – Chornobyl Catastrophe; also referred to as Chernobyl or the Chornobyl accident) was a catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine (then officially the Ukrainian SSR), which was under the direct jurisdiction of the central authorities of the Soviet Union. An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe.

The Chernobyl disaster was the worst nuclear power plant accident in history in terms of cost and casualties.[1] It is one of only two classified as a level 7 event (the maximum classification) on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011.[2] The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles.[3] During the accident itself, 31 people died, and long-term effects such as cancers are still being investigated….

The disaster began during a systems test on Saturday, 26 April 1986 at reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant, which is near the city of Pripyat and in proximity to the administrative border with Belarus and the Dnieper River. There was a sudden and unexpected power surge, and when an emergency shutdown was attempted, an exponentially larger spike in power output occurred, which led to a reactor vessel rupture and a series of steam explosions. These events exposed the graphite moderator of the reactor to air, causing it to ignite.[4] The resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area, including Pripyat. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe. From 1986 to 2000, 350,400 people were evacuated and resettled from the most severely contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.[5][6] According to official post-Soviet data,[7][8] about 60% of the fallout landed in Belarus.

Good morning, Whitewater.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with an even chance of rain during the day, and a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 5:56 and sunset is 7:48, for 13h 52m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Popcorn – it’s both delicious and interesting:

On this day in 1996, Gov. Tommy Thompson signs a welfare reform bill:

On this date Governor Tommy Thompson signed the W-2 (Wisconsin Works) program into law, making Wisconsin the first U.S. state to replace a benefits-based welfare system with a requirement that recipients work to get aid. W-2 formed the basis for national welfare reform.[Source: W-2, Wisconsin Works.]