Weather, Johnny Depp Poll

It's a beautiful summer day here. Forecast is calling for 90's the rest of the week and into the weekend. 90's + humidity = hot! I will take that over freezing any day!! The older I get the more I don't like winter. Now that my friend 'Arthur Ritis' is with me everywhere I go it just makes me ache all over.
Monday the hubby had to stay home to meet the John Deere repair man to get our lawn mower running again. It was running along just fine and then died. Come to find out it was the battery, duh, don't we feel stupid! Anyway, when I get home from work I about had a heart attack!. Hubby had the yard done, dishes washed, coffee set for next day and house picked up!! Let me tell you that hasn't happened very often. Or not as often as I would like it too :P

I also added a poll to the right---> Feel free to vote ;)

Flashing back to the 70's yesterday was fun so I checked out my birth year, 1957...

• Soviet Union inaugurates the "Space Age" by launching Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite. A month later Sputnik II carries a dog into orbit, making that dog the first living being to enter space.
• Federal troops ordered to enforce integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas
• Teamsters union expelled from the AFL-CIO for failing to deal with organized crime
• New York Giants move to San Francisco; Brooklyn Dodgers move to Los Angeles
• Movies: The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Prince and the Showgirl, Twelve Angry Men, Love in the Afternoon
• Songs: Young Love, Tonight, Wake Up Little Susie, That'll Be the Day, Jailhouse Rock
• Books: On the Road, Jack Kerouac; Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand; The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss
• Theater: West Side Story and The Music Man open in New York
• "Beatnik" enters the vernacular as a description of the emerging "Beat Generation" counterculture movement
• An earthquake in the Soviet Union June 27 leaves 1,200 dead; an equal number die in a quake that rocks part of Iran 5 days later, registering 7.4 on the Richter scale; an Iranian quake that registers 7.3 kills 1,130 December 13.
  

Here's an interesting article about the Frisbee.

The Frisbee is introduced by the Wham-O Manufacturing Co. of San Gabriel, Calif., which has been licensed by Los Angeles inventor Walter Frederick Morrison to produce the plastic "Pluto Platter" devised by Morrison in 1948. New England college students have tossed metal pie tins produced since 1871 by the Frisbie Baking Co. of Bridgeport, Conn. (the company will go out of business next year), Morrison will obtain a patent next year for his faster, more accurate flying disc, Wham-O's Rich Knerr will come up with the registered trademark Frisbee, and his company will sell upwards of 100 million units before Mattel Corp. acquires the toy. The Frisbee launches a new sport whose first world champion will be crowned in 1968.

This Day in History:

July 16, 1951

Catcher in the Rye is published

J.D. Salinger's only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is published by Little, Brown on this day in 1951. The book, about a confused teenager disillusioned by the adult world, is an instant hit and will be taught in high schools for half a century.

The 31-year-old Salinger had worked on the novel for a decade. His stories had already started appearing in the 1940s, many in the New Yorker.

The book took the country by storm, selling out and becoming a Book of the Month Club selection. Fame did not agree with Salinger, who retreated to a hilltop cabin in Cornish, New York, but he continued to publish stories in the New Yorker periodically. He published Franny and Zooey in 1963, based on two combined New Yorker stories.

Salinger stopped publishing work in 1965, the same year he divorced his wife of 12 years, whom he had married when he was 32. In 1999, journalist Joyce Maynard published a book about her affair with Salinger, which had taken place more than two decades earlier.

July 16, 1969

Apollo 11 departs Earth

At 9:32 a.m. EDT, Apollo 11, the first U.S. lunar landing mission, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a historic journey to the surface of the moon. After traveling 240,000 miles in 76 hours, Apollo 11 entered into a lunar orbit on July 19.

The next day, at 1:46 p.m., the lunar module Eagle, manned by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, separated from the command module, where a third astronaut, Michael Collins, remained. Two hours later, the Eagle began its descent to the lunar surface, and at 4:18 p.m. the craft touched down on the southwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong immediately radioed to Mission Control in Houston a famous message, "The Eagle has landed." At 10:39 p.m., five hours ahead of the original schedule, Armstrong opened the hatch of the lunar module. Seventeen minutes later, at 10:56 p.m., Armstrong spoke the following words to millions listening at home: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." A moment later, he stepped off the lunar module's ladder, becoming the first human to walk on the surface of the moon.

Aldrin joined him on the moon's surface at 11:11 p.m., and together they took photographs of the terrain, planted a U.S. flag, ran a few simple scientific tests, and spoke with President Richard M. Nixon via Houston. By 1:11 a.m. on July 21, both astronauts were back in the lunar module, and the hatch was closed. The two men slept that night on the surface of the moon, and at 1:54 p.m. the Eagle began its ascent back to the command module. Among the items left on the surface of the moon was a plaque that read: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon--July 1969 A.D.--We came in peace for all mankind." At 5:35 p.m., Armstrong and Aldrin successfully docked and rejoined Collins, and at 12:56 a.m. on July 22 Apollo 11 began its journey home, safely splashing down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:51 p.m. on July 24.

There would be five more successful lunar landing missions, and one unplanned lunar swing-by, Apollo 13. The last men to walk on the moon, astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 mission, left the lunar surface on December 14, 1972. The Apollo program was a costly and labor intensive endeavor, involving an estimated 400,000 engineers, technicians, and scientists, and costing $24 billion (close to $100 billion in today's dollars). The expense was justified by President John F. Kennedy's 1961 mandate to beat the Soviets to the moon, and after the feat was accomplished, ongoing missions lost their viability.

July 16, 1999

JFK Jr. killed in plane crash

On July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy, Jr.; his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy; and her sister, Lauren Bessette, die when the single-engine plane that Kennedy was piloting crashes into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., was born on November 25, 1960, just a few weeks after his father and namesake was elected the 35th president of the United States. On his third birthday, "John-John" attended the funeral of his assassinated father and was photographed saluting his father's coffin in a famous and searing image. Along with his sister, Caroline, he was raised in Manhattan by his mother, Jacqueline. After graduating from Brown University and a very brief acting stint, he attended New York University Law School. He passed the bar on his third try and worked in New York as an assistant district attorney, winning all six of his cases. In 1995, he founded the political magazine George, which grew to have a circulation of more than 400,000. Unlike many others in his famous family, he never sought public office himself.

Always in the media spotlight, he was celebrated for the good looks that he inherited from his parents. In 1988, he was named the "Sexiest Man Alive" by People magazine. He was linked romantically with several celebrities, including the actress Daryl Hannah, whom he dated for five years. In September 1996, he married girlfriend Carolyn Bessette, a fashion publicist. The two shared an apartment in New York City, where Kennedy was often seen inline skating in public. Known for his adventurous nature, he nonetheless took pains to separate himself from the more self-destructive behavior of some of the other men in the Kennedy clan.

On July 16, 1999, however, with about 300 hours of flying experience, Kennedy took off from Essex County airport in New Jersey and flew his single-engine plane into a hazy, moonless night. He had turned down an offer by one of his flight instructors to accompany him, saying he "wanted to do it alone." To reach his destination of Martha's Vineyard, he would have to fly 200 miles--the final phase over a dark, hazy ocean--and inexperienced pilots can lose sight of the horizon under such conditions. Unable to see shore lights or other landmarks, Kennedy would have to depend on his instruments, but he had not qualified for a license to fly with instruments only. In addition, he was recovering from a broken ankle, which might have affected his ability to pilot his plane.

At Martha's Vineyard, Kennedy was to drop off his sister-in-law Lauren Bessette, one of his two passengers. From there, Kennedy and his wife, Carolyn, were to fly on to the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod's Hyannis Port for the marriage of Rory Kennedy, the youngest child of the late Robert F. Kennedy. The Piper Saratoga aircraft never made it to Martha's Vineyard. Radar data examined later showed the plane plummeting from 2,200 feet to 1,100 feet in a span of 14 seconds, a rate far beyond the aircraft's safe maximum. It then disappeared from the radar screen.

Kennedy's plane was reported missing by friends and family members, and an intensive rescue operation was launched by the Coast Guard, the navy, the air force, and civilians. After two days of searching, the thousands of people involved gave up hope of finding survivors and turned their efforts to recovering the wreckage of the aircraft and the bodies. Americans mourned the loss of the "crown prince" of one of the country's most admired families, a sadness that was especially poignant given the relentless string of tragedies that have haunted the Kennedy family over the years.

On July 21, navy divers recovered the bodies of JFK Jr., his wife, and sister-in-law from the wreckage of the plane, which was lying under 116 feet of water about eight miles off the Vineyard's shores. The next day, the cremated remains of the three were buried at sea during a ceremony on the USS Briscoe, a navy destroyer. A private mass for JFK Jr. and Carolyn was held on July 23 at the Church of St. Thomas More in Manhattan, where the late Jackie Kennedy Onassis worshipped. President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, were among the 300 invited guests. The Kennedy family's surviving patriarch, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, delivered a moving eulogy: "From the first day of his life, John seemed to belong not only to our family, but to the American family. He had a legacy, and he learned to treasure it. He was part of a legend, and he learned to live with it."

Investigators studying the wreckage of the Piper Saratoga found no problems with its mechanical or navigational systems. In their final report released in 2000, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the crash was caused by an inexperienced pilot who became disoriented in the dark and lost control.

Take care.....until next post...