Greetings!
Inspired by three beautiful things.
Morning coffee with toes in the sand.
Green flowering vegetation.
Thawing out after a long winter.
Today’s tip for better living: Learn to drive a stick shift.
Great Moments in Television
Greetings!
A moment of silence for the passing of a great mind…
Inventor of the TV remote dies
BOISE, Idaho — Hit the mute button for a moment of silence: The co-inventor of the TV remote has died.
Robert Adler, who won an Emmy Award along with fellow engineer Eugene Polley for the device that made couch potatoship possible, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at 93, Zenith Electronics Corp. said Friday.
In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Adler and co-inventor Polley, another Zenith engineer, an Emmy in 1997 for the landmark invention.
Adler joined Zenith’s research division in 1941 after earning a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna. He retired as research vice president in 1979, and served as a technical consultant until 1999, when Zenith merged with LG Electronics Inc.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published his most recent patent application, for advances in touch screen technology, on Feb. 1.
Adler is survived by his wife, Ingrid.
Then, a bit of weird news:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Police called to a Long Island man’s house discovered the mummified remains of the resident, dead for more than a year, sitting in front of a blaring television set. The 70-year-old Hampton Bays, New York, resident, identified as Vincenzo Ricardo, appeared to have died of natural causes. Police said on Saturday his body was discovered on Thursday when they were called to the house over a burst water pipe.
“You could see his face. He still had hair on his head,” Newsday quoted morgue assistant Jeff Bacchus as saying. The home’s low humidity had preserved the body.
Officials could not explain why the electricity had not been turned off, considering Ricardo had not been heard from since December 2005. Neighbors said when they had not seen Ricardo, who was diabetic and had been blind for years, they assumed he was in the hospital or a long-term care facility.
Todays Tip for better living: Laugh so hard you wet your pants!
Crossing Over
Greetings!
Do you believe in psychics? Today on Oprah, she hosted John Edward and Allison DuBois and Oprah seemed skeptical. There were some interesting theories on how these mediums receive messages from “the other side”. Quantum physics, vibrations and frequencies, things that make you go hmm-mmm.
Regarding crossing over, we had an interesting conversation with members of the Hummingbird Medicine Band, Southeastern Cherokee Council regarding their funeral rituals. They refer to the deceased as “travelers” and believe that after the spirit is released from the body, it remains in nature. It’s considered disrespectful to mention the name of the deceased for a year after the “journey” has begun.
Architecturally speaking of spirits leaving the body, here’s an interesting site on abandoned buildings.
Observation: We’ve noticed several clients who willingly fork over their credit card information, but are reluctant to give out their email address for tracking info.
Tip for better living: Forecast the Future.
Winter Whiteout
Greetings and Happy Valentine’s Day!
Here’s a couple of items we’ve learned this week:
Naps can save your life.
When you look into someone’s eyes (the pupils) you can see their brain.
Red, truly is a power color, symbolizing good, evil, and wealth. In China, brides wear red because white is the color of death and mourning. Red is the color of the Catholic church. Satan is known to appear in red. The Spanish Empire had the monopoly on the color red, creating the dye from the a small red producing insect found in South America.
We study color in the garden. Aristotle declared that the colors of the world were created where darkness and light met, and that the simple colors are the colors of the elements: fire, air, water, and earth.
Regarding urns, our research indicates that blue is still America’s favorite color. Many women are fond of purple. And for the naturalists, Wood is Good.
We are happy to report that we were able to assist a family in California and save them several hundred dollars on their urn selection. Same urn at the funeral home was $675.00. Makes me question my prices.
The mortuary actually had this urn in stock. Many of the funeral homes we deal with stock samples or work from catalogs and carry a very limited supply of expensive urns. When asked the question, do your cremation families make an urn purchase at the funeral home? Guess what the answer is.
Today’s tip for better living: Go deep.
What Is Time?
Greetings!
No death talk today.
A couple of topics that have been on my mind; Time and Politics. Two of the major reasons I cashed out of the corporate world. Let’s start with politics. Not office politics, that’s a manageable sport. Dirtsister speaks of the real deal, the hustle, the spending orgy known as the Campaign. Here we go. The media is already ramping up for the next wave and I’m reminded of the promise that I made to myself during a stint at the tee-vee factory: flee before the next election.
One of my favorite authors, the good Dr. HST, accurately describes a medical condition known as “Campaign Bloat”. A swelling of the adrenal glands. “The body’s entire adrenaline supply is sucked back into the gizzard, and nothing either candidate says, does, or generate will cause it to rise again…and without adrenaline, the flesh begins to swell; the eyes fill with blood and grow small in the face, the jowls puff out from the cheekbones, the neck-flesh droops, and the belly swells up like a frog’s throat…the brain fills with noxious waste fluids, the tongue is rubbed raw on the molars, and the basic perception antennae begin dying like hairs in a bonfire.”
Smells like burning feathers.
Time. I found this interesting question posed on verypink and wondered what Dirtsister would tell her 15 year old self. Hmmm.
Always fascinated with ancient civilizations, we found this blurb regarding time: “The Mayan calendar, devised several centuries before the birth of Christ, is still more precise than the one we use today: They had the solar year broken down to exactly 365.24 days, and 12 lunar months of 29.5 days each. None of this sloppy “leap year” business, or odd-numbered months.”
Today’s tip: Know six things you would do if you were president.