Wednesday 10/5/22
Celebrate:
Balloons Around the World Day
Chic Spy Day
Do Something Nice Day
Global James Bond Day
International Walk to School Day
National Apple Betty Day
National Get Funky Day
National Kale Day
National Kiss a Wrestler Day
National Pumpkin Seed Day
National Storytelling Day
Random Acts of Poetry Day
World Teachers' Day
Yom Kippur
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Loretta Lynn, the “Coal Miner’s Daughter” whose gutsy lyrics and twangy, down-home vocals made her a queen of country music for seven decades, has died. She was 90.
Read more here.
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Sports History!
Aaron Judge has made history … the New York Yankees superstar slugger just knocked his record-breaking 62nd home run of the year.
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Tom Hanks has written his first novel. It's called "The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece", and it's due out in May of 2023.
It's about the making of, quote, "a colossal, star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film," and it spans about 80 years leading up to the opening of the movie.
And Tom knows what he's talking about because, as he says, quote, "I've made a ton of movies (and four of them are pretty good, I think)."
He adds, quote, "Every character in the book does something I've experienced while making a movie, as well as discovered a philosophy or learned an important lesson.
"Even the foolish moments are some kind of stunt I've pulled or mistake I've survived."
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Over half of Americans had a teacher growing up who changed their LIFE.
53% of us say at least one teacher changed our life for the better. And it doesn't matter how old you are. 60% of seniors say it's true, and so do 54% of people under 30. So there are still lots of great teachers out there making a difference.
The survey also looked at which grade people were in when their favorite teacher made an impact on them. And it's most likely to happen in high school.
33% were in grades 9 through 12 . . . 13% were in 6th to 8th grade . . . and 16% said somewhere between 5th grade and kindergarten.
7% said it was a teacher they had after high school, like a professor in college. And 3% said it was a coach.
Chances are you also had a few BAD teachers along the way. 22% of us had a teacher who changed our life for the worse.
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Do you ever leave music on for your dog to keep them company while you're gone, or maybe put on a TV show? Well, turns out you might just be wasting electricity . . .
A new study looked at how dogs behaved when their owners played music and audiobooks while they were gone. And in general, it didn't make a big difference.
If music helped, it was only a little. And audiobooks had NO effect.
The study involved 82 different dogs. Some sat in silence . . . some listened to Mozart . . . and others listened to the audiobook version of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone".
The classical music did seem to help them settle down a little faster at first. But that was the only real difference, and they still showed other signs of stress.
The researchers didn't look at whether the visuals from a TV might do anything. But they say that sound alone appears to offer, quote, "little value to dogs" dealing with short-term stress.
And of course cats.....well they just don't care about anything.
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A 33-year-old named Christopher Ver-Straten crawled through a Taco Bell drive-thru on a late Saturday night and wouldn't leave.
And it was especially shocking for employees . . . because he was completely NAKED during all of it.
It's not clear if he was on drugs, wanted food, or what. He just laid there in the kitchen and refused to get up.
Cops eventually removed him from the Taco Bell. He's facing charges for "exposure of sexual organs" in a public place.
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A new English course at the University of Texas at Austin will study the greats of Western literature: Shakespeare, Keats, Frost, and Swift. No, not Jonathan Swift . . . TAYLOR Swift.
The class is called "The Taylor Swift Songbook", and professor Elizabeth Scala says students will study Taylor's lyrics alongside the classics, and be asked to, quote, "analyze and contextualize common practices and problems across the centuries."
She hopes to show the kids how Taylor, quote, "draws on richer literary traditions in her songwriting, both topically but also formally in terms of how she uses references, metaphors, and clever manipulations of words."
Required materials for the class include Taylor's last four albums.
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Stuck in traffic on the highway? Pay attention to the lanes that semi trucks are merging to, and follow them. They usually communicate over the radio which lanes are blocked or shut down from an accident.
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Today's Useless Fact of the Day - Donuts only make up 10% of Dunkin's revenue . . . the bulk of their money comes from coffee. That's why they dropped "Donuts" from their name in 2019.
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