Wednesday 6/14/23
Celebrate:
Army's Birthday
Family History Day
Flag Day
International Bath Day
National Bourbon Day
National Strawberry Shortcake Day
Own Your Share of America Day
Pause for the Pledge Day
Pop Goes the Weasel Day
World Blood Donor Day
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Where there's smoke, there's a new song by Shawn Mendes. The singer has dropped a single titled "What the Hell Are We Dying For?", the cover photo of which is a picture of New York City engulfed in smoke from Canadian wildfires. In fact, Mendes said he started writing it "yesterday morning with my friends in upstate New York" and finished it "only a few hours" before it was released. Though the meat of the song is seemingly about a relationship and possibly Camila Cabello specifically, he alludes to the situation in New York very subtly by singing, "Smoke in the air / The city's burning down." Mendes said he's donating to the Canadian Red Cross, but he faced criticism for tying his song to an ongoing crisis, with one fan commenting on Instagram, "i mean i luv u shawn, but u prolly should've left recent tragic events out of a song about camila." The man's getting smoked.
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Jennifer Lawrence is putting her foot down and setting the record straight about her Cannes look. The actress told Entertainment Tonight she wants to "straighten this out" when asked about recently wearing flip-flops at the Cannes Film Festival, noting she received tons of praise for supposedly making a statement. "I was not making a political statement, not that I wouldn't," she stressed. Lawrence was dressed in a red gown when attending a film screening at the festival, but she was also spotted wearing black flip-flops on the red carpet. She told ET she "had no idea" that there "was a whole controversy" with women reportedly not being allowed to wear flats at Cannes. Instead, Lawrence said this was simply because her "shoes were a size too big." Though she "wore heels going up," she switched to flip-flops because she was worried she would "eat s--t" when she had to walk down the stairs. Never again
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Family members cleaning out a late relative's home found more than 1 million pennies. They're older pennies made out of copper, not the zinc-coated steel of modern cent pieces, and thus are worth far more as metal than their $10,000 value as legal tender. If the sacks, boxes and crates contain any collectible pennies, they could be worth even more: A rare 1943 penny sold for $1.7 million in 2010.
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Each day 700,000 cars, taxis and trucks pour into Lower Manhattan, one of the busiest areas in the world with some of the worst gridlock in the United States.
Car travel at just 7.1 mph on average, even bus speeds have slowed. New Yorkers lose 117 hours on average each year sitting in traffic, costing them nearly $2,000 in lost productivity and other costs.
So....you'll need to pay to enter Lower Manhattan. The toll is formally known as the Central Business District Tolling Program — but it’s commonly called “congestion pricing.”
Proposals range from charging vehicles $9 to $23 during peak hours.
Proponents also note it will improve public transit, an essential part of New York life. About 75% of trips downtown are via public transit.
But public-transit ridership is 25% to 30% lower compared to pre-pandemic levels, according to the MTA. The MTA says congestion fees will generate a critical source of revenue to fund $15 billion in future investments to modernize the city’s 100-year-old public transit system.
This isn't a new idea, London added it's charge in 2003 and traffic dropped by 30%. Stockholm Sweden launced theirs in 2007.
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Treat Williams was killed yesterday while riding his motorcycle in Vermont. He was 71 years old. His rep says he was making a turn and a car cut him off.
Treat got his big break in 1979, in the movie version of "Hair". . . which was based on the Broadway musical of the same name. More recently, he played Dr. Andrew Brown on the WB's "Everwood" from 2002 to 2006.
His other credits included "Things to Do in Denver When you're Dead", "Heart of Dixie", and the TV shows "Blue Bloods", "The Late Shift", "Chicago Fire", and "Chesapeake Shores".
He also appeared in several Hallmark movies, and the Netflix musical "Dolly Parton's Christmas on the Square".
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Study links taurine, a naturally occurring amino acid and a common ingredient in supplements and energy drinks, to a roughly 10%-12% increase in life span in animal studies; how the compound affects the aging process remains unclear.
If you want to get more in your diet (besides supplements) Most animal products and byproducts like beef, dark meat poultry, shellfish, and dairy.
Scallops have the highest level, tuna is a great source, tilapia, turkey, chicken, and yes seaweed.
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A recent global study looked into how people feel about their age . . . and they found that in America, the average age when people STOP feeling young is 43. Right now, that's people who were born in 1979 or 1980.
The good news is Americans don't start feeling OLD until they're 52.
So this is the LAST YEAR before elder Millennials stop feeling young. Millennials are generally considered to be born between 1981 and 1996, and next year, those 1981 babies will be turning 43.
Of all countries, ITALIANS are apparently the youngest at heart. They don't stop feeling young until they're 60. And they don't start feeling old until they hit 70.
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Most people agree this is something you shouldn't do. And yet, it turns out most of us have done it.
82% of Americans say they've snooped through someone's PHONE before. Women were even more likely to say they've done it . . . 88%, compared to 77% of men.
"General curiosity" and "suspicion of wrongdoing" were the top two reasons people say they snoop. And a lot of those searches are fruitful. 53% of snoopers say they've found something incriminating before.
Here are a few more snooping stats . . .
1. The top two people we've snooped on are significant others, and exes. 9% have also looked through their kid's phone . . . friends, 8% . . . parents and siblings, 7% each . . . and 3% of us have looked through a coworker's device.
2. The top things we look at when we snoop are the person's text messages . . . their photos or videos . . . and their browser history.
3. The most concerning things we've found are flirtatious texts . . . proof of cheating . . . and evidence they've been lying in general.
4. When we do snoop, we usually get away with it. 81% of snoopers said they've never been caught.
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Today's Useless Fact of the Day - Only 3,715 copies of "Moby-Dick" were sold between when it was published in 1851, and when author Herman Melville died 40 years later. Tens of millions of copies have been sold since then.
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