Thursday, September 30, 2010

major mountain ranges in US

1. Rocky Mountains
2. Appalachian Mountains
3. Cascade Range
4. Sierra Nevada Mountains
5. Catskill Mountains

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Ozark Mountains

Also called Ozark Plateau, is a heavily forested group of highlands in the south-central United States, extending southwestward from St. Louis, Mo., to the Arkansas River. The mountains occupy an area of about 50,000 square miles of which 33,000 square miles are in Missouri, 13,000 square miles in northern Arkansas, and the remainder in southern Illinois and southeastern Kansas. The Ozarks and the adjacent Ouachita Mountains represent the only large area of rugged topography between the Appalachians and the Rockies.

World History According to Students

During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe. Later the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean, and the was called the 6cPilgrim’s Progress. When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they were greeted by Indians, who came down the hill rolling their was hoops before them. The Indian squabs carried porposies on their back. Many of the Indian heroes were killed, along with their cabooses, which proved very fatal to them. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Rocky Mountain Facts

The average snowfall in the mountains near Salt Lake City is 500 inches (over 40 feet!) - that is nearly five times the average snowfall of Juneau, Alaska.

Katherine Lee Bates wrote America the Beautiful after being inspired on the summit of Pikes Peak, near Colorado Springs. Trail Ridge Road, State Road 34 in Rocky Mountain National Park, is the highest continuously-paved road in the U.S.

World History According to Students

The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He lived in Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies and errors. In on of Shakespear’s famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy. In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the King by attacking his manhood. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miquel Cervantes. He wrote “Donkey Hote”. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote “Paradise Lost.” Then his wife dies and he wrote “Paradise Regained.”

Monday, September 27, 2010

quote

"Those who endure conquer."
~A Motto

Sunday, September 26, 2010

quote

"Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear."
~Marcus Aurelius

World History According to Students

Then came the Middle Ages. King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harlod mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc was cannonized by George Bernard Shaw, and the victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. Finally, the Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

quote

"Hard pounding, gentlemen: but we shall see who can pound the longest."
~Duke of Wellington Arthur Wellesley

World History According to Students

In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath. The government of Athen was democratic because the people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn’t climb over to see what their neighbors were doing. When they fought the Parisians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.

Friday, September 24, 2010

quote

"An arch never sleeps."
~Indian Proverb

World History According to Students

Without the Greeks, we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns – Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in “The Illiad”, by Homer. Homer also wrote the “Oddity”, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

quote

"The men who learn endurance, are they who call the whole world, brother."
~Charles Dickens

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

quote

"Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts”
~ James Russel Lowell

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

quote

"Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes.”
~ Buddha

Monday, September 20, 2010

The Dream by Byron

.....
Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being;
.....

Often heard repeated by Abe Lincoln

world history according to students

Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. When Lincoln was President, he wore only a tall silk hat. He said, “In onion there is strength.” Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope. He also signed the Emasculation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment gave the ex-Negroes citizenship. But the Clue Clux Clan would torcher and lynch the ex-Negroes and other innocent victims. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposedly insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

a famous dream

Dream Leads to Nobel Prize

Otto Loewi (1873-1961), a German born physiologist, won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. In 1903, Loewi had the idea that there might be a chemical transmission of the nervous impulse rather than an electrical one, which was the common held belief, but he was at a loss on how to prove it. He let the idea slip to the back of his mind until 17 years later he had the following dream. According to Loewi:


"The night before Easter Sunday of that year I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at 6 o'clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at 3 o'clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered 17 years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a single experiment on a frog's heart according to the nocturnal design."

unusual tale from Vermont

One man's Insurance against premature burial in Vermont
Things are looking up...for someone who's been dead for over 100 years.
Discover Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Vermont, final resting place of Timothy Clark Smith, whose 1893 crypt includes a window to help him escape in case he was buried alive.

Friday, September 17, 2010

a famous dream

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Inspired By a Dream

In the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover, the poet Percy Shelley (whom she married later that year), visited the poet Lord Byron at his villa beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Stormy weather frequently forced them indoors, where they and Byron's other guests sometimes read from a volume of ghost stories. One evening, Byron challenged his guests to each write one themselves.

Mary's story, inspired by a dream, became Frankenstein.

Dudleytown, Ct

In northwestern Connecticut within the town of Cornwall, in the shadow of three mountains, lies the remains of Dudleytown. The small hamlet holds accounts of ghostly tales, demons, unexplained events, and curses coupled with over 400 years of British and American history -- including ties to King Henry VIII, Horace Greeley, General Heman Swift, and General George Washington.

Note from the Connecticut State Police: Those who go, or attempt to go to Dudleytown will be arrested for trespassing and/or parking. The fines start at $75.00 per person and rapidly increase.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Unusual facts about September

September is National Chicken Month.

It is also Cholesterol Awareness Month in America

September 9th is National Teddy Bear Day.

September 16th id National Play-Doh Day.

September 19th is “Talk Like A pirate Day” around the world…an International event.

September 12th is National Chocolate Milkshake Day

The 4th week of September is National Dog Week

Monday, September 13, 2010

The Ides of September - Roman Calendar

You may know that the Ides of March -- the day on which Julius Caesar was assassinated -- was the 15th of March, but that doesn't mean the Ides of a month was necessarily on the 15th. For example, today, September 13, is the Ides of September.

Nursery Rhyme

Monday's Child


Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child must work for a living,
But the child that's born on the Sabbath day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay.
~~Unknown

Sunday, September 12, 2010

The Koran of Islam

We Christens practice abortion and have killed millions of our own unborn,
We Christens drive drunk and slaughter many families of our own on the highway,
We Christens sell drugs, embezzle, and extort our own for greed.

Perhaps one should listen to the good people of Islam and read their Koran before one thinks to destroy it. All religions have followers who fail their God.

Friday, September 10, 2010

quote

"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.”


~~ Oscar wilde

A Ballad Sent to King Richard

.....

Truth is put down, reason is holden fable;
Virtue hath now no domination;
Pity exil'd, no wight is merciable;
Through covetise is blent discretion;
The worlde hath made permutation
From right to wrong, from truth to fickleness,
That all is lost for lack of steadfastness.
....

~~Geoffrey Chaucer

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Poem

Common Cold

.....

Bacilli swarm within my portals
Such as were ne'er conceived by mortals,
But bred by scientists wise and hoary
In some Olympic laboratory;
Bacteria as large as mice,
With feet of fire and heads of ice
Who never interrupt for slumber
Their stamping elephantine rumba.

A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!
Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;
Don Juan was a budding gallant,
And Shakespeare's
plays show signs of talent;
The Arctic winter is fairly coolish,
And your diagnosis is fairly foolish.
Oh what a derision history holds
For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!

~~ Ogden Nash

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

true ancient roman joke

A man meets an acquaintance and say "it's funny, I was told you were dead". He says "well, you can see I'm still alive." But the first man disputes this on the grounds that "the man who told me you were dead is much more reliable than you".

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Poem

I Didn't Go to Chruch Today

I didn't go to church today,
I trust the Lord to understand.
The surf was swirling blue and white,
The children swirling on the sand.
He knows, He knows how brief my stay,
How brief this spell of summer weather,
He knows when I am said and done
We'll have plenty of time together.

~~Ogden Nash

Monday, September 6, 2010

An Ancient Rome history joke

1st Roman Soldier: What is the time?

2nd Roman Soldier: XX past VII!

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Poem

Fleas

Adam
Had'm

~~ Ogden Nash

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Poem

Because I could not stop for Death
by Emily Dickinson


Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

.......


Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

Friday, September 3, 2010

More Julius Ceasar

The chief reason his assassinators gave as a reason to hatch a plot to kill Caesar was the fact that he had failed to stand and greet the senators who later murdered him when they came to the temple of Venus Gentrix to inform him of new honors that had been bestowed upon him.

Apparently a lesson in ungratefulness was in order. Some of Caesar's supporters insisted that he did not stand due to a sudden attack of Diarrhea. .

Thursday, September 2, 2010

I Am! by John Clare

....

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

More Julius Ceasar

Appointed at the age of 17 he was the high priest of Jupiter until the title was stripped from him along with his inheritance and his wife's dowry by his political rival Lucius Cornelius Sulla who seized control of Rome in 82 BC and had himself appointed as dictator.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Alexander the Great

Alexander's horse Bucephalas was a magnificent black stallion that had a white blaze on his forehead.