In honor of Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary, here is  Google’s image for today:

In honor of Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary, here is Google’s image for today-

In honor of Sesame Streets 40th Anniversary, here is Cookie Monster-

I came across this Google Doodle today-

Here is a blog posting with more information-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/04/big-bird-google-doodle-ce_n_345030.html

DID YOU KNOW?

1. A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.

2. A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.

3. Every time you lick a stamp, you consume 1/10 of a calorie.

4. A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.

5. A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.

6. Every person has a unique tongue print.

7. According to German researchers, the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week.

8. After spending hours working at a computer display, look at a blank piece of white paper. It will probably appear pink.

9. An average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in a lifetime.

10. A fingernail or toenail takes about 6 months to grow from base to tip.

11. An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.

12. It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.

13. Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood, we only have 206 in our bodies.

14. Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his
    lifetime.

15. By age sixty, most people have lost half of their taste buds.

16. By the time you turn 70, your heart will have beat some two-and-a-half billion times (figuring on an average of 70 beats per minute).

17. Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.

18. Every human spent half an hour as a single cell.

19. Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.

20. Fingernails grow faster than toenails.

21. Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour and about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.
    

Amazing Lung Facts

• At rest, a person breathes about 14 to 16 times per minute. After exercise it could increase to over 60 times per minute.

• New babies at rest breathe between 40 and 50 times per minute. By age five it decreases to around 25 times per minute.

• The total surface area of the alveoli (tiny air sacs in the lungs) is the size of a tennis court.

• The lungs are the only organ in the body that can float on water.

• The lungs produce a detergent-like substance which reduces the surface tension of the fluid lining,
  allowing air in.

Amazing Heart Facts

• Your heart is about the same size as your fist.

• An average adult body contains about five quarts of blood.

• All the blood vessels in the body joined end to end would stretch 62,000 miles or two and a half times around the earth.

• The heart circulates the body’s blood supply about 1,000 times each day.

It had been snowing for hours when an announcement came over the high school intercom: “Will the students who are parked on University Drive please move their cars so that we may begin plowing.”

Twenty minutes later there was another announcement: “Will the twelve hundred students who went to move 26 cars, return to class.”

Hans Christian Ørsted (b. 14 August 1777 in Rudkøbing, Denmark, d. 9 March 1851 in Copenhagen) was a Danish physicist and chemist who is best known for discovering that electric currents can induce magnetic fields, which is an important part of electromagnetism. He shaped post-Kantian philosophy and advances in science throughout the late 19th century.^[1]

Ørsted founded Selskabet for Naturlærens Udbredelse (SNU), a society to disseminate knowledge of the natural sciences. He was also the founder of predecessor organizations that eventually became the Danish Meteorological Institute and the Danish Patent and Trademark Office. Ørsted was the first modern thinker to explicitly describe and name the thought experiment.

A leader of the so-called Danish Golden Age, Ørsted was a close friend of Hans Christian Andersen and the brother of politician and jurist Anders Sandøe Ørsted, who eventually served as Danish prime minister (1853-54).

My Mom by Roxanne Lorenz

My mom was a beautiful person both inside and out. She was loved and admired by everyone she met.
When I was just an infant I contracted the whooping cough. Since I had trouble breathing, she sat up all night for many nights in a row, holding me upright so I could breathe.
She always made matching outfits for my sister and me and sometimes my brother.
She would always come to my rescue when I was in trouble. One year I was tormented daily by a schoolmate on my way home from school. When I came home crying, my mother said she would shake the bully out of her boots.
The next day my mom waited behind a bush for the mean child to torment me. Then she jumped out, picked her up and shook her.
My mom was a great teacher. She loved to read me great literature. We often sat at the kitchen table, where she would read stories focusing on strong moral values. Some favorites where writings by Abraham Lincoln, poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, If by Rudyard Kipling, Shakespeare, and of course the Bible.
She thought it important to teach me these things all the time.
She would also give me advice about men. She would say men like the trill of the chase and encouraged me to play hard to get. She said it was like an English fox hunt.’ Would it be any fun if the fox lay down at the hounds feet?’’, She said. To demonstrate she lay on the floor and said ”Here I am!!” When I tried this on my future husband he thought it a certain rejection.
She loved to laugh and make people laugh and told funny stories. My favorites were of her childhood. She told me one time, egged on by her brothers, she climbed a tree in her fathers cherry orchard. She had a slingshot. When a mean neighbor bent over, she aimed, and sent a cherry sailing and it hit its mark.
Her father told her to always treat a gun as if it where loaded. She decided to test a gun before she used it to put one of the chickens out of it’s misery, but blew a hole through the mattress.
She liked to make fun of people who committed what she called a faux parson speaker at church once messed up and said,’ If you see a bad man shun him, if you see a good man emulate him!”
She always told my sister and me to be concerned with our appearance. She would say ” suffer to be beautiful’’; this seemed to apply mainly to our hair. We had to endure many sessions of pulling; prodding, plaiting, and perming.She would twist hair into ringlets with rags.She made us wear brush rollers to bed.
One day Julie and I got into mothers henna and used it on ourselves. Though the results were less than ideal our mother took it all in stride.
My mother had a flair for the dramatic. When I asked her if there really was a tooth fairy, my mother waltzed into the room in the middle of the night in blue gossamer formal carrying a wand.
For years my mom and I would go on shopping excursions at the mall. We would mostly window shop, and have a leisurely lunch where we would sit and talk. Those where happy times.
My mother was always busy. She would sew, made puppets for Primary, crotchet, cook and garden. Her rose garden was admired my all and still exist today. I have my own rose garden which she helped me plant.
My mother taught me how to sing, and helped me memorize verse after verse and rewarded me with candy bars.
Once in awhile my mother became obsessed with doing one thing. One of the most memorable was what I like to call the Midas touch. She painted everything she could think of gold. Picture frames, dresser knobs, jewelry boxes, mirror frames, heater vents, and even faucets. Why, I will never know, but she made me laugh.
My favorite times with my parents were birthdays and holidays. We spent everyone we could together. When I was younger Thanksgiving and Christmas be at my parents home. Later it was at my home. Every year I would cook. Christmas Eve was our favorite night of the year. My parents would come over for oyster stew, eggnog and Christmas tree loaf. Then my husband, children and I would have a Scripture reading and sing carols. Amanda played her flute and Tony his guitar in more recent years. Last year my parents were at facilities, and we came to them and sang.
Though it makes me sad that this will never happen again in my life, I take comfort in the wise words of a friend,’ you just have to make new memories.”
Whenever I see a beautiful garden, it makes me think of my mom. I will always treasure the words of a primary song I sang as a little girl.

My Grandmother’s Old Fashioned Garden

Written By: Unknown
Copyright Unknown

My grandmother dear
Has a garden,
Old fashioned and quaint
As can be
The flowers so rare,
That none can compare,
‘Neath the plum and apricot
And cherry tree.

Would you like me to
Show you the garden?
Then follow me now
And we’ll go
‘Round the old grape-vine arbor,
Back of the walk,
Where the birds and the butterflies
And flowers grow.

The daisies and lilies
Are telling
Of grandmother’s kind,
Tender care
Sweet William and peas,
Heliatrope and heartsease,
And violets, modest
‘Tho fragrant and fair.

I still long for
My grandmother’s garden;
With hollyhocks,
Stately and tall
And sometimes in my dreams
I see her, it seems,
My dear grandmother
Standing there close to the wall.

In my grandmother’s
Old fashioned garden,
There are flow’rs
Of every hue
Daffodils, pansies,
And hyacinths
And old fashioned pinks
Are there too

I belong to
My grandmother’s garden,
I was picked
From the family tree;
So out in my grandmother’s
Old fashioned garden,
If you come there
You will find me.

All of the grandchildren think she was the best grandmother in the world. We will never forget her……

This is Google’s image for today-

Written by José Wilson Miranda
Friday, 19 June 2009
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Sean Goldman The 16th Federal Court of Rio de Janeiro decided that American David Goldman can live with his 9-year-old son during the week as long as the boy stays in Brazil. It was a victory of sorts, a decision by the Brazilian justice favoring American David Goldman, who is trying to take to the US his son, Sean Goldman, who was abducted by his own mother from the US to Brazil 5 years ago.
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The mother, Bruna Bianchi, died while giving birth to a daughter last year, but the woman’s new husband, a powerful Brazilian lawyer, has been able to prevent Goldman from taking his son home.
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The new decision by Rio’s Federal Justice also stipulates that Sean is to spend Sundays with his Brazilian stepfather, João Paulo Lins e Silva. The boy’s Brazilian family lawyer informed, however, that they are going to appeal the decision.
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The same judge who issued this last ruling, Rafael Pereira Pinto, had determined earlier that the child be returned to his biological father to be taken to the US, but that order was overruled by the Brazilian Supreme Court, which also refused to deal with the case and sent it back to be decided by Rio’s Regional Federal Court (TRF).
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Sean is being disputed in the courts by the stepfather, whose family the Lins e Silvas, is a very rich and influential family in Brazil. The previous ruling by judge Pereira Pinto had ordered that the boy be given to the father in 48 hours. The Supreme, however, on intervening has also noted that there is no doubt that “the minor needs to once again have contact with the father as soon as possible.”
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Sérgio Tostes, the Lins e Silva’s lawyer, informed that he intends to appeal to the Rio’s TRF but recognized that the new determination is more suitable to Sean’s Brazilian family aspirations. They want to prevent the boy from suddenly moving to the United States, something that according to the attorney would be a violence against the boy’s own wishes.
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Said Tostes: “The judge’s decision is totally extravagant and shows his acknowledgment that he made a mistake when he ordered a trip in less than 48 hours and compliance to an agreement in that country, out of his jurisdiction. For the family, this is something better, since he will not need to travel to the United States.”
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Tostes handed out to the Justice, this week, a report prepared by a psychologist hired by Lins e Silva where it’s shown that Sean wishes to stay in Brazil. While the document has no juridical value Tostes believes that it might help his case and he encourages David Goldman to get his own psychologist to also hear the boy.
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In a tape made by the psychologist and released by Lins e Silva, Sean calls Lins e Silva his father and insists that he wishes to stay in Brazil. The boy also complains that this biological father has skipped some visitations with him.
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According to the psychologist Bianca Zacher, general secretary of the Brazilian Society of Juridical Psychology, heard by daily O Estado de S. Paulo, the child’s Brazilian family might be adding to the boy’s suffering by making him talk again. She says that is important that the boy be heard, but this should be done seldom and with much tact .
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“The child,” she observes, “relives the traumas every time he exposes himself and needs to tell his story, which is suffering.” She also criticized the interview’s publication. “This child has already been overexposed,” Zacher argues.
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Sean was born in New Jersey and lived there until the age of 4, when his mother, Bruna Bianchi, took him for what should have been a brief vacation to Brazil. Bruna, however, never went back to the US and ended up marrying Lins e Silva. Today, a age 9, the kid lives in Rio with the stepfather, the maternal grandmother and the little sister who was born last year.
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Some friends of Goldman in the US believe that the father would have a hard time to leave everything in the United States to go live right now in Brazil to comply with the new ruling. They say that he is very busy in New Jersey where he makes a living organizing fishing boat rides for tourists.
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The decision over the return of Sean could take a long time. Rio’s Regional Federal Court still hasn’t scheduled hearings to rule on the case.

From Brazzil Magazine