Happy October! Before harvest, and popular in autumn around Halloween, fall festivals kick off a corn maze craze. Called maize mazes in the United Kingdom and labyrinths in Europe, corn mazes are a great way for farms to create income from tourism. This competition factor among Halloween fields of horror are also why these puzzles carved into the corn grow increasingly complex each year. The point is to solve the maze by finding a route from the start to finish, but many have “activities” and “secret” coded clues on dead end routes setup inside the maze. There are usually bridges, overlooking the maze both for viewing and for those folks who are a bit lost and need a little help with directions. Corn mazes range from family-friendly with additional attractions like hay rides, petting zoos, pumpkin patches and play areas for children, to very scary, haunted-house-type corn mazes. The farms decide on themes, the designs start on graph paper and then are plotted over the fields before planting. Farms and orchards grow specialty corn that is taller than most and very dense. These temporary works of corn art are usually huge, up to 45 acres, and are harvested in November. Here’s a look at the corn maze craze past and present, from aerial photos showing the entire theme-design, bird’s eye views from above, to inside the haunted corn maze. [77 Photos]
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US Census Bureau:Halloween: Oct. 31, 2012 “Halloween, which dates back to Celtic rituals thousands of years ago, has long been associated with images of witches, ghosts and vampires. Over the years, Halloween customs have changed dramatically. Today, Halloween is celebrated many different ways, including wearing costumes, children trick-or-treating, carving pumpkins, and going to haunted houses and parties.”
The first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, or the Bill of Rights, were adopted as a single unit on Dec. 15, 1791. They constitute a collection of mutually reinforcing guarantees of individual rights and of limitations on federal and state governments. The Bill of Rights derives from the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the colonial struggle against king and Parliament, and a gradually broadening concept of equality among the American people. – Provided by Reference.com
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PETA wants sign to memorialize fish killed in crash
An Irvine resident representing the group requests that the city place the sign recognizing the suffering of hundreds of saltwater bass that died at the spot.
An Irvine resident is requesting that the city install a sign to memorialize the hundreds of fish killed in a traffic crash in early October as they were being taken to Irvine Ranch Market.
In the letter, Dina Kourda, on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, asks the city’s street maintenance superintendent to place the sign at the site of the crash on Walnut and Yale avenues.
The sign would read, “In memory of hundreds of fish who suffered and died at this spot,” to remind tractor-trailer drivers of their responsibility to the animals who are “hauled to their deaths every day,” according to the letter provided by PETA.
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The mouthpiece newspaper of China’s Communist Party has launched a blistering attack on The New York Times, accusing it of “faking” and “distorting” news and being a government “propaganda tool”.
The 1,500 word People’s Daily editorial appeared to be a direct response to The New York Times’s explosive exposé last week about the $2.7 billion (£1.67 billion) “hidden fortune” of the family of Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao.
But in a humiliating about-turn, within hours of the People’s Daily publishing its lengthy assault on the American newspaper’s journalistic integrity it emerged that much of the Chinese newspaper’s critique had in fact been plagiarised from other sources.
The Beijing-based People’s Daily turned its canons on the 161-year-old newspaper on Monday, three days after The New York Times published the highly embarrassing results of its one-year investigation into Mr Wen’s family’s finances.
“For a long time, the New York Times has [had] one line printed on its masthead, ‘All the news that’s fit to print’,” noted the People’s Daily opinion piece, under the headline: ‘New York Times: scandals stack-up, prestige declines’.
“This century-old newspaper claims its news is authentic and reliable, yet there have been quite a few [cases of] plagiarism and fake news in recent years,” added the combative piece published on the website of a newspaper which is controlled, funded and censored by the Chinese government.
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SpaceX Success Milestone for Commercial Spaceflight
The first commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has ended with the unmanned space capsule’s successful reentry and splashdown, marking a major milestone in the privatization of spaceflight. This was the first of 12 missions California-based company SpaceX is contracted to carry out for NASA, which retired its fleet of space shuttles in 2011. The Dragon capsule delivered about 1,000 lb (450 kg) of cargo to the ISS and brought back broken machinery and medical samples collected from the astronauts aboard the station over the past year.
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Today we show one of my favorite Indigenous construction methods . . . Adobe Bricks. Adobe bricks are made from mud and are dried in the sun. This was a popular building style in New Mexico. Often times the Adobe walls are up to two feet thick, and so the houses are very well insulated. If you visit New Mexico today, many of the homes have that Adobe Style, but in fact are standard frame houses covered in stucco, made to look like Adobe Homes. I guess Adobe construction techniques are not suited for today’s build-em-fast-and-cheap construction methods.
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Gaza: A Way Out?
This week’s arrival in Gaza of the Emir of Qatar and his entourage of fifty Mercedes revived the frenetic pace of activity in the coastal enclave, which has been uncommonly quiet in recent months. On his day-trip spent laying foundation stones for cities, hospitals, and schools all bearing his name, the Emir, Sheikh Hamad Al Thani, came pledging gifts of $400 million in reconstruction, and promised to end the political and economic isolation Gaza has endured since the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas took power six years ago.
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Safety Lessons From the Morgue
Susan P. Baker, an epidemiologist who has spent more than four decades trying to find out why people are dying and what could be done to stop it.On a bright, chilly morning in February, Susan P. Baker sat in her fifth-floor office at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, staring at her computer screen. She had just completed a search for the word “sightseeing” in a federal database of U.S. aviation crashes between 2000 and 2010. Now she was scrolling through a seemingly endless list of grim case histories of people who were killed or injured when their sightseeing aircraft or balloon crashed.A month before, she read a news story about the crash of a tour helicopter in Nevada. Five people died, including a couple celebrating their 25th anniversary. “It made me sad and angry,” she recalled. “Such senseless deaths!” So Baker, an epidemiologist, did what she’s been doing for more than four decades. She decided to find out why people were dying and what could be done to stop it.
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How the ‘Having It All’ Debate Has Changed Over the Last 30 Years
A new grandmother catches a glimpse of what parenting looks like today.
I recently cleared my calendar for nearly a month, deleting it all: work, meetings, appointments, dinners, movies, and even workouts at the gym. It felt at once liberating and luxurious, and a little bit scary. I had done this a few times before, twice for much longer times when our sons were born and once for a sad, open-ended time when my father was dying.
This would be a happy time. Our son and daughter-in-law had arranged to bring their first-born across the country for two separate two-week visits. They would both have work; could I take care of Jack? “He’s really active for a one-year-old!” warned our son. “You forget I raised you and your brother at the same time,” I replied.
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Originally posted 2012-10-31 10:45:39. Republished by Blog Post Promoter