The album art from Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles is one of the most popular album covers in music history. beatles sgt pepper The cover is a collage of more than 60 famous people. Most of the people selected for the collage were requested by The Beatles. For example, George Harrison requested the three Hindu gurus who appear in the collage. Lennon requested Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ. However, Jesus and Hitler were rejected because the record label feared a public backlash. The record label was nervous because of the controversy over the US Butcher Cover a year earlier. Mahatma Gandhi was excluded because EMI was worried about a negative reaction in India. >EMI needed the permission of all living persons in the collage, creating a nightmare for their legal department. All the celebrities in the collage gave their permission. Only one person, Leo Gorcey was removed from the collage because he demanded a payment of $400. The following is the complete list of all the people on the cover of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band:
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Free File: Your Link to Free Federal Online Filing “Free File is the fast, easy, and free way to prepare and e-file your federal taxes online. Can’t make the April 15th deadline? Use Free File to prepare and e-file your extension. Official site of IRS.gov.” Related site: IRS: Frequently Asked Tax Questions and Answers.
The Norwalk virus or Norovirus (the virus that causes the stomach flu) can survive on an uncleaned carpet for a month or more. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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One Monday morning in September last year, Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus medical centre in Rotterdam, stood at the Intercontinental hotel in Malta and told an audience of scientists how he created one of the world’s most dangerous viruses.
In a secure laboratory built to contain harmful pathogens, Fouchier took the H5N1 bird flu virus and mutated it, through some worryingly simple steps, into an airborne strain that spread swiftly among ferrets in neighbouring cages. At first glance, the work might seem bad news for ferrets and little more. But the animals are the best mimic we have for how the virus could infect people, for example, through coughs and sneezes.
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FEMEN Protest Islam Oppression of Women in Paris
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Barack Obama: disputes that the US is in declineIt feels like you are entering a parallel universe. In reality it is just a few short steps down a plank into the neon-lit floating world of a casino ship. The location is Lake Michigan. The town is Gary, Indiana. And the host is the Majestic Star Casino. “Welcome to Majestic Star,” says a croupier. And to post-industrial America, she might add.Many cities and towns across America have been shattered by the demise of mass employment in manufacturing over the last generation. Few have been hit as hard as Gary – once a thriving hub of steel production, and birthplace of the late Michael Jackson, one of the most successful pop stars in history. Some places, such as Pittsburgh, have become showcases of urban reinvention, partly by making the most of the strong medical legacy left by the departing generation of well-paid union workers whose “Cadillac” healthcare packages spawned a robust hospital system.bashingAlmost every city, including Gary, has dug deep to fund a new sporting stadium. Convention centres are also a staple of America’s formula for urban regeneration. The jury remains out on their impact. In contrast, there is a surprisingly broad consensus among state and city officials across America about the economic virtues of gambling. Unlike the titans of football and baseball, whose new stadiums swallow huge chunks of local capital budgets, gaming companies only require a licence to gamble and a few tax breaks. It helps if there is a large population centre nearby – East Chicago virtually merges with Gary at the Illinois state border line.
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We live in a much more democratic world than our great-grandparents. But democracy has always had its trenchant critics, often people of high educational attainment and income arguing that important social and political decisions cannot be left to the uneducated, manipulable masses, who could not be trusted to make decisions for the social good let alone for their own good. Ortega y Gasset, though a liberal and supporter of republican ideals, raised the alarm bells at the beginning of the 20th century, warning of the dangers of mass participation in politics in his The Revolt of the Masses. The American intellectual, Walter Lippmann, articulated this idea by writing in Public Opinion:
the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality.
These voices have become even louder recently by those who contrast the speed with which authoritarian China has been able to deal with the global recession to the raucous wrangling in the US. So has democracy run its course?
We don’t think so.
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Sitting for Extended Periods Could Shorten Your Life
In a recent study, people who reported spending at least 11 hours a day sitting down were 40 percent more likely to die during the three-year study period than those who sat for less than four hours a day. Even when researchers accounted for exercise, weight, and health status, the association between sitting and shortened lives persisted. The findings indicate that regular exercise may not be enough to counter the effects of prolonged sitting. More …
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The War Against Youth
Published in the April 2012 issue
Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance.
In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.
This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human potential has been consistently growing, generating greater material wealth, more education, wider opportunities — a vast and glorious liberation of human potential. In all that time, everyone, even followers of the most corrupt or most evil of ideologies, believed they were working for a better tomorrow. Not now. The angel of progress has suddenly vanished from the scene. Or rather, the angel of progress has been sent away.
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“IS SIN original?” That is the question addressed by Shaul Shalvi, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, in a paper just published in Psychological Science. Dr Shalvi and his colleagues, Ori Eldar and Yoella Bereby-Meyer of Ben-Gurion University in Israel, wanted to know if the impulse to cheat is something that grows or diminishes when the potential cheater has time for reflection on his actions. Is cheating, in other words, instinctive or calculating?
Appropriately, the researchers’ apparatus for their experiment was that icon of sinful activity, the gambling die. They wanted to find out whether people were more likely to lie about the result of a die roll when asked that result immediately, or when given time to think.
To carry out their experiment, Dr Shalvi, Dr Eldar and Dr Bereby-Meyer gave each of 76 volunteers a six-sided die and a cup. Participants were told that a number of them, chosen at random, would earn ten shekels (about $2.50) for each pip of the numeral they rolled on the die. They were then instructed to shake their cups, check the outcome of the rolled die and remember this roll.
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As the World Turns Premieres (This day in 1956)
Soap operas began in the early 1930s as 15-minute radio episodes and continued in that format when they began appearing on TV in the early 1950s. As the World Turns premiered as the first half-hour TV soap. The show, which primarily focused on two professional families in the fictional town of Oakdale, Illinois, ran for 54 years and aired nearly 14,000 episodes. For 20 of those years, it was most-watched daytime drama in the US. What interrupted a live broadcast of the show in 1963? More…
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In January, the town of Spicewood, Texas, ran out of water. It’s a scenario virtually unheard of in modern America, but the state’s worst drought in half a millennium changed that. Now, four times a day, a 7,000-gallon truck rolls into town, a sort of liquid life-support system that’s the only thing preventing a full-scale evacuation.
That’s not going to work in Las Vegas. Nevertheless, Vegas’ main water source, Lake Mead, is nearly tapped out. The water level there will soon drop below one of the city’s two pipelines. So they’re building a third pipe, except this one will come up from underneath the lakebed, like a drain. Even that may not be enough — Lake Mead could be empty as early as 2021. So the city has hatched a scheme for a 300-mile pipeline that will siphon water from the eastern half of the state to the Strip. And if that plan doesn’t work …
It’s a slo-mo ’70s disaster flick that seems too improbable to panic about — cheap, clean water-on-demand is, after all, practically an American birthright. But another birthright (one that we’ve exercised liberally) is the right to move to illogical places: car-dependent exurbs, coastal flood plains and, most recently, very dry cities. Of the past decade’s 10 fastest-growing metro regions, three get less than 15 inches of rain a year, and several of the others are prone to severe dry spells. Yet these cities have grown as if they had all the rain in Seattle — complete with omnipresent lush lawns, swimming pools and golf courses — just as climate scientists are predicting that they’re about to get even drier.
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In the decades after Reconstruction, sporting men came to New Orleans from across the country, drawn to horse racing during the day and to the city’s rampant vice by night. In saloons and honky tonks around Vieux Carre (French Quarter), the liquor flowed as men stumbled out onto streets pulsing with Afro-Caribbean styled music played by street urchins and lit by a system of electric flares. Brothels and gaming houses became so prevalent they were said to occupy nearly all of the city, and in the waning years of the 19th century, a reform movement had begun to gain momentum under the stewardship of an alderman named Sidney Story, a respected businessman and sworn enemy of the sin and depravity that he felt was plaguing the Crescent City.
To pen in the brothels and sporting houses so the police might gain some measure of control over the raging lawlessness, Story crafted legislation in 1897 that designated 16 square blocks just off the French Quarter where vice would be legal. Once the law was passed, hundreds of prostitutes celebrated by staging a parade down Canal Street, marching or riding nude or arrayed in elaborate Egyptian costumes. In self-proclaimed victory, they drank liquor and put on a bawdy display that brought hoots from the men on the streets who followed them into New Orleans’ new playground. Sidney Story saw it as a victory, too, but only until he learned that the district’s happy denizens had named it after him.
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When computers were sexy: Hilarious vintage ads from the early days of the PC
Companies such as Apple have made their name by marketing their products not just as technological tools but as glamorous and fun toys.
But this marketing technique is nothing new, as these vintage adverts from the early days of PCs show.
They portray computers as fun, easy to use – and even sexy, with the help of a few eager-looking models.
Other quirks of the now-outdated ads include the attempt to initiate consumers in the strange world of ‘electronic mail’, and an appearance from the young Bill Gates.
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Originally posted 2012-04-02 12:36:57. Republished by Blog Post Promoter