Get Cynical

These are children who have supposedly been raised by animals: there are monkey boys, wolf girls, gazelle boys and even an ostrich boy. Click on the child’s name to read more about that child. The information available varies greatly from child to child. Where the name is in bold, there is a considerable amount of information here.

This is the eighth-grade final exam* from 1895 from Salina, Kansas. It was taken
from the original document on file at the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society
and Library in Salina, Kansas and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10.Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

The year was 1972. This is the first VCR made in the U.S.A. for consumers. The product flopped horribly ~ of course. Shown in the photos above, is a beautiful example of an end table model. These were large machines and had they had to blend in with the living room decor. The Cartrivision VCR was typically intended to be built into a console style 25″ color TV, a popular screen size at that time. Sets like that were produced by Sears, Montgomery Wards, Curtis Mathes, just to name a few. The third photo is of the interior front of the mechanism.

Very few Cartrivision VCRs were sold new. Thousands were sold surplus through outlets like Olsen Electroncis or private clubs. Initially they were sold here in the San Jose / south bay area (Silicon Valley, where else?). Steve Wozniak had one, as well as the fellows who founded Newtek, makers of the Video Toaster! I wonder if they still have their Cartrivision VCRs?

It’s something near and dear to my heart, audiobooks provided for free from project gutenberg. Some of decent amateur recordings by people, some are group efforts by people all tackling parts of a big work, and some are (horrible of all horribles) mp3s of audiobooks read by computers. This last category is what is widely available to a lot of blind people who order books from the Library of Congress (at least that last trivia bit is my surmise from what the project’s site had implied). There are also a variety of links there to other for free audiobook sites. Worth a gander.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – In the latest Vatican broadside against “The Da Vinci Code”, a leading cardinal says Christians should respond to the book and film with legal action because both offend Christ and the Church he founded.

Cardinal Francis Arinze, a Nigerian who was considered a candidate for pope last year, made his strong comments in a documentary called “The Da Vinci Code-A Masterful Deception.”

Arinze’s appeal came some 10 days after another Vatican cardinal called for a boycott of the film. Both cardinals asserted that other religions would never stand for offences against their beliefs and that Christians should get tough.

This digital collection integrates over 2,300 photographs and 7,700 pages of text relating to the American Indians in two cultural areas of the Pacific Northwest, the Northwest Coast and Plateau. These resources illustrate many aspects of life and work, including housing, clothing, crafts, transportation, education, and employment. The materials are drawn from the extensive collections of the University of Washington Libraries, the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture (formerly the Cheney Cowles Museum/Eastern Washington State Historical Society), and the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle.

So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. It is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. We may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure.