The date of what is typically recognized as the first Thanksgiving is not precisely known, though it occurred between September 21 and November 9, 1621. The Plymouth Mass. Pilgrims dined with the Wampanoag Indians.

A Calvinist Thanksgiving actually did occur in 1623 and did not involve sharing food with the Native Americans. But in the fall of 1621 the feast lasted three days. Approximately 50 Native Americans attended this feast which included Massasoit and Squanto - the Pilgrim's translator. 52 Pilgrims attended the first Thanksgiving, including John Alden, William Bradford, Priscilla Mullins, and Miles Standish. According to Edward Winslow, a participant in the first Thanksgiving, the feast consisted of corn, barley, fowl including wild turkeys and waterfowl, and venison. Mashed potatoes, popcorn, milk, corn on the cob, and cranberries were not foods present on the first feast table. Rather Lobster, rabbit, chicken, fish, squashes, beans, chestnuts, hickory nuts, onions, leeks, dried fruits, maple syrup and honey, radishes, cabbage, carrots, eggs, and goat cheese are thought to have made up the first Thanksgiving feast. And the pilgrims didn't use forks; they ate with spoons, knives, and their fingers.

• In 1863, two national days of Thanksgiving were declared: One celebrated the Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg. The other began the Thanksgiving holiday we still celebrate today. Sarah Josepha Hale, an American magazine editor, persuaded Abraham Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday. She is also the author of the popular nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb". Abraham Lincoln issued a 'Thanksgiving Proclamation' on third October 1863 and officially set aside the last Thursday of November as the national day for Thanksgiving.

• In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of November, to stimulate the economy by lengthening the holiday shopping season.
• In 1941, Congress stated that from then on, Thanksgiving would take place on the fourth Thursday in November, ensuring that all Americans would celebrate a unified Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November every year.

Plus, did you know turkey was the first meal enjoyed by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin when they were on the moon.

Now you can be the talk of your dinner table this holiday — a perfect turkey tidbit to impress holiday dinner guests.

This article is from NASA, Nov. 21, 2013.

The animation below shows the most common type of gamma-ray burst, thought to occur when a massive star collapses, forms a black hole, and blasts particle jets outward at nearly the speed of light. Viewing into a jet greatly boosts its apparent brightness. A Fermi image of GRB 130427A ends the sequence.

On April 27, a blast of light from a dying star in a distant galaxy became the focus of astronomers around the world. The explosion, known as a gamma-ray burst and designated GRB 130427A, tops the charts as one of the brightest ever seen.

A trio of NASA satellites, working in concert with ground-based robotic telescopes, captured never-before-seen details that challenge current theoretical understandings of how gamma-ray bursts work.

"We expect to see an event like this only once or twice a century, so we're fortunate it happened when we had the appropriate collection of sensitive space telescopes with complementary capabilities available to see it," said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division in Washington.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the cosmos, thought to be triggered when the core of a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel, collapses under its own weight, and forms a black hole. The black hole then drives jets of particles that drill all the way through the collapsing star and erupt into space at nearly the speed of light.

Gamma-rays are the most energetic form of light. Hot matter surrounding a new black hole and internal shock waves produced by collisions within the jet are thought to emit gamma-rays with energies in the million-electron-volt (MeV) range, or roughly 500,000 times the energy of visible light. The most energetic emission, with billion-electron-volt (GeV) gamma rays, is thought to arise when the jet slams into its surroundings, forming an external shock wave.

The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope captured the initial wave of gamma rays from GRB 130427A shortly after 3:47 a.m. EDT April 27. In its first three seconds alone, the "monster burst" proved brighter than almost any burst previously observed.

"The spectacular results from Fermi GBM show that our widely accepted picture of MeV gamma rays from internal shock waves is woefully inadequate," said Rob Preece, a Fermi team member at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who led the GBM study.

NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Burst Mission detected the burst almost simultaneously with the GBM and quickly relayed its position to ground-based observatories.

Telescopes operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as part of the Rapid Telescopes for Optical Response (RAPTOR) Project quickly turned to the spot. They detected an optical flash that peaked at magnitude 7 on the astronomical brightness scale, easily visible through binoculars. It is the second-brightest flash ever seen from a gamma-ray burst.

Just as the optical flash peaked, Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) detected a spike in GeV gamma-rays reaching 95 GeV, the most energetic light ever seen from a burst. This relationship between a burst's optical light and its high-energy gamma-rays defied expectations.

"We thought the visible light for these flashes came from internal shocks, but this burst shows that it must come from the external shock, which produces the most energetic gamma-rays," said Sylvia Zhu, a Fermi team member at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The LAT detected GRB 130427A for about 20 hours, far longer than any previous burst. For a gamma-ray burst, it was relatively nearby. Its light traveled 3.8 billion years before arriving at Earth, about one-third the travel time for light from typical bursts.

"Detailed observations by Swift and ground-based telescopes clearly show that GRB 130427A has properties more similar to typical distant bursts than to nearby ones," said Gianpiero Tagliaferri, a Swift team member at Brera Observatory in Merate, Italy.

This extraordinary event enabled NASA's newest X-ray observatory, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), to make a first-time detection of a burst afterglow in high-energy, or "hard," X-rays after more than a day. Taken together with Fermi LAT data, these observations challenge long-standing predictions.

No big surprise, but I'm Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yah, I'm good if given a pointy object.

Wow! I just went through another "Mandela Effect". This time it was with Ariel Castro. But according to this article he's about to serve life in prison. 

 I remember a month or two ago that he hung himself in jail and died. No Joke! CNN still has a story on it. And the three girls that were held captive by him said "it was in God's hands now."

Does anyone remember this? It was all over the media.

What the hell? Did a dimension that merged with another screw-up and forget to check the internet. Wouldn't that be funny.

I heard it is supposed to be a balmy 33 degrees in upstate NY, sooo...

I know I have a sick sense of humor but holy crap, I can't stop laughing about the next one. Imagine if you saw this guy on the side of the road.

What a whack-a-doodle! Still, I'd be laughing for miles after I saw this fella.

This is one of my favorite holidays. A day where a person can be as creative as they want.
Here is a website that has a directory of Haunted Places. You can check your area for a fun place to go on the 31st.
Also, here is an interesting article about the case that inspired "The Exorcist".

You know me, all-about-the-homemade.

This one is kind-of fun, especially around the holidays, and so easy!

-Cut the top of the milk carton off, wash it thoroughly, and coat the inside of the carton with petroleum jelly. Be sure to coat the corners.
-To melt glycerin, cut them into smaller cubes to fit in a microwave safe bowl. Heat glycerin on high in the microwave, stirring at intervals every 15 seconds until it is completely melted.
-Start with one or two drops of food coloring, and stir thoroughly. Use something like a coffee stirrer. Gradually add the drops until you get the desired color.
-Pour the melted glycerin into the milk carton. Tap gently to make sure there are no bubbles trapped in the carton. Let it cool completely for about 2 hours. Tear the cardboard away when soap is set and using a bench scrapper, slice the block into individual bars.

If you want layers like the bars above; cut the carton long ways. Make your 2 types of soaps and let them set in stages in the carton so they stay separated when the soap solidifies. For example, the soap above probably took a total of 6 hours to solidify, 2 hours for each layer.

-After you add the food coloring, you could then add, ¼ tsp at a time scented oils. Stir thoroughly. You could also use lemon or orange zest to add a scent. Or small amounts of heavy cream.
-If you add a heavy substance like oatmeal or sand, let the soap set a bit, so the added ingredients do not sink to the bottom of the mold. And gently stir the ingredients through the soap.

There are soo many ideas you can do, just search the web. And yes, that is a bag of soap with toy fish in the middle. Cute, right?

I think everyone kind-a felt like that.

Like many Americans, I'm a mutt. I'm a hodge-podge of many ethnicities and religions,
and I don't really prescribe to any. But it is interesting to study how these many different backgrounds have now melted into the average-joe-American.
Plus, living all over the country like I have, can be fascinating to see how each township atmosphere can differ. From New England to the South to the West, each has it's own vibe all rooted in it's ancestry.

The Daily Mail Online out of UK, put out an article about the ethnicities in counties with in the US, according to the 2000 census. It's an nice read.

So, this one time, I was eating salad...

Have you seen this? The Trilithon stones in Tell site, Ba’albek, Lebanon. The enigmas surrounding the Tell site and the colossal stone blocks remain a mystery.

You can see one here in the process of being moved.

Where were those stone blocks quarried; because at a stone quarry a couple miles away is one of those 1,100-ton blocks is still there – its quarrying unfinished. This means someone had the capability and technology needed for quarrying, cutting and shaping colossal stone blocks in the quarry. Then lifting the stones up and carry them to the construction site. They weren’t just let-go and dropped either, but placed precisely in the designated blocked row.

And there they have remained, intact and unshaken in spite of its' 9,000 years and frequent earthquakes, and held together without any mortar…

The western wall of that structure has been reinforced with rows of stone blocks weighing 900 tons each. On top of them is made up of three unique stone blocks weighing 1,100 tons each. Known as the Trilithon, these are the largest cut and shaped construction stone blocks in the world!

How did they build this? Was it alien technology used back then? I laugh at the idea that logs and sand could be used under it, to move it. If that was so, there would be squashed, petrified remnants of it under the one that was in the processed of being moved. It’s important to keep an open mind about these theories because this structure is just too amazing!

wiki entry

Have you seen this? This is absolutely cool, and absolutely crazy. As a cat owner this is just amazing to me.

How'd you like to see these putty 'tats clawing up your furniture :)

If you are out of an item, like furniture polish, you can skip the trip to the store. It is possible to clean your home using what’s already in it. Plus these item are all natural so there aren’t any hazardous (cancerous) chemicals being introduced to your home. Not that I need to mention, it’s also cheaper...

All-purpose cleaner
¼ cup vinegar
1 gallon hot water

Mix these to create an effective all-purpose cleaner. Put it in a spray bottle to make it easier to use.

Disinfectant
½ cup Borax
1 gallon hot water
Few sprigs of thyme (optional) –add the sprigs for 10 min. then strain and let the water cool.

Borax is a natural mineral that kill bacteria, mildew, and mold. Again add it to a spray bottle for use.

Oven Cleaner
1 tblsp. Baking soda
½ tsp hot water

Make a paste. Sponge onto stains and wipe clean.

Toilet bowl cleaner
sprinkle baking soda into the toilet bowl
add less than a ¼ cup of vinegar

Brush and scour the toilet bowel. It will clean and deodorize it.

Tub, sink, and tile cleaner
½ a lemon
Borax

Dip the cut end of the lemon into the borax. Rub the area with the lemon then rinse and dry with a soft cloth.

Furniture polish
Option 1: With a soft cloth wipe with a bit of mayonnaise.
Option 2: Rub the furniture with a cloth that has been dipped in cool tea.
Option 3: Mix 2 parts olive oil with one part lemon juice. Apply to furniture with soft cloth and wipe dry.