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| April 24, 2011 |
MY JOHNNY MATHIS PLAYLIST |
| JOHNNY MATHIS Born September 30, 1935 This October, 2011, Johnny will again be performing in one of his favorite places--the UK! Johnnys last visit to the UK was in September, 2006. |
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| White-fronted Goose (Anser albifrons) |
| RESEARCH IN AUSTRALIA
In 1838 the Goulds sailed to Australia intending to study the birds of that country and be the first to produce a major work on the subject. They took with them the collector John Gilbert. They arrived in Tasmania in September, making the acquaintance of the governor Sir John Franklin and his wife. Gould and Gilbert collected on the island. In February 1839 Gould sailed to Sydney, leaving his pregnant wife with the Franklins. He travelled to his brother-in-law's station at Yarrundi, spending his time searching for bowerbirds in the Liverpool Range. In April he returned to Tasmania for the birth of his son. In May he sailed to Adelaide to meet Charles Sturt, who was preparing to lead an expedition to the Murray River. Gould collected in the Mount Lofty range, the Murray Scrubs and Kangaroo Island, returning again to Hobart in July. He then travelled with his wife to Yarrundi. They returned home to England in May 1840. After his wife's death in 1841 Gould's books used illustrations by a number of artists, including Henry Constantine Richter and Joseph Wolf. |
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| SEAL ROCK |
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| THE SIEGE OF VICKSBURG
After much bloody fighting east of Vicksburg, in May 1863 Grant's army reached the Vicksburg fortifications. After two unsuccessful direct assaults on the Rebels, Grant decided the best tactic was to lay siege: "I now determined upon a regular siege ~ to 'outcamp the enemy,' as it were and to incur no more losses. The experience of the 22d convinced officers and men that this was best, and they went to work on the defenses and approaches with a will. With the navy holding the river, the investment of Vicksburg was complete. As long as we could hold our position the enemy was limited in supplies of food, men and munitions of war to what they had on hand. These could not last always." |
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| THE SIEGE OF VICKSBURG |
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| The siege of Vicksburg lasted from May 18 to July 4, 1863.
Admiral Porter bombarded the city with his naval cannons, while Grant had his men dug a series of thirteen trenches to the very face of the Confederate fortifications, isolating Vicksburg and sealing its doom. Over sixty thousand feet of excavations, manned by Union troops, were completed. By July, Vicksburg's Confederate General Pemberton and his soldiers were hungry, sick and despaired of rescue. On July 3, General Pemberton asked Grant for surrender terms; Grant's answer was "unconditional surrender." Grant rejected Pemberton's proposed surrender terms and promised to send amended terms of surrender that night to Pemberton that he accepted early on July 4. Grant immediately sent food to the hungry Confederate soldiers. |
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| SURRENDER OF VICKSBURG--July 4, 1963 The 13th, 15th and 17th Corps, Commanded by General Grant, and assisted by the navy under Admiral Porter, accept the surrender of Vicksburg. |
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| VICKSBURG LEVEE AFTER SURRENDER |
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| UNION FORTIFICATION AFTER SEIGE (Actual Photo) |
 | The largest living organism ever found is a honey mushroom, Armillaria ostoyae. It covers 3.4 square miles of land in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, and it's still growing!
To go into the forest where this giant makes its home you would not look at it and see a huge, looming mushroom. Armillaria grows and spreads primarily underground and the sheer bulk of this organism lies in the earth, out of sight. Occasionally, during the fall season, this specimen will send up golden-colored "honey mushrooms" that are the visible evidence of its hulking mass beneath. Scientists have not yet begun to attempt to estimate the weight of this specimen of Armillaria. |
| Armillaria ostoyae is quite common on both hardwood and conifer wood in forests west of the Cascade crest. The mycelium attacks the sapwood and is able to travel great distances under the bark or between trees in the form of black rhizomorphs ("shoestrings"). |  |
| This organism is estimated to be 2,400 years old. The fungus was written about in the April 2003 issue of the Canadian Journal of Forest Research. While an accurate estimate has not been made, the total mass of the colony may be as much as 605 tons. If this colony is considered a single organism, then it is the largest known organism in the world by area, and rivals the aspen grove "Pando" as the known organism with the highest living biomass. |
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In 1877 this 'man' and the product name were first used as a trademark by Henry Crowell at his mill in Ravenna, Ohio. Crowell and 7 other mill owners formed the American Cereal Company of Chicago in 1891. In 1901 the name of the company was changed to the trademark name first used by Crowell. Who is this 'trademark' man, and what is the name of his product?
??? PASS YOUR MOUSE OVER THE QUESTION MARKS FOR THE ANSWER! |
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| Wheel of Fire |
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| The House of Dr. Gachet in Auvers |
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| The House of Pére Lacroix in Auvers |
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| Edo--once also spelled Yedo or Yeddo--is the former name of the Japanese capital Tokyo, and was the seat of power for the Tokugawa shogunate which ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868. | |
| The One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, the last masterwork of the ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Hiroshige (also known as Ando), is a series of landscape ukiyo-e prints whose subject matter is views of the city of Edo and its outskirts.
It is composed of 118 prints designed by Hiroshige I, one print by Hiroshige II and a Table of Content, totaling 120 prints as a complete set. The series, along with his Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, is not only the most renowned polychrome woodblock prints of famous placesby Hiroshige, but also, with its bold compositional contrast between foreground and background and assimilation of the Western linear perspective, represents an apex of the landscape ukiyo-e prints of the Edo period. |
Its superb artistic quality was also recognized in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century, and the marked influence it exerted on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters such as Monet, Van Gogh and Gauguin is well-known.
Furthermore, since the Tokyo Association for the Crafts of Traditional Woodblock Printmaking completed its project of reprinting the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo in 2003, the number of exhibitions and publications related to the series has risen. At the same time, new scholarly works on its development of pictorial compositions and its place in a wider historical background have been undertaken in recent years, showing its continuing vitality as an object of research. |
ONE HUNDRED FAMOUS VIEWS OF EDO (TOKYO) NUMBER FORTY-FOUR |
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| View of Nihonbashi Tori l-chome |
| It is a hot summer day in the middle of the Main Street of Edo, just south of Nihonbashi. Almost everyone seems intent on escaping the sun and is hidden under hats or parasols. Only an old man to the right reveals his mouth, even his teeth, as they prepare to sink into a tiny yellow Makuwa melon, chilled and peeled by the peddler below.
Beyond him to the left a delivery boy in well-ventilated attire is hidden by his trayload of stacked noodle boxes from the soba shop Tokyoan (the white noren in the center). The curious assemblage under a huge two-tiered parasol is a group of Sumiyoshi dancers--so-called because of their origins as seasonal minstrels from Sumiyoshi Shrine near Osaka, who would perform celebratory shrine dances in return for donations. |
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| BLUE DOCTOR |
| The blue doctor is found only in South and Central America. The blue doctor can often be seen at open places, forest clearings, and woodland edges. These lovely butterflies often rest on the undersides of leaves and fly off only to circle back to the same spots.
A favorite flower growing in the blue doctor's range is the OXALIS. Abundant in South America, oxalis flowers produce a copious supply of nectar and attract bees, butterflies, and other insects. The oxalis is a perennial well suited to rock gardens and indoor cultivation. |
| WHO ARE THESE FELLOWS? Answer below. |
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| Akita | Aloha |
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| Segnosaurus ("Slow lizard") is a genus of theropod dinosaur belonging to the family Therizinosauridae. | |
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Sinornithoides ("Chinese Bird Form") is a genus of troodontid theropod dinosaur. It lived during the Early Cretaceous (Aptian to Albian stages, around 120 to 100 million years ago).
It is one of the smallest known theropods, approximately 1 meter long (3 ft). It lived in China, and probably ate invertebrates and other small prey. | |
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Sinornithosaurus ("Chinese bird-lizard") is a genus of feathered dromaeosaurid dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Period (Middle Barremian) of the Yixian Formation in what is now China.
Sinornithosaurus was a member of the family Dromaeosauridae, a group of agile, predatory dinosaurs with a distinctive sickle-shaped toe claw, which also includes Deinonychus and Utahraptor. It lived about 125 million years ago in the Barremian age of the Lower Cretaceous period, which makes it among the earliest and most primitive dromaeosaurids yet discovered. The presence of vaned feathers on Sinornithosaurus is consistent with feather evidence from other dromaeosaurs. | |
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| LEOPARD pixdaus.com |
| HERB ALPERT AND THE TIJUANA BRASS |
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 | The loquat, also called Japanese Plum or Japanese Medlar, is native to China, and has been cultivated in Japan for over 1,000 years. They may be eaten out of hand, used in fruit salads, and may be used in almost any recipe that calls for peaches or apricots. Japan, Israel and Brazil are leading producers. |
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| The yellow/orange fruit is pear shaped and about the size of a plum, with a slightly downy skin, and contains 3 to 5 large brown seeds. The juicy flesh is white to orange with a pleasantly tart flavor. |
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| LOQUAT BLOSSOM |
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| Chinese painting of loquat and mountain bird. |
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Usquebaugh, uisge beatha, uisce beatha.
What is it and where did it come from?
??? PASS YOUR MOUSE OVER THE QUESTION MARKS FOR THE ANSWER! |
| DISCLAIMER: Material used in Bitts and Bytes is gathered from various sources--mainly the World Wide Web.
Authorship cannot always be credited nor the source defined. Authenticity of material is assumed to be correct, but is not guaranteed. |  |