[These are actual excuse notes from parents (including original spelling) from some schools in Texas.]

My son is under a doctor's care and should not take P.E. today. Please execute him.

Please excuse Gloria from Jim today. She is administrating.

Carlos was absent yesterday because he was playing football. He was hurt in the growing part.

Megan could not come to school today because she has been bothered by very close veins.

Please excuse Ray Friday from school. He has very loose vowels.

Please excuse Mary for being absent yesterday. She was in bed with gramps.

Please excuse Tommy for being absent yesterday. He had diarrhea and his boots leak.

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Thought it would be interesting to look at some of country music’s and biggest stars and the jobs they held before becoming famous. Faith Hill Martina McBride both sold t-shirts for a time. Faith sold Reba McEntire t-shirts during Fan Fair in 1987. Martina sold Garth Brooks t-shirts in the early 90’s

Kenny Chesney worked as a restaurant valet in Nashville. After he became a star, one of the valets he handed his keys to was Chuck Wicks.

Alan Jackson was a shoe repairman, starting when he was just 12 years old.

Before appearing on American Idol – Kellie Pickler worked for 3 years as a carhop at a North Carolina Sonic restaurant.

Clint Black sold newspaper subscriptions in his hometown of Houston when he was 14. He says "One time, a man slammed a door in his face and screamed, 'I don't want no damn paper." He said he forced himself to knock again and was able to tell him how great the paper was and ended up selling him a subscription."

Blake Shelton painted houses. One of his clients was the writer of 'Heartbreak Hotel'.

Clay Walker worked in a tire factory. He also sold shoes and worked as a motel night clerk before landing his record deal.

Joe Nichols hustled frozen meat out of the back of a truck in the 100-degree heat of Nashville one July. "He said it was bad that he’d walk halfway up the driveway and people would come outside and shake their heads, saying 'No, get back in the truck."

Trace Adkins worked as an oil worker for five years, busting his forehead open by a snapped cable and injured his leg by an exploding fiberglass tank. He was also stranded on an offshore rig during a hurricane.

Johnny Cash picked cotton at the age of 8. He says unless you were really concentrating when you picked the cotton balls you’d get stung by the prickers. After a week or two, your fingers were covered with little red wounds, some of them pretty painful."

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Murphy’s Law – if anything can go wrong, it will. There are some variations of it, but who’s Murphy? He was an Air Force engineer working at Edward’s Air Force Base in 1949 on a project to see how much sudden deceleration a human body could withstand in a crash. When they were doing some testing, Murphy found that a critical component had been wired wrong and he complained about the technician that did the wiring, saying “if there’s any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.”

The project manager kept a list of notes of things that had been done incorrectly during the project – he called them laws and the wiring mistake took on the name Murphy’s Law.

On the day of the experiment when the man who successfully rode the deceleration sled to a stop, pulling 40 g’s, he told reporters their good safety record on the project was because of their firm belief in trying to avoid Murphy’s Law.

News and magazine articles picked up on it and soon Murphy’s Law was a part of speech.

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Who invented toothpaste?

Actually nobody really knows. It’s something that has no definite birth date, but its history extends back more than 5-thousand years. Back in ancient Egypt, people used a mixture of powdered ashes, myrrh, powdered egg shells and pumice - flavored with honey, fruit or flowers and used their finger to clean their teeth. The toothpaste of ancient Persians included crushed oyster shells and burnt gypsum. Over hundreds of years ingredients like brick powder, chalk, ground lead, ground china and soap were commonly found in toothpaste. It wasn’t until 1873 that the Colgate company introduced Colgate Dental Cream... It came in a jar and smelled nicer than anything that was used before it. Since then, toothpaste companies have added Fluoride, whiteners, cleaners, foaming agents, polishers and humectants. That’s an additive that keeps the toothpaste from becoming hard inside the tube.

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If you had a lot of time on your hands and you wanted to do something really special – something the world would remember you for – what would you do? Something athletic? Something humanitarian. Maybe you could set up some kind of foundation or scholarship. If I had the money I’d love to do something like that. Maybe the Dale Mussen Scholarship Fund. I’d love that. Someday.....but for Australian Les Stewart, the world is going to remember him because of his typing. Lots of typing. Lots of numbers.

This guy spent 15 years, from 1983 to 1998, typing out all of the numbers from one to one million (in letters not numerals), simply because he, "wanted something to do."

He typed for 20 minutes, "every waking hour", on the hour, for 15 years until the job was done.

But maybe even more bizarre than his world record achievement, Les threw out all but two of the 19,890 pages he typed over those fifteen years.

He just put them in the recycling bin, because he says there’s just too many things in his house. But he did keep the first and the last page.

He's getting into the Guinness Book of World Records, and he has to have some kind of documentation. So they're giving him credit for his previous record...typing the numbers one to one million in numerals. He spent 10 years doing that.

Here’s a guy that spent 25 years typing numbers. Think he could use a date?

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Every second Saturday in May is Miniature Golf Day. This Saturday is the second annual celebration. Where was the first miniature golf course? It was back in 1927 when Garnet Carter built the first miniature golf course on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee. He did it to draw traffic and attention to his popular hotel and its full-length regulation golf course, but after a while his miniature course became so popular, more people wanted to play on it than on the regulation course. With the success came problems. His miniature golf course was made of natural grass and because so many people were turning out to play, all that traffic trampled it down until it was un-playable. So Carter came up with an idea for an artificial fiber surface to play on. That led to an explosion of new miniature golf courses throughout the west into California as well as the Northeast. In fact, by the fall of 1930, more than 25 million people were miniature golf fans. And really a lot of it was because you really didn’t need a whole of lot of skill to play. With some luck, even beginners have a good chance of beating a seasoned player.

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You’re familiar with the story of how Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in 1865 – just days after the end of the civil war. It was John Wilkes Booth who was able to sneak into the presidential box and fire a single shot from a Derringer into the back of Lincoln’s head, timing it so that he fired the shot during a roar of laughter during the comedy “Our American Cousin”. Nobody in the audience heard the shot and thought it was part of the act when booth jumped to the stage and shouted in Latin “the south is avenged”. Lincoln died the next morning, but it wasn’t until 12 days later that booth was tracked to a Virginia barn. The barn was set on fire and booth was shot to death by federal troops.

One story you may not have heard is that years earlier the Lincoln and booth families came together with a much different result. Edwin Booth – John’s brother – and like John was also an actor. But Edwin was the premier Shakespearian actor of his day who performed Hamlet to sold-out crowds in New York and London. One night while waiting for a train in Jersey City, New Jersey a well dressed young man lost his footing and fell between the platform and an approaching train. Edwin locked his leg around a railing, grabbed the man by the collar and pulled him to safety, saving his life. The name of the man he saved was Robert Todd Lincoln – the president’s son.

A strange irony that while one brother killed the president, the other brother saved the president’s son.

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It’s pretty routine these days among athletes, but years ago it was thought to be a physical human impossibility. Although many had come close no one had ever run a mile in under four minutes until Roger Bannister. Many people had tried. They wanted their name in the history books, but it wasn’t until a 25-year old Oxford University medical student came along and finished the mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds was the barrier finally broken. Bannister was a world class competitor. He was the mile British champion in 1951 and 1953 and as he prepared for the 1954 season, he used his medical background to research the mechanics of running and trained himself using new scientific methods he developed on his own. On the day he set the record, there was a stiff wind and it may have been an advantage in his final kick to the finish line.

He went on to win the British and Empire championships that year and the European title in the 15-hundred meter event. At the end of the year he retired from athletic competition and recounted his experiences in the book the four minute mile. Bannister went on to become a neurologist and in 1975 was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Roger Bannister’s sub-four minute mile came on this date, May 6th, 1954.

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In these days of video cameras and digital photos, the Brownie Box Camera may be just a distant memory. You might have one stored away in an attic somewhere. I’m not sure how easy it would be to find film for one anyway. But the very first Brownie Camera was introduced more than a hundred years ago in 1900. Up until then, photography was just too complicated for ordinary people...but George Eastman made it easy. His box camera had a simple lens that could focus on anything 8 feet away or beyond....it was portable and cost just a dollar. It was loaded with a roll of film that could take 100 small circular pictures and after you snapped the last picture, you would send the whole box to the factory in Rochester. They would develop the film, send you the snapshots and return the camera to you reloaded with film all for a dollar. They used the slogan, “you press the button, we do the rest.” That was more than a hundred years ago...and funny how what goes around comes around. It’s almost the same idea as those throw away cardboard cameras of today. It made George Eastman a very rich man, but he took his own life in 1932. Next to his body was a note that said...”To my friends, my work is done....why wait?” I guess he didn’t think about digital cameras.

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They say dogs are man’s best friend and it’s been that way for centuries. Their excellent hearing is probably one of the reasons – making them perfect for protection against enemies, especially at night when it’s hard to see. You’ve heard the terms watch dog or guard dog. They alert us to possible danger.

Dog’s natural instincts as a pack animal also make them nearly a perfect pet because their loyalty and devotion to other dogs in their pack are similar to the human traits of love and friendship. Dogs seem to view humans as members of their pack.

And that’s why so many dog owners say they have a special bond with their dogs and consider them a best friend, a companion or a member of the family.

As a result, we pamper them – spending billions of dollars a year. Since the mid 1990’s, Americans spending on their pets more than doubled from 17 to 38.4 billion dollars. Americans spend more money on dog food than they do on baby food.

33 percent of American dog owners say they talk to their dogs on the phone or leave messages on an answering machine while they’re away. 62 percent of dog owners say when they send a greeting card....birthday.....Christmas.....whatever.....they sign it from themselves and their dog.

It’s a shame that they have relatively short lives. Generally, larger dogs live only 7 to 8 years. Some small terriers can live to 20. The longest a dog has ever lived with reliable documentation – an Australian cattle dog by the name of Bluey who died in 1939 at the age of 29.

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For 41 years it held the title of the world’s tallest building. At 102 stories and 1250 feet high – add another 200 feet if you include the lightning rod on top – the Empire State Building brought pride and sense of hope to New York City and the country during the depths of the Depression when many were unemployed and prospects looked bleak. Just construction of the building itself was symbolic because it employed as many as 34-hundred workers on any given day. And it went up fast – just over a year to build, under budget at a cost of 40-million dollars. There were some periods during construction when it went up an incredible four and a half stories a week. Turns out the idea for the Empire State Building began as a competition between Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors, to see who could build the taller building. Chrysler had already begun work on the famous Chrysler Building. Not to be outdone, Raskob put together a group of well-known investors, including former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith. If you look at the building we’re in – the Rand Building in Buffalo and compare it to the Empire State Building – they’re very similar. The Rand Building was completed in 1929 – at the time it was the tallest building in Buffalo and many historians say it was the inspiration for the Empire State Building – just a taller version

In 1972, the Empire State Building lost its title as world's tallest building to the World Trade Center, which itself held the title for only a year. Today the honor belongs to Taiwan's Taipei 101 building, which stretches 1,670 feet into the sky.

It was on this date in 1931, President Herbert Hoover officially dedicated the Empire State Building, pressing a button from the White House that turned on the building's lights.

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Sometimes it pays to be quick to the punch. That was the case for a guy named George Selden of Rochester, New York. In 1895, he applied for and received a patent for the internal combustion car engine even though he didn’t even have a working model. He wasn’t even an inventor, but he was smart enough to know a patent would be worth millions. Other inventors such as Eli olds and the Duryea brothers not only had working models, they were driving around in their own home built cars. But by 1903 all American automakers were paying royalties to Selden for a patent he was just smart enough to get before anyone else. There was one exception – a young inventor named Henry Ford who refused to pay. A series of lawsuits were launched and it took years, but in 1911 a court of appeals ruled that the Ford Motor Company was not infringing on the Selden patent. It was the beginning of the end to Selden’s royalties.

By the way, George Selden’s father was Henry Selden who Abraham Lincoln asked to be his vice president, but he turned it down. Otherwise he would have become president following Lincoln’s assassination.

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Amazing how many things are discovered accidentally 

 

  Scientists in the late 1800’s were experimenting with electron rays and what they would do when reflected off of metal when German scientist Wilhelm Rontgen happened to put his hand in front of the rays and saw the bones of his hand projected on the wall creating the first x-ray.  

Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was researching the flu   in 1928 when he noticed that a blue-green mold had infected   one of his peetree dishes - and killed the staffel-coccus   bacteria growing in it giving us penicillin.  

The microwave oven came along in the 1940s. Microwaves were being used to power Allied radar during WWII. It was after an engineer noticed a candy bar in his shirt pocket had melted that he realized there was another use for microwaves.  

Potato chips were invented in 1853 when chef George Crum trying to satisfy a customer who kept complaining his french fries were too thick sliced a potato paper-thin and fried it to a crisp.  

Artificial sweeteners were invented because the scientists working on unrelated projects forget to wash their hands and happened to taste the sweetness on their fingers. Saccharin in 1879, cyclamate in 1937 and aspartame in 1965.  

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It was in 1890 with only 32 dollars and a carton of soap, a shipment of umbrellas and a box of baking soda that William Wrigley put his name to a company that became famous for chewing gum. It was while giving away free samples of chewing gum with each can of baking powder he sold, he found people were more interested in the chewing gum. So he dumped the baking powder and sold the gum instead. According to Wrigley, advertising and promotion were the key to a product’s success. And boy did he advertise. He said advertising is like running a train. You’ve got to keep shoveling coal into the engine because once you stop; the engine slows down and eventually comes to a dead stop.

By The time of his death at the age of 70 in 1932, Wrigley had spent more than 100-million dollars on advertising. By 1915, he had built chewing gum factories in Toronto, Berlin, London, Sydney, Australia and in Brooklyn. His packages were printed in 37 languages and production reached 40-million sticks a day, always selling for five cents a pack. During world war one, when he found out some retailers were selling his gum for A dime, he took out ads that said anyone charging more than a nickel was a wartime profiteer.

During the 1920’s, chewing gum became less of a passion for Wrigley and began dabbling in other businesses such as coal mining, transportation, hotels, ranching and even the movie industry, but his greatest love was baseball. He bought the Chicago Cubs, spent millions making it one of the model franchises in the majors. The team won the national league pennant in 1929, but never won a world series during his lifetime. And in all his businesses, he was always the boss. He was asked what would happen if his company’s board of directors disapproved of one of his decisions, he said he’d have to get himself a new board.

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Conceived in the 1940’s, designed in the 1970’s, built in the 1980’s, it was on this date (April 25th) in 1990 that the Hubble telescope was placed into orbit by the crew of the space shuttle Discovery. A major problem during its design though was that the lenses were incorrectly calculated, so the first images were blurry. A repair mission three years later basically outfitted Hubble with glasses. It worked and since then Hubble has been sending back images of the universe ten times clearer than any telescope on earth could deliver. It’s about the size of a bus; it’s powered by the Sun and orbits the Earth once every 97 minutes. Hubble has recorded a comet’s collision with Jupiter, provided a look at the surface of Pluto and shown views of distant galaxies that up until a decade ago, scientists could only imagine. It provides so much information that in just a week it would fill a collection of books two thirds of a mile long. It’s named after American astronomer Edwin Hubble whose research provided the basis for the big bang theory of Earth’s creation.

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The first mall in Western New York was the Boulevard Mall, which opened in 1962. There are 50-thousand malls in the United States. Some things about malls you might not know.

Most malls try to keep the number of places to sit to a minimum. It prevents people from loitering. But more importantly, if people are sitting, they’re not shopping.

When malls have escalators, they’re placed strategically to force shoppers to pass the maximum number of storefronts.

Most of the larger malls have bends and turns because shoppers typically won't walk towards something if it appears to be more than a tenth of a mile away.

If you have a tough time figuring out how to find your way thru a mall – there’s a reason for it. They don’t want shoppers to make a quick exit.

The average mall shopper stays for 80 minutes and spends $75 each visit.

The largest mall in the United States is the Mall of America near Minneapolis with over 500 stores.

But even bigger than the Mall of America is the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada.

It’s the largest mall in North America and fourth largest shopping center in the world with 800 stores, 58 entrances, more than 110 places to eat, parking for 20-thousand vehicles and employs more than 23-thousand people. The mall even has 3 radio stations.

There are two A & Ws, two Baskin Robbins, two KFCs, two Arbys, two Dairy Queens, three Orange Juliuses, three McDonalds, but surprisingly – it has only one Starbucks.

Southdale Center in a suburb of Minneapolis is the oldest mall in the United States opened in 1956 and is still operating.

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It was inspired by the success of the Barbie doll – it debuted in 1964 and it was one of the most successful toy introductions in American history. Not so much the toy itself - it was all the accessories that went with it that earned the company millions. And since it was a doll directed at boys, Hasbro instead called it an action figure. They did just aggressive advertising – every boy just had to have one. The prototype was actually a Ken doll with a few facial changes. Then they gave him a moveable, muscular body. And then they made him just a little bit taller than Ken. The original plan was to make four different dolls – one for each branch of the military – but Hasbro’s advertising agency said they should use just one name for all the dolls because it would be easier to advertise. They also gave him a scar on the right side of his face as a trademark so it couldn’t be copied. But how about a name? The doll’s creator was looking for a name generic enough to apply to every branch of the military and he found that name while watching a movie on TV one night. It was a 1945 movie starring Robert Mitchum and Burgess Meredith called “the story of G.I. Joe”

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Today is the 39th annual Earth Day. The first one was April 22nd, 1970 at a time when cities were buried under their own smog and polluted rivers caught fire. Now Earth Day is celebrated annually around the world. It started as a day of just recognizing the importance of the environment, but has evolved into a world-wide campaign to protect the environment. We still have plenty of problems, but we’ve come a long way since then starting with President Richard Nixon’s creation of the EPA with a mission to protect the environment and public health.

One of the first environmental acts by Congress was in 1971 when they restricted the use of lead-based paint in homes and on cribs and toys.

Next was a ban on the cancer-causing pesticide DDT.

25 years later as a direct result of that ban, the bald eagle was removed from the endangered species list.

In 1972, the United States and Canada agreed to clean up the Great Lakes, which contain 95 percent of America’s fresh water. Congress passed the Clean Water Act, limiting raw sewage and other pollution flowing into rivers, lakes and streams.

Then came the phase out of leaded gasoline and fuel economy standards. Tail-pipe emission standards for cars led to the introduction of catalytic converters.

In 1976 – the EPA began phasing-out the production and use of cancer-causing PCB’s.

One event that really opened people’s eyes to the importance of protecting the environment happened right here in our backyard. Residents living in a section of Niagara Falls found out their homes, their school, their churches, their playgrounds were located in what had been a chemical dumping ground known as Love Canal. Their kids were getting sick because chemicals were leaching through the ground from barrels that were buried there years before. Love Canal and other incidents like it led to Congress’ creation in 1980 of the Superfund to clean up hazardous waste sites. It made polluters responsible for cleaning up their mess.

We’ve come a long way since then, but still more work needs to be done. We need to get Clay to recycle his cans and bottles because it all makes a difference.

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In warm weather, 6th president John Quincy Adams often went skinny-dipping in the Potomac River before dawn.

9th president William Henry Harrison was inaugurated on a bitterly cold day and gave the longest inauguration speech ever. Within a few days, the new president caught a cold that soon became pneumonia. He died exactly one month into his presidential term, the shortest in U.S. history.

John Tyler, 10th U.S. president, was the father of 15 children - 8 by his first wife, and 7 by his second wife. Tyler was 70 years old when his 15th child was born.

17th U.S. president Andrew Johnson never attended school. When he was 17, his future wife and first lady, taught him to write. He also wore suits that he custom-tailored himself.

Both ambidextrous and multilingual, 20th president of the United States James Garfield could write Greek with one hand while writing Latin with the other.

29th President Warren Harding played poker at least twice a week, and once gambled away an entire set of White House china. His advisors were nicknamed the "Poker Cabinet" because they often joined the president at the poker table.

Harry S Truman’s middle name is S. It represents two of his grand-fathers, whose names both had "S" in them.

Did you know George W. Bush, and his wife Laura got married just three months after they first met? They were introduced at a backyard barbeque by mutual friends. Their first date was at a miniature golf course.

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It happened while most of the city was still asleep. At close to 8.0 on the Richter scale, the great San Francisco earthquake shook the city awake at 5:13 a.m. immediately killing hundreds of people as it toppled hundreds of homes and buildings. As aftershocks continued to cause more and more damage, fires broke out all over the city and because broken water mains kept firefighters from stopping them, firestorms began to sweep the city. U.S. Army troops were called in to help fight the fires and enforce a dusk-to-dawn curfew and soldiers were authorized to shoot-to-kill anybody they found looting. With the fires out of control, firefighters dynamited some whole city blocks to create firewalls. Three days later, 20,000 refugees trapped by the massive fire were evacuated onto a navy warship.

It took six days to get most of the fires put out, but then began the job of looking for the victims, if any were still alive in the devastated buildings. It was estimated that some 3,000 people died as a result of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and the resulting fires. In the end, almost 30,000 buildings were destroyed, including most of the city's homes and nearly all the central business district.

It happened on this date, April 18th, 1906.

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