Hump Day Odds and Ends

There are lots of things available to blog about today, so how about we just do a sweep of a few odds and ends to help us get over the hump and start the long, slow coast to Friday ...

Today is the day on which, in 1939, John Steinbeck published his Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, about the adventures of the Joad family as they fled the Oklahoma dust bowl for the promise of California. There may have been other fruity adventures involved as well ...

Today, March 14th, is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, born on this date in 1879. One outgrowth of his theories deals with the fact that light travels faster than sound, which explains why a lot of people look pretty bright until you hear them speak (see Santorum, Rick). Mr Einstein is also good for lots of great cartoons, like this one ...

... and this one ...

Speaking of Einstein and of things mathematical, today is "Pi Day" (3/14), your way of celebrating the relationship between a circle's circumference and its diameter ... although why you'd want to celebrate that is beyond me. One is reminded of the old Hee-Haw joke about the formula pi-r-squared ... everyone knows it's wrong, because pie are round, and cornbread are square, ha, ha. And speaking of Hee-Haw and cornbread, how about this classic film clip ...

From the What on Earth?? Department comes this interesting headline: Tide Detergent Being Stolen from Stores Across the Country. No one seems to know why this should be so, although I strongly suspect it may have something to do with amateur attempts at money laundering.

Southern conservatives appear to have given GOP presidential wannabe Rick Santorum big primary wins in Mississippi and Alabama. If they're waiting for the South to rise again, they could probably pick a better way to go about it.

And finally for today, it was on this date in 1950 that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (or FBI) introduced its "Ten Most Wanted" list. The list today actually contains only eight fugitives, Osama bin Laden having been reduced to fish food by the Navy SEALs, and racketeer/murderer James J. Bulger now enjoying a vacation at Club Fed at the expense of taxpayers like you and I.

The "Ten Most Wanted Fugitive" program grew out of a 1949 wire service news story about the toughest criminals the FBI wanted to capture. The story drew so much attention from the public that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover - never one to pass up a good publicity move - approved the official "Ten Most Wanted" list the following year. As of 2011, 465 criminals included on the list had been apprehended, located, or (so long, Osama) killed ... 153 of them as a result of tips received from the public.

And that's it for today. Enjoy 3/14 ... it is, after all, easy as "pi" to do so.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo