BabbleFest

Turns out Ralphie’s mom was right after all. Not about shooting his eye out with his Red Ryder 200 shot carbine action BB gun, but about falling icicles being known to kill people.

According to this Reuters report

Six people have been killed in three days by icicles falling from buildings in a central Russian region, ITAR-TASS news agency reported Tuesday.

San Diego County and Palm Springs – you know, southern California San Diego County and out-in-the-desert Palm Springs - have been  hit by a snowstorm accompanied by rain, sleet, hail and ice.

A couple of days ago Palm Springs was 85 degrees.

Clearly, more proof of man-made global warming.

You hear people complaining all the time:  it always rains on the weekend.

Science says otherwise. A recent study concluded more rain comes down mid-week than on weekends:

The study was carried out by atmospheric scientist Thomas Bell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and his colleagues. They looked at data collected by NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite from 1998 to 2005. This method has advantages over rain data collected with ground-based gauges that can vary from one gauge site to the next.

They found it rains on average more between Tuesday and Thursday than from Saturday through Monday. The clearest day of the week was Saturday, with nearly twice the rainfall on the wettest day, Tuesday afternoon.

Just when the 9-11 twoofers have me convinced that the US has cornered the market on complete and utter ignorance and stupidity, I come across this survey involving 3,000 residents of England, raising the hope that maybe other countries have as many drooling imbeciles per capita as we do:

23% of those British surveyed believe Winston Churchill is a myth, a fictional character who never really lived.

I am not making this up.

47% think King Richard the Lionheart is a mythical character. 23% think nurse Florence Nightingale is made up, and 3% believe Charles Dickens, one of England’s most celebrated writers of fiction, is himself a fictional character. Also on the list of people believed to be myths are the Duke of Wellington and Mahatma Gandhi.

On the other hand, 58% know that Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective, was a real person. Which would come as a surprise to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer who created Holmes.