This animal cartoon character, an anthropomorphic dog who typically wears a turtle neck and vest, debuted in 1932 as Dippy Dawg. By what name is he known today?
Azure is a bright, cyan-blue color named after the mineral Lapis lazuli. It is often described as the color of the sky on a clear day.
The name of the stone came to be associated with its color. The French azur, the Italian azzurro, the Polish lazur, Romanian azur and azuriu, the Portuguese and Spanish azul, Hungarian azúr, and the Catalan atzur, all come from the name and color of lapis lazuli.
Azure also describes the color of the mineral azurite, both in its natural form and as a pigment in various paint formulations. In order to preserve its deep color, azurite was ground coarsely. Fine-ground azurite produces a lighter, washed-out color. Traditionally, the pigment was considered unstable in oil paints, and was sometimes isolated from other colors and not mixed.
Source
Alan J was first, and correct, with:
Lapis Lazuli.
Mark. said:
Azurite.
Dave answered:
Lapis lazuli.
Randall wrote:
Azurite
Cal in Vermont replied:
Azurite. Also chessite and some others. It has been known of for a really long time having been mentioned in Pliny the Elders Book of Natural History. Which is a hoot to read what with discussions of the wonderful medicinal properties of bull and boar pizzle which is what you think it is. And so forth.
Jim from CA, retired to ID, responded:
Azure is a bright, cyan-blue color named after the mineral Lapis lazuli. It is often described as the color of the sky on a clear day.
Dave in Tucson wrote:
I was going to facetiously answer "Azurite", then looked it up for the hell of it. Imagine my surprise when I learned azurite was actually correct!
Amazing Deep Blue & Green Azurite with Malachite
Specimen ...
Michelle in AZ said:
Azurite
DJ Useo answered:
"Azurite" says my gem knowledgable mate. Personally, I had no idea.
Deborah, the Master Gardener, replied:
I found conflicting information: Lapis lazuli and azurite. I'll go with the latter, since "azure" is in the name.
Hot, but not enough to turn on the a/c. Fingers crossed that next week's "excessive heat event" doesn't force me to do so.
Daniel in The City responded:
Lapis lazuli
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Music: "Happy Woman Blues" from the album HAPPY WOMAN BLUES
Artist: Lucinda Williams
Artist Location: Nashville, Tennessee
Info: "Lucinda Williams, whose musical style defies easy categorization, recorded her first album of original songs in 1980, supported by a six-member band. Her songs are a mix of traditional and alternative country, folk, and blues that reflect her Louisiana roots. The Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau gave Happy Woman Blues an A-minus and described Williams as a 'guileless throwback to the days of the acoustic blues mamas' who 'means what she says and says what she means.'"
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $10 (USD) for 11-track album
• The Ramones were an odd-looking group to many people in the American Midwest. On one tour, they had been in a van for hours, and when they finally got out - somewhat bedraggled - and went into a Texas gas-station mini-market, the gas-station attendant turned to tour manager Monte A. Melnick and said, "It's so nice of you to take care of those retarded boys." Other people grouped the Ramones with such bands as the Sex Pistols because they played punk rock. Of course, the Sex Pistols were loud and crude in their personal lives, and they trashed motel rooms. In the 1970s, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Ramones stayed in a motel where the Sex Pistols had stayed, and Mr. Melnick saw this note behind the desk: "Watch out for the Ramones. They are dangerous." Actually, the Ramones didn't trash many motel or hotel rooms - they simply weren't making enough money to pay for the damage. Not making much money led to some creative cost-cutting maneuvers. They discovered that in exchange for a few autographed photographs, they could often get free meals at such restaurants as the Cracker Barrel, and so they carried around a lot of autographed photographs just for that purpose.
• Americans have an international reputation as litterbugs. An example: The German pianist Walter Gieseking was riding on a train to Cleveland when he bought an apple from a boy and began to peel it. Soon he had a couple of feet of peel hanging from the apple and nowhere to dispose of it. Taking thought, he threw the peel under the seat, then told his companions, "Like the Americans." Another example: Oberlin College accompanist W.K. Breckenridge was traveling in Switzerland when an American companion threw some litter on the ground. Immediately, a Swiss boy picked it up and stuffed it into his pocket. "You don't want that, do you?" asked the American. "No," answered the Swiss boy, "but I don't want you to get arrested."
• Jerry Clower used to tell funny stories at meetings at which he sold fertilizer. At one meeting, someone in the audience taped him, then sent the tape to MCA Records. The people at MCA telephoned Mr. Clower and told him that the next time he was in the vicinity of Los Angeles to come in and talk with them about recording for them. Mr. Clower replied, "I ain't never gonna be in that vicinity. Fellow, you don't leave Yazoo City, Mississippi, and just drop by Los Angeles." However, Mr. Clower kept talking, and he discovered that MCA Records had contracts with country singers Loretta Lynn, Bill Monroe, Jeannie Pruett, Ernest Tubb, and Conway Twitty, so he signed a five-year contract, and 30 days later he had his first gold record.
• As general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Edward Johnson sometimes led by having good spirits. Once, when the Met was on tour and leaving Bloomington, Indiana, on a train on a rainy morning with nearly everyone's spirits low, Mr. Johnson brightened everyone up by going from car to car in the train singing, "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'."
Wit
• Gioacchino Rossini had a ready wit, which came in handy for defeating bores. A bore asked him to look at two songs he had written and recommend one for publication. Mr. Rossini looked at the first song, then told the bore, "I'd print the second one. It couldn't possibly be worse than the first." Another bore asked him to listen to two piano pieces he had composed and tell him which one he liked better. Mr. Rossini listened to the first piece, then said, "Never mind playing the second. I like it better already."
NBC opens the night with a FRESH'Little Big Shots', followed by an 'Little Big Shots', then a FRESH'The Wall', followed by another FRESH'The Wall'.
ABC begins the night with a RERUN'America's So-Called Funniest Home Videos', followed by RERUN'Celebrity Family Feud', then a RERUN'Press Your Luck', followed by a RERUN'Match Game'.
The CW offers a RERUN'DC's Stargirl', followed by a RERUN'Supergirl'.
Faux has a FRESH'NASCAR Cup Series', then pads the left coast with local crap.
MY recycles an old 'How I Met Your Mother', followed by another old 'How I Met Your Mother', then an old 'Big Bang Theory', followed by another old 'Big Bang Theory', then still another old 'Big Bang Theory', followed by yet another old 'Big Bang Theory'.
AMC offers the movie 'The Godfather: Part II', followed by a FRESH'Killing Eve', then another 'Killing Eve'.
BBC -
[6:00AM] HIDDEN HABITATS - Australia's Red Centre
[6:30AM] PLANET EARTH: THE BLUE PLANET - Coral Seas
[7:30AM] PLANET EARTH: THE BLUE PLANET - Tidal Seas
[8:30AM] PLANET EARTH: THE BLUE PLANET - Coasts
[9:30AM] KNOWING
[12:30PM] ERIN BROCKOVICH
[3:30PM] THE PERFECT STORM
[6:30PM] TWISTER
[9:00PM] KILLING EVE - Beautiful Monster
[10:00PM] TWISTER
[1:30AM] THE PERFECT STORM
[4:30AM] DOCTOR WHO - Voyage of the Damned (ALL TIMES EST)
Bravo has 'Real Housewives Of Atlanta', followed by a FRESH'Real Housewives Of Atlanta', then a FRESH'Married To Medicine: LA', followed by a FRESH'Watch What Happens: Live'.
Comedy Central has the movie 'Get Hard', followed by the movie 'Step Brothers'.
FX has the movie 'The Fate Of The Furious', followed by the movie 'The Fate Of The Furious', again.
IFC -
[6:15A] Monty Python and the Holy Grail
[8:15A] The Watch
[10:30A] Kingpin
[1:15P] Bad News Bears
[3:45P] Caddyshack
[6:00P] Zoolander
[8:00P] Beetlejuice
[10:00P] Beetlejuice
[12:00A] Zoolander
[2:00A] Monty Python and the Holy Grail
[4:00A] Life of Brian (ALL TIMES EST)
Sundance -
[6:30am] Law & Order
[7:30am] Law & Order
[8:30am] Law & Order
[9:30am] Law & Order
[10:30am] Law & Order
[11:30am] Stripes
[2:00pm] MacArthur
[5:00pm] The Green Berets
[8:00pm] Midway
[11:00pm] Heartbreak Ridge
[2:00am] MacArthur
[5:00am] Hogan's Heroes
[5:30am] Hogan's Heroes (ALL TIMES EST)
SyFy has the movie 'Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix', followed by the movie 'Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince'.
Mister Rogers would have liked it: a day to be extra kind to your neighbors.
The day was Friday -- Pennsylvania's second annual 1-4-3 Day, an occasion when state officials encourage people to share their acts of kindness and gratitude. This year, a focus was first responders and essential workers who are at high risk of contagion during the coronavirus pandemic.
The initiative began in 2019 when Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf declared the 143rd day of the year a day of kindness in honor of the state's beloved kindness patron and promoter, Fred Rogers, who spent most of his life in and around Pittsburgh. The number had special meaning to Rogers, reflecting the number of letters in his favorite phrase, "I love you."
The University of Pittsburgh also marked the day, recalling the legacy of Fred Rogers by highlighting acts of kindness in the local community.
It was the politics of pandemic that took over Real Time with Bill Maher tonight with Michael Moore as the marquee guest.
"The only way they are going to pull it off is if he's able to cancel the election or postpone it," the Fahrenheit 9/11 director said of Donald Trump's chances at the ballot box in November against Joe Biden after this COVID-19 spring that has seen almost 100,000 deaths so far from the respiratory ailment. "I'm certain that's what's going on in his head right now," Moore worried as he has before, pledging that people will need to take to the streets on January 20, 2021 to "get this motherfucker out."
"The only way Republicans can win is if they cheat," Moore declared to Maher as he stated that most Americans are actually in sync fundamentally with progressive policies.
Not that the Oscar winner was advocating to Trump rivals that things should to go that far or that they take the ultimate bait and switch as an easy blunted move - as you can see in this excerpt.
"None of us should take him for granted," Moore told the HBO host of Trump's reign of error continuing, despite the Art of the Deal co-author's disastrous fumble of the coronavirus crisis. "We need to behave as is if he will win a second term," Moore added with a jab at Democrats who whine at such language.
Wikipedia is to institute a new code of conduct to battle what the firm called "toxic behaviour" by some volunteers.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation that runs the site, voted on new measures that will be finalised by the end of the year.
Wikipedia is written and updated by volunteers.
Many, particularly women and members of the LGBTQ community, have complained of abuse and harassment from other editors.
This has led to a form of harassment where, after one volunteer adds to a page, another volunteer will remove or change that work moments later, forcing the first editor to redo their work and leading to editing battles.
The somber face of Britain's King Henry VII was recently given a digital makeover, in an astonishingly photorealistic reconstruction.
Graphic artist Matt Loughrey produced the image of the deceased king from Henry VII's death mask, which was cast in 1509. Loughrey is the founder of My Colorful Past, a project that restores and colorizes archival images of historic figures.
Long before the invention of photography, wax masks helped to preserve a person's likeness more accurately than paintings or illustrations did. Loughrey's restoration of Henry VII adds significant detail and natural colors to the molded mask impression, transporting a long-dead face from the distant past into the present.
Henry VII ascended the throne in 1485, when he defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. When he died on April 21, 1509, at the age of 53, he had long suffered from asthma and gout, according to the website for Westminster Abbey, the royal church in London where British kings and queens are crowned, and where many (including Henry VII) are later entombed. The church's collection holds the head of the effigy that mourners carried at Henry VII's funeral; the effigy's face, which appears gaunt and careworn, is "particularly lifelike," and was probably made from his death mask, according to the Abbey.
Though the effigy was already lifelike, the new digital reconstruction is even more so. The project took about two months to complete and involved a combination of software, custom algorithms and meticulous image adjustments that were done manually, Loughrey said.
Nearly six months after the U.S. Air Force announced it wanted more pilot applicants to take advantage of its height waiver program, the service has decided to ditch the initial height requirement altogether to court more aviators.
The service gave notice Friday that it recently removed its minimum height requirement for officer applicants.
The service revised standards in 2015 to allow those shorter than 5 feet four inches or taller than 6 feet five inches to apply for a waiver.
With the height requirement eliminated, the Air Force's medical and operations communities "will apply an anthropometric screening process to individual applicants for placement in an aircraft they can safely fly as they pursue a rated track," according to the release.
A pilot gets full anthropometric measurements: buttocks to knees; knees to ankles; and seated height, which should be between 34 and 40 inches. The measurement also includes "functional reach, wingspan, body mass, weight-to-height ratio, waist-to-hip, hip-to-knee and more," the service has stated.
U.S. presidential adviser (cough, cough) Ivanka Trump's praise of an Indian teenager's bicycle ride home hundreds of kilometres away is drawing criticism in India for being insensitive to the plight of impoverished migrant workers struggling in a lockdown.
The girl carried her father on the back of her bicycle for about a week for 1,200 km (750 miles), the two said on Saturday, one of the many out-of-work migrant families leaving the big cities for their homes in other parts of India because the shutdown has sapped their savings.
"15 yr old Jyoti Kumari, carried her wounded father to their home village on the back of her bicycle covering +1,200 km over 7 days. This beautiful feat of endurance & love has captured the imagination of the Indian people and the cycling federation!" Ivanka, daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump (R-Lazy), tweeted on Friday night.
But opposition political figures, as well as some commentators, in the country of 1.3 billion said Jyoti's desperate journey home because of a crippling transport shutdown was hardly something to celebrate.
"Her poverty & desperation are being glorified as if Jyoti cycled 1,200 KM for the thrill of it. Government failed her, that's hardly something to trumpet as an achievement," Omar Abdullah, a former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, tweeted on Saturday in response to Ivanka's message.
On just one day this month, 50 Tanzanian truck drivers tested positive for the coronavirus after crossing into neighboring Kenya. Back home, their president insists that Tanzania has defeated the disease through prayer.
All the while, President John Magufuli has led a crackdown on anyone who dares raise concerns about the virus's spread in his East African country or the government's response to it. Critics have been arrested, and opposition politicians and rights activists say their phones are being tapped.
The country's number of confirmed virus cases hasn't changed for three weeks, and the international community is openly worrying that Tanzania's government is hiding the true scale of the pandemic. Just over 500 cases have been reported in a country of nearly 60 million people.
While many African countries have been praised for their response to the coronavirus, Tanzania is the most dramatic exception, run by a president who questions - or fires - his own health experts and has refused to limit people's movements, saying the economy is the priority.
The president has refused to shut churches, mosques and other gathering places, such as pubs and restaurants. He has questioned the accuracy of tests done by the national laboratory, saying the swabs used may themselves be tainted with the virus.
What if one of the strangest, most unsettling findings in particle physics turned out to be an illusion?
Since March 2016, two mysterious signals from Antarctica have baffled researchers. Twice now, a high-energy particle has seemed to burst straight up out of the ice, tripping detectors on a balloon-borne experiment floating overhead. It's as if the particles had passed through the entire Earth unscathed. But that should be all but impossible: None of the known particles, which collectively are described in a physics model known as the Standard Model, can make that trip at high-energy levels.
Particles that are otherwise identical can carry different loads of energy, and the amount of energy a particle is carrying can change its behavior. Ghostly, low-energy neutrinos can slip through all of the planet's crust, molten rock and iron unbothered. But they don't pack enough punch to create the signals found in Antarctica. High-energy neutrinos are powerful enough to create the signals. But since these higher-energy neutrinos have larger "cross sections" - they impact a bigger region of surrounding space - they tend to bang into things rather than slip through them. It's the difference between tossing a marble through a fishing net and trying to shoot a beach ball through the same gaps. No known high-energy neutrino should be able to pass through the entire Earth and emerge from Antarctic ice.
Physicists termed the two detections the "ANITA anomaly," after NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), the airborne detector that picked up the signals. They compared ANITA's findings to results from IceCube - a much larger neutrino observatory in Antarctica - and found more support for the notion that they had found something no one had seen before. And they took seriously the idea that ANITA might have stumbled onto something beyond the Standard Model.
Now, in a new paper published April 24 in the journal Annals of Glaciology, a joint team of physicists and glaciologists argue that the ANITA anomaly likely isn't evidence for new physics. Instead, it may simply be a trick of the ice. Complex, hidden structures in the white expanse might have reflected radio waves in unexpected ways, fooling ANITA's radio receivers into registering the particle as if it were coming from inside Earth.
The official newspaper of North Korea has denied that the regime's leaders can magically bend time and space, putting to bed a long tradition used to idolise the mystical powers of Kim Jong-un and former leader Kim Jong-il.
In the latest sign that the secretive regime is turning away from myth-making about its leaders, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper this week denied that the Kim family are masters of "chukjibeop", a method of folding space and travelling great distances in a short period of time.
Chukjibeop is one of the myths that has been used by the North to deify its leaders.
The newspaper, the organ of the North's ruling party, said: "In realistic terms, a person cannot suddenly disappear and reappear by folding space."
On Thursday, an official at South Korea's unification ministry said that the current regime's trend of demystification is "noteworthy".
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