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| Pancakes on Wednesdays |
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Welcome to Pancakes on Wednesdays. Wednesday September 3, 2003 |
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Here is an amalgamation of trivial facts and seemingly useless data. Do not forget to hit the hyperlinks. We have links, lots of them. 
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| SNOLLYGOSTER |
| A shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician. This is another of that set of extroverted and fanciful words that originated in the fast-expanding United States of the nineteenth century (I see a snollygoster as a outsized individual with a carpetbag, flowered waistcoat, expansive demeanour and a large cigar). These days it’s hardly heard. Its last burst of public notice came when President Truman used it in 1952, and defined it, either in ignorance or impishness, as “a man born out of wedlock”. Many people put him right, some quoting this definition from the Columbus Dispatch of October 1895, with its splendid last phrase in the spirit of the original: “A Georgia editor kindly explains that ‘a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy’.” But an American dictionary fifty years earlier had defined it simply as a shyster. The origin is unknown, though the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it may be linked to snallygoster, which some suppose to derive from the German schnelle Geister, literally a fast-moving ghost, and which was a mythical monster of vast size—half reptile, half bird—supposedly found in Maryland, and which was invented to terrify ex-slaves out of voting. |
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THE MAPLE SYRUP SONG (to the tune of Miss Mary Mack) Oh, first you tap, tap, tap,
To get the sap, sap, sap
Then pour the buckets, buckets, buckets,
Into the vat, vat, vat. Oh, stoke the fire, fire, fire,
Until it's hot, hot, hot,
And then you boil it, boil it, boil it,
Don't let it stop, stop, stop. The steam goes up, up, up,
The sap boils down, down, down,
Until it turns, turns, turns,
A nice amber brown, brown, brown. It smells so good, good, good,
It tastes so great, great, great,
So pile those pancakes, pancakes, pancakes,
High on my plate, plate, plate. |
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Happy Birthday Ferdinand Porsche 1875 
I am an excellent driver. |
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Alan Ladd 1913 
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Valerie Perrine 1943 
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George Biondo (Steppenwolf) 1945 
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| Donald Brewer (Grand Funk Railroad) 1948 
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| Jennifer Paige 1973 
See ya blowin' me a kiss
It doesn't take a scientist
To understand what's going on baby
If you see something in my eye
Let's not over analyze
Don't go too deep with it baby
So let it be what it'll be
Don't make a fuss and get crazy over you and me
Here's what I do, I play it loose
Not like we have a date with destiny
(CHORUS)
It's just a little crush
Not like I faint everytime we touch
It's just some little thing
Not like everything I do depends on you
Sha la la la, sha la la la
Sha la la la, sha la la la
It's raising my adrenaline
You're bangin' on a heart of tin
Please don't make too much of it baby
Say the word forevermore
That's not what I'm looking for
All I can commit to is maybe
So let it be what it'll be
Don't make a fuss and get crazy over you and me
Here's what I do, I play it loose
Not like we have a date with destiny
CHORUS
Vanilla skies, white picket fences in your eyes
A vision of you and me
CHORUS |
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1783 - The Revolutionary War between the U.S. and Great Britain ended with the Treaty of Paris. 
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| Todays Wednesday field trip takes us to a strange place. An amazing country where everyone is flatter than a pancake.
It is a land that exists in only two dimensions! |
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1838 - Frederick Douglass boarded a train in Matryland on his way to freedom from being a slave. 
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| Russian Pancakes Ingredients
2 cups milk
1 tbsp. sugar
1 package active dry yeast
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tbsp. melted butter or margarine
3 eggs, separated
3/4 tsp. salt
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
Caviar
Smoked salmon
Minced onion
Sour cream Method Scald milk, pour into a large bowl. When lukewarm, add sugar and yeast, mixing well to dissolve yeast. Stir in 1 cup all-purpose flour; cover bowl and set in warm place until "sponge" doubles in volume (about 1-1/2). Combine butter, egg yolks and salt. Stir down the sponge and add butter-egg mixture, along with buckwheat flour and 1 cup all-purpose flour. Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry, then gently fold into batter. Cook batter, one tablespoonful per blini, on a hot buttered griddle or skillet. Flip blini to brown second side after batter appears set on top. Cover blini with a towel and hold in 200° oven until serving. Accompany blini with caviar, smoked salmon, minced onion, sour cream - creative self-service. |
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1939 - British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in a radio broadcast, announced that Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Germany had invaded Poland on September 1. 
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1999 - Mario Lemieux's ownership group officially took over the National Hockey League's Pittsburgh Penguins. Lemieux became the first player in the modern era of sports to buy the team he had once played for. 
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Miranda eats 1 pancake. Gina eats 1 pancake. How many do they eat all together? About a hundred pancakes. |
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Three pancakes.
| You have a hat in which there are three pancakes: One is golden on both sides, one is brown on both sides, and one is golden on one side and brown on the other. You withdraw one pancake, look at one side, and see that it is brown. What is the probability that the other side is brown? A) The chance is two out of three. The pancake you withdraw had to be one of only two of them: the brown/brown one or the brown/golden one. And of the three brown sides you could be seeing, two of them also have brown on the other side. B) Only two pancakes have brown sides, and one of them has brown on only one side. There is a 50% chance that you are looking at the one with brown on both sides. |
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| German Pancakes. 
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The Möbius stip is the simplest geometric shape which has only one surface and only one edge. It can be created by taking a strip of paper, giving it a half twist along its long axis, and then joining the two narrow ends together. The Möbius strip in 3 dimensions can be represented parameterically f(s,t) as follows
where s ranges from 0 to 2*pi and t ranges typically from -0.4 to 0.4
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| Pancakes Wednesdays |
| Definitely |
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