~ Friends ~

No one can make you laugh quite the way your friends can, and there's nothing like sharing a few funny friendship quotes with those closest to you to make your day shine a bit brighter.


"A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg
even though he knows that you are slightly cracked."
~ Bernard Meltzer

"There are three faithful friends, an old wife, an old dog, and ready money."
~ Benjamin Franklin

"Money can't buy friends, but you can get a better class of enemy."
~ Spike Milligan

"A true friend stabs you in the front."
~ Oscar Wilde

"Marriage is a sort of friendship recognized by the police."
~ Anonymous

"An old friend will help you move.
A good friend will help you move a dead body."
~ Jim Hayes

"Give me one friend, just one, who meets the needs of all my varying moods."
~ Esther M. Clark

"Love is blind. Friendship tries not to notice."
~ Anonymous

"I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street."
~ Virginia Woolf

"Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate."
~ Thomas Jones

Humorous Thoughts on Life

"I don’t have an hourglass figure.
I have an hour and a half.
I have a little too much time on my ass."
- Wendy Liebman


"Life is something to do when you can’t get to sleep."
- Fran Lebowitz

"Inside every older person is a younger person
-- wondering what the hell happened?"
- Cora Harvey Armstrong

"The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy."
- Helen Hayes (at 73)

Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back,

you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

**Live Well - Laugh Often - Love Much**
Helene Malmsio

Living Life in Peace

Peace,
originally uploaded by svenkataraman.

Nice image and message on 9/11 - or every day. ^_^

leaf gave peace

gave peace,
originally uploaded by blacqbook.

Beautiful found object. I love it.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Here's Snapping at You, Kid!

North Dakota Woman's Yard Overrun With Snapping Turtles

Sunday, September 9, 2007

Earlier this summer, Betty Kratzke noticed that something was disturbing the ground near the flowers that line her driveway. Solving the mystery this week proved to be a snap — when baby snapping turtles started crawling around her yard.

"They just keep popping up out of the hole," said Cliff Hanson, Kratzke's brother-in-law.

The turtles had recently hatched and were no bigger than a half dollar coin, said Darrell Perry, another brother-in-law.

Family members scooped up 44 turtles in all. They were put in a cardboard box and taken to the nearby James River.

"They went swimming away like crazy," Kratzke said.

Snapping turtles live to be decades old and can grow up to 40 pounds, said Gene Van Eeckhout, a biologist with the North Dakota Game and Fish Department. They do not make nice pets, he said.

"They're not very friendly to play with," Van Eeckhout said.

Kratzke said she thought some sort of animal was disturbing her flowers. "But it was a long ways from being a muskrat or a raccoon," she said. "They are the cutest little things."

Perry said the experience was one to remember.

"While they were coming out, we just stood there and watched them in amazement," he said.

Source: Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,296187,00.html

Today's birthday and Frankenstein

Luigi Galvani (September 9 1737–December 4 1798) was an Italian physician and physicist who lived and died in Bologna and who discovered that muscle and nerve cells produce electricity. Also, he was a pioneer in modern obstetrics.

Dissecting a frog at a table where he had been conducting experiments with static electricity, Galvani's assistant touched an exposed sciatic nerve of the frog with a metal scalpel, which had picked up a charge. At that moment, they saw sparks in an electricity machine and the dead frog's leg kick as if in life. The observation made Galvani the first investigator to appreciate the relationship between electricity and animation — or life. He is typically credited with the discovery of bioelectricity.

Galvani coined the term animal electricity to describe whatever it was that activated the muscles of his specimens. Along with contemporaries, he regarded their activation as being generated by an electrical fluid that is carried to the muscles by the nerves. The phenomenon was dubbed "galvanism," after Galvani, on the suggestion of his peer and sometime intellectual adversary Alessandro Volta. Galvani's report of his investigations were mentioned specifically by Mary Shelley as part of the summer reading list leading up to an ad hoc ghost story contest on a rainy day in Switzerland—and the resultant novel "Frankenstein"—and its electrically reanimated construct.

Galvani's investigations led shortly to the invention of an early battery, but not by Galvani, who did not perceive electricity as separable from biology. Galvani did not see electricity as the essence of life, which he regarded vitalistically. Thus it was Alessandro Volta who built the first battery, which became known therefore as a voltaic pile.

While, as Galvani believed, all life is indeed electrical — in that all living things are made of cells and every cell has a cell potential — biological electricity has the same chemical underpinnings as the flow of current between electrochemical cells, and thus can be recapitulated in a way outside the body. Volta's intuition was correct as well.

Galvani's name also survives in the Galvanic cell, the galvanometer and galvanization.

Galvani crater, on the Moon, is also named after him.

References

• Kandel E.R., Schwartz, J.H., Jessell, T.M. (2000). Principles of Neural Science, 4th ed., p.6. McGraw-Hill, New York.
• Malmivuo, J., & Plonsey, R. (1995). Bioelectromagnetism: Principles and applications of bioelectric and biomagnetic fields. New York: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 29 June 2006, from http://butler.cc.tut.fi/~malmivuo/bem/bembook/00/ti.htm

*This is an article from: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Luigi%20Galvani