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Days Won
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Posts posted by laffite
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Marvelous gallery of Hope. The early pictures are particularly fascinating!
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HELLO DOLLY
HELLO VIETNAM or THE GOODBYE GIRL
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A WICKED WOMAN
on his trail is the last thing he needed just now, preparing for Iowa and all, and so he donned his Yves Saint Lauren 6-6926c designer sun glasses while glancing about furtively like they do in the movies, hoping against hope that the wayward blonde with the kimono would be?
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>The best Ed Sullivan Show was when The Beatles first appeared on it wearing suits. He use to coin the line , tonight we have a very big shooww.
No, no...it was *sheeeeww*

and, a propos:
"I'm the bad guy for saying it's a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket." BILL MAHER
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-smart-president_b_253996.html
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>The Greeks thought it - Columbus proved it...
*Rainingviolets*, I do want to acknowledge your point and though I don't quite agree with it, what you seem to be saying, IMO, is something that has its own merit. For all the high theory and fancy math of the Greeks maybe there is this underlying supposition to it all, as if they were saying, ?Well, we?re quite sure the earth is round and if we?re right about that, then the circumference is such and such, etc?? I personally believe it was more definite than that---they did quite a bit more than just "think" it---but, yes, maybe it took the Great Voyages of the Age of Discovery as well to actually provide the hard evidence to complete the picture. Maybe that?s a fair way to look at it. Although Columbus made his contribution to this end I would probably nominate Magellan for crowning glory honors if only because it was he who, in a single voyage, first circumnavigated the globe. (Columbus' voyage was shorter and not so dramatic as Magellan's, but Columbus came first, a fact to which, for instance, you and others may want to understandably attach special importance). Magellan died en route but some crew members made the entire voyage and their amazing experience represent perhaps a sort of empirical evidence that the earth is round. The Greeks provided the blue print and the explorers did the deed and they did in a fashion that was, of course, beyond what the Greeks could have done in their own time. But, in their own fashion, the Greeks were brilliant. their calculations were amazing and they turned out to be correct by most if not all accounts with a remarkable degree of accuracy. To the question who proved what and who deserves the most credit, like so many other things, can be a matter of opinion and though I am still partial to the Greeks your point is valid as well.
Also, your postcard-like Happy Columbus Day greeting post was certainly innocuous and if I may say so a little bit charming as well and I probably shouldn?t have messed with it in a way that could be interpreted as flippant, which was not my intention. I was just trying to be funny. Sorry for any misunderstandings about that and I hope you had a nice Columbus Day. Laffite
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The Piano (?)

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A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE
by comparison, where Roger Thornhill and Eve Kendall were sparring verbally with hushed innuendo in the dining car, an edgy air about their persons, and in direct contrast with Alan who was preparing for Iowa by learning how to pass out from boredom while remaining upright. Two plainclothesmen were rushing through his car and one of them caught Alan just as he was about to fall down, saying that they were looking...
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SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER
A SUMMER PLACE or THE LONG HOT SUMMER
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The Wizard of Oz
flat
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In Name Only
(sweet Carole)
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Close Encounter of the Third Kind
patio
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MY FAVORITE BLONDE
MY FAVORITE WIFE or MY BEST GIRL
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The Days of Wine and Roses
polyglot
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Zeffirelli, Franco...director, The Taming of the Shrew
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STALAG 17
This must be Bill?s idea of a practical joke, Alan thought. He obviously fixed it with the ticket window. And why are these people pointing fingers at me? Like I was some sort of?informer, or something. I knew I should have gotten off at Sunset Boulevard. The Commandant was blustering about going, ?Ah So,? over and over again. Hmm, he must have a cold. Suddenly Bill Holden appeared with a look on his face that meant?
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okay, next:
Great Accommodations
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Gate of Hell...Not Wishing Well
Algiers
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>The Greeks thought it - Columbus proved it...
(Quote)
In today's encore excerpt - the ancient Greeks determined the Earth was a sphere and calculated its diameter over 1700 years before Columbus sailed to America:
"The Greeks had noticed that on occasion, Earth blocks the sunlight from hitting the Moon, causing what is called a lunar eclipse. By observing the shadow of Earth cast upon the Moon during a lunar eclipse, they could see that Earth was also a round body, a sphere, just like the Moon and the Sun.
"Eratosthenes, a Greek scholar and the chief of the famous ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt, around 240 BCE, knew that in a town far to the south, Syene, there was a deep water well. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year - June 21 - the full image of the Sun could be seen reflecting, for a brief moment, in the water of the deep well in Syene precisely at noon. Therefore, the Sun at noon must be passing exactly overhead in Syene. He noticed, however, that on this same day, the Sun did not pass directly overhead in his hometown of Alexandria, which was 800 km (500 mi) due north of Syene. Instead, it missed the zenith, the point directly overhead in the sky, by about seven degrees. Eratosthenes concluded that the zenith direction was different by seven degrees in Alexandria from that in Syene. Using some elementary geometry, he could determine the diameter of Earth and found it to be 12,800 km (8,000 mi).
"Earth's true diameter, as we know it today, depends slightly upon where you measure it, since Earth is oblate, that is, wider through the equator than through the poles, and it also has mountains, tides, and so on, that require us to quote only an 'average value.' The average diameter of Earth through the equator is about 12,760 km (7,929 mi), and through the polar axis, about 12,720 km (7,904 mi). This means that Eratosthenes derived the correct result for Earth's diameter to an astounding precision of better that 1 percent, assuming Earth was a sphere."
Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill, Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe, Prometheus, Copyright 2004 by Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill, pp. 18-19.
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>In fourteen hundred ninety two
>Columbus sailed the ocean blue
>and proved the world was round~
A discovery the Greeks had already found
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The Shanghai Gesture...Gambling House Havoc
La Nuit de Varennes
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>Just curious as to who is this Kim that B. Mankiewicz interviewed & is shown on TCM?
Oh no...
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Wife vs Secretary
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THE DEATH KISS
was surely in the offing and he worried that it might be his own. He realized with horror that he had no idea how Rollerball worked after all. He must have misunderstood the memo. Shudders of fear engulfed him cap-a-pe and he waited for the ax to fall, or was it for the ball to roll. Not knowing what to do he decided to pray but before he could even begin this act of humility?

Hello, Norma Jean!
in Your Favorites
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>One of my favorites...
Hi MissGoddess, that's one of my favorites too. I wonder what's on her mind.