Pulse Rates October 2013

LI’s modern wine industry celebrates 40 years. It began with 17 acres of cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir and sauvignon blanc grapes planted by Alex and Louisa Hargrave in Cutchogue.

Since its formation, the sun has completed approximately 20 orbits around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Only 1/1250 of an orbit has been completed since the dawn of human life on Earth.

Christopher Columbus’ ultimate goal was not India but Japan (then known as Cipangu), because he thought it was “most fertile in gold, pearls and precious stones.”

Intrepid eaters have sampled flesh from frozen mammoths and steppe bison tens of thousands of years old. Tasting notes: Putrid, tough, freezer burn, Pleistocene aroma.

The longtime mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska is a cat named Stubbs. He was a successful write-in when townsfolk disliked all of the human candidates. This politically minded feline is currently recovering from an attempted assassination by a dog.

That futuristic-looking font on checks is called the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) font. It is specifically designed to be read by a computer so bank employees nationwide don’t have to manually sort millions of checks a day.

Plankton at the pump? That’s right, it’s not dinosaurs that produced fossil fuels, but the remains of these single-celled hydrocarbon-rich beings buried in the earth and transformed over hundreds of millions of years into crude oil.

It is a myth that there are no rules in international waters (also known as the “high seas”). Every ship and passenger is subject to the rules of the country’s flag it officially flies.

The first capital of the United States was Philadelphia. Then Baltimore, Philly again, Lancaster (PA), York (PA), Philly again, Princeton (NJ), Annapolis (MD), Trenton (NJ), New York City, Philly one more time, then finally Washington DC.

Believe it or not, Pablo Picasso didn’t use a special paint to produce some of his greatest works. He used Ripolin, the first commercially available enamel housepaint.

Law enforcement agents generally don’t draw chalk outlines around dead bodies at crime scenes. Investigators see this as contamination of the crime scene. Photographs suffice.

Unlike POTUS, the Vice President of the United States didn’t have a permanent residence until 1974. It’s a Victorian Queen Anne-style country home built in 1893 for the Superintendent of the United States Naval Observatory.

michael isenbek
