History Minute: Edison Demonstrates Incandescent Light

EDISON DEMONSTRATES INCANDESCENT LIGHT:
December 31, 1879

In the first public demonstration of his incandescent lightbulb, American
inventor Thomas Alva Edison lights up a street in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The
Pennsylvania Railroad Company ran special trains to Menlo Park on the day of the
demonstration in response to public enthusiasm over the event.Although the first
incandescent lamp had been produced 40 years earlier, no inventor had been able
to come up with a practical design until Edison embraced the challenge in the
late 1870s. After countless tests, he developed a high-resistance carbon-thread
filament that burned steadily for hours and an electric generator sophisticated
enough to power a large lighting system.Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, Edison
received little formal schooling, which was customary for most Americans at the
time. He developed serious hearing problems at an early age, and this disability
provided the motivation for many of his inventions. At age 16, he found work as
a telegraph operator and soon was devoting much of his energy and natural
ingenuity toward improving the telegraph system itself. By 1869, he was pursuing
invention full-time and in 1876 moved into a laboratory and machine shop in
Menlo Park, New Jersey.Edison's experiments were guided by his remarkable
intuition, but he also took care to employ assistants who provided the
mathematical and technical expertise he lacked. At Menlo Park, Edison continued
his work on the telegraph, and in 1877 he stumbled on one of his great
inventions--the phonograph--while working on a way to record telephone
communication. Public demonstrations of the phonograph made the Yankee inventor
world famous, and he was dubbed the "Wizard of Menlo Park."Although the
discovery of a way to record and play back sound ensured him a place in the
annals of history, the phonograph was only the first of several Edison creations
that would transform late 19th-century life. Among other notable inventions,
Edison and his assistants developed the first practical incandescent lightbulb
in 1879 and a forerunner of the movie camera and projector in the late 1880s. In
1887, he opened the world's first industrial research laboratory at West Orange,
New Jersey where he employed dozens of workers to investigate systematically a
given subject.Perhaps his greatest contribution to the modern industrial world
came from his work in electricity. He developed a complete electrical
distribution system for light and power, set up the world's first power plant in
New York City, and invented the alkaline battery, the first electric railroad,
and a host of other inventions that laid the basis for the modern electrical
world. One of the most prolific inventors in history, he continued to work into
his 80s and acquired 1,093 patents in his lifetime. He died in 1931 at the age
of 84.



from www.history.com

Today's Drink Recipe: Jeannie's Giggle Box

Prepared on the fly Saturday night for a new customer who liked my "Tiki Kooler", but wanted something sweeter. About half way through this drink she began giggling uncontrollably, much to the amusement of her husband and me.

Jeannie's Giggle Box

1 oz light rum

1 oz dark rum

1 oz Malibu coconut rum

1 tsp granulated sugar

1/2 grenadine

orange juice & pineapple juice to balance

Build over ice in a hurricane or similar glass. Shake shake shake! Listen to Jeannie giggle.

The Smurfette Show

Posted By:TikiTender®

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History Minute: Gadsden Purchase

Dec 30, 1853 : Southern U.S. border established

James Gadsden, the U.S. minister to Mexico, and General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the president of Mexico, sign the Gadsden Purchase in Mexico City. The treaty settled the dispute over the location of the Mexican border west of El Paso, Texas, and established the final boundaries of the southern United States. For the price of $15 million, later reduced to $10 million, the United States acquired approximately 30,000 square miles of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona.

Jefferson Davis, the U.S. secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce, had sent Gadsden to negotiate with Santa Anna for the land, which was deemed by a group of political and industrial leaders to be a highly strategic location for the construction of the southern transcontinental railroad. In 1861, the "big four" leaders of western railroad construction--Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker--established the Southern Pacific branch of the Central Pacific Railroad.

Questions About 2006

1.) Where did you ring in 2006?
Behind the bar at The Golden Lion

2.) What was your status by Valentine's Day?
Employed? Married? Middle Class?

3.) Were you in school (anytime this year)?
yes, seems like forever!

4.) How did you earn your keep?
slinging & pulling

5.) Did you have to go to the hospital?
i do believe i made it through the whole year withou being in a hospital

6.) Did you encounter the police?
yes, but not in a bad way.

7.) Where did you go on vacation
went on a sea cruise in january

8.) What did you purchase that was over $300?
maybe new tires?

9.) Did you know anybody who got married?
hmmmmmmmm

10.) Did you know anybody who died?
yes :<

11.) Have you run into anybody you graduated from high school with?
don't think so, but i did get a random call on my cellie from my best friend's wife. seems there is a stay at home dad in her car pool group named mark. she had jsut dropped off her kids and others at school and needed to ask him something. she hit "Mark-Cell" and got me instead!

12.) Did you move anywhere?
well..i move wherever i go LOL

13.) What sporting events did you go to?
none, and that is sad because I love the Daytona Cubs

14.) What concerts did you go to?
Def Leppard/Journey in June

15.) Are you registered to vote?
yes

16.) If so, did you do your patriotic duty on Nov. 7?
yes

17.) Where do you live now?
my house in Flalger Beach

18.) Describe your birthday.
I was working actually, but was fresh from a Bahamas cruise

19.) What's the one thing you thought you would never do but did in 2006? adopted a dog

20.) What is one thing you regretted this year?
no regrets, only lessons

22.) Any additions to your family?
A new doggie, Marley!

23.) What was your best month?
hmm, january was pretty good. after that was kind of ho-hum.

24) How do you plan to ring in 2007?
slinging & pulling

A Pirate Looks At Sixty. Happy Birthday Jimmy Buffett!

Jimmy was born on Christmas, 1946. The below info is borrowed from Wikipedia.com

Early life

The son of James Delaney "J.D." Buffett Jr. and Mary Loraine "Peets" Buffett, Buffett grew up along the eastern shore of Mobile Bay^[1]. He graduated high school from McGill Institute for Boys (now McGill-Toolen Catholic High School) in Mobile, Alabama in 1964. He began playing guitar during his college years at Auburn University and The University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he received a bachelor's degree in history in 1969. Although a pledge of Sigma Pi (S?) at Auburn, he was initiated into the fraternity Kappa Sigma (?S) at the University of Southern Mississippi. He later married his first wife, Margie Washichek, at Spring Hill College in Mobile. After graduating from college, Buffett worked as a correspondent for Billboard magazine in Nashville.

Career

Buffett began his musical career in Nashville during the late 1960s as a country artist and recorded his first album, the folk rock Down to Earth, in 1970. During this time Buffett could be frequently found busking for tourists in New Orleans. Country music singer Jerry Jeff Walker took him to Key West on a busking expedition. Buffett then moved to Key West and began establishing the easy-going beach bum persona for which he is known.

Buffett's third album was the 1973 A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean. Havana Daydreamin' appeared in 1976, followed by 1977's Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes, which featured the breakthrough hit song "Margaritaville".

During the 1980s, Buffett made far more money off his tours than albums and became known as a popular concert draw. He released a series of albums during the following twenty years, primarily to his devoted audience, and also branched into writing and merchandising. In 1985, Buffett opened the first of the "Margaritaville" restaurants in Key West, bringing new visibility and life to the Margaritaville name.

Two of the more out-of-character albums were Christmas Island, a collection of holiday songs, and Parakeets, a collection of Buffett songs sung by children and containing "cleaned-up" lyrics (like "a cold root beer" instead of "a cold draft beer").

In 1997, Buffett collaborated with novelist Herman Wouk to create a short-lived musical based on Wouk's novel, Don't Stop the Carnival. Broadway showed little interest in the play, so it instead ran for six weeks in Miami. He released the soundtrack for the musical in 1998.

In 2003, he partnered in a partial duet with Alan Jackson for the song "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere," a number one hit on the country charts.

License to Chill

Buffett's album, License to Chill, released on July 13, 2004, sold 238,600 copies in its first week of release according to Nielsen SoundScan. With this, Buffett topped the U.S. pop albums chart for the first time in his three-decade career.

Buffett continues to tour throughout the year although he has shifted recently to a more relaxed schedule of around 20-30 dates, and rarely on back-to-back nights, preferring to play only on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, thus the title of his 1999 live album Buffett Live — Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays. Purchasing tickets is difficult with most of his concerts selling out in minutes.

Buffett owns or licenses the Margaritaville Cafe and Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant chains. He loves baseball and was part-owner of two minor league teams: the Fort Myers Miracle and the Madison Black Wolf. Between his restaurants, album sales, and tours, he earns an estimated 60-70 million a year.

In 2006, Buffett plans a cooperative project with the Anheuser-Busch brewing company to produce his own beer called Lone Palm named for a song from his 1994 album Fruitcakes. The label of the beer bottle will most likely feature a pirate's map. The seaplane airport at the Orlando Margaritaville Cafe is also called Lone Palm.

In June of 2006, Buffett produced, soundtracked (5 songs), and had a small role in the New Line family film Hoot, directed by Wil Shriner and based on the book by Carl Hiassen. While not a big hit, Hoot was a critical success and garnered an award from the Film Advisory Board.

In August 2006, he released "Bama Breeze," the first track on the album Take The Weather With You. The Bama Breeze is a fictional tavern (the physical location actually being the Firedog Saloon in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi) symbolic of all the hometown bars destroyed in Alabama during Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Another song on the album, "Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On," refers to 2005's Hurricane Katrina. He pays tribute to Merle Haggard with his rendition of "Silver Wings" and collaborates with Mark Knopfler in the track, "Whoop De Doo."

Writing

Buffett has written 3 No. 1 best sellers. Tales from Margaritaville and Where Is Joe Merchant? both spent over seven months on the New York Times Best Seller fiction list. His book A Pirate Looks At Fifty went straight to No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller non-fiction list, making him one of seven authors in that list's history to have reached No. 1 on both the fiction and non-fiction lists. The other six authors who have accomplished this are Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Styron, Irving Wallace, Dr. Seuss and Mitch Albom. He also co-wrote two children's books, Jolly Mon and Trouble Dolls, with his eldest daughter, Savannah Jane Buffett.

His latest book, A Salty Piece of Land, was released on November 30, 2004, and included a CD single of the same title. The book was a New York Times best seller soon after its release.

Trivia

• While he was at Auburn University, Buffett was a pledge of Sigma Pi Fraternity, but left Auburn before he was initiated.
  
• He is a regular visitor to the Caribbean island of Saint Barts and other islands where he gets inspiration for many of his songs and some of the characters in his books.
  
• Buffett has been instrumental in the work of the Save the Manatee Club.[1]
  
• He is friends with legendary investor Warren Buffett and they suspect that they are distant cousins, but they have not been able to document this. (Wall Street Journal, 5/2/2005)
  
• Buffett appears on a Phish tribute album called Sharin in the Groove, where he performed the band's "Gumbo" (which references a gun-slinging parrot) with Lamont Berry of Chicago, Illinois. He also performed Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl in concert with Phish in 1995.
  
• Buffett wrote the music for and appears in the 1975 movie Rancho Deluxe. The movie was written by his brother-in-law, author Tom McGuane.
  
• Buffett has had cameos in several movies, including Repo Man as "Additional Blond Agent", Congo as a pilot, a pirate in Hook and in a cameo in Cobb. Additionally, he and his music appear in the 2006 release Hoot.
  
• Buffett appeared in the May 13, 1978, episode of Saturday Night Live. He also wrote and performed the theme song to the short-lived 1993 CBS television series Johnny Bago.
  
• An avid pilot, Jimmy Buffett owns several planes including a Grumman HU-16 "Albatross". The plane, named "Hemisphere Dancer", is currently parked next to his Margaritaville restaurant in Orlando, Florida. Previously it could sometimes be seen on the ramp at Princess Juliana International Airport (IATA identifier SXM, ICAO identifier TNCM) in nearby Saint Maarten while he was in the area. This is the plane Buffett was flying during the incident recounted in the song "Jamaica Mistaica" on the album Banana Wind. While in Jamaica on January 16, 1996, Buffett's plane was shot at by Jamaican police. The "Hemisphere Dancer" had been carrying Buffett, U2's Bono, and Island Records producer Chris Blackwell, but they were not onboard at the time. Police suspected it was smuggling drugs. No one was hurt, although there were a few bullet holes in the plane. Buffett's company has since licensed use of the name Margaritaville to several restaurants in Jamaica, in Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and Negril, where the "Jamaica Mistaica" incident took place.
  
• Buffett was hired to sing for Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski at a party on the Island of Sardinia. The local news showed a video of him singing at the extravagant Roman toga party. Horatio Sanz impersonated Buffett on SNL after the incident, alleging he "smoked dope with Hulk Hogan."
  
• On November 23, 2004, Buffett raised USD$3.4 million at his "Surviving the Storm" Hurricane Relief Concert in Orlando, Florida to provide relief for hurricane victims in Florida, Alabama and the Caribbean affected by the four major hurricanes that year. He has donated $500,000 to Hurricane Katrina relief so far.
  
• Buffett wrote the sound-track for, co-produced and acted in the film version of Hoot which focuses on issues important to him, such as conservation.
  
• On February 4, 2001, he was ejected from a Miami Heat/New York Knicks game for yelling profanities at referee Joe Forte.
  
• Buffett sang for President Bill Clinton on the White House south lawn for his birthday in the year 2000. [2]
  
• Buffett owns a super yacht that goes by the name "The Last Coconut", with which he frequents the island of Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts.
  
• Buffett is mentioned in The Offspring song "Mota" as one of the things the singer finds more enjoyable while taking drugs.
  
• Current members of Buffett's Coral Reefer Band include saxophonist Amy Lee.
  
• In September of 2005, Buffett became the first musician to stage a concert at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
  
• Tom Corcoran shot photographs for seven of Buffett's album covers, as well as cowrote the hits "Fins" and "Cuban Crime of Passion".
  
• In 1978, the University of Southern Mississippi renovated its Student Union Building. A time capsule, found over a telephone booth, contained a picture of Buffett and several of his fraternity brothers wearing dresses. (The Student Printz, Oct., 1978)^{[citation needed]}
  
• Some of Buffett's 1976 Havana Daydreamin' albums are misprinted with two versions of "Woman Going Crazy on Caroline Street", a song that may be titled "Please Take Your Drunken Fifteen Year Old Girlfriend Home", and are missing the song listed on the cover and on the album label as "Defying Gravity"

Plugging David Lane

and when I plug someone I plug them goooooood ;-)I used to work with David. It's his fault that my hair grew so long! LOL Go show him some love!









David Lane was born and raised in the tiny town of Darien, Ga, and at about the tender age of six, knew what he would do for the rest of his life. David had a pretty rocky road as a child and found strength in the songs he would hear either from his parents radio or from the endless collection of albums his mother introduced him to. He started writing songs around this time and would put on concerts for neighborhood kids. He would even make homemade albums of his material on an old karaoke machine and pass them out as well.However, it wasnt until the age of twenty one and some college and dozens of misc. jobs later that David would pick up his first guitar. Since then David has performed up and down the coast of Georgia and Fla. He was the winner of the 2006 Clay County Talent Showcase and has opened for Tracy Byrd among others.Davidis now living in Nashville Tennessee with his beautiful wife Jenel and their new baby girl Leilani Louise. He is also ready to now showcase his talents to the world. Take a listen, you'll be glad you did!!



www.myspace.com/intertwyne

www.battleofthebands.com/David Lane

www.myspace.com/djrecordsinc

Special Drinks For The Shuttle Launch!

This is what I will be serving up tonight in anticipation of the 9:35 launch time... Cross your fingers for favorable weather!

..

Fuzzy Astronaut

3/4 oz vodka

3/4 oz peach schnapps

Tang®..orange drink..to balance

Build over ice in a highball glass and serve.

..

Lost In Space Martini

2 oz Absolut Citron

1 oz triple sec

1 oz Tang® orange drink

Rim a cocktail glass with powdered Tang®... Shake ingredients in an ice filled shaker and strain into glass.

..

Rocket Fuel

3/4 oz 151-proof rum

1/2 oz vodka

1/2 oz blue curacao

Pour ingredients, in order listed, into a shot glass or rocks glass. Serve.

Today's Drink Recipe: Gingerbread Man

Gingerbread Man (Shooter)

1/2 oz irish cream

1/2 oz Goldschlager

1/2 oz butterscotch schnapps

1/2 oz vodka

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a rocks or shot glass.

Today's Drink Recipe: Melanie's S.O.S.

Melanie's S.O.S.

Created 12/02/06 for Melanie, who came into my bar looking like she needed a little "pick me up".

1 1/2 oz vodka
2 oz cranberry
1 oz sour mix

Build over ice in a highball glass. Stir gently and serve.

Today's Drink Recipe: Sandee's Dirty Snatch

Sandee's Dirty Snatch
A modification of my Tight Snatch recipe. Created for the founder of the Phlockers of Flagler County, and also a good friend, Sandee.

1/2 oz Bacardi® light rum
1/2 oz peach schnapps
1/2 oz Malibu® coconut rum
1/4 oz Chambord® raspberry liqueur
splash pineapple juice
splash cranberry juice

Combine all ingredients in an ice filled shaker. Shake and strain into a rocks or cocktail glass.

Today's Drink Recipe: Cream Soda

Max Roux, son of Michele Roux (Crillon Importers), and I tinkered around to come up with this recipe. When I say tinkered, I mean I tried different combinations and he tasted them, :-D


Cream Soda

1 1/2 oz Pango rum
splash of grenadine
ginger ale to balance

In a highball, build over ice and stir. I swear it tastes just like cream soda!!!