03/10/11 - NNHS Newsletter
Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms

“You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-
confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.”

 - Douglas MacArthur
(26 Jan 1880 - 05 Apr 1964)

Sunday, March 9 1862
MONITOR, MERRIMAC MAKE MARITIME MESS

The name is wrong and the outcome was indecisive, but the battle between “The Monitor and the Merrimac” at Hampton Roads, Va., on this day changed the future of naval warfare forever. The USS Monitor, built from the keel up from a design rejected by Napoleon, battled the CSS Virginia, which was a metal-plated reconstruction of the partly-burnt ship USS Merrimac. The “Virginia” had arrived the day before and wreaked havoc on the wooden Union ships. Up against another ironclad her defects became more obvious, primarily that her steam engine was not powerful enough to propel the weight of her iron plating. Although she arrived a day late, and had been laughed at as the “cheese-box on a raft”, the Monitor would be only the first of a new class of fighting ships. The days of wooden ships was over.

SOMETHING SPECIAL

   GIGGLES! Thanks, Wayne Honey! Regrettably, extensive searching did not yield me a usable copy of the very pretty predominantly blue version you sent me in a PowerPoint slideshow. I was able to locate this account with the text - including the correct attribution to Dr. Bob Moorehead who wrote it. Elsewhere it is often incorrectly said to have been authored by the late George Carlin. 

http://www.xdude.com/paradox.htm

   MORE GIGGLES! Thanks, Dools!

   Once again, I wasn't able to locate a usable form of what you originally sent me, but here is a whole series of related jokes:

http://www.digitaldreamdoor.com/pages/quotes/men_are.html

THE POSITIVE SIDE OF LIFE:

Living on Earth is expensive,
But it does include a free trip
Around the sun every year.

How long a minute is
Depends on what side of the
Bathroom door you're on.

Birthdays are good for you;
The more you have,
The longer you live.

Happiness comes through doors you
Didn't even know you left open.

Ever notice that the people who are late
Are often much jollier
Than the people who have to wait for them?



Most of us go to our grave
With our music still inside of us.


If Wal-Mart is lowering prices every day,
How come nothing is free yet?



You may be only one person in the world,
But you may also be the world to one person.

Some mistakes are too much fun
To only make once.



Don't cry because it's over;
Smile because it happened.

We could learn a lot from crayons:
Some are sharp, some are pretty,
Some are dull, some have weird names,
And all are different colors....but
They all exist very nicely in the same box.

A truly happy person is one who
Can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Have an awesome day, and
Know that someone
Who thinks you're great
Has thought about you today!..

"And that person was me.".....
Please don't keep this message
To yourself.....send it to those
Who mean so much to you.... "NOW"..
 

ALWAYS SAY A PRAYER

QUICK PRAYER
Please do not break. Just 27 words -

"God, our Father, walk through my house and take away all my worries and illnesses and please watch over and heal my family in Jesus name, Amen."

This prayer is so powerful. Pass this to 12 people including me. A blessing is coming to you in form of a new job, a house, marriage, finances, or maybe an answer to something (a prayer, a request) that you have been waiting for. Do not break or ask questions.

Does God come first in your life? If so, stop what you are doing & send it to 12 people now. Watch what He does!

   ABSOLUTELY! Thank you so much, Shari!

by: Chris Morris

Having been a part of the pop-culture landscape for over 30 years now, Pac-Man is a pretty familiar character.

He has adorned cereal boxes, been the star of a Saturday morning cartoon program and appeared on virtually every gaming platform to have ever been released.

That's not just systems from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. It also includes essentially every cell phone that has a screen, long-dead portable systems and plug-and-play devices for your TV. Along the way, the little pellet-muncher has built an empire that has allowed publisher Namco-Bandai to survive the worst the economy could throw at it.

But even the most well known icons have their secrets. This week, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Toru Iwatani, creator of the game, offered a postmortem on the industry's biggest franchise-and told a few tales most fans have probably never heard.

Here are the five most surprising:

The point of the game was to attract girls

While today's player is slightly more likely to be male, gaming in the late 1970s was pretty much exclusively a men's club. Iwatani wanted to change this, creating something that could appeal to both women and families, he says.

"The reason I created Pac-Man was because we wanted to attract female gamers," he says. "Back then, there were no home games. People had to go to the arcade center to play games. That was a playground for boys. It was dirty and smelly. So we wanted to include female players, so it would become cleaner and brighter."

Each ghost had specific orders

When you play the game, it might seem as if the four ghosts are actively chasing you. That's not exactly true. Iwatani intentionally avoided programming them with that purpose, since that would have resulted in Pac-Man zipping around the screen with four ghosts always right behind him.

Instead, it's only Blinky, the red ghost, who doggedly pursues you throughout the game. Pinky, the pink ghost (naturally), simply wants to position itself at a point that's 32 pixels in front of Pac-Man's mouth. The blue ghost, Inky, is seeking to position itself at a similar fixed spot. And Clyde, the orange ghost, moves completely at random.

Because the player constantly has Pac-Man on the go, however, the ghosts are always changing direction and trying to achieve their goal, which adds to the challenge of the game.

What, exactly, does Pac-Man mean?

You may have heard the story about how a pizza with a missing slice inspired Pac-Man's design. But it turns out the game was designed entirely around food.

"I thought about something that may attract girls," says Iwatani. "Maybe boy stories or something to do with fashion. However, girls love to eat desserts. My wife often does! So the verb ‘eat' gave me a hint to create this game."

That theme continued with the game's name. In Japanese, "puck puck" is akin to the U.S. saying "munch munch". So the original name - Puck-Man - translated as "Munch man". (A savvy Midway Games official changed it to Pac-Man when the game hit the U.S. to discourage vandals from shaving off part of the "P," thereby creating an obscene word.)

The missing puzzle piece

Pac-Man was designed to be as simple as possible, to attract a wide audience. The limits of technology in 1980 made this a little easier to achieve. Iwatani says he's happy about this now, but at the time, there was one more thing he wanted to add to the game.

"I wanted to have a shelter and it would move up and down," he says. "When the ghost comes, the ghost would be pinched by the shelter which would disfigure the ghost."

The ghosts were almost just one color

It's kind of hard to picture Pac-Man without the brightly colored ghosts today, but when the game was being developed, Iwatani says he was pressured hard to change that.

The president of Namco ordered him to make the ghosts a single color - red, to be precise - since she believed players would be confused that some ghosts, perhaps, were Pac-Man's ally.

Iwatani refused the order and on questionnaires to the game's testers, asked if they would prefer a single color ghost or four. Not a single person wanted the single-color option. That ultimately convinced the president she was wrong.

© 2011 CNBC, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The guy grabs the microphone and says, "Why don't we start with the name of the jerk who pushed me in?"