Thursday, January 24, 2013

Cleopatra's Needle was erected in Central Park 132 years ago this week

If you took a good look around this week and listened to your friends and neighbors, you’ve probably noticed a good bit of progress taking place in the Evergreen area.

Bubba’s BBQ opened up to large crowds Monday of last week. Owned and operated by former Evergreen mayor Pat Poole, this new restaurant is located on Highway 83, right across from the Pizza Hut. Not only is the food outstanding, but Pat’s decorated the building with a lot of cool memorabilia that’s worth checking out.

On the other side of I-65, Evergreen’s new Shrimp Basket restaurant opened for business on Saturday. Huge crowds also flocked to this new eating establishment, and from all accounts their food and service is excellent. One Evergreen resident told me that she ate there and didn’t even feel like she was eating in Evergreen.

Also this week, you might have noticed that the walls are going up on the new FedEx facility on U.S. Highway 84, just east of Middleton Airfield. Construction began there weeks ago, but this week the project entered a new phase with the construction of the actual walls. Once complete, this will be another feather in Evergreen’s hat.

Maybe the best thing of all is that if you listen closely to local officials like Bobby Skipper, these recent developments are just the beginning. Skipper, who leads the city’s economic development team, says that more is to come if the city stays on track with its current plans. If he’s correct, and I suspect he is, who can say what’s in store for the future of Evergreen. Only time will tell.

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Much was made over the very large halo that was clearly visible around the moon on Monday night, and like a lot of people, I’ve always associated halos with rain. “Ring around the moon, rain comes soon” is one of those old weather sayings that many of you have probably heard some old-timer say before. There wasn’t any rain in the forecast for Tuesday, so the jury’s still out on whether or not this halo will bring any rain.

When you see a halo around the moon, what you’re actually seeing is moonlight passing through ice crystals in thin, high-altitude clouds. Usually, these clouds are about 20,000 feet above the ground, that is, almost four miles high.

The next full moon is set to occur on Saturday, and January’s full moon is commonly referred to as the “Wolf Moon.” According to my Old Farmer’s Almanac, the Indians gave it this name because wolves howled in hunger outside their villages when this winter full moon rose high in the sky. The January full moon is also commonly referred to as the “Old Moon,” and some Indians called it the “Snow Moon.”

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From the weird news file this week, I read that during this week in 1881, the ancient Egyptian obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle was erected in New York City’s Central Park. Originally erected in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis around 1,450 BC, this monument is 68-feet-tall and weighs 224 tons. It’s made out of red granite. If you’re ever in New York, you might want to check it out.

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