Where It Rained for 331 Days in a Row in the U.S.

A week in a row with rainy conditions is bad enough, but can you imagine being in a location where measurable rain has occurred for hundreds of days in a row? Windward-facing locations in Hawaii are the prime locations for the most persistent rainfall day-after-day, and where the record for the most consecutive days with measurable rain is held. Between 1939 and 1940, Maunawili Ranch on the island of Oahu saw 331 straight days with measurable rain. Four other locations in Hawaii round out the top five for the most consecutive days with measurable rain in the United States: two on the Big Island and two on Oahu. All those locations have seen streaks with more than 200 days of measurable rain. The most recent entry on the top five list is Pali Golf Course on Oahu, where 247 days in a row with measurable rain was recorded between 1993 and 1994. Another incredible rainfall record in Hawaii is a location on the Big Island that once saw 881 straight days with at least a trace of rain — a small quantity of precipitation that can't be measured.

Continue Reading...

The Untold Truth of the Movie "Planes, Trains and Automobiles"

There are literally hundreds of Christmas movies, but surprisingly few centered around Thanksgiving. Perhaps the best Turkey Day movie of all times is Planes, Trains and Automobiles, starring Steve Martin and John Candy. The 1987 film has become a classic Thanksgiving Day movie that’s watched every year by countless of people, thanks to home video, streaming and cable. The film throws together an uptight marketing executive and a hilarious-bordering-on-obnoxious shower curtain ring salesman, who are forced to endure multiple modes of transportation, indignities, and delays as they both try to get home to Chicago to celebrate Thanksgiving. What most people don’t realize is that the movie was almost as long as the characters’ journey. Initially, writer-director John Hughes wanted the characters’ frustration to be felt by the audience. However, the original script that made that possible was a whopping 270 minutes long (4½ hours). Knowing that no audience would sit still for that long, Hughes wound up cutting the script down to a mere 93 minutes.

Continue Reading...

Watch Out For White Eyes In Photos

Parents today have phones and cameras that are likely full of hundreds of photos of their children — smiling, sleeping, drooling and laughing. Each of the photos is a little piece of family history, but no parent expects that a photo could be part of a child’s medical history as well. Sometimes, when a photo of a child is taken using a flash, one or both of the eyes looks like it has a white glow or reflection in it — known as "white reflex." This is different than the common “red eye” we're used to seeing in flash photos. White reflex may appear in lots of photos of the child, or you may only see it in one photo. There are several causes, but the most common one is simply a light shining off the optic nerve. This happens when light entering the eye at a certain angle is reflected, causing a white eye effect and is totally harmless. However, the white reflex could be a sign of something more serious, including retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer that affects babies and young children mainly under the age of six. It’s very important to remember that retinoblastoma is rare and only affects around 50 children a year. There are other, much more likely causes of the white eye effect. Parents who have seen the white reflex in their child’s eyes are urged to get it checked out as soon as possible just to rule out anything serious.

Continue Reading...

How One Man Accidentally Killed the Oldest Tree Ever

In 1964, Donald Rusk Currey was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina. Under a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, he was studying climate dynamics when he visited Wheeler Peak in eastern Nevada. There, he came across the Bristlecone pines that grow in that area. Based on the size, growth rate and growth forms of some of the trees, he became convinced that one of the trees that existed on the mountain was extremely old and he decided to take a core sample to check. Basically, Currey got his tree corer stuck in the tree — so stuck that it wouldn’t come out. An unwitting park ranger helped him by cutting the tree down to remove the instrument, and later Currey began to count the rings. Eventually, he realized that the tree he had just felled was almost 5,000 years old – the oldest tree ever recorded. The incident led to a tighter restrictions on the felling of old trees, the eventual creation of Great Basin National Park (now overseen by the National Park Service), and the decision to hide the exact location of Methuselah, the tree now believed to be the oldest.

Continue Reading...