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This blog is the product of an undocumented journalist.
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1904 – The steam locomotive City of Truro becomes the first steam engine to exceed 100mph, probably the first ANYTHING man-made to exceed 100 mph carrying people… Well, in Europe, anyway. No. 999,of the Empire State Express In New York broke 112 mph in 1883, but that was “unofficial” because it was, you know, those smart-assed Americans with all their technology and stuff…
1933 – About 25,000 books, including at least one copy of the Bible, burned by the Nazis in Germany.
1941 – World War II: The German submarine U-110 is captured by the Royal Navy. On board is the latest Enigma cryptography machine which Allied cryptographers later use to break coded German messages. Allies can now read some of the German navy’s message traffic.
1950 – L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health is released. Hubbard creates a “religion” from scratch and some people actually BELIEVE it.
1960 – The FDA announces it will approve birth control as an additional indication for Searle’s Enovid, making Enovid the world’s first approved oral contraceptive pill. This is the opening shot of the Sexual Revolution.
1980 – In Florida, Liberian-registered freighter MV Summit Venture collides with the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay, making a 1,400-ft. section of the southbound span collapse. 35 people in six cars and a Greyhound bus fall 150 ft. into the water and die. Amazing…
It gets monotonous, but near seventy last night, mid-eighties this morning. A hydrocodone sure helps knock the edge off the knee pain, but it makes me sleep too late. AT any rate, it was already pushing eighty when I walked out to get the paper. Ol’ Bin Ladin’s no longer front page stuff, so now we’re back to “Let us tell you how wonder WE’RE gonna make things if you’ll just cut loose some more money” stories.
For the second week in a row, we have birth announcements from two hospitals, the big “walk-in” across the river, and the little one on this side. Between the two, we have thirty-eight births from between April 4 and May 3. Twenty-two are emerging into “families” where Mommy and Daddy chose not to share last names. In this neck of the woods, that usually means that mommy and daddy were a little bit more permanent than a hook-up, but not serious enough for a marriage. And four of the new babies were not treated to a daddy name at all.
So let’s start off with the “Huh?” category:
Lynette S. & John J. throw some tryndeigh at their baby girl, little Haileigh Renee’. That extra apostrophe (don’t lecture me on accent grave) is so their relatives won’t pronounce the middle name “Ruh-knee” instead of “Ruh-nay”.
Darren & Amanda Y. tag their son with Bray Robert, which, I’m sorry, sounds like a command one might give one’s donkey.
Miss Lia C. celebrates her Celtic heritage by tagging her daughter with Lauryn McKenzy.
Derek C. & Valerie C. (different last names) had a discussion, like in:
d: Whut we gonna name de baby?
v: I dunno, hon. I likes “Aubrey” for de first name.
d: But whut ’bout de middle name?
v: I dunno. Sumthin’ whut starts wit’ “J”.
d: Why doan’ we jus’ name ‘er “J”, but spell it out, like.
v: Oh, baby, dat’s why I LUVVVV ya. You so SMART!
And their baby girl starts out as Aubrey Jaye.
Miss Danielle L. presents her baby boy, Darius Javon, product, apparently, of virgin birth.
Mitchell & Audy V. toss us twins, Easton Paul and Ember Leigh. Like in “Emberly”, yaknow.
Jonathan L. & LaToya R. remember that Sesame Street episode about the letter “J’ with particular fondness as is reflected with their son, little Jayden Jamar.
Travis B. & Jasmine R. show us their son, little Haven James.
T: Hey, Jazz, whut we doin’ Saturday?
J: You dummy. I pregnant. Dat de day I be to da hospital, haven James.
Timothy & Ashley J. choose a random last name for their son’s first name, giving us little Conner Lee.
Next we have some of the “That’s a PURTY name, but let’s change the spelling so it’ll look SOPHISTICATED”:
Molly & Joshua R. received their inspiration following a trip down the produce aisle, presenting us with a son named Khale Steven.
Steven J. & Valerie C. didn’t want their daughter mistaken for a member of a clan of alcoholic degenerates, so she starts out as Kennedi Alyse, with the added benefit of being able to change the dot on that “i” to fit the situation, from a little heart to a smiley face to a business-like dot.
Cory B. & Allison R. liked the “K” episode of Sesame Street, so their son comes out as Kameron Kenneth.
And lastly we have a little foray into “Names With Punctuation Just Drip Sophistication”, as do extra capital letters:
Donavine(!) M. & Megan J. perpetuate a travesty by tagging their new son with Donavine Donte’.
Jamie & Denise S. throw us a triple, an apostrophe, AND an extra capital letter with their new daughter, little Ja’Kayle Nevaeh Denise.
Jonathan W. & Breanna C. celebrate their own Celtic heritage and use it as an excuse to drag in an apostrophe for their son, little Kobin O’Neal.
And that’s the list on this fine spring morning.
1541 – Hernando de Soto reaches the Mississippi River and names it Río de Espíritu Santo. The way things are going, they’ll be calling it that again in fifty years.
1794 – Branded a traitor during the Reign of Terror by revolutionists, French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was also a tax collector with the Ferme Générale, is tried, convicted, and guillotined all on one day in Paris. The same thing happens to scientists today if they call “Bullsh*t” on Algore’s “global warming”.
1846 – Mexican-American War: The Battle of Palo Alto – Zachary Taylor defeats a Mexican force north of the Rio Grande in the first major battle of the war. For those of you who might be confused, the Rio Grande is the border. Mexico is SOUTH of that river. If they hadn’t been NORTH of it, we wouldn’t have been compelled to administer an a**-kicking.
1886 – Pharmacist John Styth Pemberton invents a carbonated beverage that would later be named “Coca-Cola“.
1902 – In Martinique, Mount Pelée erupts, destroying the town of Saint-Pierre and killing over 30,000 people. Only a handful of residents survive the blast. FEMA slow to respond. Bush widely blamed.
1945 – Combat in Europe ends in World War II: V-E Day. German forces agree to an unconditional surrender. The next thirty-five years for Eastern Europe are the result of making a deal with the devil (Stalin).
1970 – The Hard Hat riot occurs in the Wall Street area of New York City as blue-collar construction workers clash with anti-war demonstrators protesting the Vietnam War. Hippie a**holes.
A couple of eons ago man dropped one handy rock against another handy rock and noticed that the broken result was a sharp edge that served far better than teeth and nails to rend apart a day’s sustenance. The knife was invented. For several thousand years, that’s what knives were: cleverly broken bits of stone, some more elegant than others, some serving only as tool of the moment, to be tossed aside after one use, others clearly becoming items of personal value, even to the point (Point! In a Knife article, Hah! I slay me!) of being items to be buried alongside the dear departed for his use in the next life.
Somewhere a few thousand years ago, some enterprising republican discovered that if one used a certain type stone in a fire, this STUFF leaked out and when it hardened, it made a knife, maybe not as sharp as the stone, but a lot easier to shape. Copper became bronze, and for centuries, bronze was “knife”. Then Iron. And a particularly adept ironmonger discovered steel. And up till sometime in the very recent past, STEEL was “knife.” Utility merged with art and a knife to many was more than a tool to prepare food and vanquish enemy and do myriad cutting and rending tasks. And no man was ever without a knife.
An apocryphal story about the Norwegian king at a posh function found him among a bunch of men talking, as men are wont to do, about guns and knives. The king bared a sheath on his belt: a very functional utility knife. Said he, “A man never knows when he needs a good knife.”
I carry knife with me at all times, except when under the watchful eye of the Nanny State, and then I feel naked. But I carry a knife.
Let me move this little diatribe along a bit. In the kitchen a good knife is a joyous tool. I have several. I also read blogs. so when I read on Say Uncle about a good CERAMIC knife, I order a set. From these folks.
The package arrived this past week and I have used them. They are devilishly sharp and the right size for various kitchen tasks involving slicing and chopping veggies and meat and sausage.
And “ceramic”. Stone, albeit man-made, carefully formulated and engineered stone. But stone, nonetheless. In a hundred thousand years the circle closes. Somewhere around here I should find a mammoth.
Obama’s “leadership” in the Libyan situation has been discussed. The official transcript is missing a word:
Just like the cartoon says: Hope ‘n’ Change Cartoons
Liberals have such a great rapport with Hollywood because liberals believe that much of Hollywood’s make-believe is REAL.
Think about it. Rambo draws a .45, aims at a truck racing toward him a quarter mile away. Said truck is your standard “paint a “deuce and a half” truck a different color and Look! It’s Russian/Iranian/whoever” and is loaded with the requisite amount of bad guy minions. And from a quarter mile away, with a single .45 bullet, said truck is hit, evolves into a huge flaming explosion, and suddenly there’s a virgin shortage in raghead heaven.
Rambo. Bad-ass. with a .45. And after seeing and believing this for their whole lives, the Left cannot fathom that real life is any different. After all Hollywood wouldn’t LIE, would they?
Discount the fact that I have actually hosed down a “deuce and a half” at a thousand meters with a .50 caliber, 4 API, 1 API-T, making hits obvious, and wasn’t the least bit surprised that my M-85 didn’t replicate Rambo’s .45. I know about real life. If you aren’t one of practical gunnery’s cognoscienti, that’s Armor Piercing Incendiary and Armor Piercing Incendiary with Tracer. When they hit a white phosphorus filler in the projectile bursts into flame, giving it a very pretty effect at night. In the daytime, it’s a very distinctive puff of dense white smoke. And if there’s something around to burn or explode, it burns or explodes. Plain ol’ deuce and a half trucks do not fit that category.
I know wherein the magic resides. I know that the act of flipping the switch, while it does have the APPEARANCE of making the light come on, is NOT of itself able to make the light come on. And I know, that no matter how genteel and well, manicured is the hand that flips that switch, there are a million people that put things together so that when I clicked, light came out. And many of those hands are not even manicured at all.
Obama and his bunch need to meet those people. That SEAL team helicoptered into the compound. A helicopter is a terribly complex (in this day and age. 1950, maybe not so much) bit of technology, the mere tip of a pyramid of infrastructure that, American-style, is the natural conclusion of allowing people to do something and make money at it, to feed families, build schools, dream dreams, all the while making a specialty bolt that is only ONE of several thousand parts for that helicopter, so that somebody can say “Let’s take a helicopter into the compound.”
If you don’t have the infrastructure, the big nasty steel mill that makes the steel that goes to the little factory that makes the bolt… no helicopter. And nasty ol’ big holes in the ground coal mines that produce the coal to fuel the steel mill that makes the steel that goes to the factory that makes the bolt… And the nasty factory that makes the paint that paints the bulldozer that digs the hole that makes the coal that fuels the steel mill that makes the steel that goes to the factory that makes the bolt… Getting the picture? Oh, you’re already one of my readers and you too live in the real world?
I’ve read stories about Africa in the middle of the last century as natives began to assimilate the technologies that those nasty colonialist Europeans brought with them. It was a curiosity to see how a culture that was only a step up from the Stone Age made the leap to the Twentieth Century. It was in some ways amusing. In other ways, it was (and is) sad. And in modern Africa, it is tragic.
Worse, though, is to find that the finest (snark! Real, honest to goodness snark!) minds of America’s Ivy Leagues are no better than Tsombe Mbobo in rural Africa, when Tsombe saw a steam engine on a track and marveled that the white man could harness the demon and make him howl so loudly as he pulled the white man’s burdens. Our Ivy League overlords, MBA’d and Dr.Lit’d and J.D.’d to the gills are as bereft of understanding of the demons harnessed in a steam turbine, and how they got there, as was poor ol’ Tsombe.
And to ride my analogy into the ground, we can look at Rhodesia Zimbabwe and see what sort of effect that disconnect from reality may have on a nation. The ability of a nation to give time and place to lofty (and not so lofty) thought and entertainment and frivolity as ours does is because such things are enabled by men and women whose hands get dirtied, who can pick up a wrench or hit the keyboard of a complex control system, and while they might not be able to differentiate between vintage years in French vineyards, they know how to interpret frequency signatures of vibration records, and while the first set of knowledge might make pleasant conversation at a formal dinner, the second set of knowledge makes sure that said dinner takes place in a building with electricity.
And while a course on the eithics of war might be a perfectly fine thing, and a passing grade in that course might be a little slice of a lovely academic record, when it comes time to make sure that the wolves stay FAR away from your door, I’d rather depend on the guy who actually spent his time slogging through the muck for several days, training at a practical level for the day he’d crawl out of a nasty ditch and put a red dot on the forehead of the follower of a pedophile prophet who wants to move civilization back to the seventh century.
And those guys seldom show up at Obama’s parties.
We all oughtta be thanking bin Ladin. Now we got us a new many, action hero president, right????
And as usual, Michael Moore comes out as our national conscience:
And now Obama can go back to solving the other problems…
1718 – The city of New Orleans is founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. I must note that wasn’t Cajuns. At this point in history we were happily ensconced in what is now Nova Scotia. The people who settled New Orleans were the worst sort of FRENCH surviving just as new Orleans does today, off the labors of those better than themselves.
1794 – French Revolution: Robespierre introduces the Cult of the Supreme Being in the National Convention as the new state religion of the French First Republic. Nothing like a bunch of elitists telling you that YOUR religion is gone and they’re going to give you a new god to worship.
1824 – World premiere of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Vienna, Austria. The performance is conducted by Michael Umlauf under the deaf composer’s supervision. One of my personal favorite bits of music.
1864 – American Civil War: The Army of the Potomac, under General Ulysses S. Grant, breaks off from the Battle of the Wilderness and moves southwards. Total losses: USA-17,666; CSA-7,500. The Union can afford to lose that manpower and materiel. The South can’t.
1915 – World War I: German submarine U-20 sinks RMS Lusitania, killing 1,198 people including 128 Americans. Public reaction to the sinking turns many formerly pro-Germans in the United States against the German Empire.
1920 – Treaty of Moscow (1920): Soviet Russia recognizes independence of the Democratic Republic of Georgia only to invade the country six months later. Does any of this sound vaguely familiar?
1945 – World War II: General Alfred Jodl signs unconditional surrender terms at Reims, France, ending Germany’s participation in the war. The document takes effect the next day.
1946 – Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering (later renamed Sony) is founded with around 20 employees.
1954 – Indochina War: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu ends in a French defeat (the battle began on March 13). In the last century, how many American lives have been lost following a “French defeat”?
1998 – Mercedes-Benz buys Chrysler for $40 billion and forms DaimlerChrysler in the largest industrial merger in history. Ten years later Chrysler has “teh sux” so bad they’re selling out to FIAT (Fix It Again Tony).
The joke’s been making the rounds. The inimitable John Cox puts it to picture:
You realize what must be going through the minds of every towel-headed jihadi right now? “If they got the Big Guy, then… Uh… Achmed, check the door…
The images that really turn American stomachs…
And he told us this when he was campaigning, and over fifty percent of America voted for him anyway.
And now we’re in between two conflicting disasters.
As bits of data leak out and the story unfolds, we find out more and more about the Osama Bin Ladin operation.
This bit just surfaced for your analysis: Continue reading More Osama data
This guy SOOOOO desperately wants to be more than he is… And NOBODY really knows what he is, or where he came from, or how he got here…
Our “friends” the Pakistanis:
Destroying America…
And since Superman is renouncing his American citizenship, there ARE real American superheroes. And they don’t wear colorful skivvies:
And, well, just BECAUSE…
1536 – King Henry VIII orders English language Bibles be placed in every church. Previously, the bible was only commonly available in Latin, making its readability rather lower, although Latin remained a language in common use in academia and the Catholic Church.
1835 – In Belgium, the first railway in continental Europe opens between Brussels and Mechelen.
1862 – Cinco de Mayo in Mexico: troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza halt a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla. Beating the French makes this a Mexican holiday. Germany celebrates the days it beat the French: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc.
1865 – In North Bend, Ohio (a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio), the first train robbery in the United States takes place. I thought this stuff only happened with those cowboys in the Wild West…
1886 – Coca-Cola first goes on sale in Atlanta, Georgia.
1889 – The Eiffel Tower is officially opened to the public at the Universal Exposition in Paris. Like much that is French, it is stunningly graceful, a technological tour de force, and as useless as nipples on a lizard.
1912 – Communist Party newspaper Pravda begins publishing. Recently superceded by the New York Times.
1937 – Hindenburg disaster: The German zeppelin Hindenburg catches fire and is destroyed within a minute while attempting to dock at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Thirty-six people are killed. Airships end their brief foray into public transport.
1954 – Roger Bannister becomes the first person to run the mile in under four minutes.
1961 – The Mercury program: Mercury-Redstone 3 – Alan Shepard becomes the first American to travel into outer space, making a sub-orbital flight of 15 minutes. This was momentous event, such that I, in the sixth grade, watched previous scrubbed attempts with my classmates on a TV brought into the classroom. This one, thought, was a Saturday, so we watched it at home.
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"Only criminals, dictators and democrats fear armed citizens."
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