It’s all about Earl Scruggs this week. Here’s a video about Earl.
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Today in History – March 31
1774 – American Revolutionary War: The Kingdom of Great Britain orders the port of Boston, Massachusetts closed in the Boston Port Act. That whole “Tea Party” thing really upset them. The original Tea Party folks didn’t dump their own tea in the harbor… We’re just not mad enough YET!
1854 – Commodore Matthew Perry signs the Treaty of Kanagawa with the Japanese government, opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American trade. Nothing like armed naval vessels showing up on your doorstep with superior firepower to get the ol’ diplomacy going.
1889 – The Eiffel Tower is inaugurated. Built to commemorate the French national bloodbath Revolution, it is very French in that it is eminently elegant and does absolutely nothing except give the Germans something photogenic to march under…
1906 – The Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (later National Collegiate Athletic Association – NCAA) is established to set rules for amateur sports in the United States. Yeah. They’re amateurs like I’m Prince Consort to the Tsarina of All the Russias.
1933 – The Civilian Conservation Corps is established with the mission to relieve rampant unemployment. It wouldn’t work today because back then, people actually wanted to work. Today it’d just upset the dimoocrats’ biggest voting bloc. it’s easier to just pay ‘em to stay home.
1992 – An era ends as the USS Missouri (BB-63), the last active United States Navy Battleship, is decommissioned in Long Beach, California.
1998 – Netscape releases the code base of its browser under an open-source license agreement; the project is given the code name Mozilla and would eventually be spun off into the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. If you’re still running MS Internet Exploder, you should change to FireFox. Really.
What? A weekend?
I am actually going to spend a Saturday and Sunday doing ‘me’ things. I will be accompanied by a delightful friend who shares similar interests. To that point you might surmise that blogging will be rather thin. You’d be right.
I will be back home and back in the blog later on Sunday.
Behave yourselves in my absence.
He’s back!
Francis Porretto, late of “Eternity Road” is back blogging at Bastion of Liberty. You’re encouraged to visit. Often.
Food for Thought – 30 March 2012
And one more for ol’ Earl…
Today in History – March 30
1814 – Britain & allies march into Paris after defeating Napoleon. How many foreign armies have paraded through Paris?
1842 – Anesthesia is used for the first time in an operation by Dr. Crawford Long. He uses ether.
1858 – Hymen Lipman patents a pencil with an attached eraser.
1867 – Alaska is purchased for $7.2 million, about 2 cent/acre ($4.19/km²), by United States Secretary of State William H. Seward. The news media call this Seward’s Folly.
1870 – Texas becomes last Confederate state readmitted to Union. Lately they’re asking about a do-over on that.
1932 – Amelia Earhart is first woman to fly solo cross the Atlantic, spends first half of trip with left blinker on, applying mascara.
1951 – Remington Rand delivers the first UNIVAC I computer to the United States Census Bureau. 5,200 vacuum tubes, weighed 29,000 pounds (13 metric tons), consumed 125 kW in electricity.
1981 – President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by John Hinckley, Jr., who is trying to impress Jodie Foster. Contrary to rumor, I did NOT send Hinckley an letter telling him that Obama was doing Jodie Foster.
1991 – William Kennedy Smith allegedly rapes a woman, in keeping with his family’s high tradition. Also in keeping with his family’s high tradition, he’s found “not guilty”
La-La-La…
So yesterday morning I roll away from the house at 0630, headed deep into Cajun country (Look up Kaplan, Louisiana. That’s pretty much dead center) to do a little training on my favorite safety topic, electricity and how to avoid killing yourself with it. At 0800 I’m there. Unfortunately, pressing operational requirements had my prospective audience spread over a good chunk of the region, so I wrote that class off, chatted with the manager for a little while, then got back in my car and back on the road.
I plan some of this stuff, and the plan here was to do this station on Wednesday morning, then slide two hours east and catch the bunch that tends our system just west of the mouth of the Mississippi. Look up “Houma, Louisiana.” That’s the bunch. They get a piece of the Chacahoula Swamp and a whole lot of the Gulf coastal marshes and the dozens of miles of offshore pipelines and several platforms standing out there in the Gulf, including one that’s manned.
Thursday is crew-change day, so visiting the site today got me everybody in one fell swoop. I did that training this morning.
Observations: Even in Houma, as Cajun as its roots might be, walking into a place named ‘Cajun’ and ordering a bowl of gumbo for lunch (yesterday) won’t guarantee that you get good gumbo. Never ceases to amaze me. They almost got the color right (brown) and it had shrimp and crab, but it just didn’t quite make the grade for flavor. Wasn’t bad. Just wasn’t GOOD. Maybe a ‘C’. I’ve paid for worse. I can cook much BETTER.
For dinner last night, on my journey through town, I saw a place offering ‘Mediterranean’ cuisine. Oddly (or maybe not) there’s a pretty significant contingent on Louisiana from the eastern end of the Mediterranean, since waaaay back, and you can find some pretty good things. This restaurant was one of them. A little pricy, I tossed forty buck on appetizers, main course, and dessert, but I left there full and happy. The Cajun loves him some kibby. And shawarma. And hummus, AKA ‘Purina Hippie Chow’ to my son.
I finished the class before ten this morning and headed back towards the other corner of the state, home. I did maybe a hundred miles while on the phone, discussing the intricacies of high voltage power systems. Nothing makes the miles fly like a conversation about ground detection systems on ungrounded three-phase electricity. The remainder of the trip was courtesy of Mister Beethoven.
And I’m home again.
Today in History – March 29
1806 – Construction is authorized of the Great National Pike, better known as the Cumberland Road, becoming the first United States federal highway.
1911 – The M1911 .45 ACP pistol became the official U.S. Army side arm. I carried an M1911A1. Still own one, a brilliant design of the sainted John M. Browning.
1936 – In Germany, Adolf Hitler receives 99% of the votes in a referendum to ratify Germany’s illegal reoccupation of the Rhineland, receiving 44.5 million votes out of 45.5 million registered voters. Just because it receives a majority vote doesn’t make it right. That’s why we (used to) have the Constitution.
1971 – A Los Angeles, California jury recommends the death penalty for Charles Manson and three female followers. And he’s STILL alive, but his victims are still DEAD.. Our enlightened overlords call this “justice”.
1973 – Vietnam War: The last United States combat soldiers leave South Vietnam.
Earl is gone…
You can’t be familiar with MUCH American music and not know the name of Earl Scruggs.
Whether you appreciate banjo music or not, Earl Scruggs defined a style.
And at the age of 88, he’s passed on.
Here he is, in 1965, on the Grand Ol’ Opry:
We lose a great one, and you won’t see him in a 24/7 wail-fest, because he lived a long life and didn’t drown in a bathtub in a drug-induced coma.
Food for Thought – 28 March 2012
Today in History – March 28
37 AD – Roman Emperor Caligula accepts the titles of the Principate, entitled to him by the Senate. Pelosi and Reid are contemplating this as we speak.
193 AD – Roman Emperor Pertinax is assassinated by Praetorian Guards, who then sell the throne in an auction. Secret Service? Hey guys, I have a twenty in my back pocket if the opportunity avails itself. Wait! Gimme a bit… I can take up a collection!
845 AD – Paris is sacked by Viking raiders, probably under Ragnar Lodbrok, who collects a huge ransom in exchange for leaving.
1933 – German Reichstag confers dictatorial powers on Hitler. History. Learn from it.
1979 – In Pennsylvania, a pump in the reactor cooling system fails in the Three Mile Island accident, resulting in the crapping of many pairs of pants. Zero, that’s ZERO!, deaths.
Losing a Good One
Francis Porretto at Eternity Road announces that he’s closing down that blog. I hate that. His blog is one of the ones that gave me impetus to try my own hand with that. He’s a great writer, a great thinker, and as far as one can say on this internet thingie, a friend.
Food for Thought – 27 March 2012
Today in History – March 27
1513 – Spaniard Juan Ponce de Leon discovers Florida. Couldn’t locate that “Fountain of Youth” thing, though… And to hell with a “Fountain of Youth” anyway. We need a “Fountain of Smart”.
1794 – The United States Government establishes a permanent navy and authorizes the building of six frigates. “Let there be squids.”
1836 – Texas Revolution: Goliad massacre – Antonio López de Santa Anna orders the Mexican army to kill about 400 Texans at Goliad, Texas.
1945 – US 20th Army corps captures Wiesbaden. I was stationed right across the Rhine from Wiesbaden in the mid-1970’s, spent a month in the hospital there, and it was a favorite place to visit.
1945 – World War II: Operation Starvation, the aerial mining of Japan’s ports and waterways begins. By war’s end, the official ration for a Japanese subject was 1500 calories per day.
1964 – The Good Friday Earthquake, the most powerful earthquake in U.S. history at a magnitude of 9.2 strikes South Central Alaska, killing 125 people and inflicting massive damage to the city of Anchorage. Effects were wide-ranging. Waves moved boats from their moorings in southwest Louisiana.
1977 – Tenerife airport disaster: Two Boeing 747 airliners collide on a foggy runway on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, killing 583 (all 248 on KLM and 335 on Pan Am). 61 survived on the Pan Am flight.
2009 – A suicide bomber kills at least 48 at a mosque in the Khyber Agency of Pakistan. All too often, this is a valid form of political expression in Muslim countries.