No, not THE ObamaCare website. This one actually WORKS! And it’s gotten more hits than that abortion that cost six hundred million of our tax dollars.
No, make sure you click through to the “Let’s Get Started” page and look at the selections on the form.
And then the page after that, because it has an interesting list of government agencies that have visited the site.
1517 – Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther posts his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. This move would result in the deaths of thousands on both sides of the discussion.
1846 – Donner party, unable to cross the Donner Pass, construct a winter camp. “What’s for lunch?”
1917 – World War I: Battle of Beersheba – “last successful cavalry charge in history” done by the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade. Or maybe not. See “1942? below.
1923 – The first of 160 consecutive days of 100 degrees at Marble Bar, Australia. Curse that Global Warming!
1941 – World War II: The destroyer USS Reuben James is torpedoed by a German U-boat near Iceland, killing more than 100 United States Navy sailors. It is the first U.S. Navy vessel sunk by enemy action in WWII.
1942 – Colonel Alessandro Bettoni (led) three mounted squadrons of Italians forward at a gallop into the Soviet lines… In the victorious charge the Italians lost 40 cavalrymen (including the commander of the 4th Squadron, Captain Abba) with another 79 wounded and almost 100 precious horses but they inflicted over 150 casualties on the Soviets and captured some 900 unfortunate Siberians along with a collection of sixty mortars, artillery pieces and machine guns.
1944 – Dr. jur. Erich Göstl, a member of the Waffen SS, is awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, to recognise extreme battlefield bravery, after losing his face and eyes during the Battle of Normandy. Bravery has no borders.
1956 – Suez Crisis: The United Kingdom and France begin bombing Egypt to force the reopening of the Suez Canal. You know you’re waaaaay down the food chain when you get bombed by France…
1968 – Vietnam War October surprise: Citing progress with the Paris peace talks, US President Lyndon B. Johnson announces to the nation that he has ordered a complete cessation of “all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam” effective November 1. There’s nothing quite like a dimmocrat president “managing” a war. LBJ’s perception of “progress” was as finely developed as his morals, and the war went on until the mid-70’s, and tens of thousands more American soldiers died while the war was “managed” instead of won by Johnson and Nixon.
758 AD – Guangzhou is sacked by Arab and Persian pirates. They were at it back then, too…
1503 – Queen Isabella of Spain bans violence against Indians. This royal edict is totally ignored as conquistadores run through the New World.
1534 – English Parliament passes Act of Supremacy, making King Henry VIII head of the English church – a role formerly held by the Pope.
1938 – Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States. Today it’d cause pants-shi**ing hysteria and we’d have to call out the National Guard. Lawyers would profit greatly.
1960 – Michael Woodruff performs the first successful kidney transplant in the United Kingdom at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. On the day before, a guy woke up in a cheap hotel sitting in a bathtub of ice with a huge incision in his side…
1961 – Because of “violations of Lenin’s precepts”, it is decreed that Joseph Stalin’s body be removed from its place of honor inside Lenin’s tomb and buried near the Kremlin wall with a plain granite marker instead. The soviets aren’t the only ones who will rewrite history to fit an agenda. On the same day, Tsar Bomba, the largest man-made explosion ever made, equivalent to 58 MILLION tons of TNT, was conducted by the USSR.
1983 – The first democratic elections in Argentina after seven years of military rule (and a royal ass-kicking by Britain over the Falkland Islands) are held.
1988 – Philip Morris buys Kraft Foods for U.S. $13.1 billion. Now one of their product lines consists of questionable products known to cause cancer, sold under heavy advertising. The other is cigarettes.
1995 – Quebec sovereignists narrowly lose a referendum for a mandate to negotiate independence from Canada (vote was 50.6% to 49.4%).
To keep things from getting too routine around the office, I ended up on a conference call about the specifications for electrical power equipment for a new station down in Florida. The call started yesterday at 1500 hrs. I had a sheaf of drawings and three specifications, Low voltage (480 volts) switchgear, low voltage motor control cnter, and medium voltage (13,200 volts) swtichgear, two people in an engineering office in Houston and one in Minnesota. We hammered things out. Took us until 2100. but we finished. Somebody’s deadline, don’t you know… It’s fun stuff for me, but all in all, I’d rather not be doing it at nine o’clock at night.
This morning I got up to drive to my station northwest of Houston to get some paperwork to close out a project and to talk with one of my cohort about training issues. While we were in the office, some body hollered “Anybody know anything about snakes?”
I have some familiarity with snakes. My brother and I collected live snakes commercially when we were in high school, so I volunteered. I was followed by several others. This is what I found.
(Click gets you a really big version)
That’s a beautiful, healthy specimen of one of dozens of varieties of water snake. At first he was a brave little serpent, viciously striking and looking just soooo impressive. I needed to move him to the nearby pond. There’s a trick to handling these snakes: Call the bluff. I taunted him in the midst of his display of bravado and he backed down and went into defensive mode, hiding his head and neck under coils of his body. When that happens, it’s a mere matter of reaching through the coils to grasp him gently behind the head. He tossed a stinky coil around my wrist and I carried him easily to the bank of the pond and released him.
Oh, yeah… We’re those eeeevil industrial sites, right? You know, all about raping the environment and wasting the ecosystem. Well, this one little snake ended the day back on the edge of watersnake paradise, this pond.
(clicky gets you bigger)
That’s the station pond. Those are Mexican, or black-bellied, whistling ducks, a completely wild flock that chooses to spend time in our little station, along with about a billion squirrels and other varied bits of fauna.
This station is far from unique in this respect. I walked out of the break room at our station in north Mississippi and saw several wild turkeys walking on the bank of their pond.
1929 – The New York Stock Exchange crashes in what will be called the Crash of ‘29 or “Black Tuesday,” ending the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and beginning the Great Depression. Leads to the election of a dimmocrat president and the massive expansion of the federal government. Seconds, anyone?
1945 – The first commercially-made ballpoint pens went on sale — at Gimbels Department Store in New York City. The pens sold for $12.50 and racked up a tidy profit of $500,000 in the first month!
1966 – The National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed. An alternative name, the “National Association of Gals” (NAG) doesn’t make the cut. It gives homely women a way to appear meaningful in mainstream society.
1969 – The first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. Al Gore curiously absent.
1998 – Space Shuttle Discovery blasts off on STS-95 with 77-year old John Glenn on board, making him the oldest person to go into space. Senator Glenn is an excellent example of heroism in younger years NOT translating to wisdom in later years.
1664 – The Duke of York and Albany’s Maritime Regiment of Foot, later to be known as the Royal Marines, is established.
1775 – American Revolutionary War: A British proclamation forbids residents from leaving Boston. That recent bombing and the police orders in the aftermath show that Boston is a lot more amenable to government control than it was in 1775. Leave the city? How about ‘Don’t leave your HOUSE.” And they obeyed. Sad.
1886 – In New York Harbor, President Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty. Like many things French, it’s magnificent. And hollow.
1919 – The U.S. Congress passes the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, paving the way for Prohibition to begin the following January. And we all know how well that little bit of government tampering turned out. Works equally well for drugs, huh?
1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev announces that he had ordered the removal of Soviet missile bases in Cuba. The world steps back from the brink of nuclear war. Today Obama would call him up and say “Forget that! I hate America too!”
2006 – The funeral service takes place for those executed at Bykivnia forest, outside Kiev, Ukraine. 817 Ukrainian civilians (out of some 100,000) executed by Bolsheviks at Bykivnia in 1930s – early 1940s are reburied. Just remember that these deaths were the result of a centralized, powerful government who KNEW how best to run the country.
Overcast and in the sixties this morning, expecting rain later. It’s still more pleasant than walking out into the dank wall of heat and humidity of summer. Fall and winter, I love ’em. Comfort is only a boiling pot of water away.
Opened the morning paper and found the usual report from the big hospital across the river. This time it’s forty-seven new babies from between September 28 and October 22. Twenty-three are born to unmarried parents and five of the new mommies introduce their babies into a world without having the guts to tag some guy with the name of ‘father’.
Shall we just dive in?
Cody & Jessica W. are the first of a couple dozen in today’s column that chose a mellifluous surname and tagged their kid with it, giving us little Landon Chase, which is also a pretty neat air cavalry tactic.
Norman Jr. & Melissa C. name their son after a car, so we meet little Novah Vince. Probably has a sister named Aztek.
Robert H. & Shawnie(!) M. triple up on their son, little Jason Lee Sawyer.
Miss Shonique(!) M. substitutes an apostrophe for a missing daddy, giving us little De’Reona Denise.
Jason C. & Kimberly J. tag a son with Javion Jamar, angling him for a sports contract.
Anthony D. & Brittani(with an ‘i’!) E. give their daughter her very first stripper name, Jaidyn Starr.
Miss Avia J. gives her daughter her own apostrophe to make up for the missing daddy, so we meet little Kayz’Lan.
Zakarij(!) C. Sr. & Kayla R. perpetuate a travesty by tagging their son with Zakarij Fitzpatrick Eric Jr.
Eric B. & Heather V. throw three names at their daughter, little Nico Ray Linnea.
John ‘n’ Cheri P. give their son a name AND a lifetime goal, tagging him with Chazin Cash.
Blake M. & Aime'(!) J. LOVE them some punctuation, so their daughter gets to be Elleigh-Anna’Fayeth. Can you imagine the joy on the faces of her teachers?
Miss Vanessa A. likes playing with letters, so her son starts out as Jaxston Karter. she should have stuck with playing with letters.
Miss Temica(!) P. apostrophicates her daughter, little Marlaysia A’niyah.
Half the kids are born out of wedlock? Do we have a problem? Nahhhhhh! See you next week.
312 AD – Constantine the Great is said to have received his famous Vision of the Cross. This moves him to declare the entire Roman Empire to be Christian. Nothing like a politician using religion to further his goals.
1806 – The French Army enters in Berlin. This pi**es off the Germans. The Germans say “Oh, that’s how you wanna play” and they return the favor several times in the next century and a half. Like in 1870, when Marshal François Achille Bazaine surrenders to Prussian forces at Metz along with 140,000 French soldiers in one of the biggest French defeats of the Franco-Prussian War.
1810 – United States annexes the former Spanish colony of West Florida. It ends up as part of three states, Alabama, Mississippi and the “Florida Parishes” of Louisiana.
1964 – Ronald Reagan delivers a speech on behalf of Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater. The speech launched his political career and came to be known as “A Time for Choosing”.
1971 – Democratic Republic of the Congo is renamed Zaire. “Yeah, we’re a basket case of corruption but if we change the name it’ll confuse people for a while and we can get MORE money…”
Luigi Boccherini again. This time it’s his Fandango – Quintet for strings, guitar & castanets n. 4 in D major. When’s the last time you heard castanets in classical music?