Daily Archives: 10/2/2013
Lost a good one…
‘Hunt for Red October’ author Tom Clancy dies at age 66
Celebrated author Tom Clancy, who became famous for best-sellers like “Hunt for Red October” and “Patriot Games,” died on Tuesday night. He was 66.
Clancy died after a brief illness at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Baltimore Sun reports.
I am a fan. I guess I started with Red Storm Rising, about a war between my old nemesis, the Soviet Union, and NATO.
tom was prescient in so many ways. Red Storm Rising opened with an attack a a major Soviet oil refinery by (here’s the prescient part) radical Muslims.
Tom was a great story-teller. After RSR, I read everything he wrote.
Prescient. In Debt of Honor the closing scene had a pilot crashing a Boeing 747 into the Capitol Building. This was years before 9/11.
Many people will doubtless say that Tom wrote ‘pop fiction’. I look at him as a great storyteller and am saddened that I won’t be looking in the mailbox for the next one of his new stories.
Today in History – October 2
1535 – Jacques Cartier discovers Montreal, Quebec. You mean it was ALREADY there?
1835 – The Texas Revolution begins with the Battle of Gonzales: Mexican soldiers attempt to disarm the people of Gonzales, Texas, but encounter stiff resistance from a hastily assembled militia. I figure the way things are going, in another ten years it’ll be Mexico again…
1866 – J Osterhoudt patents the tin can with key opener.
1924 – The Geneva Protocol is adopted as a means to strengthen the League of Nations. With this one momentous and visionary step, peace is spread abroad on the wings of doves. Bloody-handed despots everywhere see the error in their ways and repent, and the world eases into an age of peace, love and harmony. Oh, wait! That DIDN’T happen with the League of Nations. We needed the United Nations to bring worldwide love and harmony. I’m STILL waiting…
1941 – World War II: In Operation Typhoon, Germany begins an all-out offensive against Moscow. These are the same two parties that only two years before had signed a pact NOT to fight each other, meanwhile divying Poland up between them.
1968 – A peaceful student demonstration in Mexico City ends in the Tlatelolco massacre. Dead number in the hundreds. Makes that bunch of smelly hippies singing “Four dead in Ohio” sort of a sad thing…
2002 – The Beltway sniper attacks begin, extending over three weeks. Everybody knows that serial killers are always white guys.