This one from John Cox is just TOOOO rich:
Monthly Archives: March 2014
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! Boil, froggy, boil!
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 Katherine of All the Russias.
1918 – Daylight saving time goes into effect in the United States for the first time.
1933 – The Civilian Conservation Corps is established with the mission to relieve rampant unemployment. Federal dollars paid men to work. Families got money. The country got completed work. It wouldn’t work today because back then, people actually wanted to work. Today it’d just upset the dimmocrats’ biggest voting bloc. it’s easier to just pay ‘em to stay home except on election day.
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.
The Name Game #357
Seventy-five yesterday afternoon, forty-eight last night. Beautiful weather. I enjoy it while it’s here, because we’ll soon be doing “Ninety by nine” in the summer.
Opened the paper up this morning and found an abbreviated list of birth announcements from the big hospital across the river. They report another fifteen new babies. When I saw the size of the column, I thought that perhaps we’d see a slow week, but no, they managed quite well. Of fifteen, thirteen are to unwed parents and one new mommy didn’t get a name for a baby daddy.
Let’s see what’s in the bag.
DeMario (!) B. Sr. & his squeeze LaTisha (!) F. perpetuate the travesty by tagging their son DeMario LeKeith Jr.
Salvin P. & Victoria D. get all tryndeigh on us with their daughter, little Aisleigh Grace.
Kevin S. & Denise (another) S. present their daughter, little Kaydee A’Miracle. It’ll be a’miracle if this isn’t a proto-dimmocrat.
Randy L. & Laikin G. stick with the letter “L” with their daughter, little Linsie Larie.
Okay, it seems like themes run through this thing. One day in the hospital Miss Christana L. drops a daughter tagged off as Kemari Deanna. Three days later, same hospital, Labarron (!) A. & Courtney C. do up a son as Kimahri King. But it’s okay since both contrived names are spelled differently.
And this one makes me scratch my head. Of late I’ve been helping some of my stations with upgrades to lighting, so I have a few terms in my head. Imagine my surprise when Jeremy W. & Abbra (Don’t you wonder if her middle name isn’t ‘Cadabra’?) T. pop out twin boys named Lumen James & Lux John. ‘Lumen’ and ‘Lux’ are both terms of measurement for lighting levels.
And that’s the list this week.
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. Ether this or it’s gonna hurt like h**l.
1858 – Hymen Lipman patents a pencil with an attached eraser.
1867 – Alaska is purchased for $7.2 million, about 2 cents/acre ($4.19/km²), by United States Secretary of State William H. Seward. The news media call this Seward’s Folly. The news media is always right, you know…
1870 – Texas becomes last Confederate state readmitted to Union. Lately they’re asking about a do-over on that. If they do, I’m gonna get me a big hat and haul my Cajun butt over there.
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 banging Jodie Foster like a screen door in a tornado.
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”
Saturday Song #126
This one’s been Haydn. (Obscure musical pun!) It’s the Second Movement of Haydn’s 94th Symphony, “Surprise”:
Food for Thought – 28 March 2014
When Good Engineers Go Bad
With the approach of April 1, one of the trade magazine websites posted an article about pranks. An example:
There is sweet justice in some pranks. Years after Dobkin’s prank on Lamond, application engineer Jim Williams noted that Dobkin was making a few too many comments about the time employees were getting it to work. So rather than do a cycle-stealing circuit, Jim and co-worker Len Sherman took down Dobkin’s clock and put in a slower crystal. Dobkin bought a new clock. So then they put in a faster crystal. Dobkin bought a new clock. Then Jim used a file to reshape the pole pieces on the electric motor. “The hard thing was making his clock run backwards,” Jim confesses. When Dobkin saw his clock doing this, he knew that a perpetrator had been made a victim.
Then here’s another one. The pranks are in the comments, like this one:
Prior to going into broadcast engineering I worked with the engineer who was on duty the night the “blue bananas” prank was pulled.
It was to be the first color transmission ever and the studio engineering staff was working to make sure that it went perfectly. At that time the cameras were huge and they started there to set then up. They used a still-life bowl of fruit as the subject. After completing the camera setup, they moved to the control room the setup the camera control units (CCU’s). After setting the phase of the I & Q signals – the quadrature phasing which adjusts the hue – they put the picture on a monitor. The apples were red, the grapes were green, the oranges were orange and the bananas were blue.
Now in a panic with only a couple of hours before air time, they readjusted the CCU’s from +/- 1 degree to +/- nothing. The damn bananas were still blue. Frantically they went into the studios to recheck the cameras. That’s when they found that some one had painted the bananas blue.
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. In 1945, the US and its allies paid the price to get the Germans out so that prancing fop, deGaulle could waltz in after the Americans, Brits and Canadians had cleared the way for him.
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.
1994 – In South Africa, Zulus and African National Congress supporters battle in central Johannesburg, resulting in 18 deaths. You’ll see more of this as South Africa follows Zimbabwe’s path.
Food for Thought – 27 March 2014
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. What they gave prisoners of war is left to your imagination.
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.
1980 – The Norwegian oil platform Alexander L. Kielland collapses in the North Sea, killing 123 of its crew of 212. Offshore drilling and energy production remains a dangerous field. So are many other tasks that keep civilization going.
2002 – Passover Massacre: A Palestinian suicide bomber evangelist for the Religion of Peace kills 29 people partaking of the Passover meal in Netanya, Israel.
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.
Food for thought – 26 March 2014
Today in History – March 26
1812 – A political cartoon in the Boston Gazette coins the term “gerrymander” to describe oddly shaped electoral districts designed to help incumbents win reelection. Today it’s standard procedure to shape a district as necessary to guarantee minority representation in Congress. You should see some of the ‘districts’ Louisiana had to keep a black congressman elected.
1942 – World War II: In Poland, the first female prisoners arrive at Auschwitz. That’s what REAL Nazis do. Kind of puts that “they won’t pay for my birth control” argument in perspective, doesn’t it?
1967 – Ten thousand people gather for one of many Central Park be-ins in New York City, 4000 hippie chicks and six thousand guys who heard “hippie chicks are easy.”
1979 – Anwar al-Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter sign the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty in Washington, D.C. I wonder if it will survive “democracy” in Egypt.
Food for Thought – 25 March 2014
Today In History – 25 March
1802 – The Treaty of Amiens is signed as a “Definitive Treaty of Peace” between France and the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. That makes you wonder about that whole “Waterloo” thing in 1815. Who was Britain fighting? The Belgians???
1811 – Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from the University of Oxford for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. Now you can enroll in a CATHOLIC university and create a national furor by demanding free birth control and everybody’s okay with it. We’re just sooooo tolerant, right?
1911 – In New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire kills 146 garment workers.
1979 – The first fully functional space shuttle orbiter, Columbia, is delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for its first launch.
1996 – The European Union’s Veterinarian Committee bans the export of British beef and its by-products as a result of mad cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy). And I thought “Mad Cow Disease” was the Hillary (Haauuugghhhh! Spit!) Clinton campaign theme. I was wrong, though. It’s actually the operative underpinning of the Michele Obama role as First ‘Lady’.