Back when I was a kid, there were groups who brought music to us – emotions set to harmony. Here are a few:
Monthly Archives: April 2017
The Name Game #478
Just like last week, another little spring cool front came through last night, actually in the wee hours of the morning, affording me the incredible luxury of waking to thunder, then rolling over and going back to sleep to the sounds of G-d’s own orchestra.
The pavement was still wet when I walked out to get the paper in sixty degrees of ambrosia.
Opening the paper we see that the big town across the river has elected a new mayor. Black guy and white guy in a run-off, white guy won, 55-45, accurately depicting the racial makeup of the city, and in a precint by precinct analysis, you can see which neighborhoods hold which populations.
I find that the big hospital across the river reports twenty-nine new babies from between April 13 and April 24. of those, eighteen are to unwed ‘households’ and three new mommies aren’t sure who to tag with the ‘baby-daddy’ title.
It’s a sad list this week, but we shall endeavor to persevere:
John B. & Tamra(!) P. do a daughter up with Haven Ma’Kay, giving her her very own apostrophe.
Nathan T. & Rachel W. do an apostrophe for their daughter too, but cleverly hide it in a tribute to their Hibernian heritage, giving us little Oaklynn O’Riley.
Mark ‘n’ Mikah M. show a son, little Breman Scott.
Kevin & Mary F. do a daughter, little Isla Rose.
Duon(!) & Bradney(!) R. give us a daughter, Anyah Sage.
Miss Aisha J. shows her daughter Marleigh Grace. Baby daddy? No gots.
Caleb B. & Dallyn(!) R. contrive a name for their son Kaceton Bryan.
Leigh(!) S. & Kaitlyn O. tag their son with Cantyn Kayde.
Pedro C. & Veronica H. give us daughter Daleyza Azul.
Traelyn(!) c. & Tammaria(!) S. show us the tryndee with their daughter Rileigh.
And that’s the sad little list on this grey little day. See you next week.
Today in History – April 30
311 AD – The Diocletianic Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire ends.
In 303, the Emperors Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius and Constantius issued a series of edicts rescinding the legal rights of Christians and demanding that they comply with traditional Roman religious practices. Later edicts targeted the clergy and demanded universal sacrifice, ordering all inhabitants to sacrifice to the gods.
1789 – On the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City, George Washington takes the oath of office to become the first elected President of the United States. See? See??!! That’s where the country went wrong! The first president was sworn in on WALL STREET!!!! {/moonbat}
1803 – Louisiana Purchase: The United States purchases the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million, more than doubling the size of the young nation.
1812 – The Territory of Orleans becomes the 18th U.S. state under the name Louisiana.
1863 – A 65-man French Foreign Legion infantry patrol fights a force of nearly 2,000 Mexican soldiers to nearly the last man in Hacienda Camarón, Mexico. The Legionaires take a butt-kicking in a brave and public fashion and the day is still celebrated by the Foreign Legion. This would be roughly equivalent to the Seventh Cavalry celebrating Little Big Horn Day.
1897 – J. J. Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory announces his discovery of the electron as a subatomic particle, over 1,800 times smaller than a proton (in the atomic nucleus), at a lecture at the Royal Institution in London. We electrical folks have identified the homoton, a gay electron that runs around blowing fuses.
1900 – Casey Jones dies in a train wreck in Vaughn, Mississippi, while trying to make up time on the Cannonball Express.
1938 – The animated cartoon short Porky’s Hare Hunt debuts in movie theaters, introducing Happy Rabbit, who would evolve into Bugs Bunny, my favorite of all animated characters.
1945 – World War II: Fuehrerbunker: Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide after being married for one day. Soviet soldiers raise the Victory Banner over the Reichstag building.
1975 – Fall of Saigon: Communist forces gain control of Saigon. The Vietnam War formally ends with the unconditional surrender of South Vietnamese president Duong Van Minh. With the demise of the evil south Vietnamese government, Vietnam can get on with “Giving Peace a Chance”, refugees of which have provided a new ethnic enrichment to America. Thousands who couldn’t get out died in ‘re-education’ camps. Other thousands died by drowning as they tried to escape in overloaded boats.
1993 – The World Wide Web is born at CERN. Al Gore curiously absent.
Food for Thought – 29 April 2017
Saturday Song #190
Simple little song by a simple little brown-haired girl from across the Sabine river…
Janis Joplin with the first studio run at Me and Bobbie McGee:
Today in History – April 29
1553 – Flemish woman introduces practice of starching linen into England.
1587 – Francis Drake leads a raid in the Bay of Cádiz, sinking at least 23 ships of the Spanish fleet. Today he’d be sitting onshore in “Merrie Olde England” sipping beer out of a plastic mug, his fleet sold for scrap, and hoping that the government could convince the UN to send a sternly worded letter…
1882 – The “Elektromote” – forerunner of the trolleybus – is tested by Ernst Werner von Siemens in Berlin. There’s that “S-word” that has caused me such heartache in recent years.
1945 – The Dachau concentration camp is liberated by United States troops. War! – What is it good for?
1965 – Pakistan’s Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) successfully launches its seventh rocket in its Rehber series. Oddly enough, one of its design specifications is the ability land a payload in downtown New Delhi.
1992 – Los Angeles riots: Riots in Los Angeles, California, following the acquittal of police officers charged with excessive force in the beating of Rodney King. Over the next three days 53 people are killed and hundreds of buildings are destroyed. Korean shopkeepers arm themselves to protect their own lives and property when the police fail to provide services.
2002 – The United States is re-elected to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, one year after losing the seat that it had held for 50 years. A commission on human rights at the UN carries about the same logic as a symposium on chastity at a whorehouse.
2004 – Oldsmobile builds its final car ending 107 years of production. Now it’s Pontiac, Hummer and Saturn’s turn. 2011 – they’re history.
Food for Thought – 28 April 2017
Today in History – April 28
1789 – Mutiny on the Bounty, Captain William Bligh and 18 sailors are set adrift and the rebel crew returns to Tahiti briefly and then sets sail for Pitcairn Island.
1862 – American Civil War: Admiral David Farragut captures New Orleans, Louisiana. The Feds have been taking care of the place ever since…
1944 – World War II: Nine German E-boats attacked US and UK units during Exercise Tiger, the rehearsal for the Normandy landings, killing 946.
1945 – Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are executed by a firing squad consisting of members of the Italian resistance movement who became exceedingly brave once the Allies were on the peninsula and the Germans were on the run.
1947 – Thor Heyerdahl and five crew mates set out from Peru on the Kon-Tiki to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. I’ve read and re-read this story. It’s a classic tale of men against the sea.
1952 – Dwight D. Eisenhower resigns as Supreme Commander of NATO. He’s headed for the Presidency of the United States.
1969 – Charles de Gaulle resigns as President of France. This is akin to a fish losing its bicycle as the general who single-handledly won France back from Germany takes his well-deserved retirement.
1996 – In Tasmania, Australia, Martin Bryant goes on a shooting spree, killing 35 people and seriously injuring 21 more, resulting in draconian Australian gun laws that disarm the law-abiding. Crazy people, however, remain crazy, and criminals remain criminals.
Food for Thought – 27 April 2017
Today in History – April 27
1521 – Battle of Mactan: Explorer Ferdinand Magellan is killed by natives in the Philippines led by chief Lapu-Lapu. Magellan STILL gets credit for circumnavigating the world.
1749 – First performance of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks in Green Park, London. Handel and fireworks? There’s only one thing better, this side of heaven.
1810 – Beethoven composes his famous piano piece, Für Elise. Who “Elise” was is uncertain, but we forever associate her with a delightful bit of music.
1813 – War of 1812: United States troops capture the capital of Ontario, York (present day Toronto, Canada). We gave it back. Shoulda kept it and let the Brits have New Orleans.
1865 – The steamboat Sultana, carrying 2,400 passengers, explodes and sinks in the Mississippi River, killing 1,700, most of whom were Union survivors of the Andersonville and Cahaba Prisons. More lives lost than the Titanic, but a boatload of millionaires is oh so much more photogenic than a boatload of smelly old soldiers.
1945 – World War II: Benito Mussolini is arrested by Italian partisans in Dongo, while attempting escape disguised as a German soldier.
1965 – RC Duncan patents “Pampers” disposable diaper. If you’ve never popped the lid on a container of yesterday’s dirty cloth diapers, you may never realize how big a step forward this product is…
1981 – Xerox PARC introduces the computer mouse. As one of my computer nut buddies tried to tell me, “That “mouse” thing and those little 3.5 disks are what makes the Macintosh a toy. REAL computers use DOS.” Today knowledge of a command line interface makes you either an ubergeek or a dinosaur (or both).
1987 – The U.S. Department of Justice bars Austrian President Kurt Waldheim from entering the United States, saying he had aided in the deportation and execution of thousands of Jews and others as a German Army officer during World War II. Now the entire Arab bloc of the UN actively supports the immolation of every Jew in Israel and that’s perfectly fine.
1994 – South African general election, 1994: The first democratic general election in South Africa, in which black citizens could vote. The Interim Constitution comes into force. This will make South Africa’s slide into the toilet like Zimbabwe all the more acceptable.
Food for Thought – 26 April 2017
Today in History – April 26
1607 – English colonists of the Jamestown settlement make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia for the first British colony in North America.
1805 – That “shores of Tripoli” thing: United States Marines captured Derne, Tripoli under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon. A freakin’ FIRST LIEUTENANT! Today we’d have to let the State Department petition the UN to get permission for us to even THINK about using harsh words. Back then, a lieutenant of Marines just goes ahead and takes the city. And we call this “progress”.
1933 – The Department of Homeland Security Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.
1956 – SS Ideal X, the world’s first successful container ship, leaves Port Newark, New Jersey for Houston, Texas. She held 58 standard 33-foot containers. Now, 95% of the world’s non-bulk cargo goes in containers, and modern ships may carry 18,000 or more 20-foot containers.
1963 – In Libya, amendments to the constitution transform Libya (United Kingdom of Libya) into one national unity (Kingdom of Libya) and allows for female participation in elections. You can bet that after Barack and Hillary’s ‘Arab Spring’, the groups running the country now could give a damn about women voting. Or voting in general.
1970 – The Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization enters into force. The Red Chinese and Soviets ignore it.
1986 – A nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), creating the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Comparing the Chernobyl reactors to the American version is like comparing apples to oranges, but every time you talk about nuclear power, the bunny-hugging left wants to bring up three-Mile Island (where the safeties worked) and Chernobyl, which didn’t have that same level of safety.
Today in History – April 25
1507 – Geographer Martin Waldseemuller first used name “America”.
1792 – La Marseillaise is composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle. It’s kind of like the French national anthem except when they’re singing backup to “Deutschland Uber Alles”. The German anthem’s music was penned by Haydn:
1847 – The last survivors of the Donner Party are out of the wilderness, with new recipes.
1901 – New York becomes the first U.S. state to require automobile license plates. “It’s moving! Tax it!”
1915 – World War I: The Battle of Gallipoli begins — The invasion of the Turkish Gallipoli Peninsula by Australian, British, French and New Zealand troops begins with landings at Anzac Cove and Cape Helles. It was a bloody blunder, rife with individual heroism overwritten by strategic stupidity.
1960 – The U.S. Navy submarine USS Triton completes the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe. They did have to poke the conning tower out long enough to off-load a sailor with appendicitis, but the sub never fully surfaced.
1961 – Robert Noyce is granted a patent for an integrated circuit.
1975 – As North Vietnamese forces close in on the South Vietnamese capital Saigon, the Australian Embassy is closed and evacuated, almost ten years to the day since the first Australian troop commitment to South Vietnam. We’re getting ready to give peace a chance.
1990 – The Hubble Telescope is deployed into orbit from the Space Shuttle Discovery.
2004 – The March for Women’s Lives brings between 500,000 and 800,000 protesters, mostly pro-choice, to Washington D.C. to protest the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, and other restrictions on abortion. Protesting is now a viable career choice for many. I mean, what else do you wiht a degree in womyn’s studies?
Damn! I missed Earth Day.
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”