1565 – Oldest city in the US, St Augustine Florida, established. Immediately overrun by snowbirds…
1830 – The Tom Thumb presages the first railway service in the United States by racing a horse-drawn car. When a belt slipped off, killing the blower to the boiler, the horse won! Besides, all it takes to make a horse is two horses. It took an industrial revolution to make a locomotive.
1837 – Pharmacists John Lea & William Perrins manufacture Worcester Sauce. Life is good!
1859 – The Carrington event – a geomagnetic solar storm – disrupts electrical telegraph services and causes aurora to shine so brightly that they are seen clearly over the Earth’s middle latitudes. If it happened today the world would be in the dark.
1862 – American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run Battle of Second Manassas. The Confederacy won, but General Longstreet’s disobedience here made the victory smaller, and Longstreet later would cost us the Battle of Gettysburg.
1898 – Caleb Bradham renames his carbonated soft drink “Pepsi-Cola“.
1909 – A group of mid-level Greek Army officers launches the Goudi coup, seeking wide-ranging reforms. The civilization that gave us Aristotle and Pythagoras in antiquity can’t organize, in the words of an English friend, a piss-up in a brewery today.
1962 – 22 inches (55.9 cm) rainfall at Hackberry, Louisiana (state record). Hackberry is about fifteen miles south of me.
1963 – Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech at Lincoln Memorial in front of a crowd of 200,000. Poor, poor deluded man. Who’s gonna believe that “they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” nonsense?
1981 – The National Centers for Disease Control announce a high incidence of Pneumocystis and Kaposi’s Sarcoma in gay men. Soon, these will be recognized as symptoms of an immune disorder, which will be called AIDS. At that point the spread can be prevented by sitting on your butt and keeping your mouth shut…
1981 – Surely by now you understand that Preferred Species are not about to do anything like that. And even back then, queers were Preferred Species, standing atop that ladder at that time. Of course, that was BEFORE the ragheads supplanted them there…
1862: While Longstreet contributed to the loss at Gettysburg, the more proximate cause of both the battle being as big as it ultimtely was, and our loss, was more the failure of General J.E.B. Stuart to follow HIS orders. Had he done as Lee directed, the Army of Northern Virginia would have had the necessary intelligence to properly disposition his forces to counter Union reinforcements. Stuart was attempting to repeat his glorious ride around the Union Army as he did in the Peninsula Campaign in 1862, and as such, was unavailable to perform such mundane tasks as inform his commander of opposing forces’ strength, location and direction of movement. Once more, an epic fail for those who wore the crossed sabers, leaving the infantry alone with no long range reconnaisance capabilities. You can only hike so far so fast.
General George Meade was not the ditherer that McCllelen had been, so Stuart’s recon data would have been crucial to Lee. From this time forward, Lee never again trusted Stuart to be anything other than a flamboyant cavalier, and of Longstreet, his performance reinforced the criticality of Thomas Johnaton Jackson’s loss in the Wilderness. This battle proved conclusively that Lee HAD lost his right arm.
1859 – We missed being hit by another Carrington storm by one week in 2012. There was enough geomagnetically induced current to directly power the highest technology of the day — the telegraph — without batteries. Dump that much current into the national power grid today, and everyone gets to see what the lead time is on transformers the size of houses.
As has been said here, a wise man prepares…
1981 – Sitting on your butt – keeps all other STD’s in check as well; not to mention the most prominent STD – pregnancy. Keeping your mouth shut – helps with not exposing your ignorance. The first piece of advice came from my mother and the second from my father.
Didn’t you just hate it when your parents were right!
Judy-
Of course you know the old joke –
Young thing in Catholic School approaches a nun about a sensitive personal matter. “Sister, I need to know the most effective means of birth control.”
The nun looks at her young student. “My dear, a simple aspirin is all you need.”
“I’ve never heard that about aspirin. Are you SURE, sister?”
“One hundred percent,” the nun said.
“How does it work?”
“You grasp it tightly between your knees.”
MC