Daily history

Good morning,


Quote of the day:

"You are responsible for your life. You cannot blame others for your dysfunctions. Life is about moving on."

                                 Oprah Winfrey

Sunday night 51 year old Billy Gowens of Spartanburg, South Carolina decided to use a rifle to stick up the Little Cricket convenience store of Valley Falls Road. His robbery was successful as well as the theft of a Dodge Neon in the parking lot. A silent signal had been sent to the Spartanburg Shefiff's Department before Billy had left the parking lot. The cops saw the Neon about five blocks away and gave chase. Billy did not stop for the siren nor the blue light and would occasionally point the rifle out the window. In his haste to manipulate the rifle, Billy temporarily lost control, hit a curb and blew a tire. In a moment of clear insanity, Billy gets out of the car and refused to drop the rifle and began aiming it toward the cops. Billy went down in a hailstorm of gunfire dead as fried chicken. No one knows why Billy would do something so stupid unless he wanted to commit suicide.

When I was five years old my father took a job as a welder in the shipyards of Baltimore building Liberty ships during WWII. It was not unusual for ships to be torpedoed by German U-boats within sight of the shipyards. Soon after arrival in Baltimore I came down with tonsillitis. My parent s took me to Saint Agnes hospital for the removal of my tonsils. I remember waking up and a nun in a big hat picking me up and walking me around a large room full of kids about my age. What I remember most is they had black velvet covering all the windows so no light could escape. They were afraid that German bombers might fly over and bomb the hell out of anything they saw or a German gunboat might take a shot at anything that they could see. It never happened, of course, but they were very cautious. As far back as I can remember, my recovery period from the tonsillectomy is the first time I tasted ice cream. I probably had ice cream before that but the ice cream at Saint Agnes is remembered because it tasted so good but hurt like hell when I swallowed.

I just read a short history about a 21 year old woman from an upstanding family in Camden, New Jersey. She met up with a real scumbag that had just gotten out of prison and was on probation for drug dealing. This jackass was 35 years old and persuaded the girl to follow him down to Fort Lauderdale. He established a drug house in very short order and began dealing again. The cops in Fort Lauderdale knew this idiot and had been looking out for him after he got out of prison up in New Jersey. One night the drug squad of Fort Lauderdale showed up with a warrant, knocked the door down and went in. The dealer ran out the back door in his undies leaving his girlfriend on her own. The sweet young thing was terrified and obeyed the cops without question. It took about 3 minutes for the cops to run down the dealer and brought him back in the house. The dealer was struggling and smart mouthing the cops the whole time, that is until they hit him with a Taser, then he shut up. They found pounds of grass and drugs in the house and promised the dealer an extended period in a Florida prison. They asked the girl if she knew that the dealer was out on probation for dealing. She said that she did know but SHE THOUGHT SHE COULD CHANGE HIM!!!! Here is a message for all you men and women out there on a crusade to change someone into an image that you have for them. Except in rare occasions people's basic personalities are established by the time they are 9 years old. ACCEPT PEOPLE AS IS OR NOT AT ALL! SAVE YOURSELF AND EVERYBODY ELSE A LOT OF GRIEF.

Good News:

I think we all are familiar with the Tasmanian Devil made famous by the Warner Brothers cartoons. The Devils are as ferocious as displayed in the cartoons including an ear-splitting shriek. This marsupial is found no where else in the world except the island of Tasman off the coast of Austrailia. The beast has been under attack here lately by a viral cancer that is transmitted from one animal to another by fights in which one animal with the cancer bites another in the face during a fight. After this a tumor forms and grows on the face of the bitten animal. It can grow so big that the animal cannot eat and starves to death. A group of geneticists have isolated the defective gene and are in the process of developing a vaccine. The geneticists say that "a cure is visible on the near horizon." The world would be a worse place without "Taz".

This date in history January 12

1983   On this date an international restoration committee attempting to restore the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, decide that modern day building techniques were not working. The mixture of water and limestone that was being used as a mortar was cracking the adjoining original limestone blocks. They also were attempting to restore the Sphinx and were successful using water and limestone. But on the Pyramid the restorers had to resort back to the ancient method interlocking blocks. It is believed that the Egyptians build over 100 pyramids with the majority of them during 2600 BC and 2200 BC. The method used to build these behemoths has been in dispute but the generally accepted method was a spiraling ramp built of sand and rubble and this ramp was disassembled after the completion. The three enormous pyramids on the plains of Giza were built by the Pharaoh Khufu, his son and grandson. They all were built with yellowish colored limestone and after completion coated with white limestone. The Great Pyramid was as tall as a 50 story building and had a burial chamber in the middle for the Pharaoh. What a sight it must have been to see a shimmering white building rising out of the Egyptian desert as you approached. It has been estimated that it took 20,000 men 25 years to complete the Great Pyramid. The Great Sphinx was built of one gigantic block of limestone in the quarry that was used to extract the stone used in the pyramids. The Great Pyramid is the last remaining of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

1777    On this date one of the most colorful and important leaders in the history of the United States, dies of seven bayonet wounds delivered by the British at the Battle Of Princeton. Hugh Mercer was born in Rosehearty, Scotland in about 1725. It is known that he studied medicine at the University of Aberdeen and served King Bonnie Prince Charles and his army in 1745. After this army was crushed at the Battle of Culloden by the British, Mercer hauled ass to Aberdeenshire, Scotland and hid out for a couple of years. After this he secretly crossed the Atlantic and settled in Pennsylvania. Surprisingly enough, after his arrival in 1747 he joined the army of British King George III, the very king he was trying to overthrow two years before. During the Seven Years War he was under the command of British Edward Braddock. Braddock and company wandered into a disastrous ambush and were all but annihilated with Mercer being wounded also. After recovery he joined with Lt. Col. John Armstrong and was involved in the brilliant raid of Kittanning in 1756. Peace prevailed for a while and Mercer became a doctor and apothecary in Fredericksburg, Virginia. When the Colonies decided to take up arms against Great Britain and seek independence, Mercer’s warlike nature arose and he offered his service to the Colonial Army. He eventually ended up in command of the 3rd Virginia regiment with such luminaries as James Monroe and John Marshall under his command. General George Washington personally requested his promotion to Brigadier General. Five months later Mercer led a brigade into a line of British infantry at the Battle of Princeton and was impaled seven times. Even though he was under the care of one of the best doctors in America, Benjamin Rush, he died nine days later in a house on the north end of the battlefield. He was 52 years old. He did live long enough to know that The Continentals had kicked the living shit out of the British and this battle turned out to be a pivotal battle in America’s search for independence. Hugh Mercer was a pure warrior, ya’ll. He was one of many that showed up at the right place and the right time for America.

1888    On this date a blizzard that became known as the “Schoolchildren’s Blizzard” struck the Great Plains killing 235 people. It was estimated that in this storm the temperature dropped over 100 degrees in 24 hours. The storm began in the Dakotas and Nebraska about 2:00p with the temperature dropping precipitously and the wind increasing the same way and then it started snowing ferociously. This put the schoolteachers in those tiny schoolhouses between a rock and a hard place. They could not let those kids out in that blizzard to lose their way and freeze to death. Many of them kept the kids in the schoolhouse if they had enough wood to heat it through the night. One teacher had the roof blown off her schoolhouse and she bundled up, tied a rope to the school and felt her way to her nearby house, tied the other end of the rope to the house and went back to the schoolhouse and got her kids and they felt there way to the teacher’s house following the rope. Another teacher whose house was only 90 yards away did not use the rope trick and felt she could lead her kids to the house directly. She was wrong. Three of her children froze to death and she wandered around long enough for her feet to freeze and had to be amputated. The next morning the parents of the kids came looking for them through five feet of snow. I do not understand how anyone can live in that part of the country and enjoy it.

1838    Earlier Joseph Smith had established a Mormon controlled bank in Kirkland, Ohio along with a Mormon settlement. Due to the nationwide run on banks called the Panic of 1837, Smith’s bank failed and he felt that the had better get his ass out of Dodge so on this date he headed into Missouri with the cops nipping at his heels. He and his followers did not stay long because word got out about the Mormons practicing polygamy and they were ran out of Missouri so they headed on to the Illinois frontier and settled a town they called Nauvoo. A little later on the word got out about the polygamy thing and a crowd of people surrounded the town with blood in their eye. Not to mention Joseph Smith had spread the word that he might run for president. Joseph told the mob that he and his brother would surrender if the rest of the town would be allowed to leave peacefully. The mob allowed this and jailed Joseph and his brother. Three days later, the mob got likkered up and raided the jail and hanged Joseph and his brother. Everyone thought that with the death of Smith the Mormon movement would collapse. They were wrong, Brigham Young assumed command and the whole bunch headed west and did not stop until Young saw the Great Salt Lake Valley and said the immortal words “This the place”. The Church of Latter Day Saints based in Salt Lake City thrives to this day.

1943    Earlier Adolph Hitler decided that he wanted to conquer Russia even though he had signed a non-aggression pact with them earlier. Hitler sent three enormous armies into Russia to capture its three largest cities, Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow. The three German armies were named the Northern army, The Central army and the Southern army. The Northern army headed a bee line toward Leningrad thinking it would be an easy operation. They found out, as did the other two armies that these operations would be no walk in the park. The Northern army ran up against a stone wall and was repeatedly repulsed on any attack they tried. Hitler decided that siege would be the best avenue so the Northern army surrounded the city and would not let anyone or anything in or out. During the first year of the siege 650,000 residents of the city died of exposure, starvation or injuries from the almost constant bombardments. The Russian secretly moved the very young and the very old out of the city and eventually left only 2 million people to feed and this left enough open ground to raise a modicum of crops and livestock. On this date during a blizzard with temperatures in the -30’s, the Russian army broke through the encirclement and surrounded the Germans themselves. The Germans were then in deep doo-doo because the Russians would cut off their supply lines and they would wither without a constant supply of high protein food and winter clothing to fight the worst Russian winter in 50 years. The Germans saw the handwriting on the wall and began a retreat back toward Germany on January 27 with the enraged Russians right behind them. The siege was over after 827 days and the sacrifice of millions upon millions of Russian lives. No one knows for sure but it is estimated that the Russians lost over 26,000,000 soldiers and civilians in WWII. It is no wonder that when the Russians finally began an offensive and entered Germany they slaughtered every air breather they came across. They wanted revenge and they got it.

Born today:

1729    Irish politico Edmund Burke. He said “It is an error to suppose that the loudest complainer for the public is really interested in its welfare.” That sounds like Hillary to me, Edmund.

1863    Indian spiritual leader Swami Vivekananda. He said “We already have the power of the universe at hand. It is we that hold out hands in front our face and say that it is dark.” It is good to hear a deep and rational thought from time to time.

1902    US actor Joe E. Lewis. He said “I went on a diet. No more eating and drinking and in the span of fourteen days I lost two weeks.”

1910    US actress Patsy Kelly. She said “Estelle Winwood is not Tallulah Bankhead’s best friend, I am and I have the scars to prove it.” Tallulah was hell on wheels, ya’ll.

1970    US Singer Zach de la Rocha. He said “Anger is a gift”. It certainly is, and it is a difficult one to control from time to time.

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow