Daily history

Good morning,




Quote of the day:

“Who was the guy that looked at a cow and said ‘I think I will drink whatever comes out of those things when I squeeze them?”

                                      Bill Watterson



In the last two months here in Greenville, South Carolina there have been a rash of carjacking/robberies along with just plain stick-ups and all of them were reinforced by one of the three people involved carrying a rifle. There were at least 4 incidences. This weekend all three of the robbers were captured. They were two kids that were 17 years old and one that was 16. They all will be tried as an adult meaning that they will do at least 20 years each. Their lives are ruined. For the life of me I do not understand how teenagers think they can get away with one crime after another and not do hard time. That, my friends, is the epitome of stupidity.



I am not sure what all the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt is but it worked in Tunisia because the president of Tunisia hit the freaking road because he thought he would be assassinated. President Mubarak of Egypt saw it a different way. He had the news media shut down, all the internet servers and phones were disabled and finally he captured a hell of a lot of CNN camera that were sending their pictures to satellites. The coup-de-etat came when he sent in the Egyptian Marines. The rioters were angry but the reputation of the ruthlessness of the Egyptian Marines was enough to calm things down…for a while…then the protestors got their second wind and hit the streets again. A few policemen stripped off their uniforms and joined the protestors. It will not be over until Mubarak takes a hike.



There was a concert a few days ago at the Music Barn in Charleston, SC. The big acts were Juicy J and Twista. I have visited this place when I was working in Charleston or “Chucktown” as the natives call it. The cops were called three times during this concert. All incidents involved fights involved drunken males between the age of 25 and 30, as you might suspect. There was a lot of shouting and waving but no blows were struck because the cops were standing right there with pepper spray and/or Tasers at hand. One of the alcohol soaked men was told by the management not to come back in the presence of the police. This dumb-ass said “I don’t care what you say, I coming in.” After a duel with a Taser he found himself in handcuffs French kissing the concrete and was arrested. All he had to do was to keep his stupid trap shut and he would have went home rather than at least 13 hours in the drunk tank. Here is yet another example of stupidity in the sovereign state of South Carolina.



This date in history January 31





1865    Earlier United States President Abraham Lincoln had declared that the purpose of the Civil War was to preserve the Union. But after the major ass-kickings the Union army had received during the first year of the War, the northern public said “To hell with it, let the Rebs have their own country, stop the bloodbath.” So Abe had to take another tack to get the country back together so he now changed horses and said the purpose of the War was to free the slaves. It had been noticed that when the Union Army infrequently won a battle, the slaves nearby would join-up with the Yankee soldiers and they would not give them back to their owners. Then Abe issued the Emancipation Proclamation which allegedly freed the slaves in those states in rebellion. Abe’s advisors had in mind that those slaves in the Confederacy would rise up in rebellion upon hearing of the Emancipation but they were wrong, it did not happen and Abe stood there with egg on his face. The Confederacy did not consider themselves “states in rebellion”. They considered themselves as a separate and equally sovereign nation. Not only that there were four states that had slaves but had not seceded. What happened to those slaves? And finally, the Proclamation was not enforceable. I don’t know what Abe was thinking but the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t worth paper it was written on. It took the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, that was ratified on this date, to get the job done and it read in part ...”neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United States nor any place subject to their jurisdiction....” Now the law had some teeth. This amendment passed the Senate and a House vote of 119-65, barely enough of a majority. The bill was introduced in 1864 but failed to pass the House vote because of “states rights” issues.



1923    One of my favorite writers is born on this day. Norman Mailer is born in Long Branch, New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Norman was seen as a gifted child at an early age and was given a scholarship to Harvard during WWII but delayed his education and joined the army. After the war he attended the Sorbonne in Paris. While there he was encouraged to pursue his obvious writing skills and gave us one of the greatest war novels ever written in “The Naked and the Dead”. It is very unusual for an author to deliver such a blockbuster on their first try. He wrote a couple of more novels that were not as successful as his first. Norman joined the peace protest march in Washington in 1967 and wrote about his experiences in the book “Armies of the Night” and received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for this one. Later he gave us another winner in “The Executioners Song”. It is the story of the last few days and months of convicted serial killer Gary Gilmore before Gary met his maker in front of a firing squad in Utah. Again, Norman received a Pulitzer Prize and another National Book Award. Norman is known as a two-fisted drinker/brawler and avid anti-feminists. He has written about nearly everything and everyone. He has written about politics, war, religion, etc and written biographies on people like Marilyn Monroe and Richard Nixon among many others. He wrote about the Chicago police riot during the Democratic National convention. His irascible nature and anti-feminisms has made him one of the most controversial in the entire literary world. It had been reported that he got into an argument with actor Rip Torn and the mother of all brawls ensued. He got into an argument with his wife at a party and chose to stab her in the arm. But no matter, Norman Mailer is one of the most versatile and talented writers this country has ever produced. Not that it matters, Norman is Jewish.



1945    During the later years of WWII the United States were running out of soldiers and lowered the draft requirements. Eddie Slovik had originally been rejected because of a Grand Theft Auto conviction. Since the lowering of the standards Slovik was re-classified as 1-A, trained and sent to France to join the 28th Division as a private. Slovik got lost in the turmoil of battle and ended up with a Canadian outfit. Slovik was a hater of guns and a pacifist and refused to fight. The Canadians finally got fed up with Slovik and turned him over to MP’s of the 28th Division. Slovik tells his commanding officer that he does not want to fight and runs away to the Canadians again. He is again returned to the MP’s of the 28th Division. This time his commander gives him a choice to go immediately to his combat team or face a firing squad. Slovik refuses and a date is set for his execution. He appeals to General Dwight Eisenhower but this is a bad time for this because the Battle of the Bulge was underway and American soldiers were dying by the hundreds. Eisenhower rejects Slovik’s appeal and on this date at dawn, a firing squad of twelve riflemen ends the life of Private Eddie Slovik for cowardice and desertion. He was the first man in the United States military that was executed since the Civil War. It was reported that the men in the firing squad never flinched because they believed he was getting what he deserved. Maybe so, maybe not.



1872    Future western writer Zane Grey is born to a wealthy family in Zanesville, Illinois. He is encouraged to become what his father is, a dentist. He also develops a good fist fighting technique because of his given name. In their wisdom, his parents had named him Pearl. It was later that he changed his name to Zane. Zane had a talent for baseball and is given a scholarship to Penn to play baseball while attending a school for dentistry. After graduating he moved to New York and opens a practice. Zane quickly determines that he hated the dentistry business and is on the alert for any other vocation so he tries writing. He wrote an unsuccessful novel about his ancestry and it looked like it might be a boring life of dentistry for Zane. Then he met a man named “Buffalo” Jones, an explorer of the American west. Zane was encouraged to write by Jones and so Zane wrote a novel about the life of Jones called “The Last of the Plainsmen” The novel received little attention so Jones took Zane on a tour of the great American west. This tour formed Zane’s life forever and western novels became his forte’. In 1912 he delivered to the world the eternal western novel “Riders of the Purple Sage”. It was similar to the famous novel by Owen Wister “The Virginian” whereby a tenderfoot easterner comes west and learns what it takes to survive in a hostile environment and finds out things about himself that he did not know before. Zane wrote 78 western novels which made him a very wealthy man. He loved to big game fish and some of his records for big fish have never been broken and he fished on many an expedition with Ernest Hemingway. It was his descriptions of the great southwest like the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest that makes me want to go for a tour there to this day. His death was a loss for us all, but his books endure.



Born today:

1892    US entertainer Eddie Cantor. He said “Every time I see a Most Wanted list I have this thought. If they had been wanted in their youth, would they be wanted now?” I wonder if Atilla the Hun was wanted as a youth.



1905    US writer John O’Hara. He said “So who is perfect? Washington had false teeth, Ben Franklin was nearsighted, Mussolini had syphilis, unpleasant things have been said about Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, Tchaikovsky had his problems too, and Lincoln was constipated a lot.” That is really ironic that thousands of troops on both sides in the Civil war died of dysentery.



1921    US actor John Agar. He said “Hell I don’t drink anymore than John Wayne, Ward Bond, Spencer Tracy, Alan Ladd or Robert Walker but I got in hell of a lot more trouble.” John, that is because you got into the acting business only because you were married to Shirley Temple. You are really a wimp.




1938    US Secretary of the Interior James Watt. He said “Hell, we don’t have to protect the environment; the evangelicals say the Second Coming is at hand.” He is right ya’ll. If the Second Coming is at hand, why do we need to worry about the future?



Thanks for listening I can’t wait until tomorrow.