Thursday

Good morning,

Quote of the day:

When told by Xerxes, the King of Persia, to surrender his weapons he said “Come and take them”.

                   Leonidas, the leader of the Spartans at Thermopylae

I have decided to do a brief essay on the different adventures of Ulysses as written by Homer in his immortal book The Odyssey. By the way. Ulysses is also known as Odysseus. He was the King of Ithaca which was a Greek island. One of his first adventures on his way home from the Trojan War was an encounter with Polyphemus. This critter was a titan, meaning he was the issue of a God and a mortal human...in addition to being very large, Polyphemus was a cyclops meaning he had only one eye and it was in the middle of his forehead. Ulysses and the crew of his ship stopped on an island looking for fresh water and food. Unfortunately, this island was where Polyphemus resided and he captured Ulysses and his crew. I forgot, Polyphemus was also a cannibal and the crew he had just captured was herded into a cave where there also was a herd of sheep. Ulysses and his crew was not the first humans to be captured as evidenced by a pile of human bones in the cave. A huge stone was rolled into the entrance of the cave blocking any exit. Ulysses was known for his guile and he knew that they would need Polyphemus to move the stone to escape. Ulysses found a long tree limb in the cave and was able to sharpen one end and hardened it with fire. He then had his crew kill some of the sheep and skin them. They covered themselves with the skins and began slowly crawling toward the entrance. Polyphemus thought his sheep wanted out to graze and pulled back the stone. Ulysses stabbed Polyphemus in the eye with the fire hardened stick blinding him and he and his crew scrambled out and escaped. They reached their ship carrying the sheep carcasses and barrels of water they stole from Polyphemus and sailed away. They were not out of the woods yet. Remember me telling y'all about Polyphemus being the offspring of a God and a mortal? The father of Polyphemus was Poseidon, the God of the Seas and he was not pleased about what Ulysses had done to his son. He made life miserable for Ulysses and crew while at sea for quite a spell. There a variations of the details of this tale dependent upon the translation but the results are the same.

This Date in History September 25

1864 CSA President Jefferson Davis traveled from Richmond to Palmetto, Georgia to visit with CSA Gen. John Bell Hood to find out why Hood’s mighty Army of Tennessee received a major ass whipping at the Battle of Atlanta. As usual when an army gets almost destroyed the military leaders start finger pointing to avoid the blame for the failure. In this case it was Hood pointing at CSA Gen. William Hardee one of his three Corp commanders. From the outset of the war it was apparent that Hardee should have had command of the Army of Tennessee but President Davis would not admit a mistake and left Hood in command. On his way back to Richmond Davis made a speech in Columbia, S.C. trying to pump up the morale of the people and mentioned that Hood “Had his eyes on farther horizons”. US Gen. William Sherman read this in the newspaper and correctly assumed that Hood was on his way back to Tennessee to try to cut Sherman’s supply lines. There was an army waiting on Hood and the Army of Tennessee was eliminated as an effective fighting group. Davis should have kept his mouth shut.

1957 Nine black students are escorted by the 101^st Airborne into Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Previously the US Supreme Court had ruled that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional. There were some 500 blacks within Central High School’s district that expressed interest in attending Central. Through a series of interviews and mind-changing the 500 were whittled down to nine. Gov. Orville Faubus being a staunch segregationist ordered the Ark. National Guard to prevent the blacks from entering the school to avoid bloodshed. This ploy did not sit well with Federal District Court Judge Davis and Davis ordered the black kids be allowed to attend the school, National Guard not withstanding. Finally President Eisenhower had had enough of Faubus and sent in the 101^st to enforce the law. It was not until the 70’s that blacks were socially accepted and the on and off violence abated. Hatred has no limits.

1942 The damned Nazis invade and conquer Norway looking for that country’s iron ore and it being a good location to mount attacks on allied shipping to England and Russia. The government of Norway had fled and set up a government-in-exile in London. The Norwegians were not happy about this and started giving the Germans some crap. The Germans responded with setting a puppet government with a Norwegian monster named Vidkun Quisling in control. This jackass sucked up to the Germans and even sent some his fellow Norwegians to German concentration camps. To this day the word Quisling means a hated government. The Germans also set up a Gestapo headquarters in Oslo and other cities to intimidate the populous into behaving. On this day the RAF (English Air Force) bombed the Gestapo headquarters in Oslo and sent the Germans running. But it was for naught because the Gestapo came back and murdered innocent people in reprisal. I cannot express enough my hatred for the Germans and Arab terrorists. (See the last sentence in the previous paragraph) They are all pig- sucking cowards.

1897 William Faulkner was born in Oxford, Miss. Faulkner was one of the most celebrated authors in American history. His first success was his book The Sound and Fury but he made his mark being a screenwriter in giving us the movies To Have and Have Not with Humphrey Bogart starring and The Big Sleep also starring Bogie. In 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and the next year his book Collected Stories was awarded the National Book Award. He was a true talent but left us when he had a heart attack and died at the age of 55. It is interesting to note that he and his wife Estelle bought an old ante- bellum house near Oxford and refurbished it. I can see him now on the columned front porch in a cane bottomed rocker sipping a little bourbon and branch water.

1957 Little Augie Carfano is shot to death on the street in New York. Augie was a soldier in the army of mobster Meyer Lansky and was caught not giving Meyer an appropriate amount of tribute after a successful score. Meyer didn’t play, y'all. It was estimated that Meyer had accumulated over $300M by the early 70’s but even with that the Feds could never come up with enough solid evidence to can his ass. His friend Bugsy Siegel with great vision had borrowed $6M from Meyer and opened the Flamingo, first casino in Las Vegas. It was an instant success but it looked like he wasn’t interested in paying Meyer back. Bugsy came down with a 30.06 caliber headache from which he never recovered. Almost appropriately Meyer disintegrated and died from lung cancer in 1983.

1867 Cattle baron Oliver Loving died in Ft. Sumner, New Mexico of gangrene. Ollie was also a great visionary. He and his friend Charlie Goodnight decided that it was a bummer to have to drive their cattle to a rail head somewhere in Kansas where a middle man would be involved and cut into their profits. So they decided to make cattle drives from west Texas through New Mexico and on up into the burgeoning cities and towns in Colorado and sell their cattle directly to the meat houses. On their first drive they lost 400 cattle but were able to deliver about 1,600 and walked away with $12,000 in gold an enormous amount in those days. They had one major problem, the Comanche. They were not happy with these honkies passing through their lands and demanded tribute in the form of cattle. Ollie and Charlie struggled with this problem until one day about 500 Comanche caught Ollie out by himself and hacked on him a while. Ollie was able to get back to Ft. Sumner with the most severe of his wounds being one of his arms. When his arm started to fester Ollie asked the local doctor to amputate it. The doctor said that he had never done such a thing and he wasn’t going to start now. So Ollie died a few days later because a freaking doctor had no nerve. There are markers out there to this day showing the Loving-Goodnight Trail from New Mexico to Colorado. The trail was used for many years by other drovers.

Born today:

1207 Afghani mystic and poet Jalal-ud Din-Rumi. He said “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” That sounds the stock market to me.

1924 American playwright Truman Capote. He said “Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.” As with a lot of people, he got rich and partied himself to death.

1931 US actress Angie Dickenson. She said “I dress for women and undress for men.” She sure is/was a sexy woman.

Died today:

0420 Italian religious leader Saint Jerome. He said “When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.” Jerome, you sound like a wise man but for me fasting is out of the realm of possibility.

1628 English writer Fulke Grenville. He said “No man was ever so much deceived by another as himself.” You know Fulke, I think we all are guilty of that from time to time.

1985 German actress Simone Signoret. She said “Chains do not keep a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.” That is a very profound and true statement, Simone. I guess I just ran out of thread, or never learned how to sew.

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow

Goodbye from the land of speech slow as molasses, thought even slower...but fast women...sometimes.