Wednesday

Good morning,

Quote of the day:

”A restless soul is a sign of life.”

                  Aristotle

                                                 Crazy as Hell

Chapter 2

New Years Eve of 1972 fell on a Sunday and as you might expect in the Big Easy the streets were packed with revelers and the cops had their hands full. Just before 11:00 p.m. Essex stepped out of his Chevy one block from the New Orleans city police headquarters armed with the Colt and the Ruger and pockets full of ammo. He sneaked to point across the street from the main entrance to the headquarters and took aim. By this time the cops were in the middle of a shift change. There was a 19 year old police cadet in a glass cage that controlled the doors for vehicles entering the building with prisoners. Standing in front of the doors was two police lieutenants and another 19 year old police cadet. Essex chose as his target the cadet in the glass cage and opened fire. The first round shattered the glass and the cadet knew he was under attack and jumped from the cage. Essex was momentarily stunned by the considerable recoil but regained his composure and fire twice more. One of the shots hit the cadet in the chest, passed through, ricocheted and hit one of the lieutenants in the leg. The cadet was dead before he hit the ground. After firing four rounds and with the Ruger only holding five, Essex ran away from the building and stopped briefly, reloaded and fired a couple of more rounds without aiming...no one else was hit. He ran about 50 feet lit off a string of firecrackers as a diversion and fired off a few more rounds without hitting anything. He must have really rushed because he dropped the Colt and several rounds of Winchester .44 magnum ammo.

I am back to the textbook on the history of the Comanche. For over 80 years these guys were recognized as the finest light cavalry in the world. They were aboard fiery Spanish ponies that had escaped the Spanish conquistadors and ran wild and bred for a couple of centuries. The Comanche were the first to capture and “break” them. Both the Comanche riders and the ponies could last longer without rest, food and water than anyone chasing them. The ponies were in great demand to the other plains tribes for running down bison. Eventually the Comanche realized that if they were going to expand their influence they needed firearms and metal tipped axes, lances and arrows, etc. They decided that the answer was kidnapping people, especially the Spanish and the Apache. Why them? They had horses. The would kidnap these people and hold them as hostages and trade them back for at least three horses per person. They would take the extra horses and trade them to the illegal gun runners for firearms and metal tools. In many cases they would take the extra horses and trade them to the other plains tribes for bead work, gold and silver and use that as currency. Eventually the US cavalry entered the picture and they needed horses also and business boomed because the illegal gun runners needed even more horse to sell to the US cavalry. But finally the US cavalry began indiscriminate slaughter of the plains tribes. In a stunning display of logic, these tribes determined that there were more members of their tribe that were dying or disappearing than were being born and if that continued they would be annihilated. They decided that they needed replacements for their women and children that were murdered or died from the white man's diseases. The plains tribes felt that if the honkies were responsible for the death or disappearance of their women and children the honkies should be responsible for replacing them and business increased for the Comanche. The beginning of the end for the Comanche came when the US Cavalry ceased trying to track down the warriors and began a wholesale slaughter of horses wherever they found them. Without horses the Comanche had nothing to trade and no way to run down bison. The tribes as a whole did not believe that anyone would indiscriminately try to annihilate animals just to subdue other human beings. They were wrong.

             This Date in History October 29

1777  After a prolonged illness, John Hancock resigned as president of the Continental Congress. Hancock is famous for his large and flowing signature on the monumental Declaration of Independence that was signed on July 4, 1776. He was present in one capacity or another at nearly every important document signing in this country’s fight for independence. He was a very wealthy man and had much to lose if the rebellion had failed. After resigning he went back home to Massachusetts and started his recovery from his illness. By 1780 he had recovered enough to run for the Governor of Massachusetts which he easily won. He served for five years and then refused to run again in 1785 and went back to his home. Two years later in 1787 he ran for the Governorship again and won. He served in this capacity until his death in 1793. His tenures as Governor of Massachusetts proved this man’s great leadership and administrative skills. Not only that, he was a feisty devil and the British knew it and had a bounty on him. After signing the Declaration of Independence, Hancock said about his signature, “Now the British can read it without their spectacles, their bounty be damned.” I like his attitude.

1901  On this date a nurse named Jane Toppan is arrested in Amherst, Massachusetts. It seems that in the recent past this woman had been responsible for the death of the entire Davis family of Boston. As with most serial killers Jane had an atrocious childhood. Her mother died when she was very young and her father, a tailor by trade, was crazy as a loon. He went to an asylum after sewing his eyelids shut. Jane bounced around several foster homes until she was finally adopted. Jane expressed a desire to become a nurse and attended a nursing school. But Jane was not interested in healing as much as she was interested in hanging around morgues an autopsy rooms. She began her reign of terror by being an in-home nurse which gave her an opportunity to do her evil things unobserved and unsupervised. She finally ended up in the Davis house in Boston to take care of the feeble Mattie Davis. Soon thereafter Mattie died, followed swiftly by Mattie’s sister Annie, Mattie’s father Alden and Mattie’s sister Mary. Mary’s husband called bullshit on this as being too much of a coincidence and demanded autopsies of all the above. The autopsies revealed that all had died of an overdose of morphine. Upon hearing that autopsies were going to be performed on the Davis family, Jane hightailed out of town but was easily captured. While she was on the run she chose to murder her sister with an overdose of morphine also. At trial she admitted to at least twenty murders but the authorities thought she was responsible for over 100. Jane was sentence to life in a mental institution. While there she was constantly bugging the nursing staff to give her some morphine and a syringe so she could kill even more. She died in 1938 and hell rejoiced at their new arrival.

1962   Bahamian actor Sidney Poitier testified before the United States Congress about the lack of opportunity for black actors and actresses in the movie industry. Sidney was recognized as a superb actor and was indeed an Oscar winner for his performance in the movie Lilies of the Field. What I don’t understand is what Sidney wanted Congress to do about it. The movie industry is like any other business, its goal to make money for their investors. If I was an investor I would not give damn about the equality of the casting of roles, I would just be interested in the making of a profitable enterprise and the producers and casting directors had damn well better keep that in mind, racial issues not withstanding. Congress cannot dictate to a business enterprise such as this who they must hire or not hire. After all the success of any movie is greatly dependent on the skill of the actors, screenwriters, and large variety of other skilled technicians, not the color of their skins.

1740   One of the greatest writers of his time is born on this date. James Boswell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland to wealthy and influential parents. The name Boswell goes deep into the history of the ancestry of Scotland. As with most parents of that era, they had already decided that James was going to be a lawyer. After James grew up he decided that he wanted to be a writer instead and ran away from home and traveled Europe and met with other great writers such as Rousseau, Voltaire and a short Corsican that later became the legendary Napoleon Bonaparte. But James parents ran him down and brought his young ass back Edinburgh and began forcefully teaching him English law. That did not extinguish the flame of writing burning inside James in spite of the fact that he established a successful law practice in London. He eventually became a very successful writer of essays. He consorted with another successful writer in Samuel Johnson and they exchanges ideas regularly. James delivered his most famous and successful essay “The Life of Samuel Johnson”. This essay came in three volumes. Boswell finished writing the first two but while writing the third he decided to drink heavily and chase skanky women in the London night life. Boswell died drunk with a smile on his face before finishing the third volume. He was 53 years old.

1901   The assassin of US President William McKinley is executed in the electric chair. Leon Czolgosz went to meet his maker medium rare courtesy of the electric chair. Leon was in a receiving line waiting to shake the hand of President McKinley at the World’s Fair. When it came Leon’s turn, he had a handkerchief tied around his right hand hiding a small revolver. McKinley thinking that Leon was crippled reached out with his left hand and Leon pumped two rounds into McKinley’s abdomen. Leon was immediately disarmed and arrested. Of the two shot, one went all the way through and caused very little damage but the other one lodged near his liver and had to be removed surgically. It looked like McKinley was going to be OK but after a couple of days her started getting worse and soon died. It was gangrene that had set up inside his abdomen that was undetected. Leon was unrepentant to the end. His last words were “I am not sorry, he was an evil man.”

1619   English explorer and bon vivant Sir Walter Raleigh had a fateful meeting with a big guy with a big axe on the lawn of the Tower of London and went to meet his maker in two pieces. It seems that Sir Walter had been a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I and she was quite fond of him. She sent Sir Walter on several exploratory trips to the new world including the fateful settlement on Roanoke Island, North Carolina of which not one scrap was ever found after a supply ship arrived two years later. After returning to London Queen Elizabeth found out that Sir Walter had been having a liaison with a Scottish beauty named Bessy Throckmorton, one of the Queen’s Maids-of-Honor, and the Queen became enraged the threw Sir Walter and Bessy into the Tower. Sir Walter coughed up enough money to bail out them both. Sir Walter and Bessy were married and they tried their damnedest to stay out of the way of the Queen. Elizabeth died in 1603 and James I rose to power. James accused Sir Walter of opposing him becoming King shortly but allowed him to live so he could send Sir Walter on some more expeditions. Sir Walter finally returned from an expedition of establishing a village near a gold mine in South America. James I evidently felt that Sir Walter had outlived his usefulness and recalled the supposed crime of 15 years before and had him executed. Sir Walter Raleigh was 66 years old and had spent the greatest part of his life in the service of his country. But as the saying goes “What have you done for me lately, Walt?”

Born today:

1897 Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. He said “If the day should ever come when we Nazis must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that it will shake the universe and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.” Hey Joe, what really happened was the Allies sealed off the western side of Germany and would not accept a surrender and allowed the Russian army to attack unhindered from the east. The Russians were bloodthirsty for revenge because the Germans had slaughtered over 25,000,000 Russians in their attack toward Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. When the Russians found the German extermination camps of Dachau, Buchenwald and several others, they decided that no German air breather should live. They headed toward Berlin slaughtering everybody and everything in sight including dogs, cats and various and sundry livestock. The Russians crushed any resistance to the city of Berlin that was being defended by sub-teen boys and men in their 70’s. Yeah Joe, mankind was stupefied alright. And you, being the brave son-of-a-bitch that you were, poisoned yourself your wife and your five daughters. It was that kind of cruelty that stupefied mankind to this day.

Born today:

1971 US actress Wynona Ryder. She said “I feel my best when I am happy.” Wynona, shut up.

Died today:

1918  English adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh. He said “All men are evil and will declare themselves so if the occasion occurs.” See the above paragraph on Joseph Goebbels.

                    Thanks for listening   I can hardly wait until tomorrow