Thursday OYSTERS

Good morning,

Quote of the day:

“Changing with the environment is not necessary, survival is not required.”

                                                     Oscar Wilde

To get away from the children of Henry VIII for a while, I have delved into the movers and shakers of the French Revolution. In this era there was Voltaire, Rousseau and a lesser known thinker named Diderot. He had an especially different approach to a subject. In one particular case he started out describing his love of apricots. He told how to tell if the apricot was completely ripe. He then offered a recipe for apricot jam. He told how to peel and slice them, mix them with a measured amount of sugar....then he gave a long dissertation about where sugar cane is raised (back then it was Barbados), how granular sugar is arrived at and then he hit on his main subject which was the evils of slavery. About how men women and children were kidnapped from various places but mostly west Africa to work in gigantic sugar cane fields and sugar mills so he could make his apricot jam. He then concluded this item with the rest of the recipe like add specific spices and cook for three hours at medium heat, how long to cool etc. This is an interesting concept in storytelling.

I have been touching on the royalty of old that led their armies in combat. There was English kings Harold, Henry V, Richard III and many, many other kings of England, Ireland, Scotland, Germanic tribes, etc, etc. that led their armies in combat. It took courage and commitment and belief in your troops and your troops had to believe in the king to pull off something like that . It was not until the days of Oliver Cromwell that a permanent standing army was realized. These guys were sent through very tough training both as infantry and cavalry units. They were constantly trained in various movements and maneuvers. They were the equivalent of Green Beret units of their day.

              This Date in History   October 8

1918 On this day US Private Alvin York in one engagement killed 25 Germans and captured 132. Earlier, York and 15 others had been sent to capture a railroad depot in the Argonne Forest and gotten lost and found themselves behind enemy lines. There was a brief firefight and in the confusion a number Germans surrendered. On their way back toward their lines, a German machine gun nest above saw how small York’s unit was and in German yelled to the captured Germans to hide and then opened fire. Half of York’s unit was killed almost instantly. York, being a backwoodsman hunter from Tennessee, started picking off the Germans with his rifle with deadly accuracy. After a while York jumped up and charged the nest with the other following close behind. A detachment of 6 Germans were sent to intercept York but all were cut down by York and his Colt 1911 .45 automatic. York kept up the killing until the rest of the Germans surrendered. On the way back to his lines many other Germans surrendered thinking it was a general surrender. Alvin York was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

1780 On October 7 the Battle of Kings Mountain occurred with the destruction of British Major Patrick Ferguson and his detachment. Ferguson had been sent by British General Cornwallis to make sure that there would be no guerrilla tactics against his army while moving from Winnsboro, S.C. through North Carolina into Virginia. After hearing about the destruction of Ferguson and his troops, Cornwallis reversed course and went back to Winnsboro to await reinforcements. The strange thing about this engagement was that Ferguson was the only British subject in the battle. All the others were American Loyalist and Patriots. The beginnings of this victory had begun on September 25 when Patriot leaders Colonels Charles McDowell, John Sevier, Isaac Shelby and William Campbell met in western North Carolina and decided to eliminate Ferguson and his troops. They marched for 5 days before stopping at the Quaker Meadows Plantation in present day Morganton, N.C. there they were joined by many frontiersmen, mostly wild-eyed Scottish immigrants. In the mean time Ferguson who was in camp at Gilbert Town near present day Rutherfordton, N.C. decided to move on to Kings Mountain. The Patriots found out that Ferguson was not at Gilbert Town and followed him to Kings Mountain. Ferguson camped on a plateau about 60 feet higher that the surrounding lands. The Patriots surrounded the base of the plateau and the battle began. After about an hour of ferocious gunfire Ferguson raised a white flag of surrender, and yelled out “I am an officer in the King’s army and will be treated with dignity and respect”. That was greeted almost instantly with eight musket balls and Ferguson was dead as fried chicken before he hit the ground. The second in command raised the white flag of surrender again but the Patriots kept killing and all were annihilated. The Patriots were seeking revenge for when some Patriots tried to surrender to the infamous British Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Waxhaw, North Carolina he continued to kill them anyway. British General Henry Clinton recognized this as the beginning of the end and said so. About a year later Gen. Cornwallis handed his sword to Gen. George Washington. There were a few skirmishes after this but essentially the Revolutionary War came to an end and this great ship of liberty and freedom was launched on the sea of blood shed by our ancestors.

Born today:

1912 US writer John Gardner. He said “All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.” That sounds like a football game to me.

1890 US aviator Eddie Rickenbacker. He said “Aviation is proof that given the will, we can achieve the impossible.” Tack onto that “like understanding of the female mind.” I’m just joking.

1920 US writer Frank Herbert. He said “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe that nothing can stand in their way.” That sounds like Jimmy Swaggart and Hillary Clinton entertaining each other.

1938 Hell’s Angels founder Sonny Barger. US writer Hunter Thompson spent a year with the San Bernardino branch of the Hell’s Angels gathering information for a book. After he left Sonny said “Hunter turned out to be a real weenie, and a stone f**king coward. He was a total fake.” If you read Hunter’s book about his experience here, you would have thought that he was a Spartan at Thermopylae. Hunter blew his own brains out later on.

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow