Tuesday OYSTERS

                                   Al's Most Recent

Quote of the day:

“I have an inferiority complex, but it is not a very good one.”

                                   Steven Wright

A little trivia couldn't hurt:

Where did the word “Sharpshooter” come from? It came from a American named Christian Sharps who patented a special rifle in 1848. This rifle was .52 caliber shooting a 475 grain projectile and 70 grains of powder in a brass cartridge. This essentially was an elephant gun designed to kill bison. A mature male bison can reach 2,000 pounds. As the bison became more wary the cartridge morphed into the immortal .45/90. This kept most of the knockdown power by decreasing the size of the projectile but increasing the amount of powder which increased the range. A shot of 800 yards was not unusual. There was an instance where 12 buffalo hunters were surrounded by over 300 irate Comanches at a place in the panhandle of Texas called Adobe Walls. Most of the hunters had the latest Sharps rifle and began picking off the Comanche at enormous range. The Comanche tried and tried again but finally determined that they could not cope with the Sharps and left. After that it became a “Sharps shooter” for those shooters with long range accuracy and eventually corrupted into “sharpshooter”. There you have the resssstt of the story.

             This Date in History   November 10

1775 The United States Marines were born on this date with the signing of a resolution by President John Adams specifying the formation of “two battalions of Marines”. The first amphibious assault by the Continental marines was led by Captain Samuel Nicholson against a British held fort on New Province Island in the Bahamas which was captured by the Marines. The Marines consider Captain Nicholson the first Commandant. After the Revolutionary War in 1783 the short-sighted United States Congress de-mobilized the Navy and disbanded the Marines. However in 1798 United States shipping was harassed partly because of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. Not only that, pirates were preying on US shipping in the southern Mediterranean near the Barbary Coast (Tripoli) so the United States navy was resurrected along with the US Marines as an arm of the Navy. Now a days the Marines are divided into three divisions based at Camp Lejuene, North Carolina, Camp Pendleton, California and Okinawa. In these divisions there an “expeditionary” force. These guys are ready to go anywhere in the world and attack in force within two weeks of notification. The have their own artillery, tanks and armaments, etc meaning they are pretty much self contained. The US Marines have made over 300 landings in their history. As we all know, they are usually the first ones in and the last ones out. They are very much feared and respected by our enemies, as well they should be.

1926 Mrs. William Edwards shows up dead in San Francisco. Mrs. Edwards had been strangled and raped, in that order. She was not the only one that had been killed in that manner, there were nine others. The police finally figured it was a madman named Earle Nelson. Earle was a smoothie. He would go to a boarding house bible in hand and ask to speak to the landlady about a room. Once he got inside the door it was all over for the landlady. Earle felt the heat from the police and skedaddled into Canada and set up shop there. Pretty soon the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Mounties) discovered a trail of murdered and raped women all across Canada. Coordination with the American authorities who put the Mounties on Nelson’s trail and he was finally arrested but not before killing and raping an additional 11 Canadian women. When the Mounties asked if he was Earle Nelson and was it he who had killed all of those women? He said “Yes, but I only killed my ladies on Saturday nights.” Obviously Earle was a tent short of a campsite. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death and in 1928 went to meet his maker wearing a hemp necktie.

1975 Two days before the merchant ship Edmund Fitzgerald had departed an iron mill in Wisconsin with a load of 26,000 tons of taconite (iron pellets) heading east across Lake Superior. The Edmund Fitzgerald was the biggest and fastest of all the ships on the Great Lakes. This puppy was 729 feet long with a crew of 29. On this night a storm of hurricane proportions roared in out of Canada. The merchant ship Anderson was following the Fitzgerald a few miles back and they were in occasional radio and visual contact. As night fell and the winds increased to over 80 miles an hour pushing up monstrous waves. According to the captain of the Anderson he had the Fitzgerald on his radar almost all the time then all of a sudden the blip disappeared and there were no answers to his radio calls. It was later determined that the huge ship had sank with all aboard lost. The ship was only 15 miles from Whitefish Bay and safety. The remains of the ship were found in 536 feet of water. The ship was in two pieces but that is no indicator of why the ship went down in the first place. That mystery will remain. The ship’s bell was recovered and is now in a museum on Whitefish Point.

1808 The Osage branch of the Sioux Indians ceded to the United States their lands in Missouri and Arkansas for settlers in return for a huge chunk of land in central Oklahoma. What the United States did not know was that that hunk of land was virtually afloat on a sea of oil and natural gas. Not only that, cattle ranches exploded with the arrival of new people and a railroad. The Osage Indians began charging a fee to let the ranchers graze cattle on their lands while drilling for and finding oil. As of this writing, the Osage tribe is the richest in the Americas.

Births and deaths:

1875 US inventor Wilbur Wright is born. When he and Orville were at Kitty Hawk, Wilbur said “We can hardly wait to get up in the morning”. They knew they were on the cusp of a world shaking event. What a thrill it had to be when that contraption flew under its own power.

1922 English writer Kingsley Amis is born. When speaking of a fellow writer he said “He is chiefly of the faith in the sense that the church he does not attend is Catholic.” I know several like that.

         Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow