Wednesday OYSTERS

                               Al's Most Recent

Here is something for those of you are down and discouraged. It is a poem by William Ernest Henley. It was quoted in the movie Invicta. Morgan Freeman won an Oscar portraying Nelson Mandela.

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

Back in the 1830's the US Government chose to move many of the Native Americans in the mountains of Appalachia because they wanted their lands. They moved them to the great plains of what is now Kansas and Oklahoma. The major tribe there was the Comanche who welcomed them because they had farming skills and manufactured goods like metal axes woven fabric which the Comanche needed. They also brought about 5,000 slaves with them. That's right y'all. On occasion the Comanche would kidnap some of the slaves and trade them for horses to tribes that had silver mines. Think about all of that and then decide where justice really lies and how righteous we really are.

Recently an inventor died. This man created a device that changed to world forever. It was the Russian Mikhail Kalashnikov. He invented the AK-47 assault rifle.

This is a recap of a couple of years ago:

I saw one person that was in the Milwaukee airport that was jammed to the rafters with others that have been trapped there since Saturday because of a blizzard. This one woman said that she had no change of clothes because she had no clue where here luggage was. She did say that she had a small carry-on bag with her full of cosmetics only. Not only that, her credit cards were in the lost luggage (bad move) and she was out of money to eat on. This is why men carry their stuff in their wallets. The airport appeared to be operating but the departures were so far behind that it will “take until New Years to get caught up”. I also heard about a pregnant woman in New York that had gone into labor and the baby was in trouble. Someone with the woman called EMS and explained what was wrong. The EMS dispatcher said that she would get someone there as soon as possible. 9 hours later and ambulance showed up but it was too late, the baby was dead. You can imagine what kind of turmoil those guys were going through in the early hours of a blizzard.

I saw a program on TV about the ice melting on the polar ice caps. They showed one ice field that had retreated and it exposed an area that had not seen daylight for millions of years. Guess what was there? They found fossils of mussels and clams that will not live in water deeper than 10 feet or in water colder than 50 degrees. There were also fossilized stumps of trees that were of the cedar and cypress family All of this tells us that at one point the Arctic and Antarctic ice fields were in a temperate climate, speaking of global warming. 

 

                This Date in History   December 30

1916 Earlier Czar Nicholas of Russia and his wife the Czarina Alexandra fell under the spell of a holy man named Rasputin. The Czar and Czarina had a son that was a hemophiliac and had suffered a cut and no one could stop the bleeding. Rasputin was called and somehow he was able to stop the bleeding and saved the boy’s life. From this time on Rasputin was in favor with the royal family. In addition to being a holy man, Rasputin was known to be a heavy drinker and woman chaser. The best possible thing happened for Rasputin. Czar Nicholas was called away to a foreign war. This left the Czarina in control of Russia and Rasputin in charge of her. Eventually the other member of royalty got fed up with Rasputin and decided to cap this heathen. A group of them invited Rasputin to dinner in a fancy mansion. What Rasputin did not know was that his food and drink had been heavily poisoned but he swallowed everything with great relish with no apparent ill effects...so they shot him. Rasputin fell and as the other try to drag him out of the room, Rasputin got up and knocked one of them out and then ran outside trying to escape. He was shot once again and fell face down. The others jumped on top of him, tied his hands and feet and threw him in a near freezing river never to be seen again. The Czarina was heartbroken at the loss of her lover but the Czar was ecstatic.

1853 Earlier the United States Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce, Jefferson Davis (later to become the President of the Confederate States of America) sent the Ambassador to Mexico named James Gadsden to visit with the President of Mexico, General Santa Ana. Gadsden’s job was to settle the squabbles the United States had been having with Mexico about the lands in the southwestern area of the present day United States. Gadsden and Santa Ana set down with a map and drew up a new border for northern Mexico and the southwestern United States that formed the area known as the Gadsden Purchase and that map became the present day southern border of Arizona and New Mexico. We offered Santa Ana $12 million that was later lowered to $10 million. The United States felt that this strip of land was vital for the development of a transcontinental railroad. In 1861 the “big four” in railroading, Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker got together and decided that a railroad was to be built on the newly acquired land and make it a branch of the Central Pacific Railroad known later as the immortal Southern Pacific Railroad.

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow