Friday OYSTERS

                                       Al's Most Recent

Quote of the day:

“Men travel the Earth seeking what they need and eventually return home to find it…their families.”

                                             George Moore

After my career as an air traffic controller I went back to school and went into the engineering business, mostly chemical, plastics and fibers piping design including manual drawings, 2D and 3D computer modeling. This included going “in the field” and supervising the assembly and installation of piping that we had designed. I was working in a plant site near Theodore, Al. when a peculiar thing happened. I was about 30 feet above ground and walking around in a pipe rack dropping a plumb bob to people below to determine places to add “branches” into existing piping. I was working for the Fluor/Greenville, SC office at the time. I heard someone coming toward me in the pipe rack. I eventually recognized him as the head of the Fluor-Greenville office. When he got close enough I asked him what the hell was he doing here. He just said that he wanted to see how it was “in the field”. How many people do you know with that much power and status that would climb around in huge chemical plant construction site just to see how his troops worked? I was impressed.

Here is one more wild animal tale.

There is a large demand for “white” tigers. This is a mutation of the familiar orange, black and white Bengal tiger that we are all familiar with. To ensure that white tiger cubs are produced there is very close inbreeding (father-daughter...brother-sister, etc.). The down side is these tiger are very unpredictable. On a farm here in the US that raises these particular tigers there was a 23 year old female worker. She was present at the birth of a litter of white tiger cubs and took a female aside and hand raised it. When it was born it was about the size of a house kitten. A year later it weighed about 150 pounds not full grown. One day she went into the tiger's cage to clean it. She bent over to pick something off the floor with her back to the tiger. The tiger jumped on her back, bit her in the back of the neck killing her instantly. The tiger also fed on her corpse. Not only that, when workers tried to get the corpse the tiger would have none of it, it “protected its kill” just like it would in the wild. They finally shot the tiger and retrieved the corpse. I wondered why they just didn't dart the tiger with a tranquilizer but the law in that state was that once an animal killed a human, it had to be destroyed as a danger to others. An animal behavior expert said that no tiger will attack from the front and once it saw this woman's back and looked like it was on four legs (bent over) it reverted back to its thousands of years old genetics of attacking its four legged prey from the rear...in spite of the fact that this woman was the only “relative” she had ever known. God works in mysterious ways.

This Date in History February 12

1789 On this date the Patriot General Ethan Allen died of a stroke on the banks of the Winooski River in Vermont at the age of 56. In spite of the ongoing struggle between Vermont and New York, Allen was a superb military leader for the fledgling United States. The problem was that New York felt that the lands of Vermont were part of New York and the New Yorkers had no problem selling lands in Vermont and fought against admitting Vermont to join the Union as a separate state. Ethan Allen was even arrested for treason because he got fed up with being refused admission to the Union; he approached England to allow Vermont to be part of Canada. Vermont and New York eventually settled their differences and Vermont was admitted. In the meantime Allen teamed up with US General Benedict Arnold and they attacked the British at Montreal. Allen was captured by the British and was kept prisoner for 3 years. After his release he formed a unit called the Green Mountain Boys and joined up again with Benedict Arnold and captured the British bastion of Fort Ticonderoga. It was from this fort that the Patriot General Henry Knox brought the captured cannon to Boston and then to the peak of Dorchester Heights which drove the British out of Boston.

1805 The Lewis and Clark expedition was wintering with the Mandan Indians near present day Bismarck, North Dakota. There they met a French/Canadian fur trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau. This man had just bought two Indian women from the Hidatsa tribe that was famous for kidnapping and selling women. One of the women was kidnapped from the Shoshone tribe near the Montana/Idaho border. Her name was Sacagawea. Lewis and Clark knew they would need horses to cross the Continental divide and knew that their best bet was to buy them from the Shoshone. Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau as a guide if he would bring Sacajawea with him to which he agreed. On this date Sacajawea went into labor and Clark acted as a midwife assisting her as best he could. Sacagawea was having a tough time but Clark was told that a brew made from powdered rattlesnake rattle would induce birth. Clark administered this to Sacajawea and two hours later she delivered a son named they Jean Baptiste Charbonneau into this world. Clark became very attached to this baby and nicknamed him Pompey, or Pomp and Clark paid for his education. Pomp died in 1866.

Born today:

1809 US President Abraham Lincoln. After receiving a message from Union General Joseph Hooker who signed the message “Headquarters in the saddle” Lincoln said “The trouble with Hooker is that he has his headquarters where his hindquarters ought to be.” Hooker had just been routed by CSA Generals R.E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville, Virginia in spite of the fact that Hooker had the Confederates outnumbered more than two to one. Before the battle Hooker had said “Now we have Lee where he will have to come out and fight or ingloriously run.” Lee and Jackson did neither; it was Hooker and Yankees that “ingloriously ran”. It cost Hooker his command.

Quotable quotes:

“Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.”

                                                Oscar Wilde

“It seems that we must hire lobbyists to protect us from the people we just elected.”

                                                 Mark Twain

“Marriage is the price men pay for sex. Sex is the price women pay for marriage”

                                                  Oscar Wilde

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow