Thursday

Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“I feel like a child walking on the seashore picking up prettier shell or a smoother pebble whilst the whole ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.”

It was Sir Isaac Newton that uttered these words after being told how smart he was.

This past Sunday I went to my favorite watering hole. This place has three bars and a gigantic music building. They had two bands scheduled. One from 2 to 5 and another from 6 to 9. It was an interesting mix of people. I met a USN helicopter instructor pilot, a Delta airline pilot, several laid off offshore oil platform workers, a number of professional women in a variety of careers, a retired USMC three star general, two New Orleans Saints offensive linemen not to mention wall-to-wall party loving ladies. By the way, you don't really know how big those NFL linemen are until you get next to them.

Things to ponder:

The generally accepted method of populating North America was people crossing over from present day Siberia to Alaska then turning south. They were able to walk over because much of the Earth's oceans were at least 300 lower that they are now making a land bridge available. The oceans were lower because of an Ice Age that had frozen much of the worlds oceans into the polar ice caps. Where is all that ice now? It has melted!! The cause...the dreaded global warming. When did this happen...about 13,000 years ago.

There are canyons in Yosemite that are box shaped rather than vee shaped like you would find with a river and these box canyons have no rivers. What caused these box canyons? It was glaciers, y'all. There is positive proof that there was a glacier where New York City is today. What happened to the glaciers? They melted!! Yet another dreaded global warming!

Geologist tell us that there have been at least five ice ages that they know of. All of this should tell us that ice ages and global warming are cyclic in spite of what Al Gore says. It is true that burning fossil fuels and being poor stewards of the Earth contributes to global warming...but history tells us it is going to happen again anyway. After all, we have had at least five instances of global warming without the use of fossil fuels and other contaminents.

            This Date in History April 28

1789 Earlier the Government of England had tasked ship captain William Bligh to sail into the South Pacific with a ship load of breadfruit saplings. The idea was to plant the breadfruit sapling and see if the fruit grew in sufficient quantity to feed the slaves that were gong to be used in the area later on. The ship he was commanding was the HMS Bounty. The ship arrived in Tahiti in October of 1788 and remained five months doing research. But the Captain and his botanist was not the only people aboard doing research and planting. The ships crew had fallen for the warm weather, laid-back life style not to mention the beautiful and receptive Polynesian women. To make it worse, Captain Bligh was a notorious hard-ass and was unmerciful in the dispensing of his form of discipline, many

unfair floggings included. After leaving Tahiti the ship went to Tonga to plant some more saplings. It was during this trip that the crap hit the fan. The majority of the crew persuaded the second in command, Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, to take over the ship and stop this brutal treatment by Captain Bligh. On this date, the majority of the crew led by Fletcher Christian did indeed mutiny and took control of the ship. Christian chose to put Bligh and 18 of his loyal crew men adrift in a 25 foot sailboat and sailed away. In a superb show of seamanship, Bligh was able to navigate the boat using the stars alone to Timor Island, a distance of 3,600 mile and he made it there on June 24, 1789. After a brief stop at Tubuai Island looking for a place to settle, the crew of the Bounty set sail for the ever loving arms of Tahiti. After arriving at Tahiti Christian had second thoughts knowing the British Navy would be there soon looking for the Bounty because that was on Bligh’s pre-sailing log. So he gave his crew the choice of going with him to find another settlement or to stay here in Tahiti and risk the wrath on the British Navy. 16 of the crew chose to stay in Tahiti, the British Navy be damned. Fletcher Christian sailed off with eight of the crewmen, six Tahitian men and 12 Tahitian women looking for a remote island to settle. They chose Pitcairn Island about 1,000 miles southeast of Tahiti. After stripping the Bounty, Christian ordered it burned. The British navy never looked for them there but they were discovered in 1806 by a whaling vessel that saw smoke from a cooking fire. In 1825 a British ship finally arrived at tiny Pitcairn and those remaining crew members were granted amnesty and were taken to Tahiti. After a few year they decided that they had rather be on Pitcairn and went back home. To this day there are about 40 people on Pitcairn all of which can trace their ancestry to the British crewman of the Bounty. By the way, this was not the only mutiny Bligh had to endure, this one was the third.

1945 On the date the Fascist Leader of Italy, Benito Mussolini was caught trying to cross the Italian border into Switzerland with his mistress Clara Petacci and both were shot to death by Italian troops. This jackass had sided with Hitler early on and was hoping to bring Italy back to the glory of ancient Rome. The only problem here was that the present day Italian infantry were the worst fighter on the planet and Hitler was constantly having to bail them out an the smallest conflict. After the Allies landed on Sicily and Italy soon after and met with success against the defending Germans, although it was a bloody one, Mussolini saw that his days were numbered. It was then that he gathered up his girl friend and split for Switzerland. Mussolini had a wife and 6 children and apparently he just abandoned then to whatever the Allies chose to do with them. What a great husband and father. After Mussolini and Petracci were killed they were transported to the town square of Milan and hanged upside down for all to see, spit upon and throw rocks at, etc. What goes around.....

1955 On this date little Stephanie Bryan disappeared from her neighborhood in Berkeley, California. The police were about to write this one off when something peculiar happened. The wife of one Burton Abbot found a strange pocketbook in their garage. After looking inside she found Stephanie’s student identification card and knowing the cops were looking for her gave them a call. The cops swarmed down on the garage and found a bra that same size and type of that worn by Stephanie. They interviewed Burton extensively but he denied everything and said that his garage had been used as a polling place in the past and that is where the evidence came from. The police were about to buy Abbot’s story when a radio news reporter hired a detective and a bloodhound and went to the Abbot’s mountain cabin and found the corpse of little Stephanie. Abbot was tried and convicted of murder and was sentenced to death. Abbot appealed his death penalty unsuccessfully several time but he was one too short when he was sitting in a chair when some pellets were dropped into a pan of acid under his seat and he was dead in four minutes. Two minutes later the Governor called and tried to issue a stop execution order. Too bad.

1950 US comic Jay Leno. He said “You can say want you want but when Dan Quayle was in the National Guard, not one Viet Cong got past Muncie, Indiana.”

          Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow