Monday

                    Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“Music has the charm to soothe the savage beast, but keep a revolver close by just in case.”

                                            Josh Billings

             This Date in History January 9

1493 On this date Christopher Columbus, having sailed from Spain with three ships 6 months earlier, makes an entry in the ships log that he has sighted three mermaids. He was in close proximity to the island of Hispaniola, present day Haiti/Dominican Republic when he made the sightings. His entry said that the mermaids were not nearly as beautiful as the paintings of them he had seen. Reports of mermaid sightings had been made since the days of the ancient Greek mariners. They were usually portrayed as having a woman’s head and torso and a fish’s tail. There is little question that they were different versions of manatees because the location of the sightings are now known as the habitat of manatees or a version thereof. I now understand why Columbus said that they were not as beautiful as the paintings. Manatees are not the most handsome of God’s critters. It goes right along with reports of Sirens. In Greek legend, Sirens were half bird half woman that lived on small islands and when an unsuspecting ship came by they would sing beautiful and seductive songs to them and lured them to their deaths of shallow reefs or rocky shores. Homer spoke of them in his book “The Odyssey”. Now-a-days Sirens are found in places like The Trophy Club, Platinum Plus and Nepal’s which are all strip joints in Greenville. Only they don’t sing men to their destruction, they wriggle them to it climbing a brass pole.

1806 In October of 1805 Napoleon Bonaparte was overpowering the whole of Europe and things did not look good for England. A British fleet of warships led by Lord Horatio Nelson met and engaged a combined fleet of French and Spanish warship off the coast of Spain near a point of land called Trafalgar. Even though outnumbered and outgunned, Nelson beat the hell out of Napoleon’s armada thus preventing the invasion of England. Before engaging the enemy fleet, Nelson had signaled to his fleet “England expects every man to do his duty.” During the battle, a sniper up in the rigging of a French warship put a bullet through the lungs of Lord Nelson and he collapsed on the deck. Before dying, Nelson asked if the battle was won. After being assured that the victory was his, Nelson said “Thank God I have done my duty” and then he died. The captain of the ship knew it would be a few months before they got back to England so he put Nelson’s body in a cask of rum to preserve it. From that day on, the daily ration of “grog” or rum for English sailors was known as “Nelson’s blood”. On this date Lord Horatio Nelson was buried in the graveyard in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. The English people had a park in London named Trafalgar Square in his honor and erected a column with a statue of Lord Nelson at the top. I have been to both Saint Paul’s and Trafalgar Square and both are very impressive. When I was visiting Saint Paul’s I was thinking about the great fire of 1666 that nearly destroyed London and lo and behold, very near the Cathedral is a marker showing the limit of that great fire. On the way back to the hotel we went by the Tower of London and right across the street was the “Drawn and Quartered Pub.” I almost jumped out of the bus to get a tee shirt from that place but I couldn’t. But it just gives me a reason to return to that great historic city. By the way, the tour guide said that the main attraction to the younger tourists is the dungeons and torture chambers. I don’t get it.

1972 Earlier in 1937 in a Scottish shipyard, construction began on the largest passenger vessel ever built, the Queen Elizabeth. The ship was finished just in time for World War II and spent four years ferrying troops from various places to Europe to fight the Germans and Italians. After the war she was refitted into what she was meant to be, a luxurious passenger liner for the Cunard Line. She was retired in 1968 and went up for auction. In 1970 she was purchased by Taiwanese shipping magnate C.W. Tung and he renamed her Seawise University. Tung had envisioned a worldwide traveling university. Unfortunately, on this date just before completion of the refitting she caught fire and sank to the bottom in her moorings nothing more than a scrap heap. What a shame.

1984 Earlier in 1977 New Yorker Kenneth Bianchi decides that he wants to move to Los Angeles and live with his cousin Angelo Buono. Angelo frequently had prostitutes over to his house and he and Kenneth start talking how easy it would be to kill one of them and no one would ever know the difference. So they pick up a hooker in Angelo’s van, took her to his house and tortured, raped and strangled her. Angelo insists that she be cleaned so he gives her a bath, takes her out to a hillside near a police station and carefully arranges her body into a vulgar position and leaves her there. The media assumed the perpetrator was one person and named him The Hillside Strangler. After the police found the 10^th corpse, all of a sudden the killings stopped. What had happened was the Angelo and Kenneth had a falling out and Kenneth moved to Bellingham, Washington and applied for a job as a policeman, for crying out loud. He did not get the job as a policeman but he did get one as a security guard. Eventually Kenneth’s blood lust got the best of him and he tortured and murdered two college coeds. The difference here was that there were witnesses that saw them together and he was arrested soon after. Kenneth had seen the movie “Sybil” about a woman with multiple personalities so he tried it himself claiming that “Steve”, his other “person”, had done the deed. The police called in a couple of psychiatrists to examine Kenneth and they assured the police that Kenneth was putting on an act. The police told Kenneth that they did not believe him and assured him that they would seek the death penalty. That woke Kenneth up and he told the police that he could name the Hillside Strangler if he could be tried in California which did not have the death penalty at that time. The police agreed and he rolled on his cousin Angelo and both were tried and convicted and on this date Angelo was given life without parole. Kenneth is still in the slammer but Angelo died of a heart attack in 2002 and hell rejoiced at its new arrival.

1887 The past few winters had been very mild for the cattle ranchers in Montana, Wyoming and Colorado and therefore the ranchers decided not to raise cattle feed for the winter. In their greed the cattlemen put more cattle on the range than normal which ate up the grass more than normal. The summer of 1886 was a dry and blistering one and the grass died stranding the cattle with no feed. Then in this month a winter storm blew in and it snowed for 16 straight hours. The cattle were up to their bellies in snow and could not readily dig through to the sparse vegetation. Then a warm spell came and thawed the top several inches of snow, then extreme cold came and froze it over into a sheet of ice that the cattle could not break through. With no winter feed set aside the ranchers could do nothing but watch their cattle die. And die they did, to the tune of over a million head. Never again did the ranchers not raise winter feed for their cows and with the advent of barbed wire they could keep the cows out of the hay fields.

Born today:

1886 US writer Arthur Baer. He said “Alimony is like feeding oats to a dead horse.”

1913 US President Richard M. Nixon. He said “If the President does it, that means it cannot be illegal.” That may be true in Haiti, but it ain’t true here, Dick.

         Thanks for listening   I can hardly wait until tomorrow