Thursday

                              Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“Most men have a genetic defect. They can't see dirt in a house until there is enough of it to support agriculture.”

                                                         Dave Barry

A while back I had a friend from Louisiana whose family raised gamecocks. He never admitted to personally sponsoring a match but he did admit they made a lot of money selling them. One day he said “Do you know who Ferdinand Marcos is?” I said that he was the President of the Philippines and was under a lot of pressure from the his military to resign because of corruption. He said Marcos will resign in a couple of days. I asked how he knew and he said that Marcos had shipped 3,000 gamecocks to Hawaii. He said that Marcos had some of the finest breeds of gamecocks in the world and they were tracked where ever they went. Sure enough, two days later Marcos resigned and moved to Hawaii.

Down south of Cleveland, Ohio there is a man who raises black bears in cages for two reasons. Occasionally a movie script will call for a bear and reason number two; this man will bring a bear to a county fair and charge people for the chance to wrestle one of his bears. I will repeat that. He charged people for a chance to wrestle a bear. A while back a man paid the fee and attempted to wrestle a bear…the bear won by inflicting a fatal bite to his opponent’s neck. The bears don’t know that we are different than any other animal invading their space. Let them the hell alone.

               This Date in History   August 24

79AD   On this date the Roman elite in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples were just sitting down to lunch or a late breakfast. Most of the houses in these cities were vacation homes to the Roman rich. Then a stupendous explosion shook the very ground on which they were sitting/standing. It was the eruption of the centuries old extinct volcano Mount Vesuvius. A cloud of white hot ash and rock shot 20,000 feet into the atmosphere and lava and mud slid down the side of the volcano in torrents. The people in the cities did not have a chance. The dust and rocks in the atmosphere began raining down burning people to death or mixed with the poison gasses that accompanied the mud and lava and asphyxiated them. The ash and rock mixed with the lava and mud forming a sort of concrete and buried thousands of them under 10 to 15 feet which cooled into a solidified mass. A Roman General name Pliny the Elder was in command of a Roman fleet that was on patrol in the Bay of Naples when this great event occurred. Pliny saw with disbelief swarms of people swimming out into the bay to escape the enormous heat but the raining ash was still hot enough to burn and people were screaming for death in their agony. Pliny ordered some of his ships to go and try to rescue them but they returned after a short while saying the ash was so hot that it was setting their ships on fire. Pliny just could not stand aside and watch so he ordered his boat into the maelstrom and went to the sides of the ash flow and tried to comfort those that had escaped. Pliny got a whiff of the toxic gasses and collapsed and died. His nephew Pliny the Younger, aged 17, was on the opposite side of the bay and chronicled what he saw and gave it to the Roman historian Tactius. The two cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were eventually forgotten until when a farmer digging a vineyard the ground collapsed into the courtyard of a buried mansion. From then on archaeologists and paleontologists descended on the area and nearly the entire towns have been excavated giving us a snapshot of what life was like in those ill-fated cities.

1572   The king of France was King Charles IX but the real control was in the hands of his mother Catherine de Medici. Catherine went down in history as one of the most manipulative and ruthless person who ever lived. She and he son Charles were supposed to be Catholic but she would persuade Charles to dance with whoever held sway at a given time be it the Pope or the French Huguenots which were protestant. In this particular point in time the leader of the Huguenots Admiral Garpard de Coligny held sway with King Charles and good old Catherine saw the Admiral as a threat and ordered his murder. On this day, Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the assassins found the Admiral and killed him. For some reason the Catholics got their bloodlust aroused and they began killing the Huguenots wholesale all across France in spite of King Charles ordering them to stop. They stopped alright, after killing over 70,000 of them. This event was known since and The Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre. Catherine may have felt more secure after this but France suffered because all the surviving Huguenots moved away taking their money with them.

1814   Earlier during the War of 1812 the British army under the command of General Robert Ross flanked and defeated the Patriot Militia at the Battle of Bladensburg, Maryland. This victory for the British left the road to Washington undefended. On this date the British army marched into Washington unopposed and began burning everything in sight. The British were pissed off because the Patriot army had burned the British consulate in Canada for no apparent reason. During the Battle of Bladensburg president James Madison went to the battle site and took command of one of the artillery batteries. This is the only time that a sitting American president engaged in combat. Before he left he told his wife Dolly that she would have to evacuate soon and to take only those things that were important. She took the portrait of George Washington with which we are all familiar. I guess it was that important because later that night the British burned the White House to the ground. The redcoats ran up against US General Andrew Jackson and company near Chalmette, Louisiana who sent them running away asses in hand. But the war was over before this fight but the communications were so slow that Jackson knew nothing about the British surrender.

Born today:

1894 Welsh writer Jean Rhys. She said “Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but most importantly, it finds homes for us everywhere.” It does that for me.

1898 US writer Malcolm Crowley. He said “They tell you that you’ll lose your mind when you get older. What they don’t tell you is that you won’t miss it much.” Did you say something, Malcolm?

1929 PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He said “Choose your friends carefully, your enemies will choose you.” Especially ex-wives and girl friends.

Died today:

1953 US writer Kate Wiggin. She said “Every child born into this world is a new thought of God, an ever fresh and radiant possibility.” That is except those monstrous brats that scream and yell running down the aisles of a library or a restaurant. They are the spawn of the loins of Beelzebub.

1957 English writer Ronald Knox. He said “It is a shame that modern civilization has chosen not to believe in the devil, when he is the only explanation for it all.” You notice that Ronald put the devil as masculine...he never met my third ex-wife.

2004 Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Ross. She said “Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and believe that everything in life has a purpose.”

                Thanks for listening   I can hardly wait until tomorrow