Tuesday

                              Musings and History

Quote of the day:

Earlier LSU had fired head football coach Les Miles and installed defensive line coach Ed Orgeron as interim head coach. They have had a disappointing season and everybody thought they are looking for head coach other than the interim. I have a friend in Baton Rouge that is a die-hard LSU fan and an alumnus. He said that hiring Oregeron is popular primarily because he went to LSU, is a Cajun and would be cheaper than all the other potential candidates. I told him “Money is not everything.” He said “No it isn't, but it allows you to buy your own brand of misery.”

Tom Sylvest, Jr.

BTW...LSU hired Ed Orgeron as permanent head coach...God works in mysterious ways.

Trivia question of the day:

On the TV show “Gunsmoke” there was a half white/half Comanche blacksmith name Quint Asper...who played him?

Back in 1937 a beautiful 16 year old Idahoan named Julia Turner was sitting at the counter at the Top Hat restaurant on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles when newspaper man named Bill Wilkinson approached her and offered to introduced her to Mervyn LeRoy of Warner Brothers. She was indeed hired and given the more glamorous name of Lana Turner. She was treated as a typical starlet given roles more for her beauty than her acting skills. She was eventually successful at more dramatic roles. She had a daughter by actor Stephen Crane and named her Cheryl. At the age of 37 her roles diminished and she was wooed by a Mafia enforcer named Johnny Stompanato, a real grease ball. Heavily moussed wavy hair, silk shirts unbuttoned to the navel and heavy gold necklaces. Lana accepted his advances. One night Stompanato and Lana were arguing and it became physical, 14 year old Cheryl came into the room and stabbed Stompanato to death. The media, as rotten as ever, shouted that Cheryl had stabbed Stompanato to death in a jealous rage because she wanted him. Cheryl, an admitted lesbian, was acquitted calling her actions self defense and her identity was kept secret for several years. In 1995 Lana Turned died of throat cancer in her Studio City, Ca. home at the age of 74.

This Date in History November 28

1862 Earlier US General John Blunt and his army had driven the CSA army commanded by General John Marmaduke into the Boston Mountains in northwest Arkansas. On this date CSA General George Hindman and his army arrived from across the Boston Mountains to try and kick Blount and his Yankee army out of Arkansas. Hindman and his army joined in battle with Blount’s army at a place called Cane Hill. Hindman was unsuccessful and Blount and his army stayed in Arkansas. The Battle of Cane Hill was short and sweet with the Yankees suffering less than 50 casualties and the Rebs less than 40.

1987 On this date the New York City Police found a 16 year old

black girl covered in feces and wrapped in plastic garbage bags near a dumpster. She was alive and kicking but had parts of her hair cut off and a few small cuts on her arms and legs. Her name was Tawanda Bailey. Tawanda told the police that she had been kidnapped by four white men, with one of them was wearing a badge. She said that she had been repeatedly tortured and raped over a four day period. The black rabble-rousers came out of the woodwork in the form of , Vernon Mason, Alton Maddox and the ever present Rev. Al Sharpton. They began raising hell claiming that there was a conspiracy against the black community by the NYPD. They even had the nerve to accuse the Solicitor Stephan Pagones of not only turning his head at this crime but that he was present and participated in the kidnapping and rape of Tawanda. The police could get no cooperation from Towanda’s family but the family had no problem with accepting contributions. It was finally determined that Tawanda’s parents knew that Tawanda was lying but saw it as an opportunity to get some easy money. The police increased their investigation and put the pressure on Tawanda and she finally cracked and admitted that she had hatched the plan to fake the kidnapping to cover her attending an overnight party and not attending school then next day and cut her self and cut her hair as part of the plan. There stood Mason, Maddox and Sharpton with egg on their respective faces knowing that Solicitor Pagones would come after them with fire in his eyes and come he did. He filed a defamation charge against the trio. Before the ink had dried, the trio offered Pagones a settlement that was never made public. Pagones took the offer, resigned his position and disappeared from the public arena. We still have Mason, Maddox and that bane of justice, Al Sharpton who are still with us, however. Yes I am talking about the same Al Sharpton that was an adviser to the President Obama

1582 On this day playwright/actor William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in the town of Avon, England. Five months later the blissful couple is delivered of a daughter. Evidently the Bard of Avon had been doing more than just writing and acting.

1520 Earlier the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan had been tasked with finding a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific by sailing west rather than south and east around Africa. He sailed across the Atlantic to a point near Venezuela and began sailing south exploring the rivers coming out of South America for a passage to the Pacific. He was not successful until he reached the Patagonia region of Argentina and he found a passage that appeared to be the one they were looking for. They sailed southwest and then northwest through a narrow passage for several weeks and on this date they sailed out onto the broad Pacific. This route is known to this date as the Straights of Magellan. Even with this passage shortening the trip around Cape Horn (The southern tip of South America) by several hundred miles, the trip through the Straights was a formidable one, especially in the winter which was May to September. During this time severe storms prevailed and is was a dangerous passage for any ship regardless of size. The Panama Canal ended that danger.

1979 On this date an Air New Zealand DC-10 crashed in Antarctica killing all 257 souls aboard. Air New Zealand had been flying tourist flights over Antarctica for several years. The vast wasteland was a sight to see and was relatively close. On this trip an inexperienced crew was making their first trip there. The airline forbade their pilots to descend below 6,000 feet while over the Antarctic continent but on this day there was cloud cover and the pilots took the plane down to 1,500 feet to get under it. Suddenly the12,600 foot extinct volcano Mount Erebus appeared straight ahead and the plane crashed into the side of it. It took the rescue teams many days to get to the crash site. There were no survivors.

1954 On this date one of the most brilliant scientist that ever lived, Enrico Fermi, died. Fermi was a nuclear physicist teaching at the University of Chicago at the time. Fermi was teaching at the University of Florence, Italy in the 1930’s when the Fascist Mussolini rose to power. After Mussolini aligned himself with Adolph Hitler, Fermi knew it was time for him and his Jewish wife to get out of Dodge. It was Fermi that jury rigged an atomic pile under the bleachers of a squash court at the University of Chicago and produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Earlier Fermi, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Edward Teller and other nuclear physicists had formed a letter that Einstein took personally to US President Franklin Roosevelt. The letter explained that they had proven mathematically that a nuclear chain reaction was possible and so was a nuclear weapon. The message that was sent by Fermi to his fellow scientists was “The Italian navigator has landed on a foreign shore...the natives are friendly”

Births:

1820 German philosopher Frederick Engels is born. He said “Some laws of state aimed at reducing crime are even more criminal.”

Answer to the trivia question

Blacksmith Quint Asner was played by Burt Reynolds

                   Thanks for listening   I can hardly wait until tomorrow