•   Musings and History

    Quote of the day:
    “A friend is someone with whom you can be sincere. Before them you can think out loud.”
                                             Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Trivia question of the day:
    Who played police captain Louis Renault in the movie Casablanca? Answer at the end of the blog.

    Back in 1992 a lady named Addie Mack has an emergency health problem and went to the emergency room. One of the workers in the emergency room named William Garner took Addie’s driver’s license and apartment keys from her purse and while she was being treated and went to her apartment and stole her TV, a boom box, a VCR and various other things and headed out. He met 6 children from 14 to 6 months that had been asleep. He herded them back into the apartment bedrooms and set the place on fire. I am going to repeat that, he set the place on fire. Five of the six children were killed by smoke inhalation. There was one survivor. Garner was captured, tried and convicted of 5 counts of murder and sentenced to death. July 16, 2014 at 10:43am this animal’s heart ceased to beat due to a lethal dose of sodium thiopental administered by the State of Ohio Bureau of Prisons. The one survivor of the fire was witness to the execution. Garner refused breakfast on but listen to what he had for dinner the day before:
    Porterhouse steak, onion rings, fried shrimp, barbecue ribs, potato wedges w/cheese, sweet potato pie, chocolate ice cream, Buffalo chicken wings, tossed salad, Funyuns and Hawaiian Punch.

                           This Date in History July 17

    1945 Earlier in 1939 Danish physicist Neils Bohr came to American and called a meeting with other physicists including Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein and reported that the Germans were just within a few years of developing a nuclear device that could be used in warfare. Enrico Fermi went to the physics department at Columbia University and discussed the possibility of the development of a nuclear weapon. Einstein already convinced that it was possible, drafted a letter to President Roosevelt and hand delivered it to him stating his fears that the Germans may be able to deliver a nuclear weapon before the United States. Roosevelt was convinced and called in US Army officer Brigadier General Leslie R. Grove to head up a program known as the Manhattan Project. Grove’s mission was to round up the best physicists in the world and get them to work developing a fissionable material that could be used in a bomb. Groves, though being an engineer, was no scientist and named the brilliant but at time obtuse physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as chief scientist. Oppenheimer began to gather around him some of the most brilliant minds in the world and they set up shop in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico. A sustained chain reaction nuclear explosion could not be done without a test of a controlled nuclear chain reaction. This task was given to Italian emigrant Enrico Fermi who was teaching physics at the University of Chicago. Fermi built a radioactive pile under the stands at a squash court on campus. He had radioactive material separated by carbon rods that would absorb any stray neutrons. Fermi ordered the carbon rods withdrawn 6 inches at a time and monitored the reaction with a Geiger counter. Fermi’s test was a complete success. A controlled nuclear chain reaction had been achieved. One of the scientists that witnessed the test sent another scientist that was not there a telegram saying “The Italian navigator has landed on a foreign land, the natives are friendly.” From there they had to determine what would be the best fissionable material to use for a weapon and in what mass and shape. They decided that an isotope of Uranium (U-235) would do the trick. Now they had to determine what mass (size, weight and shape) would be the best. This meant that is if the core had too much mass it would be very unstable and might explode on its own; too little mass and it would not explode. They finally arrived at the conclusion that about 40 Kilos (30 Pounds) and a spherical shape (about the size of a golf ball) would be best. For safety purposes, they kept enough Uranium to reach critical mass separated in different rooms. Anyway, the scientists decided a test explosion was required to see if all of their engineering had worked. On this morning at 5:45a a light brighter than the sun flashed across the New Mexico desert and the nuclear age was born. The test was called Trinity and the device was hoisted atop a 200 foot tall steel tower before detonation. The tower was vaporized, y'all, vaporized. The United States now had an atomic bomb and word was sent to President Truman who was on the way home on the USS Augusta from the Potsdam conference with Stalin and Churchill. Truman released the bomb to be used at the discretion of the military. Twenty-two days later Hiroshima, Japan disappeared from the face of the earth. Remember me telling you that the scientists tried to keep pieces of near critical mass apart? Well a few days before the ”Enola Gay” took off to bomb Hiroshima the US battleship USS Indianapolis arrived at Tinian to bring the last part of the bomb. This part was not installed in the bomb until the aircraft had been airborne for several hours. After all, you can’t be too safe with something this nasty. A day or two after the Indianapolis departed Tinian she was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine. It was several days before the Indianapolis was due back home in the Philippines so no one was looking for her. Nearly all of her crew of 850 were able to abandon ship but there was not enough life boats for all to get aboard so some of the sailors just held on to the sides in rotation. This sounds like a good plan except that those waters were thick with man eating sharks. After the US navy discovered the Indianapolis was missing and began a search several days had past. The Navy recovered about 160 survivors, the rest were killed by sharks. Later the Captain of the Indianapolis committed suicide.

    1779 On this date US General George Washington ordered Colonel Anthony Wayne commanding 1,200 troops to retake the British Fort at Stony Point, New York.. Colonel Wayne was not pleased with the number of troops he was given so he decided to try and kill as many of the enemy as he could as quietly as he could. He sent his troops in among the sleeping British and told his men to bayonet them in the throat so they would not make a sound. Sure enough Wayne’s troops killed 95 Brits before they knew what was happening. Needless to say Wayne was successful in re-taking the fort with a minimum amount of casualties. After this slaughter Colonel Wayne was given the nickname “Mad Anthony” . But he ended up being one of our most efficient combat commanders during the Revolution.

    1863 The draft riots continue in New York after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation Irish Immigrants, mostly dockworkers riot in New York City. They were afraid that the blacks would take their jobs. Soon after, the dockworkers went on strike and sure enough the city brought in recent immigrant blacks from the south to take their place. So they were indeed right and in the heat of these events, the riots turned violent and the strikers turned their attention to the blacks themselves. There were many lynchings and outright murders. The reason for all this turmoil was that A. Lincoln had said that the US needed to raise an army to combat the Confederacy from seceding from the union because we need to stay together. This was acceptable to most of the people in the north but after the Union army had received one ass-kicking after another by the Confederates, the people in the north said “To hell with this slaughter, let them have their own country.” So Lincoln changed horses and issued the Emancipation Proclamation saying this war is to set the slaves free. That is a long way from preserving the Union and Lincoln’s administration began a draft. This meant that men in the north were going to be drafted to set the slaves in the south free to take their jobs in the north. That is except those people that cough up $300 and then they did not have to go. No wonder the poor Irish rioted. I would have too.

    Answer to the trivia question:
    In the movie Casablanca police captain Louis Renault was played by Claude Rains.

               Thanks for listening    I can hardly wait until tomorrow