Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Feb 3, 1894: illustrator Norman Rockwell was born. When Rockwell tried to join in the U.S. Navy at age 23 during WWI (less than 3 months before the war ended), at 140 pounds (64 kg) he was rejected for being 8 pounds underweight for a man of his height. After spending the night gorging on bananas and doughnuts, he was able to enlist the next day and was given the duty role of a military artist.



His original orders were to take him to a base in Ireland, where he would paint insignia on airplanes, but a German submarine off the East coast detoured his ship to Charleston, SC. While awaiting a duty assignment, several personnel noticed his portraits drawn while waiting and he was assigned to draw cartoons and making layouts for Afloat and Ashore, the Charleston Navy Yard’s official publication. The work only took him two days a week and the rest of the time he could work on anything he wanted as long as it was related to the Navy. Below is the cover for the Saturday Evening Post published January 18, 1919.

Rockwell survived the 1918 "Spanish Flu" pandemic while stationed at Charleston and eventually moved his studio on the base to the Commanding Officer's site of employment on the USS Hartford, Admiral Farragut's famous Civil War ship. The first ship of the US Navy named for Hartford, the capital of Connecticut. She survived until 1956, when she sank awaiting restoration at Norfolk, Virginia.



Sloop-of-War USS Hartford:

• Laid down (date unknown) at Boston Navy Yard, Boston, MA.
  
• Launched, 22 November 1858
  
• Commissioned, USS Hartford, 27 May 1859
  
• Decommissioned, 13 December 1864, at New York
  
• Recommissioned in July 1865
  
• Decommissioned in 1868, at New York
  
• Recommissioned, 9 October 1872
  
• Decommissioned, 14 January 1887, at Mare Island Navy Yard, Vallejo, CA.
  
• Laid up at Mare Island while being rebuilt
  
• Recommissioned, 2 October 1899
  
• Designated Miscellaneous Unclassified (IX-13), 17 July 1920
  
• Decommissioned, 20 August 1928, at Charleston Navy Yard, Charleston, S.C.
  
• Moved to Washington D.C. Navy Yard, 18 October 1938
  
• Towed to Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, VA., 19 October 1945
  
• Reclassified as a relic
  
• Final Disposition, sank at her berth, 20 November 1956, and subsequently dismantled at Portsmouth, VA. in 1957.
  

Tons more history pics at:  USS Hartford (IX-13) ex USS Hartford (1859 - 1920)


Which Norman Rockwell apoclaypse?




British lexicographer's Word of the Day is 'constult' (17th century): to act stupidly together. [i.e. the Biden Administration]

1. Interdespise: to loathe someone as much as they loathe you.

Admittedly it’s not the most positive of words, but there is some pleasure to be had in knowing that there is a term for mutual dislike. Best to get it out in the open.

2. Constult: to act stupidly together.

Whether it’s a night out, the office awayday, or a government cabinet meeting, ‘constulting’ is a pithy way of describing a joint exercise in idiocy. The word goes nicely with another unfairly jettisoned word: ‘unasinous’, meaning ‘united in stupidity’.



3. Latibulate: to find a corner and hide in it.

There are days when it all gets too much and we long to dive back under the covers whence we reluctantly emerged that morning. If no bed is available, then latibulating is the next best option. A ‘latibule’, put simply, is a hiding place, and ‘latibulate’ has just one record in the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as ‘privily to hide one’s self in a corner’.

4. Paracme: the point at which one’s prime is past.

In German, they have Torschlusspanik, ‘shut door panic’, for the fear in middle age that life is passing you by and its opportunities are dwindling. A useful adjunct from the English lexicon is ‘paracme’, which represents the period when, as the Dictionary puts it, ‘the highest vigour is past’. Make of that what you will.

5. Quisquilious: of the nature of rubbish

Quisquiliae, for the Romans, described waste matter or refuse. English happily accepted the adjective quisquilious, which has the advantage of sounding beautiful whilst describing something that is total rubbish.

6. Sitzfleisch: the ability to endure something.

Back to German, and while ‘sitting meat’ doesn’t sound very pleasant, it does provide a useful descriptor for the ability to sit patiently for a long period of time, particularly through something unpleasant or annoying. This is the kind of ‘sitting stamina’ you might require when a friend is showing you a hundred of their best holiday snaps, or at the office meeting when people just don’t know when to stop.

7. Sialoquent ‘that spits much in their speech’.

Not much more needs to be said about this word, which helpfully describes anyone who at times can be a total snoozefest. The first and last recipient of this undesirable epithet appears in a letter by the 19th-century poet Robert Southey, who writes of ‘the rector, a humdrum somnificator’.

8. Somnificator: one who induces sleep in others.

At some point, we have all stoically ignored the fact that the person talking to us has accidentally spat on us in conversation. For those who commit this sin non-stop, the adjective ‘sialoquent’, from the 1700s, may at least reassure you that such individuals have existed for centuries.

9. Finifugal

The box set that has kept you gripped for weeks; the book that is so good you never want to close it, or the holiday that takes you away from it all: any one of these might leave you feeling ‘finifugal’, a Latin-based word that means ‘shunning the end’ of something because you want it to go on forever.

10. Yepsen: the amount that can be held in two hands cupped together.

Measurements in the past tended to involve the capacity or length of a particular body part. Horses were measured in hands, distances in feet (a mile represented a thousand, or mille, paces by a Roman soldier), and ocean depths in fathoms: originally the span of a pair of outstretched arms. We can add to this list the ‘yepsen’, which once described the capacity of two cupped hands, i.e. a ‘double handful’. A potentially convenient means of measuring biscuit intake.

Susie Dent’s Top 10s

Rogue Nation, a Finifugal realized experience!

8. Realize

For some inexplicable reason British (or Twitter’s) hackles are never so raised as when someone uses the American -ize in verbs such as ‘realize’. In fact, this is the house style of Oxford Dictionaries, not least because the z is closer to the Greek origin of such verbs. It seems the Americans even know a thing about etymology.

Susie Dent’s Top Tens: 10 ‘Americanisms’ that aren’t actually American

About 260 million light-years away, Hubble Sees a Merged Galaxy

This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows ESO 185-IG013, a luminous blue compact galaxy (BCG). BCGs are nearby galaxies that show an intense burst of star formation. They are unusually blue in visible light, which sets them apart from other high-starburst galaxies that emit more infrared light. Astrophysicists study BCGs because they provide a relatively close-by equivalent for galaxies from the early universe. This means that BCGs can help scientists learn about galaxy formation and evolution that may have been happening billions of years ago.

Hubble imaged ESO 185-IG013 in ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths to reveal details about its past. Hundreds of young star clusters, many of which are younger than 100 million years, populate the galaxy. A large number of star clusters are only 3.5 million years old – relative infants compared to the timescale of our universe.

Marshall Ramsey: Perspective





I take any poll with a dose of salt and any poll on twitter with a quarry mine of salt.



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