Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Happy Friday. - Time magazine, March 15, 1954
"The story you are about to see is true", "Just the facts, ma'am", "We were working the day watch."




Beware the Ides of March! Julius Caesar was assassinated on this day in 44 BC. This coin was issued by his betrayer Brutus.


The British Museum


Beware the Ides of March! March 15-16, 1889: a cyclone wrecked six warships in the Samoan Islands. However, the disaster may have helped avert a war by ending a tense standoff between the United States, Germany and Great Britain over control of the islands.


SMS Adler was wrecked together with the German gunboat SMS Eber, the German corvette SMS Olga, the United States Navy gunboat USS Nipsic, the U.S. Navy screw steamer USS Trenton, and the U.S. Navy sloop-of-war USS Vandalia on 16 March 1889 in a hurricane at Apia, Samoa, during the Samoan crisis.

According to a 1889 NYT article:
American crews: 4 officers & 46 enlisted drowned.
German crews: 9 officers & 87 enlisted.

Only the Royal Navy ship HMS Calliope nicknamed "Hurricane Jumper" escaped the cyclone wrath as her captain had well-prepared for foul weather with all boilers lit off and ready for full speed. Seamanship matters then and now.


After retirement from active service, Calliope served as a training ship until 1951, when it was stripped and sold for parts & scrap. The name "Calliope" also lives on in the Royal Navy. In 1951 the ship's successor as training ship on the Tyne took that name, and now the shore establishment itself bears the title and honours the memory of HMS Calliope.

Sources:
SMS Adler (Gunboat, 1885-1889)

NY Times article (PDF) published March 30, 1889.

HMS Calliope (1884)

HMS CALLIOPE (GATESHEAD)


March 15, 1924: Lieutenant General Robert Lee Bullard (January 5, 1861 – Sept 11, 1947) is made a blood brother of the Arapahoes at New York’s Governor Island, as the Indians including Chief Go-in-Lodge (far left) return to the U.S. from a European tour.




March 15, 1968: the day before announcing his bid for president, Sen. Robert Kennedy at the Sky Island Club attracted national attention when he inadvertently launched his presidential campaign at the Garden City Hotel. Kennedy was the guest of honor. There was a belly dancer.




March 15, 1985: the very first .COM domain, http://symbolics.com, was registered. Symbolics was a spinoff from the MIT AI Lab, one of two companies to be founded by AI Lab staffers and associated hackers for the purpose of manufacturing Lisp machines. The early origins of AI funded in part by DARPA.


Symbolics.com Museum

Happy World Contact Day or Mass Meditation day. For those International Flying Saucer Bureau members, good luck on sending a telepathic message into space.






March 15, 1970: the SS Columbia Eagle became the first U.S.-flagged vessel in over a century to be seized in a mutiny. Carrying napalm under contract with Military Sealift Command, the ship was taken by two armed crew members, Clyde McKay and Alvin Glatkowski to protest the Vietnam War and who then sought asylum in Cambodia. They were arrested and the ship was returned to U.S. control. McKay escaped custody in Cambodia and his fate was unknown until decades later when evidence revealed that he had been executed by the Khmer Rouge. The Manson Family cheered them on, according to the media. Glatkowski survived only to spend over 7 years in Lompoc, California federal prison.


The Columbia Eagle was a Victory-type cargo ship constructed by Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation of Portland, Oregon in 1945 for the U.S. Navy and originally christened SS Pierre Victory. She was designed to carry all types of dry supplies and munitions to Pacific theaters during World War II. SS Pierre Victory survived three separate kamikaze attacks by the Japanese in 1945.

The last mutineer

Here's a 2019 podcast interview with transcript of the mutineer who survived.


Latin exulans, exile, wanderer, derived from the Latin name of the Wandering Albatross, diomedea exulans, who spend most of their life in flight, rarely landing, going hours without even flapping their wings. The albatross is a symbol of good luck, a curse, and a burden, and sometimes all three at once. Pronounced “ek-suh-lan-sis.” From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Ne’er-Be-Gone (n.) a person who has no idea where their home is, or was, or when they might have left it—which leaves their emotional compass free to swing around wildly as they move from place to place, pulling them everywhere and nowhere all at once, making it that much harder to navigate.



"To teach well, we need not say all that we know, but only what is useful for the pupil to hear."
- Jean-François de La Harpe