Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory — in his essay “Bad Air” Brett Beasley explores The Doom of the Great City (1880), a piece of Victorian science fiction considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse:

Scarcely can I portray in words the dire and dismal scenes that met my vision here. . . . For here, where on the previous night had throbbed hot and high the flood-tide of London’s evening gaiety, was now presented to my poor fevered sight, the worst, the most awful features of the whole terrific calamity. I had entered into the very heart and home of horror itself.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a bronchial spasm. That is, at least, according to William Delisle Hay’s 1880 novella, The Doom of the Great City. It imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog. The story is told by the event’s lone survivor sixty years later as he recalls “the greatest calamity that perhaps this earth has ever witnessed” at what was, for Hay’s first readers, the distant future date of 1942.

Bad Air

June 12, 1963: The hugely expensive movie Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, premiered in New York City. It was the highest-grossing film of 1963, earning box-office receipts of $57.7 million ($574 million on today’s value).



The making of the 1963 film version of "Cleopatra" is an epic story all on its own. Read about how Elizabeth became the first actor to get a million dollar contract for a single role, her spellbinding performance, and an off-screen scandalous romance:

All Roads Lead to Rome: The Making of “Cleopatra” (1963)


Standby for heavy rolls! Time to grow yer sea legs, matey. In 1960, USS Bennington (CV-20) spent 40 straight hours making 308 left circles within a 2,000-yard area as part of an antennae radiation test. At the end of the test, the carrier had a persistent (but temporary) list to port. Almost the entire crew had vertigo.




Your reminder that the Mexican Navy has an active duty tallship and the US Navy does not. ARM Cuauhtémoc is a sail training vessel of the Mexican Navy, named for the last Mexica Hueyi Tlatoani Cuauhtémoc who was captured and executed in 1525. The coast Guard has one, but they don't count.



USS Constitution is most noted for her actions during the War of 1812 against the United Kingdom, when she captured numerous merchant ships and defeated five British warships: HMS Guerriere, Java, Pictou, Cyane, and Levant. The battle with Guerriere earned her the nickname "Old Ironsides" and public adoration that has repeatedly saved her from scrapping.

Technically, the HMS Victory is the oldest commissioned vessel by 32 years, but she has been in dry dock since 1922. So, the US Navy periodically tugs Old Ironsides around the Boston Harbor to one up the British.

Coast Guard cutter "Eagle" original name was "Horst Wessel" when it was built and commissioned in 1936 by Germany. Namesake is Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel who was a member of the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, who became a propaganda symbol in Nazi Germany following his murder in 1930. The ship was captured in April 1945 by the British. At the end of World War II, the four German sailing vessels still surviving were distributed to various nations as war spoils. Horst Wessel was won by the US in a drawing of lots with the Soviet and British navies, and requested by the US Coast Guard. She was transferred to America and commissioned in May 1946 into the United States Coast Guard as the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Eagle; nickname is "America's Tall Ship". Apparently, German sailing tech is good stuff & fuel is cheap! LoL.


June 12, 1981: Raiders of the Lost Ark is released.




On the morning of June 12, 1982, as the sun shined down on the green grass in Central Park, people began to gather carrying signs for nuclear disarmament. Throughout the morning, buses arrived from around the country. By the afternoon, nearly every blade of grass was covered. Citizens filled second, third, fifth, sixth, seventh, and Madison avenues. By mid-afternoon, the police estimated that over 750,000 people were in Central Park demanding an end to nuclear weapons. By the end of the day, that number had swelled to 1 million.
It was the largest anti-nuclear protest in American history.


It was a diverse crowd from activists to feminist and LGBT campaigns to mom & pop. It was reported that no violence, no looting, no burning, no racial tension occurred and it played a role in Reagan changing course, and helped get us the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt and Gary U.S. Bonds performed for a million protesters at the Rally for Nuclear Disarmament on the Great Lawn in New York’s Central Park.

The vast parade and rally, organized by a coalition of peace groups, brought together pacifists and anarchists, children and Buddhist monks, Roman Catholic bishops and Communist Party leaders, university students and union members. There were delegations from Vermont and Montana, Bangladesh and Zambia, and from many other places. The smiling, hand-clapping line of marchers was more than three miles long, and the participants carried placards in dozens of languages.

"There's no way the leaders can ignore this now," said Alex Willentz, who drove overnight from Utica, N.Y., for the event. "It's not just hippies and crazies anymore. It's everybody."

Late in the afternoon, Alice T. McGillion, a Police Department spokesman, said there might be as many as 600,000 or 700,000 people around the park. "There's so much movement it's hard to be certain," she said.

The sponsor of the demonstration was the June 12 Rally Committee, an umbrella organization of religious and secular peace groups. The groups participating ranged from radicals seeking immediate unilateral disarmament by the United States to moderates asking a resumption of negotiations on arms cutbacks.

Perhaps the only dissenters in the huge throng were a group of about 40 people who stood for a time at 42d Street and First Avenue. They carried signs saying, "Build Up or Freeze to Death" and "Peace Is a Soviet Weapon of Conquest." Leonard Holihan, a businessman based in London, said his organization was called Coalition for Peace Through Security. Profusion of Placards

Among the marchers, there was a profusion of placards: "Choose Life"; "Bread Not Bombs"; "No Nukes"; "Reagan Is A Bomb - Both Should Be Banned"; "U.S. Out of El Salvador"; "Freeze or Burn"; "Build Houses Not Bomb Shelters"; "A Feminist World Is a Nuclear-Free Zone," "Arms Are for Embracing." A little girl carried a sign saying, "I Hate Nuclear War," and one marcher had an inflated rubber whale with the legend "Save the Humans."

Further along the route, one policeman stood in the center of a group of marchers and talked to them. "I was in the service in the 60's," he said. "You know how they brainwash you there. Well, when I got out, most of the marching in '69 was over, and there was a new era. But now, it's just like a resurrection. This march is for everybody. Whatever happens, we're going to get toasted."

THRONGS FILL MANHATTAN TO PROTEST NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Orson Welles speaks before a crowd of 700,000 at a nuclear disarmament rally in Central Park on June 12, 1982: (audio only)




June 12, 1987: At the Brandenburg Gate, U.S. President Ronald Reagan gives one of the most famous Cold War speeches in publicly challenging Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.




A cycle of repeated "unprecedented" events, LOL...


After a 21 gun salute the Russian frigate Gorskhov-class FFG Admiral Gorshkov enters Havana harbor. Possibly the most modern Russian war ship to ever visit Cuba.

Video of Gorshkov's arrival: https://x.com/Archer83Able/status/1800897931102548096

Every few years this "unprecedented" stuff happens again...

2017: Russian Spy Ship Spotted 30 Miles Off Connecticut Coast Near Naval Base


Recent foreign film: Konvoi (The Arctic Convoy) trailer. War cinema told differently: a Norwegian merchant vessel in summer 1941 struggles to deliver arms to Russia.




A few of BIAD's banners are fitting for Traffle.







An edgy, dicey title for a poem in 2024, But this was published in 1929 by D.H. Lawrence...

If you want to have sex, you've got to trust
at the core of your heart, the other creature.
The other creature, the other creature
not merely the personal upstart;
but the creature there, that has come to meet you;
trust it you must, you must
or the experience amounts to nothing,
mere evacuation lust.