Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

September 2, 1752: Britain and its colonies got a new timeline. They replaced the Julian calendar with the Gregorian one, which was used in most of Europe. The following day was 14 September 1752, meaning 11 days were cut from the 1752 calendar. These days simply floated out to the aether. However, the four countries which have not adopted the Gregorian calendar are Ethiopia, Nepal, Iran and Afghanistan.


Claims of civil unrest and rioters demanding “Give us our eleven days” may have arisen through a misinterpretation of a contemporary painting by William Hogarth. His 1755 painting entitled: “An Election Entertainment” refers to the elections of 1754 and depicts a tavern dinner organised by Whig candidates. A stolen Tory campaign banner with the slogan, “Give us our Eleven Days” can be seen lower right (on the black banner on the floor under the seated gentleman’s foot). The Tories can be seen outside the window, demonstrating.

When you wake up tomorrow, you'll be on an alternate timeline and maybe things will be better... or not.



Just to be safe I live in a Van Gogh down by the river...




September 2, 1945: Japanese officials, aboard the USS Missouri, signed the “Unconditional Surrender” to officially end the Second World War in the Pacific. The colorized photo shows Yoshijirō Umezu, Chief of the Japanese Army General Staff, signing the documents.


Eager to witness history, the crew of USS Missouri perched wherever they could to watch the Japanese surrender ceremony. However, many Missouri sailors missed the proceedings because they were manning anti-aircraft batteries in case there was a final kamikaze attack.

An embittered ADM Halsey ordered that no courtesies be provided to the Japanese delegation as they were being transported to USS Missouri for the surrender ceremony. Not even coffee or cigarettes were to be offered. FADM Nimitz directed him to revoke the order.

Gen. MacArthur wanted his flag to fly on USS Missouri during the Japanese surrender ceremony, but tradition held that the flag of the senior naval official onboard was to be flown. Nimitz compromised. It was the only time that two five-star flags flew on the same mast.


Witnesses to the surrender on USS Missouri on this day in 1945 received a souvenir card. Some officials in the U.S. requested the extra copies, but CAPT Stuart Murray insisted they were only for those present. The unused cards were burned, and the printing plates were thrown overboard. My grandfather had one of these cards with his name on it.

Surrender of Japan (1945)

Ceremonial Surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri

A Ceremony of Surrender: The Formal End to a Brutal War (LIFE magazine, lots of photos)



Originally, this 1966 film was to star Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Among the proposed titles for this film were "Beach Party in a Haunted House," "Slumber Party in a Horror House," "The Ghost in the Glass Bikini," and "Pajama Party in a Haunted House".



Susan Hart stars as "The Ghost" and she was also in the 1965 film "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine" with Frankie Avalon & Annette Funicello. A skirt-chasing spy and a millionaire bachelor must foil mad scientist Dr. Goldfoot's plot to use his army of bikini-clad sex-bots to seduce wealthy men into signing over their assets. It sounds like a real life world plot today.




From fairy-rings to Lewis Carroll's Alice, mushrooms have long been entwined with the supernatural in art & literature. Mike Jay on early reports of mushroom-induced trips and how one species became established as a stock motif of Victorian fairyland.

The first recorded mushroom trip in Britain took place in London’s Green Park on October 3, 1799. Like many such experiences before and since, it was accidental. A man identified in the subsequent medical report as “J. S.” was in the habit of gathering small mushrooms from the park on autumn mornings and cooking them up into a breakfast broth for his wife and young family. But this particular morning, an hour after they had finished it, everything began to turn very strange. J. S. noticed black spots and odd flashes of colour interrupting his vision; he became disorientated and had difficulty in standing and moving around. His family were complaining of stomach cramps and cold, numb extremities. The notion of poisonous toadstools leapt to his mind, and he staggered out into the streets to seek help, but within a hundred yards he had forgotten where he was going, or why, and was found wandering in a confused state.

By chance a physician named Everard Brande was passing through this part of town, and he was summoned to treat J. S. and his family. The scene he witnessed was so unusual that he wrote it up at length and published it in The Medical and Physical Journal a few months later.1 The family’s symptoms were rising and falling in giddy waves, their pupils dilated, their pulses fluttering, and their breathing laboured, periodically returning to normal before accelerating into another crisis. All were fixated on the fear that they were dying except for the youngest, the eight-year-old son named as “Edward S.”, whose symptoms were the strangest of all. He had eaten a large portion of the mushrooms and was “attacked with fits of immoderate laughter” which his parents’ threats could not subdue. He seemed to have been transported into another world, from which he would only return under duress to speak nonsense: “when roused and interrogated as to it, he answered indifferently, yes or no, as he did to every other question, evidently without any relation to what was asked”.

Dr Brande diagnosed the family’s condition as the “deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric [mushroom], not hitherto suspected to be poisonous”. Today, we can be more specific: this was intoxication by liberty caps (Psilocybe semilanceata), the “magic mushrooms” that grow plentifully across the hills, moors, commons, golf courses, and playing fields of Britain every autumn.

Fungi, Folklore, and Fairyland

CIA repo agents seize a prize...

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1830651223722119223


"After hearing talks by a Jesuit who directs the Vatican observatory and Steven Dick of the Naval Observatory, we were invited by some junior US Naval officers here to join them for a “LAN party” of the computer game StarCraft. A curious game." — Jacques Vallée (25 October 2003)

SEPTEMBER

by

Helen Hunt Jackson

The golden-rod is yellow;

The corn is turning brown;

The trees in apple orchards

With fruit are bending down.

The gentian's bluest fringes

Are curling in the sun;

In dusty pods the milkweed

Its hidden silk has spun.

The sedges flaunt their harvest,

In every meadow nook;

And asters by the brook-side

Make asters in the brook.

From dewy lanes at morning

the grapes' sweet odors rise;

At noon the roads all flutter

With yellow butterflies.

By all these lovely tokens

September days are here,

With summer's best of weather,

And autumn's best of cheer.

But none of all this beauty

Which floods the earth and air

Is unto me the secret

Which makes September fair.

'T is a thing which I remember;

To name it thrills me yet:

One day of one September

I never can forget.