Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

September 8, 1727: A fire during a puppet show in a barn in Burwell, Cambridgeshire, killed 78 people (including 51 children). Astonishingly, the door of the barn had been nailed shut after they had gone inside. Click the link above for the sad details.




Sept 8, 1900: The Great Galveston hurricane and the Galveston Flood. Hurricane winds estimated at speeds of up to 120 mph ripped across the Texas coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, killing more than 6,000 people and decimating the city of Galveston. During the storm, water swept through sea-level streets; destroyed homes and buildings and wiped out electricity, roads, and communication systems. The death toll number most cited in official reports is 8,000. In response to the storm, engineers designed and oversaw plans to raise the Gulf of Mexico shoreline of Galveston Island by 17 ft (5.2 m) and erect a 10 mi (16 km) seawall.

It remains the deadliest natural disaster in United States history. As of 2024 it remains the fourth deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record, behind Hurricane Fifi of 1974. Wiki


Searching for bodies in Galveston in the aftermath of the storm at the time this film was shot, the stench of hundreds of bodies could be smelled for miles. What a gruesome scene it must have been.


Album of Galveston the day before and the day after the great storm



Short vid clip of Saint Mary’s Orphan Asylum, located just off the Gulf, where dozens of children and their caretakers died.



Sept 8, 1914: 19-year old Private Thomas James Highgate was a British soldier during the First World War and the first British soldier to be convicted of desertion and executed by firing squad on the Western Front in France, 35 days into the war.

On 5 September, as his battalion moved forward to take part in the First Battle of the Marne, he was apprehended in a barn on the estate of Baron de Rothschild at Tournan-en-Brie by the gamekeeper. He reportedly informed the latter, 'I have had enough of it, I want to get out of it and this is how I am going to do it.' He was tried by court martial, convened at Chateau Combreaux, near Tournan in northern France, convicted of desertion and the death sentence was confirmed on 6 September 1914.

His execution was almost as hasty as his trial, as senior officers insisted that he be executed "At once, as publicly as possible." He was informed of his fate at 6.22am on 8 September in the presence of a Church of England clergyman. An officer then ordered a burial party and a firing squad to prepare, and Highgate was shot at 7.07am witnessed by men from the 1st Dorset Regiment and 1st Cheshire Regiment.

Pvt Thomas James Highgate

His two brothers were killed in action during the following years. Posthumous pardons for over 300 such soldiers were announced in August 2006, including for Highgate. In his hometown of Shoreham, Kent, the local council voted not to include his name on its war memorial. However, he is included at Sidcup memorial along with his brothers. Damn, sad tough break!



Sept 8, 1944: The world's first long-range guided ballistic missile, a German V-2 rocket (Vergeltungswaffe 2; 'Vengeance Weapon 2') fell on Britain, exploding at Chiswick in London, killing 3 people. During the succeeding months 1,402 V-2's were fired on Britain, 1,358 at London; 43 on Norwich and 1 on Ipswich. Belgium received 1,664; 1,610 at Antwerp.




Sept 8, 1960: The classic Hitchcock thriller Psycho was released. It set a new level of acceptability for violence, deviant behavior and sexuality in American films.





Sept 8, 1966: The landmark American science fiction television series Star Trek premieres with its first-aired episode, "The Man Trap" on NBC-TV.


'Enterprise' Nebulae Seen by Spitzer


Sept 8, 1975: Gays in the military: US Air Force Tech Sergeant Leonard Matlovich (July 6, 1943 – June 22, 1988), a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, appears in his Air Force uniform on the cover of Time magazine with the headline "I Am A Homosexual". He is given a general discharge, later upgraded to honorable.


Matlovich died in Los Angeles of complications from AIDS. His tombstone, meant to be a memorial to all gay veterans, does not bear his name.

Recognizing military officials would not then allow such a marker in Arlington Cemetery, Matlovich chose a gravesite in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. He chose the same row where the graves of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Hoover's longtime lover, Assistant Director and heir Clyde Tolson are, as a kind of last laugh.



Sept 8, 2001: First Lady Laura Bush and Librarian of Congress James H. Billington opened the first National Book Festival in a brief public ceremony on the Neptune Plaza of the Library of Congress. Checkout his book, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (1980).


Billington analyzes the ideas that inspired European revolutionary movements from the 1700s to the 1900s. The book takes its name from Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Demons" (The Possessed) novel, (an allegory of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the political and moral nihilism that were becoming prevalent in Russia in the 1860s.) and it attempts to investigate the passion for revolutionary change which developed strongly in Central Europe and Russia starting with the French Revolution of 1789.

Unlike many other histories of revolutions and revolutionaries Billington does not focus on events and social causes leading to popular uprisings. Instead he follows a sometimes almost invisible thread of incendiary ideas sometimes transferred via occult societies, but all having common genesis in the motto of the French Revolution: "Liberté, égalité, fraternité".

In Billington's historiography he presents the second and third terms as reactions to and expansions of the more rudimentary (and susceptible to egoism) concept of liberty. He describes how the idea of brotherhood was inherited from secret and occult societies such as the freemasons and became an inflammatory idea which led to the Paris Commune, but then was extinguished as far as popular revolutions went (until it resurfaced as national socialism in 1920s Germany). Instead the idea of equality would become the fuel for socialism and communism.

The Library of Congress National Book Festival has annual posters since its opening in 2001. The chosen one for 2024 is absolute crap.


NATOsferatu: terrifying photo of Blinken from his interview with WIRED a few days ago.


Antony Blinken Dragged US Diplomacy Into the 21st Century | Archive link


"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson