Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

October 30, 1938: Orson Welles' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS was broadcast.



Midshipman Ed Beach rushed to alert the duty officer of the Martian invasion. His gullibility was mocked with a cartoon in the school magazine. He later became a decorated submarine commander of WWII and wrote the famous 1955 novel RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP.



Captain Edward Latimer Beach Jr. was Eisenhower military naval aide, who developed the nuclear football protocol and who carried the first nuclear football.





October 30, 1958: at RAF Sculthorpe, ~3 miles west of Fakenham, England, US Air Force atomic bomb technician Master Sgt. Leander V. Cunningham, 41, suffered a mental breakdown, locked himself in the bomb maintenance building, and threatened to detonate a Mark-5 bomb by shooting it with his .45 pistol.

Although the bomb likely did not contain a fissile plutonium capsule—meaning it could not achieve a nuclear detonation—shooting it could have set off the bomb's conventional high explosives, killing Cunningham, possibly igniting other bombs inside, and causing significant damage.

After an 8-hour standoff, during which Cunningham reportedly climbed into the building's rafters, he was talked down and surrendered peacefully. After some medical care and evaluation, the senior technician was sent home to the United States.

Pre-Dr. Strangelove times...


The USAF tried to hush up the incident, but word quickly leaked out from people who worked at the base and had seen or heard about it. Press coverage, not always accurate, increased public interest. On November 5, Harold Davies, a member of Parliament from Staffordshire, inquired about the “beserk American airman” and nuclear weapons safety. Secretary for Air George Ward replied, “It is impossible for one individual to set off a nuclear explosion ... even assuming that he could get into the building, which I think would have been impossible.”

Not until 1962 did the government officially acknowledge Cunningham's dire intentions that day. But US officials refused to confirm whether any plutonium or uranium was in the building at the time of the incident, though they admitted that the high explosives could have gone off.

As a result of the public disclosure of this incident and lingering UK concerns about the mental stability of people working with/near nuclear weapons, the Department of Defense created the “two-man rule” and the Personnel Reliability Program to carefully screen such individuals.


October 30, 1961: the Soviet Union detonated the "RDS-220" hydrogen bomb variously known as “Big Ivan” or “Tsar Bomba” (King of Bombs), the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever created and tested. The bomb with an estimated yield of 57 Megatons was dropped from a Tu-95 bomber and detonated at an altitude of 4 km over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago.

The mushroom cloud rose 67 kilometers into the atmosphere. In the photo the diameter of the fireball is about 5 miles (8 kilometers). The initial fireball was visible from 620 miles (1000 kilometers) from the hypocenter. A visible shock wave in the air was seen at a distance of 435 miles (700 kilometers). The shock wave from the explosion traveled around the world three times.


The Soviets reduced its yield in HALF to give the air crew dropping it a 50% chance of surviving. Had they detonated it at full yield (100 MT) the Tupolev would have been blown out of the sky. The crew survived, but their plane was blown 1000 meters lower by the gust of the shockwave.

After the nuclear explosion data was analyzed by the Foreign Weapons Evaluation Panel (the “Bethe Panel”) the RDS-220 yield was estimated at 57 megatons. This was the largest nuclear weapon detonation in history. It was also the “cleanest,” with 97% of the energy yield produced by fusion. Relative to the size of the explosion, very little fallout was produced or so we are told.

Mother of all Nukes


October 30, 1965: Supermodel Jean Rosemary Shrimpton (born 7 November 1942) caused a fashion sensation on Derby Day at Flemington racecourse in Melbourne by wearing a dress called "The Mini". The dress was made by Shrimpton’s dressmaker, Colin Rolfe, and its hem was only 4 inches above the knee. She was an icon of Swinging London and is considered to be one of the world's first supermodels.





It's About Time TV series by the creator of Gilligan's Island. First episode aired on 9/11/66.




October 30th: Jack Torrance and his family arrived at The Overlook Hotel to look after the place over the winter.




Words for Halloween eve...


In The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, Clarice Starling reveals to Hannibal Lecter one detail of her father's last days in a hospital: an elderly neighbour reading to him the last lines of "Thanatopsis."

Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant (1821) (last stanza)

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.



Brigadier General Buzz Aldrin Endorses Donald J. Trump for President of the United States


Forget donkeys and elephants. They're not American.

You know what is American? The Trash Panda. Mr. Garbage himself.