Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

March 7, 1778: Captain John Barry (March 25, 1745 – September 13, 1803) led 27 men in row boats to capture two British supply ships and an armed schooner in the Delaware River. The Americans also took 116 prisoners. Barry sent a captured jar of pickled oysters and a large wheel of cheese to George Washington. Tasty spoils of war.


Barry was the first captain placed in command of an American warship commissioned for service under the Continental flag. After the Revolutionary War, he became the first commissioned American naval officer, at the rank of commodore, receiving his commission from President George Washington in 1797.


March 7, 1933: In Atlantic City, New Jersey, unemployed salesman, Charles Darrow, completed the invention of a board game he called Monopoly. It was based on a design for a game called, The Landlord's Game by Elizabeth Magie but it was Darrow who took the credit and the money.

The Landlord’s Game was meant to teach people about the dangers of wealth concentration.


Magie held her 1923 patent (refiled due to expiration) until 1935, when she sold it to Parker Brothers for $500. In 1933, unemployed salesman Charles Darrow made his own version called Monopoly. Magie then did two interviews showcasing copies of the original board, with The Washington Post and The Evening Star, to show that Darrow was not the inventor of the game.

He sold it to Parker Brothers and became a millionaire. Surviving copies of The Landlord's Game manufactured by Parker Brothers are considered by many the rarest of all 20th century board games. If you have one up in grandma's attic, don't throw it out!



RIP Pearl Harbor survivor Jessie Alton Mahaffey who passed away on March 1 at the age of 102 in Alexandria, Louisiana. Mahaffey was serving on board USS Oklahoma when the battleship was sunk by the Japanese on 7 December 1941. 20 Officers and 395 Men were lost with the ship and remain on eternal duty. He also survived the sinking of USS Northampton during the Battle of Tassafaronga in the Solomon Islands, Nov. 30, 1942. According to the Navy, only 14 veterans of the attack on Pearl Harbor are still alive.


Ill-Fated Oklahoma (BB-37), All or Nothing
Experts said the attempt to tow the huge ship to the mainland was recognized beforehand as a big gamble but the buyers would have made a big profit on their investment if they had succeeded. The sale was on a "where is and as is" basis. Since there were no passengers, formal certification of seaworthiness was unnecessary. The venerable warship left Pearl Harbor in tow of two big seagoing tugs on 10 May. She was due in San Francisco Bay on Memorial Day. Six days out, the captain of the tug Hercules radioed that the Oklahoma had begun to list heavily. He was ordered to head back for Pearl Harbor but a little later the battleship parted the tow lines and plunged to the bottom on 17 May 1947, 540 miles out, at that point the sea is about three miles deep. The tugs stood by until daybreak, but so cleanly had the Oklahoma died that not even a scrap of debris was seen.



The B-1B aka BONE, nicknamed the Dark Knight after the DC comic books hero Batman, landed at Bodø Main Air Station in northern Norway on March 7, 2021. This bomber is one of four from the 7th Bomb Wing out of Dyess Air Force Base in Texas that arrived at the Royal Norwegian Air Force's Ørland Main Air Station last month. This is the first time B-1Bs have ever deployed on any basis to this country, which is also a NATO member, though these bombers have flown long-distance missions to train with Norwegian forces and other American allies and partners in the region in the past.


Just aft of the forward landing gear is the Sniper Advanced Targeting Pod, an electro-optical sensor pod capable of detecting and tracking both air and ground targets, providing two-way full motion real-time video via datalink, and marking targets on the ground with a laser designator. Sniper would allow Dark Knight's crew to detect targets marked by JTACs with lasers, providing precision bombing support to ground forces.



Scientidiots finally catching up with 50 years of Electric Universe research, showing the direct influence of the Sun on Earth's Geology and Weather:


The Sun's Activity Can Trigger Earthquakes, And Now We Know How


Sundowning, you better take care: Trump late yesterday afternoon cited the two astronauts stuck in space for a few more months: "Maybe they'll love each other, I don't know. But they've been left up there. Think of it. And I see the woman with the wild hair. Good solid head of hair she's got. There's no kidding. There's no games with her hair." He said Elon Musk promised to send his rocket to bring them back. Then, a few minutes later: whoops. The NY Times:

    Air traffic was disrupted across Florida when a SpaceX Starship, a prototype of the spacecraft that Elon Musk says will one day take people to Mars, disintegrated during its latest test flight.

    For the second consecutive time, the upper stage of the most powerful rocket ever built malfunctioned. It started spinning out of control after several engines went out and then lost contact with mission control.

"rapid unscheduled disassembly" - well, you know sh*t happens.





Cartoon depicts President John F. Kennedy beating Premier Nikita Khrushchev with a stick in an effort to protect Berlin. Cartoon drawn following President Kennedy's July, 25, 1961 speech to Congress on the crisis in Berlin in which he asked for a six-step program in preparation for a showdown with the Soviet Union over Berlin. President Kennedy stated that the United States would defend Berlin if the Soviet Union tired to drive out the Western Powers. Following Kennedy's speech, Khrushchev responded by threatening to sign a peace treaty with East Berlin and stated that western access to Berlin would be severed and if the West utilized nuclear warfare it would ensure the destruction of United States allies.


RadioFreeTom from that NATO rag mag gifts us with his latest hit piece "this-is-too-insane-to-be-real" act of the Trump reign...


The Pentagon’s DEI Panic

He does raise a good point and the Pentagon has a long track record of often going way too far (spending) or not far enough (spending cuts). On the flip-side it is often those who raise the greatest panic are the media.


Left / Right Friday night memes...




TGIF as I'm dumfungled over political theatre, but also quite Voorpret for the weekend.

I have been reading “The Boys of Summer” (1971) by Roger Kahn. Considered by many to be one of the great sports books, it focuses on the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team who among other things broke down the colour bar in professional baseball in this period through the presence of the legendary Jackie Robinson. I must admit that some of it is hard going for a non-baseball fan but I was struck by the title of the opening chapter- “Lines from the Transpontine madness“. He attributes the phrase “Transpontine madness“ to Stanley Woodward of the New York Herald Tribune who complained in the 1940s that sports reporters sent to cover the Dodgers invariably ended up becoming passionate supporters of the team.

So why transpontine? Well if the word was popularised in the 19th century to refer to the south London areas across the bridges of the Thames it has also sometimes been applied in other cities divided by a river. In this case of course, Brooklyn is separated from Manhattan by the East River spanned by the famous Brooklyn Bridge. And as with South London, Brooklyn and the other transpontine boroughs have sometimes been looked down upon from the other side of the river, a condescension summed up in the disparaging phrase “bridge and tunnel” to describe the supposedly less sophisticated travelling into central New York to work and play.

I don’t think that the word Transpontine has really caught in a New York context but it is interesting to see the similarities with London and other cities divided by rivers where the different sides are often perceived as socially and culturally distinct.

Lines on the Transpontine Madness - Brooklyn as South London?

Ramones - "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" - Rocket to Russia