Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

The August 31, 1857 Sacramento Union printed a Hutchinson's Magazine article on Lake Bigler, now Lake Tahoe.
"Its northern extremity is only known by report... so contradictory that the length of the lake cannot be set down with anything like accuracy."


How the name was changed to Lake Tahoe starts with a war of words during the Civil War and later includes staunch critic Mark Twain insisting the original name be kept. "Tahoe" was not universally accepted till end of 19th century.

The Placerville Mountain Democrat paper began a notorious rumor that "Tahoe" was actually an Indian renegade who plundered upon White settlers. To counter the federal government, the California State Legislature reaffirmed in 1870 that the lake was indeed called "Lake Bigler". It took until 1945 when the California State Legislature finally reversed its previous decision and officially changed the name to Lake Tahoe.

Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America, with a depth of 1,645 ft (501 m), making it the second deepest in the United States after Crater Lake in Oregon (1,949 ft or 594 m). Tahoe is the 17th deepest lake in the world, and the sixth deepest in average depth. It is about 22 miles (35 km) long and 12 miles (19 km) wide and has 72 miles (116 km) of shoreline and a surface area of 191 square miles. The lake is so large that its surface is noticeably convex due to the curvature of the Earth.

Folklore: Lake Tahoe is home to various legends that have been passed down through local Native American traditions and other sources. These include stories about Water Babies, the Ong, Tahoe Tessie, and the Ghosts of Fannette Island. Fannette Island in Emerald Bay is purportedly haunted by the ghost of Captain Richard Barter, a man who lived on the island in the late 1800s. He died while returning to the island in 1873, and some local stories claim that his ghost can be seen wandering the island.

Apple's macOS 26 Tahoe was named after Lake Tahoe.

British rock band A's song "Here We Go Again (I Love Lake Tahoe)" and the accompanying music video centers around the band's love for the lake. If you love snow, this is your place.




"Dean of American Jungian Psychologists," Dr. Joseph L. Henderson was born in Elko, Nevada on August 31, 1903.

As a young journalist in search of a new direction in the late 1920s, Dr. Henderson traveled to Zurich to undergo analysis with Jung, the pioneering psychological theorist and rival of Sigmund Freud.

While in Zurich, he studied dream imagery and colors, symbols and archetypes, which Jung believed crossed cultures to be almost universally recognized. After attending medical school in London, Dr. Henderson returned to the United States and opened a psychoanalytical practice in Manhattan in 1938. He moved to San Francisco shortly thereafter and carried Jung's methods and ideas about a collective unconscious mind with him.

Dr. Henderson became most widely known for a related notion: that of a cultural unconsciousness in which a person's inherited impulses may be automatically filtered through his culture, sometimes to appear in sharply different forms. An example would be the channeling of aggression, in which the impulse might take the form of team sports, dance or warfare, depending on the surrounding culture.

Dr. Henderson first explained his idea in 1962, in a "most stimulating paper that added a dimension to Jung's theory about how we talk about images and emotions coming up from the psyche," said Dr. Thomas Kirsch, a psychiatrist and former president of the International Association for Analytical Psychology and the author of "The Jungians."

In 1967, Dr. Henderson looked at psychological aspects of initiation rites, in a study that combined religion and anthropology. That book, "Thresholds of Initiation," examined how a person might face and surmount various hurdles at different times of life.

Dr. John Beebe, a psychiatrist and former president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, called it the "antithesis of a self-help book," saying that it made a distinction between a heroic figure in an extraordinary situation and the more commonplace experience of dealing with aging and other challenges.

In 2003, when he was 100, Dr. Henderson, with his fellow analyst Dyane N. Sherwood, published a study of the symbolism of alchemy, "Transformation of the Psyche." The book connected colors that appear in dreams with emotions and treated the alchemical notion of turning lead into gold as a metaphor for a movement of the unconscious mind toward the conscious.

Dr. Henderson passed away in 2007 at age 104.

Memorial site

Note: had an aunt that lived to be 105.


Remembering Joseph L. Henderson


August 31, 1957: at the Nevada Proving Ground, the United States conducted the 15th atmospheric nuke test, "Plumbbob Smoky", a 44-kt thermonuclear test detonated atop a 700-foot steel tower. Smoky created massive fallout, exposing 3,224 troops performing maneuvers to high levels of radiation.



Operation Plumbbob - Smoky 42947 (slow-motion view of the earliest stages of the Smoky fireball and mushroom cloud)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIjiIwonnds


August 31, 1962: in the Evening Star

Oops! High Altitude H-bomb explosion creates radiation belt / Thalidomide pills found in US pharmacies for "investigational use".




Let's Talk About Goofballs and Pep Pills. US Bureau of Naval Personnel, 1969. Art by Dean Hurst.




August 31, 1975: Former roller skating speed champion Tony Stevens sets off on a mission to skate from Sydney to Canberra, Australia to lodge a protest to Prime Minister Whitlam over an alleged misuse of a scheme to help handicapped children in NSW. Stevens, the secretary of the Australian Roller Club, said he would reach 96kh (60mph) during the trip.




Dan Wakefield [1932-2024], future creator of NBC's JAMES AT 16 (1977-78), wrote a piece on the NYC civil defense drills for the Aug. 1960 ESQUIRE. NYU English professor Leonard R. Marelli [1933-1972] wrote a letter to the editor that was published in the Oct. edition.




August 31, 1990: Howard Blum's account of the US government's decision to summon 17 of the nations intelligence specialists to a top secret meeting in the Pentagon in an attempt to solve the mystery of whether the human race is alone in the universe.


Out There: The Government's Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials



August 31, 2006: “The Scream” and “Madonna,” two paintings by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, were recovered after being stolen in 2004. Munch actually produced four versions of “The Scream,” two with paint and two with pastels. Two of the four versions were stolen in 1994 and again in 2004, but both were recovered in good condition. The 1910 version of The Scream was stolen on August 22, 2004, during daylight hours, when masked gunmen entered the Munch Museum in Oslo and stole it and Munch's Madonna. “The Scream” (1893) greatly influenced the Expressionist movement.

The Department of Energy had decided "Scream" will make good use as a non-language-specific symbol of danger in order to warn future human civilizations of the presence of radioactive waste.




Happy 101st birthday to USS Yorktown veteran Robert E. Taylor. Taylor was manning an anti-aircraft gun during the Battle of Midway when he received the order to abandon the crippled carrier. He jumped overboard and swam to the destroyer USS Balch. He now lives in Central Florida.


World War II veteran, remaining survivor of U.S.S. Yorktown to celebrate 101st birthday