Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

It's National Dessert Day. This special "mushroom cloud" cake was served for dessert at a reception celebrating the Operation Crossroads atomic tests on Bikini Atoll in 1946. Some critics charged that the cake revealed a cavalier attitude towards mass destruction.



The critics included a local D.C. minister who called the photograph "utterly loathsome."

...the outspoken pastor uncorked his outrage over the insensitive revelry and delivered a blistering broadside from his pulpit at the All Souls Church:

    I have with me here in the pulpit this morning a page from a newspaper. From a very fine newspaper. It contains a picture—as it seems to me, an utterly loathsome picture. If I spoke as I feel I would call it obscene. I do not blame the newspaper for printing the picture, or the photographer for taking it. What fills me with bitterness is the fact that such an event could take place at all. It is a picture of two high naval officers and a very beautiful lady.[3] They are in the act of cutting what is called an atom-bomb cake. And it is indeed a cake shaped in the form of an atomic explosion. The caption [in the Post’s photo] says it is made of angel food puffs. I do not know how to tell you what I feel about that picture. I only hope to God it is not printed in Russia—to confirm everything the Soviet government is telling the Russian people about how ‘American degenerates’ are able to treat with levity the most cruel, pitiless, revolting instrument of death ever invented by man… The naval officers concerned should apologize to the armed service of which they are a part, and to the American people. No apology would be sufficient to efface what it may mean to the people of the world.

For more on the controversy see The Atomic Cake Controversy of 1946




Oct 14, 1925: H.G. Wells and his publisher, MacMillan, are sued by a Canadian woman who says the author's best-selling "Outline of History" published in 1920 is a plagiarism of her unpublished manuscript. Florence Deeks' action in Toronto will turn into a seven-year legal battle.

Deeks, 61, an Ontario teacher, had sent her world history, "The Web of the World's Romance," to MacMillan, which held onto it for six months before rejecting it. She later comes across Wells' "Outline" and sees similarities to her own work, even repeating some of her errors. The Canadian has no direct evidence of Wells' plagiarism, other than a similar structure, and the fact that Wells only began working on his book after she had finished hers. Three expert witnesses testify that from their analyses, Wells relied on her writing to guide his own. Although it may of been HG's wife as she helped write the large volume.


For their part, the best-selling British writer Wells denies ever knowing before the lawsuit who Deeks was, and MacMillan denies letting him see her manuscript. The British Empire's highest court rejects Deeks' appeal in 1932. Case closed.

"The Spinster and the Prophet," a 2002 book by A.B. McKillop, argues from textual clues that Wells did in fact plagiarize from Deeks, although without offering hard evidence. McKillop's thesis was that Deeks did not receive fair treatment from the courts, which, he argued, heavily favoured men at that time, both in Canada and in Britain. The Outline of History was one of the first of Wells' books to be banned in Nazi Germany.

“The Spinster and the Prophet” book review.


"NUCLEAR EXPLOSION!" Advertisement for a military sound effects record found in the November, 1962 issue of ESQUIRE. Listen to sample sounds from the LP:



(Nuke explosion starts at 10:10 followed by B-52s startup & take-off @ 14:00)




Oct 14, 1981: the first Caesars Palace Grand Prix weekend began in Las Vegas with a F1 race in their 75-acre parking lot and scrubland between the Las Vegas Strip and Interstate 15. F1 would return in 1982 after Caesars agreed to waive parking fees. Bonus - Paul Newman was race chairman.



Corrao construction is still in business today and is America's oldest and largest hotel casino design/build firm.

Take a lap around the inaugural F1 Las Vegas track at Caesars Palace in 1981 with Alain Prost (France) before the race. The track was on the Caesars Palace parking lot which is now the Forum Shops at Caesars and The Mirage.

The 1981 Caesars Palace Grand Prix was on October 17, 1981 on NBC Sports.

Some drivers said that they didn't like the track because it was too flat and too repetitive. F1 stopped coming to Las Vegas after the second year in 1982 but has now returned in 2023.





John Taylor’s Corpus Clock at Corpus Christi College University of Cambridge, which features an insect named Chronophage – "Time Eater".

The Chronophage is one of the things I’m most proud of. ‘Chronophage’ is derived from the Ancient Greek words ‘chronos’ and ‘phage’, meaning ‘time-eater’. The creatures that stalk the top of the clocks will continue to eat time for hundreds of years to come, so the majority of the construction is in stainless steel, gold and enamel, chosen for their longevity.

Dr John Taylor demonstrates]Chronophage in motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCqGtvTA36k  (5 min clip worth a view if you've never seen)

When I returned to Cambridge in 1999, I found the undergraduate library was unchanged since I was a student in 1956. I decided to offer my former college – Corpus Christi – sufficient funds to transform the adjacent bank into a new library. The Corpus Chronophage was created to occupy the old bank’s front door.

We designed the Corpus Chronophage using materials that would last for hundreds of years. The main body is made of stainless steel and gold, both of which will last for a long, long time.

What inspired me to produce the Chronophage? Modern art. The majority of modern art is superficial, there’s nothing to it.

I was inspired to create the Chronophage because of modern art. I’ve never been a fan of it, so I wanted to create something that was modern art but had a bit more to it. I wanted to find a new way of telling time.

The Chronophage

Professor Stephen Hawking unveils The Corpus Clock, seen behind him, a new installation at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, England, Friday, Sept. 19, 2008. Professor Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, was guest of honour at a ceremony to mark the creation of The Corpus Clock, which cost more than 1 million pounds (US$1.8 million) to build and erect in Cambridge. The "Corpus clock" is the brainchild of inventor John Taylor, who used his own money to build it, in part to pay homage to the genius of John Harrison, the Englishman who in 1725 invented the "grasshopper" escapement - a mechanical device that helps regulate a clock's movement. Making a visual pun on the grasshopper image, Taylor has designed a fantasy version of a grasshopper at the top of the clock face, and uses this beast - with its long needle teeth and barbed tail - as an integral part of the clockworks. Its jaws begin to open halfway through a minute, then snap shut at 59 seconds. The creature's eyes, usually a dull green, occasionally flash bright yellow. The oversize grasshopper is called a chronophage, or "time eater."

As one walks down the street known as King’s Parade in Cambridge, just outside Corpus Christi college you will see a rather remarkable clock.  There many strange features to this clock but the most striking and disturbing is the creature that stretches itself across the top.  This is the chronophage – the “time-eater”.  As the seconds turn the outer circle, this locust-like monster crawls along with mouth open, as if it is devouring every second. Periodically, its jaws will snap shut and its eyes will close in satisfaction as he swallows a minute or two. The clock limps along irregularly—stalling sometimes, sometimes speeding forward—like our own experience of life. Only every five minutes can it be trusted to tell the time accurately.  And then on the hour, instead of a chime, the sound of a chain dragging across a coffin appears.  At the base of this gilded disc is carved in stone, Latin words from 1 John 2:17, “mundus transit et concupiscentia eius” – “the world is passing away as are its desires.”  The designer and donor of the clock, John Taylor, sums up the symbolism pretty clearly, “Basically I view time as not on your side. He’ll eat up every minute of your life, and as soon as one has gone he’s salivating for the next.”

Concordia Theology

Here comes 500% tariff on the magazine...


TIME: How the Trump Administration Sealed the Gaza Ceasefire Deal


Three hundred and fifty pages. Why are we excited/happy about 350 pages from the Russians when that’s not even a full 1% of the material generated by the Soviets between 1959 and 1962, when Lee Harvey Oswald lived in the USSR, and then after the death of JFK?


Confirming this is a report made by the Russian Govt., and not (yet) any actual documents themselves. One hopes the documents will follow...probably around the time we get the Cram Report and the missing footage from Epstein’s jail cell. Weird timing too. I guess those secret back channels have been busy.

The three handlers of Lee Harvey Oswald between his return from the Soviet Union to his eventual employment at the Texas School Book Depository: James Walton Moore (FBI agent, the Navy, the OSS, the State Department and CIA chief for the Dallas office before & after JFK plus supervisory role for the CIA office in New Orleans!), George S. De Mohrenschildt, and Ruth Hyde Paine.

All three are dead now.

The Assassination Records Review Board could have interviewed Moore, and considered interviewing Moore, but instead let the clock run out. The GOP Oversight Committee could have interviewed Paine, but it does not seem this was ever even contemplated.


JFK Facts


When legends collide...