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Milestones

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A Japanese submarine sank the USS Lexington in the battle of the Coral Sea,
Aren't you confusing with USS Yorktown in the Battle of Midway? I thought USS Lexington sunk, because torpedo and bomb hits from a Japanese air attack had ripped open fuel pipes. Fuel fumes has accumulated, and an electric short circuit made them explode, causing uncontrollable, fatal fires.
 
Aren't you confusing with USS Yorktown in the Battle of Midway? I thought USS Lexington sunk, because torpedo and bomb hits from a Japanese air attack had ripped open fuel pipes. Fuel fumes has accumulated, and an electric short circuit made them explode, causing uncontrollable, fatal fires.
Yes, you are right. It is true, however, that Japanese submarines were a constant threat to the US fleet early in the war. Yorktown was sunk under tow, after it had been badly damaged at Midway by the Japanese counter attack. The book "Crossing the Line" is an eyewitness account of Lexington's demise by an airman in his early twenties who later became an English professor. It is an excellent book.
 
A man who served as a machine operator on U 776 lived in the neighboring village. It was the only boat that had to enter the port of London after the crew surrendered and was exhibited there.
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The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago had a U-boat on display (which one could tour) when I was a kid, and apparently still does.
 
Three hundred years ago today, on 28 November 1721, Cartouche was broken on the wheel at the Place de Grève in Paris.

The famous leader of the gang was scheduled to die the day before. However, not seeing any of his faithul comrades ready to sprung him on arrival at the Place de Grève, Cartouche decided that dying all alone is too dull and spent the rest of the day giving all of his underlings away.

His confessions kept the courts of Paris busy throughout 1722 and into 1723 -- and were kept out of the legend of Cartouche.
 
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By the way, in many of these French stories about criminals like Cartouche, whose biography was also used for a really good movie with Jean-Paul Belmondo ...


... you will sometimes be surprised like I was when I have often read the same name of the executioner of thousands of delinquents in Paris during the last century of the French kingdom, during the the whole French Revolution and the time of the Restauration ... which was always "Sanson", for 159 years?!!

It was always a member of the same family and even at least one of them hated his "job", but he could never escape the "tradition" and the "pressures" of his society of that time:


All of this family seemed to have been above average intelligence - possibly except one who fell from the scaffold and broke his own neck when showing a severed head - but it also seems to have been their destiny not to escape their "family tradition".

It is not a job you can really love, although you can meet interesting people like King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette - possibly the most polite person because she apologized to Sanson for stepping inadvertently on his feet - and many of the persons who caused their "meetings" with Sanson, but in the end it must have been very unsatisfying to meet all these influential people without being able to have a small-talk with them because they all were expected to lose their heads very soon during their meeting with the "Sanson"-family.

No, not really a job you would like to have ...
 
I've never heard of this, but I did know that that early in the war the American troops in New Guinea performed very poorly. I am not surprised at MacArthur's attitude at all--he was a complete, pompous ass.
My family knew the late Bil Keane, who drew (his son draws it now) a popular American comic strip called "The Family Circus". His wife (also deceased) was Australian, and he met her while he was stationed in Brisbane (I don't think he saw combat--at least I never heard him talk about it). One of my younger brothers went to grade school with one of his sons, and they were good friends, so I wasn't so clued it, but I was at his home numerous times.
This is from Wikipedia.
Keane served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945, drawing for Yank and creating the "At Ease with the Japanese" feature for the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes.

Fremantle in Western Australia was a major submarine base for the US Pacific Fleet. I read a memoir of a submarine officer who all but admitted he'd had an extra-marital affair with an Australian woman. I wonder whether there were "tensions" on the other side of the continent as well.
 
Übrigens, in vielen dieser französischen Geschichten über Kriminelle wie Cartouche, dessen Biografie auch für einen richtig guten Film mit Jean-Paul Belmondo verwendet wurde ...


... Sie werden manchmal überrascht sein, wie ich es war, wenn ich im letzten Jahrhundert des französischen Königreichs, während der gesamten Französischen Revolution und der Zeit der Restauration in Paris oft denselben Namen des Henkers von Tausenden von Straftätern gelesen habe. .. was immer "Sanson" war , 159 Jahre lang ?!!

Es war immer ein Mitglied derselben Familie und sogar mindestens einer von ihnen hasste seinen "Job", aber er konnte sich der "Tradition" und dem "Druck" seiner damaligen Gesellschaft nicht entziehen:


Diese ganze Familie schien überdurchschnittlich intelligent gewesen zu sein - möglicherweise außer einem, der vom Schafott fiel und sich das eigene Genick brach, als er einen abgetrennten Kopf zeigte -, aber es scheint auch ihre Bestimmung gewesen zu sein, ihrer "Familientradition" nicht zu entkommen.

Es ist kein Job, den man wirklich lieben kann, obwohl man interessante Leute wie König Ludwig XVI. Meetings" mit Sanson, aber am Ende muss es sehr unbefriedigend gewesen sein, all diese einflussreichen Leute zu treffen, ohne mit ihnen einen Smalltalk führen zu können, da sie alle bei ihrem Treffen mit dem "Sanson ." sehr bald den Kopf verlieren sollten "-Familie.

Nein, eigentlich kein Job, den man gerne hätte...
Maybe time, to reading it again.
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Five hundred years ago today, on 1 December 1521, Pope Leo X died in Rome.

Best remembered as the indulgence-selling adversary of Martin Luther, the first Medici to sit on the papal throne could well have been one of Roman emperors, having refined literary and carnal tastes -- and not shying away from putting this or that recalcitrant senator, I mean cardinal, to death. He had joy :jump:, he had fun :b2:, he had seasons in the sun and :elefant: in his menagerie, and he emptied the Papal Treasury in the process.

Leo X was a pope of his wild times, perhaps even of the better kind -- the rest of 16th Century pontiffs were either stone fuck-ups (Clement VII, Julius III, Gregory XIII of the calendar fame) or paragons of fanaticism and cruelty (Paul IV, Pius V), or just cruelty (Julius II, Sixtus V), with Alexander VI Borgia in a class of his (and his son's) own. I think no other century had so many short-lived popes, too -- all those Renaissance poisoners... :drink:

The legend has it that one of Leo's buffoons implored the dying pontiff: 'Holy Father, think of God!' Yet the pope stayed an atheist to the end. :devil:
 
Five hundred years ago today, on 1 December 1521, Pope Leo X died in Rome.

Best remembered as the indulgence-selling adversary of Martin Luther, the first Medici to sit on the papal throne could well have been one of Roman emperors, having refined literary and carnal tastes -- and not shying away from putting this or that recalcitrant senator, I mean cardinal, to death. He had joy :jump:, he had fun :b2:, he had seasons in the sun and :elefant: in his menagerie, and he emptied the Papal Treasury in the process.

Leo X was a pope of his wild times, perhaps even of the better kind -- the rest of 16th Century pontiffs were either stone fuck-ups (Clement VII, Julius III, Gregory XIII of the calendar fame) or paragons of fanaticism and cruelty (Paul IV, Pius V), or just cruelty (Julius II, Sixtus V), with Alexander VI Borgia in a class of his (and his son's) own. I think no other century had so many short-lived popes, too -- all those Renaissance poisoners... :drink:

The legend has it that one of Leo's buffoons implored the dying pontiff: 'Holy Father, think of God!' Yet the pope stayed an atheist to the end. :devil:
Very tactically, you ignore Adrian VI, the immediate successor of Leo X. First and only Dutch pope, the last non-Italian before John-Paul II in 1978.
He only ruled a year and a half. Leading a simple life, particularly in contrast to his predecessor, attempting reforms, and considered a 'Barbarian', since no Italian, by the people of Rome, he was far from popular.
 
Today is World AIDS Day. Possibly lost in the concern over COVID is the on-going AIDS pandemic, which has so far killed, by a median estimate, 36 million people. The two pandemics may well have intersected, since at least one theory for the origin of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is that it arose in an immunosuppressed patient, very possibly someone with HIV, who didn't clear the coronavirus, giving it ample opportunity to accumulate mutations.
 
Very tactically, you ignore Adrian VI, the immediate successor of Leo X. First and only Dutch pope, the last non-Italian before John-Paul II in 1978.
He only ruled a year and a half. Leading a simple life, particularly in contrast to his predecessor, attempting reforms, and considered a 'Barbarian', since no Italian, by the people of Rome, he was far from popular.
Adrian VI's personal physician must've been Italian. :facepalm:
 
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