Quote:Avast! No lubbers today, ye scurvy bilge rats!

Arrrr!!

'Tis once again Talk Like a Pirate Day, and thar ye be sittin', me beauties and landlubbers, with yer cup o' grog, or yer bucket o' chum, holding this scurvy newspaper in your hand, just a-waitin' fer a tale.

Arrrr!!

What? Ye never heard of Talk Like a Pirate Day, ye slimy bilge rat?

Well, don't get yer doubloons in a wad, me hearties. Just bend ye an ear.

If ye read that scurvy syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry on Sundays, ye might know what we're talkin' about.

But it was two landlubbers in Albany, John Baur (Ol' Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap'n Slappy), who started this whole thing - that's now gone international - when they e-mailed Barry last year and asked him to promote it.

Quote:Madcap spoof, a collection of comedy skits includes the Kung-Fu parody, "A Fistful Of Yen" and "Catholic School Girls In Trouble." Enjoy the future of movie-going with the "Feel-A-Round" theater experience. See a notable and highly respected actor as the clumsiest waiter in motion picture history. Watch such character as Cleopatra Schwartz and Big Jim Slade tickle your funny bone until it has to be removed surgically!
IMDB

Quote:Francis W Reichelderfer (1895-1983) was appointed Chief of the US Weather Bureau in December 1938 and was in office when the bureau was transferred to the Department of Commerce. He would serve in office for 25 years until retiring in 1963. Over these years he was responsible for bringing the Weather Bureau into a progressive new age. He also helped found and was the first head of the WMO when it was created in 1951.

Educated as a chemical engineer, he started his meteorological career in the US Navy during World War I. After the war, he was the meteorologist for the the first transatlantic flight of an airplane, the Navy's NC-4 seaplane, in May 1919. He was an experienced aviator, and served as Chief of Naval Aerology (i.e., meteorology) from 1922 to 1928, working in the Weather Bureau building. In 1931 the Navy sent him to Bergen, Norway to study Bjerknes' theory of fronts and air masses.

After this Reichelderfer was assigned to the dirigible service (he was weather officer for the dirigible Los Angeles at Lakehurst, New Jersey). Later he served as executive officer aboard the battleship USS Utah. In 1938 he retired from the Navy to become Chief of the Weather Bureau. His background in aviation and familiarity with the Norwegian cyclone model were key to his appointment. He appointed Carl Gustav Rossby, prominent Swedish meteorologist, academic, and friend, as his assistant chief.

Reichelderfer led the Weather Bureau during World War II, which was responsible for training hundreds of meteorologists and for bringing the first women into meteorology.  He served on the Joint Committee on Meteorology with Navy and Army chiefs.  He promoted the involvement of universities in offering programs in forecasting as well as meteorological physics.  Before this, forecasting was something learned by apprenticeship.

Quote:In China’s quest for global domination, it invades Taiwan and captures an AI chip factory, giving them control of most of the world’s chip supply. Chinese missiles even sink an Australian merchant marine ship near the Solomon Islands. At first, the Americans suffer horrific losses, and Chinese leaders believe they have won an easy victory.

So the U.S. Navy must find a way to drive out the enemy without triggering World War III. The Marines have a specific goal to rescue Sam Chang, the 79-year-old chief executive of the world’s largest semiconductor fabrication company. He is indispensable to the U.S. tech industry, and he may be on his deathbed. People around him, including his son, do not have his interests at heart, and they will gladly turn everything over to the People’s Republic of China.

Although the story is not part of a Tom Clancy series, it’s very much in that style. Indeed, Woodward has written for the Clancy franchise. There are spectacular battle scenes that will give fans of the genre heart palpitations. Plenty of excitement for fans of military fiction."—Kirkus

Red Tide

Quote:The Dorothy Dorothy Photograph Collection (approximately 1910-1985) consists of photographic prints and photographic transparencies of farmer and singer, Dorothy Dorothy, [born in 1899] and her involvement in political activism, city development, animal rights awareness, and other philanthropic efforts. Included are photographs of campaigns, meetings, and banquets with politicians. Also included are photographs of her husband, Dale Dorothy, and their ranch in Pahrump, Nevada. There are several photographs of nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site captured from the Dorothy's ranch in Pahrump as well as photographs of Dorothy Dorothy's singing career in California.

Dorothy took flying lessons at Mills Field in San Francisco, California and subsequently earned her pilot’s license. She was acquainted with Amelia Earhart, who organized an association of female pilots. Dorothy was a member of this group, known as the "Flying 99's," and was actively involved in the local chapter while living in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In 1949 the Dorothys bought a 1,400 acre alfalfa and cotton farm in Pahrump, Nevada. She actively promoted the establishment of infrastructure in Pahrump such as roads, telephones, and electricity. Dorothy successfully lobbied local and state politicians to improve the road to Pahrump. A paved road to Pahrump from Las Vegas was opened in 1954 and citizens of Pahrump held a city-wide gathering near the road to celebrate this achievement.

In 1949 the Dorothys bought a 1,400 acre alfalfa and cotton farm in Pahrump, Nevada. She actively promoted the establishment of infrastructure in Pahrump such as roads, telephones, and electricity. Dorothy successfully lobbied local and state politicians to improve the road to Pahrump. A paved road to Pahrump from Las Vegas was opened in 1954 and citizens of Pahrump held a city-wide gathering near the road to celebrate this achievement.

From 1949 to 1958 Dorothy wrote a weekly column for the Las Vegas Sun. She also wrote for the Tonopah Times and the Henderson Home News.

Dorothy organized and served as the first president of the Women's Democratic Club of Whitney, Nevada. She worked with Virginia Catt and Gladys Dula to organize the Boulder City, Nevada Democratic Club, and with Sara Denton to organize the Blue Diamond, Nevada Democratic Club. Later Dorothy established a Democratic Club chapter in Pahrump, Nevada.

In 1958, the Dorothys migrated from Pahrump back to Las Vegas. During the presidential election of 1960, Dorothy helped campaign for the Democratic nominees and future presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Throughout the remaining years of Dorothy's life she was actively involved in a variety of local civic organizations and societies.

Dorothy Dorothy died on October 31, 1986.

Dorothy Dorothy Photograph Collection

Quote:Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

But to halt the spread of these terrible weapons, to halt the contamination of the air, to halt the spiraling nuclear arms race, we remain ready to seek new avenues of agreement, our new Disarmament Program thus includes the following proposals:

    First, signing the test-ban treaty by all nations. This can be done now. Test ban negotiations need not and should not await general disarmament.
    Second, stopping the production of fissionable materials for use in weapons, and preventing their transfer to any nation now lacking in nuclear weapons.
    Third, prohibiting the transfer of control over nuclear weapons to states that do not own them.
    Fourth, keeping nuclear weapons from seeding new battlegrounds in outer space.
    Fifth, gradually destroying existing nuclear weapons and converting their materials to peaceful uses; and
    Finally, halting the unlimited testing and production of strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, and gradually destroying them as well.

Quote:We shall propose further cooperative efforts between all nations in weather prediction and eventually in weather control. We shall propose, finally, a global system of communications satellites linking the whole world in telegraph and telephone and radio and television.

Quote:The S.S. Star of Oregon was among the first three Liberty Ships built in the United States and the first launched by Henry J. Kaiser’s Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation (OSC). It was the first of its class to enter service. It took 226 days to complete the ship, which was launched 131 days after its keel was laid in May 1941. The twenty-five thousand people who attended the launch in Portland exceeded any of the OSC’s hundreds of other ship launches. In spite of the ship’s auspicious beginnings, however, it was not long afloat.

The crew included as many as 62 civilian merchant mariners and 40 U.S. Navy sailors. Aesthetically unremarkable and expendable but effective and highly adaptable, President Franklin Roosevelt called the Liberty Ship an “ugly duckling.”

The S.S. Star of Oregon, named for the first ship EuroAmerican settlers had built in Oregon, was one of the few Liberty Ships not named after a deceased person of historical significance.

Quote:My guess is that he was a remarkable set of contradictions, still baffling to biographers. But I had a great interest in what Huey did in his world, and a greater interest in Huey as a focus of myth. Without this gift for attracting myth he would not have been the power he was, for good and evil. And this gift was fused, indissolubly, with his dramatic sense, with his varying roles and perhaps, ultimately, with the atmosphere of violence which he generated.

Rumors of violence were constant. You heard that conspiracies for assassination had been formed, that the straws had been drawn. There was, for instance, an anti-Long group called the Square Dealers, organized (as we can now read on the sober pages of history) in squads and companies, armed, baying for blood. On one occasion, a man I assumed was a Square Dealer showed me his new sawed-off shotgun, loaded. How the young man - a filling-station operator - fondled the polished stock! Not long after, at legal hearings, a presumptive spy in the organization reported lurid plottings. The National Guard imposed martial law. Long announced a conspiracy of assassination and no doubt believed it. There does not seem to be any overwhelming reason for disbelief, even if such conspirators had no direct connection whatsoever with the eventual assassin, young Dr. Carl Weiss, an able and intelligent member of the medical profession.

Quote:Earth's magnetic field dramatically flipped roughly 41,000 years ago. Now you can actually 'hear' this epic upheaval, thanks to a clever interpretation of information collected by the European Space Agency's Swarm satellite mission.

Combining the satellite data with evidence of magnetic field line movements on Earth, geoscientists mapped the Laschamps event and represented it using natural noises like the creaking of wood and the crashing of colliding rocks.

The result – unveiled in 2024 by the Technical University of Denmark and the German Research Center for Geosciences – is is an eerie, otherworldly audio track unlike anything you've heard before.

Quote:He publicly attacked superiors in the Army, Navy and even the White House, making a statement to the New York Times, Dec. 6, 1919 that read: "The United States had produced practically no aerial war equipment since the armistice and consequently, is not capable of meeting any first class power in the air today, as foreign countries had continued development of wartime equipment."

Congress and the Navy reluctantly gave in and on July 20 and 21, 1921, Mitchell and the 1st Provisional Air Brigade demonstrated to the world the superiority of air power.

He and his unit sank the famous, "unsinkable," Ostfriesland, a captured German battleship.

However, the Navy was not pleased with the outcome of the tests; countering that Mitchell cheated by exceeding the parameter of the tests.

Nonetheless, the Navy began developing aircraft carriers, while Congress continued to cut the Air Service's budget.

Mitchell's frustration climaxed after the Navy's airship Shenandoah crashed due to weather in September 1925. Mitchell publicly accused the Navy and War Departments of "incompetence and criminal negligence."

In a statement to the press, he said, "Brave airmen are being sent to their deaths by armchair admirals who don't care about air safety."

That published statement was the beginning of the end of Mitchell's military career.

In November 1925, Mitchell was called to Washington D.C. and court-martialed on the charge of "Conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline and in a way to bring discredit upon the military service."

Mitchell was convicted of insubordination, but rather than serve a five-year suspension, Mitchell decided to resign his commission.

During retirement in Virginia, he continued to be outspoken on the importance of air power. He wrote books, newspaper and magazine articles, and gave lecture tours until his death, Feb. 11, 1936.

Mitchell received several honors following his death including a posthumous promotion to major general by President Harry Truman.

A military aircraft bomber, the B-25 Mitchell, was named after him. In 1979, Mitchell was inducted in the International Hall of Fame.

William 'Billy' Mitchell -- 'The father of the United States Air Force' (US Army website)

Quote:Efforts to promote Mitchell continued in vain into the late 1950s, when the director of the Air Force Records Center added a document to Mitchell’s personnel file claiming that "on 18 July 1947, a special bill was passed by Congress promoting General Mitchell to the rank of major general." In fact, however, the bill only passed in the Senate on July 16, 1947; it never gained the consent of the House.

Mitchell’s promotion to major general was finally authorized in 2004, when Rep. Perkins Bass  (R-N.H.), a relative of Mitchell’s, successfully inserted a provision into the FY05 defense bill. However, the promotion reportedly did not occur; congressional authorization merely permitted the action and could not require it be carried out.  Air Force Lt. Col. William Ott reflected in the Air & Space Power Journal that the promotion would be “a pyrrhic victory,” since it would not “erase the questionable actions that proceeded from [Mitchell’s] passionate advocacy of air power’s independence.”

There is no dispute that Mitchell was never posthumously promoted. However, at this writing, the mistaken promotion claim still appears on the official Air Force website for Medal of Honor recipients. The website incorrectly claims that in 1947, “a special bill of Congress promoted him to major general.” Indeed, the claim that Mitchell is a Medal of Honor recipient is also untrue. Congress recognized Mitchell with a Congressional Gold Medal in 1946, not a Medal of Honor. The bill’s sponsor did not understand the difference, leading to the measure’s original language that would have authorized a Medal of Honor. The House Committee on Military Affairs discovered the error and amended the bill to remove all substantive references to the Medal of Honor, and clarified that “the legislation under consideration does not authorize an award of the Congressional Medal of Honor.” Nevertheless, the title of the bill—Authorizing the President of the United States to award posthumously in the name of Congress a Medal of Honor to William Mitchell—was never corrected, which understandably misled many readers.

The Air Force presumably advanced mistaken claims about Mitchell in good faith, but with many historical and legislative resources at their disposal, it is difficult to explain why these errors remain uncorrected.

Four Air Corps and Air Force Leaders and the Shadows that Remain

Quote:He was court martialed for being right, as he predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in WW2. The story of William "Billy" Mitchell, the father of the United States Air Force. Contains rare historical footage, the biography of Jimmy Doolittle, and the Doolittle Raid, as the North American B-25 takes his name after Colonel Mitchell. I guess his tombstone inscription is more less permanent.

Court Martialed For Being Right! Colonel Billy Mitchell, The Father Of The United States Air Force:

Quote:Imgur blocks access to UK users after regulator warned of fine

(09-30-2025, 09:41 AM)BIAD Wrote: When the UK decides to go Chyna...



Add On: It seems the show might be on the other foot!

Quote:Imgur blocks access to UK users after regulator warned of fine

BBC Link: