Crabs and Beer!

Today is the birthday, in 1863, of Margaret Murray. She was a British Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and folklorist. The first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom, she worked at University College London (UCL) from 1898 to 1935. She was president of the Folklore Society from 1953 to 1955, and published widely.

Born in Calcutta, British India, Murray divided her youth between India, Britain, and Germany, training as both a nurse and a social worker. Moving to London, in 1894 she began studying Egyptology at UCL, developing a friendship with department head Flinders Petrie, who encouraged her early academic publications. she took part in Petrie’s excavations at Abydos, Egypt, there discovering the Osireion temple, and the following season investigated the Saqqara cemetery, both of which established her reputation in Egyptology.

Murray became closely involved in the first-wave feminist movement, joining the Women’s Social and Political Union and devoting much time to improving women’s status at UCL. Unable to return to Egypt due to the First World War, she focused her research on the witch-cult hypothesis, the theory that the witch trials of Early Modern Christendom were an attempt to extinguish a surviving pre-Christian, pagan religion devoted to a Horned God.

Murray’s work in Egyptology and archaeology was widely acclaimed and earned her the nickname of “The Grand Old Woman of Egyptology”. The influence of her witch-cult theory in both religion and literature has been examined by scholars, and she herself has been dubbed the “Grandmother of Wicca”. She died in 1963.

Margaret Alice Murray

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R.I.P. Sam Neill

GOOGLY EYES!

Here’s Juice Newton to get you started this morning…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0DK-0fIKCw

This day in 1925 was the first day of the he State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, commonly known as the Scopes trial or Scopes Monkey Trial. a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee state law which outlawed the teaching of human evolution in public schools. Scopes was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had offered to defend anyone accused of violating the Butler Act in an effort to challenge the constitutionality of the law.

Scopes was found guilty and was fined $100 (equivalent to $1,850 in 2025), but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate and former secretary of state, argued for the prosecution, while famed labor and criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow served as the principal defense attorney for Scopes. The trial publicized the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, which set modernists, who believed evolution could be consistent with religion, against fundamentalists, who believed the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge.

William Jennings Bryan (seated at left) being interrogated by Clarence Seward Darrow, during the trial of the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes

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Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh singer who, with a frosted, teased-up coiffure and a voice both weathered and operatic, soared to No. 1 with “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” one of the titanic pop anthems of the 1980s, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Portugal. She was 75. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcOxhH8N3Bo

On this day in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted. Considered one of the most consequential amendments, it addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law at all levels of government. The Fourteenth Amendment was a response to issues affecting freed slaves following the American Civil War, and its enactment was bitterly contested.

The amendment, particularly its first section, is one of the most litigated parts of the Constitution. The amendment’s first section includes the Citizenship Clause, Privileges or Immunities Clause, Due Process Clause, and Equal Protection Clause. The Citizenship Clause broadly defines citizenship. The Privileges or Immunities Clause prevents states from impeding federal rights, such as the freedom of movement. The Due Process Clause builds on the Fifth Amendment to prohibit all levels of government from depriving people of life, liberty, or property without substantive and procedural due process. Additionally, the Due Process Clause supports the incorporation doctrine, by which portions of the Bill of Rights have been applied to the states. The Equal Protection Clause requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people, including non-citizens, within its jurisdiction.

Rep. John Bingham of Ohio was the principal author of the Equal Protection Clause.

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I remember…

New cocktail…’The Reflecting Pool’

It’s SUMMER! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wvx14Qv9cg

On this day in 1947, reports were broadcast that a UFO crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico.

By 1947, the United States had launched thousands of top-secret Project Mogul balloons carrying devices to listen for Soviet atomic tests. These high-altitude balloons carried a series of highly sensitive microphones to detect Soviet nuclear tests. On June 4, researchers at Alamogordo Army Air Field in New Mexico launched a long train of these balloons; they lost contact with the balloons and balloon-borne equipment within 17 miles (27 km) of the ranch managed by W. W. “Mac” Brazel near Corona, New Mexico, where a balloon array subsequently crashed. Later that month, Brazel discovered tinfoil, rubber, tape, and thin wooden beams scattered across several acres of the ranch.

With no phone or radio, Brazel was initially unaware of the ongoing flying disc craze. When Brazel visited Corona, on July 5, his uncle Hollis Wilson suggested his debris could be from a “flying disk”. The next day Brazel drove to Roswell, New Mexico, and informed Sheriff George Wilcox of the debris he had found. Wilcox called Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). RAAF was home to the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, the only unit at the time capable of delivering nuclear weapons. The base assigned Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt to return with Brazel and gather the material from the ranch.

On July 8, RAAF public information officer Walter Haut issued a press release stating that the military had recovered a “flying disc” near Roswell. After station director George Walsh broke the news over Roswell radio station KSWS and relayed it to the Associated Press, his phone lines were overwhelmed. Media interest in the case dissipated soon after a press conference where General Roger Ramey, his chief of staff Colonel Thomas DuBose, and weather officer Irving Newton identified the material as pieces of a weather balloon.

Roswell Daily Record. July 8, 1947

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Here’s George Thorogood…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyhJ69mD7xI

On this day in 1928, the first loaf of sliced bread was sold by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri. Their product, “Kleen Maid Sliced Bread”, proved to be a success. Otto Frederick Rohwedder (July 7, 1880 – November 8, 1960) was an American inventor and engineer who created the first automatic bread-slicing machine for commercial use.

St. Louis baker Gustav Papendick bought Rohwedder’s second bread slicer and set out to improve it by devising a way to keep the slices together at least long enough to allow the loaves to be wrapped. After failures trying rubber bands and metal pins, he settled on placing the slices into a cardboard tray. The tray aligned the slices, allowing mechanized wrapping machines to function.

W.E. Long, who promoted the Holsum Bread brand, used by various independent bakers around the country, pioneered and promoted the packaging of sliced bread, beginning in 1928. In 1930, Wonder Bread, first sold in 1925, started marketing sliced bread nationwide.

The phrase “the greatest thing since sliced bread” is a common idiom used to praise an invention or development. A writer for The Kansas City Star wrote that “the phrase is the ultimate depiction of innovative achievement and American know-how.”

This photograph depicts a “new electrical bread slicing machine” in use by an unnamed bakery.

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Apparently not for everyone…

Bethan’s Rock is a small grey stone on display at Poole Museum in Poole, England. It was donated to the museum in 2019 by a five-year-old girl named Bethan, and it has since attracted significant attention on social media and become the museum’s most famous object. – Wikipedia

This is one of my Patsy Cline favorites…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gzthI-oltM