Crabs and Beer!

On this day in 1831, the French Foreign Legion, Légion étrangère, also known simply as la Légion, was created by King Louis Philippe. The Legion is a corps of the French Army created to allow foreign nationals into French service. It formed part of the Armée d’Afrique, French Army units associated with France’s colonial project in North Africa, until the end of the Algerian War in 1962.

Legionnaires are today renowned as highly trained soldiers whose training focuses on traditional military skills and on the Legion’s strong esprit de corps, as its men come from different countries with different cultures. Consequently, training is often described as not only physically challenging, but also very stressful psychologically. Legionnaires may apply for French citizenship after three years’ service, or immediately after being wounded in the line of duty: This latter provision is known as “Français par le sang versé” (“French by spilled blood”).

Members come from 140 countries. In the past, legionnaires were forced to enlist under a pseudonym (“declared identity”). This policy was designed to allow recruits who wanted to restart their lives to enlist. The Legion held the belief that it was fairer to make all new recruits use declared identities. French citizens can enlist under a declared, fictitious, foreign citizenship (generally, a francophone one, often that of Belgium, Canada, or Switzerland). As of 20 September 2010, new recruits may enlist under their real identities or under declared identities. Recruits who do enlist with declared identities may, after one year’s service, regularize their situations under their true identities. After serving in the Foreign Legion for three years, a legionnaire may apply for French citizenship.

As the Foreign Legion is composed of soldiers of different nationalities and backgrounds, it is necessary to develop an intense esprit de corps, which is achieved through specific traditions, the loyalty of its legionnaires, the quality of their training, and the pride of being a soldier in an elite unit. n contrast to all other French Army units, the motto embroidered on the Foreign Legion’s regimental flags is not Honneur et Patrie (Honour and Fatherland) but Honneur et Fidélité (Honor and Fidelity). Legio Patria Nostra (in French La Légion est notre Patrie, in English The Legion is our Fatherland) is the Latin motto of the Foreign Legion.

Because of its traditional slower marching pace, the Foreign Legion is always the last unit marching in any parade

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Repossessions are ruthless…

A proper Tramp Stamp…

Where to store your cat…

Bada Bing!

I got my shot for Shingles today. Just to be safe, l also got one for Vinyl Siding too!

Turns out you can just buy a birthday cake anytime and eat it yourself. Nobody checks.

Are the conservatives more afraid of the drag queens or the books they’re reading to the kids?

I have this cool phone app that shows me what I would look like as an old person. It’s called “camera.”

There is no bigger test of patience than using a remote to type your email address on a TV.

Does anyone know when W-2s for Walmart’s self checkout will be sent out?

I thought Ariana Grande was a font.

Every time I go out in public, the public is there. I can’t keep living like this!

I’m so poor I rub cologne from magazines on my shirt. When people say, “Oh, you smell good, what is that?” I say, “Page 14.”

I heard they’re building a mirror factory in my town. I could see myself working there.

So……where exactly are all these clinics that clinically approve everything?

I’m eating a second cookie because I ate the first one absentmindedly and didn’t appreciate it enough.

A man has passed out on the Ferris Wheel at the local fair. Paramedics on site say he is slowly coming around.

I will also be posting telepathically today. So if you think of something funny, that was me.

Guy in emergency room with several broken limbs. “But those pants DID make her butt look big!”

Why did they name them sea-monkeys when ‘shrimpanzees’ was sitting right there?!

Cop: Do you know why I stopped you? Me: Looking back at my trailer full of donkeys… “Because I’m hauling ass?”

Any pan can be a non-stick pan if you non-cook in it.

That look you get on your face when you say you’re bored and someone suggests some form of exercise.

The spaces between ladder rungs have increased because Americans are getting taller. Manufacturers claim it’s due to climb it change. 

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Some people are not as smart as others…

Here’s Alicia Keys… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J91ti_MpdHA

Today is the anniversary of the première performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, Nabucco. It is an Italian-language opera in four acts composed in 1841 by Giuseppe Verdi. It is the opera that is considered to have permanently established Verdi’s reputation as a composer. The opera follows the plight of the Jews as they are assaulted, conquered and subsequently exiled from their homeland by the Babylonian king Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar II). The historical events are used as background for a romantic and political plot.

the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves (known as Va, pensiero) from the third act of the opera Nabucco was used an anthem for Italian patriots, who were seeking to unify their country and free it from foreign control in the years up to 1861 (the chorus’s theme of exiles singing about their homeland, and its lines such as O mia patria, si bella e perduta / “O my country, so lovely and so lost” were thought to have resonated with many Italians).

Verdi’s operas remain among the most popular in the repertoire today. In addition to Nabucco, Aida, Rigoletto, La Traviata, Otello and Falstaff are produced regularly around the world.

Photograph of Giuseppe Verdi, circa 1872

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Same here…

No car…no problem…

slow news day…

Verdi – Nabucco Va Pensiero – MET 2002 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS6L_9xUT5E

Today is the anniversary of the 1857 decision of the Supreme Court – Dred Scott v. Sandford. It held that the United States Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, and therefore they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens.

The decision involved the case of Dred Scott, an enslaved black man whose owners had taken him from Missouri, a slave-holding state, into Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal. When his owners later brought him back to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom and claimed that because he had been taken into “free” U.S. territory, he had automatically been freed and was legally no longer a slave.

In March 1857, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision against Scott. In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States”.

Although Chief Justice Taney and several other justices hoped the decision would settle the slavery controversy, which was increasingly dividing the American public, the decision only exacerbated interstate tension. In 1865, after the Union‘s victory in the Civil War, the Court’s ruling in Dred Scott was superseded by passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery, and by Congress with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 conferring full citizenship and equal rights flowing from it. After Southern lawyers and courts countermanded this federal law with state law, Congress and 3/4 of the states in 1868 constitutionalized the 1866 Act by enacting the Fourteenth Amendment, whose first section guaranteed citizenship for “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

Dred Scott

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Weekend plans????

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Here’s Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BQLE_RrTSU

Today is the anniversary of the 1770 Boston Massacre, known in Great Britain as the Incident on King Street. It was a confrontation on March 5, 1770 during the American Revolution in Boston in what was then the colonial-era Province of Massachusetts Bay.

In the confrontation, nine British soldiers shot several in a crowd, estimated between 300 and 400, who were harassing them verbally and throwing various projectiles. Five American colonists were killed. The event was subsequently described as “a massacre” by Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and other leading Patriots who later became central proponents of independence during the American Revolution and Revolutionary War.

Amid tense relations between the civilians and the soldiers, a mob formed around a British sentry and verbally abused him. He was eventually supported by seven additional soldiers, led by Captain Thomas Preston, who were hit by clubs, stones, and snowballs. Eventually, one soldier fired, prompting the others to fire without an order by Preston. The gunfire instantly killed three people and wounded eight others, two of whom later died of their wounds.

Eight soldiers, one officer, and four civilians were arrested and charged with murder, and they were defended in court by attorney, and future U.S. president, John Adams. Six of the soldiers were acquitted; the other two were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to branding on the thumb, according to the law at that time.

The Boston Massacre is considered one of the most significant events that turned colonial sentiment against King George III and British Parliamentary authority. John Adams wrote that the “foundation of American independence was laid” on March 5, 1770, and Samuel Adams and other Patriots used annual commemorations (Massacre Day) to encourage public sentiment toward independence.

A variation of Paul Revere’s famous engraving, produced just prior to the American Civil War, which emphasizes Crispus Attucks, the black man in the center who became an important symbol for abolitionists

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Unfortunate headline….

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Today is the birthday, in 1951, of English singer and actress Elaine Page, best known for her work in musical theatre. Paige played Eva Perón in the first production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita in 1978 which for this role won the Laurence Olivier Award for Performance of the Year in a musical. She had the 1985 UK No.1 single with Barbara Dickson from the musical Chess ‘I Know Him So Well’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gd_ohoPzYc

Today is the birthday, in 1745, of Kazimierz Michał Władysław Wiktor Pułaski, anglicised as Casimir Pulaski. He was a Polish nobleman, soldier, and military commander who has been called “The Father of American cavalry” or “The Soldier of Liberty”.

Born in Warsaw and following in his father’s footsteps, he became interested in politics at an early age. He soon became involved in the military and in revolutionary affairs in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Pulaski was one of the leading military commanders for the Bar Confederation and fought against the Commonwealth’s foreign domination. When this uprising failed, he was driven into exile.

Following a recommendation by Benjamin Franklin, Pulaski traveled to North America to help in the American Revolutionary War. He distinguished himself throughout the revolution, most notably when he saved the life of George Washington. Pulaski became a general in the Continental Army, and he and his friend, the Hungary-born colonel commandant Michael Kovats, raised Pulaski’s Legion and reformed the American cavalry as a whole. At the siege of Savannah, while leading a cavalry charge against British forces, he was fatally wounded by grapeshot and died shortly after.

Pulaski is remembered as a hero who fought for independence and freedom in Poland and the United States. Numerous places and events are named in his honor, and he is commemorated by many works of art. Pulaski is one of only eight people to be awarded honorary United States citizenship.

Pulaski at Częstochowa, an 1875 painting by Józef Chełmoński.

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Some people are just really hungry…

today is the birthday, in 1678, of Antonio Lucio Vivaldi, an Italian composer, virtuoso violinist and impresario of Baroque music. Regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers, Vivaldi’s influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe, giving origin to many imitators and admirers. His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LiztfE1X7E