Month: February 2026

On this day in 1945, 30,000 US Marines landed on Iwo Jima to begin one of the fiercest and bloodiest campaigns of the Pacific war. The American invasion, designated Operation Detachment, had the goal of capturing the island with its two airfields. The Japanese Army positions on the island were heavily fortified, with a dense network of bunkers, hidden artillery positions, and 18 km (11 mi) of tunnels.

Unique among Pacific War battles involving amphibious island landings, total American casualties exceeded those of the Japanese, with a ratio of three American casualties for every two Japanese. The invasion of Iwo Jima was controversial, with retired Chief of Naval Operations William V. Pratt stating that the island was useless to the Army as a staging base and useless to the Navy as a fleet base. The island’s airfield did support P-51 Mustang long-range escort fighters to protect B-29 Superfortress bombers en route to Japan, and also for emergency landings of B-29s, although these were of limited value late in the war. The Japanese continued to maintain early-warning radar capabilities on the island of Rota, which was never invaded by American forces.

Unlike many days during the three-day preliminary bombardment, D-Day dawned clear and bright. At 08:59, one minute ahead of schedule, the first wave of Marines landed on the beaches of the southeastern coast of Iwo Jima. Under Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, six Navajo code talkers worked around the clock during the first two days of the battle. These six men sent and received over 800 messages, all without error. Connor later stated, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

In hindsight, given the number of casualties, the necessity and long-term significance of the island’s capture to the outcome of the war became a contentious issue and remains disputed.^[75] The Marines, who conducted the landings and suffered the vast majority of the casualties, had not been consulted in the planning of the operation. The justification behind Iwo Jima’s strategic importance to the United States’ war effort revolves around the island’s role as a base for the P-51 Mustangs to serve as long-range fighter escorts for B-29 Superfortress bombers. However, by the time Iwo Jima had been captured, the bombing campaign against Japan had switched from daylight precision bombing to nighttime incendiary attacks, so fighter escorts were of limited utility.

The lessons learned on Iwo Jima served as guidelines for the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945, and influenced American planning for an invasion of the Japanese home islands. In the planning for a potential invasion of Japan itself, it was taken into account that around a third of the troops committed to Iwo Jima, and later again at Okinawa, had been killed or wounded.

Members of the 1st Battalion 23rd Marines burrow in the volcanic sand on Yellow Beach 1. A beached LCI is visible upper left with Mount Suribachi upper right.‘

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Today is the birthday, in 1940, of American singer, songwriter, record producer, and former record executive Smokey Robinson. With The Miracles he had the 1970 UK & US No.1 single ‘The Tears Of A Clown’. As a solo artist Robinson scored the 1981 UK No.1 & US No.2 single ‘Being With You’. He became the vice President of Motown Records in 1972. During the course of his 50-year career in music, Robinson has accumulated more than 4,000 songs to his credit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCwkZrj2VT4

Today is the birthday, in 1848, of Louis Comfort Tiffany. He was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in art glass, especially stained glass and Favrile glass. He is associated with the art nouveau and aesthetic art movements. Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass such as vases, ceramics, jewelry, enamels, and metalwork. Glass work by Tiffany Studios is known as Tiffany glass. He was the first design director at his family company, Tiffany & Co., founded by his father Charles Lewis Tiffany.

n 1879 he joined with Candace Wheeler, Samuel Colman, and Lockwood de Forest to form Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated American Artists. The business lasted only four years. The group made designs for wallpaper, furniture, and textiles. In 1881, Tiffany did the interior design of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, which still remains.

The new firm’s most notable work came in 1882 when U.S. president Chester Alan Arthur refused to move into the White House until it had been redecorated. Arthur commissioned Tiffany, who began to make a name for himself in New York City society for the firm’s interior design work, to redo the state rooms, which Arthur found charmless. Tiffany worked on the East Room, the Blue Room, the Red Room, the State Dining Room, and the Entrance Hall, refurnishing, repainting in decorative patterns, installing newly designed mantelpieces, changing to wallpaper with dense patterns, and adding Tiffany glass to gaslight fixtures and windows and adding an opalescent floor-to-ceiling glass screen in the Entrance Hall. The Tiffany screen and other Victorian additions were all removed in the Roosevelt renovations of 1902, which restored the White House interiors to Federal style in keeping with its architecture.

In 1892 he founded his own glassworks, the Louis C. Tiffany Furnaces in Corona Queens. Tiffany experimented with glass. Sand for glassmaking was abundantly available at nearby Oyster Bay. Tiffany would eventually oversee two hundred artisans. Among them, Clara Driscoll, whose dragonfly lamp won a prize in the 1900 Paris Exposition, was by 1904 one of the highest paid women in the world. Tiffany used opalescent glass in a variety of colors and textures to create a unique style of stained glass. Tiffany acquired Stanford Bray’s patent for the “copper foil” technique, which, by edging each piece of cut glass in copper foil and soldering the whole together to create his windows and lamps, made possible a level of detail previously unknown.

In 1902, Tiffany became the first design director for Tiffany & Co., the jewelry company founded by his father. 1911 saw the installation of an enormous glass curtain fabricated for the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. It is considered by some to be a masterpiece. Tiffany used all his skills in the design of his own house, the 84-room Laurelton Hall, in the village of Laurel Hollow, on Long Island, New York, completed in 1905. Later this estate was donated to his foundation for art students along with 60 acres (243,000 m²) of land, sold in 1949, and destroyed by a fire in 1957. Aside from his fame for glass and jewelry design, Tiffany also designed what we know today as the New York Yankees logo, originally used in 1877 as part of the NYPD’s Medal of Valor.

Tiffany died on January 17, 1933, and is interred in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York City.

Louis Comfort Tiffany c. 1908

Lily lamp design exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900

Favrile glass vases, 1900–02

Tiffany Studios Daffodil stained glass leaded lampshade, now known to be one of head designer Clara Driscoll’s creations

Autumn Landscape, circa 1923–1924, designed by Agnes Northrup

Wisteria table lamp

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Ash Wednesday!

BADA BING!!

What’s the difference between a $20 steak and a $55 steak? February 14.

I got an email from a man claiming to be an Egyptian pharaoh, asking me to help him move money to the United States. I think it’s a pyramid scheme.

In the near future there is going to come a time when AI tells a woman that she is wrong and needs to calm down. This will mark the end of AI and possibly computers all together.

How do we know how happy a clam is?

White Americans in Minneapolis are putting Mexican flags on their cars so that ICE will waste time by pulling them over. Minnesotans are calling it ICE fishing.

“There are no words in the English language that have all the vowels in alphabetical order,” he said facetiously.

A Rabbi once complained to a Methodist minister that the Christians had stolen the Ten Commandments. “Yes, we stole them, ” said the minister.  “But you can’t say we’ve kept them.”

I’m not sure of the name of the essential oil that calms people down. It’s Chloroform, isn’t it?

I’ve been playing a game called Silent Tennis. It’s like regular tennis without the racquet.

The price of chimneys have gone through the roof.

One minute you’re young and cool, maybe a little dangerous; the next minute you’re reading Amazon reviews for birdseed.

Angry poster… “Bad Bunny is performing in Spanish, and I don’t understand that language XX”. Commenter… “Relax. We’ve seen your posts and the way you confuse “there, their, they’re, then, than, it’s, its, your, and you’re”, we are not sure you understand English.

tRUMP celebrated at the Winter Olympics after winning the gold medal in the downhill presidency.

Bondi: “Stop mailing coupons for Depends to the White House or else”. Hmmmmmmmm

Someone told me to check my attitude. I did. It’s still there.

Let’s admit that drinking bleach and shoving a UV light up your ass is the closet we’ve gotten to a republican healthcare plan in the last 16 years.

We need to start referring to “age” as “level,” because “Level 74” sounds way cooler than “74 years old.”

A good way to threaten somebody is to light a stick of dynamite. Then you call the guy and hold the burning fuse up to the phone. “Hear that?” you say. “That’s dynamite, baby.”

When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if they ever press charges.

What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t work?  A stick.

How do you top a car? Tep on the brake tupid.

Did you hear about the cat who swallowed a ball of yarn?  She had mittens!

Time flies like an arrow.  Fruit flies like a banana.

Right now I’m having amnesia and Deja vu at the same time.  

I think I’ve forgotten this before.

Have you ever wondered why just one letter makes all the difference between here and there? 

How do you know when it’s time to tune your bagpipes?

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Today is the birthday, in 1952, of Juice Newton American pop and country singer, songwriter, and musician who had the 1981 US No.2 single, ‘Queen Of Hearts’. Newton has received five Grammy Award nominations in the Pop and Country Best Female Vocalist categories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0DK-0fIKCw

Today is the birthday, in 1821, of Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, better known by the stage name Lola Montez. Shewas an Irish dancer and actress who became famous as a Spanish dancer, courtesan, and mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who made her Gräfin (Countess) von Landsfeld.

She was born in Limerick into an Anglo-Irish family, the daughter of Ensign Edward Gilbert and Elizabeth (“Eliza”) Oliver. The family resided at King House in Boyle until early 1823, when they journeyed to Liverpool, England, and later departed for India on 14 March. Shortly after their arrival in India, Edward Gilbert died of cholera. Her mother, who was then 19, married Lieutenant Patrick Craigie the next year. Craigie quickly came to care for the young Eliza, but her spoiled and half-wild ways concerned him greatly. Eventually, it was agreed she would be sent back to Britain to attend school, staying with Craigie’s father in Montrose, Scotland. But the “queer, wayward little Indian girl” rapidly became known as a mischief-maker. On one occasion, she stuck flowers into the wig of an elderly man during a church service; on another, she ran through the streets naked.

In 1837, 16-year-old Eliza eloped with Lieutenant Thomas James. The couple separated five years later, in Calcutta, India, and she became a professional dancer under a stage name. When she had her London debut as “Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer” in June 1843, she was recognized as “Mrs. James”. The resulting notoriety hampered her career in England, so she departed for the continent, where she had success in Paris and Warsaw.

She met and had an affair with Franz Liszt, who introduced her to the circle of George Sand. After performing in various European capitals, she settled in Paris, where she was accepted into the city’s literary bohemia, becoming acquainted with Alexandre Dumas, with whom she was also rumored to have had a dalliance.

In 1846, Montez arrived in Munich, where she was discovered by and became the mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. When they first met, Ludwig asked her in public if her breasts were real. Her response to the question was to tear off enough of her garments to prove that they were. She soon began to use her influence on the king and this, coupled with her arrogant manner and outbursts of temper, made her extremely unpopular with the Bavarian people (particularly after documents were made public showing that she was hoping to become a naturalized Bavarian subject and be elevated to nobility). Despite opposition, Ludwig made her Countess of Landsfeld and Baroness of Rosenthal on his next birthday, 25 August 1847, and along with her title, he granted her a large annuity.

n March 1848, under pressure from a growing revolutionary movement, Ludwig abdicated in favor of his son, King Maximilian II, and Montez fled Bavaria, ending her career as a power behind the throne. After a sojourn in Switzerland, Montez made a brief excursion to France and then removed to London in late 1848. There she met and quickly married George Trafford Heald, a young army cornet (cavalry officer) with a recent inheritance. But the terms of her divorce from Thomas James did not permit either spouse’s remarriage while the other was living, and the beleaguered newlyweds were forced to flee the country to escape a bigamy action. George survived a reported drowning in Lisbon in 1853, but died three years later from tuberculosis. Meanwhile, in 1851 Montez set off to make a new start in the United States, where she was surprisingly successful at first in rehabilitating her image.

From 1851 to 1853, Montez performed as a dancer and actress in the eastern United States, one of her offerings being a play called Lola Montez in Bavaria. In May 1853, she arrived in San Francisco, where her performances created a sensation and inspired a popular satire, Who’s Got the Countess? She married Patrick Hull, a local newspaperman. Her marriage soon failed; a doctor named as co-respondent in the divorce suit brought against her was murdered shortly thereafter.

In June 1855, Montez left the U.S. to tour Australia and resume her career by entertaining miners at the gold diggings. She arrived in Sydney on 16 August 1855. In September 1855 she performed her erotic Spider Dance at the Theatre Royal in Melbourne, raising her skirts so high that the audience could see she wore no underclothing at all. Montez earned further notoriety in Ballarat when, after reading a bad review of her performance in The Ballarat Times, she attacked the editor, Henry Seekamp, with a whip.

She departed for San Francisco on 22 May 1856. On the return voyage her manager and purported lover was lost at sea after going overboard. She found some success as a writer, beginning with the publication of her letters, which were well-received enough for her to write and publish The Arts of Beauty, or Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet, with Hints to Gentlemen on the Art of Fascinating. She spent her last days in rescue work among women, which included working with women who had been prostitutes but were trying to leave the profession.

she died of syphilis at age 39 on 17 January 1861 and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, where her tombstone erroneously lists her age at death as 42, reading “Mrs. Eliza Gilbert | Died 17 January 1861.

Portrait of Lola Montez (1847), painted by Joseph Karl Stieler for Ludwig I of Bavaria

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Leftover V-Day stuff…

Today is the birthday, in 1991, of Ed Sheeran, British singer, songwriter. In 2012, he won two BRIT Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist, and British Breakthrough of the Year, while ‘The A Team’ also won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. Also won Best Song of the Year at the 2016 Grammys for ‘Thinking Out Loud’. Sheeran has sold more than 150 million records worldwide, making him one of the world’s best-selling music artists, two of his albums are in the list of the best-selling albums in UK chart history. As of April 2022, he is the most followed artist on Spotify. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp-EO5I60KA

On this day in 1960, France conducted it’s first nuclear test, Gerboise Bleue, becoming the fourth country to possess nuclear weapons. It was conducted by the Nuclear Experiments Operational Group (GOEN), a unit of the Joint Special Weapons Command on 13 February 1960, at the Saharan Military Experiments Centre near Reggane, French Algeria in the Sahara desert region of the Tanezrouft, during the Algerian War. General Pierre Marie Gallois was instrumental in the endeavor, and earned the nickname of père de la bombe A (“father of the A-bomb”). Gerboise is the French word for jerboa, a desert rodent found in the Sahara.

Initial plans were proposed to detonate a nuclear bomb on French territory in the Argentella mine on the island of Corsica. These plans were abandoned after widespread protests on the island.^[6][7]

On 13 February 1960 at 7:04:00 UTC, the plutonium bomb was detonated on a steel tower 100 m tall. The command post was 16 kilometers away from the blast. In order to study the immediate effects, military equipment was placed at varying distances from the epicenter, while jets flew overhead to take samples of radioactive particles. No journalists were allowed on site; instead, an eyewitness account was given to the French press, saying “the desert was lit up by a vast flash, followed 45 seconds later by an appreciable shock-wave”; an “enormous ball of bluish fire with an orange-red center” gave way to the typical mushroom cloud.

Gerboise Bleue was by far the largest first test bomb up to that date, larger than the American “Trinity” (20 kt), the Soviet “RDS-1” (22 kt), or the British “Hurricane” (25 kt). The yield was 70 kilotons, bigger than these three bombs put together; In comparison, Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, was 22 kilotons, one-third as powerful.

Five months after the last Gerboise A-bomb, the Soviet Union responded by breaking its atmospheric tests moratorium, settled de facto since late 1958 with the United States and the United Kingdom. The USSR conducted many improvement tests, starting in September 1961 with a series of 136 large H-bombs. The series included the most powerful bomb ever tested, the 50-megaton (50,000 kt) “Tsar Bomba”, which was detonated over Novaya Zemlya.

Following the USSR, the United States reactivated its own atmospheric test program with a series of 40 explosions from April 1962 to November 1962. This series included two powerful H-bombs topping 7.45 Mt and 8.3 Mt.

China also launched its own nuclear program, resulting in the A-bomb “596” (22 kt) tested on 16 October 1964, and the H-bomb Test No. 6 (3.3 Mt), tested 17 June 1967.

In 1968, France detonated its first thermonuclear weapon, Canopus (2.6 Mt), at the new facility at Fangataufa, a desert atoll in French Polynesia. All other French atomic-bomb tests, including Canopus, were carried out in French Polynesia from 1966 to 1996. The last bomb, Xouthos (<120 kt), was detonated on 27 January 1996.

The nation faced many international critics following the nuclear test, especially from Africa. Just days after the test, all French assets in Ghana were frozen, “until such time as the effects of the present explosion and the future experiments referred to by the French Prime Minister become known.” Morocco, which lays claim to the portion of the Sahara where the bomb was detonated, withdrew its ambassador from Paris just two days after the event. Other African nations expressed their disappointment with France’s decision to test nuclear weapons in the Sahara, citing fears of radioactive fallout and the safety of their citizens.

Students from Mali protesting in Leipzig against the French nuclear test

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How to hide your candy…

It’s Friday…here’s Kylie Minogue… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POWsFzSFLCE

Today is the birthday, in 1809, of Charles Darwin. He is widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental scientific concept.^[7] In a joint presentation with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and was honored by burial in Westminster Abbey.

Darwin’s early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped Robert Edmond Grant to investigate marine invertebrates. His studies at the University of Cambridge’s Christ’s College from 1828 to 1831 encouraged his passion for natural science. Darwin became a close friend and follower of botany professor John Stevens Henslow. After visiting Wales to study some geologic formations, he returned home on 29 August to find a letter from Henslow proposing him as a suitable (if unfinished) naturalist for a place on HMS Beagle with captain Robert FitzRoy, a position for a gentleman rather than “a mere collector”.

the voyage began on 27 December 1831; it lasted almost five years. As FitzRoy had intended, Darwin spent most of that time on land investigating geology and making natural history collections, while HMS Beagle surveyed and charted coasts. Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations and, in 1838, devised his theory of natural selection. Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in On the Origin of Species (1859).

As HMS Beagle surveyed the coasts of South America, Darwin theorized about geology and the extinction of giant mammals. Watercolor by the ship’s artist Conrad Martens, who replaced Augustus Earle, in Tierra del Fuego.

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If only we had a truck…

Nominative Determinism…

Today is the birthday, in 1939, of Ray Manzarek, keyboards, with The Doors, who had the 1967 US No.1 & UK No.9 single ‘Light My Fire’ and the 1971 single ‘Riders On The Storm’. Manzarek died on 20th May 2013, he had suffered from bile duct cancer for many years. He formed the band with lead singer Jim Morrison in 1965 after a chance meeting in Venice Beach, Los Angeles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKd6yarfkxA