Tom

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

On this day in 1937, the Flint Sit-Down Strike ended. It changed the United Automobile Workers (UAW) from a collection of isolated local unions on the fringes of the industry into a major labor union and led to the unionization of the American automobile industry.

The United Automobile Workers (UAW) labor union had only just been formed in 1935 and held its first convention in 1936. Shortly thereafter the union decided it could not survive by organizing campaigns at smaller plants as it had in the past. Instead it would organize automobile workers and go after the biggest and most powerful employer, General Motors Corporation. It would do this by focusing on GM’s most valuable plants, which were in Flint, Michigan. The importance of these plants to GM cannot be overstated: the production plants in Flint were essential to the multiple lines of GM cars, and to the cars of GM’s subsidiary companies like Chevrolet and Buick.

Organizing in Flint was a difficult and dangerous plan. GM controlled city politics in Flint and kept a close eye on outsiders. As Wyndham Mortimer, the first UAW officer put in charge of organizing the campaign in Flint, entered the town, he was noticed. GM also maintained an extensive network of spies throughout its plants. Mortimer concluded after talking to Flint auto workers that the existing locals, which had only 122 members out of 45,000 auto workers in Flint, were riddled with spies. He decided that the only safe way to organize Flint was to bypass those locals and meet with workers in their homes.

As the UAW studied its target, it discovered that GM had only two factories that produced the dies from which car body components were stamped: one in Flint that produced the parts for Buicks, Pontiacs, and Oldsmobiles, and another in Cleveland that produced Chevrolet parts. Events forced the union to accelerate its plans when the workers at Cleveland’s Fisher Body plant went on strike on December 28, 1936, due to two brothers being fired from the assembly line. The UAW immediately announced that it would not settle the Cleveland strike until it reached a national agreement with GM covering all of its plants. At the same time the union made plans to shut down Fisher #1 in Flint. On December 30, at 8:00 AM, the union learned that GM was planning to move the dies out of Fisher #1. UAW lead organizer Bob Travis immediately called a lunchtime meeting at the union hall across the street from the plant, explained the situation, then sent the members across the street to occupy the plant. The Flint sit-down strike began.

In a conventional strike, union members leave the plant and establish a picket line to discourage other employees from entering, thus preventing the employer from operating. In a sit-down strike, the workers physically occupy the plant, keeping management and others out. By remaining inside the factory rather than picketing outside it, striking workers prevented owners from bringing strikebreakers to resume production.

Once the strike had been established in Flint, workers at other General Motors plants joined the strike. By January 25, the strike had major secondary effects throughout General Motors’ chain of production, leading fifty GM plants to close and suspending work for 150,000 employees. The police, armed with guns and tear gas, attempted to enter the Fisher Body 2 plant on January 11, 1937. The strikers inside the plant pelted them with hinges, bottles, and bolts, led by Bob Travis and Roy Reuther.^[15] They were able to withstand several waves of attack, eventually ending the standoff. The strikers dubbed this “The Battle of Running Bulls”, a mocking reference to the police (“bulls”). Fourteen strikers were injured by gunfire during the battle.

GM obtained a second injunction against the strike on February 2, 1937. GM was granted the injunction by Judge Edward S. Black. Black owned over three thousand shares of GM and was disbarred from the case after the UAW found out about this. GM’s representatives refused to be in the same room as the UAW’s, so Governor Frank Murphy acted as courier and intermediary between the two groups. Murphy sent in the Michigan National Guard, not to evict the strikers, but rather to protect them from the police and corporate strike-breakers. The two parties reached agreement on February 11, 1937, on a one-page agreement that recognized the UAW as the exclusive bargaining representative for GM’s employees who were members of the union. In the next year, UAW membership grew from 30,000 to 500,000 members. Employees of other car manufacturers such as Ford joined, as the entire industry was rapidly unionized. As later noted by the BBC, “the strike was heard ’round the world”.

Strikers guarding window entrance to Fisher body plant number three. Flint, Michigan.

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Romantic idea for Valentine’s Day

Today is the birthday, in 1941, of Brazilian musician Sergio Mendes, who had the 1983 US No.4 single ‘Never Gonna Let You Go’. His career took off with worldwide hits by his band Brasil ’66. He has over 55 releases and plays bossa nova heavily crossed with jazz and funk. He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song in 2012 as co-writer of the song ‘Real in Rio’ from the animated film Rio. He died from complications of long COVID in Los Angeles on 5 September 2024, at the age of 83. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrZBiqK0p9E

On this day in 1355, the St. Scholastica Day Riots began in Oxford. The disturbance began when two students from the University of Oxford complained about the quality of wine served to them in the Swindlestock Tavern, which stood at the crossroads now known as Carfax (The name “Carfax” derives from the Latin quadrifurcus via the French carrefour, both of which mean “crossroads”).

The students quarreled with the taverner; the argument quickly escalated to blows. The inn’s customers joined in on both sides, and the resulting mêlée turned into a riot. The violence started by the bar brawl continued over three days, with armed gangs entering the town from the countryside to assist the townspeople. University halls and students’ accommodation were raided and the inhabitants murdered; Around twenty townsfolk were killed, as were up to sixty-three members of the university.

King Edward III sent judges to the town with commissions of oyer and terminer to determine what had gone on and to advise what steps should be taken. He came down on the side of the university authorities, who were given additional powers and responsibilities to the disadvantage of the town’s authorities. The town was fined 500 marks and its mayor and bailiffs were sent to the Marshalsea prison in London.

An annual penance was imposed on the town: each year, on St Scholastica’s Day, the mayor, bailiffs and sixty townspeople were to attend a Mass at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin for those killed; the town was also made to pay the university an annual fine of one penny for each scholar killed. The practice was dropped in 1825; in 1955—the 600th anniversary of the riots—in an act of conciliation the city’s mayor was given an honorary degree, while the university’s vice-chancellor was made an honorary freeman of the city.

Ending the St Scholastica Day riot, as depicted on a 1907 postcard

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Let’s hear it for good people!

Thanks, Debra…

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BADA BING!

Covering up your camera on your laptop could damage it. Apple. Yes this statement is correct. Please remove the tape immediately. For… Safety reasons. FBI.

What a time in life to have an anxiety disorder, a love of history, and a compulsive need to stay informed.

At my age, to see the Northern lights, all I have to do is stand up too fast. Sometimes I even see a solar eclipse. 

I wish I could still buy things at the prices I used to complain about.

My doctor asked me if I exercise and I replied with “I jump to conclusions really well”.

Men are saying NYC is getting 10 inches of snow and women are saying NYC is getting 4 inches of snow.

Oh but 4 inches is suddenly a lot when it’s snow.

I hate watching breakfast on TV shows. You know they’re not going to eat 90% of the food.

Guy 1: Socialism doesn’t work. Guy 2: Did a satanic pedophile billionaire tell you that?

Your body needs 1000 calories an hour when you are snowed in.

The storm isn’t even here yet and I ate all my food.

Be the reason someone can’t use your name for their baby.

School teacher asked little Jane to tell the class what her dad did for a living. She said that he was a stripper at a gay night club and turned tricks in the alley for extra cash. After school the teacher asked Jane if that was really true. Jane said no, he really works at Fox news, but she was too ashamed to say that.

his year feels like being awake during surgery, but also it’s the wrong surgery and now you have a serious infection, and none of it is covered by your insurance anymore, and you still have to go to work tomorrow.

On February 2nd a ground hog was harassed by a bunch of dipshits in stupid hats.

The president of the United States and the dumbest motherfucker on earth should be two different people.

I forgot to pay my Scrabble Club subscription fee. Now they’re sending me threatening letters.

Do clouds ever look down on us and say “that orange one is shaped like an idiot”?

After recent events, Mexico has decided to pay for the wall. Canada has one in the plans also.

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Today is the birthday, in 1937, of American singer Roberta Flack who had the 1972 US No.1 single ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’. Clint Eastwood chose the song for the soundtrack of his directorial debut Play Misty for Me. The song was written by British political singer/songwriter Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger, who later became his wife. Flack also had the 1973 US No.1 & UK No.6 single ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’. Flack was the first artist to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in two consecutive years: ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ won in 1973 and ‘Killing Me Softly with His Song’ won in 1974. Flack died of cardiac arrest on 24 February 2025, on her way to a hospital in Manhattan. She was 88 years old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8_fLu2yrP4