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On this day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act offered 160 acres of surveyed Federal Land to any US citizen or intended citizen who paid a small filing fee and lived on and cultivated the land for five years.

In all, more than 160 million acres (650 thousand km²; 250 thousand sq mi) of public land, or nearly 10 percent of the total area of the United States, were given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River.

The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 ended homesteading; by that time, federal government policy had shifted to retaining control of western public lands. The only exception to this new policy was in Alaska, for which the law allowed homesteading until 1986.

Elizabeth (Betty) Clouse-Smith was the last woman homesteader to successfully prove up land in her own name. She was among a group of people, including her son William J. Smith, who filed for homestead west of Big Delta, Alaska. On October 18, 1984, she received a patent for her 116-acre claim (47 ha).

The last claim under this Act was made by Ken Deardorff for 80 acres (32 ha) of land on the Stony River in southwestern Alaska. He fulfilled all requirements of the homestead act in 1979 but did not receive his deed until May 1988. He is the last person to receive a title to land claimed under the Homestead Acts.

Henry Holm’s sod house in Custer Country, Nebraska. Library of Congress

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BADA BING!

The new Pope has a degree in mathematics from Villanova. This guy doesn’t just understand sin. He understands cos and tan.

You can either expect me to work well with other or pass a drug test. But not both.

Trump accuses Librarian of Congress of having pro-book bias.

I’ve decided my body is not a temple; it’s a haunted house! It’s slowly falling apart, makes weird noises, and contains the spirit of an old man who’s always mad at something.

Two Irishmen were in a graveyard. Paddy reads a gravestone and says, “This guy was 95 when he died!” “Who was it?” the Mick asks. “Somebody named O’Toole from Kerry,” Paddy replies. Mick says, “Never mind him. There’s a feller here called Murphy who was 102 when he died! From Castletown. “Well that’s nothing!” says Paddy. “This chaps stone says 147!” “147? That’s amazing!” says Mick. “Who was he?” “According to the stone, its somebody called Miles from Dublin!”

Tablets were replaced by scrolls, and scrolls were replaced by books. Now we scroll through books on tablets. Times change.

I’m officially at the age where everything that feels like only a couple years ago was actually a couple decades ago.

Old age has come at a terrible time, just as I was starting to know it all, I’m now forgetting everything I knew.

Many top scientists are on the autism spectrum. So technically, autism causes vaccines.

I’d picked up lots of skills during all my years at work, but learning when I shouldn’t make sarcastic comments is not one of them.

Be with someone who gives you the same feelings you get when you see your food coming at a restaurant. 

I still can’t believe Aldi sells shopping carts for $.25. I’ve got 8 of them now but don’t really have a use for them. But it’s just to good a deal to pass up.

I asked my wife if she loved me for my face or my body. She laughed and said it was for my sense of humor.

There should be a summer camp for adults where you just go and sleep for 2 weeks.

Last week I walked into a revolving door and just kept going.  I did four laps before I realized what was going on.

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Today is the birthday, in 1944, of Joe Cocker, English singer and musician who had the 1968 UK No.1 single with his cover of The Beatles With a Little Help from My Friends, plus he had 8 other UK Top 40 singles and appeared at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. He scored the 1982 US No.1 single with Jennifer Warnes ‘Up Where We Belong’. In 2007 he was awarded a bronze Sheffield Legends plaque in his hometown and in 2008 he received an OBE at Buckingham Palace for services to music. Cocker died of lung cancer on 22 December 2014 in Crawford, Colorado. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfgwrdYUQ2A

On this day in 1536, Anne Boleyn was beheaded. She was Queen of England from 1533 to 1536, as the second wife of King Henry VIII. The circumstances of her marriage and execution, by beheading for treason, made her a key figure in the political and religious upheaval that marked the start of the English Reformation. The King’s determination to end his marriage with Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn led directly to the separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church.

As Queen, Anne gave birth to one daughter, who would become Elizabeth I, but, to Henry’s exasperation, and despite several miscarriages, did not produce a male heir. Henry became infatuated with his new favorite, Jane Seymour and soon Anne was arrested and charged with treason and adultery.

She was found guilty and condemned to death. Henry commuted Anne’s sentence from burning to beheading, and rather than have a queen beheaded with the common axe, he brought an expert swordsman from Saint-Omer in France to perform the execution.

On the morning of Friday 19 May, Anne was taken to a scaffold erected on the north side of the White Tower. She wore a red petticoat under a loose, dark grey gown of damask trimmed in fur, and a mantle of ermine. The ermine mantle was removed, and Anne lifted off her headdress and tucked her hair under a coif. After a brief farewell to her weeping ladies and a request for prayers, she knelt down; one of the ladies tied a blindfold over Anne’s eyes. She knelt upright, in the French style of beheadings. Her final prayer consisted of her continually repeating, “Jesu receive my soul; O Lord God have pity on my soul.”

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Possibly, this is not exactly true…

Cats back then…

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Today is the birthday, in 1947, of Greg Herbert, from jazz-rock American music group Blood Sweat & Tears. They scored the 1969 US No.2 single ‘Spinning Wheel’, and the 1969 US No.12 single ‘You’ve Made Me So Very Happy’. They had a US No.1 with their second album Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1968. Herbert died of an accidental drug overdose 31st January 1977. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK62tfoCmuQ

On this day in 1770, Louis-Auguste, Dauphin of France, married Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria and youngest daughter of Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I.

This marriage was met with hostility from the French public. France’s alliance with its traditional enemy Austria had pulled the country into the disastrous Seven Years’ War, in which it was defeated by the British and the Prussians, both in Europe and in North America. By the time that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were married, the French people generally disliked the Austrian alliance, and Marie Antoinette was seen as an unwelcome foreigner.

The marriage ended badly. Due to financial difficulties, her husband, now King of France, summoned the Estates General and the French revolution began. The king and queen attempted to flee the country and were caught. The king was convicted of high treason by the National Assembly and On 21 January 1793, Louis XVI, at age 38, was beheaded by guillotine on the Place de la Révolution.

Early on 16 October, 1773, Marie Antoinette was declared guilty of the three main charges against her: depletion of the national treasury, conspiracy against the internal and external security of the state, and high treason because of her intelligence activities in the interest of the enemy; the latter charge alone was enough to condemn her to death. Marie Antoinette was executed by beheading by guillotine at 12:15 pm on 16 October. Her last words are recorded as, “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprès” or “Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose”, after accidentally stepping on her executioner’s shoe.

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Signzzzzz

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Today is the birthday, in 1947, of Barbara Lee, singer, from American all-girl group The Chiffons who had the 1963 US No.1 single ‘He’s So Fine’, and the 1972 UK No.4 single ‘Sweet Talking Guy’, (first released in 1966). Lee died on 15th May 1992. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHx4hk7H51o

On this day in 1911, the Supreme Court declared Standard Oil to be a monopoly and ordered the company to be broken up. The decision also held, however, that U.S. antitrust law bans only “unreasonable” restraints on trade, an interpretation that came to be known as the “rule of reason”.

Over the course of the 1870s, the Standard Oil Company of Ohio acquired a monopoly on oil refining in the United States. By 1879 it controlled more than 90 percent of the market. In November 1906, the Justice Department sued Standard Oil of New Jersey for violating the Sherman Act. The action was brought under the Expediting Act in the United States circuit court for the Eastern District of Missouri. After a 15-month-long trial, the court issued its decree of dissolution in November 1909 and its opinion in December 1909.

The main issue before the Supreme Court was whether it was within the power of Congress to prevent one company from acquiring numerous others through means that might have been considered legal in common law, but still posed a significant constraint on competition by mere virtue of their size and market power, as implied by the Antitrust Act. As in the case against American Tobacco, which was decided the same day, the Court concluded that these facts were within the power of Congress to regulate under the Commerce Clause.

The Standard Oil case resulted in the breakup of Standard Oil into 43 separate companies. Many of these have since recombined; the largest present direct descendants of Standard Oil are ExxonMobil (Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York) and Chevron (Standard Oil of California). Some Standard Oil descendants merged into other companies, particularly BP, which acquired/merged with Standard Oil of Ohio and Amoco.

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The Hout Bay Music Project was created by the residents of Hout Bay in South Africa to provide music development opportunities to disadvantage children. Here is an excerpt from one of their concerts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIIQgTIhE2w&list=PLzSz6NxvKpJAiHk1LKjz27By8GnLrLtsD&index=36

On this day in 1796, Edward Jenner administered the first smallpox vaccination. Jenner is often called “the father of immunology”, and his work is said to have saved “more lives than any other man”. In Jenner’s time, smallpox killed around 10% of the global population, with the number as high as 20% in towns and cities where infection spread more easily.

The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae (‘pustules of the cow’), the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox. He used it in 1798 in the title of his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae known as the Cow Pox, in which he described the protective effect of cowpox against smallpox.

Jenner postulated that the pus in blisters from sufferers of cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox but much less virulent) protected them from smallpox. On 14 May 1796, Jenner tested his hypothesis by inoculating James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of Jenner’s gardener. He scraped pus from cowpox blisters on the hands of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom (whose hide now hangs on the wall of the St. George’s Medical School library, now in Tooting, London). Phipps was the 17th case described in Jenner’s first paper on vaccination.

Jenner inoculated Phipps in both arms that day; this led to a fever and some uneasiness but no full-blown infection. Later, Jenner injected Phipps with variolous material, the routine method of immunization at that time and again no disease followed. The boy was later challenged with variolous material and again showed no sign of infection. There were no unexpected side effects, and neither Phipps nor any other recipients underwent any future ‘breakthrough’ cases.

US physician Donald Hopkins has written, “Jenner’s unique contribution was not that he inoculated a few persons with cowpox, but that he then proved [by subsequent challenges] that they were immune to smallpox.

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People are still posting about the new Pope…

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Today is the birthday, in 1937, of English studio guitarist Vic Flick best known for playing the guitar riff in the ‘James Bond Theme’. Flick played the riff on a 1939 English Clifford Essex Paragon Deluxe guitar plugged into a Fender Vibrolux amplifier and was paid a one-off fee of £6 for the recording. He also played a pastiche of the “James Bond” guitar part for The Beatles’ film A Hard Days Night – Ringos Theme (1964). Flick died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at a care facility in Los Angeles on 14 November 2024, at the age of 87. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9-cDa4JCwM