The gist of the HuffPo article is that Paul Ryan is not at all plussed by today's (yesterday's for EST readers) indictments. Consequently, HuffPo exhorts:
Meanwhile, I have some advice for Americans, and specifically Wisconsinites. Check out an honest, caring ironworker from Racine named Randy Bryce, who’s running against Ryan in 2018. Let’s make America America again.
Let's do that -- let's check out Randy Bryce. The first Google result that pops into my browser concerns a smear tweet by Bryce accusing Ivanka Trump of having an affair with Justin Trudeau [ed. note: Google, get this search result under control!!].
Like that shit's gonna fly in Wisconsin. It might fly among the female jealousy-fueled, Ivanka-hating nooks and grannies of the NYT, where the butt sisters also conspired to bring down Sarah Palin -- but I have serious doubts about Wisconsin. Well except for Madison. I'd say that HuffPo just destroyed Bryce's chances.
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*I don't actually read The Huffington Post. I found this topic via a Google alert set to "Titanic" and this popped up just a few hours ago.
Looking back at so many posts both here and at El Pollo Real, I'm struck by how often embedded videos become disabled over time making the posts nearly unitelligable. As I suggested long ago, YouTube, instead of killing creativity, should make copyrighted clips freely available at a nominal fee.
Here is an old post of mine -- one which still gets my eyes misty -- full restored:
I'm a Titanic nut and have been since I was very young. So, I'm fascinated by this project. What kind of steel are they using? It looks so shiny -- could it be aluminum or stainless steel?
The burning bunker news was published in 1912. I wrote about that here: Fire And Ice.
I've read other theories about how that fire contributed to the sinking: the fire weakened a crucial bulkhead and failed dramatically on contact with cold seawater, compromising the elaborate bulkhead system designed to keep her afloat.
But there is always comforting authority:
The Court, having carefully inquired into the circumstances of the above mentioned shipping casualty, finds, for the reasons appearing in the annex hereto, that the loss of the said ship was due to collision with an iceberg, brought about by the excessive speed at which the ship was being navigated.
That was the conclusion of the British Admiralty at the time of the sinking. (h/t EBL).
Ah, but I'm such a sucker for all things Titanic -- sort of the way Chip loves Egyptology. I even have a google alert set to "Titanic."
The notion of draining the Atlantic to get at a shipwreck is absurd fantasy. But something like that happened once.
Benito Mussolini had an entire lake, Lago di Nemi, drained to reveal an ancient Roman shipwreck:
Emperor Caligula's Pleasure Craft?
[note how small the men standing in the foreground are]
The whole incredible story is here. I've been to Lago di Nemi. At the time, I was unaware of the wrecks. I was attracted to the lake's history and the myths surrounding the lake as related by George Frazer in The Golden Bough.
The lake wasn't really hard to drain. It is a crater lake, inside an extinct cinder cone volcano and all they needed to do was to tunnel an outlet on one side of the cone and drain the water to the surrounding lower elevation. Researchers found two largely intact wooden ships. The remains were carefully removed from the lakebed and reconstructed on higher ground. Unfortunately, everything went up in flames in WW II when an errant American bomb set them afire. More history per Wiki: link
Given what we know of Emperor Caligula's depravities, it's hard to fathom what actually happened onboard this ship:
The story is about the wreck of RMS Titanic's younger sister ship, HMHS Britannic.
Five years ago, I wrote a post about Britannic on my old blog (see after the jump). That post now has over 17,000 page views and is my second most-cited post. I like to think it's because I pointed out some similarities between Jacques Cousteau's documentary about Britannic and James Cameron's movie script for Titanic for the first time. But really, I think it was just people clicking on the gorgeous graphic which I cannot now even attribute correctly.
In any case, you can now re-watch Cousteau's original documentary here.
This is probably like watching paint dry for most people. But the simulation puts together most of what we know about the course of her sinking via little blurbs in a timeline. I love timelines.
I've been enthralled with Titanic since I was a boy and I just now learned how late Smith, Wilde, and Andrews tried to call barely-filled boats back in to pick up more people.
The simulation gets two elements absolutely right: the moonless, stars-ablaze sky witnessing all and the calm, cold water darkly receiving all. Titanic played that physical and spiritual interface like nothing before or since.
For the impatient, fast-forward to about 2:12 when her demise really picks up speed.
A life-size replica of the ill-fated luxury liner Titanic will be
assembled in southwest China's Sichuan Province at the end of this year,
it was revealed on August 5 during the second China (Sichuan)
International Tourism Investment Conference in Chengdu. Link
I'm reposting this blog post I did around the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic. Why? Because the centenary of the Lusitania is looming and I'm not sure what lessons can be drawn from it. But there are lessons in this one if you look.
The following story of his bravery was told by Mrs. Henry B. Harris, wife of a theatrical manager:
'The world should rise in praise of Major Butt. That man's conduct will remain in my memory forever. The American army is honored by him and the way he taught some of the other men how to behave when women and children were suffering that awful mental fear of death. Major Butt was near me and I noticed everything that he did.
When the order to man the boats came, the captain whispered something to Major Butt. The two of them had become friends. The major immediately became as one in supreme command. You would have thought he was at a White House reception. A dozen or more women became hysterical all at once, as something connected with a life-boat went wrong. Major Butt stepped over to them and said: 'Really, you must not act like that; we are all going to see you through this thing.' He helped the sailors rearrange the rope or chain that had gone wrong and lifted some of the women in with a touch of gallantry. Not only was there a complete lack of any fear in his manner, but there was the action of an aristocrat.
When the time came he was a man to be feared. In one of the earlier boats fifty women, it seemed, were about to lowered, when a man, suddenly panic-stricken, ran to the stern of it. Major Butt shot one arm out, caught him by the back of the neck and jerked him backward like a pillow. His head cracked against a rail and he was stunned.
'Sorry,' said Major Butt, 'women will be attended to first or I'll break every damned bone in your body.'
The boats were lowered one by one, and as I stood by, my husband said to me, 'Thank God, for Archie Butt.' Perhaps Major Butt heard it, for he turned his face towards us for a second and smiled. Just at that moment, a young man was arguing to get into a life-boat, and Major Butt had a hold of the lad by the arm, like a big brother, and was telling him to keep his head and be a man.
Major Butt helped those poor frightened steerage people so wonderfully, so tenderly and yet with such cool and manly firmness that he prevented the loss of many lives from panic. He was a soldier to the last. He was one of God's greatest noblemen, and I think I can say he was an example of bravery even to men on the ship.
Miss Marie Young, who was a music instructor to President Roosevelt's children and had known Major Butt during the occupancy of the White House, told this story of his heroism:
Archie himself put me into a boat, wrapped blankets about me and tucked me in as carefully as if we were starting on a motor ride. He, himself, entered the boat with me, performing the little courtesies as calmly and with as smiling a face as if death were far away, instead of being but a few moments removed from him.
When he had carefully wrapped me up he stepped upon the gunwale of the boat, and lifting his hat, smiled down at me. 'Good-bye, Miss Young,' he said. 'Good luck to you, and don't forget to remember me to the folks back home.' Then he stepped back and waved his hand to me as the boat was lowered. I think I was the last woman he had a chance to help, for the boat went down shortly after we cleared the suction zone.
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I cannot fathom why Butt's gallantry has been whitewashed from Titanic history. Was it just his unfortunate name?
Sometime between 1912 and the publication of Walter Lord's A Night To Remember in 1955, Major Butt's actions were inexplicably downgraded to casual bystander. He doesn't even appear in Cameron's Titanic. Lord, doyen of Titanic historians, had interviewed dozens of living Titanic survivors for his book, but I wonder if Marie Young or Mrs Harris were among them.
I can suggest three other possible reasons:
Butt had been over-dramatized in earlier accounts and Walter Lord wanted to attenuate that. Lord also downplayed the words and heroism of Benjamin Guggenheim, who will be in a future post.
Butt was a southerner and the nephew of a Confederate general (Lord was an early civil rights activist).
Butt was a bachelor and was travelling with the artist Francis David Millet, who had scandalously lived abroad with another man. Lord himself was a lifelong bachelor and probably should have been more sympathetic.
Despite his diminished stature among Titanic historians, Butt's memory lives. According to the Wiki:
During his time serving with two presidents, Butt wrote almost daily letters to his sister-in-law Clara, of Augusta, Georgia. These letters are prized by modern historians as a key source of information on the more private events of these two presidencies, as well as invaluable insights into the respective characters of Roosevelt and Taft.
I heard somewhere, Twitter, some hole-in-the-wall run down backwater biker bar, there is a contest of some sort to caption this photo, but you now what? After reading all the fawning vapid celebrity-worship comments to the photo, one after another, here and there, the original posting and the twitterer who posed the challenge, I cannot think of anything amusing. And who would waste their time with such an absurd challenge anyway? Gawl. Don't these people have anything better to do?
I am against such idle captioning activities. Down with this sort of thing. The original is a particularly egregious photograph, look at it again to see for yourself it is taken at that precise angle that makes the president's ear look idiotic as if a malevolent puppet maker formed a carelessly cut leather cone and crammed into the side of the puppet's head for a cartoon character's ear that doesn't hear anything. And that's just mean. So I fixed that with Leo DiCaprio's face. That worked out rather nicely, don't you think?
But the whole time I was thinking, oh man, that guy has a Nikon. I bet it's a flagship full-frame. A camera that cannot take a bad picture. And now I'm back to being jealous of other people's cameras and the crap photos they manage with them. The cameraman for this photo did catch a precious moment by being ready, kudos, one that the president's shallow adorers can wet themselves over but he also caught his mockable monkey ear that remind all the rest of us we're living a parody of a satire.
Like this:
These are among the funniest scenes in the Princess Bride, actual satire. The actor depicts an official officially officiating while affecting a mockable debilitating speech impediment. That the man rose to high office of bishop or whatever is what makes it so funny. So absurd. The scenes are nothing without it. It implies corruption because you ask how the character got there. I noticed they've done this with Barry Kripke's character on the television show The Big Bang Theory. It's funny imagining the character delivering an important speech.
But that is comedy and this is life as we live it replete with it comic moments and even among people doing important things. It is humanizing. Imagine for a moment Bush II goofing around like this, as we cool guys do, but as president, and a photo like this is taken in such a way that shows Bush II's close resemblance to Alfred E. Newman to perfection, and the flash of white pain that stabs the spine of each of his detractors when they see it. The original photo, goofing around, goofy ears, the imagined photo goofing around goofy face. I tend to become disgusted when I think neither side deserves this doubling down on goofiness, I'l mention, not fair to everyone in between these two parties, unaffiliated, even all those people too uninterested to vote still do not deserve choices so open to parody. That is the satire of limited choice offered by two parties, the corruption of two controlling parties. There are much better people available in the United States than what these two parties offer. We can do much better than this. We deserve better than this, and one way or another we shall have it.
