Jim > Recent Status Updates

The purge of the Red Army left the Russians apparently unprepared to defend their own territory and prompted Hitler to think he would outdo Napoleon and successfully invade Russia. The failure of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa was no thanks to Stalin's idiocy in destroying his own generals.

I went home and built the fire, drank some tea of dried nettles and considered that by the end of what looked to be a worse winter than I'd feared, I might be forced to boil my moccasins. That was one good thing at least. I hadn't taken to wearing tradestore boots of dyed leather. Those can kill you.

I trailed after her, feeling like a cross between Alice and Gulliver and a stray cat. Questions buzzed in my skull--if these people didn't build the city, then who did? And why was everyone dressed like some weird cross between a circus performer and a tramp?

Not only did BP agree to put $20 billion into a response fund to compensate victims of the spill, but we arranged for the money to be placed in escrow and administered independently ...The fund didn't solve the environmental disaster. But it fulfilled my promise that all the fishermen, shrimpers, charter companies, and others who were racking up losses would get their due.

The truth is that I'd forgotten most of my Indonesian beyond simple greetings and ordering off a menu. But despite my long absence, I was struck by how familiar Southeast Asia felt to me, with its languorous, humid air, the whiffs of fruit and spice...

Michelle did generate her own bit of controversy, though. At a reception for the G20 leaders and their spouses with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, she was photographed with her hand resting on Her Majesty's shoulder--an apparent breach of royalty-commoner protocol, although the queen didn't seem to mind, slipping her arm around Michelle in return.

He ( King Leopold) embarked on a regime probably unparalleled in its pointlessness and cruelty. Tax collectors were sent to extract whatever they could from the unfortunate Congolese...Rubber and ivory were collected, slavery established to ensure greater productivity, and intense cruelty marked the whole enterprise. One estimate sees the population of the Congo reduced from 20 million to 10 million...

He saw in sober fact that his kind might have reached the end of its time. Year by year, as the living died, the empty rooms about him would multiply, like the cells of a giant hive that no bees visited, until they filled the world....

A man came to the foot of the bed. He wore a stethoscope.
--Ah--he said.--You have awakened.--He was speaking Esperanto.
"Am I in the division hospital?" asked Tommy in English.
The man looked at him uncomprehendingly.
He asked the same again, in Esperanto, searching for the words as he went.

"They call us (Biafra) a dot on the map," said General Ojukwu, "and nobody's sure quite where."
Inside that dot were 700 lawyers, 500 physicians, 300 engineers, 8 million poets, 2 novelists of the first rank, and God only knows what else-about 1/3 of all the black intellectuals in Africa. Some dot.

....the presidency was correspondingly lucrative to the Trump family....the Trump hotel in Washington, DC collected $4.1 million more than projected in the first four months of that year (2017). Foreign governments, US corporations, and Trump's own super PAC made the Trump hotel their first choice of venue.

Yet after some 12 centuries of steady occupation of their land, something happened in the world of the Maya, and the Maya civilization in the lowlands came to a precipitous end. All building stopped and center after center was deserted, to be reclaimed by the creeping jungle.

" .... I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do..."

Ferguson field-tested one of his rifles for the British military in April 1776. After a demonstration for the royal family later that year, the Master-General of Ordnance stopped producing jaeger rifles and began producing Ferguson rifles instead. The British Ordnance Department ordered 100 of the rifles from four different gunsmiths (25 apiece).

..."There won't be any vertebrates for half a million years...All we can offer is that which creepeth. Some shellfish, some big fellows that look like squids and trilobites. Seven hundred billion different species of trilobites..."

-----from "Hawksbill Station" by Robert Silverberg

Here (at Troy), he (Alexander) and Hephaestion paid their tribute to the immortal friends (Achilles and Patroclus); Plutarch says also that Alexander and his comrades stripped and ran a ceremonial race round Achilles' gravemound. All sources agree that he sacrificed to the hero.

The other crate contained a fluffy white cat with eyes the color of pale jade. A note from William Short explained: "A Turkish Angora, to keep you company in your lonely retirement. Angoras like high places." Ellen picked the cat out of the crate, but it somehow scrambled from Ellen's arms and onto Martha's shoulder.

To be sure, Hitler never lost his ambition to invade the Soviet Union. To the end of his life, he... remained committed to the task....Yet, Hitler's inability to accomplish his paramount goal of eliminating Russian communism preserved the Third Reich...

But Azima Ali, the Tuareg tourist guide, insisted that the imam's message was unpopular in Timbuktu. "The people here are not extremists," he said. "The kind of Islam that we practice is generous and kind. We don't believe in spreading the religion through violence..."

There's little (Bobby) Brown needs to tell his roomie about hitting, but he does show Berra a side of life that will help him when they both advance to New York: how to order meals at high-end restaurants, which pieces of silverware to use, how much to tip a waiter, and where to buy a good suit-Yankee management insists their players leave good tips for service and wear suits when traveling.

The virus was still not finished. All through the spring of 1919 a kind of rolling thunder moved above the earth, intermittent, unleashing sometimes a sudden localized storm, sometimes even a lightning bolt, and sometimes passing over with only a rumble of threatened violence in the dark and distant sky.

"Colonel, I'm a stranger in a strange land. I'm alone, except for my dog. You have a sheriff, a major scientist, an intelligence officer from some fancy army college, and the whole First Infantry if you need them...."

Inside she saw a woman named Sabrina, a refugee from Mississippi, a survivor of the firebombing of Hopewell. She recognized her despite the bloody, swollen pulp of her face. The woman's jaw had been shifted violently to the right, the skin around her eyes made puffy and purple. She lay on the floor of her tent with her skirt hiked high...

There was a long silence on the bridge, and then Picard looked slowly at Riker. "Set course for Terminus," he said quietly. "You have the conn. I...will be in Ten-Forward if you have need of me."

Despite the warnings and protests of his men, Patton personally exposed himself to the fire while he directed often very reluctant work crews to get the tanks across the ditch. It was not easy to do. Patton resorted to hitting one man on the head with a shovel. He might have killed him. He never knew.

By the 70s, almost all new mammals were captive-bred and obtained either from other zoos or, occasionally, from animal dealers. Zoos across the country were slowly but steadily moving away from competitive relationships to more cooperative associations.

...and I finally tracked her down a few miles outside Lincoln, Nebraska, living in an old Airstream travel trailer parked out behind a carnival sideshow tent. She'd been with the outfit--part thrill-ride sidestall midway, part Pentecostal revival--for almost six months. I never did learn where she'd been before that. ( from " The Hole with a Girl in its Heart" )

"Having a good shore leave, sailor?" Holden asked with a grin.
"I'll never drink again," Amos groaned.
"Naomi's comin' over with some chow she got at that sushi place," Alex said. "Nice raw fish wrapped in fake seaweed."
Amos groaned again.