Just an Earth-Bound Misfit: The Rantings of an Aging, Armed, Pinko Chick

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"Thou Shalt Get Sidetracked by Bullshit, Every Goddamned Time." -- The Ghoul

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck,
"FOFF" = Felonious Old Fat Fuck,
"COFF" = Convicted Old Felonious Fool,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset,
A/K/A P01135809, A/K/A Dementia Donnie, A/K/A Felon^34,
A/K/A Dolt-45, A/K/A Don Snoreleone

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

75 Years

The Japanese Navy executed a near textbook perfect strike on Pearl Harbor.

"Near textbook", because there were important targets left to hit, which were not attacked.

75 years after a large-scale event is usually about the last time that there is even a few of the participants still alive to tell the tale. The Submarine Veterans of WWII disbanded a few years ago.

They are passing into history.

7 comments:

Borepatch said...: I'm reminded of the 75th anniversary of Gettysburg, where they had a couple dozen veterans of the battle and a couple thousand of the war. That was 3 years before Pearl Harbor. Amazing that with all the advances in medicine since then that there are not so many more Pearl Harbor vets on this 75th anniversary.; 12/07/2016 2:55 PM
Comrade Misfit said...: The advances in medicine get more people into their 70s+. Most people didn't make it that far, back in the day.

But once you get over the "three score and ten", shit starts to happen.; 12/07/2016 3:51 PM
Dark Avenger said...: The last witness to the Lincoln assassination passed away in the late 1950s, he was a 5-year old boy at the time. In the course of noodling around and checking my own ancestry I found one collateral relative who was born in 1865 and died in 1957, he'd have been a great-granduncle.; 12/07/2016 10:16 PM
deadstick said...: Borepatch, if you got through the Civil War without dying of disease, you had antibodies that could kick some serious germ ass...; 12/07/2016 10:20 PM
Keaaukane said...: Borepatch, remember the raw numbers. Wikipedia sez there were almost 200,000 soldiers at Gettysburg, as young as 12 years old. I would guess that there were around 20,000 involved with Pearl Harbor.; 12/08/2016 2:00 AM
BadTux said...: My great-great-grandfather was 17 years old in 1865, supervised the moving of the clan from the burnt-out hills of northern Alabama to the pristine hills of northern Louisiana, and died there in 1948 at age 99, having seen the United States win WW2. Man, *that* was some history, surviving the Civil War where the most advanced technology in common use was the Minie rifle, and living long enough to see carriers and planes and battleships and tanks and such win WW2. Point being, I guess, that if you survived to adulthood back in those days, you usually lived pretty long. Most of the graves in the family graveyard (established in the early 1870's on land the family donated to build a church) from the 1800's and early 1900's are tiny little graves, often with just "Baby" as the name because they didn't bother naming children until they were at least six months old because so many died before reaching six months of age.; 12/08/2016 2:29 AM
deadstick said...: Tux--

There are a lot of mid-19th photographs of dead babies. Photography was too expensive for most people most of the time, but when a child died they'd dress him up, put a bible in his hands, and spring for his first and last photograph.; 12/08/2016 9:01 AM