Doves

China’s Chang Cheng Station [in Antarctica] was inaugurated with a “dove of peace” ritual in which hundreds of Chinese pigeons were released, nearly all of which froze to death within hours.

Peaceful.

Countries Maneuver for Potential Future Land Grab – Wired News

Putin and Reagan

Vladimir Putin (left), then a KGB agent, posing as a tourist for Ronald Reagan’s 1988 visit:

Picture: Putin Pretending To Be Tourist During Reagan’s 1988 Visit To Moscow – TheHotJoints

Cafe con leche

King Alfonso XIII visited Las Hurdes [a backwards region full of destitute hillbillies] in 1922 in order to display the concern of the crown. The king and his retinue lived in military tents planted near the town of Casares de las Hurdes. During the king’s visit, a strange incident took place: A local village chief, concerned that the king was drinking only black coffee (a consequence of the king’s aides distrusting the quality of the local milk owing to unsanitary conditions in the area) served the king a small jug of milk saying, “Your Majesty rest assured that this milk is totally trustworthy,” which turned out to be milk from his wife who had recently given birth. The king became aware of this fact only after having had his café con leche.

A Dry White Season (1989)

Just watched this eye-opening film, now 20 years old:

Tokyo Leveled

Beyond words.

1945: In the single deadliest air raid of World War II, 330 American B-29s rain incendiary bombs on Tokyo, touching off a firestorm that kills upwards of 100,000 people, burns a quarter of the city to the ground, and leaves a million homeless. By the end of the war, more than 60 Japanese cities had been laid waste by firebombing.

Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, commander of the 21st Bomber Command, argued that incendiary bombing would be particularly effective because Japanese cities contained a lot of tightly packed wooden structures that would burn easily when set alight. He was right.

Tokyo was hit over a three-hour period by three bomber streams that dropped roughly 2,000 tons of incendiaries near the docklands and in the industrial heart of the Japanese capital. Tokyo immediately burst into flames. The combination of incendiaries, the way they were dropped, windy weather conditions and lack of coordinated firefighting on the ground resulted in a firestorm. Temperatures on the ground in Tokyo reached 1,800 degrees in some places. The human carnage was appalling; bomber crews coming in near the tail end of the raid reported smelling the stench of charred human flesh as they passed over the burning capital.
Sixty-three percent of Tokyo’s commercial area, and 18 percent of its industry, was destroyed. An estimated 267,000 buildings burned to the ground. The firebombing campaign, coupled with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are believed to have killed more than 1 million Japanese civilians between March and August of 1945.

March 9, 1945: Burning the Heart Out of the Enemy – Wired Magazine

Suicide Boys

After the recent suicides of German billionaire Adolf Merckle, Bernie Madoff victim Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, and real-estate executive Steven L. Good, is suicide spreading like an epidemic through the fields of finance and business?

To find out, we should first look at similar periods in the past to see if the same sort of behavior occurred then:

October 1929: Vice president of the Earl Radio Corporation jumped to his death from the window of a Manhattan hotel. His suicide note read, “We are broke. Last April I was worth $100,000 ($1.2 million in today’s dollars). Today I am $24,000 in the red.” [1]

On Friday, November 8, 1929, J.J. Riordan, president of the County Trust Company, took a pistol from a teller’s cage at his bank, went to his home in downtown Manhattan, and shot himself. [1]

On October 30th, 1929 (the day after Black Tuesday), Winston Churchill, visiting New York, was awakened by the noise of a crowd outside the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. “Under my very window a gentleman cast himself down fifteen storeys and was dashed to pieces, causing a wild commotion and the arrival of the fire brigade,” he wrote. [1]

The wife of a Long Island broker shot herself in the heart; a utilities executive in Rochester, New York, shut himself in his bathroom and opened a wall jet of illuminating gas; a St. Louis broker swallowed poison; a Philadelphia financier shot himself in his athletic club; a divorcee in Allentown, Pennsylvania, closed the doors and windows of her home and turned on a gas oven. In Milwaukee, one gentleman who took his own life left a note that read, ‘My body should go to science, my soul to Andrew W. Mellon, and sympathy to my creditors.’ [1]

But is suicide contagious? Malcolm Gladwell argues that it is:

…the very strange epidemic of teenage suicide in the South Pacific islands of Micronesia. In the 1970′s and 1980′s, Micronesia had teen suicide rates ten times higher than anywhere else in the world. Teenagers were literally being infected with the suicide bug, and one after another they were killing themselves in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances. We like to use words like contagiousness and infectiousness just to apply to the medical realm. But I assure you that after you read about what happened in Micronesia you’ll be convinced that behavior can be transmitted from one person to another as easily as the flu or the measles can. [excerpted from The Tipping Point]

Perhaps Adolf Merckle and Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet are signs of more suicides to come.

Source:

1) 1929: The Year of the Great Crash (1989) by William K. Klingaman

High Society

Taken in 1937 by Margaret Bourke-White

Moustache

The word “moustache” or “mustache” derives from 16th century French moustache, which in turn is derived from the Italian mostaccio (14th century), dialectal mustaccio (16th century), from Medieval Latin mustacium (8th century), Medieval Greek moustakion (attested in the 9th century), which ultimately originates as a diminutive of Hellenistic Greek mustax (mustak-) “moustache”.

Moustache – Wikipedia

Wassail

Wassail is a hot, spiced punch often associated with Christmas. Particularly popular in Germanic countries, the term itself is a contraction of the Anglo-Saxon term, wæs hæil, meaning, “Be healthy”.

While the beverage typically served as “wassail” at modern holiday feasts with a medieval theme most closely resembles mulled cider, historical wassail was completely different, more likely to be mulled beer or mead. Sugar, ale, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon would be placed in a bowl, heated, and topped with slices of toast as sops.

British Pubs named ‘Pig and Whistle’

The Norse word for Barley was ‘byg’, as in modern Danish. This terminology still persists in areas of Britain formerly part of the Danelaw, for example the ‘Bigg Market’ in Newcastle on Tyne, the former barley market. Today many British pubs are still named ‘Pig and Whistle’ which is a corruption of the name of an early Medieval feast known as the ‘Byggen Wassail’ celebrated at the end of the barley harvest, malted barley being the main ingredient of ale.

Wassail – Wikipedia

It seems the Germans, with their Glühwein, are really celebrating Christmas in a more historically-accurate manner than those who drink non-alcoholic mulled fruit juice.