Archive for June, 2024
29 Jun 2024
Via FB:
Lest We Forget . . . . . .
This man lived in the alcove of the old Finlay’s tobacconist kiosk, in Camden Town Underground Station and although he had been living there since the early 1970’s, nobody knew anything about him. He didn’t beg, he refused to accept money, he never drank alcohol, he didn’t smoke and for me, he was as much a part of Camden Town as the tube station itself. He only spoke to me once and it was on the day that I took this photograph. He’d seen me walking around with my camera loads of times but on this particular occasion he stopped me and said, “photographs are important, because people soon forget”. I always knew that there was a lot more to him than the image he presented to the world but I was stunned, when I read his story in the Camden Journal, the week after he passed away in 1988. He was born in Poland and when the Germans invaded in 1939, he made his way to England. He fought in the battle of Britain, flying a Spitfire in one of the Polish squadrons, married an English girl and worked as a printer after the war. When his wife died in 1969, he was so devastated that after the funeral, he never went home and instead, he moved into the alcove of the tube station. It is to Churchill’s detriment that he and other Polish pilots were not allowed to participate in the victory celebrations, because it was felt that the presence of the Polish contingent might upset the Russians. This man really was, one of the forgotten few, who spent the last 20 years of his life, living in a kiosk, mourning his wife.
28 Jun 2024
Karen Myers (the wife) gleefully on facebook:
Even the people who are running the former Drudge Report as a skinsuit are freaking out…
I don’t even have to point you to a specific article — the front page is a billboard.
27 Jun 2024
He is engraved in stone in the National War Memorial in Washington, DC- back in a small alcove where very few people have seen it. For the WWII generation, this will bring back memories. For you younger folks, it’s a bit of trivia that is a part of our American history. Anyone born in 1913 to about 1950, is familiar with Kilroy. No one knew why he was so well known-but everybody seemed to get into it. So who was Kilroy?
In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, “Speak to America ,” sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real Kilroy, offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article. Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had evidence of his identity.
‘Kilroy’ was a 46-year old shipyard worker during the war who worked as a checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy. His job was to go around & check on the number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piecework & got paid by the rivet. He would count a block of rivets & put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn’t be counted twice. When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would erase the mark. Later on, an off-shift inspector would come through & count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters.
One day Kilroy’s boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about all the wages being paid to riveters, & asked him to investigate. It was then he realized what had been going on. The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn’t lend themselves to lugging around a paint can & brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but added ‘KILROY WAS HERE’ in king-sized letters next to the check,& eventually added the sketch of the chap with the long nose peering over the fence & that became part of the Kilroy message.
Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks. Ordinarily the rivets & chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. With the war on, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn’t time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy’s inspection “trademark” was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the yard produced.
His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up & spread it all over Europe & the South Pacific.
Before war’s end, “Kilroy” had been here, there, & every where on the long hauls to Berlin & Tokyo. To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that someone named Kilroy had “been there first.”
As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.
Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always “already been” wherever GIs went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable (it is said to be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the underside of the Arc de Triomphe, & even scrawled in the dust on the moon.
As the war went on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (& thus, presumably, were the first GI’s there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!
In 1945, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, & Churchill at the Potsdam conference. Its first occupant was Stalin, who emerged & asked his aide (in Russian), “Who is Kilroy?”
To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard & some of the riveters. He won the trolley car, which he gave to his nine children as a Christmas gift & set it up as a playhouse in the Kilroy yard in Halifax, Massachusetts.
And The Tradition Continues..
24 Jun 2024
Vladimir Putin the Terrible responded to US permission to Ukraine to employ US-supplied weapons to strike military targets deeper in Russia with a show of force designed to strike fear in American hearts.
He dispatched a Russian naval flotilla, including a nuclear submarine, to sail dramatically close to Florida while steaming in the direction of Havana.
The world’s newspapers headlined Tsar Putin’s scary, scary sabre rattling.
South Florida Sun Sentinel:
Three Russian Navy ships and a nuclear-powered submarine will arrive at the Port of Havana for an official visit next week, the Cuban armed forces said in a statement Thursday, confirming the military exercises first disclosed by U.S. officials on Wednesday.
The Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces said the Russian missile frigate Admiral Gorshkov, the nuclear sub Kazan, the oil tanker Pashin and the salvage tug Nikolai Chiker will arrive on June 12 and stay for a week.
The Cuban military said the visit by the Russian Navy ships is part of the “friendly” relations between the two countries, complies with international law and does not pose a security threat to the region because “none of the ships carry nuclear weapons.”
Take that, United States! Tremble in your boots, American warmongers!
It sounded downright alarming, alright. But a little dose of reality from Murphy Barrett responding to a question on Quora puts it all into proper perspective.
Could Russia simply blockade America’s ports to stop and search every ship heading towards Europe and seize military equipment bound for Ukraine?
You do realize that most of Russia’s Black Fleet was sunk…by land forces.
As a show of force, Russia sent a “flotilla” to putter around Cuba consisting of one frigate, a submarine that is missing part of soundproofing panels (you know, those things that keep submarines quiet), and two support ships. So that’s one surface combatant that a Coast Guard cutter could deal with, a submarine that Helen Keller could hear coming, and two support ships to nursemaid them.
Meanwhile, the US Navy is the largest navy in the world (fuck China, we’re counting combatants, not just every thing that can float including canoes), the US Navy is also the second largest air force in the world (after the US Air Force), and frankly nobody who fucks with our boats gets away with it, as the Houthis most recently found out, and the Japanese found out hardest.
Hell, Iran fucked with our boats once, and we wiped out half of their navy, in eight hours, and only stopped because the US Admiralty thought that we probably shouldn’t wipe the whole thing out because…reasons, I guess.
I mean, if Putin somehow lost what little sanity he has left, and decided to fuck with our boats, the only problem the US Navy would have bitch-whipping him all the way back to Moscow would be to explain how in fuck all the lady sailors managed to actually pop motto-boners. Anatomically improbable, yes, but goddamn is the Navy gonna have a field day protecting the environment and creating new coral reefs.
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Many decades ago, when I was young and working on war game design at the late great Simulations Publications in New York in the late 1970s, there was news of a Soviet naval build-up, and SPI began contemplating a new Soviet Navy versus NATO and US Navy game.
At the weekly designers conference, all the keen military history buffs sat around the big table discussing current and future projects. And the new major “Naval War with the Russians” proposal came up.
One of the older grognards interrupted, inquiring aloud: When exactly was the last time the Russians ever won a naval action?
Present were over a dozen knowledgeable experts in military history, and we all were flummoxed. “Uh, how about the Battle of Navarino (20 October 1827 during the Greek War of Independence)?” asked a true savant.
No, someone else reminded us: the Russians were only a small part of a mostly British and French Allied fleet under British command.
We were left wondering if it would be possible to count John Paul Jones victories against the Turks under Catherine the Great in 1787. And the proposed game died buried under gales of laughter at the idea of the Russian Navy trying to take on the US Navy.
20 Jun 2024
(as usual, click on photo to enlarge)
LeBron James breaking the NBA scoring record last year. The lone phoneless gent at the front is octogenarian Phil Knight.
HT: the Anonymous Professor.
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