Saint Crispin's Day

The Battle of Agincourt took place 25 October 1415.

The English army, led by King Henry V, famously achieved victory in spite of the numerical superiority of its opponent. The battle repeated other English successes in the Hundred Years’ War.

It was commemorated in the Shakespeare play Henry V.

There are several movie versions of Henry V, including ones staring Kenneth Branagh, and Laurence Olivier. One of my favorite versions of the Band of Brothers speech is from the 1994 movie Renaissance Man.

Margaret Hamilton - First female programmer for Apollo at M.I.T.

Margaret Hamilton: 17 August 1936 to 30 September 2026. Margaret Hamilton, Whose Software Guided the Apollo Missions, Has Died - The New York Times

People are confused about the fact that women where very much in computing in the early days. That is because at one time "computer" was a job description, akin to bookkeeper, and women where involved, as it wasn't considered manly work.

Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, guiding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe landing on the moon, died on Sept. 30 in Cambridge, Mass. She was 90.

The picture to the right, is from NASA. It shows Hamilton standing next to the printed code in 1969.

She was the first female programmer hired to work on the Apollo project, housed at M.I.T.’s Instrumentation Laboratory, in 1965. Her skills led to her promotion to director of software engineering on the project, which developed the two 70-pound onboard computers for the Apollo flights: one in the command module, which carried the astronauts from Earth, and the second in the lunar module, which set down on the moon’s surface.

And that code reflects the personality of designers. The routine that controls Master Ignition for the Command Module is headed by a comment that says...

BURN. BABY. BURN. -- MASTER IGNITION ROUTINE

The hat tip for this sad news goes to The Silicon Graybeard: The most important SW engineer that most people don't know passes.

By 1968 Hamilton was "assistant director in charge" of the Command and Service module software. She thought it would be a good addition to incorporate a failsafe into the system software’s “priority display” interface routines, should the onboard guidance computer become overloaded with more tasks than it could handle in real time.

You can find my archive post on How Women Were Pushed Out of the Tech Industry at that link.

The Chicago Tylenol Murders

A history lesson from 90 Miles From Tyranny. September 29, 1982: The Chicago Tylenol Murders Begin

A 12-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman dies in the suburbs of Chicago after taking an Extra-Strength Tylenol, becoming the first of six people in the area to soon turn up dead after taking that same medication. Investigators later found cyanide in the capsules.

No one was ever convicted of these crimes.

I have seen this reenacted on at least one procedural, cop show. Except Hollywood, in the times before MeToo and COVID, loved a happy ending, which meant the bad guy being brought to justice of some kind.

Click thru for more history.

Charles "Commando" E Kelly: Medal of Honor Recipient

Remembering a Hero on his birthday. Charles "Commando" E Kelly | World War II | U.S. Army | Medal of Honor Recipient

Charles E. Kelly: 23 September 1920 to 11 January 1985

For no particular reason, except that I find his story fascinating. He was the first enlisted soldier to receive the Medal of Honor in the European Theater in WWII.

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty. On 13 September 1943, near Altavilla, Italy, Cpl. Kelly voluntarily joined a patrol which located and neutralized enemy machine-gun positions.

The official citation is informative, if dry, but worth clicking through and reading. The X post below covers about the last third of the citation.

Charles Kelly held off the Germans almost single-handed in a house in Italy, and when he ran low on other weapons, he pulled the pins on mortar shells and threw them by hand like giant grenades down the stairs at the enemy. He was the first American soldier in the European… pic.twitter.com/sie3vELunp

— Voices of WW2 (@VoicesofWW2) September 7, 2026

Oktoberfest in Cincinnati

800,000 people, more or less, will gather in a downtown Cincinnati this weekend, drink beer, do The Chicken Dance, listen to polka, and in general celebrate the German heritage of the city.

I will not be attending. (I have bad memories of Cincinnati Oktoberfest, and the Chicken Dance. Don't ask.)

This is Tim's America video Germans CAN'T EXPLAIN Why 800,000 Americans Throw An OKTOBERFEST In Cincinnati

The visitor from Munich, can't explain the chicken dance because it was never [music] German in the first place. It's a Swiss tune given words by a Belgian named in Oklahoma and made enormous in Ohio.

The video is 20 minutes long.

The Other McCain on Liberalism

From The Other McCain: The Permanent Problem of Liberalism

Every time I use the word liberalism — as it has been commonly used in the United States for decades, describing the belief system associated with the Democratic Party — some pedant will invariably show up in the comments to scold me with a lecture about “classical liberalism” as if I’m an ignorant schoolboy in need of their tutelage, which I am not. Nobody needs to teach me about John Locke, Adam Smith, et al., whose books have been on my shelves for 30 years. Nor am I ignorant of the fact that most young left-wingers nowadays make a point of scorning liberals, instead referring to themselves as progressives or socialists.

Click thru for Friedrich Hayek, William Buckley, Andrey Vyshinsky and Eleanor Roosevelt, and more on why Democrats cannot, under any circumstances, denounce Hamas and terrorism.

I Still Remember

I'm not in the mood for remembering, but I do remember. Do people remember, or has the country as a whole decided to forget?

Page down for a song. It is hard to believe the September 11th attacks were 25 years ago.

This song is "I Remember" by Deadmau5 and Kaskade from the 2008 album Random Album Title. Like most dance music, it takes about 30 seconds to get past the intro.

Sing, Sing, Sing

More insomnia means more late-night/early-morning video watching. One of the things I am continuously amazed by, is how little people know about music that was popular before they were in high school. It doesn't surprise me that the average kid today, or most Zoomers, and Millennials, know nothing of the Big Band era of music. But when a drummer or a drum critic doesn't know who Gene Krupa was that is just plain sad. (But then I ran across a video by one drummer who didn't know who Neil Pert was.)

Purportedly the first sticksman to use a bass drum on a recording session, big-band swing meister Gene Krupa can claim to have influenced the format of the modern drum kit. He was also instrumental in establishing the popularity of cymbals and tom-toms. Renowned for his explosive “drum battles” with Buddy Rich. [Ref. 50 Best Jazz Drummers Of All Time.]

And no, they don't know who Buddy Rich was either. (I think there are some problems with that list, but they do seem to cover everyone, and more importantly, they say why Krupa was important.)

The use of bass drum, high hat, floor toms, in addition to a snare, with drums as an integral part of the band, actually contributing to the overall feel of the song marked a change in music. That pretty much started with Big Band and Swing. And today's song, and Gene Krupa, played a major role in that.

This is "Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)" by the Benny Goodman Orchestra. It is from a recording that features Gene Krupa on drums. (I think it is a 1955 recording, but I'm not sure of that.) It is probably the song that made Kruppa the star that he would go on to be.

And yes, I have featured "Sing, Sing, Sing" in the past, but that was a Louis Prima Orchestra version.

Anak Krakatau Erupted

I'm no linguist, but it is my understanding Anak Krakatau is essentially "Son of Krakatoa." More on the original later. Indonesia cancels flights as Anak Krakatau volcano erupts

Indonesia’s Anak Krakatau volcano erupted early Sunday, prompting the cancellation of all flights at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport and disrupting other domestic airports as volcanic ash drifted across parts of western Indonesia.

Seven airports around the region were closed, impacting 1000s of flights. I saw one headline that five of those airports have since reopened.

By Sunday evening, the closure had affected 467 flight movements in Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta airport alone that affected about 150,000 passengers. The airport was ordered closed until at least 9:30 p.m.

The news is mostly about impacted airlines, and worries about a repeat of what happened in 2018. In 2018 a side of Anak Krakatau collapsed, giving rise to the Sunda Strait tsunami. That tsunami killed more than 400 people and injured more than 14,000. It came without the usual warning, because the cone of the volcano collapsed without an earthquake to trigger the tsunami warnings.

Of course Krakatoa erupted violently in 1883.

Its explosive eruption in 1883 was one of the most catastrophic in history.

That is because we don't have historic records for the supervolcanos, only geologic records.

How bad was it?

The climax was reached at 10:00 am on August 27, with tremendous explosions that were heard 2,200 miles (3,500 km) away in Australia and propelled ash to a height of 50 miles (80 km). Pressure waves in the atmosphere were recorded around the Earth. Explosions diminished throughout the day, and by the morning of August 28, the volcano was quiet. Small eruptions continued in the following months and in February 1884.

Click that link for an interesting graphic on loudness of the explosion (remembering that decibel is a logrithmic scale), compared to atomic bombs, and rock concerts.

I include this post from X, because of the video. As volcanoes go, this eruption looks fairly average to my non-scientific eye.

🇮🇩🌋 TERRIFYING MOMENT: Anak Krakatau erupts in Indonesia.

Footage captures the first seconds of the eruption, sending a huge plume of ash into the sky.

Watching Anak Krakatau erupt today makes it almost impossible to imagine the sheer scale of the legendary 1883 Krakatau…

— XPRESS (@Xpress_24_7) September 6, 2026

And becuase I can't resist. "Volcano" by Jimmy Buffett. It is the title song to his 1979 album.

25 Years of Instapundit

2001 was a long time ago. 25 Years of Blogitude - by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

InstaPundit turned 25 on Saturday.

I didn’t mean for it to last this long. When I started InstaPundit, it was just the latest in a series of Internet ventures, ranging from Internet radio stations, and bands, on MP3.com, to RaveRights.com, an electronic music civil-rights site I set up because the DEA was at the time prosecuting raves under the so-called “crack house law,” which criminalizes owning or operating a building for the purpose of taking drugs.

Click thru for Glenn Reynolds' reflections.

In the middle of 2001 was still thinking that I wanted my career in corporate America. By the middle of 2002 I was living on my boat in Florida. And in 2004, I was so angry about the election coverage in the lamestream media, that I started the first incarnation of this blog. It still exists, but I had to make it private. Too many broken/hijacked links for the folks at Alphabet. The Trolls kept reporting me.

The History of the Weather Forecast

A tragedy on 25 October 1859 lead one man in Great Britain to create the idea of predicting the weather. On 1 August 1861 The Times (of London) published the world's first forecast.

630 people drowned in the Irish Sea in one night. ⛵💀

A British man studied the data afterwards. And invented something that every single person on earth uses every single day.

On 25 October 1859 the Royal Charter was hit by a hurricane off Anglesey. 450 people died. That same… pic.twitter.com/AKIY12DBRN

— Proudofus.uk (@ProudofusUK) March 31, 2026

This is a link to the Proud Of Us UK video 630 People Drowned In One Night. One British Man Made Sure It Never Happened Again. 🇬🇧 over on YouTube

What happened to Great Britain?

The Horror of a Post-Christian World

The Other McCain on Friedrich Nietzsche vs. Robert E. Lee

This is a complicated read, and no mistake. It covers a lot of ground, including - tangentially - why college students are so easily indoctrinated.

One of the benefits of being a bad student is that, by the time I began to take the world of ideas seriously, I was already an adult, with a job, a wife, three kids and a mortgage. It was in the early 1990s, when I was on the staff of the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune, that I began haunting the local used book store, snapping up old volumes at 50 cents or a dollar each, pursuing an autodidactic course of remediation, to fill in the gaps in my knowledge that had by then become apparent to me.

I think you will find it an interesting read.

Remembering Kevin Mitnick

Kevin Mitnick passed away 16 July 2023 at the age of 59 from Cancer. The Wiki lists him as a "computer security consultant, author, and convicted hacker."

From The Drive we get a story about hacking. This Man Was Gifted His Dream Car by the Notorious Hacker He Put in Prison

It’ll help if you know the name Kevin Mitnick. He was a hacker-turned-security consultant who, later in life, helped shape the modern white-hat. Just how prototypical was Mitnick? He put himself on the proverbial map in 1979 by dialing into a software company’s server and copying its forthcoming operating system release in its entirety. Imagine convincing a Microsoft server to cough over an early copy of Windows 12 using little more than a phone number.

Click thru for the details of how Mitnick got caught trying to hack/social engineer his way into Novell in the 1990s.

In the end, Shawn Nunley caught him. Mitnick was convicted and sent to prison.

When he got out, Mitnick contacted Nunley to apologize. Their bury-the-hatchet moment was even immortalized by Wired, and they went on to become good friends.

Mitnick went on to found a couple of White Hat hacking/consulting firms. He became quite successful.

When Mitnick passed from pancreatic cancer in 2023, he left Nunley a gift—enough to buy his dream car, a 911 Carrera 4 GTS.

An interesting story.

12 July 1979 - The Disco Demolition

Quite a day in Chicago History. Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park - Chicago History Museum

OK, so the story is from a couple of years ago.

July 2024 marks 45 years since the infamous “Disco Demolition Night” promotional event at a July 12, 1979, Chicago White Sox twilight doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers that erupted into chaos. To encourage attendance, the White Sox hosted WLUP 97.9 rock DJ Steve Dahl, who was known for mocking disco and had been fired from a previous radio job when the station switched from rock to disco. They asked fans to bring a disco record to the ballpark in exchange for 98-cent admission, and those LPs were to be gathered and then blown up in a controlled explosion between games.

It was a great success and a great failure.

The stadium was full of people who didn't care about baseball. When Dahl blew up the records it damaged the field. The WLUP fans invaded the field. The White Sox ended up forfeiting the 2nd game of double header.

Disco, which was already declining in popularity by 1979, went on to influence house music, EDM, Europop, new wave, dance-punk, and hip-hop and has seen revivals in the 21st century.

Hat tip to EBL: Disco Inferno. Click thru for a musical interlude, and a brief video of the night in question.

Graham 'Totenkopf' Platner Ends Campaign

The Maine Democrat, with the now-covered, SS tattoo, has terminated his campaign. Springtime for Platner ends - Don Surber

His tattoo from 1930s Germany didn't disqualify him in the eyes of Democrats. The early report of a sexual harassment didn't disqualify him in the eyes of Democrats. But they are abandoning him now.

Also on Monday, Senator Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland said, “I don’t know [Graham Platner] but I’m supporting Democrats. We need Democrats in office. We need Democrats in office to fight back against Donald Trump.”

What a refreshingly honest answer about Democrat ethics. They have none. It is all about power.

As for the tattoo: Totenkopf is a compound German word meaning "Death's Head." The particular tattoo that Platner was sporting is, if I'm reading it correctly, the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf, which was used between 1939 and 1945 in the the Waffen-SS. If you don't know what that means, you should study more about World War II.

Nothing clarifies one’s position on genocide quite like a Nazi tattoo.

Anyway, he started falling in the polls. There is apparently (I really don't care that much about Maine politics - I may have it wrong) more than one allegation of inappropriate and/or illegal activity. I can't tell you which, as I don't really care. It was interesting to me that the Democrats were willing to overlook a tie to the Waffen-SS. The party of tolerance, and inclusion willing to overlook a symbol of the Schutzstaffel, or the SS.

The SS as a whole was declared a criminal organization by the Allied Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946. [Ref. Britannica]

But then the Democrats as a whole seem, to me anyway, to be completely at ease with antisemitism these days. (Hat tip to Wombat-socho: In The Mailbox: 07.08.26 (Afternoon Edition)

Killdozer - 4 June 2004

I almost missed it.

A lot has been written about Marvin Heemeyer, but mostly the picture painted has been by the people who he believed had done him wrong.

The embedded video below, is long at an hour and 16 minutes. This one is 20 minutes from Unsubscribe Clips, and an interview with Lore Lodge.

This is the Lore Lodge video You Were Lied To About Killdozer

The History of June as Gay Pride Month

I'm recycling posts. That's OK. My writing was better 20 years ago. This post is originally from June, of 2006. I lifted it (almost) wholesale from the The now offline original Archives. You'll get over it. (Not to be confused with the newer Archives you can find in the sidebar)

History is different from the current state of things. A lot of gay folks are sort of over it. Pride from 40 years ago, was very different from today. I will get to some of them later in the month.

---

Gay Pride is typically celebrated in June. This dates back to the early morning of June 28th, 1969, and a few days in that week, when a bunch of New York's Finest bit off a bit more than they could chew. While several organizations were around before 1969, the start of the movement to secure Gay civil rights is usually marked by the Stonewall riots.

All you straight folks out there have no idea of gay history. I even had a protracted argument one day, with someone who was generally well educated and aware of political reality, that there were no gay bars before the 1980s. There were. They were underground, and even maintaining a low profile was no guarantee that police wouldn't show up.

The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar in The Village neighborhood of New York. Since gay bars had been basically illegal before 1966, it was not uncommon for gay bars to be mafia run. Stonewall was reputed to be mafia run.

Prior to 1966 it was illegal for a bartender to serve a drink to 3 or more homosexuals. So of course, this being the 60s, a "sip in" was staged. The NY liquor board later stated that the rules never had been what the rules actually were, so gay bars started to proliferate after 66.

The police still took delight in harassing gays, lesbians and transgendered at every turn after 66. On June 27, 1969, a Friday night, they decided to raid the Stonewall Inn. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and the following Wednesday riots were the result of that raid.

Take a look at the desperate criminals arrested by police at a 1962 Halloween Party.

New York must have been VERY safe in 1962, if this is how police were spending their time on Halloween. Or maybe the cops were just a bunch of bigoted idiots back then.

When police would raid a bar, they would arrest anyone "in clothes usually reserved for the other gender." Drag queens and lesbians in butch attire. Sometimes they would simply arrest everyone in the bar. Often they would publish the names of those arrested in the paper.

As they were forcing a lesbian into a squad car on that Friday night in June, she struggled. The crowd decided she had the right idea, and attacked. There were 400 "onlookers" and 8 police, so the police retreated and barricaded themselves in the bar. Since resisting was not to be condoned the cops grabbed the first person they could and dragged him into the bar and beat him. That person was heterosexual folk singer Dave van Ronk, who had come from a straight club down the block to see what the commotion was all about. (Van Ronk was later charged with assaulting police.) A parking meter was uprooted and turned into a battering ram. Someone tried to set fire to the bar with the police inside. Eventually more police arrived and dispersed the crowd. The two following nights, and the next Wednesday saw more of the same, and galvanized the Gay Community.

The first Gay Pride parade took place the following year, in commemoration of the riots.

The Battle of Midway

Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Midway took place. That was 4–7 June 1942. It was supposed to be another Japanese sneak attack, with the goal of sucking in the American aircraft carriers, so that Japanese can destroy America air power in the Pacific. In reality the Americans had broken the Japanese code, and knew what was going on. So they reversed the ambush.

It was a decisive battle in the Pacific War.

One of the people who distinguished himself during the battle was Jack "Dusty" Kleiss.

This is The Fat Electrician's video America's Greatest Dive Bomber - Dusty Kleiss. It is an hour-long video, but the Fat Electrician manages to make history interesting. And you might learn something. (It will only hurt for a minute.) You get a bit of background on Kleiss, an overview of the Battle of Midway, and Dusty's part in the battle.

Ibogaine in the News

From The Other McCain - Fear and Loathing at Mar-a-Lago? Freaky Friday Flashback to ‘Big Ed’ Muskie

Hunter S. Thompson brought up Ibogaine in relation to the 1972 Campaign of Ed Muskie.

For reasons that were never adequately explained at the time, and which seem ridiculous in hindsight, the media pundits and Democratic Party power brokers decided in advance of the 1972 campaign that Muskie was the front-runner, the man to beat. Thompson had other ideas.

Strange coincidence that Thompson, working for Rolling Stone, was covering George McGovern at the start of the campaign.

The very idea of Rolling Stone sending a correspondent to cover the presidential campaign was weird, at the time, and Thompson’s eccentricities were notorious enough that his hunch about McGovern’s chances didn’t get much credit from other reporters on the campaign trail, and yet in the end he was vindicated — especially in regard to his contempt for the “mainstream” consensus front-runner Ed Muskie.

That is (some of) the background. Click thru for more and the news from today.

There is apparently some use of Ibogaine to treat PTSD. Whether it actually works or not is the issue. The Other McCain has the details.

Where are the 300 Spartans?

Actually, I think that might have been a completely different war. (College was a long time ago.)

pic.twitter.com/THRDb2DOou

— Alex Sakalis (@alexsakalis) March 2, 2026