Archive for the ‘nazi’ Tag
I’ve spent a great deal of my life dealing with the more unsavory side of the human race. Unfortunately, it’s taken a toll on me and seriously bruised the faith I once held for human tolerances. Doing historical research has its ugly side and I’ll share some of that with you today. Hopefully at some point in the future things will improve but I’m certain anyone reading this post today will never live to see it.
- Adolf Hitler kept a framed photograph of Henry Ford on his desk and Ford had one of Hitler on his desk in Dearborn Michigan. Hitler had used in his book Mein Kampf some of Ford’s anti-Semitic views, and he always welcomed Ford’s substantial contributions to the Nazi movement.
- From the beginning Puritan colonists engaged in the slave trade, first selling captive Indians to the West Indies and then bringing in Negroes from Africa. Cotton Mather, pastor of Boston’s North Church, owned both Indian and Negro slaves. In 1641, Samuel Maverick proposed the breeding of Negro slaves on Noodles Island, which is now East Boston.
- It has been estimated that the Spaniards killed off 1.5 million Indians within a few years after Columbus discovered the New World.
- Human beings have been exterminating animals at the average rate of one species a year for the last two centuries. That rate appears to be on the increase, despite the rising of ecological awareness that began in the 1960s.
- 40 million Americans are murdered, maimed, raped, mugged, or robbed every year.
- Pope Innocence VIII (142-1492) received a gift of 100 Moorish slaves, who he distributed as a gratuity to Cardinals and friends.
- Not all the bad guys in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s mild abolitionist tract about U.S. slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, are Southerners. The villains, in fact, are Northern renegades. Simon Legree, the wicked slave driver, was from Vermont.
- Here in the “civilized West” a human being has been killed by others every 20 seconds for the last half-century, either legally or illegally. This is three times the rate of the century preceding these 50 years.
- The English promised land in the colony of Nova Scotia to former slaves to join their side during the American Revolution. When the promise was broken, a former slave, Thomas Peters, who had been a sergeant in the British Army, sailed to England and won a concession of land in Sierra Leone in West Africa, for his fellow blacks landless in Nova Scotia.
NUFF SAID
I’ve made it clear over the years that I’m a huge fan of Isaac Asimov. I’ve tried to read as many of his writings as I could find, and his limericks are outstandingly bawdy. He also has another talent which I really appreciate and that was his ability to collect odd facts. It never ceases to amaze me how diverse his level of knowledge became over the years, and it still fascinates me. It was one of my motivations for starting this blog because there are just so many interesting odd and weird facts available and most of them never see the light of day. This blog is my way of bringing as many of those facts as possible to light so you all can enjoy them. Today’s topic of discussion will be the world of entertainment. Where else could you find the appropriate amount of weirdness that Asimov so religiously documented. Here we go.
- Not until 1959 was a play by a black woman produced on Broadway. 29-year-old Lorraine Hansberry’s starred in, A Raisin in the Sun, which concerned the problems (comic and serious) of a black family in modern day America. It was highly successful and eventually made into a motion picture.
- The great French actress Sarah Bernhardt was obsessed with death. As a teenager, she made frequent visits to the Paris morgue to look at corpses of derelicts dragged up from the Seine, and she begged her mother to buy her a pretty rosewood coffin with white satin lining. The coffin became part of the Bernhardt legend. Occasionally, she slept in it, and eventually she was buried in it when she died at the age of 79.
- A U.S. television network’s dramatic representation of the trial of Nazi judges was sponsored by the natural gas industry. The word “gas” was excised from the script, but a few “gases” slipped by the censors; those had to be blipped before the program was aired.
- During the pre-Broadway tour of the 1936 musical Red, Hot and Blue, Cole Porter had to do a lot of rewriting. Rather than hire a professional stenographer to take his dictations and transcribe the changes, he used the services of one of the stars of the show, Ethel Merman. Before she went into show business, Ms. Merman had been a secretary. Porter described her as “among the best stenographers I’ve ever had.”
- A tambourinelike instrument used in old time minstrel shows was made from the jawbone of a horse or ass, from which the instrument got its name, “Bones.” When the bone was thoroughly dried, the teeth were so loose they rattled and produced sounds as loud as a castanet. Every minstrel troupe had a “Mr. Bones.”
- Rin Tin Tin, for years the most famous dog in the world, was born to a war-dog mother in a German trench in France during World War I. Deserted when the Germans retreated, the German-shepherd puppy was found by an American officer who just happened to be a police dog-trainer from California. He trained Rin Tin Tin when they returned home. The dog was so intelligent he came to the notice of Warner Brothers Studios, which signed him up for what turned out to be a long career as one of the biggest box office draws of the silent screen era.
I just love these hidden stories and facts and envy Azimov’s ability to research and publish all of them. I’m happy to share them with you and I hope you enjoyed them.
THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES, ISAAC!
As I was preparing this post, I decided midsentence to step away from poetry for a day or two and to return to one of my favorite things which are limericks. I have quite the collection of limericks of all types and unfortunately, I have hundreds that I really can’t post on this blog, no matter how much readers continue to request them. I’ve picked out a few random samples from different historical periods and I’ll post them over the next few weeks. Here is my history by limerick . . .
***
World War II
A lady of doubtful nativity
Had an ass of extreme sensitivity.
She could sit on the lap
Of a Nazi or Jap,
And detect Fifth Column activity.
🪖🗽🪖
Don’t dip your prick in a WAC
Don’t ride the breast of a WAVE.
Just sit in the sand
And do it by hand
And buy bonds with the money you save.
🪖🗽🪖
There was a young lady from Beaman,
Who was known as a sexual demon.
“These soldiers,” said she,
“Mean nothing to me,
For what I really like is the semen.”
🪖🗽🪖
A female Nazi from Bredo
Advances her sinister credo,
By displaying her charms
During air raid alarms,
Inflaming the warden’s libido.
***
I’ve been blogging for almost 15 years and have written thousands of words. Also, I’ve been addicted to crossword puzzles for my whole life and know thousands of other words. That being said, I recently stumbled across some trivia concerning words and languages and I like to pass them along. I know a lot of words, but I found out I didn’t know as much as I thought I did.
- Egyptians, Indians, and Turk’s search for “sex” on Google more than any other nationality. “Hitler” is the most popular in Germany, Austria, and Mexico. The word Nazi is a favorite in Chile, Australia, and Britain. “David Beckham” gets the most hits in Venezuela.
- In the Eskimo language Inuktitut, there is a single word meaning “I should try not to become an alcoholic”: Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga.
- The words “tomato”, “coyote”, “avocado”, and “chocolate” all come from the Aztec language Nahuatl.
- The word “boredom” did not exist in the English language until after 1750.
- The “zip” in “zip code” stands for “zone improvement plan”.
- An 18-year-old knows approximately 60,000 words, which represents a learning rate of one word per 90 walking minutes from the age of one.
- By the age of five, children will have acquired 85% of the language they will have as adults.
- The Finnish language has no future tense.
- Over just six days in the month of August 1998, The Washington Post devoted 80,289 words to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
- The condition of being unable to release a dart from one’s hand when throwing is known as dartitus.
WORDS CAN BE FUN
Today is not just a day of remembrance for me but for the descendants of nearly 1200 Jews saved from death at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Oskar Schindler died at the age of 66 in 1974. Being a member of the Nazi party made it possible for him to bribe officials and obtain forged documents. He placed himself and his family at mortal risk and when it was all said and done he was penniless.
As a member of the Nazi Party, he ran an enamel-works factory in Krakow during the German occupation of Poland, employing workers from the nearby Jewish ghetto. When the ghetto was liquidated, he persuaded Nazi officials to allow the transfer of his workers to the Plaszow labor camp, thus saving them from deportation to the death camps. In 1944, all Jews at Plaszow were sent to Auschwitz, but Schindler, at great risk to himself, bribed officials into allowing him to keep his workers and set up a factory in a safer location in occupied Czechoslovakia. By the wars end, he was penniless, but had saved 1200 Jewish lives.
In 1962, he was declared a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official agency for remembering the Holocaust. According to his wishes, he was buried in Israel at the Catholic cemetery on Mt. Zion.
SOME PREOPLE SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN
Today feels exceptionally uninteresting. It’s a little blah, a little gray, and a little cold which means I’m suffering from a total lack of interest. I was just advised by my better-half that I’d be spending the better part of this day being dragged along on her shopping safari. Thank God I recharged my Kindle last night so I’m now good to go. That means I get to sit in the car and read while she shops.
If I use my head and offer up a little charm I might just convince her to buy me some sort of breakfast. I have a serious need for bacon and I need it right now. I swear it’s a worse addiction than cigarettes or coffee. It’s maybe the only thing that keeps these shopping forays bearable for me.
This blog needs a bit of a breather from stories about my life and times. Today I’ll supply the world with a few really useless but possibly interesting tidbits of information. It’s been a while since I’ve dished out a dose of these factoids and today’s the day. Here we go . . .
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The average American two-car garage is 25 percent bigger than the average Tokyo home.
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The European Union exports more to Switzerland than to China.
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During the first year of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the Red Army issued 800,000 death sentences to it’s own soldiers.
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The first year in which there was no recorded lynching of a black American was 1952.
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There were 658 suicide bombings around the world in 2007 – more than double the number in any of the previous twenty-five years. Afghanistan and Iraq were responsible for 542 of them.
I didn’t say that all of the factoids would be funny or uplifting because life on this planet leaves a lot to be desired at times.
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In 1976, the United States had 30 percent of the world’s college students. By 2006, that had dropped to 14 percent.
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Intel employees collectively send or read 3 million emails a day.
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The Mafia accounts for 7 percent of the Italian GDP, more than any single business.
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There are as many fake doctors practicing in India as real ones.
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The average male orgasm lasts eight seconds, the average female orgasm twenty seconds.
I guess that last one explains a lot of things. Women not only orgasm longer but get to have multiples as well. That’s just unfair.
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In the United States, adult bookshops outnumber McDonald’s restaurants three to one.
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Napoleon often masturbated before going into battle.
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Red Bull is illegal in Norway, Denmark, and Ireland.
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In 2007, twenty-four people killed themselves jumping under Paris Metro trains. On the New York City Subway the figure was twenty-six, and on the London Underground fifty.
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Men produce twice as much saliva as women.
I think that’s enough for today. I wouldn’t want you to overdose on all this useless stuff. It’s Sunday, watch some football, drink a beer or two, eat some nacho’s and belch like you have a pair. That’s what I call “a day of rest”.
HAPPY SUNDAY
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