Happy St. Patrick’s Day my fellow Irish men and women. It is finally here! I can’t wait to have corn beef and cabbage this morning for breakfast, go to the parade, and to listen to the Irish music. I miss listening to the Irish music every weekend like when I lived in the Chicago area. Actually this is the first St. Patrick’s Day that I haven’t spent in Chicago celebrating. Oh well, at least I will spend the day with some of my best Irish friends!
Stay safe today everyone. — “Erin Go Bragh”
This is one of my favorite Irish song, I hope you all enjoy!
A story of emigration – an Irish folk song based on letters from a father to his son, discovered in a loft some 120 years after they were written during Ireland’s Great Famine. “Kilkelly Ireland” is by Peter Jones, performed and arranged by Ciara Considine from her debut album of April 2008 titled Ó Mo Chroí.
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Abraham Lincoln was a wise man and his timeless words ring more true today than they ever did. You cannot help someone by doing for them what they can do for themselves.
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Wow isn’t this great? If only I could get my hands on just one of these One Hundred Trillion Dollar Zimbabwe bills. I could pay off the national debt, fund health care, pay off all American household debt & still have plenty of money to live comfortably.
Then reality hits and you realize how sad it is that the country of Zimbabwe has to print One Hundred Trillion Dollar bills because their currency isn’t worth the paper it is printed on. I wold still like to get a hold of one of these bills though, it would be a neat collectible.
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Caution Wide Load!! Well this isn’t something that you see every day, as a matter of fact I have never seen anything like this. It is quite unusual to witness a stuffed elephant on the back of a flat bed tuck, but on a trailer being pulled by a car just makes this all the more unusual.
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Here is a neat picture that I ran across the other day. Check out what the White House kitchen looked like in 1909. I bet it doesn’t look anything like this today.
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This alien looking object at first glance looks like a crashed flying saucer but in reality it is a man made structure called the Cactus Dome.
The Cactus Dome Was created at a cost of $239 million to cover the 350 foot wide, 30 foot deep crater that was created on May 5, 1958 as a result of the nuclear explosion called the Cactus Test. Underneath the Cactus Dome there is not only a large crater but also 111,000 cubic yards of radioactive soil and debris from the nuclear tests at the Bikini and Rongelap atolls sites.
If you notice the black specs on top of the Cactus Dome, they are people walking on top of it.
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I have never seen anything like this before, and I can’t believe it hasn’t had a ton of coverage on the Discovery Channel.
This video is of the 1993 Pantai Remis landslide in Malaysia. This mind blowing landslide is what happens when you have a huge open pit tin mining operation to close to the ocean. What the hell were they thinking?
In the picture below you can see the new cove that was created by the landslide and subsequent sea intrusion. If you want to check it out for yourself this Google Earth image can be found at (100°36′21.32″E, 4°25′18.85″N):
Here is a bizarre Presidential gift that most Americans don’t know about. The Grizzly Bear Chair was created by the great bear hunter Seth Kinman, who claimed to have killed over 800 grizzly bears in his lifetime. On September 8, 1865 Seth presented this chair to President Andrew Johnson. One of the great features of the Grizzle Bear Chair was that by touching a cord on the chair the head of a huge grizzly bear would come out from under the front of the seat with it’s teeth snapping and gnashing as if it was still alive.
The above picture is of Seth Kinman sitting in the chair that he gave President Johnson. If you notice the grizzly bears head is extended in this picture unlike the the first picture at the top of the page.
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This has to be my favorite Great Pyramid pictures. It is part of the Library of Congress’s collection, reproduction number LC-USZ62-130867. It was from a 1931 Stereoscope called “The Graf Zeppelin’s rendezvous with the eternal desert and the more than 4,000 year old pyramids of Gizeh, Egypt.
The Graf Zeppelin was a German passenger carrying airship that was in operation from 1928 to 1937. It was named after the German airship pioneer Ferinand Von Zeppelin, who held the rank of Graf or Count in the German nobility.
During the 9 years that it was in service the Graf Zeppelin made 590 flights, covering more than a million miles, and spending the equivalent of 2 years in the air. Part of that million miles was a 49,618 km (30,831 miles) 1929 around the world voyage that took 21 days, 5 hours and 31 minutes.
This is a 1930 German Reichsmark coin honoring the Graf Zappelin’s 1929 “Round the World” Flight.
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“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.”
When I first came across these pictures I was a little surprised that I had never heard anything about it before. The United States Pledge of Allegiance as originally written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy a Baptist minister and writer.
He wrote the Pledge for the September 8th issue of The Youth’s Companion, which was the Readers Digest of its day. Included with Francis’s original Pledge of Allegiance was what he described as the proper salute of the flag to go along with the pledge.
The proper salute, which was called the “Bellamy salute” after it’s creator. He modeled his hand salute after that of the Romans. The salute consisted of one arm stretched out toward the flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The Bellamy Salute was used by school children all over the United States for almost 50 years.
Then in the early 1940’s it was noticed that the salute bore a resemblance to a certain other salute being used in Germany at the time, which was based on the same original Roman salute. As a result Congress replaced the Bellamy Salute in June of 1942 with the Hand-On-Heart Salute.
The three photographs below were taken by Charles Fenno Jacobs, which are now in the Library of Congress. They were taken one month before the new salute became official in Southington, Connecticut.
Here is another old picture with a slightly different salute taken in 1899 along with a few other pictures throughout history.
Civil War Veterans saluting the flag
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