Winters sent me a new replacement from Philly. It was Babe. He came into the barracks, and he walked like a penguin, side to side, like a duck. He did the South Philly shuffle. You couldn’t miss it. We started asking each other who we knew back home. I thought he was as goofy as I was. He liked to have fun; I liked him right away, the dirty rat.
Bill Guarnere - Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends
Holy FUUUUUUUCK
Murdered the entire squad
THIS. This shit right here is why any adaptation that has Daphne as a “bitchy popular girl” stereotype and Fred as a “popular jock” stereotype are totally wrong.
They both self-ID as fucking NERDS.
Fred is obsessed with setting traps and Daphne is an aspiring mystery novelist… in what world are they not nerds.
Mundane America. Broken pole with rope and an American Flag. Cincinnati, Ohio.
Wait. Wait.
Wait.
I know that telephone pole.
I know that telephone pole intimately because I’m the one who broke it.
Thats the pole next to Sycamore Jr. High, in between the jr high school and Pipkins, where I had my second car accident. A woman t-boned my car and drove me into that pole in 2008 and it took them years to actually take it down.
That black metal pole you see just beyond the broken phone pole is a “Now Leaving/Welcome To Blue Ash, Ohio” sign, visible at 5520 Cooper Road on google maps.
(the flag is there, btw, because its the starting point for the Blue Ash/Montgomery July 4th parade.)
The internet is so staggeringly immense that I can’t help but be disproportionately delighted when things like this happen.
Okay, here’s the thing though. It isn’t a question of if. They existed and this is exactly what they did.
After the United States entered World War II at the end of 1941 and Germany subsequently declared war upon it, Great Britain recommended several steps the United States should take in order to safeguard their ships from Nazi u-boats. Recommendations included sailing ships in convoy (preferably with escort, but records proved ships in convoy without escort were still safer than ships sailing alone), if a ship had to sail on its own, it should avoid known navigation routes and markers, and towns and cities along the East Coast should adhere to strict blackouts at night. These recommendations came from the previous two years of experience in which u-boats absolutely ran wild in the North Atlantic and North Sea, obliterating British shipping. This period of time was referred to by Nazi u-boat captains as “The First Happy Time”.
Despite British warnings, the United States was slow to follow them and impose restrictions. Ships continued to sail along marked navigation routes and run standard navigation lights at night. Boardwalk communities along the coast were only requested they turn off their lights at night and the cities weren’t even asked that because they didn’t want to offend the tourism, recreation, and business sectors.
Blacking out coastal communities would have made it infinitely harder for Nazi submarines to find and sink targets. A ship running with no lights is still visible against the backdrop of a lit city.
Conversely, a dark ship running against a dark coast is virtually invisible.
But because citizens living on the coast refused to adhere to wartime suggestions for amenity reasons, merchant ships sailing up and down the East Coast became sitting ducks of u-boats. The US government did not begin strictly enforcing blackouts until roughly August 1942. By then, the Nazis had been given 8 months to run rampant along American shores. This time period was referred to by u-boat captains as “The Second Happy Time” or “American Shooting Season”.
By August, Nazi u-boats had sunk 609 merchant vessels, totaling 3.1 million tons and costing thousands of lives, mostly of merchant mariners performing their essential jobs.
By comparison, only 22 u-boats were sunk.
While the failure of coastal blackouts were not the sole reason the Nazis had such success during this time period (the Navy was slow to implement convoys and remove notable aids to navigation along the coast), I do not think it can be argued they did not contribute significantly to such great loss of American lives.
If you can, please read the reply above or save it for whenever you have time. We need to break the habits of our history and that starts with applying our past to our present.
The Faces of Ben: Adam Kenyon edition, part deux
Aged like fine wine
The beauty of tumblr. I don’t know OP. Don’t follow Op but I have the same cloud from a slightly different angle.
Someone posted this on fb recently, WCCO shared it (not my pic)
But yeah. I have absolutely almost gotten into a vertigo-induced car wreck bc the clouds made me feel like I was falling down into the sky.
RENEEEE!!!!! seeing her and Gene together looking actually happy is so odd but such a nice change😭
I love you. Most ardently.
