Search Results for: george washington

Two Revolutionaries

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Washington_and_Lafayette_at_Mount_Vernon,_1784_by_Rossiter_and_Mignot,_1859.jpg

The key to the Bastille resides at Mount Vernon.

The Marquis de Lafayette had served under George Washington during the American Revolution, and when the French political prison fell in 1790 he sent the key to his former commander.

“Give me leave, my dear General,” he wrote, “to present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few days after I had ordered its demolition,–with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a tribute, which I owe, as a son to my adoptive father, as an Aide-de-Camp to my General, as a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.”

| History

Cincinnatus

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Washington_as_CIC_of_the_Continental_Army_bust.jpg

Shortly after the American Revolution, a movement arose urging George Washington to declare himself king.

The general rejected the scheme as “big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my country.”

This brought him an unlikely admirer: George III remarked that refusing a crown would make Washington “the greatest man in the world.”

| History

Freaks of the Storm

http://books.google.com/books?id=fGFDAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

On May 27, 1896, an F4 tornado walked through St. Louis, leaving a mile-wide path of devastation and playing some violent pranks along the way.

Above, wheat straws were forced half an inch into the body of one tree.

Below, a gardener’s shovel was driven 6 inches into another tree, and a 2×4 pine scantling was shot through 5/8″ of solid iron on the Eads Bridge, “the pine stick protruding several feet through the iron side of the roadway, exemplifying the old principle of shooting a candle through a board.”

George Washington University meteorologist Willis Moore also saw “a six by eight piece of timber driven four feet almost straight down into the hard compact soil.” The confirmed death toll is 255, but additional bodies may have floated off down the Mississippi.

http://books.google.com/books?id=fGFDAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

| Oddities

Reporting In

Army slang collected in Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words:

  • snafu: situation normal, all fucked up
  • janfu: joint army and navy fuckup
  • susfu: situation unchanged: still fucked up
  • fumtu: fucked up more than usual
  • tarfu: things are really fucked up
  • fubb: fucked up beyond belief
  • fubar: fucked up beyond all recognition
  • sapfu: surpassing all previous fuckups

George Washington said, “An army of asses led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by an ass.”

| Language

Two-Faced Politicians

Until 1999, Abe Lincoln was the only person to appear on both the front and back of the same United States coin (he’s just barely visible on the back of the penny, sitting in his memorial):

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2005-Penny-Uncirculated-Obverse-cropped.png

Now George Washington can claim the same honor with the release of New Jersey state quarter, whose reverse shows him crossing the Delaware River:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2006_Quarter_Proof.png

| Trivia

All in the Family

Relationships among U.S. presidents:

  • James Madison was the half first cousin twice removed of George Washington.
  • Zachary Taylor was the second cousin of James Madison.
  • Grover Cleveland was the sixth cousin once removed of Ulysses S. Grant.
  • Theodore Roosevelt was the third cousin twice removed of Martin Van Buren.
  • Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the fourth cousin once removed of Ulysses S. Grant, the fourth cousin three times removed of Zachary Taylor, and the fifth cousin of Theodore Roosevelt (although his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, was a niece of Theodore).
  • Harry S. Truman was the great-great-great nephew of John Tyler.
  • Richard Nixon was the seventh cousin twice removed of William Howard Taft and the eighth cousin once removed of Herbert Hoover.
  • George H.W. Bush was the fifth cousin four times removed of Franklin Pierce, the seventh cousin three times removed of Theodore Roosevelt, the seventh cousin four times removed of Abraham Lincoln, and the eleventh cousin once removed of Gerald Ford.
| History · Trivia

Doc Holiday

Doctor Zebra’s Medical History of American Presidents gives the lowdown on all 43 commanders-in-chief. Excerpts:

  • George Washington really did wear dentures, made of hippopotamus ivory, seahorse ivory, and lead. “Other sets used the teeth of pigs, cows, elks, and humans.”
  • A dentist once broke off part of Lincoln’s jawbone while pulling a tooth — without anesthesia.
  • JFK was diagnosed with Addison’s disease in 1947 and given less than a year to live. In October he was actually given last rites.
  • Reagan quit smoking easily, which can be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease.
  • George W. Bush has creases in his earlobes, which may be a marker for increased cardiovascular risk. No one knows why.

The Constitution explains what to do if the president dies, but not if he’s incapacitated by illness. “Note the heavy burden of disease that has afflicted our presidents,” writes the anonymous doctor. “We have been very lucky indeed.”

| History · Trivia

Unnatural Beauty

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Common_Fig.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Harvard’s Museum of Natural History owns a unique collection of botanical models made of glass, more than 800 startlingly realistic plants produced by the German father-and-son glassworking team Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. They were commissioned by Professor George Lincoln Goodale to serve as aids in the teaching of botany, but their strikingly accurate detail leads many to regard them as works of art in themselves.

The modern naturalist Donald Schnell, who painstakingly deduced the mechanism by which the butterwort Pinguicula is pollinated, was astonished in 1997 to see the glass butterwort that the Blaschkas had prepared a century earlier: “One sculpture showed a bee entering the flower and a second showed the bee exiting, lifting the stigma apron as it did so,” just as he had hypothesized. “As far as I know Professor Goodale never published this information, nor did it seem to have been published by anyone back then, but the process was faithfully executed.”

This raises a question in aesthetics. If we find, say, the Blaschkas’ glass chicory flower beautiful, shouldn’t we find a live chicory flower equally beautiful? For the two are practically indistinguishable. Some will say yes, but others will insist that “there is an important difference … between perceiving a set of characteristics in an object and perceiving that same set of characteristics as natural to that object,” writes University of Washington philosopher Ronald Moore. “To perceive something as a product of nature is not to perceive one more thing about it; it is to change the way we perceive everything about it.”

(Ronald Moore, “Appreciating Natural Beauty as Natural,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 33:3 [Autumn 1999], 42-60.) (See Perspective.)

| Art

Plausible Deniability

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johannes_Adam_Simon_Oertel_Pulling_Down_the_Statue_of_King_George_III,_N.Y.C._ca._1859.jpg

The Boston Gazette published this cleverly seditious “Enigmatical Ballad” on June 24, 1782. If each line is read in full, the poem supports British rule of the American colonies, but if either the italic or the roman text is read alone, then it advocates revolution:

I justify every part, of King and Parliament,
Of a whig with all my heart, I hate their cursed intent;
For to support I’ll try, friends of administration,
Friends of Liberty, are troubles to the nation;
I think the association, a cruel, base intent,
An honor to the nation, the act of Parliament,
I wish the best success, to North and his conclusion,
Unto the grand Congress, the worst of all confusion;
All luck beneath the sun, to Mansfield, Bute and North;
To General Washington, destruction and so forth,
Hark! Hark! the trumpet sounds, the din of war’s alarms,
O’er seas and solid ground, doth call us all to arms;
Who for King George doth stand, their honors soon will shine;
Their ruin is at hand, who with the Congress join;
The acts of Parliament, in them I much delight;
I hate their cursed intent, who for the Congress fight,
The Tories of the day, they are my daily toast;
They soon will sneak away, who independence boast,
Who non-resistance hold, they have my hand and heart;
May they for slaves be sold, who act a whiggish part;
On Mansfield, North and Bute, may daily blessings pour,
Confusion and dispute, on Congress evermore;
To North, that British Lord, may honors still be done;
I wish a block or cord, to General Washington.

| History · Language · Poems

Podcast Episode 349: The National Hotel Disease

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_Hotel_Washington.jpg

In 1857 guests at Washington D.C.’s National Hotel began to come down with a mysterious illness. One of them was James Buchanan, who was preparing to assume the presidency of the United States. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the deadly outbreak and the many theories that were offered to explain it.

We’ll also contemplate timpani and puzzle over an Old West astronaut.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast