July 1
The United States Congress meets in two sessions during the year. For some reason, the nation’s collective blood pressure rises whenever both the House and Senate meet to go about doing whatever it is that they do. The people in Scotland had an easy go of it for a while, but the passage of the Scotland Act in 1998 changed all that. On the 1st in 1999, Queen Elizabeth presided over the official opening of the Scottish Parliament. Prior to this occasion, a Scottish parliament had not met in almost three centuries. That goes a long way towards explaining all the newspapers that had been piling up on Edinburg’s porch.
June 30
All it takes to ruin my day is yet another unexplained cataclysm. I just hate it when that happens, don’t you? On the 30th in 1908, in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, near the Tunguska River, a massive explosion leveled an estimated 840 square miles of forest. You can call it whatever you want to call it, either the Tunguska Event, or the Great Siberian Explosion; either way it has yet to be definitively explained.
June 29
Thomas Henry Huxley was a scientist who kept it all in its proper perspective when he said, “the great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” He also gave the world a clear indication of the role that skepticism should play in the human experience when he noted, “Not far from the invention of fire … we must rank the invention of doubt.” He died on the 29th in 1895.
June 28
The United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland monarch, Queen Victoria’s coronation was held on the 28th in 1837. She had a very long reign and gave her name to the Victorian Age. In all the depictions that I have seen of her, she seems to be always wearing a rather dour expression. This might be because she became a grandmother when she was 39 and a great-grandmother at 59. On the other hand, it could be that at the time of her sitting for her portraits she had just run out of the Vin Mariani, a cocaine laced beverage, of which she was so terribly fond. I have thus far been unable to verify that she actually said, “We are amused” instead of “We are not amused”. Nevertheless, I am reasonably sure that she found the Vin Mariani quite amusing indeed.
June 27
Joshua Slocum was born in the middle of the 19th century. I stumbled upon him when I was looking for the wreck of the General Slocum, a steamship that caught fire and burned to the waterline on June 15, 1904, resulting in the deaths of over 1,000 people. This just goes to show you that key-word searches are sometimes wildly off base. While there is a bit of the mariner in Joshua Slocum, quite a lot actually, simply having the last name Slocum does not make for a connection with the steamship General Slocum tragedy. The steamship wasn’t even named for Joshua or anyone in his family. I enjoyed finding Joshua however because I learned that on the 27th in 1898 Joshua Slocum, at the helm of his 37’ sloop-rigged sailboat, pulled into the harbor in Newport, Rhode Island. His journey had begun with his sailing, alone, out of Fairhaven, Massachusetts on April 24, 1895. His arrival in Rhode Island marked the end of the first solo circumnavigation of our world.
June 25
Born on the 26th in 1824, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was a true visionary in the world the physical sciences. In addition to the development of the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature measurement, he left his fingerprints all over the emerging tool of transatlantic telegraphy. The honors he received during his lifetime are many and varied. He had a long string of letters after his name, which when strung together are really rather impressive. His rather keen powers of observation of the world around him led him to proclaim, in 1895, that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” and in 1897 “Radio has no future.”
June 25
Born on the 26th in 1824, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was a true visionary in the world the physical sciences. In addition to development the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature measurement, he left his fingerprints all over the emerging tool of transatlantic telegraphy. The honors he received during his lifetime are many and varied. He had a long string of letters after his name, which when strung together are really rather impressive. His rather keen powers of observation of the world around him led him to proclaim, in 1895, that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” and in 1897 “Radio has no future.”
June 25
Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma was born on the 25th in 1900. He died when a bomb placed on his boat by the IRA exploded on August 27, 1979. It would be callous of me to ask at this point “What’s small, white and travels at 300 miles per hour?” The answer, of course, is Lord Mountbatten’s deck shoe across Donegal Bay.
The United States Congress meets in two sessions during the year. For some reason, the nation’s collective blood pressure rises whenever both the House and Senate meet to go about doing whatever it is that they do. The people in Scotland had an easy go of it for a while, but the passage of the Scotland Act in 1998 changed all that. On the 1st in 1999, Queen Elizabeth presided over the official opening of the Scottish Parliament. Prior to this occasion, a Scottish parliament had not met in almost three centuries. That goes a long way towards explaining all the newspapers that had been piling up on Edinburg’s porch.
