3/16/2018

Thirty-six to Forty-eight Hours Later...

Malcoordinated.

I don't remember who I was talking to about what, but the word I was looking for at the time was definitely "malcoordinated."

Which I realize is a neologist pseudoscientific let's-see-how-many-times-I-can-offend-spell-check kind of word.

But all I could think of at the time was: "Krônick and Klûmsi" -- who were the Bordurian agents (Eastern Bloc counterparts of Thompson and Thomson) in the Tintin book The Calculus Affair.

Oh migraine brain! 

I try to find it humorous.  Habitual cheerfulness may be a survival skill when part-time migraine brain is replaced as I age by full-time brain fade. 




3/08/2018

And the rest . . . is history

Having been given a mission by United States President Millard Fillmore in 1852, and having been pecking away at Asian diplomacy in various places, and having made overtures to the Edo powers in 1853, Commodore Matthew C. Perry was given permission to land at Kanagawa near what is now Yokohama, on 8 March 1854.  During the following weeks he and his counterparts in Edo worked out what is called the Treaty of Kanagawa, opening Japan to American trade.

Ostensibly about trade in the general sense, the mission was largely about coal, since this was the dawn of the steamship era.  Be that as it may, trade commenced.

Yeah there were some speed bumps on the road to understanding, but now the people of Japan even beat us in baseball sometimes, which is the definition of  friends.

So we owe it to Commodore Perry and President Fillmore that we now have Daiso, Ghibli movies, manga, Akitas, sushi, red bean buns, and a host of other wonders!    ^_^ 

What's old is new again



The upper image is the cruiser Olympia, launched in 1892 (commissioned in 1895) as U.S.S. Olympia (C-6).  She currently lies in the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia.  The museum site says Olympia is the oldest steel warship still afloat!

The lower picture is the new super-duper stealthy guided missile destroyer U.S.S. Zumwalt (DDG-1000).  Yeah, the one with all the problems, like the ammo-less main gun...

But what struck me is that the hull designed to let naval gunfire bounce off (it didn't work that well...) has been brought back to let radar beams bounce off (well, off and up, not off and back to the source).