[Original is in the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, Washington DC, United States. Picture from Google Arts & Culture]
Above is the plaque awarded to Sgt. Andrew Segal.
At the top it reads “COLUMBIA GIVES TO HER SON THE ACCOLADE ON THE NEW CHIVALRY OF HUMANITY”.
The inscription below reads “Andrew N. Segal Sgt. Co. G 316th Inf. SERVED WITH HONOR IN THE WORLD WAR AND WAS WOUNDED IN ACTION”, with President Woodrow Wilson’s signature.
Saturday/ it’s official: LEGO’s RMS Titanic
From CNN Style:
Made up of 9,090 pieces, the replica model divides into three sections to reveal the interior of the ill-fated vessel, including the first-class grand staircase, which sprawls over six decks, as well as a Jacobean-style dining saloon and the engine room.
The LEGO ship is a 1:200 scale model and also includes a recreation of the ship’s bridge, promenade deck and swimming pool.
“At the time of its launch the Titanic was the pinnacle of nautical engineering, the largest moving vehicle ever created. It has been an incredible journey to recreate this iconic vessel from LEGO bricks, using blueprints created over a century ago,” Mike Psiaki, design master at the LEGO Group, said in a statement Thursday.
“Designing the LEGO Titanic with such a focus on immense detail and scale, but also accuracy, has allowed us to create one of the most challenging building experiences to date,” he added.
The set won’t come cheap though: Available for pre-order from November 1 and general sale from November 8, the ship will retail at $629.99.
All pictures are from Lego.com.
Saturday/ Twenty Years later
On Saturday, both President Bush and President Biden acknowledged that what has happened in the years since, has only challenged the notion that Americans prized coming together over choosing to grow hostile to one another’s differences.
– Katie Rogers reporting for the New York Times
[Picture by Todd Heisler/The New York Times]
Monday/ wheels up, for the last time
It’s official: America’s 20 year-long war in Afghanistan is over.
The last cargo plane from the United States armed forces had left at midnight Kabul time on Monday night. Someone on flightradar24.com noted that the United States military has ceased to provide air traffic control functions at Kabul Airport, and that the entirety of Afghan airspace is now without air traffic control.
‘Afghanistan has once more completed a cycle that has repeatedly defined the past 40 years of violence and upheaval: For the fifth time since the Soviet invasion in 1979, one order has collapsed and another has risen. What has followed each of those times has been a descent into vengeance, score-settling and, eventually, another cycle of disorder and war’, writes Thomas Gibbons-Neff for the New York Times.
[Hand-out photo from U.S. Air Force]
Friday/ the national flower of Mexico
Summer is dwindling, and so are the flowers to be found on my neighborhood walk. Still, I got these two beautiful dahlias tonight.
Centuries ago, dahlia tubers were grown as food crops by the Aztecs. This use of the plant largely died out after the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519-21). The dahlia was declared the national flower of Mexico in 1963.
Friday/ Afghanistan: what’s next?
Kandahar, in particular, is a huge prize for the Taliban. It is the economic hub of southern Afghanistan, and it was the birthplace of the insurgency in the 1990s, serving as the militants’ capital for part of their five-year rule. By seizing the city, the Taliban can effectively proclaim a return to power, if not complete control.
– By Christina Goldbaum, Sharif Hassan and Fahim Abed writing in the New York Times
Lester Holt spent 10 minutes on NBC’s Nightly News on the Taliban’s unsettling takeover of Afghanistan.
Retired US Army general David H. Petraeus and Commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in 2010 & 2011, said on the radio today, that pulling out is a mistake, and that US forces need to go back in. It’s too late for that. Twenty years of effort and tens of billions of dollars of aid, to train an Afghan army, succumbed to the local corruption and internal strife there. The Biden* Administration has made it clear that the US troops are leaving, no matter what.
*Yes: Joe Biden is still the President of the United States. The delusional My Pillow guy had long touted today as ‘Reinstatement Day’ (which would see Trump put back in office).
Wednesday/ Zuma is in jail, finally
I thought it would never happen, but here we are: former president of South Africa Jacob Zuma (age 79), is actually in jail as of Wednesday night*.
It gives me hope that a former president of the United States of America, can be found guilty (it should not hard, to do that), and be sentenced to serve a long time in jail as well. Lock him up.
*15 months, for contempt of court. After all that he had done, Zuma deserves to go for 15 years.
NKANDLA, South Africa — Jacob Zuma, the former president of South Africa, was taken into custody on Wednesday to begin serving a 15-month prison sentence, capping a stunning downfall for a once-lauded freedom fighter who battled the apartheid regime alongside Nelson Mandela.
The Constitutional Court, the nation’s highest judicial body, ordered Mr. Zuma’s imprisonment last month after finding him guilty of contempt for failing to appear before a commission investigating corruption accusations that tainted his tenure as the nation’s leader from 2009 to 2018.
Under Mr. Zuma, who was forced to step down, the extent of crony corruption within the governing African National Congress Party became clear, turning a once heralded liberation movement into a vehicle of self-enrichment for many officials. The corruption led to the gutting of the nation’s tax agency, sweetheart business contracts and rivals gunned down in a scramble for wealth and power.
Mr. Zuma, 79, voluntarily surrendered on Wednesday, 40 minutes before a midnight deadline for the police to hand him over to prison officials. He was driven out of his compound in a long convoy of cars and taken to the Estcourt Correctional Center, the corrections department said. The arrest followed a week of tense brinkmanship in which the former president and his allies railed against the high court’s decision, suggesting, without evidence, that he was the victim of a conspiracy.
-John Eligon reporting for the New York Times
Fourth of July
This Fourth of July, we are reminded that patriotism isn’t just about our loyalty to country – it’s about our loyalty to one another, to our communities, to those in need, whose names or stories we may never know, but to whom we are connected by compassion and by resilience.
-Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, referring to the collapse of the condominium tower in Surfside, Miami-Dade County. The remainder of the partially collapsed building has now been demolished.
Happy Independence Day to my fellow American citizens!
Washington State would be the 42nd state to join the Union. It happened some 113 years after July 4, 1776: on Nov. 11, 1889.
[Image from philacarta.com]
Friday/ it’s Gay Pride weekend
It’s Gay Pride weekend, but there will again be no Pride in downtown Seattle. (The organizers did not know at the outset of 2021 where Washington State and the city of Seattle would find itself come June, in the Covid-19 pandemic).
Honoring Pride Month at the White House on today, President Biden signed a law to designate the site of Pulse, a gay nightclub in Florida where a gunman killed 49 people and wounded dozens in 2016, as the National Pulse Memorial.
Pete Buttigieg, transportation secretary in the Biden administration, was the first openly gay cabinet secretary confirmed by the Senate, earlier this year.
[Photo credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images]
Juneteenth: now a federal holiday
President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, effective on Jan. 1, 1863, declared that the enslaved in Confederate-controlled areas were free.
Texas was the last Confederate territory reached by the Union army. On June 19, 1865—Juneteenth—U.S. Army general Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to proclaim the war had ended and so had slavery (in the Confederate states).
Slavery was only ended in Kentucky and Delaware by the passing of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution in Dec. 1865. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
This Thursday, President Biden signed the Juneteenth bill, creating a new federal holiday for June 19th, to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S.
[Hulton Archives/ Getty images]
Sunday/ pomp and circumstance
Pomp and circumstance: impressive formal activities or ceremonies (Merriam-Webster dictionary).
Beefeater: Beef + eater. Prob. one who eats another’s beef, as his servant. Could also be from: hlāfǣta, servant, properly a loaf eater. (Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary).
Beefeaters are the yeomen of the English royal guard, who, since the accession of Henry VII. in 1485, have attended the sovereign at state banquets and on other ceremonial occasions.
The name is also given to the warders of the Tower of London, who wear a similar uniform.
By Sunday night he had arrived in Brussels, for a meeting of NATO Allies. Later in the week he will meet the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. (Photo by Samir Hussein – Pool/Wire Image)
Queen Elizabeth II received President Biden and First Lady Dr Jill Biden at Windsor castle today. ‘President Biden and the first lady seemed relaxed, and there were no obvious diplomatic breaches‘ reported the New York Times.
Yes. Like stepping in front of the Queen. Or tweeting about the Prince of ‘a group of large marine mammals’ (‘Whales’).
Tuesday/ ‘an incalculable and enduring loss’
A century ago, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., perished at the hands of a violent white mob.
The mob indiscriminately shot Black people in the streets. Members of the mob ransacked homes and stole money and jewelry. They set fires, “house by house, block by block,” according to a commission’s report (done in 2001).
Terror came from the sky, too. White pilots flew airplanes that dropped dynamite over the neighborhood, the report stated, making the Tulsa aerial attack what historians call among the first of an American city.
The numbers presented a staggering portrait of loss: 35 blocks burned to the ground; as many as 300 dead; hundreds injured; 8,000 to 10,000 left homeless; more than 1,470 homes burned or looted; and eventually, 6,000 detained in internment camps.
…
There is a pending lawsuit and ongoing discussions about how and whether to compensate the families of the Tulsa Massacre victims. No compensation has ever been paid under court order or by legislation.
…
The destruction of property is only one piece of the financial devastation that the massacre wrought. Much bigger is a sobering kind of inheritance: the incalculable and enduring loss of what could have been, and the generational wealth that might have shaped and secured the fortunes of Black children and grandchildren.
…
To this day, not one person has been prosecuted or punished for the devastation and ruin of the original Greenwood.
– Excerpts from a report in The New York Times, May 24, 2021
Memorial Day
It’s Memorial Day in the United States, the day when we commemorate our fallen soldiers.
Monday/ around South Lake Union
Here are pictures from Sunday, from my walk around South Lake Union.
Wednesday/ Happy St Patrick’s Day
The White House was lit up in green on Wednesday night to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, and the rich bond between the United States and Ireland.
Picture from @WhiteHouse on Twitter.
Friday/ Anton Goosen turns 75
South African folk singer Anton Goosen turned 75 today.
He sings mostly in Afrikaans, but also in English.
I love his song called Magalies, O Magaliesberg — a song that (somewhat) romanticises the hardships of the 1830s Great Trek of the Voortrekkers (pioneers).
Some of these pioneers ended up in what would become the Transvaal Colony, and is today called Gauteng Province.
The Magaliesberg is a modest but well-defined mountain range north of Pretoria, with ancient origins. It was formed some 2 billion years ago.
The area around the range has seen occupation by humans dating back at least 2 million years, to the earliest hominin species (such as Mrs Ples). The Sterkfontein Caves, which lie at the World Heritage Site called the Cradle of Humankind, are close by. [From Wikipedia].
[Picture from Wikimedia Commons, from p209 of the book ‘The Voortrekkers’ by J.S. Skelton, 1909].
agter op die wa sit my vaalhaarma
Waai die wind, waai my jas,
knoop my Sannie haar sydoek vas
Veertien rooies voor aan die wa,
sewe van my en sewe van my pa
Die hotagter, die Afrikaan,
hy en sy maat moet die disselboom dra
(Front of the wa1 sits my hoop-legged pa,
back of the wa sits my drab-haired ma
Blows the wind, blow our coats,
ties my Tammy her silk cloth close
Fourteen red ones front of the wa,
seven of mine & seven of my pa’s
The left back, the Afrikaan2,
he and his mate, must bear the bar)
1Short for wagon, we say v-ahh in Afrikaans
2A breed of cattle indigenous to South Africa
Lyrics from ‘Magalies, O Magaliesberg‘ from the Anton Goosen album ‘Liedjieboer Innie Stad’ (1986), with my own rough translation into English.
Wednesday/ Holocaust Memorial Day
It is Holocaust Memorial Day. I took this picture when I was in Berlin in the summer of 2015.
Wednesday/ The Biden has landed
‘The new dawn blooms as we free it,
There is always light.
Only if we are brave enough to see it.
There is always light –
Only if we are brave enough to be it.’
— National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman (22), delivering a poem at President Biden’s inauguration
It’s been a wonderful day here in the United States.
We now have President Joe Biden and Madam Vice-President Kamala Harris.
Before they were both sworn in, Lady Gaga sang The Star-Spangled Banner in her Schiaparelli scarlet & black couture, and wearing the largest golden peace dove brooch I had ever seen.
She made me cry (but Garth Brooks did not).
Tuesday/ more than 400,000 lives lost
Exactly one year ago on Jan. 19, 2020, a 35-year-old man checked into an urgent-care clinic in Snohomish County, Washington, with a 4-day history of cough & fever. He had arrived at Seattle-Tacoma airport on Jan. 15, after traveling back from visiting family in Wuhan, China, for three months.
The next day, the CDC confirmed that the patient’s nose and throat swabs had tested positive for 2019-nCoV, in a PCR test. He was the first known case of Covid-19 in the States. The patient got worse before he got better, but by Feb. 3, he was well enough to go home.
There must already have been many other unknown carriers of the virus in the Seattle area, though. The Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington, was the first Covid-19 hotspot in the US. In February and March, 46 people lost their lives there.
By Jan. 19, 2021, the virus had made it into every county in the entire United States, and had killed 400,000 people.
[caption from the New York Times/ Photo by Doug Mills/ NYT]
Monday/ it’s Martin Luther King Day
Fast forward some 57 years, and in that time the United States had inaugurated its first black president — twice.
In 2016, though, the archaic electoral college system, and vast social media disinformation campaigns, resulted in the first white supremacist president to be elected.
In 2021, that Capitol building in the distance would be overrun by violent white supremacists, seeking to overturn the free & fair* election results of 2020.
So now there is a vast amount of work to do, to eradicate a pandemic of lies about the election, along with the pandemic of the Covid-19 virus.
*A generous characterization? .. given the voter suppression, the non-stop gaslighting of voters by the sitting president and his allies, and the damage done to the US Postal service, in order to interfere with mail-in ballots and mail-in votes.