Infinite Wisdom

"Son of a whore, what an ocean!"

La Triviata

• While the Emperor Trajan was campaigning against the Parthians (A.D. 113-116), the famed gourmet chef Apicius, knowing of Trajan’s great fondness for oysters, shipped him barrels of the precious bivalves, preserved by a special process.
• Of the 600 men who jumped into Arnhem with the British 2^nd Parachute Battalion, September 17, 1944, only 17 escaped death or capture while attempting to secure the "bridge too far" over the Rhine.
• In 1882 Harper’s Weekly reported that Queen Victoria’s prize deerhound Hero, the star attraction of the Westminster Kennel Club Show, in Madison Square Garden, was on the alert for assassination plots by setters and terriers of the Irish persuasion.
•  In 1943, the ramshackled transient officers’ quarters at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal were nicknamed “The Hotel de Gink”, after a “famous” flophouse in Seattle.
• Military regulations instituted by Shang Yang in Wei China during the fourth century BC prescribed that a soldier was to be promoted by one social rank for each enemy head he took in battle, but prohibited officers were from taking such trophies (since, if they did, it would mean they weren’t properly supervising the fighting), instead rewarding them based on the number their troops took.
• Abolition in 1943 of the III-A draft classification, (which exempted married men with dependents) resulted in thirty percent of all American draftees thereafter -- 944,426 men -- being fathers.
• When Dutch national leader William the Silent was shot by Balthasar Gérard on July 10, 1584, he gained the dubious distinction of becoming the first political leader in history to be assassinated with a firearm.
• Commissioned in December of 1914, the 3,750 ton British light cruiser Caroline remained in continuous service in war and peace, either with the fleet or as a headquarters, accommodation, or reserve training ship, until  2011, by which time she was the second oldest commissioned vessel in the Royal Navy (after Victory) and after which she remained preserved at Belfast, the last veteran of Jutland still afloat. 

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