Infinite Wisdom

"A dumb ally is worse than a smart adversary."

La Triviata

• For generations the Royal Navy’s famous “commissioned” shoreside installations, such as HMS Britannia, the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, were commonly referred to as “stone frigates”.
• In the mid-nineteenth century Edo, today Tokyo, had a population of about 750,000-800,000 people, of whom about 150,000 were government workers, functionaries, and officials, and some 300,000 were samurai.
• As completed in 1877, the British ironclad screw frigate HMS Shannon came equipped with a removable ram, stowed ashore in peacetime so as to avoid accidentally sinking friendly ships during collisions.
• Supposedly a virtual illiterate, King Alfred the Great of Wessex (r. 871-899), a notable ruler, warrior, and military reformer, is reputed to have had an imposing memory, and apparently could recite entire books that had been read to him.
• During the summer of 1941, residents of communities around Japan’s Kagoshima Bay, noting a significant increase in air exercises in their area (with attendant noise as aircraft often flew at roof-top levels), protested to the Imperial Navy, which ignored them, as it was practicing for the attack on Pearl Harbor.
• The Emperor Maximinus Thrax (235-238), a doughty warrior who came to power by bloodshed and left the same way (usefully defeating a barbarian invasion in the interim) reportedly daily consumed nearly seven gallons of wine, forty pounds of meat, and much bread, though rarely any fruits or vegetables save strawberries, perhaps because (according to a probably exaggerated tradition) he stood 8½ Roman feet (c. 8¼ English), and was built in proportion.
• The first operational airlift of American troops in wartime began on December 15, 1941 (little more than a week after Pearl Harbor), when three small companies of marines (totaling fewer than 200 men) took off from Quantico, Virginia, in nine chartered Pan Am Clippers, arriving at their destinations (Belem, Natal, and Recife, in northeastern Brazil) on the 19^th and 20^th, after a half-dozen or so intervening stops. 

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