Crab (by Andy Lederer)
Soldier writing a letter home, 1914.
Letters from home were often painful because of their naïveté. The ironies jumped out at the soldier: “Try not to get wounded!” or “We are having a hard time, too!” “My God! From what?!” was Delvert’s response. The soldier’s sensation, on reading such comments from home, was often one of complete isolation. The troops might as well have been on the moon. They lived and fought in a place beyond understanding, beyond imagination, even beyond feeling. “The Army fights on its own” was Garfield Powell’s conclusion during the Somme offensive.”
-Modris Eksteins, Rite of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age.
![collective-history:
The Wendigo is part of the traditional belief systems of various Algonquian-speaking tribes in the northern United States and Canada, most notably the Ojibwe and Saulteaux, the Cree, the Naskapi and the Innu people. Though descriptions varied somewhat, common to all these cultures was the conception of Wendigos as malevolent, cannibalistic, supernatural beings (manitous) of great spiritual power. They were strongly associated with the Winter, the North, and coldness, as well as with famine and starvation. Basil Johnston, an Ojibwe teacher and scholar from Ontario, gives one description of how Wendigos were viewed:
“The Weendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tautly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Weendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody [….] Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Weendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.”
At the same time, Wendigos were embodiments of gluttony, greed, and excess: never satisfied after killing and consuming one person, they were constantly searching for new victims. In some traditions, humans who became overpowered by greed could turn into Wendigos; the Wendigo myth thus served as a method of encouraging cooperation and moderation.
Among the Ojibwe, Eastern Cree, Westmain Swampy Cree, Naskapi, and Innu, Wendigos were said to be giants, many times larger than human beings (a characteristic absent from the Wendigo myth in the other Algonquian cultures). Whenever a Wendigo ate another person, it would grow in proportion to the meal it had just eaten, so that it could never be full. Wendigos were therefore simultaneously constantly gorging themselves and emaciated from starvation.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4hdsszjwZ1rubozqo1_500.jpg)
The Wendigo is part of the traditional belief systems of various Algonquian-speaking tribes in the northern United States and Canada, most notably the Ojibwe and Saulteaux, the Cree, the Naskapi and the Innu people. Though descriptions varied somewhat, common to all these cultures was the conception of Wendigos as malevolent, cannibalistic, supernatural beings (manitous) of great spiritual power. They were strongly associated with the Winter, the North, and coldness, as well as with famine and starvation. Basil Johnston, an Ojibwe teacher and scholar from Ontario, gives one description of how Wendigos were viewed:
“The Weendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tautly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Weendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody [….] Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Weendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.”
At the same time, Wendigos were embodiments of gluttony, greed, and excess: never satisfied after killing and consuming one person, they were constantly searching for new victims. In some traditions, humans who became overpowered by greed could turn into Wendigos; the Wendigo myth thus served as a method of encouraging cooperation and moderation.
Among the Ojibwe, Eastern Cree, Westmain Swampy Cree, Naskapi, and Innu, Wendigos were said to be giants, many times larger than human beings (a characteristic absent from the Wendigo myth in the other Algonquian cultures). Whenever a Wendigo ate another person, it would grow in proportion to the meal it had just eaten, so that it could never be full. Wendigos were therefore simultaneously constantly gorging themselves and emaciated from starvation.
During WWI, Carrier Pigeons Were Used to Send Urgent Messages
The British Western Front in France: Tanks kept in touch with the infantry by carrier pigeons which were released and carried messages back.
Photo: Courtesy of Nationaal Archief
Ed note: During the First World War, Allied birds outperformed their rivals and saved thousands of lives—all thanks to the efforts of one London pigeon fancier.
Starfish Prime
In the middle of the night on 8 July 1962, the sky above Honolulu lit up bright orange through heavy cloud as the city went black. This was the first of a series of five tests carried out by the US during 1962 as part of Operation Dominic.
Starfish Prime was the detonation of a 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead at an altitude of 400 km - right in the mid-reaches of the ionosphere. The bomb, releasing an energy equivalent to 100 Hiroshimas, generated a gigantic electromagnetic pulse, wiping out much of the blast research instrumentation and extinguishing streetlights all over the Hawaiian capital, 1,400 km away.
A fleet of rockets were launched packed with measuring equipment to try, amongst other things, to put a gauge on the size of the radio blackout zone created by nuclear blasts.
X-rays produced by the detonation ionised a large portion of the surrounding atmosphere resulting in the excitation of high-energy β-particles. This residual radiation proved to be a terrible unforeseen after-effect. When charged particles become trapped in the upper atmosphere, they spiral around magnetic field lines and ‘bounce’ between the poles - an effect known as magnetic mirroring.
The β-particles from Starfish Prime formed a radiation belt around the Earth which reportedly persisted for five years. In that time, it was responsible for disabling around one third of all the low Earth orbit satellites, including the famous Telstar which, by coincidence, was due to launch the day after Starfish Prime.
