What Would Jimmy Do?

Every day when you read the news, there’s always one or more articles about the war in Ukraine, or more recently Israel and the middle east conflicts. There’s always a war going on someplace on the planet, so the fact of a war isn’t really big news. Of course some wars have gotten more publicity and become more “famous” than others over the years. 

One war, or actually, wars, has gotten its fair share of press over the years — the Wars of the Roses. 
The Wars of the Roses were a series of bloody civil wars for the throne of England between two competing royal families: the House of York and the House of Lancaster, both members of the age-old royal Plantagenet family……

To get things started, when King Richard II of England came back from a trip to Ireland, there was somebody else sitting on his throne. And, as they say, the fireworks began.
The Yorks ruled Britain for almost 250 years from 1154 to 1399 — and were successful enough to add Scotland and Wales to the list of countries under British rule. But in 1399 Henry Bolingbroke, of the Lancaster branch of the family, took the throne from his cousin King Richard II, a York.

Henry threw Richard in prison, where he died — probably by starving himself. The whole episode ticked off Richard’s branch of the family to no end. They kept pretty quite because Henry, now King Henry IV, and his son, Henry V, were popular kings (the younger Henry added lots of territory to the British Kingdom including most of France.) Tensions were kept to a minimum between the Lancastrians and Yorkists for a long time after Henry IV took the throne.

It was during the reign of King Henry VI, that England lost control of her holdings in France (thanks in part to Joan of Arc) and unrest began to brew. And there was the question of Henry’s sanity (most thought he was cuckoo) that led to real trouble. Suddenly, it was remembered how Henry VI’s grandfather had taken the throne from Richard II — that was all the Yorkists needed.

The two branches of the Plantagenet family really started carrying on — they sniped at and feuded with each other whenever time and distance permitted. The Lancasters assumed they were the rightful rulers because, let’s face it, possession is nine-tenths of the law. The York side wanted to even the score for Richard’s sake, and for the next 20 years, Merry Olde England wasn’t so merry. Every skirmish between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists was another War of the Roses. 

Finally — in 1471, Henry VI was deposed (probably murdered by the Yorks.) The Yorks took over and put their own Edward IV on the throne. Things were merry again — until — Edward died, leaving behind only an infant son. His name was also Edward, naturally, and he took over the throne as Edward V. But because he was a baby, Edward Jr. wasn’t particularly intimidating. The boys uncle, Richard, one of the folks not intimidated in the least by the baby king, seized the throne as Richard III and little Eddie was never seen or heard from again. Richard III ruled until 1485, during which there were more skirmishes between the Yorkists and Lancastrians, and bad feelings grew throughout the kingdom.

Richard II was generally disliked, so you can probably figure out what his fate was. On August 22, 1485, Henry Tudor defeated King Richard II’s forces at the Battle of Bosworth (which is famous because it signaled the end of the Wars of the Roses — and — because it lasted only two hours…. I’m sure that must be some kind of record.)
Henry Tudor was crowned King Henry VII — he married Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV, to unite the two branches of the family. Their son was the famous Henry VIII.

So if you haven’t given up by now, or your computer battery hasn’t failed, and you’re still confused about all the Henrys, Richards, Plantagenets, Yorks, Lancasters, and Tudors — and — the Edwards, you’re not alone. Shakespeare wrote seven plays trying to set the record straight as to the history of the Wars of the Roses. The plays, titled after the Henrys and Richards involved in the wars, are known as Shakespeare’s  history cycle.

If you’re still here, why were they called the Wars of the Roses? Obvious — well, maybe not so obvious — each family, or “house,” had a symbol: the Lancaster’s was the red rose, the York’s was the white rose.
When Henry VII took the throne, he designed what’s called the “Tudor Rose,” a rose with alternating red and white petals signifying the unification of the houses of York and Lancaster.
The Tudor Rose is a common sight in England even today — it is a representation of the merging of two waring houses, and the end of years of conflict.
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You can hardly read a magazine or newspaper or watch TV without running across the topic of Artificial Intelligence. AI is becoming more “humanized” every day. I read the other day that law enforcement organizations are looking more and more to AI to help solve crimes — kind of like an artificial Sherlock Holmes to help them out.

Sherlock Holmes was, of course a fictional detective created by the British author and physician Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle. He created the character in 1887 and Sherlock Holmes has had quite a following ever since. Even today he has his own official fan club, called the Baker Street Irregulars. In the 20th century so many readers were convinced that Holmes was a real person they sent mail to his address at 221B Baker Street in London. He even has his own page on Facebook.

Doyle claimed that he modeled his famous detective on Dr. Joseph Bell of the University of Edinburg. Doyle had been Bell’s assistant when he was a medical student at the university. Doyle, and everyone else, was awed by Bell’s ability to deduce all kinds of details regarding origins, life histories, and professions of his patients by his acute powers of observation. The doctor had what his students called “the look of eagles” — very little escaped him.Reportedly, he could tell a working man’s trade by the pattern of the calluses on his hands and what countries a sailor had visited by his tattoos.

In 1892, Doyle wrote an appreciative letter to Bell, saying, “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.” When Bell was asked about the resemblance between him and Sherlock Holmes, he replied that “Dr. Conan Doyle has, by his imaginative genius, made a great deal out of very little, and his warm remembrance of one of his old teachers has colored the picture.”

Bell wrote an introduction to the 1892 edition of A Study in Scarlet, the story that launched Holme’s career as a sleuth — and, Doyle’s as a writer. By the mid-1890s, Doyle had largely abandoned medicine for the life of a full-time writer.

Dr. Joseph Bell was a fellow of the the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the author of several textbooks and one of the founders of modern forensic pathology. The university honored his legacy by establishing the Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic statistics and Legal Reasoning in 2001.
One of the center’s first initiatives was to develop a software program that could aid investigations into suspicious deaths. Police detectives have praised the potential of the software. The software is called — appropriately — Sherlock Holmes.
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On April 13, 1844, the New York Sun published a story about the first transatlantic balloon flight. The story said that a Mr. Monck Mason, and his crew in Wales, tried to cross the English Channel, but got caught in a strong wind, and landed in South Carolina. The story described the balloon in great detail, including a discussion of the use of ballast and even information about the amount of gas used.
Then on April 15, the Sun had to admit that the story was a hoax — or all “hot air.”

Actually, there would be no successful transatlantic balloon flight until 1919. But even though the Sun’s story was a hoax, they got a lot of details right. A Mr. Monck Mason did, in fact, cross the English Channel by balloon in 1837, and his balloon was very much like the one described in the story. And on top of that, when someone actually did make the transatlantic crossing, the return flight took exactly the length of time the Sun article had printed — “seventy-five hours from shore to shore.”

The person that submitted the hoax to the Sun knew newspapers wanted to be first with a story. Since there were no telephones or telegraphs to confirm the facts, newspapers would print first and worry about mistakes later. Whoever submitted the balloon hoax story also knew a lot about science and knew how to tell a convincing tale. Guess who that someone was….. Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe’s total wealth amounted to less than $5 when he submitted the story to the Sun. Even in 1844, that was chump change. Poe and his family had just moved to New York, and he had a sick wife and her mother to support. They’d found rooms in a house that he described as “old and buggy.”  It was obvious Poe needed money, but he also loved literary “pranks.” 

The “balloon hoax” wasn’t Poe’s last joke. In 1845, he published another article entitled “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which convinced many readers that hypnotism enabled people to communicate with the dead. Poe may have been famous for stories gruesome or grisly, but he was in fact writing what his readers liked best. He was always painted as kind of a dark character, but it seems that he liked a good laugh, too.
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Most of us have at least heard of, if not read about, Sherlock Holmes — a famous fictional detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. One of the things Sherlock Holmes is most remembered for is a line that supposedly helped make him famous…. “Elementary, my dear Watson!”

But — the world famous detective never spoke that line. In only two of Doyle’s stories does he even come close. In “The Crooked Man” (1893) Holmes makes his usual array of deductive conclusions, to which his assistant De. Watson exclaims, “Excellent!” Holmes reply is only one word — “Elementary.”
And in “A Case of Identity,” Holmes says, “All this is amusing, though rather elementary, but I must go back to business, Watson.”
I guess sometimes famous quotes become famous, but they’re not really “quotes.”
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Something you don’t hear much about anymore are waterbeds. Back in the 1970s and maybe early 80s they were fairly popular. Claire’s sister had waterbeds and when visited, we slept on one. Actually, that’s the only time I ever slept on a waterbed. This subject came up the other day when we were discussing things that were once popular but have pretty much just faded away today.

But since I haven’t been terribly busy lately, I thought I’d look into waterbeds….
I found that there is evidence that the Persians slept on goat skins filled with water more than 3,600 years ago — so, I guess the waterbed was actually invented in Persia. 

But in the early 1800s, Neil Arnott (a Scottish physician) invented something called the Hydrostatic Bed — it was basically a trough of water covered with a rubber cloth. It was designed to prevent bedsores. 
The first patent for a waterbed was issued to Dr. William Hooper, of Portsmouth, England, in 1883. His bed resembled a giant hot-water bottle and it turned out to be cold and leaky and it was a complete commercial flop. The first successful waterbed wasn’t produced until the invention of durable, water-proof fibers, like vinyl, came along.

But for some reason, the waterbed has gone the way of the typewriter….I’ve heard you can make a waterbed more bouncy if you use spring water — maybe if the bed manufacturers had pushed that a little harder, they’d still be in business.
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I don’t remember ever having drills when I was in school in case of a bomb attack, but Claire, being a little younger remembers the old “duck and cover” drills that were popular during the Cold War. The fire alarm would go off and the students would get under their desks and curl into a fetal position. I’m not sure what great scientific minds thought that the desks would provide protection during a nuclear attack, but I’m sure a lot of thought went into those procedures. 

But anyhow, back then the threat of nuclear war seemed very real and I remember seeing lots of posters than featured the mushroom cloud. I remember reading that after the first nuclear tests in the 1940s, there were various names suggested to describe the cloud produced by a nuclear blast, like cauliflower cloud or raspberry cloud — but mushroom cloud won out. 

When a nuclear device is detonated, an almost incomprehensible amount of thermal energy is released and that creates a massive fireball that incinerates everything below it. As the fireball rises into the air, convection currents rush after it, sucking up debris into a column. Eventually, the fireball reaches the peak of its upward movement and expands outward, creating the mushroom-shaped head. That physical process occurs in other forms of explosions too, like volcanic eruptions. 

I’m not sure if the risk of a nuclear holocaust is more or less today than it once was, but from what I’ve seen, school desks don’t seem a sturdy as they were when I went to school……
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For some reason, I’ve watched a lot of PBS programs lately. A couple of weeks ago there was a documentary about the old west. It indicated that maybe the most famous gunfight occurred at the O.K. Corral. According to the TV show, the gunfight has been immortalized in over 40 feature films and written about in more than 1,000 books. 

Well — that was enough for me…. this subject just screamed for some of my extensive research. One of the first big surprises my research uncovered was the fight had nothing to do with cattle. I thought that this was a fight between cattle rustlers and lawmen…. but there was no cows involved in any way with the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Another thing that is terribly misleading in all the books and movies is that the showdown in Tombstone, Arizona didn’t take place in the O.K. Corral — it happened in the city’s vacant lot No. 2. I guess the Shoot-out in Vacant Lot No. 2 just didn’t have the same ring to it, so some journalist, or scriptwriter must have moved it over a few yards. 

And — no matter what the movies may suggest, it wasn’t a simple tale of white hats versus black hats or good versus evil — the real story is complicated with lots of twists and turns. It also had a cast of characters that included carousing cowboys, contentious lawmen, corrupt politicians, card sharks, cattle rustlers, a dentist named Doc, and Doc’s lady friend, Big Nose Kate (apparently her name was appropriate.)

One thing that everyone seems to agree on is that on October 26, 1881, at around 3:00 p.m., four men entered the lot behind the O.K. Corral: They were Wyatt Earp, his brothers, Virgil and Morgan, and John Henry “Doc” Holliday. There, they encountered Ike Clanton, his brother Billy, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Billy Claiborne. Thirty seconds later, both of the McLaury brothers as well as Billy Clanton were dead. Virgil and Morgan Earp sustained serious sounds and Holliday suffered a minor injury while Wyatt walked out without a scratch.

So — what brought them all there? Trouble had been brewing between the Earp and Clanton groups for quite a while. Doc Holliday, a Philadelphia-trained dentist, preferred playing cards to pulling teeth, and this habit left him short of cash. Earlier he had been accused of stagecoach robbery by his own girlfriend, Big Nose Kate. The Earp brothers suspected that Ike Clanton had put her up to it to deflect suspicion from Clanton’s friends. When four of those friends turned up dead, Clanton accused the Earps, and the bad blood began to boil.

How did the gunfight begin, who fired first? Most historians agree that Holliday and Morgan Earp started it, one wounding Frank McLaury and the other Billy canton. When that happened, all **** broke lose. An estimated 30 shots were fired within half a minute. Wyatt claimed that 17 were his, thought he is only thought to have killed one man, Tom McLaury. 

The Earps and Holliday were ultimately acquitted of any wrongdoing. Several months later, Morgan Earp was shot to death by unknown assailants. Wyatt spent the next two years tracking down everyone he thought was connected with his brother’s death. The song says he was “brave, courageous, and bold,” but was he, or was he just a ruthless vigilante? The jury is still out on that one.  

But whatever you think of him, Earp’s wife is responsible for shaping the narrative about him that most people know today. Josie Marcus, who technically never married Earp, was obsessed with making sure she could give her husband the epitaph she believed he deserved. But I’d say Wyatt Earp is an American original and there’ll probably be stories about him for years to come…
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Yesterday, when I was checking on the meaning of the word hoax, I ran across a few “hoaxes” that have become famous, or notorious, over time. One that I found interesting involves fairies….
In 1917, two yours girls, Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffiths, claimed that they’d played with fairies in the garden of their home in Cuttingly, England. They even produced photographs of the fairies to prove it.
The pictures made headlines around the world and the story was believed by many, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He became an ardent supporter of the girls’ story.
But 55 years later the girls, now old women, admitted that it had all been a hoax and that they had cut pictures of fairies out of a book and attached them with paper clips to branches and shrubs before taking the photographs. Frances Griffiths expressed her amazement that anyone believed the story, saying, “How on earth anyone could be so gullible as to believe that they were real has always been a mystery to me.”
Imagine what she’d think if she saw the Internet today…..
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If you’ve been paying any attention much at all to the news lately, you’ve probably noticed that the terms witch hunt and hoax are mentioned a lot.

For no good reason I decided to look up the word hoax. According to the dictionary, it means an act intended to trick or dupe — or — something accepted or established by fraud or fabrication.
Digging a little deeper, the word hoax is a shortening of “hocus-pocus,” a synonym for trickery that in turn comes from the Latin “hoc corpus est” — “This is my body” — the phrase spoken during the Mass when Catholics believe that the bread is transformed into the body of Christ.
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While cleaning out some of our recordings from TV, I ran across a whole section that we’d recorded for Emily — probably a couple of years ago. One of the recordings was Pocahontas — an animated version released by Disney. It occurred to me that the Disney-fied version of Pocahontas and John Smith didn’t look anything like reality. 

Most of the legends about Pocahontas are about her courage and kindness — the way she intervened between her own Algonquin tribe and the colonial settlers, and how she saved the life of Captain John Smith when she put her own head down next to his on the execution block.

Turns out that there probably isn’t a lot of truth to those tales. It’s possible that John Smith and Pocahontas may have crossed paths when Smith skirmished with her father, Powhatan, but it’s unlikely that the 12-year old performed any legendary acts of bravery. 

Pocahontas was really an innocent victim of the colonists — she was kidnapped as a teenager by British settlers and held hostage in hopes that her father, Powhatan, would strike a peaceful — and lucrative — settlement. While in captivity, a British minister taught her English and tried to “civilize” her. Pocahontas had an aptitude for both her English lessons and for British culture. When she was 19, she married Englishman-colonist John Rolfe and took the name Rebecca — that means “mother of two peoples.” (Pocahontas has several different names. She was named Ammonite at birth and went by the name Matoaka, that means “flower between two streams.” She supposedly earned the nickname Pocahontas, which means “playful one,” because of her happy, inquisitive nature.)

Rolf was a planter and cultivator of tobacco, but his business was suffering due to heavy English import taxes. King James I refused to lower tariffs, so Rolfe’s solution was a promotional tour that used his English-speaking Indian wife as bait while Rolfe peddled tobacco samples. Pocahontas was a big hit with her careful English and her high-necked English dresses — a big contrast to the traditionally dressed Indians that traveled with her on the tour. But King James I never lowered tobacco duties and the trip to England proved to be her undoing. Pocahontas, and about half of the Indians who accompanied her on the tour, was stricken with a European disease — she died of smallpox shortly before she was to return to America. She was only 22 year old and she was buried in England.

I mentioned the story of Pocahontas saving the life of John Smith when his head was on the execution block — here’s how the story goes….
The first English settlers arrived in Jamestown colony in 1607. That winter, Pocahontas’ brother kidnapped colonist Captain John Smith and made a spectacle of him before taking him to meet the chief.
According to Smith’s writings, his head was placed on two stones and a warrior was prepared to smash his head and kill him. But before the warrior could strike, Pocahontas rushed to Smith’s side and placed her head on his, preventing the attack. Chief Powhatan then bartered with Smith, referred to him as his son, and sent him on his way.

The legend appears to be his own publicity-seeking invention. Captain John Smith never even mentioned Pocahontas in his writings until 1824, seven years after Pocahontas had died and decades after he’d landed at Jamestown.
So I guess the message is don’t believe everything you see on TV or in the movies, and probably less of the things you see in animated movies….
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