James Boys On Western Wednesday...!

I know we have talked about the James boys before, but here's a glance from another perspective.

The Pinkertons took a real beating over some of their mis-advntures in trying to catch the James boys. This is just one example.

Jan 26, 1875:

Pinkertons maim Frank and Jesse James' mother

Mistakenly believing Frank and Jesse James are hiding out at their family home, a gang of men--likely led by Pinkerton detectives--mount a raid that leaves the outlaws' mother permanently maimed and their nine-year-old half-brother dead.

The Chicago-based Pinkerton Detective Agency had been pursuing the James brothers and their gang since 1874, when several big railroad companies first hired the Pinkertons to stop the outlaws. Responsible for a string of bank and train robberies, the James brothers were already famous for their daring style, and some even viewed the men as modern-day Robin Hoods. The Pinkertons, though, had no such romantic illusions about the outlaws. One of their best operatives working on the case, John W. Witcher, had been found dead from a bullet wound to the stomach, with his head, shoulder, and face eaten away by wild hogs. The Pinkertons were convinced Jesse James and another gang member had murdered Witcher, and they were determined to stop the outlaws.

In late 1874, the Pinkertons learned that Jesse and Frank James periodically returned to their old family farm in Clay County, Missouri, to visit with their mother and other family. On the night of January 26, 1875, a gang of men surrounded the James farm in the mistaken belief that the James brothers were inside. In an attempt to flush the outlaws out of the house, the gang threw several flares through the windows. Unexpectedly, one of the flares exploded instantly, killing Frank and Jesse's young half-brother and blowing away their mother's arm. Though the identity of the gang members has never been determined with absolute certainty, contemporary admirers of the James Brothers and modern-day historians agree that the Pinkertons were probably responsible. Regardless, the incident gave credence to the popular view that the men were innocent victims of the powerful railroads that had hired the Pinkertons to wipe them out.

After the attack on the James farm, the Pinkertons appear to have backed off from their more aggressive tactics. One of his own gang members, not a Pinkerton operative, killed Jesse James for a bounty in 1882. Frank James surrendered shortly thereafter, but no jury would convict him, and he remained a free and law-abiding citizen until his death in 1915. The grave of Jesse, who was buried in the front yard of his mother's farm, became a popular tourist attraction. For many years, tourists could pay Mrs. James 25ÝF to visit the grave and listen to her tearful and melodramatic account of how venal Pinkertons and evil railroad barons had so unjustly persecuted her good and utterly innocent sons.

The Pinkertons just couldn't win sometimes. It's hard to outshine a legend, I reckon!

Coffee out on the patio this morning. Almost 50, so that ain't too bad!

A Really Bad Steak...!

The one thing that most military men agree on is that the food can be very, very good...or very, very bad!

I enjoyed the food I had in the Air Force for the most part, especially breakfast. I never recall getting any steak, though. maybe because I wasn't an officer. By today's standards, this meat shipment was not so good. When more folks are killed by the food than the fighting, I'd say you have a real problem, wouldn't you?

When Meat Was More Deadly Than Combat

By Dustin Koski on Friday, January 2, 2015

In 1898, a shipment of hundreds of tons of beef arrived for American troops in Cuba fighting the Spanish-American War. The meat was so badly tainted that many officers attested to the fact it was deadly, with some sources putting the number of soldiers that died at 2,500, while only 385 were killed in action. Within a decade, new laws regulating the meat industry were passed.

During the late 1890s, the United States of America was undergoing a period of extreme imperialism, and one of its opponents became the Spanish Empire. One of the most famous results of the clash was the “liberation” of Cuba during the Spanish-American War. It featured larger-than-life figures and events such as future US president Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the 10th Colored infantry charging Kettle and San Juan Hill. But mostly, like all wars at the time, it involved sitting around being bored and trying to stop any of the threats to their health that living in army conditions usually brought on.

A very severe threat for the soldiers came in the form of 337 tons of refrigerated beef and 198,508 tons of canned meat. Many officers testified that the meat was so unfit to eat that it was giving the soldiers dysentery and other illnesses. By at least one account, the beef contributed to the deaths of as many as 2,500 soldiers. If true, that would have made the beef more than six times deadlier than the battles the Americans fought in Cuba.

Newspapers like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal began spreading the word that the meat served had been “ancient” or “embalmed.” The claim that it was embalmed was in reference to supposedly harmful preservatives included in the meat such as borax, sulfites, and benzoic acids. This was apparently untrue and possibly only made up by anti-preservative activists (preservatives were an extremely controversial topic at the time). An analysis of the beef found that only 6 percent of it had any preservatives at all, let alone the poisonous amounts it had been suspected of. None of them were the preservatives that were suspected of being dangerous. But no matter: America’s meat-packing industry was suspected of having knowingly provided the nation’s servicemen with unhealthy rations.

The matter of who was at fault became quite muddied as the investigation went on. Part of the blame was given to the Cuban climate, which supposedly had caused the canned meat to spoil faster than anticipated. Another culprit put forward was the idea that the Army’s rations had been improperly balanced in favor of meat, and that what had really been making all those soldiers ill was malnourishment. In short it seemed as if the Army was doing what it could to take the blame for this catastrophe.

Whatever the guilt of the meatpacking industry, it had just made an enemy that was about to become quite powerful and an active crusader. Roosevelt came away from his military experience with a deep distrust of the meat industry even though there’s no record that any of the meat ever made him ill personally. By 1906, and after reading Upton Sinclair’s classic novel The Jungle, he began passing troublesome legislation regulating the meat industry. So perhaps those soldiers that died from their bad food ended up preserving the health and well-being of more people than the liberation of Cuba ever did.

It seems that we owe the men in the service even more than we thought. I can only hope that today's meals don't make any troops ill, and that safeguards are taken to assure that the troops get nothing but the best and healthiest available. They deserve that an so much more!

Coffee in the kitchen again. I sure am ready for Spring!

Wartime Art For Monday Mystery...!

This is the kind of mystery we would all like to find the answer to. At least I would.

Not many good and pretty things come out of war, but occasionally something does. This story from Listverse is one such instance.

Who Was the Artist JM?

In a time before photojournalism was widespread, soldiers’ artwork was one of the only true depictions of life on the front line. Recently, professors at the University of Victoria in Canada found an incredible book of World War I sketches—and they have no idea who created them.

Aside from his amazing talent, little is known about the mysterious artist. The work is on the stationery of the Royal Regiment of Artillery and signed with the initials “J.M.” The artist was probably based in France and/or Belgium between 1917 and 1918. Some of the art is inscribed to his daughter, Adele. He survived the war, as one of the pieces is dated 1920.

There are two books of sketches, done in pen and ink as well as in watercolor. They’re a breathtakingly beautiful look at not only war, but into the mind of a soul trapped in the middle of it. Devils and skeletons dance around a king wearing a crown, terrified horses flee from dropping bombs and die from gas poured into the trenches. He illustrates towns destroyed by conflict—the eerie, peaceful images of graves, exhausted nurses, and smoking rubble.

The university is still hopeful that they’re going to find the mysterious, talented artist who created this very, very personal look into the horrors of war.

One can only hope that the artist lived long enough to produce many more pictures, maybe some with other inspirations than the bleak and dreary backdrop of war.

Coffee in the kitchen again this morning. Cold and rainy out on the patio.

Wet Sunday "Toons...!

Being in the grip of cold Winter weather, I figured some old fashioned "toons could help to warm things up just a tad.

Seems like I heard somewhere that grinning can warm ya up. Let's hope that's the case!









Well, I reckon that's enough for today. Looks like a good day for curling up and reading a book, ya know?

Coffee in the kitchen, cause it's trying to rain again!

Col. Sanders Was A Tough Ol' Bird...!

Often we find out that a person's back story is really more interesting than we could imagine.

Looking back at Harland Sanders before he became known as the "Colonel", we found out that he was plenty tough when he needed to be. His early start in the food industry was inerestig, to say the least. Here is a bit of his history I found over at Knowledgnuts!

Colonel Sanders Started With A Gas Station And A Shoot-Out

By Nolan Moore on Thursday, January 8, 2015

With his famous facial hair and trademark white suit, Colonel Sanders is one of the most recognizable people on the planet. But before the Colonel came up with his world-famous recipe of 11 herbs and spices, the man was running a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky. However, the Colonel almost never opened a single restaurant thanks to a trigger-happy business rival who wanted to send Sanders to the local cemetery.

In the pantheon of fast food mascots, Colonel Sanders is right up there with Ronald McDonald and The Burger King. However, unlike most of his peers, Sanders was a real guy. Born in 1896, Harland Sanders led an interesting life, working as everything from a small-time lawyer to a ferryboat operator. Eventually, he wound up in Corbin, Kentucky running a Shell gas station on a nasty stretch of highway known as “Hell’s Half-Acre.”

The region was full of bootleggers, and there were plenty of gunfights to keep things lively. Wanting to protect his family and business, Sanders kept a gun beneath his cash register and a shotgun near his bed. But really, Sanders didn’t need to worry about desperadoes. Instead, he had to keep an eye on his rival down the street, a man named Matt Stewart. Stewart ran his own gas station, and as the two were competing for customers, they didn’t exactly get along.

Things got particularly tense after Sanders decided to advertise his business by painting a sign on a nearby railroad wall. This didn’t sit well with Stewart who promptly painted over Sanders’ sign. Furious, the Colonel threatened to shoot off Stewart’s head and then went back to repaint his billboard. Unfortunately, Matt Stewart was a stubborn fellow, and one day in the late 1920s, he grabbed a brush and started slapping paint on Sanders’ sign.

When Sanders learned what Stewart was doing, he was in the middle of a meeting with two Shell officials named Robert Gibson and H.D. Shelburne. Needless to say, the three men were not happy. Determined to put a stop to Stewart’s shenanigans, the trio loaded their guns, hopped into a car, and drove off to confront their petrol-pumping adversary. Only when Stewart saw them coming, he pulled out his pistol and pumped three bullets into Robert Gibson’s heart.

That’s when the Colonel sprang into action. He grabbed Gibson’s gun and started shooting back. At first, it seemed Stewart had the advantage because he was hiding behind the railroad wall, but the man was outnumbered two to one. One moment, he was winning the gunfight, and the next, he found himself surrounded. Shelburne put a bullet into Stewart’s hip, and Sanders blasted the man in the shoulder.

Bleeding and in pain, Stewart shouted, “Don’t shoot, Sanders! You’ve killed me!” Only Stewart didn’t die. Instead, the gun-toting gasman was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Sanders and Shelburne, on the other hand, were found not guilty, and Sanders went back to his Shell station where he started serving steak, ham, biscuits, and—you guessed it—fried chicken to hungry customers. Soon, he was running a full-fledged restaurant across the street, and his food was so popular that Governor Ruby Laffoon gave Sanders the honorary title of Kentucky Colonel.

Eventually, Sanders sold his restaurant so he could develop his fast food franchise, and the rest is history. Today you can find KFC restaurants in over 80 countries and territories. As for Matt Stewart, well, after two years behind bars, he was shot to death by a deputy sheriff. No one knows for sure, but rumors has it the deputy was a paid gunman, hired to assassinate Stewart by Robert Gibson’s family.

Isn't it funny that so much of a famous persons interesting background never comes to the surface until years later? After all, it's our past that so often shapes who we turn out to be, right?

Coffee in the kitchen this morning. Still a little chilly and damp out on the patio.

Smelling With Your Body For Freaky Friday...!

I just found out that our skin can smell odors, not just our noses. Freaky, right? Wait...it get's even better!

It seems that certain smells can actually help our body heal. That's right! According to this article I found over at Knowledgenuts, certain smells are almost like medicine. That's pretty cool when you think about it!

You Don’t Just Smell Through Your Nose

By Debra Kelly on Wednesday, January 7, 2015

We tend to think that we smell with our nose, but we’ve recently found that nearly every single organ in our bodies is capable of smell. More precisely, our organs have been found to contain olfactory receptors that are keyed to react in certain ways to certain scents. When receptors in the skin are exposed to the smell of sandalwood, healing and regeneration increases. When prostate cells smell rose scents, the formation of cancer cells stops. The potential is pretty staggering, considering the same receptors even exist in our kidneys, our muscles, and a lot of other places.

We’ve heard the stories about having taste buds in our stomachs, but it turns out that as far as our senses go, that’s not even the weirdest thing we’re capable of doing.

For as long as we’ve been aware of things happening around us, we’ve realized that we’re capable of smelling things, for better or for worse. But the mechanics of just how our bodies and our brains register smells has been largely a mystery until the last few decades.

And in those decades, we’ve been finding that we have olfactory receptors pretty much everywhere. Almost every organ in our bodies, from the kidneys to the liver to the colon, has the same olfactory receptors that are found in our noses.

It seems pretty bizarre (what is there to smell in there, anyway?) but researchers have also found that our internal olfactory senses do some pretty amazing things.

Much of the work is being done by researchers at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, and one of their most recent discoveries is that olfactory receptors in the prostate are incredibly sensitive to a particular scent called beta-ionone. You know it as what gives a few popular flowers, like roses, their distinctive smell, and apparently, it’s also what stops the development of cancer cells in the prostate. They also found that smell receptors in sperm were uniquely coded to respond to the smell of an egg.

At about the same time, Emory University researchers were finding that the smell of lily of the valley was directly linked to the regeneration of muscles; increase the amount of the muscle’s exposure to the scents, and regeneration increased dramatically.

Just as bizarre are tests performed at Johns Hopkins that have found that scent receptors in the kidneys of mice are stimulated by smell to help control blood pressure and metabolism.

It’s not only internal organs that have these uniquely developed smell receptors, either. Skin cells also contain them, although it’s at a much lower sensitivity than the receptors in your nose. (There’s also a much smaller variety of them than in many animals.)

Researchers from the German university then decided to test the reaction of the skin’s receptors to different scents; as one, they chose sandalwood. For more than 4,000 years, we have records of sandalwood being used in oils and perfumes, highly valued for not just its scent but for medicinal purposes.

And it turns out that there’s something to it. When the cloned olfactory receptors were exposed to the smell of sandalwood, there was a major, major increase in the cell replication that took place. In addition to healing injuries to the skin, there’s also the possibility that the science could be used in a new school of products to prevent aging and to help in the skin’s healing process after burns or other traumatic injuries.

The science is still rather up in the air, and it’s a pretty long, involved process discovering just what scents trigger what receptors and what they’re designed to do. But the development behind the stimulation of the body’s olfactory receptors opens a whole new set of doors for everything from reducing the effects of aging to combating cancer.

I always knew that certain smells could make me hungry or sleepy or calm, but now I know that I might be doing myself a big favor by investigating a little more on healing smells. Heck, I'll take all the help I can get, ya know?

Coffee in the kitchen once again this morning. Anyone want to smell some bacon cooking?

Heard Of The "Knocker-Up?"

Back in the Victorian days, there were some strange jobs that folks had to perform. Some were good, some were not, but all of them were filling a need.

I thought this particular job was unusual, but I can certainly see how it was needed by many. In fact, it might be a good idea to have something like this when the grid goes down!

Knocker-Up

Imagine a world without your cell phone. Now imagine a world without alarm clocks. How would people get up in the morning? Thankfully, Britons had knocker-ups or human alarm clocks to help. Working-class folks depended on knocker-ups to run around town at a predetermined time in the morning and wake them up.

Since many working-class folks lived in tall apartment buildings, knocker-ups could not simply pound on the door a few times and move along. Instead, knocker-ups utilized long metal-tipped poles to knock on slabs of slate placed near bedroom windows. Customers would write the time they wished to be woken up on the slate slabs.

Diligent knocker-ups would not leave the window until the customer woke up. This left the embarrassing possibility that a client spent the night at a brothel and the knocker-up banged for hours and hours and then the whole village knew.

Nice factories even hired their own knocker-up to make sure their workers were on time for their soul-crushing Industrial Revolution jobs. Knocker-ups could not fight the rise of technology and, once alarm clocks came, they became completely obsolete.

Now days it would take a brave man to have this job around a Houston neighborhood. Either that, or he would have to be armed!

Coffee in the kitchen this morning. Freshly baked chocolate chip cookies on the plate there!