Tuesday, January 30, 2018

January 30, 2018 Ridley's Believe It Or Not Fred Koramatsu Day


Ridley’s Believe It Or Not For January 30, 2018 Tonight is Trump’s first SOTUS and  smart money like on DACA is that he will try to reach across aisle to chairs filled with closed and biased minds even as black unemployment falls to all time lows; despite tooth and nail objections from leftist demagogue Adam Schiff House Republicans have voted to release the controversial four page memo detailing illegal surveilling by the FBI of Trump supporters if Trump does not object within 5 days (finally the conflict of interest allegations that have tarnished Mueller’s witch-hunt have claimed its first victim—Deputy Director Andrew McCabe who was removed from the FBI but sadly will not have his pension affected); reports out of North Korea indicate a very nervous Kim Jong Un has been executing several top generals as international sanctions are further crippling the Hermit Kingdom’s anemic economy; NBC’s two heavy weights are in a snit fit over NBC’s decision not to send Megyn Kelly to South Korea for the Winter Olympics and instead send Couric (why Kelly ever left Fox is a mystery); the reptilian brain has just claimed another victim--Glee star Mark Salling, who was to be sentenced for possessing child pornography on March 7 and was facing 4-7 years (assuming the cons did not kill him first as child pornographers often suffer that fate,  committed suicide; in Chicago through January 28, 2018 190 people have been shot of whom 31 have died.
        As always, I hope you enjoy today’s holidays and observances, a music link to Foreigner,  factoids of interest for this day in history, enjoying the fact that your movements are not “limaciform” that you can use in Scrabble and a relevant quote by Walter Cronkite on the Vietnam War and art,  secure in the knowledge that if you want to find a gift for any memorable events like birthdays, weddings, or anniversaries, you know that the Alaskanpoet can provide you with a unique customized poem at a great price tailored to the event and the recipient. You need only contact me for details.
1. Fred Korematsu Day—commemorating since 2010 in California and followed by the states of Hawaii, Florida and Virginia to honor the efforts of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American to overturn the executive order of FDR to relocate forcibly citizens and resident aliens of Japanese descent away from the West Coast.
2. Start of Season for Nonviolence (January 30-April 4)—created by Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Gandhi to promote and honor the philosophies of Gandhi (assassinated on January 30, 1948) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (assassinated April 4, 1968).
3. 1985 Number One Song— the number one song in 1985 on a run of 2 weeks in that position was “I Want to Know What Love Is” by Foreigner. Here is a recording of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raNGeq3_DtM
4. Word of the Day—today’s word of the day is “limaciform” which means sluglike which fits Congress to a tee in describing how fast it moves toward compromise and away from gridlock.
5. Angler’s The Name--celebrating the birth on this day in 1941 of Dick Chaney, Secretary of Defense under President H.W. Bush and Vice President with George W. Bush. An avid hunter and fisherman, his Secret Service nickname was Angler and was satirized viciously by comedians for accidently shooting one of his hunting companions.
          On this day in:                                                               
a. 1831 Richard Lawrence became the first person to attempt an assassination of a president when his two pistols misfired at President Jackson. He was beaten by Jackson with his cane and subdued by a crowd, arrested and found not guilty by insanity and sentenced to an insane asylum for the rest of his life.
b. 1956 in retaliation for the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, the home of Martin Luther King, Jr. was bombed.
c. 1959 the MS Hans Hentoft like the HMS Titanic touted as the safest ship afloat and “unsinkable” struck on its maiden voyage an iceberg off the coast of Greenland and sank, killing all 95 passengers and crew aboard; it was the last ship to have been sunk by an iceberg.
d. 1968 after being fed a diet of overoptimistic reports that we were winning the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong and NVA unleashed a series of attacks throughout South Vietnam that although they were all repulsed, the Tet Offensive marked the beginning of the end of support for the war and the end of LBJ’s presidency as he soon announced he would not seek reelection.
e. 1982 15 year old Richard Skrenta created the first PC computer virus, 400 lines long and disguised as an Apple boot code called “Elk Cloner.”
Reflections on the Tet Offensive by the most trusted news anchorman in America: “For it seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.” —Walter Cronkite in an editorial at the close of the CBS Evening News broadcast on February 27, 1968 reporting on what he had learned to South Vietnam in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. Please enjoy the poems on events of interest on my twitter account below (if you like them, retweet and follow me) and follow my blogs. Always good, incisive and entertaining poems on my blogs—click on the links below. Go to www.alaskanpoet.blogspot.com for Ridley’s Believe It Or Not—This Day in History, poems to inspire, touch, emote, elate and enjoy and poems on breaking news items of importance or go to  Ridley's Believe It Or Not for just This Day in History.
© January 30, 2018 Michael P. Ridley aka the Alaskanpoet
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