Infinite Wisdom

"Of the two it might be cheaper to go to war with California than with Japan."

--	Editorial, The Hartford Times, 1915, Addressing calls from California, for war with Japan

La Triviata

• In 1511 the troops of Pope Julius II – Michelangelo’s patron – stormed the city of Mirandola in mid-winter, by attacking across its moat, which was frozen solid..


• To ease his boredom during his long exile in the Netherlands following World War I, former Kaiser Wilhelm II dabbled in gardening and mysticism, in 1934 publishing a book on Eastern religious symbology in which he pointedly noted that the version of the swastika used by Hitler and his Nazis stood for darkness, misfortune, and death.


• For every casualty they inflicted on the defending Germans during the protracted Battle of the Somme (July-December 1916), the attacking British suffered nearly two of their own.


• When an irate representative of the Women's Christian Temperance League vigorously protested the use of champagne to christen the Navy's ships, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded by saying, "Madam, remember: After a ship has tried alcohol once, it takes to water for the rest of its life."


• Between 1676 and 1910 at least 76 operas were written on the subject of Arminius’s shattering defeat of the Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9 – German operas, of course.


• His mother not being able to make it to a bed when her time came on August 15, 1769, Napoleon Bonaparte – or rather Napoleone Buonaparte – was born on a sofa in the living room of the family home in Ajaccio, Corsica.


• At the height of its operations during World War II, the U.S. Army’s European Civil Affairs Division was providing humanitarian assistance to about 80 million civilians.


• In 1817 French Count Charles Lefebvre-Desnouettes, who had commanded a cavalry division at Waterloo, led a group of Bonapartist veterans in an attempt to create an olive oil and wine producing settlement in Alabama, a venture that failed utterly due to poor reconnaissance, the winters being too cold for the olives and the summers too hot for the grapes

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