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I don't much like fireworks anymore. I'll see if it's any better this year than it was in '07. My platoon was TDY to Georgia, we went and watched a baseball game and they fired off a nice half-hours' worth of fireworks and we all about ducked under our bleachers cursing. It was okay as long as you were looking, you could tell they were only fireworks. But if you looked away, the reaction was not good. Adrenaline rush, heart racing, damn things sound like RPGs.
Spent the Fourth of July in Iraq in '06 and '08. Any of you old-timers have this problem? Does it get better after a few years? I guess this is why God invented I-pods and noise isolating earphones. That's what got me through a noisy year in Baghdad once upon a time. All this, and I never left the wire. Goes to show what a pretty fireworks show the Mujahideen put on during the insurgency...
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----- HUZZAH!!! ---- Come Sat., 233 years without a coup! Top that loser world...
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Fourth a July will be spent with my beer in frount of the TV watching old war movies.
And wondering how da*** "All these brilliant guy's came together at one place at the same time,in the same place,to form this country in the first place?"
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Same to you. We won't being going anywhere this year the temp is predicted to hit at least 103 tomorrow, and as the weather folks tend to be off by 2 or 3 degrees it could be as hot as 106, just to hot for us. So we will stay in and watch, "A Capitol 4th" on PBS or a DVD.
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Happy 4th of July! Something to enjoy for the 4th... quote: Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code
* JULY 2, 2009
For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.
The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society -- a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities -- and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.
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After about a week of working on the puzzle, the numerical key to Mr. Patterson's cipher emerged -- 13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49. Using that digital key, he was able to unfurl the cipher's text:
"In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events..."
That, of course, is the beginning -- with a few liberties taken -- to the Declaration of Independence, written at least in part by Jefferson himself. "Patterson played this little joke on Thomas Jefferson," says Dr. Smithline. "And nobody knew until now."
+http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124648494429082661.html |
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