It was for the convenience of citizens who needed reasonable access to the site of government. In some parts of the county I live in, response time for law enforcement and emergency is 45 minutes.
What I have heard, is this is based on voting. It allowed those farthest from the county seat to go vote and get back home.
Stopped in today at the local Democratic Party field office, where they're coordinating canvassing and such. As I stood there, I realized that it was 52 years and 13 Presidential elections ago that I was part of wave of starry-eyed young folks working to secure the nomination and election of George McGovern to the presidency. I worked for him in my home state, in Wisconsin, and California Bay area (which involved 5 of us crowded into a VW bug and driving through the Great Basin and deserts of Utah and Nevada). We succeeded in the getting him nominated; the election resulted in a 48 state landslide for Richard Nixon. We were disappointed, but the days and weeks leading up to the election had been golden and halcyon days. We weren't always serious, but we were always enthusiastic and mostly sincere, and it was a great time to be young and alive.
Woof. He beat Mondale in 1984 at least, who only got one state IIRC. All I can think of is the episode of All in the Family when Rob Reiner comes into some money and says he's going to donate to the McGovern campaign and Archie Bunker gives him one of his are you fucking crazy looks. ETA: I'd have to check the electoral map, but 84 might have been the only time RI voted red since before a blue/red map mattered
As I recall, George carried only the eggheads of Massachusetts and those lost souls of his home state of South Dakota.
Yeah, and Nixon held a grudge against Massachusetts afterward, according to my Dad. Something about withholding defense contract funding, which Dad would have just been getting involved with then.
I always pictured you as a family of restauranters momma mixing up gggg great grandmas secret pasta sauce from the old country, while dad sat at the bar and drank Strega
Plenty of that, too, but when dad wasn't drinking strega he was designing sonar signal processing software and torpedo guidance systems. As he describes it, it's like taking the sound of 70K screaming fans at Gillete Stadium, isolating the sound of one particular voice from the gaggle, and dropping a warhead in their lap without hitting anybody else. He was fairly big in that world, enough so that his security clearance required my sister and myself to be investigated every few years as potentially exploitable liabilities.
Probably? Though there seemed to be an inordinate number of Russians and Chinese working with me during my casino years. And we did a lot of crazy shit, so maybe they were planted to compromise my ass? I'd like to think so, particularly the cocktail waitresses. Life is so boring without a little espionage in your day to day.
He never had a chance, with his first VP nominated, Thomas Eagleton, revealing later that he had once been hospitalized for depression. McGovern waffled on that for awhile, saying that it shouldn't matter and that he was "1000 percent" behind the choice, only to dump Eagleton and go with a Kennedy family hanger-on, Sargent Shriver. That brouhaha took all the wind, such as there was, from the campaign. Watergate was then simply a media rumor.
I may have just made a hefty cross for my own back. I have been pretty depressed at work since my best friend and sidekick left the department for a while for complex reasons that have culminated in an investigation of our office by HQ. During the course of the investigation I happened to mention (a lot) how boring and demoralising my specific role is. So my boss' boss' boss' boss mentioned during an interview that 'there's a lot going on out there and we're pretty stretched. If there's someone enthusiastic and with capacity to get out and travel then I'm glad to know it. I'll be in touch.' Yay? Shit? I don't know.
Maybe a little bit of both? Let's go with a hopeful, excited YAY! for now. Congratulations on attracting positive attention that perhpas signals an exciting new adventure.
Walking in the woods this morning, I heard a large owl off in the trees. Beautiful, mournful sound, I thought. Then I thought what the sound must mean to the rabbits and squirrels and the like, the threat of some killer swooping silently through the dawn, aiming to grab hold and tear its prey to shreds. I read somewhere that a rabbit's nervous system is such that it is likely to faint and die of a heart attack in such a situation, to allow a relatively merciful ending. I hope so.
Here's a little factlet that I only found out today - Roald Dahl was a fighter ace, with 5 confirmed kills. I knew he was a fighter pilot, but I didn't know he was an ace.
there seems to be some doubt about the ace thing... his official total was 4, (3 JU88s and a Vichy French Portez 63) but it depends because during the battle of athens in which he was involved 9 hurricanes shot down 22 german planes, he claimed at least 1 was his but it was so confused there was no independent verification. earlier in the war he crashed a gloster gladiator in the western desert smashing his nose and fracturing his skull, he was blind for 6 weeks and later claimed that the brain swelling led to his creativity as an author After he was invalided out of flying by heaches resulting from his brain injury he was an inteligence officer working in Washington DC
I suppose there are committees to determine ace-dom, but I'm not going to argue details with a man who was in the Battle of Athens. Divide 22 by 9 and odds are in his favor that he got one.
I think his nose was partly severed in the crash @big soft moose mentions above, but it was reattached, I believe. I didn't really notice anything in his photographs.
I wouldn't try going up in those if I were you, Homer. The Gloster Gladiators, though fairly well armed and with an exceptional turning radius, were notoriously ineffective. They were too slow to catch a He-111 or Bf-109, which why they were replaced. They needed a Ju-52 for an opponent. They were last used in the late 1930s on the western front, before they were shipped to Finland for use against the Soviets. It was also the RAF's last biplane fighter aircraft, but was rendered obsolete by newer monoplane designs even as it was being introduced.
They had a trio sextet of FAA Sea Gladiators at Malta during the siege.. Not through choice, mind you. Quick question- say somebody at your work finds out on Facebook that it's your birthday and bakes you a very nice cake in the shape of a big red heart and then brings it to your workplace on her day off.... then this same person has a birthday during the weekend but you're not a very good baker, what would be a suitable, non-creepy way to reciprocate without drawing too much attention from colleagues who already have opinions? My bestie suggests buying a nice cake and card because it's the thought that counts, but I feel a bit inadequate being unable to craft something in return. Also, she just really likes cake, so that's her answer to most things.
Get some big heart cookies and decorate them yourself. Might need to buy a frosting funnel or whatever they're called, and practice a few times.
