Infinite Wisdom

"Why did you come to this war if you can't stand the gaff?"

La Triviata

• When the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston was formed, in 1638, it encountered some difficulties securing a charter from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because several members were suspected of harboring beliefs heretical to the established Puritan brand of Christianity.
• During the First World War, attendance at motion picture theatres in London soared from c. 7 million a week in 1914 to c. 21 million by 1917.
• Visiting Russia in 1837, to deliver a new American minister, the USS Independence, a 54-gun razee (cut-down ship-of-the-line), so impressed Tsar Nicholas I that he secured permission for some of his naval architects to study warship design in the United States, resulting in the construction of a steam frigate in an American yard.
• Of 350 tanks committed to combat on Okinawa by American forces in the spring of 1945, 153 were destroyed by enemy action.
• The highest ranking foreign volunteer to serve in the Continental Army was probably Charles Lee, a native Englishman and former British officer with service in North America during the Seven Years' War, who had turned soldier-of-fortune to serve variously in the Polish, Turkish, and Russian armies, in the last of which as a major general. 
• At a Parliamentary session in September of 1939, Member Leopold Amery suggested that the RAF bomb selected targets in the Black Forest, where large amounts of equipment and ammunition were believed to be concealed, whereupon Air Minister Kingsley Wood protested, saying “Are you aware it is private property? Why, you will be asking me to bomb [the Krupp works at] Essen next!”
• In A.D. 61, the Roman Emperor Nero dispatched a detail of Praetorians on an expedition up the Nile, who apparently turned back upon reaching the Sudd, a vast swamp from which the river emerges at about 10° North Latitude, perhaps 500 miles south of modern Khartoum, in Sudan.
• During the 1930s, a Communist agitator serving in the U.S. Navy secretly distributed copies of an anti-military book aboard the USS Pennsylvania (BB-38), only to discover them later in the ship's library stamped "Property of the U.S. Navy." 

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