Good morning, Whitewater.

Tuesday in town will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-seven. Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:21 PM, for 14h 39m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 55.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1775, America establishes a postal service:

On this day in 1775, the U.S. postal system is established by the Second Continental Congress, with Benjamin Franklin as its first postmaster general. Franklin (1706-1790) put in place the foundation for many aspects of today’s mail system.

During early colonial times in the 1600s, few American colonists needed to send mail to each other; it was more likely that their correspondence was with letter writers in Britain. Mail deliveries from across the Atlantic were sporadic and could take many months to arrive. There were no post offices in the colonies, so mail was typically left at inns and taverns.

In 1753, Benjamin Franklin, who had been postmaster of Philadelphia, became one of two joint postmasters general for the colonies. He made numerous improvements to the mail system, including setting up new, more efficient colonial routes and cutting delivery time in half between Philadelphia and New York by having the weekly mail wagon travel both day and night via relay teams. Franklin also debuted the first rate chart, which standardized delivery costs based on distance and weight.

In 1774, the British fired Franklin from his postmaster job because of his revolutionary activities. However, the following year, he was appointed postmaster general of the United Colonies by the Continental Congress. Franklin held the job until late in 1776, when he was sent to France as a diplomat. He left a vastly improved mail system, with routes from Florida to Maine and regular service between the colonies and Britain.

President George Washington appointed Samuel Osgood, a former Massachusetts congressman, as the first postmaster general of the American nation under the new U.S. constitution in 1789. At the time, there were approximately 75 post offices in the country.

Tuesday’s JigZone puzzle is a chain link:

Good morning, Whitewater.

Monday in town will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 5:40 AM and sunset 8:22 PM, for 14h 41m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 66.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s School Board meets tonight at 7:00 PM.

On this day in 1832, passengers experience the first recorded American railroad accident:

The first recorded railroad accident in U.S. history occurs when four people are thrown off a vacant car on the Granite Railway near Quincy, Massachusetts. The victims had been invited to view the process of transporting large and weighty loads of stone when a cable on a vacant car snapped on the return trip, throwing them off the train and over a 34-foot cliff. One man was killed and the others were seriously injured.

The steam locomotive was first pioneered in England at the beginning of the 19th century by Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad began operation in 1828 with horse-drawn cars, but after the successful run of the Tom Thumb, a steam train that nearly outraced a horse in a public demonstration in 1830, steam power was added. By 1831, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had completed a line from Baltimore to Frederick, Maryland.

The acceptance of railroads came quickly in the 1830s, and by 1840 the nation had almost 3,000 miles of railway, greater than the combined European total of only 1,800 miles. The railroad network expanded quickly in the years before the Civil War, and by 1860 the American railroad system had become a national network of some 30,000 miles. Nine years later, transcontinental railroad service became possible for the first time.

July 25th, 1999 sees a first for the Brewers:

1999 – First Brewer Inducted into Hall of Fame

On this date Robin Yount became the first player inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in a Brewer’s jersey. Yount entered the major leagues at the age of 18 and spent his entire career with the Milwaukee Brewers as number 19 at short stop and center field. His awards are numerous, including being selected as an all-star three times as well as American league MVP twice. [Source: Milwaukee Brewers]

JigZone‘s daily puzzle is a 67-piece cut of Fischer’s lovebirds:

Good morning, Whitewater.

Sunday in town will be partly cloudy, with a high of eighty-nine, and an even chance of afternoon thunderstorms.  Sunrise is 5:39 AM and sunset 20:23 PM, for 14h 43m 34s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 76.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Friday’s FW poll asked whether readers thought that unofficial national holidays (for foods, causes, etc.) were inspiring or irritating.  The results were about evenly split, at least compared to most FW polls that wind up leaning strongly one way or another.

On this day in 1911, historian Hiram Bingham makes an extraordinary discovery:

Machu Picchu (in hispanicized spelling, Spanish pronunciation … or Machu Pikchu (Quechua machu old, old person, pikchu peak; mountain or prominence with a broad base that ends in sharp peaks,^[1] “old peak”, pronunciation.. is a 15th-century Inca citadel situated on a mountain ridge 2,430 metres (7,970 ft)above sea level.^[2][3] It is located in the Cusco Region, Urubamba Province, Machupicchu District in Peru,^[4] above the Sacred Valley, which is 80 kilometres (50 mi) northwest of Cuzco and through which the Urubamba River flows.

Most archaeologists believe that Machu Picchu was built as an estate for the Inca emperor Pachacuti (1438–1472). Often mistakenly referred to as the “Lost City of the Incas” (a title more accurately applied to Vilcabamba), it is the most familiar icon of Inca civilization. The Incas built the estate around 1450 but abandoned it a century later at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Although known locally, it was not known to the Spanish during the colonial period and remained unknown to the outside world until American historian Hiram Bingham brought it to international attention in 1911.

Machu Picchu was built in the classical Inca style, with polished dry-stone walls. Its three primary structures are the Inti Watana, the Temple of the Sun, and the Room of the Three Windows. Most of the outlying buildings have been reconstructed in order to give tourists a better idea of how they originally appeared.^[5] By 1976, thirty percent of Machu Picchu had been restored^[5] and restoration continues.^[6]

Machu Picchu was declared a Peruvian Historical Sanctuary in 1981 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.^[3] In 2007, Machu Picchu was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in a worldwide Internet poll.

On this day in 1892, Iron River experiences disaster:

1892 – Fire Destroys Iron River

On this date a major fire destroyed most of Iron River, Wisconsin. After the fire was extinguished, the town resembled a “tent city” during the rebuilding. [Source: “B” Book I, Beer Bottles, Brawls, Boards, Brothels, Bibles, Battles & Brownstone by Tony Woiak, p.18]

Dust Buddies from Ringling Computer Animation on Vimeo.

Good morning, Whitewater.

Saturday in town will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-nine, and a one-in-five chance of an afternoon thunderstorm. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 14h 45m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 85.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Viviana Guzman, the “Flute Queen” contends that the humpback whales of Half Moon Bay like her flute playing. Perhaps they do – one came close recently, as recorded below:

Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was a British-American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot“, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California.^[1]

Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is considered to be a founder of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers. The protagonist of his novels, Philip Marlowe, like Hammett’s Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with “private detective.” Both were played in films by Humphrey Bogart, whom many consider to be the quintessential Marlowe.

Some of Chandler’s novels are considered important literary works, and three have been considered masterpieces:Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye was praised in an anthology of American crime stories as “arguably the first book since Hammett’s The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery”.^[2]