Good morning, Whitewater.

Midweek in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 4:21 PM for 9h 12m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with ninety percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1776, Gen. Washington reaches the banks of the Delaware River, directing his army to cross into Pennsylvania. He arrives at a time, just half a year beyond the Declaration, when Patriot fortunes seem at their lowest:

In a letter dated December 3, 1776, General George Washington writes to Congress from his headquarters in Trenton, New Jersey, to report that he had transported much of the Continental Army’s stores and baggage across the Delaware River to Pennsylvania.

In his letter Washington wrote, ‘Immediately on my arrival here, I ordered the removal of all the military and other stores and baggage over the Delaware, a great quantity are already got over, and as soon as the boats come up from Philadelphia, we shall load them, by which means I hope to have every thing secured this night and tomorrow if we are not disturbed.’

Washington then made the critical strategic move of confiscating and burning all the boats along the Delaware to prevent British troops from pursuing his beleaguered forces across the river. The British strategy of chasing Washington across New Jersey, rather than capturing his entire army in Manhattan, seemed to be a stroke of genius. As New Jersey was devastated at the hands of British forces and Washington’s men cowered in Pennsylvania, even staunch Patriots, including Thomas Jefferson, considered surrender to the crown.

Also on this day, General Washington received a letter dated November 30 from his second-in-command, General Charles Lee, reporting that he was about to cross into New York near Peekskill on this day in 1776. In an apt reflection of the state of the American fortunes, the British captured General Lee nine days later in New Jersey. Richard Stockton, a leading New Jersey patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was also in British custody and was forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the British king along with thousands of his New Jersey neighbors.

On this day in 1947, Wisconsin gets a new medium:

1947 – First TV Station in Wisconsin Established
On this date the first TV station in Wisconsin, WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, was established. The seventeenth television station in the country, WTMJ-TV was the first in the Midwest. [Source: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Libraries]

Google-a-Day asks a sports question:

What British Queen watched and promoted a lacrosse game in 1867?

Good morning, Whitewater.

Tuesday in town will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 13m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 82.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

We’ve a series of public meetings in the city today. At 6 PM, the Planning Commission will meet, at 6:10 PM the Alcohol and Licensing Commission meets, and at 6:30 PM Common Council meets in joint session with the Planning Commission.

On this day in 1804, France gets what no one needs, an emperor:

The coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of the French, which took place on Sunday December 2, 1804 (11 Frimaire, Year XIII according to the French Republican Calendar), at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, has been said to mark “the instantiation of modern empire”, representing a “transparently masterminded piece of modern propaganda”.[1] On May 18, 1804, the Sénat conservateur vested the Republican government in an Emperor, and preparations for a coronation followed. Napoleon’s elevation to Emperor was overwhelmingly approved by the French citizens in a referendum. Among Napoleon’s motivations for being crowned were to gain prestige in international royalist and Catholic milieux and to lay the foundation for a future dynasty.[2]:243

In the classical French tradition, kings underwent a ceremony of consecration (sacre) rather than a coronation; in consecration, anointment was conferred by the archbishop of Reims in Notre-Dame de Reims.[2] Napoleon blended Roman imperial pageantry with the purported memory of Charlemagne. The coronation was held in Paris in the presence of Pope Pius VII. According to government tallies, the entire cost was over 8.5 million francs…..

In Wisconsin history, a Wisconsin’s U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy is disgraced:

After two months of hearings and deliberations, the Watkins Committee recommended that McCarthy be censured on two of the 46 counts: his contempt of the Subcommittee on Rules and Administration, which had called him to testify in 1951 and 1952, and his abuse of General Zwicker in 1954. The Zwicker count was dropped by the full Senate on the grounds that McCarthy’s conduct was arguably “induced” by Zwicker’s own behavior. In place of this count, a new one was drafted regarding McCarthy’s statements about the Watkins Committee itself.[110]

The two counts on which the Senate ultimately voted were:

That McCarthy had “failed to cooperate with the Subcommittee on Rules and Administration”, and “repeatedly abused the members who were trying to carry out assigned duties …”

That McCarthy had charged “three members of the [Watkins] Select Committee with ‘deliberate deception’ and ‘fraud’ … that the special Senate session … was a ‘lynch party'”, and had characterized the committee “as the ‘unwitting handmaiden’, ‘involuntary agent’ and ‘attorneys in fact’ of the Communist Party”, and had “acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity”.[111]

On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to “condemn” McCarthy on both counts by a vote of 67 to 22.[112] The Democrats present unanimously favored condemnation and the Republicans were split evenly. The only senator not on record was John F. Kennedy, who was hospitalized for back surgery; Kennedy never indicated how he would have voted.[113] Immediately after the vote, Senator H. Styles Bridges, a McCarthy supporter, argued that the resolution was “not a censure resolution” because the word “condemn” rather than “censure” was used in the final draft. The word “censure” was then removed from the title of the resolution, though it is generally regarded and referred to as a censure of McCarthy, both by historians[114] and in Senate documents.[115] McCarthy himself said, “I wouldn’t exactly call it a vote of confidence.” He added, “I don’t feel I’ve been lynched.”[116]

Google-a-Day poses a sports question:

The longest tennis match in history was played over three days and included how many strokes by the American born player?

Good morning, Whitewater.

The twelfth month of the year begins in our town on a partly cloudy day with a high of sixteen degrees. Sunrise today is 7:06 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 15m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 73.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1990, workers connected both sides of Europe’s Channel Tunnel:

The Channel Tunnel (French: Le tunnel sous la Manche; also referred to as the Chunnel)[2][3] is a 50.5-kilometre (31.4 mi) rail tunnel linking Folkestone, Kent, in the United Kingdom, with Coquelles, Pas-de-Calais, near Calais in northern France, beneath the English Channel at the Strait of Dover. At its lowest point, it is 75 m (250 ft) deep.[4][5][6] At 37.9 kilometres (23.5 mi), the tunnel has the longest undersea portion of any tunnel in the world, although the Seikan Tunnel in Japan is both longer overall at 53.85 kilometres (33.46 mi) and deeper at 240 metres (790 ft) below sea level. The speed limit in the tunnel is 160 kilometres per hour (99 mph).[7]

The tunnel carries high-speed Eurostar passenger trains, the Eurotunnel Shuttle for automobiles and other road vehicles—the largest[8] such transport in the world—and international rail freight trains.[9] The tunnel connects end-to-end with the LGV Nord and High Speed 1 high-speed railway lines….

Construction

Working from both the English side and the French side of the Channel, eleven tunnel boring machines or TBMs cut through chalk marl to construct two rail tunnels and a service tunnel. The vehicle shuttle terminals are at Cheriton (part of Folkestone) and Coquelles, and are connected to the English M20 and French A16 motorways respectively.

Tunnelling commenced in 1988, and the tunnel began operating in 1994.[32] In 1985 prices, the total construction cost was £4.650 billion (equivalent to £12 billion today), an 80% cost overrun. At the peak of construction 15,000 people were employed with daily expenditure over £3 million.[8] Ten workers, eight of them British, were killed during construction between 1987 and 1993, most in the first few months of boring.[33][34][35]

Completion

Class 319 EMUs ran excursions trips into the tunnel from Sandling railway station on 7 May 1994, the first passenger trains to do so
A two-inch (50-mm) diameter pilot hole allowed the service tunnel to break through without ceremony on 30 October 1990.[36] On 1 December 1990, Englishman Graham Fagg and Frenchman Phillippe Cozette broke through the service tunnel with the media watching.[37] Eurotunnel completed the tunnel on time,[30] and it was officially opened, one year later than originally planned, by Queen Elizabeth II and the French president, François Mitterrand, in a ceremony held in Calais on 6 May 1994. The Queen travelled through the tunnel to Calais on a Eurostar train, which stopped nose to nose with the train that carried President Mitterrand from Paris.[38] Following the ceremony President Mitterrand and the Queen travelled on Le Shuttle to a similar ceremony in Folkestone.[38] A full public service did not start for several months….

On this day in 1906, a Wisconsinite briefly holds the world boxing title:

1906 – Fred Beell Crowned Heavyweight Champ
On this date Fred Beell, of Marshfield, Wisconsin, won the American heavyweight wrestling championship in New Orleans, taking two of three falls from Frank Gotch. Beell’s reign was brief. Sixteen days later, he lost a rematch to Gotch. Beell’s victory was the only match that Gotch lost from 1904 until his death in 1918. [Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Google-a-Day asks a question about literature:

What is the last line of the poem in which the famous line about “Mistah Kurtz” is used as an epigraph?

Good morning, Whitewater.

November ends, and Advent begins, with a partly cloudy day and a high of thirty-five degrees. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 16m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63% of its visible disk illuminated.

Friday’s FW poll asked whether respondents thought a deer should (apart from Wisconsin regulations) belong to the boy who first shot it, or the adult hunter who later killed it. Just over sixty-one percent of respondents felt it should have gone to the boy (that is, that at the adult hunter should have let the boy have the deer.)

The Chernobyl area, decades after the nuclear accident that befell a nuclear plant near Pripyat, remains an empty, eerie place. Danny Cooke recently returned from a visit, during which he recorded the scene, twenty-eight years on:

Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit Chernobyl whilst working for CBS News on a '60 Minutes' episode which aired on Nov. 23, 2014. Bob Simon is the correspondent. Michael Gavshon and David Levine, producers.

For the full story http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chernobyl-the-catastrophe-that-never-ended/

—-> ***Soundtrack 'Promise land' by Hannah Miller – licensed on themusicbed.com

Chernobyl is one of the most interesting and dangerous places I've been. The nuclear disaster, which happened in 1986 (the year after I was born), had an effect on so many people, including my family when we lived in Italy. The nuclear dust clouds swept westward towards us. The Italian police went round and threw away all the local produce and my mother rushed out to purchase as much tinned milk as possible to feed me, her infant son.

It caused so much distress hundreds of miles away, so I can't imagine how terrifying it would have been for the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who were forced to evacuate.

During my stay, I met so many amazing people, one of whom was my guide Yevgen, also known as a 'Stalker'. We spent the week together exploring Chernobyl and the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat. There was something serene, yet highly disturbing about this place. Time has stood still and there are memories of past happenings floating around us.

Armed with a camera and a dosimeter geiger counter I explored…

www.dannycooke.co.uk Follow me on twitter @dannycooke

Shot using DJI Phantom 2 (GoPro3+) and Canon 7D

It’s Mark Twain’s birthday:

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[1] better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),[2] the latter often called “the Great American Novel”.

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to the newspaper of his older brother, Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.[3] In 1865, his humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, and was even translated into classic Greek.[4] His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so.

Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley’s Comet, and he predicted that he would “go out with it”, too. He died the day following the comet’s subsequent return. He was lauded as the “greatest American humorist of his age”,[5] and William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature”.[6]

Good morning, Whitewater.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-three. Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 17m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 51.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1952, President-Elect Eisenhower visits Korea:

In late 1952 Eisenhower went to Korea and discovered a military and political stalemate. Once in office, when the Chinese began a buildup in the Kaesong sanctuary, he threatened to use nuclear force if an armistice was not concluded. His earlier military reputation in Europe was effective with the Chinese.[150] The National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Strategic Air Command (SAC) devised detailed plans for nuclear war against China.[151] With the death of Stalin in early March 1953, Russian support for a Chinese hard-line weakened and China decided to compromise on the prisoner issue.[152]

In July 1953, an armistice took effect with Korea divided along approximately the same boundary as in 1950. The armistice and boundary remain in effect today, with American soldiers stationed there to guarantee it. The armistice, concluded despite opposition from Secretary Dulles, South Korean President Syngman Rhee, and also within Eisenhower’s party, has been described by biographer Ambrose as the greatest achievement of the administration. Eisenhower had the insight to realize that unlimited war in the nuclear age was unthinkable, and limited war unwinnable.[152]

A point of emphasis in Ike’s campaign had been his endorsement of a policy of liberation from communism as opposed to a policy of containment. This continued to be his preference despite the armistice with Korea.[153] Throughout his terms Eisenhower took a hard-line attitude toward China, as demanded by conservative Republicans, with the goal of driving a wedge between China and the Soviet Union.[154]

Here’s something good ahead, in just about a year from now:

It’s just one trailer, but it looks promising.