Good morning.

We’ll have a rainy day again today, with thunderstorms, and a high of sixty-two.

Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1862, U.S. Marines take the Confederate flag from the New Orleans city hall, after a successful naval campaign against that city:

From April 18 to April 28, Farragut bombarded and then fought his way past the forts in the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, managing to get thirteen ships up river on April 24. Historian John D. Winters in The Civil War in Louisiana (1963) noted that with few exceptions the Confederate fleet at New Orleans had “made a sorry showing. Self-destruction, lack of co-operation, cowardice of untrained officers, and the murderous fire of the Federal gunboats reduced the fleet to a demoralized shambles.”^[10]

….Despite the complete vulnerability of the city, the citizens along with military and civil authorities remained defiant. At 2:00 p.m. on 25 April, Admiral Farragut sent Captain Bailey, First Division Commander from the USS Cayuga, to accept the surrender of the city. Armed mobs within the city defied the Union officers and marines sent to city hall. General Lovell refused to surrender the city, along with Mayor Monroe. William B. Mumford pulled down a Union flag raised over the former U.S. mint by marines of the USS Pensacola and the mob destroyed it. Farragut did not destroy the city in response, but moved upriver to subdue fortifications north of the city. On April 29, Farragut and 250 marines from the USS Hartfordremoved the Louisiana State flag from the City Hall.^[13] By May 2, US Secretary of State, William H. Seward, declared New Orleans “recovered” and “mails are allowed to pass”.^[14]

Here’s Tuesday’s game in Puzzability‘s Lone Rangers series:

This Week’s Game — April 28-May 2

Lone Rangers

Welcome to the Daily Hitching Post. For each day this week, we started with the name of a well-known person from the days of the Old West and removed all the letters that appear more than once, leaving just the singly occurring letters. Each day’s clue gives the unique letters in order (with any spaces removed), along with the lengths of the name components in parentheses.

Example:

CHIAY (3,8)

Answer:

Doc Holliday

What to Submit:

Submit the full name (as “Doc Holliday” in the example) for your answer.

Tuesday, April 29

UAICDY (7,4,4)

Good morning.

We’ve a rainy day ahead, with a high of forty-seven.

On this day in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl begins an ocean voyage in the Kon-Tiki expedition:

Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. Although most anthropologists as of 2010 had come to the conclusion they did not,[1][2][3] in 2011, new genetic evidence was uncovered by Erik Thorsby that Easter Island inhabitants in fact do have some South American DNA,[4] lending credence to at least some of Heyerdahl’s theses. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.

The Kon-Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard facilities provided by the Peruvian authorities, they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in an indigenous style as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began on April 28, 1947. Heyerdahl and five companions sailed the raft for 101 days over 6900 km (4,300 miles) across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947. The crew made successful landfall and all returned safely.

Here’s a trailer for the very fine 2011 film, Kon-Tiki:

Puzzability begins a new series today, called Lone Rangers:

This Week’s Game — April 28-May 2

Lone Rangers

Welcome to the Daily Hitching Post. For each day this week, we started with the name of a well-known person from the days of the Old West and removed all the letters that appear more than once, leaving just the singly occurring letters. Each day’s clue gives the unique letters in order (with any spaces removed), along with the lengths of the name components in parentheses.

Example:

CHIAY (3,8)

Answer:

Doc Holliday

What to Submit:

Submit the full name (as “Doc Holliday” in the example) for your answer.

Monday, April 28

IOKLY (5,6)

Good morning.

We’ve a forty-percent chance of scattered showers today (with a hundred-percent chance tonight). Otherwise, Sunday will be cloudy with a high of fifty-two.

What was spring break like in the 1950s? Here’s how Chevrolet depicted it:

On this day in 1963, Dave Brubeck plays Beloit:

1963 – Dave Brubeck Performs at Beloit College
On this date jazz legend Dave Brubeck brought his quartet to Beloit College for a concert in the field house. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

Here’s Brubeck’s Bossa Nova U.S.A. from At Carnegie Hall, recorded in ’63:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty-six. Sunrise is 5:56 AM and sunset 7:50 PM. The moon is a waning crescent with only eight-percent of its visible disk illuminated.

In yesterday’s FW poll, Friday Poll: Brewers – Good or Lucky?, 50% of respondents weren’t sure, 29.17% said good, and 20.83% said lucky.

In Underlapse, French filmmakers Claire & Max show what the world would look like in time-lapse, if one viewed the passing scene while upside down. They call their work an ‘antigravity visual experience’ —

On this day in 1954, significant medial trials begin:

…the Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. Children in the United States, Canada and Finland participated in the trials, which used for the first time the now-standard double-blind method, whereby neither the patient nor attending doctor knew if the inoculation was the vaccine or a placebo. On April 12, 1955, researchers announced the vaccine was safe and effective and it quickly became a standard part of childhood immunizations in America. In the ensuing decades, polio vaccines would all but wipe out the highly contagious disease in the Western Hemisphere….