Good morning.
We’ll have a partly sunny day with a high of eighty-three.
Common Council meets today at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1945, fewer than fours years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America bombs Hiroshima:
…at 8:16 a.m. Japanese time, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the world’s first atom bomb, over the city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people are killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 are injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout.
U.S. President Harry S. Truman, discouraged by the Japanese response to the Potsdam Conference’s demand for unconditional surrender, made the decision to use the atom bomb to end the war in order to prevent what he predicted would be a much greater loss of life were the United States to invade the Japanese mainland. And so on August 5, while a “conventional” bombing of Japan was underway, “Little Boy,” (the nickname for one of two atom bombs available for use against Japan), was loaded onto Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets’ plane on Tinian Island in the Marianas. Tibbets’ B-29, named the Enola Gay after his mother, left the island at 2:45 a.m. on August 6. Five and a half hours later, “Little Boy” was dropped, exploding 1,900 feet over a hospital and unleashing the equivalent of 12,500 tons of TNT. The bomb had several inscriptions scribbled on its shell, one of which read “Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis” (the ship that transported the bomb to the Marianas).
Puzzability‘s new series this week is about mythology:
Myth Takes
For this week of freaks and Greeks, we started each day with a mythical creature. Then we hid it in a sentence, with spaces added as necessary. The answer spans at least two words in the sentence and starts and ends in the middle of words. The day’s clue gives the sentence with a Greek column in place of the creature.
Example:
I am not rising from this comfortable so
til I’ve finished this fascinating myth about the early days of Mt. Olympus.
Answer:
Faun (sofa until)
What to Submit:
Submit the mythical creature (as “Faun” in the example) for your answer.
Tuesday, August 6:
The preac
mas of Euripides are a bit much for me; I prefer lightweight comedies by playwrights like Aristophanes.