Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with a high of eighty-eight.

Today at 1 PM, at the Starin Park Community Building, there will be a free showing of the award-winning film, No. It’s the story of an actual advertising campaign against dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988.

In the early 1970s, with the technology of that time, NASA thought about a manned flyby around Venus. In What might have been: Visiting Mars and Venus with Apollo-era hardware, Amy Shira Teitel tells the tale:

Imagine three astronauts, 125 million miles from the Earth, talking to Mission Control with a four-minute time lag. They have seen nothing out their windows but stars in the blackness of space for the last 150 days. With a carefully timed burn, they slow into orbit around Venus, and as they loop around the planet, they get their first look at its thick cloud layer just 7,000 miles below.

It might sound like the plot of a science fiction movie, but in the late 1960s, NASA investigated missions that would send humans to Venus and Mars using Apollo-era technology. These missions would fly in the 1970s and 1980s to capitalize on what many expected would be a surge of interest in manned spaceflight after the Apollo lunar landings. They would be daring missions, but they would also be feasible with what was on hand….

Puzzability‘s current series is entitled, Silent Partners:

“Can we get a little piece and quiet around here? For each day this week, we started with a word and added the letters SH to the beginning to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the SH word.”

Example:
Hands out portions of green onions

Answer:
Allots shallots

What to Submit:
Submit the phrase, with the SH word second (as “Allots shallots” in the example), for your answer.

Wednesday, August 21:

Little movement indicating that a cow is cold while being milked

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with a high of eighty-five.

Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1911, a communications first:

…a dispatcher in the New York Times office sends the first telegram around the world via commercial service….

The Times decided to send its 1911 telegram in order to determine how fast a commercial message could be sent around the world by telegraph cable. The message, reading simply “This message sent around the world,” left the dispatch room on the 17th floor of the Times building in New York at 7 p.m. on August 20. After it traveled more than 28,000 miles, being relayed by 16 different operators, through San Francisco, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Bombay, Malta, Lisbon and the Azores–among other locations–the reply was received by the same operator 16.5 minutes later. It was the fastest time achieved by a commercial cablegram since the opening of the Pacific cable in 1900 by the Commercial Cable Company.

Puzzability‘s current series this week, from August 19-23, is entitled, Silent Partners:

“Can we get a little piece and quiet around here? For each day this week, we started with a word and added the letters SH to the beginning to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the SH word.”

Example:
Hands out portions of green onions

Answer:
Allots shallots

What to Submit:
Submit the phrase, with the SH word second (as “Allots shallots” in the example), for your answer.

Tuesday, August 20:

Bloodsucking bug’s comedy routine

Whitewater’s week begins with beautiful August weather. Our city will enjoy sunny skies with a high near 84. Light south winds will become southwest at 5 to 10 mph in the morning.

On this day in 1812, the young American navy saw victory over a warship of the British navy:

During the War of 1812, the U.S. Navy frigate Constitution defeats the British frigate Guerrière in a furious engagement off the coast of Nova Scotia. Witnesses claimed that the British shot merely bounced off the Constitution’s sides, as if the ship were made of iron rather than wood. By the war’s end, “Old Ironsides” destroyed or captured seven more British ships. The success of the USS Constitution against the supposedly invincible Royal Navy provided a tremendous boost in morale for the young American republic.

Margherita Desy describes the 8.19.1812 battle and victory of the Constitution:

What lesson is there in this, for people today, from our ship and her great victory?

I think it’s that one of strong stuff can hold on against others in opposition, no matter how numerous or vaunted they may be. Cognoscenti of that time might have predicted an easy British victory; Constitution proved them wrong more than once.

Puzzability begins a new series this week, from August 19-23, entitled, Silent Partners:

“Can we get a little piece and quiet around here? For each day this week, we started with a word and added the letters SH to the beginning to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the SH word.”

Example:
Hands out portions of green onions

Answer:
Allots shallots

What to Submit:
Submit the phrase, with the SH word second (as “Allots shallots” in the example), for your answer.

Monday, August 19:

Psychiatrist who works at a skating venue

Good morning.

We’ve a beautiful day ahead: sunny, with a high of 80 and south winds around 5 mph in the afternoon.

On this day in 1590, the English find a New World colony mysteriously deserted:

John White, the governor of the Roanoke Island colony in present-day North Carolina, returns from a supply-trip to England to find the settlement deserted. White and his men found no trace of the 100 or so colonists he left behind, and there was no sign of violence. Among the missing were Ellinor Dare, White’s daughter; and Virginia Dare, White’s granddaughter and the first English child born in America. August 18 was to have been Virginia’s third birthday. The only clue to their mysterious disappearance was the word “CROATOAN” carved into the palisade that had been built around the settlement. White took the letters to mean that the colonists had moved to Croatoan Island, some 50 miles away, but a later search of the island found none of the settlers.

Somewhere on the planet, it’s dog v. duck:

Good morning.

Saturday in town will be sunny, with a high near 79, and winds of the southeast around 5 mph.

On this day seventy years ago, the Iron Horse confirms why he’d earned the nickname the Iron Horse:

On August 17, 1933, New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig plays in his 1,308th consecutive game, breaking former Yankee Everett Scott’s record for consecutive games played. Gehrig would go on to play in 2,130 games in a row, setting a record that would stand for over half a century.

Henry Louis Gehrig was born June 19, 1903, in New York City, the only child of German immigrants to survive childhood illness. His doting parents stressed education over sports, and he attended Columbia University on a football scholarship and studied engineering….

Gehrig set his endurance record against the Browns in St. Louis more than eight seasons after the streak began on June 1, 1925. He was honored after the first inning, when Browns and Yankees players surrounded him at home plate and he was presented with a silver trophy by American League President William Harridge. The Yankees went on to lose the game in 10 innings, 7-6, in spite of home runs from Babe Ruth and Bill Dickey.

For his career, Gehrig’s offensive output was as extraordinary as his consecutive games streak. The left-handed slugger led the American League in RBIs five times and drove in at least 100 runs 13 years in a row. He led the AL in home runs three times, runs four times and in hitting once. On June 3, 1932, Gehrig became the first player to homer four times in a single game. In the Yankees first golden era, Gehrig batted cleanup, right after Babe Ruth, the bigger star of the two. It was Gehrig, however, who was named American League MVP in 1927, on a Yankee team considered the greatest team in history. He won the award again in 1936, another championship year for the Yankees. In all, Gehrig helped the Yankees to six World Series titles.

In 1938 Gehrig’s batting average dropped below .300 for the first time in his career and he began to experience chronic illness. As his strength continued to dwindle and doctors struggled to diagnose him, Gehrig took himself out of many games. He was eventually diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a rare degenerative disease now often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He retired and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1939 and died just two years later.

Gehrig spoke six years later at his retirement: