The Daily Dose/January 16, 2019
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy
Leading Off: We asked for it and we got it
The most prosperous nation in human history is approaching the end of its first month of making some of its employees work for free. They will have missed two paychecks and while they’ll eventually be paid the money they’ve earned that is not doing them a whole lot of good now.
(As we’ve noted here before, we don’t have to worry about whether or not the president and Congress and their staffs are getting paid during the shutdown. Essential government employees get paid during shutdowns and no one is more essential to this fiasco than the president and Congress.)
Everyone associated with this should be ashamed of themselves but no one really is. The president certainly isn’t. He is maximizing his only real talent of drawing attention to himself and he is accustomed to holding out and getting his way besides. The Democrats certainly aren’t feeling any shame; sniffing blood, they are also giving a clinic in hunkering down and circling the wagons. The GOP itself might be, but long ago they went all-in with a candidate and a president they never really wanted in the first place and they will continue to tolerate this.
We are tolerating it, too. We are allowing our government to completely hamstring our country. We are tolerating our government saying, in essence:
Here are the chains we have for you. Put them on.
A hundred years from when all new people are looking back on this period, they may well be looking back at the beginning of the end of The Great American Experiment, America having been tossed aside History’s scrap heap, along with, among others, the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union.
Or, perhaps, they will look at an America that collectively declared they’d had enough of perpetual war, of fiscal insanity, of a partisan, fractured and bickering government and went and did something about it at the ballot box.
We’ll see.
Today At The Site
The Diary of a Nobody: Dr Sparrow takes yet more water readings at the hotel and there is a house guest at The Shire.
I took more water readings at the hotel this morning…A classically trained scientist, I suppose, I simply needed more data before submitting my results for peer review in Nite Auditor’s Water Journal…
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On This Date
In 1605 – The Ingenious Nobleman Sir Quixote of La Mancha – commonly known as Don Quixote – by Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes is published in Madrid. Sales were strong from the start, despite the fact most of a shipment to the New World was lost. Don Quixote has long been considered one of the founding works of western literature and remains the second-translated book in human history, trailing only the Bible.
In 1896 – The University of Chicago defeats the University of Iowa 15-12 in Iowa City in the first college basketball game featuring five players on a side. The original 13 rules for the game, written by James Naismith in 1892, did not specify the number of players on a side and, previously, anywhere from seven to nine players had been used. Some sources give the date of this game as January 18.
In 1943 – Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra is at #1 on Billboard’s Best Selling Singles chart – Billboard’s very first chart, established in 1940 – with There Are Such Things. Vocals were by Frank Sinatra and the song was the fourth and final #1 single Sinatra and Dorsey would have together. The song spent four weeks at #1 before dropping out of the top spot for a week and would return to #1 for one more week on February 27.
Quotebook
Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished.
Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote
Editor’s Note: click here to read commentary from Gaylon on this quote, from the old Thought for the Day feature.
Answer To The Last Trivia Question
The parents of Elizabeth I were Henry VIII and his second wife Anne Boleyn.
Today’s Stumper
What was the first #1 song Billboard’s Best Selling Singles chart? –Answer next time!
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