Historical Coincidences are Quite Numerous

October 12. It seems like just another ordinary day. It probably is just another ordinary day, even though a few extraordinary things happened on October 12. If one wishes, one can peer into the past and find patterns and connections that seem unusual, even eerie. It's a kind of pointless fun, which is pretty much what this blog is for.

So...

October 12, 1492: Chris Columbus landed in what is now the Bahamas. He thought he had found India or something close to India. He was of course mistaken. Some sources say that the date was really October 13 but Columbus fudged his ship's log because the 13th was considered an unlucky day. Here's a related Brautigan poem, part of a longer series called "Good Luck, Captain Martin."

 

The Bottle      Part 3
A child stands motionless.
He holds a bottle in his hands.
There's a ship in the bottle.
He stares at it with eyes
that do not blink.
He wonders where a tiny ship
can sail to if it is held
prisoner in a bottle.
Fifty years from now you will
find out, Captain Martin,
for the sea (large as it is)
is only another bottle.

October 12, 1810: A princess with the musical name Therese von Sachsen Hildburghausen married a Bavarian prince with the prosaic name Louis. The prince soon became King Ludwig I and so Therese became a queen. Their wedding was a big deal in Bavaria and the event was celebrated throughout the land with music and dancing and beer. It was so much fun that the Bavarians decided to do it every year. It became known as Oktoberfest. For this we thank them. Herr Bossnack, my high school German teacher, taught us several drinking songs, including the one seen here. For this I thank him.

October 12, 1892: Exactly 400 years after Columbus began his vacation in the Bahamas, the first rail shipment of iron ore went from Mountain Iron, MN to Duluth. The Duluthians were busy celebrating Oktoberfest (or was it Columbus day?), so the ore sat in piles by the dock for a week before the barely-sober stevedores loaded it onto a big ship headed for Gary, IN.

Iron Ore Betty is the unofficial queen of the Iron Range thanks to this goofy John Prine tune.

October 12, 1960: The United Nations general assembly was meeting in New York. It was a typically cordial (read: boring) meeting until it was Nikita Kruschev's turn to speak. He was agitated about something and began a new rhetorical tradition by removing his shoe and pounding the podium with it. The reasons for his outburst are obscure, but it's likely that he wanted Russian vodka to get equal billing with German beer at the UN after-party.

Facts: Retention of

Uno: The human trachea is lined with pseudostratified superciliated columnar epithelium with goblet cells. This I learned from Dr. Rafalko in introductory human anatomy, circa 1967. I believe it was Dr. Rafalko's single favorite anatomical fact. He stressed over and over that this would be a test question. Why the quirky professor attached such importance to this arcane fact is still a mystery to me.

Superciliated means that even the cilia have cilia!

Dos: In the decade before construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began, Brooklyn was the fastest growing city in the US of A -- adding about 130,000 residents between 1860 and 1870. This fact was included in the entertaining but somewhat annoying spiel of a tour guide. My youngest son and I had come to New York mostly to see a game at legendary Yankee Stadium. The next day, before heading to Philadelphia, we took a little tour of Manhattan, from Central Park to the Battery to the Staten Island Ferry to the Brooklyn Bridge. Out of the roughly four hours of almost non-stop patter by our guide (who was from Queens), I remember almost nothing except the population growth of Brooklyn. Inexplicable.

Tres: John Prine once upon a time cast himself as a rebellious, outlaw-type singer-songwriter. The refrain of his song "Illegal Smile," about smokin' dope, goes "Won't you please tell the man I didn't kill anyone, I'm just tryin' to have me some fun." That was back in the early 1970's. I don't think he has that edge any more.

On a 1975 album called Common Sense, Prine recorded "Come Back To Us Barbara Lewis (Hare Krishna Beauregard)." I memorized the lyrics to that song and can recite them today. In the intervening decades, I have memorized dozens, maybe hundreds, of songs -- for a while. But these have faded or gotten jumbled. Why is it that this stupid song of Prine's is fixed so well in my addled brain? Strange.

Quatro: "Impact" makes a lousy verb. OK, so that's an opinion and not strictly speaking a fact. It's my blog, so I can include an opnion in a post that is concerned with facts. Can't I?

Anyway, to make an obvious but no less interesting point: memory is a tricky thing, made even more slippery because the line between fact and opinion isn't always clear. Just ask Roger Clemens.

Here's a poem by Richard Brautigan that touches on this phenomenon. From "Lay the Marble Tea"

Hansel and Gretel

I have always wanted to write a poem about Hansel
and Gretel going through the forest, leaving behind
them pieces of apple pie to form sort of a bridge between
dream and reality, and being followed by those gentle
birds that embrace both illusions like violins eating
pieces of apple pie.

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Mmmmm...pie.