tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-278259342009-11-10T19:45:28.689-05:00An online magazine offering a pastiche of articles on current affairs, history, technics, opinion, writing, advice, humor and trivia since May 12, 2006.audaxnoreply@blogger.comBlogger138125Postscriptshttp://feedburner.google.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27825934.post-20836568706923589082009-11-05T09:00:00.002-05:002009-11-10T07:12:46.312-05:00

HISTORYThis year the holiday known as Veterans Day, formerly called Armistice Day, will be observed on Wednesday, November 11, 2009. Although the date is widely observed, many are unfamiliar with its origins. It commemorates the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front on November 11, 1918. Marking the end of World War One, the armistice between the Allies and Germany was signed in a railway

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BIOGRAPHYLincoln "Linc" Diamant, 86, died Tuesday, October 20, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was news we all dreaded. In 2006, he and his wife, Joan, sold their home on Spring Valley Road near the Teatown Lake Reservation and moved to a comfortable apartment in the delightful college town that is home to Williams College. Here, despite being blind and suffering the palsy of Parkinsonism, he

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HUMOR, QUOTABLE QUOTESIn 1894, Mark Twain found himself almost bankrupt. He had invested $100,000 (equivalent to about $2 million today) in a venture to make a "revolutionary" typesetting machine. To free himself from debt, he made a lecture tour of the British Empire in 1895. He chose that route because it gave him many opportunities to lecture in the English language. Following the Equator: A

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HUMOR, QUOTABLE QUOTESHe is called the father of American humor. He called himself Mark Twain, after the familiar cry on Mississippi riverboats used in measuring the depth of the water. As a young man he had been a pilot on such boats.Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, he saw the introduction of the telegraph, the telephone and the motorcar. He also saw the Civil War and the Spanish American

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BIOGRAPHY"Who was Harry Chapin?" some readers may ask. Unfortunately, a whole generation has grown up never hearing his music, and he is remembered today largely by baby-boomers.Musician. Singer. Poet. Songwriter. Recording artist. Filmmaker. Political activist. Hunger fighter. Dreamer. Doer. Harry Chapin was all of these, and more.Critics scorned him and his music--yet his fans loved him and his

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Harry Chapin’s rocketlike trajectory through the world of music lasted only a few short years before it was abruptly snuffed out. For the benefit of those readers to whom the Harry Chapin biography brought back memories and those readers for whom it opened a whole new world of discovery, the following sampler of Harry Chapin quotable quotes and discography may be useful.A Harry Chapin Sampler"The

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ADVICEBe Your Own Boss: How to Start a Home-Based BusinessNot Only for New Grads: Common-Sense Job HuntingBIOGRAPHY Larger Than Life: Remembering Lincoln Diamant A Many-Talented Troubadour: Remembering Harry Chapin A Harry Chapin MiscellanyCURRENT AFFAIRSWhat the F*** Am I Doing Here?A Voter's Guide to Reality in the Middle East, or What the Politicians Won't Tell YouThe War Nobody WantedThe

audaxnoreply@blogger.comhttp://notorc.blogspot.com/2006/11/postscripts-contents-page.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27825934.post-20167744477527056502009-09-29T13:00:00.002-04:002009-09-29T14:29:41.785-04:00

LOWER HUDSON VALLEYThe curtain now opens on the third and final act in our drama of the treason that nearly succeeded. Traitorous American Major General Benedict Arnold has reached the British after his precipitous escape. British Major John André and American attorney Joshua Hett Smith have been transported to the Continental Army's encampment at Tappan, N.Y., and are being held there for

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYThe drama of Benedict Arnold and John André continues. Three new players will soon make their appearance:George Washington, 48, towering, cool-headed commander in chief of the Continental Army, one of America's wealthiest men. His unfailing dignity, courtesy and composure endear him to all who serve under him.Lt. Col. John Jameson, 29, from Culpeper County in Virginia. A

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OP EDNote: The title is taken from a favorite saying of former Secretary of State James A. Baker.Dear Mr. President:Shortly before Christmas of 1945, I was discharged from the Army at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland. I decided that I would make a point of studying the waging of war, a profession that had appropriated four years of my youth. Sixty-four years later, now with a large store of

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYAristotle defined tragedy as a drama recounting the fall of persons of high degree and exemplifying the tragic sense of life. One September 229 years ago in the lower Hudson Valley, a profoundly moving Aristotelean tragedy of errors played itself out. Two human beings, one, British Major John André, and the other, American General Benedict Arnold, were each inevitably doomed by

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEY"Head for the sound of the guns." Cadets at West Point are taught this military precept--easily remembered advice for a unit commander when trouble threatens and information is lacking.When German guns signaled the start of the First World War in 1914, hundreds of Americans headed for the sound of the guns in France. Their reasons were many. Some, impelled by humanitarian

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYIn the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian we can marvel at the tiny spacecraft in which astronauts rocketed into space a scant 47 years ago. Sailing the Hudson and neighboring waters today is the 17th-century equivalent of a modern space capsule: a full-size replica of Henry Hudson's most famous ship, the Halve Maen (Half Moon).Four centuries ago, a small band of

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYOn May 11, 1647, 55-year-old Petrus Stuyvesant stomped ashore at New Amsterdam on a wooden leg decorated with incised bands of silver. Only three years before, while attacking the Spanish-held Caribbean island of St. Martin, he had lost his right leg to a cannonball. Adriaen Van der Donck, a young lawyer and witness to his arrival, described him as “Peacock like, with great

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYWillem Kieft, fifth Dutch governor of New Netherland, arrived in New Amsterdam in 1638. You probably won't recognize his name. After you read what follows, you will not easily wipe the name Willem Kieft from your memory.Kieft was by nature a blusterer and at heart a coward. For sheer barbarity, he ranks with such genocidal monsters as Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. Had

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYEditor's Note: For the benefit of readers who desire to know more about the Lenape Indians who once roamed the area we now call home, the following is a list of books used in the preparation of this series.For readers who seek a basic introductory work on the subject of America's first inhabitants and the archeological science that enables us to discover details about their way

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYHalf of our nation’s fifty states bear names of Indian origin, as do uncounted thousands of individual towns, rivers and landscape features. Sad to say, the names the Indians left us and the few mute artifacts to be seen in museum collections are our only links to Westchester’s early inhabitants. It is important to remember that because Indians had no written language,

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYOn October 14, 1842, 167 years ago, New York City marked the completion of the Croton Aqueduct and the stream of cold, clear water it brought from the valley of the Croton River. The water's arrival touched off celebrations whose like had never been seen before. At a time when the purity of Croton's own water supply is in jeopardy from runoff contamination, it is appropriate

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYSeen from the air, the Old Croton Aqueduct gives the impression that a giant mole had tunneled its way south from the Croton River to New York City, throwing up the slight bulge that is the telltale sign of the animal's passage through a lawn. Now a public right of way, the aqueduct was purchased by New York State from New York City's Bureau of Water Supply in 1968. Listed on

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYFour hundred years ago, a virgin North America stretched invitingly from ocean to ocean waiting to be explored. Its forests were so thick, one could have walked from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and beyond under a continuous green canopy of trees. Explorers--Columbus in 1492, John Cabot in 1497 and Verrazzano in 1524--had tentatively sailed the Atlantic coast, carefully

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HISTORYToday our American Indian population of more than 2.5 million is in sharp contrast to the population in 1609, the year Henry Hudson sailed up the river that bears his name. The entire North American continent was then the exclusive domain of Indians. By the early 1700s, Indian tribes in the lower Hudson Valley had sold their highly desirable lands to Dutch or English colonists, usually for

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MOVIE TRIVIAFew books are so closely identified with a geographical region—Georgia and the Old South—as Gone with the Wind. Published in 1936, this 1,037-page tome was discovered by Macmillan editor Harold Latham on a swing through the South in search, of new writing talent. Its author, Margaret Mitchell, was a petite (4 feet 9-1/2 inches tall) native of Atlanta who had labored between 1926 and

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYOne feature of Memorial Day celebrations everywhere is the playing of Taps, a tune that has roots in the Civil War and even before. From earliest times, bugle calls have been used in armies to relay commands to troops arrayed in broad battle lines and widespread formations or to signal significant events in large encampments. Among these calls are reveille, mess call, mail call

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEYSacred groves of trees held a special significance in ancient cultures and religions. One such sacred grove exists at the Montrose veterans hospital facility named for Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who guided the nation through World War II to victory. Here a random array of eleven stone columns topped by bronze busts stands in a bosky dell amidst maples, pines, dogwoods

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LOWER HUDSON VALLEY Nils Andersen's story has never been told in detail. Born in Philadelphia in 1926, he later moved with his family to Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, where he attended public schools. Quitting high school at 17, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. After basic training, Andersen shipped out to Guadalcanal, where he joined the newly activated 6th Marine Division training for the invasion of

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