Showing posts with label Black Monday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Monday. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Monday, March 6, 1944. "Black Monday"

The first large scale daylight bombing raid on Berlin occured.  The raid, remembered as Black Monday, involved 814 bombers and 944 fighters from bases in southern England.  69 bombers were lost.

Miss Donna Mae II sustaining damage after the B-17 drifted under another B-17 dropping its bomb load. The plane would go down with all eleven crewmen.

P-51 pilot Donald Blakeslee would fly the first such aircraft over the city.  An early American fighter pilot, he first joined the RCAF in 1941, he served in the USAF until 1965 and passed away in 2008 at age 80.

For those watching Masters of the Air, it is depicted in Episode 7.

The Red Army took Volochysk.

Finland rejected a Soviet peace proposal that included interning German troops that were inside of Finland and restoring the 1940 borders.  The proposal was very similar to what the Finns would accept the following September and represented, effectively, a defeat, which is likely why it was not accepted, in part, at this time, although it was also surprisingly generous on Moscow's part.


Company B, 2nd Chemical Bn. Cassino area, Italy. 6 March, 1944.

The U-744 was sunk in the Atlantic, and the U-973 was sunk in the Arctic.

Orderlies from 25th Field Hospital loading wounded Chinese soldiers into airplane.

Albanian partisan Ramize Gjebrea age 20, was executed by a partisan firing squad for "immoral behavior", that being having intercourse with a male partisan.  She was engaged to another person.  The charge was denied by both parties, but she was convicted and, on this day, shot.


This is interesting partially as Albanian partisans were Communist dominated, but as was often the case with Communist partisan groups, and even Communist societies, traditional morality was strictly observed even though Marx had expressly rejected it and Communist revolutionaries most definitely did not observe them.

Baker City, Oregon, weather station.


Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Wasted Wednesday?

I heard this phrase for the first time yesterday.

Ironically, I'd just completed an item that will run later this week on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Green Friday, Buy Nothing Day, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. 

Wasted Wednesday was a new one.

I figured it was called that as the day tends to be wasted, in productivity terms.  And as a person who always works this day no matter what, and who often works at least one of the work days prior to the next business day (the infamous Cyber Monday), it is often not terribly productive. 

But, nope.  It's called that as apparently its a day in which there's a lot of heavy drinking.

I don't know what to say about that.  Alcohol and the holidays have gone together for a long time.  I suppose this is nothing new, but it sounds like it is.  And if it is, that's a sad development.

Monday, November 26, 2018

Thanksgiving and Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, oh my!

Today is Cyber Monday, originally so named as this was the day when workers returning to their offices, work stations, cubicles etc., chose to shop on company time, rather than dive right back in.

Not surprising really.  Those with a long weekend tend to return for the most part with the post holiday blahs.

Retailers, however, picked up this pretty quickly and started offering Cyber Monday deals, making it a real thing.

How about you, have you participated in the Consumer Culture Bacchanalia?  It's sort of hard not to, although I support Small Business Saturday.

Which doesn't mean I participated in it.  I don't like shopping much anyhow.  And my land line phone has broken so that the message light hasn't been going off.  Given that, I missed an invitation to a book signing, but truth be known as I was very much looking forwards to four days in a row with now work, perhaps that was to my benefit in another sense.  Book signings make me really tense as I'm highly introverted by nature, something that people who know me only in a professional sense would be surprised to learn.

Anyhow, I guess it isn't true that I didn't participate entirely. That Saturday I did run out and stop by a sporting goods store to get something I required anyhow.  Things were marked way, way down and it wasn't until I got home that I realized that it must have been a Small Business Saturday sale.

My daughter and wife did participate, however. They went to a collection of small local businesses on Saturday to shop for Christmas.  Good for them.

Thanksgiving was otherwise low key but odd. As already noted on these pages, we went to our in laws where an elderly hunter died in a field while we were out there.  Strange melancholy experience. The next day I had a message from one of my employees about a medical emergency of epic proportions in their family, very distressing indeed.  All that caste a sort of tense gloom over things.  I didn't work, however, and did go hunting a couple of times.

Cyber Monday?  Who knows, perhaps even I'll participate a bit.