With Hank Aaron's passing, I thought I would pass along a unique and memorable experience I had with him in the early 1990s.

My good friend, @MarkGrunskeSS, brought Hank to State Fair Park as the headliner for a 1957 Milwaukee Braves reunion.

I was afforded the opportunity to sit next to Hank, hand him items to autograph as the public filed through, hand him the correct pens and get the items back to their owners after Hank had signed them.

After a brief introduction to Hank, the signing began. It was a flurry of activity for three-plus hours. Hank was gracious to all despite the fact the line seemingly had no end.

Any thoughts I had about maybe talking to Hank or being able to hear some stories quickly went out the window as I did my best to keep up with the crowd. So I put my head down and tried to make it as easy on Hank as I could.

Once the signing was over, we retreated to a back office near a side door. As Hank's agent, Bob Allen, retrieved the car, Hank shook hands and took pictures with a few of us lucky souls.

The Great Rat Massacre Of 1902 (and how it backfired spectacularly)

(Thread, sources here:

While we're talking about £500 incentives, I thought it would be fun to look back at one that backfired spectacularly and likely led to an outbreak of bubonic plague.

In Hanoi, Vietnam, rats were a huge problem around the turn of the 20th century.

Or more specifically, they had long been a problem, but now the colonial French viewed them as a problem too after Alexandre Yersin discovered the bacillus bacteria responsible for the bubonic plague, and the role that rats and fleas played in spreading it.

Rats would occasionally use the pipes that served the flushing toilets of the colonialists (unavailable to the local population) as an entry point into their homes.

The Amazons of Dahomey.

It is noon on a humid Saturday in the fall of 1861, and a missionary by the name of Francesco Borghero has been summoned to a parade ground in Abomey, the capital of the small West African state of Dahomey.

He is seated on one side of a huge, open square right in the center of the town–Dahomey is renowned as a “Black Sparta,” a fiercely militaristic society bent on conquest, whose soldiers strike fear into their enemies all along what is still known as the Slave Coast.

The maneuvers begin in the face of a looming downpour, but King Glele is eager to show off the finest unit in his army to his European guest.
As Father Borghero fans himself, 3,000 heavily armed soldiers march into the square and begin a mock assault on a series of defenses...

designed to represent an enemy capital. The Dahomean troops are a fearsome sight, barefoot and bristling with clubs and knives. A few, known as Reapers, are armed with gleaming three-foot-long straight razors, each wielded two-handed and capable, the priest is told, of slicing...

a man clean in two.
The soldiers advance in silence, reconnoitering. Their first obstacle is a wall—huge piles of acacia branches bristling with needle-sharp thorns, forming a barricade that stretches nearly 440 yards.

On this day in 1917, Stella Cunliffe was born. She became the first female President of the @RoyalStatSoc in 1975 and during her life was associated with many famous institutions including the British Girl Guides, the Guinness Brewery and the Home Office. 1/9

Born in Surrey, she was the first person from her school to go onto University, gaining a degree in Economics from the London School of Economics in 1938. 2/9

Her statistical career began in 1939, when she joined the Danish Bacon company, working on food allocations. During the war she was in charge of rationing in London. The bacon ration was 3 or 4 rashers per person per week. 3/9

At the end of the war she joined The Girl Guides and went to Europe to help feed the war refugees. She was also among the first civilian volunteers to go to Belsen Concentration Camp to oversee the de-lousing of inmates there. 4/9

Cunliffe then took a job as a statistician at the Guinness Brewery @GuinnessGB where she stayed for 25 years. It was here that she famously redesigned the instructions for quality control workers who had to accept or reject the handmade beer barrels. 5/9

This Day in Labor History: January 17, 1915. The radical Lucy Parsons led an unemployed march of 10,000 workers in Chicago. This surprised more reformist leaders, who then worked for a sizable work program for the city's unemployed. Let's talk about it!

Chicago workers were having a hard time of it in the winter of 1915. While the 1913 recession doesn’t get the same publicity as the Great Depression or Panic of 1893, it still caused serious hardship to workers in an era when employment was often tenuous.

When periods of low employment took place, especially in the West and Midwest, where you had large amounts of seasonal and itinerant labor in farming (and logging in the Northwest), huge masses of unemployed people flooded into the cities.

The winter of 1915 was also extremely cold, exacerbating the unemployment crisis in Chicago. With all of this combined, you had thousands of homeless people, including increasing numbers of women and children. A crisis was at hand.

Lucy Parsons was a fascinating if problematic individual. She was born a slave, probably in 1853. Parsons later claimed to be entirely Mexican and Native American heritage and not African-American.

1995 ‘coup’: How Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Gwadabe were maltreated — Ex-EFCC chairman.
A former Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mrs. Farida Waziri has given a fresh insight into the 1995 alleged coup during the Gen. Sani Abacha regime.

Ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, the late General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, Col. Lawan Gwadabe and Senator Chris Anyanwu were all tried and ended up in jail on the strength of the allegations against them.
Yar’Adua died in the Abakaliki Prisons while serving his term.

Mrs. Waziri believes there was something dubious about the alleged coup and the caliber of names linked with the plot made it questionable.
The former EFCC boss in her newly released memoir Farida Waziri: One Step Ahead recalls how she and a former Chief of Staff,...

General Abdulrahman Dambazau watched Obasanjo confidently rubbish the allegations leveled at him by Colonel Bello Fadile during the trial.
The book is about her life as a spy, detective and anti-graft czar. She said when she complained to a former Inspector-General of Police, the

late Alhaji Ibrahim Coomasie that charges were being framed up against the suspects, he responded thus: “there are things beyond our power to control or influence.”
She described a former head of Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), Col. Frank Omenka as a psychopath who...

How do you guys feel about a little bit of history this Monday evening?

Oh, today's Tuesday. I seem to be slower than the times. Is it because of my addiction to history? 😂
Let's journey to South Africa. The Zulu Country with the setting in mid 18th century.

Mkabayi Kajama The Zulu Princess

Shaka Zulu was a great warrior and king of the Zulu in South Africa. His story has fascinated historians, who have tried to figure out the aspects that drove him to be the conqueror he is known today.

It is well known that he died in 1828 at the hands of his brothers, but what many do not know is the role of Princess Mkabayi Kajama in his death. The rebel Zulu princess would work to ensure Shaka become king, and then plot to have him killed.

One of the most powerful women in history, Mkabayi was cursed from birth. She and her twin sister, Mmama, were supposed to have been killed at birth, as superstition stated that twins were bad luck.

The original Fascist League of North America was established by Dino Bigongiari, Professor of Italian at Columbia University. It was not a very professional operation but was initiated by Italian-Americans, not the fascist government in Rome. 🇮🇹🇺🇸

In 1924 Count Ignazio Thaon di Revel came to reorganize the FLNA. The count took central control as President of the Fascist Council for the FLNA which stood for opposition to radicalism, chiefly instigated by the Bolsheviks and their supporters in America. 🇺🇸🇮🇹

The FLNA attracted criticism from liberals, leftists and even other Italian-American groups, such as the Sons of Italy, condemned the organization. This threatened to damage U.S.-Italy relations particularly when politicians began calling for a Congressional investigation.

In 1929, to put a stop to such difficulties, Count Revel announced that the FLNA was disbanding, having, at that time, a membership of 12,500 in 80 branches across the continental United States 🇺🇸🇮🇹.

Throughout the 1930’s many pro-Fascist Italian language newspapers and radio broadcasts were made available, some with large audiences. One of the most prolific was the Italian Library of Information in New York City under the direction of Ugo V. D’Annunzio. 🇺🇸🇮🇹

This month US Americans got a small glimpse of what a coup might feel like, and they are rightly outraged. One might hope this would provoke some reflection on the *actual* coups that the US itself has perpetrated around the world. Here are some of them:

1953: Mohammed Mossadegh, the progressive, democratically elected leader of Iran, was deposed in a US- and British-backed coup because he sought to restore national control over Iran's oil reserves.

1954: Jacobo Árbenz, the progressive, democratically elected leader of Guatemala, was deposed in a US-backed coup because he sought to restore land to small farmers and Indigenous communities that had been dispossessed by US fruit companies.

1961. Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the Republic of Congo, was assassinated in a coup backed by the US, UK and Belgium, because he sought to restore control over the country's mineral reserves. They installed the Mobutu dictatorship in his place.

1964. João Goulart, the progressive, democratically elected leader of Brazil, was deposed by a US-backed coup and replaced with a right-wing military junta.

The Ancient Egyptians Were Writing Around 3100BC....

Thread!!!

Ancient Egyptian writing formed somewhere before the Early Dynastic Period. The idea of the written word was first created in Mesopotamia and spread through trade into Egypt, according to some scholars.

Although there was probably cross-cultural contact between the two regions, Egyptian hieroglyphics are entirely of Egyptian origin; there is no evidence of early writings documenting non-Egyptian ideas,

locations, or artifacts, and early Egyptian pictographs have no connection with early Mesopotamian signs.

The Ancient Sumerian civilisation in the Middle East developed writing around 3400 BC, and a few hundred years later the Egyptians were doing the same.

The Egyptians may have developed their system of symbols independently of Sumeria, but it is ultimately impossible to say.

A HUGE thread of Bill Bernbach’s incredible advertising wisdom.

Bill Bernbach is the father of modern advertising. Much of the current structure of the ad industry and the values we try to instill in our work were greatly influenced by him. Most of us wouldn’t be here if not for Bernbach.

1) “I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.”

2) “We don’t do just snob ads, we don’t do just short copy ads, or just long copy ads, or any particular style. If you want to know what makes DDB ads, it is a fresh and original idea that conveys the advantage of the product memorably. We have no formula.”

3) “No matter how skilful you are, you can’t invent a product advantage that doesn’t exist. And if you do, and it’s just a gimmick, it’s going to fall apart anyway.”

1. Like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Patrice Lumumba was the independence leader & the first Prime Minister of the DRC. He was a pan-Africanist, an African nationalist, & the casualty of the US-Soviet Cold War. He was first deposed by Mobutu Sese Seko in 1960, with support from US & Belgium.

2. Then assassinated in 1961 by a firing squad, under the command of Tshombe Katagan regime. A mutiny broke out in the army shortly after Congolese Independence. Lumunba had requested aid from US & Belgium, to stop the “Katangan secessionists” that had risen from the mutiny.

3. Both US & Belgium refused, prompting Lumumba to turn to an unlikely foe - The Soviets.

This provoked the United States, & Belgium (US ally). The Katangan secessionists carried on with support from Anglo-Belgian mining company, & a large contingent of Belgian military chiefs.

4. Katangan army was quickly organized & trained by Belgium. Mercenaries of various nationalities were equally engaged. In the end, the DRC was engulfed in a conflict - the CONGOLESE CRISIS as we know it today. It is arguably an exact replica of the Biafran Genocide in Nigeria.

5. Belgium officially apologized for its role in Lumumba’s assassination in 2002. Mobutu went on to seize power for himself in a second coup in 1965. He received massive military, diplomatic & economic support from the US, France & Belgium.

The Boxing Day Test match is two days away, so I suppose it is better to tell the tale of the greatest Boxing Day cricket the world has ever seen.

That happened in 1953, at Ellis Park, Johannesburg (the photograph is from another match).

Warning:
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I often get carried away even while reading this, let alone writing. There may be overdose of emotions.

First, as usual, some context.

Despite playing Test cricket for over two decades, New Zealand were yet to win their first Test match.
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Jack Cheetham, on the other hand, was turning South African cricket around.

They had drawn the 2-2 in Australia and had won 1-0 in New Zealand.

And they won the first Test of this series, at Durban, by an innings.
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The South African attack already consisted of swing bowler David Ironside, the untiring Anton Murray, Hugh Tayfield.

Arguably the greatest South African spinner, Tayfield still holds the record for the most consecutive dot balls in a Test (Bapu Nadkarni does not hold this).
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And in Durban, they had drafted in Neil Adcock.

Standing at six foot six and gifted with long arms, Adcock could make the ball take off even from a good length.

And he was quick.

The first South African to take 100 Test wickets, he would finish with a bowling average of 21.
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In 1907, Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts decided to try and prove the existence of the soul.

All he needed was a set of scales, some people willing to die under his supervision, and some dogs.

(Thread, sources here: https://t.co/eAjnXjI4Rj)

The doctor, for reasons he didn't take time to note down, believed that the soul had physical mass and thus it should be possible to weigh it.

He had the imagination to believe that a piece of soul magically departs your body when you die, possibly to live in a heaven-like place for eternity, but thought it unrealistic that this couldn't be weighed like a bag of flour.

He decided the best way to prove his theory would be to weigh somebody at the precise moment they snuffed it, and then immediately after. The weight disparity would be the weight of the departed soul.

MacDougall looked for volunteers that would be up for the job of dying, and, shortly before that, having their last act on Earth be a fucking weigh-in.

🧐Some videos of Ali Alexander from a recent interview published on January 12th, 2021.

Some interesting history and confessions from the man himself.

Thread

Mohammad Ali Jinnah was born on December 25, 1876 in Karachi.
#HBDFoundingFatherOfPak

A lawyer and politician by profession he served as the leader of All-India Muslim League from 1913 until Pakistan’s independence on August 14, 1947.
#HBDFoundingFatherOfPak

Following Pakistan’s independence Jinnah held the position of the nation’s first governor general until his death on September 11, 1948.
#HBDFoundingFatherOfPak

The day will dawn with special prayers in the mosques for the peace, progress and prosperity of the country.
#HBDFoundingFatherOfPak

A change of guards’ ceremony will also be held at the mausoleum of Quaid-i-Azam in Karachi.
#HBDFoundingFatherOfPak

Everything is appalling, so here are some stories about the Navy's Coastal Forces (Motor Gun Boats and Motor Torpedo Boats) in WW2.

These small vessels had very powerful engines which were complex and hard to maintain.

As a result, base engineering staff sometimes had to remain on board to continue their work during operations.

On one occasion, an Engineering Officer was labouring in the machinery space when the boat went into battle.

Not having seen one before, he opened the hatch to look around. Every gun was in action, and enemy tracer zipped past his head. The noise was appalling.

The officer (unnamed in the story, but perhaps a nautical Wooster) took in the scene for a moment, then turned to the CO and remarked, 'Oh I say! Madly *war*, isn't it?', before returning to his tinkering.

During the raid on Dieppe an MGB picked up a German airman, who was sent below under armed guard.

So today is 260th anniversary of Third Battle of Panipat and this is a thread to commemorate it.
-Starting
It all started with the death of Aurangzeb & end of Mughal-Maratha war of 27 years. After this, Marathas started showing their power in central India.
-Then came the
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golden phase of Marathas under Peshwa Bajirao who spent more life in war camps than in his palace. Undefeated for 40 battles, he expanded Maratha boundaries crazily & whole India feared Maratha forces. His military formation was unparalleled & Marathas invested heavily
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in Artillery under him. Then after his death, his passion to expand the empire was kept alive by his sons, nephews and other Maratha Generals. The empire was now a confederation of equally powerful Maratha chiefs like Holkar, Shinde & others. They all came under banner of
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Maratha Chhatrapati & even expanded empire on their own in the name of Maratha king.
-Sons & Nephews of Bajirao- Elder son Balaji Bajirao became Peshwa and younger son Raghunathrao won Lahore, Delhi, Attock & most of Punjab in favour of Marathas. Muslim son of Bajirao
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kept in check several kingdoms from his stronghold in UP. You all have seen all these characters as kids in Bajirao Mastani. Nephew of Bajirao, Sadashivrao Bhau was a proven military strategist himself who imposed Maratha supremacy on Deccan kingdoms. Empire looked
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