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Stella's Place 
Stellars….
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I love winter. Which is a good thing, considering where I live. Thanks Lucille, beautiful images.
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YW, Tundra! The 2nd image which looks like it might be beside a lake or sea is so very appealing with the sun coming up and shining through the trees That Snowy Owl is beautiful and likely quite the hunter. And the last one with that winding stream! Love to be there to see each in person.
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I can remember how that cold, snowy air smells!
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I don’t expect too many Americans are “into cricket”… but there is a charity auction to raise money to assist Australian victims of the HORRENDOUS FIRES (that are still ongoing)
There has been loss of life, and property (also I hear millions of animals). The smoke/haze actually got as far as Auckland New Zealand with orange skies yesterday.
A slim chance, but maybe some “Rich American” would like to bid for Shane Warne’s “Baggy Green” cap 🙂
A baggy green cap belonging to Sir Donald Bradman once commanded $425,000 when auctioned off for charity.
Shane Warne is recognized as one of the top cricketers of all time.. currently still involved with coaching and commentary
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When cricketers are first selected to play a Cricket Test Match for their country that are given a (numbered) cap. (They are “capped). (Shane Warne is the 350th guy to play for Australia). It is a bit of a big deal. There is a market for Sports memorabilia. All cricket nations have a unique cap. The Australians in particular make a big deal of it. The Australian players all wear the green cap on the first day of a (5 day) test match.
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Current Bid = A$276,500
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Today is the official start of the Mardi Gra season. Tonite the Phunny Phorty Phellows kick the season off with their merriment (and booze) sotted streetcar from the barns on Willow downtown to Canal Street and back. This marks the official opening of the excessive drinking period from 12th nite thru Shrove Tuesday. The revelers then have 40 days to try and shake the hangover.
Feb 25th for Mardi Gras this year, a pretty good season length, especially as a few parading krewes have dropped out or moved to another city due to the expense of parading. The really big parades, Orpheus, Bacchus and Endymion are running, they have lots of bucks-down out-of-towners who fly in and pay the mucho moolah to participate, and Zulu will be out and running too.For more good news the 3 state-of-the-art trauma rooms will be up and running so your chances of surviving if you get shot, stabbed or pushed under a float are way up.
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Also, today is the birthday on Joan of Arc, the patron saint of New Orleans. A Krewe is holding a parade at this very minute in New Orleans.
https://joanofarcparade.org/photo-gallery/2018_photos/
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Now that looks like a cool parade. 🙂
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I’ve been doing research on various aspects of life in London during World War 2…this has some interesting info on rationing of food and other essentials…
BRITISH WARTIME FOOD
https://www.cooksinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/rations-1943.jpgs
https://www.cooksinfo.com/british-wartime-food/
One of the first questions I had was regarding how many pilots and crews from the 8th Air Force ended up in POW camps. I haven’t yet found the answer because the first couple stories I read were so harrowing that I was sick from rage, literally for hours.
One of the most horrific articles (which I will NOT link to) was about a concentration camp in Switzerland…YES, SWITZERLAND…that supposed “neutral” entity which held some of our young men in the most gawd-awful conditions you can imagine and even some you couldn’t. Apparently the American military allowed the Swiss to handle the punishment for the men who broke Swiss law by trying to escape out of Switzerland so they could return to fight the war (as they were duty-bound to try, I believe).
The first camps the men were in definitely were harsh but nothing like the camp used for those caught trying to leave the country. The Swiss later said they didn’t know of these awful conditions. I seriously doubt that. The dedicated member of a Swiss Nazi group that ran the camp was put on trial after the war. I must have been too angry while reading the story to make note of what sentence he got. Maybe later when I can stomach it, I’ll check for the result.
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Sorry, but I forgot to take off the “s” after the “jpg” in the first link on the British food rationing. The second link works fine.
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We still use my grandmother’s ‘chili’ recipe from WWII London and I still eat ‘baked bean sandwiches’, another Brit ‘delicacy’.
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Baked bean sandwiches with mustard are something we ate when I was a kid, but always made with homemade baked beans.
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The Brits generally use a tatty vegetarian bean but when my family discovered American baked beans there was a new star in the bean sammich love affair.
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My mother loved bean sandwiches. She made them with pinto beans, pork n beans, any kind of bean, I think.
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My DH loves beans on toast. Still a favourite of many poor students trying to get by.
Just heat up a can of Heinz baked beans and pour over 2 slices of toast. YUM! Cheap and cheery!
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I’ve made baked bean po’boys for myself using homemade or doctored store-bought beans. Fits right in their with my other fav, a double-fried french fry po’boy. A carb lovers splurge, even mo’ betterer with a good beef gravy on it.
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Potatoes are my fav. Made this last night:
Put oil and butter in a 9″ square pan. Melt in the oven, then add some sriracha sauce.
Put potatoes chopped into 1″ pieces (no need to peel) into the dish
Add garlic powder (or fresh garlic) and shredded parm to the dish, then mix everything together.
Bake about 40 minutes at 375.
Had leftovers with eggs for breakfast.
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The US military personnel held in neutral countries are not considered to be POWs, thet were internees and even now are not accorded any of the privileges that POWs are. They are not awarded the POW medal not bdo they get VA medical treatment accorded to former POWs.
e had a neighbor in New Orleans who was an 8th AF vet and was shot down and interred in Sweden. His treatment was far better than that received by those interred in Switzerland but the Swiss were heavily leaning towards the Germans, just look at how their banks knowingly hid Nazi treasure for decades. Anyway, the US government still doesn’t officially consider WWII internees to be POWs and, in the late 90s when my ‘POW’ neighbor was fighting for VA benefits, refused to consider changing their status. Our Senators broached the issue but the greater Congress just tabled the matter and that’s where it sits.
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There was a special “dispensation” from a generally unconcerned Pentagon for the men from this particular Swiss concentration camp which might as well have been a Holocaust camp or the worst Japanese hellhole for Allied personnel.
On April 30, 2014 143 men received POW status and medals. Only eight of them were able to attend the awards ceremony at the Pentagon, most of the others having already passed away without recognition or benefits of any kind. This belated ceremony would not have happened except for one prisoner’s son, Army Major Dwight Mears, who fought for 15 years to gain recognition for these heroes. Switzerland should have been made to pay them all reparations. When the President goes to Davos, he should tell their officials that.
As for the Swiss populace, seems that nearly 70% belonged to Nazi groups or sympathized with them. You won’t get any present-day Swiss to admit to that.
And, yes, those Allied men held in Sweden were treated much better as it was a true neutral nation, not a pretend game player.
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I left dealing with the issue when the neighbor died, he was the only one I’d ever known who was interred in a neutral country. Congress’s lack of desire to deal with the issue, especially considering the few numbers involved, is still a mystery.
The Swiss, I believe, were sympathetic with the Reich but feared the damages siding with the Reich would cause in not only the loss of business from Allied nations but the possibility the that the Reich would plunder their gold deposits as it had other nation’s. They did placate the Reich and gain a toehold in defense were the Reich to invade by buying war materials from Germany. And the Swiss did shoot at/shoot down Allied aircraft overflying Switzerland.
As bad as conditions were for the Allied POWs in Switzerland they at least came home. At the end of the war Churchill and Roosevelt allowed the Russian to keep the Allied POWs in territories they overran. Russia did return some bomber crews that crash landed in their Far Eastern areas but those airmen and soldiers in what was to become the Eastern Zone were abandoned to Russian labor teams.
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One of the facts that’s particularly maddening is that when the U.S. military officers in charge of checking on neutral countries’ “detainees” were told of this camp, they didn’t believe the men’s stories. “Why, Switzerland wouldn’t do such a thing,” was generally the response.
There is no excuse whatsoever for this camp to have been created for so-called incorrigibles, let alone for American pilots and crewman who tried to escape the country’s oppression. So the Swiss were scared shitless and didn’t want to get Germany mad enough to invade! Certainly no one wishes to experience such a fate. But their kissing up to mass murderers makes me puke.
Eventually some properly concerned U.S. officers set up an underground to get as many men out of Switzerland as possible.
We’ve condemned France for decades for surrendering, allowing Vichy, etc. Why no condemnation of Switzerland? The Biblical adage of “Love of money is the root of all evil” certainly applies here.
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people generally don’t think of the SS as it really was: a huge business. It removed the gold from camp residents right down to their teeth and everything from their belongings to their hair was sold. The SS rented out camp detainees to German business and looted the countries they invaded. Much of this booty was returned to the Reich treasury but a lot of it was left with the SS and a lot of that was stashed in Switzerland and the West was trying to track that for decades. A lot of SS members got payouts for some time post-war.
I think a good part of the Reich and Switzerland deal was that principals in the Reich didn’t invade as they needed a place to stash their private wealth, a place that, especially as it became obvious that Germany wasn’t going to win, would be safe until the bad guys could resurface and get their money. Switzerland was worth more to the big guys in the eich as a neutral body than occupied one.
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Mornin’ y’all!
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Mornin’ WeeWeed!
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Mornin’ Stella!
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Rapid explosive cyclogenesis creating a bomb cyclone followed by a period of global attitude change.
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Mornin’ Z’s! Another nice day in the works.
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Yeah, not bad. Nice breeze, clear skies and 71-degrees predicted. A cold nite tomorrow but a week of ‘tropical plants out at night’ weather to follow.
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Good day to you, WeeWeed! How about sending the entire traitorous Left on a little trip to Tehran next Monday…Nancy and Chuck could lead the delegation.
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Afternoon Lucy!
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Are people being blocked from this site? Where is everyone? Mornin’ to all who are here, all 4 of you.
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Good morning!
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I can’t get into my reply notifications (that little bell in the upper right). Just another fun day with WP.
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I’m not generally getting here until after blog-supper (mid afternoon, my time), so enjoying the reading but not commenting as much.
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Interesting happening last night, for the second time in a few months a police pursuit that began in adjacent Jefferson Parish ended up in New Orleans with a crash. The fleeing perps ran straight into one of the centuries old live oaks in City Park – oak tree ‘one’, perps ‘zero’.
As the Jeff Parish sheriff explained, it’s not unusual for New Orleans criminals to steal a car and come into Jeff Parish to rob cars and houses. For the second time in just a few months an attempt to arrest some of these perps has resulted in a high-speed chase into New Orleans, both having ended in crashes. This is causing some concern inside of the City Hall as the city has banned NOPD from instigating high-speed, or even low-speed, pursuits except in limited cases and then they can’ be engaged in without permission from an on-duty supervisor who puts his career on the line.
The city’s between a hard place and a rock here as they do not like the neighboring parishes carrying high-speed pursuits into NOLA but they can’t stop them, they have the right to hot pursuit. Meanwhile the NOLA criminals know that as long as their crime is not known to the responding officers as a violent one they can speed off and get away before the officers can maybe get permission to pursue. Nonviolent crime in New Orleans has now become a quasi-legitimate small business.
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In California, they would cut down the trees so the escapees wouldn’t run into them.
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In Virginia, set to become California East, they’re looking at raising the threshold for grand larceny from $500 to maybe as high as $2500. That would allow thieves to steal more valuable stuff without having a felony on their records. Now you get hit with a bill that your insurance may not fully cover, you’re out the loss between what you get in restitution and what you have to pay to replace the item and the thief gets a charge no worse than spitting on the sidewalk.
This artificially lowers the crime rate too as those thefts under the $2500 limit are no longer FBI reportable, the metric used mostly to gauge crime rates, there’s a one-time crime drop that politicians get to claim and you get the shaft.
How we lower crime be decriminalizing crimes.
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They’ll do coming that minorities are most affected by the laws so we have to rewrite them to be fair. 🙄
You know, because punishing then for harming others is Not Fair.
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Yeah, the nation’s done trying to excuse their bad behaviors and is rapidly moving to just decriminalizing most of them.
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I’m stick between “don’t give NOLA ideas” and “maybe this is how we have CA clean up the brush before the next for session.”
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Rolling my eyes…
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UPDATED: JAN 2, 2020 – ORIGINAL: OCT 29, 2009
Bernard Law Montgomery
War footage of Americans and British forces in North Africa…with apparently no recreations and no acting it up for the cameras…(that’s generally why I hate Hollywood war movies, with a few exceptions)…just real human beings doing a real job that could leave them dead at the end of the day…even so, the censors did clean up the footage for the newsreels shown in theaters at the time….
https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/bernard-law-montgomery
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TRUMP wants to pull troops out… and he is “forced to do it”……OH NOES
The left gonna now have to DEMAND troops stay!!
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The letter (verified)
https://i.imgur.com/lhMiwzU.jpg?1
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The letter (verified)
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rumpole, no signature…
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Yeah. That was pointed out and there has been a denial now.
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But wait… now there is a denial?
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Somebody jumped the gun, perhaps?
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Looks like it…. but the Iraqi Parliament voted for US troops to leave (and chanted “Death to America”) It’s not binding, but I have read the Iraqi President agrees.
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😕
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LOL Unfortunately, too real. 😦
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I mean to say “IRAQ”… But Iran works too. 🙂
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LOL I missed that.
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Good one, rumpole! Few others deserve breaking more, though there’s a really long queue for same.
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Good night! God bless!
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