30, To most I am known as Brother Bear, this is meant to be my running commentary of my fractured take on modern life.
Durango, CO
Joined November 2015
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Courtland Hopkins retweeted
A very happy Trafalgar Day to all our followers and friends. The Prayer Book would, of course, have been used throughout Nelson’s fleet and the “Prayers to be used at Sea” would, no doubt, have been recited on the eve of battle.
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
“Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground”
— Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto XIV
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
“What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”
- Cormac McCarthy
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
“What is glory to a man who has conquered every enemy but cannot conquer the death waiting for him?”
- The Iliad, Homer
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
This Simpsons joke about Catholic v Protestant heaven is welded into my brain, especially because in the narrative of the show Catholic heaven is meant to be undesirable despite Christ himself preferring it
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
Are you doomscrolling? Stop doing that, and read this poem by Robert Frost instead.
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
Only people who have never worked with engineers or customers would think his job is useless.
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
The ultimate Greek tragedy: finding the love of your life a second after you kill her.
Achilles didn't fall in love with Penthesilea until the moment he took her helmet off. And her last breath.
Winning the fight, losing your mind right after.
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
The worst Japanese ship of WW2 might be the biggest one they ever built as a carrier. Shinano. It lasted 17 hours at sea.
Shinano started life as the third Yamato-class super battleship, a sister to the largest battleships in history. Then came Midway in June 1942. Japan lost four carriers in a single day and suddenly needed flight decks far more than big guns.
So the half-finished battleship was converted into an aircraft carrier.
When she was done, she displaced around 72,000 tons fully loaded. The largest aircraft carrier ever built until the US launched the nuclear-powered Enterprise in 1960. Her hangar deck was armored. Her flight deck was armored. On paper, she was nearly unsinkable.
Japan kept her so secret the Americans barely knew she existed.
But by late 1944, Japan was running out of everything. Steel. Fuel. Skilled workers. Time. American bombers were starting to hit the Tokyo area, and the Navy wanted Shinano out of Yokosuka before she got caught in the shipyard.
She was commissioned on November 19, 1944. She wasn't finished.
Many of her watertight doors hadn't been properly installed or tested. Air tests on compartments had been skipped. Some of her pumps weren't working. Cable and ventilation holes between compartments hadn't been sealed. Her crew was green and barely knew the ship. Shipyard workers were still aboard.
Nine days later, on the night of November 28, she sailed for Kure to finish fitting out, escorted by three destroyers. She had no aircraft aboard.
Out in the dark was the submarine USS Archerfish.
Her captain, Commander Joseph Enright, had a lot to prove. On his previous submarine command, his patrol was so unproductive that he asked to be relieved. This was his second chance.
Archerfish spotted a massive shape on radar and started chasing. A surfaced submarine was slower than the carrier. Enright should have lost her.
But Shinano kept zigzagging to dodge submarines. Every zigzag cost her ground. For hours, the two ships played cat and mouse, until the zigzags brought the carrier straight back toward Archerfish.
At about 3:17 a.m. on November 29, Enright fired six torpedoes. He set them to run shallow, hoping to roll the giant over instead of hitting her armored belt.
Four hit.
Aboard Shinano, the captain wasn't worried. Four torpedoes against a converted Yamato hull? He kept going at speed, which forced even more seawater through the holes. The unsealed passages let the flooding spread from compartment to compartment. The untrained crew couldn't contain it. Counterflooding failed. She started to list.
Late that morning, Shinano rolled over and sank. Over 1,400 men went down with her, including her captain.
She never launched a single aircraft in combat. She never fired a shot at the enemy.
Enright reported sinking a large carrier, but the Navy initially gave him credit for a much smaller ship. They didn't believe Japan could have hidden anything that big. Only after the war did they confirm what Archerfish had actually done.
The commander who had once asked to be relieved for failure had sunk the largest warship ever destroyed by a submarine.
It's still the record today.
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
Oct 20, 1781. Yorktown, Virginia. The day after Cornwallis surrendered, George Washington writes his orders to the army. He doesn't brag. He thanks his men, frees the ones in the stockade, and tells everyone to go to church.
He began by congratulating the army on the victory and thanking everyone who made it happen. He singled out the French by name, Comte de Rochambeau and his officers, and Admiral de Grasse, whose fleet had trapped Cornwallis in the first place. He thanked his own generals, the engineers, the artillerymen, and the regular soldiers who'd dug the trenches and stormed the redoubts. He even thanked the Virginia militia and Governor Thomas Nelson.
Then came the part that tells you what kind of man he was. To spread the general joy to every heart, he wrote, every man in the army under arrest was to be pardoned and released. Deserters, men accused of misconduct, all of them. Nobody was going to sit in confinement on a day like this.
He ordered divine services to be held the next day in every brigade. He asked the troops who weren't on duty to attend with seriousness and gratitude, because he believed the victory showed a surprising and particular interposition of Providence in their favor.
That was Washington. He had just won the war, and his instinct was humility.
Around the same time, he picked a messenger to carry the news to France. It was the Duc de Lauzun, the dashing French cavalry commander whose hussars had beaten Tarleton at the Hook across the river. Lauzun sailed for Europe to tell King Louis XVI that his gamble on America had paid off.
And Washington invited the defeated British officers to dine with him. Cornwallis eventually joined in. There's a story, told by Washington's step-grandson years later, that Cornwallis raised a toast at one of these dinners. He said that when history was written, Washington's fame would rest less on the banks of the Chesapeake than on the banks of the Delaware. He meant the night crossing to Trenton, back when everything seemed lost.
Whether those were his exact words or not, it was true.
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
You may change your perspective on the First World War when you realize the French lost as many men in WW1 as the US has in every war they've ever fought.
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
82 years ago today, General Douglas MacArthur wades ashore during initial landings at Leyte in the Philippine Islands.🇺🇸
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
"All right, Hans, time to go. But he ate my last meal."
"If that's the worst thing that happens to you today, consider yourself lucky."
"Are you really allowed to execute people at a local jail?!"
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
Here's Why Reading Old Books Is More Important Than Ever:
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. … None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.”
— C.S. Lewis, On the Reading of Old Books
Courtland Hopkins retweeted
“Let the fools have their tartar sauce.”
I love that line. It's such good writing.
This is another really good season 2 episode. Homer scams his health insurance for a miracle hair growth formula. It works, and it changes his life for the better, in every way, but the good times don't last.
It's so typical of the 2nd season and how it plays with the simple moral messages of traditional sitcoms. Long story short, having hair did make all the difference (hence the episode's name), and Homer's just fated to be bald and disappointed. But of course, it's not all bad and he should count his blessings.