The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper™ • Editor: Steven Fowle • Founded 1756 by Daniel Fowle
admin Monday, June 28, 2010 — Thanks to our favorite webcam, over at PortsmouthNH.com, we got a glimpse of this ship coming in at about 2:45 p.m. We’ve got a deadline looming and the weather looks a little dicey, so we may not post again before the next paper goes out.
Friday, June 25, 2010 — On June 25th in 1218, the notoriously cruel Crusader Simon “The Buzzard” de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, died at Toulouse when his head was crushed by a stone catapulted in his general direction by women and girls of the town. While the Seige of Toulouse cost “The Buzzard,” his life, it also gave birth to an expression still popular today, as, for instance, on bloodthirsty, pro-military T-shirts: “Kill them all, let God sort them out.”
Thursday, June 24, 2010 — On this day in 1968 Gen. Earle G. “Bus” Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an audience in Long Island that “the enemy has lost whatever chance he had of taking South Vietnam by military force.” On that day, roughly two-thirds of the Americans who would eventually be killed in Vietnam were still alive. Seven years later the North Vietnamese demonstrated that there are stronger things at work in the world than military force.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010 — Twenty-two years ago today James Hansen testified before Congress that the world’s climate was changing, and we had better do something about it. Two years ago he appeared before Congress again, reiterated his message of two decades earler, and added that we had used up whatever slack time we may have had. Aside from additional climatological studies, the only significant development during this period has been the growth of a climate change denial industry. The National Academy of Sciences has now published a paper, “Expert credibility in climate change,” finding that “97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in …
Tuesday, June 22, 2010 — On this day in 1969, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River ignited and burned for twenty minutes, nearly destroying two railroad bridges. It was perhaps the dozenth time in 101 years that the river had burned, but this time, Randy Newman wrote a song about it. [audio:https://www.nhgazette.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/burnon.mp3|titles=Burn On] Thank God the blight of petrochemical pollution of our vital waterways has ended. Who says there’s no such thing as progress? Wait a minute …. What’s this? HBO apparently aired a documentary yesterday featuring a Colorado man setting the water streaming from his kitchen tap on fire.
Monday, June 21, 2010 — The Summer Solstice arrived on schedule at 7:28 Eastern, and to mark the occasion our Starving Artiste, Mike Dater, has shared with us the little drawing shown above. In our paper, of course, since we’re too cheap, lazy and hidebound to use color, we can only reproduce Mike’s work in black, white, and shades of gray. So it’s a pleasure to have an excuse to show off his palette here. For more, see this link. It was on this day in 1977 that H.R. Haldeman, who once described himself as “Nixon’s son of a bitch,” first heard from the inside …