Wasn’t the Weekend fantastic? Sunday morning was the 6th day this month that we’ve had mornings start at 62 degrees or less in July. And you know what? Not one record was broken. While certainly not something we expect all of the time, its really not that unusual and that fact alone is another reason why its so very difficult for people who really have lived in the South to be convinced that Louisville is in the South. As for the days ahead, this isn’t going to last. After all, nothing lasts forever whether it be for good or not so good. Look for temperatures and humidity to return to seasonal averages but no 90′s this week. A weakness in the atmosphere will work its way from the east across the eastern US that will destabilize things sufficiently that we will see a risk of wandering afternoon t’storms from say, Tuesday through Saturday. A front on Friday and Saturday I suspect will enhance the prospects. Kinda tough forecast though since its odd to have something going east to west so stay tuned.
On This Date in History: Doesn’t it seem like there is so much bad news these days? And not just bad news but weird, scary stuff that makes one wonder if the world has just gone haywire. Jeffery Dahmer and cannibalism? What about Andrea Yates and killing her children in her Houston home bathtub a few years ago? Well, hold on just a second. Dahmer was not the first person in America to do the things he did, though he did do more of it. And Yates was not the first woman to go and kill her kids. For instance, on this date in 1918 in Nebraska, Della Sorenson killed the first of seven people. She poisoned her sister-in-law’s infant daughter. Two years later, she knocked off her mother-in-law. Then she killed her own daughter and her husband. Four months after her husband’s death, she marries again and her former sister-in-law shows up with her new son. She poisoned him too. The sister-in-law had to have problems of her own because she showed up a few months later with another baby but this one lucked out because the poison didn’t work. After her poison tote board reached 7, Della was finally caught in 1925 when her plot to poison two neighborhood kids with cookies was foiled. She confessed to it all saying, “I like to go to funerals.”
Now that ranks up there with the kid who several years ago shot a bunch of people on a Monday because he didn’t like Mondays. But with modern, instant electronic news these days, stories of all kinds get flashed around the world. TV has lots of newstime to fill, talk radio has to fill its time to talk about something, there’s all sorts of space on the Internet to fill and newspapers and magazines have to come up with something to get your attention from all the other medium available. It worked on me as I have bought newspapers in the grocery store so I could read about the space aliens meeting with President Clinton and Rush Limbaugh!
Anyway, the result is we hear of every little tid bit of any topic that might catch our attention. I found a webpage(see…all kind of stuff in cyberspace) that has but a few of the gruesome, gory and idiotic heinous crimes over the centuries. There’s even one from the early 17th century in Hungary where Elizabeth Bathory was found to have killed hundreds of young girls simply for the sadistic pleasure of torture. The servants who helped her were tried and executed immediately but because she was royalty (a Countess) she was merely incarcerated. From 1660 to 1678, Catherine DeShayes of Paris admitted to tossing over 2500 infants to their fiery deaths in a witchcraft ritual. She didn’t have a royal title so she was burned at the stake, and its probably good for the people of the world back then they did not have cable TV because they would probably think that their world was going crazy, just like many do today. Truth is, mankind has always had awful messed up things happen because of the awful, messed up things some people do….it’s just no one knew about and there was no one around to talk about it every second of every day. If Anna Nicole had died in 1636, would anyone know?
Here’s the notorious website if you dare to care:
Your mention of all horrible things that people pe… Your mention of all horrible things that people perpetrate on one another made me think of a comment a history professor at U of L once made to us.
He was talking about the invasion of the Mongols through Southwest Asia and into the fringes of Europe. He spoke of the relentless scourge that they were, nothing has been recorded to date to compare with them. He said something to the effect of:
“The Mongols brought new levels of pain and suffering to all the peoples they encountered. Their emergence on the world scene was quite rapid, almost as if they were running from something. As rough and tumble as they were, as ruthless as treatment of those they conquered was, it makes you tremble to think of what could have had them on the run. The world, I suppose, is a much place for never having found out.”
kyplowboy