Illuminati-R-Us

Heid the Ba wrote:Is this Post-Wall when the Ossies and Soviets stopped the three western powers from accessing East Berlin/DDR? Which they had no right to do in terms of the treaty. The US commander sent tanks to the border so the Volksarmee did the same and it turned into a staring contest until cooler heads prevailed? If not then I have no idea.

Ah yes, probably either that or the release of the awful song Take My Breath Away.

Well played, that was a terrible song, and used in a film I’ve never seen.

Tangentially the 1980s BAOR Berlin Brigade vehicle camo is one of the coolest ever. I’d link to it but I’m on an iPad and I’m tech challenged.

Heid the Ba wrote:Well played, that was a terrible song, and used in a film I’ve never seen.

I thought I was the only person who hadn't seen it. Glad to know I am in esteemed company.

I would put that in the context of the Wall (I did in the exam, and I got an A, so there), so no. The one I refer to is between the airlift and the Wall. It contains a name that is ver well known around this here cozy living room of an internet board.

Fair enough, in that case I have no idea and a quick internet search didn’t help either.

After a further search would the anniversary be coming up in a couple of weeks?

No, rather in half a year.

It is interesting that the English-language Wikipedia parses this differently than the German one, so you maybe the historiographic tradition is different in the Anglo-American world , and you may not have heard of it is a stand-alone event.

It is such a bitter irony that the building of the Wall froze the Berlin conflict and actually seems to have stabilized the situation in the Cold War. Naturally, I tend to refuse to see it that way, but this is how it seems to have worked out. Could wee have a 70s détente - or really, coud we have had anything erlse but a WWIII - if the Berlin loophole had continued to exist?

Khrushchev + 10th November + ultimatum = crisis. I must admit I hadn’t heard of it, and without the reference to our mono-shoed colleague and the date I would still be none the wiser.

Chrushchev ultimatum its.

This stuff, btw., is the reason why I am inclined towards the U.S. so much more than our International Man of Mystery. In those years, Uncle Sam said, we dare you to put one Red Army or Volksarmee boot on West Berlin soil at the wrong time, and everything will go "poof" the same day. Is that worth it, yes or no? They said it, and they meant it, and they got away with it even though they had their pants full to the brim. That's how I was given the opportunity grow up in an open society and enjoy re-unification 40 years later.

June 5th, 1989:

We used to talk about a "Tienanmen solution" when protests started in GDR that fall. We were a lot luckier. From modern China's perspective, a cynical funtionary might say: Who said violence doesn't solve problems? If the cowards in the DGR politbureau had had guts and carried on the way we did, they would still be sitting pretty in their seats, and everyone would admire the GDR's economic success by now.

It's a rather uncomfortable image.

Happy 109th, Virginia Apgar. You made all of us better doctors for inventing that little clinical score. If progress is going from primitive via complicated to simple, you gave us huge progress.

June 7th, 1978: Scotland 1 - 1 Iran in the World Cup. Not our best result.

Lianachan wrote:

Heid the Ba wrote:Well played, that was a terrible song, and used in a film I’ve never seen.

I thought I was the only person who hadn't seen it. Glad to know I am in esteemed company.

Way to go guys, look what you have brought upon us, today news of upcoming Top Gun 2.

g-one wrote:

Lianachan wrote:

Heid the Ba wrote:Well played, that was a terrible song, and used in a film I’ve never seen.

I thought I was the only person who hadn't seen it. Glad to know I am in esteemed company.

Way to go guys, look what you have brought upon us, today news of upcoming Top Gun 2.

Oh shit! My bad, sorry everybody.

One for Arneb.

June 8th, 452 - DDD invaded by Attila the Hun.

Oh, thanks
Good to know there was a time when we could win against Italy.
However, DDD is for Dirty Diving Dago, one of the pejorative epithets flung around here for a certain Portuguese footballer of some proficiency

Arneb wrote:Oh, thanks
Good to know there was a time when we could win against Italy.
However, DDD is for Dirty Diving Dago, one of the pejorative epithets flung around here for a certain Portuguese footballer of some proficiency

Ah, sorry - I'd assumed it was a coded reference to your achilles heel in football tournaments.

Also:

8th June, 793 - a group of Vikings selflessly rescue the treasures of Lindisfarne from a great fire, after the monks mysteriously and spontaneously died.

God does indeed move in mysterious ways.

June 13th, 1917 - first daylight air raid on London, by Gotha G.IV bombers, causes 162 deaths and 432 injuries. People tend not to know that air raids against Britain were a thing in WW1, I find, but there were around 50 raids by airships and about 30 from bombers.

Yep, a huge scare out of all proportion to the damage done.

Heid the Ba wrote:Yep, a huge scare out of all proportion to the damage done.

It had an exciting randomness to it, though - exemplified by the airship that thought it was bombing London but was actually bombing Hull (a mere 150 miles or so further north).

Shit jobs in history Number eleventy billion: Top gunner on a Zeppelin. It's night, you're on top of a big leaky bag of hydrogen, you're armed with a machine gun. Any fighter attacking you is equipped with tracer bullets. Is it better to ride the burning Zeppelin down, jump into the North Sea at night from several thousand feet or parachute at night into the North Sea wearing enough clothing to keep you warm at several thousand feet at night?

Yeah, screw doing that.

With the World Cup looming:

June 14th, 1216: Prince Louis of France captures the city of Winchester and soon conquers over half of the Kingdom of England.
June 14th, 1404: Welsh leader Owain Glyndŵr, having declared himself Prince of Wales, allies himself with the French against King Henry IV of England.
June 14th, 1667: The five day long Raid on the Medway by the Dutch fleet ends, resulting in the worst ever defeat of the Royal Navy.