A Fountain of Useless Information: Business, Sports & anything else interesting or funny. Un-retired accountant, economist, stockbroker. Former Series 4 license
Goalies with multiple Stanley Cups, multiple Vezina Trophies, and a Conn Smythe in NHL history:
Andrei Vasilevskiy
Patrick Roy
Ken Dryden
Bernie Parent
That’s it. That’s the list.
Sure, 4K is nice, but there was nothing like sitting two inches away from one of these sweet bastards while your mother predicted you’d be as blind as Ray Charles by the following Thursday.
This Stanley Cup Final Game has been among the most statistically impossible games of all time.
Zero goals in first.
Four by one team, including a hat trick, in second.
Four unanswered goals by opponent in third.
No goals in first OT.
The contrast between Reagan’s speech at Point-Du-Hoc and Pete Hegseth today are like two different galaxies. Listen to how much reverence he gives to the same allies that Hegseth attacks.
BREAKING: Ivanka Trump has been nicknamed “Marie Antoinepstein” for looking like a vacuous nepo baby spending her husband’s corruptly obtained blood money from Israel and Saudi Arabia to steal protected land from Albania and build a new island resort for billionaire pedophiles.
The idea was brilliant. The execution was catastrophic.
Allied planners knew that the men hitting the beaches of Normandy would be cut apart without armor support in those first critical minutes. The solution was the DD tank. The Duplex Drive Sherman. A standard 33-ton Sherman tank fitted with a collapsible canvas flotation screen and two small propellers bolted to the rear. Raise the screen, drop into the water, swim to shore, lower the screen, start shooting. Tanks arriving with the first wave, ahead of the infantry, suppressing German positions before the ramps even dropped.
The concept worked perfectly in testing. The designers had one requirement: waves no higher than one foot.
On the morning of June 6th, 1944, the waves off Omaha Beach were six feet high.
Nobody stopped the launch.
At 5:40 AM, the 741st Tank Battalion began dropping their DD tanks into the English Channel, six thousand yards from shore. More than three miles of open water, in seas that were six times rougher than the tanks were designed to handle. The first tank hit the water. The canvas screen, designed to hold the weight of a Sherman afloat, was immediately overwhelmed. Waves crashed over the top. Water flooded in. The tank went down.
Then another. Then another.
The canvas screens collapsed like paper bags in the swell. Tanks that had been designed to float became 33-ton anchors the moment they hit the water. Crews inside had seconds. Some got out through the hatches. Many did not. The tanks took them straight to the bottom of the English Channel.
Some crews managed to get a radio signal out as their tank went under, warning the following units not to launch. The warnings either did not get through or came too late.
29 DD tanks were launched by the 741st Tank Battalion that morning. 27 sank before reaching the beach. The entire left flank of Omaha Beach, where the 1st Infantry Division was assaulting, had five tanks to support it. Five. Against fortified German positions housing hundreds of machine guns, 88mm guns, and mortars zeroed on every inch of that sand.
The infantry arrived first. Alone.
What happened next at Omaha Beach, the 2,400 casualties, the slaughter in the first ten minutes, the near-total destruction of Company A, is inseparable from the loss of those tanks. They were supposed to be there. They were supposed to be firing at German positions while the ramps were still closed. Instead they were on the bottom of the Channel with their crews.
The story of the 743rd Tank Battalion makes it worse.
The 743rd was assigned to the western sector of Omaha Beach. Their LCT flotilla commander looked at the sea conditions that morning, looked at the waves, and made a different decision. He refused to launch his tanks into the water. Instead he drove his LCTs directly onto the beach and dropped the ramps in the shallows. The tanks rolled off onto sand.
Nine tanks were knocked out by German fire during the assault. But they were there. They were fighting. The infantry had armor.
At Utah Beach, the sea was calmer, protected from the prevailing winds. 28 of 32 DD tanks launched there made it ashore. The infantry had support. Utah Beach cost 197 casualties. Omaha cost 2,400.
The sunken tanks of the 741st Tank Battalion still lie on the bottom of the English Channel off Omaha Beach. They have never been raised. Divers have visited them. Inside some of the wrecks, they found what they expected.
They are still there today, 82 years later, three miles off the coast of Normandy, on the bottom of the sea.
Today is June 6th.
Remember them.
Apparently, Ivanka and Jared thought they were Christopher Columbus when they discovered an island in Albania, which was protected lands.
Albanians are saying we don't want your dirty money!
#albaniaisnotforsale
$QQQ was -4.8% on Friday which is a rare occurrence. Going back to the 2008 low, only 2 such cases happened within 3 days of an ATH: June 11, 2020 and September 3, 2020. In the 1st case it recovered quickly and made a new ATH. In the 2nd case it was the start of a 14% drawdown.