@robertanglen@lauragersony@azcentral Lol. I think he has property in AZ too. It appears his wife and son are running the property in TN, She lives there. He lives here. Makes sense after the sexting stuff.
@Espo He wears purple and teal wrist and arm guards every game. Kendrick hates that. A jab at Jerry and a salary dump? Nothing would excite Kendrick more.
NEW: Starting with the graduating class of 2031, California will require ALL high school students to take a personal finance course.
Financial literacy is a life skill, and we’re making sure every California student is well-prepared.
BREAKING 🚨: The D-backs are finalizing an agreement with Korean two-way PHENOM Junsang Eom per @francysromeroFR.
Eom was widely considered the #2 prospect in the upcoming KBO Draft.
He plays SS and pitches 👀
@nick420_ward@Garrett_Archer Pratt has visibility (outside of Fox News) that Hilton doesn’t. Most folks in CA will dismiss Hilton. Pratt is converting folks in real time in LA. Again, not saying anything is rigged. But if they were going to do it, they would risk it in LA before they would statewide.
@GoldyHappens The long knives for Ketel have been out at 98.7 for nearly 2 seasons. Ketel wears purple and teal nearly every game. Kendrick is enough of a tub of dongs to want to see Ketel gone over this. The Walmart guy can’t eject shitty ass Kendrick soon enough.
The waiters dropped their trays and ran. I reached for where my sword would be.
A pack of them was closing on one table in the corner, clapping in rhythm, moving as one. Years of war read it at once: a coordinated strike. A man sat at the center. They had come for him.
I rose to defend a stranger.
Then they began to chant. "Happy... birthday... to... you." A war hymn. Slow, deliberate, sung straight into the face of the marked man — who, to his great credit, did not run. He sat. He let them come. A warrior's death.
(I will admit it. My eyes stung. I did not know his name. I saluted him anyway.)
I joined the line. I clapped. I do not abandon a man in his final hour.
I clapped harder than anyone. When they reached the part where the whole house must sing the name, I sang it loudest, though I had only just learned it was "Greg." I sang GREG like it was the last word I would ever speak.
A waiter leaned toward me. "Sir, do you... know Greg?"
"I do now," I said. "We have stood together."
They brought out fire. A single candle, on a small cake, carried like a sacred flame. So it was true. The end had come. I bowed my head.
Greg blew it out himself. Calm. Unflinching. He put out his own pyre with one breath, and the whole house cheered his courage.
I have never respected a man more.
I stood and applauded until my hands hurt. I would have carried him out on my shoulders. A waitress had to gently explain that Greg was, in fact, turning thirty-one, and was going home after this. Alive.
A man should be honored as if every year were his last. That is the only way to deserve the next one.
They have asked me not to sing at the other tables.
So tell me, America — when the drums come for a man and he does not run, what do you call that, if not the bravest thing in the room?
@Garrett_Archer Easy. She wins against another Democrat and the spotlight is immediately off her and the race.
She probably beats Pratt too. But she will go through 4 months of hell to do so.
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.