A Bob's Life: Monday Musings

Monday, March 11, 2024

Monday Musings - March 11, 2024

1. The second Monday of March has arrived. The Ides of March are lurking for on Friday. I hope you survived the transition to Daylight Saving Time! There are 42 Mondays remaining in the year.

Chris, Sue, George, and Me
Big Cork Vineyards, Rohersville, MD
March 10, 2024

2. A visit to Big Cork Vineyards is enjoyable event. We attended our Case Club pick-up event yesterday with friends and enjoyed a beautiful, but cold and windy, afternoon of food and wine. We enjoyed great wines and were some of the first to taste a new wine which is based on an Italian grape. It was the initial harvest of this limited production wine. Vermentino is a bright white wine with almost no color.

3. Fact of the Day. The Washington Post Fact Checker found that in the four years of his presidency, Trump offered a total of 30,573 untruths — an average of roughly 21 erroneous claims a day. (The Washington Post)

4. The cold Maryland pre-Spring has not deterred Chris and me from seeing friends and family. We return to the expected 80-degree days of Florida tomorrow.

5. Spring begins in 8 short days!

6. Why does a former president believe that he can meet with a head-of-state, in the U.S. who does not visit the President? The former president met with Viktor Orban on Friday and laid out a plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war. (Reuters) He will starve Ukraine for weapons allowing Russia to overrun the country. This would likely create a situation in Ukraine akin to the 1932-1933 starvation by Stalin that killed between 3.5 and 7 million Ukrainians. If the U.S. does not get aid to Ukraine now, we will have the blood of democracy seeking patriots on our hands.

7. Today in History. On March 11, 2011, the largest earthquake ever recorded in Japan causes massive devastation, and the ensuing tsunami decimates the Tōhoku region of northeastern Honshu. On top of the already-horrific destruction and loss of life, the natural disaster also gives rise to a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The Fukushima disaster is considered the second-worst nuclear disaster in history, forcing the relocation of over 100,000 people.

During the emergency, each of the three operational nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant shut down successfully, but the backup power and cooling systems failed. As a result, residual heat caused fuel rods in all three reactors to partially melt down. As crews searched the rubble for survivors and the nation reeled from the earthquake and ensuing tsunami, the nuclear disaster unfolded over the course of several days. The facilities where Reactors 1 and 3 were located exploded on March 12 and 14, respectively, prompting the government to evacuate everyone within a 20km radius. Another explosion in the building housing Reactor 2 on March 15 released even more radiation, and thousands of people left their homes as workers used helicopters, water cannons and seawater pumps to try to cool the overheating facility.