News that makes you chuckle

Folks who read my blog know that I love history. I will get back to Lewis & Clark in a few weeks. I have almost finished their journals.

But today I want to address a couple of odd occurrences I came across while reading one of my favorite books: Uncle John's Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader.  You can't beat it for great entertainment.

The topic today is food fights. Did you know that in the 1840's an Argentine dictator tried to annex Uruguay and ordered his navy to blockade Montevideo? The Uruguayans ran out of ammunition and in desperation raided the galleys of their ships and found very old, hard Edam cheeses and loaded the cannons with it. It is said the Uruguayans won the skirmish. Must be true because it is still a S. American country today.

My next one is about the potato in WWII. A destroyer, USS O'Bannon encountered a Japanese sub in 1943. The crew shot off the sub's conning tower so it couldn't dive but the captain brought it so close to the destroyer the big guns couldn't be aimed at the sub. When the Japanese men came topside the O'Bannon crewmen pelted them with potatoes. The Japanese thought they were being pelted with grenades, threw weapons overboard and scuttled the sub. When the O'Bannon was decommissioned in the 1970's a plaque was made to commemorate the event and donated to the ship by....drum roll please...the Maine potato growers.

Now that is part of history but in today's local paper there was a short piece about Chinese ships using water cannons on Philippine fishermen using a disputed shoal. Well, I guess it could have been worse.

Honestly folks, you can't make this stuff up fast enough.