Monday 11th August

My afternoon nap yesterday, when I woke up at 9.30 pm, rather upset my sleep pattern, so awoke late this morning and it took me a while to get up and get going.

I didn't do very much until I went out to the movies in the late afternoon with Pattisue to see 'Deep Sea Challenge'.   There are two or three films on at the moment I'd like to see, but she mentioned this one first.  It is hard to describe it, words like 'amazing' and 'incredible' don't really do it justice.  At the beginning of the film there were dives to the wreck of the 'Titanic' and it was amazing to see how well preserved it was.    We also saw the 'Bismarck'.   Then near the end of the film the submersible went down 36,070 feet, the deepest place on earth.  Commercial airlines fly at 35,000 feet. 

 

The creatures floating about down there were extraordinary too, nothing like anything we have seen before.  Pattisue said she would have liked to have seen more of them.   I was overwhelmed with admiration at the technology, the cameras and the devices for collecting rocks and things.  

 

This day in history............11th August 1961.

 

The Berlin Wall started to go up, evolving from a fence of barbed wire to a heavily fortified concrete wall with lookout towers, the purpose of it being to prevent the East Germans from defecting to the West.   It has been said - with all the chaos of illegal immigrants and children streaming across the southern border here with Mexico - that a similar fortified wall should be built down there to keep the immigrants out.

 

There is a lot of heated debate as to whether the immigrants, and particularly the children, should be allowed to come, or be sent back.  There are in the US 3,144 counties and county equivalents (they are called parishes and boroughs in Louisiana and Alaska) and someone calculated that if each county took 22 children, they could be easily absorbed.   Which might be true, but my thought was that the stream of immigrants wouldn't stop after the 22 children per parish were settled, they would still be streaming across.  And what happens then.   But as it is not my tax dollars supporting them, it's not my problem, I'm just commenting.

 

The Berlin Wall came down in 1989.