Dear Maga: 20190305 Open Topic

Folks, I thought I’d commemorate “Beastly Banned Wagon Day” with this Very Open daily thread.
It has been Six Hundred Sixty Six days since I was banned from SunDirge’s Eeyore Tree, also known as Can’t Tolerate Heterodoxy, and Banhammer Central.

(Not that I’m counting, mind you.)

Hey, sometimes 666 is just a number. Something has to fill the gap between 665 and 667.
 
More on the positive side apparently this Thursday is day 777 of the Trump Presidency.  That’s Eeyore Tree, ordinal counting where inauguration day is day 1, which is not at all the way I’d count…if I were to count, which (mind you) I don’t.

– – · –

– – · –

OK, on to the usual boilerplate:
It’s Very Open here, so you can comment on that, or anything else…and the way things have been hopping lately, there will be plenty else to talk about. Of course Q is at the top of the list, until the top blows off the pressure cooker.
But the point is, you can say pretty much what you want provided it’s civil.
But there is an exception: Don’t give the internet censors an opening to take this place out (see the September 1 Daily Thread for what I’m talking about).
And of course the other rules:

1. No food fights.
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.

And need I say, if you should happen to see any nuclear warheads (though I can neither confirm or deny any of them are around), do not molest them.  Especially don’t put any hypothetical bullet holes in the hypothetical warheads.  We may or may not have plans for them.

– – · –

Things certainly seem to be coming to a boil…there’s a tension building. But we don’t really know what, exactly, and we certainly don’t know what the Opposition is going to do. Nor what our side will have to do to counter it. I know some people have even put out videos warning that martial law (!) will be coming, but they reassure us it will be Our Side doing it, so just go along with it!  Of course, in the end, it’s all speculation.  But it wouldn’t hurt to be prepared.
Of course (I’m going to be a pessimist for one paragraph) it’s still possible the Opposition will strike first attempting to take out our President (and I must repeat: OUR President) before he can do it to them.
Well, they can try.
Whatever it is, however it goes down…we must stick with POTUS. Even if it looks like he’s down and on the way out at some time during the chaos, we must stick with him. Sometimes that’s all it takes to defeat a coup; the people behind it generally rely on there being enough people accepting that they’re in charge now that a sense of “accompli” sets in.  So don’t accept it.
But the most likely outcome, I think, is that we’ll come through this and “they” won’t.  I don’t know if my fantasy of heads on pikes down the Washington Mall will come to pass, but “they” won’t make it.
Maybe it will even start today, who knows? Wouldn’t it be just lovely if Beastly Day 666 of the Banned Wagon turned out to be a really bad day for them!

– – · –

OK, it’s trivia time!
US Highway 666, whose shields are shown in the topic banner, was nominally a side branch off of US 66–three digit numbers (except 101) were for loops and spurs. But between 1942 and 1992 it was quite a side branch, extending from 66 south to the Mexican border just inside the eastern edge of Arizona, and from 66 north from just inside the western edge of New Mexico, up into Colorado then turning west and ending barely inside of Utah. The 30 mile stretch of 66, which crossed the Arizona-New Mexico border, between the two turnoffs was co-signed as 666.
But that part of 66 became I-40, and in 1985 the US 66 designation was simply dropped.
US 666 became known as the Devil’s Highway, and many people either believed it was cursed, or worried that their businesses would suffer because many people believed it. In 1992, the south branch in Arizona was changed into an extension of US 191. In 2003, the rest of the highway got renumbered as 491.
Another reason for the change is that the signs got stolen so often that they became a noticeable drain on the highway department budget. In fact, within five days after the renumbering to 491 was announced–every single 666 sign was stolen, in some cases the entire sign assembly, signpost and all, was simply cut off with a chainsaw.
A lot of residents along the highway took a sort of pride in the number, and proudly used the name Devil’s Highway, sort of like how we use “Deplorables” with pride.  Even many who take the 666-Devil connection seriously didn’t want to make the change.  But change, it did.

– – · –

License plates: Colorado until 1981 used numbers of the format AB-1234, then switched to ABC-123. The ABC-123 numbers were coded by county (plates starting with K and L were for El Paso County, which contains Colorado Springs and a lot of Deplorables, for instance). At least some counties ran out of their allotment, so we went to ABC1234 in 1992. Cops found those hard to read, so we went from green mountains/white sky to white mountains/green sky in 2000, and switched numbers and letter groups, 123-ABC. We ran out of those (even after adding Q (!) to the allowable letters) in 2015, so we switched back to ABC-123, using any plate number that had never been issued (including all possible combinations with Q).  For about two years here, every new license plate issued had a Q in it!  In mid 2018, apparently (though I didn’t notice until Monday night), we went to ABC-D12 format, and it’s gone all the way up to BEX-C99 as of January 20.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.  I got this info from Wikipedia.

– – · –

And of course no post of mine would be complete without a coin. Here’s a silver dollar from the very first year that America issued them. Today, it’s known as the “Flowing Hair” type to distinguish it from the later types where Liberty’s hair was bound in some way, with a ribbon or cap.  The design was used into 1795 (when they went to a new portrait on the obverse); the 1794s are considerably rarer than the 1795s.

Producing coinage was seen then, as it is now, as a sign of sovereignty.  Getting the mint up and running (it produced cents and half cents the year before) was a big piece of that; imagine holding a dime in your hand in the mid 1790s.  (Dimes were a totally new denomination–although dollars existed before the US did, no one had divided them into tenths before.)  You turn it over and see UNITED STATES OF AMERICA on it and an eagle, and you look back over the previous 30 years ago, and remember the runup to the the American Revolution and the War of Independence that, several times, had us on the brink of defeat…and now, after all that, finally you get to see the name of your new country on a silver coin.
What will people see, twenty or thirty years from now, when they look back the late 2010s?