It's a self-deprecating term that U.S. railroad enthusiasts use for themselves. The etymology seems uncertain, but I imagined it was a play on words which combines being "rabid" with the unwanted tendency for steam locomotive boilers to "foam" if their water is contaminated.

It's missing the entire Philippines!

"No, nothing was ever here, why do you ask?"

This battle and the Norwegian king's escape from the invasion are dramatized quite well in the 2016 Norwegian movie "The King's Choice", which is how I learned about this incident!

Although Oslo still eventually fell to the Nazis, the extra time bought by the fortress's defense was enough for Norway's government and royal family to evacuate from the city and prepare to flee the country as its government-in-exile.

Between the torpedo damage and the fires, Blücher would sink in the fjord within two hours. (The wreck is still there today.) The German ships it had been leading decided that discretion was the better part of valor and retreated.

The fortress commander then followed that up with two torpedoes (just as ancient as the guns!) from the fortress's underground torpedo battery. Both hit, taking out the ship's engines and starting flooding.

Said officer took one look at the approaching German ship, decided it was up to no good, and had the fort fire two well-aimed shots at Blücher from its forty-year-old heavy guns; these set the ship afire and disabled its own main guns.

As Blücher led the German ships up the Oslofjord towards the city by night, it came near the Oscarsborg Fortress, an aging fortification armed with obsolete weapons from the turn of the century, manned by young trainees, and commanded by an old officer on the verge of retirement.

The real record for an ignominiously short combat career among Nazi German warships has to be the heavy cruiser Blücher, which during the Nazis' invasion of Norway in April 1940 was sent to help take Oslo, the capital. Blücher was practically brand new; this was its first combat operation.

*opens refrigerator*
*struck by blinding solar glare*
*closes refrigerator*

Image from the Ancient History Memes subreddit: a 3x3 sandwich alignment chart that has structure and ingredients axes, with each axis running from "purist" (classic form or ingredients only) through "neutral" (broader scope allowed) to "rebel" (anything goes). The upper left extreme is "hardline traditionalists", like the BLT. In the center is "true neutral", like the hot dog. In the lower right is "Radical sandwich anarchy", like the Pop-Tart. Here the focus is on the upper right, labeled "Structural Purist, Ingredient Rebel", which would require two container pieces with "toppings" in between, but no limit on what those are. The example "sandwich" for this is the Siege of Alesia, the climactic battle of Caesar's wars in Gaul, in which Caesar used his Roman army to surround and lay siege to the Gaulish fort of Alesia, while surrounding itself with similar siege works to keep out the Gaulish army sent to relieve the fort. So, a circle-shaped Gauls-Romans-Gauls sandwich.

...sieges of Alesia
www.reddit.com/r/Ancient_Hi...

I had the advantage of a late start, being born in 1968. :D

Rome was indeed built on a swamp, and I have no doubt that it was a very unhealthy city in ancient times, but as for "sewage was non existent", that's just not true. Rome was one of the pioneers of sewer system engineering. Look up "Cloaca Maxima".

May you be haunted by the Force ghosts of thousands of aggrieved Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives.
(Wait, would they be "Force ghosts", or "Tractive Effort ghosts"?)

Try it again, *keeping* the hyphen in "-ai". Just make sure to separate it from the previous word with a space.

It acts as a negative flag, just like any other Google negative flag, such as when you'd add "-site:reddit.com" to *exclude* results from Reddit.

The "-ai" has to be a separate word. In the example you show, it's combined with another word, so it has no effect.

I ate up _The Rising Sun_ in my teens (early 1980s), and it led me to see that war as a quasi-independent conflict in its own right, rather than a mere WW2 "theatre". Do you have any suggestions for correctives or alternatives to Toland, particularly from Japanese perspectives?

I don't think he expressed such sentiments in _The Rising Sun_, only the now standard accounts of U.S. lack of preparedness. His later (1982) book _Infamy_ might have leaned that way, but I've never read it—nor do I particularly wish to.

One strange irony: the model of German acoustic torpedo that WATU's Wrens devised this tactic to counter had been codenamed "Zaunkönig" by the Germans, which happens to mean "wren".

Though Dreadnought Holiday has already replied, to be more precise, the torpedo must get close to the ship before its acoustic sensors can "hear" it. So the ship turns hard at high speed to move itself far aside from the torpedo's path before the torpedo can get within "hearing range".

Though uphill on a comet doesn't count for much. If you even step a little too lively, you could launch yourself into orbit by mistake. Wheee... 🙂

And his wife (Carole Lombard) had died in the crash of an airliner (also transporting Army Air Corps personnel) on her way back from a war bond tour. That crash was in part the result of navigation aids being turned off by new wartime security measures. (Look up "TWA Flight 3" for details.)