Commander Charles Herbert Lightoller, R.N.R.
Born in Lancashire, England, UK in 1877. Went to sea at thirteen, starting out in masted sailing ships, and survived a shipwreck, cyclone, malaria, near-drowning, panning for gold in the Klondike, herding cattle on the Canadian prairies, riding the rails as a hobo, another storm at sea on a cattle boat, a prank that got him temporarily banned from Australia (yes, the whole place; Boer War jokes aren’t funny DURING the Boer War), and that was BEFORE becoming the highest-ranking officer aboard Titanic to survive the wreck (where he was sucked under, trapped on a grate, made it back to the surface, and spent most of the night keeping twenty men balanced on an overturned collapsible boat).
After that, he spent World War I being the first spotter in an airplane launched from a ship to locate an enemy fleet, surviving another wreck (Oceanic) and the subsequent court-martial, pioneering depth-charge fishing, and eventually retiring…to take tours of German ports and sketching them for the Admiralty, and then piloting his personal yacht to Dunkirk to evacuate 130 trapped soldiers during the evacuation. And that’s skipping the part where he convinced a young lady passenger on the Australia run to make the return trip as Mrs Lightoller. Action, adventure, daring-do and a droll sense of humor about the whole thing. And pretty darn hot to boot.
This is the beautiful flying ace Natalya Fyodorovna Meklin née Kravtsova (1922-2005), a much decorated World War II combat pilot in one of the three women-only Soviet air regiments (nicknamed the ‘Night Witches’ by their German opponents). She joined the air force at age 19 and flew 980 night missions by the end of the war. After the war, she graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages and worked as a translator until retiring. Among her many awards was the title Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest distinction in the Soviet Union, awarded personally or collectively for heroic feats in service to the Soviet state and society.
Natalya was also a huge fan of classical literature, particularly Tolstoy, and became a writer herself.
One of Charles Darwin’s last experiments - which seems more like a trick the evolutionist enjoyed playing on his dinner guests - has been re-born for the digital age. The pioneer of evolution owned a collection of photographs showing a French man having his face contorted via electrical shock treatment into a range of grimaces. So, sometime between dessert and a final drink in Darwin’s home in 1868, Darwin would confront his poor dinner guests with the images and ask them to describe the man’s expressions in their own words. Darwin then collated the responses from the 24 guests who, instead of walking out or punching him on the nose, answered his questions, and used these ‘crowd-sourced’ answers to find the definitive description for each face. Darwin’s main aim was to determine whether ‘universal core emotions’ exist, and whether they are modified through-out history and by language or culture. MORE.
Muslim family in Linxia, China. Linxia is known as the “Little Mecca of China” for its Muslim majority
