Chris Carosa, Author at Chris Carosa

Too Many Mondays

By Chris Carosa on January 6, 2026

There’s a reason your car doesn’t enjoy driving in the city (or Henrietta). Too many red lights. Vehicles can’t stand all that stopping and restarting. That’s what red lights force them to do. Cars hate it. And it kills your miles per gallon, too.

What red lights do to cars, Mondays do to you.

Think about it. Why has no other day been as universally panned as Monday? From Garfield’s primordial meme—“I hate Mondays”—to the Carpenters’ immortal “Rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” the first day of the week has always borne the brunt of criticism.

Unlike what the calendar implies, Sunday is not really the first day of the week. For those unfamiliar with the Bible, the Lord’s Day is the seventh day of creation; ergo, the seventh day of the week.

But even if you go by your day planner, at the very least, Monday remains the first day of Continue Reading “Too Many Mondays”

Posted in Gray Matter Musings, Memoir of a Real Life, The Compleat Carosa Commentaries Tagged Bible, Black Friday, Carpenters, Christmas, deadlines, December, efficiency, end of year, Garfield, I hate Mondays, Monday, New Year's, red light, Thanksgiving, The Lord's Day, The Rainy Day, traffic

I Memorize The Meaning, Not The Lines. Should You?

By Chris Carosa on December 30, 2025

That’s the difference between a great actor and a great writer. And never the twain shall meet. To be fair, there’s also a difference between a mediocre actor and a mediocre writer.

On the other hand, there is no difference between a bad actor and a bad writer—you keep watching and reading them for the same reason you keep watching those videos of old-time steam engine train wrecks. They’re so bad they border on slapstick.

But this is about where great writing and great acting (and, if you’re a Sinatra fan, great singing) do not intersect. Both please you. That’s how they’re alike. We’re not interested in Continue Reading “I Memorize The Meaning, Not The Lines. Should You?”

Posted in Great Speaking Tips

To The Tables Down At Yorkside… (Wherever That May Be)

By Chris Carosa on December 2, 2025

The Game. For generations, it has been referred to as that. Not the “Yale Harvard game” (or alternatively, depending on your home team, the “Harvard game” or the “Yale game”). No. It’s simply “The Game.”

That tells you everything you need to know. There may be other contests throughout the fall sports season. There may be other seasons throughout the year. But only one singular event towers above all. It is the ultimate game (or at least it used to be—but more on that in a moment) of the Ivy League football season. It is the world’s second-longest continuous football rivalry (behind only Yale-Princeton). Students, alumni, and affiliates of New Haven and Cambridge eagerly await the finale between Yale and Harvard.

But it’s not just “a” game; it is “the” game, as in “The Game.”

People don’t go merely to watch a classic eleven-on-eleven gridiron clash. They go for Continue Reading “To The Tables Down At Yorkside… (Wherever That May Be)”

Posted in Memoir of a Real Life, The Compleat Carosa Commentaries Tagged 2019, Betsy, Blue, Brown, Cambridge, Cantab, Catarina, Cesidia, Crimson, Davenport, Eli, FCS, football, hockey, Ingall's Rink, Ivy League, New Haven, Peter, Princeton, tailgate, The Game, Villanova, Yale Bowl, Yale Harvard, Yale Harvard game, Yorkside, Youngstown

Hate Is The Real Root Of All Evil

By Chris Carosa on November 18, 2025

Hate is evil. You agree, don’t you? Of course you do. They say “money is the root of all evil,” but they’re wrong. It’s hate—not greed—that corrupts the soul. Hate is the real root of all evil.

“Money is the root of all evil” is really just a message from those who hate the wealthy. They cherry-pick words from the Bible to change the original meaning. The Bible (1 Timothy 6:10) actually says, “For the love of money is the root of all evils” (or “all kinds of evil,” depending on your translation). Whatever your preferred reading, it’s not the coins. It’s the obsession with them.

Money may sometimes corrupt the soul, but hate almost always does. Worse, hate burns hotter than greed ever could. It melts away the conscience like acid eating through steel.

And if you don’t believe the Word of Scripture, perhaps you’ll listen to Yoda’s words: “Fear is Continue Reading “Hate Is The Real Root Of All Evil”

Posted in Gray Matter Musings, The Compleat Carosa Commentaries Tagged Abraham Lincoln, Bible, Bronx cheer, C.S. Lewis, charity, Civil War, devil, Envy, Episode I, fear, French Revolution, hate, Hobbes, Jar-Jar Binks, liberty, logic, malice, passion, pride, Red Sox, Reign of Terror, resentment, root of all evil, Salem Witch Trials, Saul of Tarsus, Second Inaugural Address, Spanish Inquisition, St. Aquinas, St. Augustine, Star Wars, The Phantom Menace, The Screwtape Letters, Timothy, virtue signal, war of all against all, Yankees, Yoda

Should You Preserve The Past Or Forge The Future?

By Chris Carosa on November 11, 2025

Forbidden Planet movie poster, Copyrighted by Loew’s International. Artists(s) not known., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Down below stretched the New York Central’s vast sun-bathed Seneca Yard. As far as my four-year-old eyes could see, the many trains slow-danced with smooth precision. Colors. Shapes. Mesmerizing! “When I grow up, I want to be like the man who owned all these trains,” I told my mother. “Why?” she asked. Without hesitation, I said, “Because he must be rich!”

Yet, hours later, I sat with my father and watched our small black-and-white TV. News of the latest NASA manned rocket launch captivated me. I moved closer to take in all the details. Countdown. Fiery thrust. Liftoff! I spun around and said, “Dad, when I grow up, I want to be an astronaut.” “Why?” “Because it must be fun!”

Would you rather preserve the past or forge the future? Or is that the wrong question? Yesterday’s lessons and tomorrow’s dreams don’t collide in the present—they converge.

Longtime readers know my split soul: classic fallen-flag railroads and space exploration. Born fifty years too late—or fifty years too early. Yet, here I am, existing in the limbo between rails and rockets—and I wouldn’t trade it.

Consider how differently they move—and how each shapes how we think. Trains vs. rockets. Rails vs. launch windows. Memory vs. momentum.

Trains offer little flexibility—you’re confined to the fixed rails they run on. You know the route, trust the schedule, and sleep easy. There are no surprises. For example, New York Central’s premier passenger train, the 20th Century Limited (1902–1967), was famously on time—often to the minute.

That precision breeds confidence. Sure, there might be delays, but the interconnectedness of things makes it less likely that the entire system will collapse. Short of a catastrophe. And even then, the rails remain.

Flipping the script, space travel is literally limitless—the whole “to infinity and beyond.” You can reach into the unknown and “boldly go where no man has gone before.” It’s thrilling. It’s liberating. It’s also a little dangerous. You never know what alien landscapes might reveal.

But aliens may be the least of your worries. It’s a Twilight Zone–like twist: the real danger isn’t aliens. It’s you. The temptation to wander takes you off the beaten track (pun intended). It can also take your mind off the ball. Mission drift. Failure mode. One detour and you’re lost in the void.

You don’t have to be a Dr. Dolittle to see how this pushmi-pullyu dynamic works. Preserve the past? Or forge the future? It’s a constant tug-of-war. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

How does this false choice play out in the real world? In Hollywood-speak, should we opt for the sure thing of endless sequels until the characters become monotonous, or should we instead risk creating a brand-new story?

But wait—that’s still binary thinking. Instead of either/or, it’s more of a yin/yang engine. The past is the fuel. The future is the fire. Together, they launch you forward.

Exit Hollywood. Enter Elizabethan theater. Shakespeare’s The Tempest debuted in 1611. The first scene of Act 2 features Antonio uttering the phrase, “What’s past is prologue.” His meaning is quite deceptive. He seeks to convince Sebastian to commit murder because the Fates—history—have set the stage for just such an act.

Ironically, the original meaning of the phrase “What’s past is prologue” has not been preserved. It has morphed into a more literal interpretation. Whereas its original use called upon the classical gods of fate, today it simply refers to how our historical past can reveal our future. Think Napoleon’s winter in Russia—and Hitler’s, a century later.

Philosopher George Santayana famously summed this up when he warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Not quite as pithy as Shakespeare, but just as memorable. And it has more bite than “if you are mindful of the past, you will plan better for the future.” That’s what the Greek rhetorician Isocrates advised Cyprian Prince Nicocles in the 4^th century BC. It’s not fate. It’s pattern recognition.

It’s not just empires. It’s your life, too. “History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” This oft-repeated quote, attributed (probably wrongly) to Mark Twain¹, embodies this key idea: the past gives us echoes, if not exact replicas. We can learn from the spirit of the past without being bound by its letter.

When “the past is prologue,” then “the future is now.” This latter phrase implies the future is happening right before our very eyes. We might not recognize it until sometime later. As with rocket ships, the future launches to sites unknown. Unburdened by the unmoving iron path of the rail, the future wanders from the straight line into a world—or pattern of thought—no one ever expects (like the Spanish Inquisition).

Just like the future, the “Spanish Inquisition” non sequitur came out of nowhere. To some extent, the same could be said of the entire Mark Twain footnote.

The future is all about these unexpected turns—the rabbit holes that make discovery possible. You can’t schedule serendipity. You can’t plot creativity on rails. But you can learn to recognize when you’ve stumbled onto something valuable—and that recognition comes from pattern, from memory, from the past.

It’s not a choice between preserving the past and forging the future. These are not distinct world lines—separate timelines that never touch, like mainline tracks that run parallel forever. Rather, they represent an interconnected mosaic that converges in the present. We look to the rails of the past to jump into the future. It’s like taking a hit radio series and adapting it for TV (like The Lone Ranger—a 1933 radio hit reborn as a 1949 television series). Same story. New medium.

Or like using Elizabethan prose (say, The Tempest) as the launching pad of a classic sci-fi spectacle (Forbidden Planet).

The old becomes fuel for the new. It’s the ultimate in recycling.

What does this mean for you?

Study the rails. Pack the rocket.

That four-year-old on the bridge understood something profound: the trains below weren’t relics—they were launching pads. The astronaut dreams didn’t replace the railroad dreams. They were fueled by them.

The past isn’t prologue.

It’s propellant.

¹ Here’s what Twain really said: “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Well, either Twain or his coauthor Charles Dudley Warner said that in The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day, the 1874 novel that they co-wrote. Some years later, Twain wrote, “no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often.”

If you’re interested, the closest approximation of the “rhyme” quote comes from a 1965 essay by psychologist Theodor Reik, who wrote: “It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.” This is the likely original source of the “rhyme” quote, as it wasn’t until the January 25, 1970, edition of the New York Times that the quote was first attributed to Twain. Did the Times try to preserve the past that wasn’t?

Posted in Gray Matter Musings, Memoir of a Real Life, The Compleat Carosa Commentaries Tagged 20th Century Limited, Antonio, Buzz Lightyear, Charles Dudley Warner, Dad, Dr. Dolittle, Elizabethan Theater, Forbidden Planet, George Santayana, Hitler, Isocrates, Kenny, Mark Twain, mom, Monty Python, Napoleon, NASA, New York Central, Prince Nicocles, pushmi-pullya, Ridge Road Bridge, rockets, Russia, Sebastian, Shakespeare, Spanish Inquisition, Star Trek, The Lone Ranger, The Tempest, Theodore Reik, Toy Story, trains, Twilight Zone

From Tun To Tripoli, Happy 250th U.S. Marines!

By Chris Carosa on November 4, 2025

Samuel Nicholas, First Commissioned Marine Officer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Happy 250^th U.S. Marines! Two hundred fifty years of storied tradition and patriotic inspiration. Wow. If only they made a movie about them. Or a TV series.

I always wanted to be a Marine. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the dress blues. That’s the uniform I wanted for my G.I. Joe. I was just the right age to get the first run of G.I. Joe action figures. Mine was the “Action Soldier.” It came in Government Issue regular army green fatigues, not the camo fatigues of the Marine version. Still, I insisted he was a Marine. My family allowed it; after all, I was only five years old. (FYI: My uncles and great uncles were in the Army and Air Force. They didn’t seem to mind.)

Naturally, I still have my Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. lunchbox. The thermos was broken when we purchased it. Those were the days when it was hard to return things. Besides, I would never use it as the school sold milk for lunch. To prevent confusion, my brother got the Rat Patrol lunchbox. His thermos worked. Maybe he used it once or twice.

Back then, the Marines weren’t yet 200 years old. This year, on November 10, 2025, will be the 250^th birthday of the Marines. At least that’s the official birthday according to the official website of the United States Marine Corps.¹

It’s true that the Second Continental Congress passed a resolution establishing the “American Marines” on the cold afternoon of Friday, November 10, 1775. The resolution reads plain as day (from the official journal):

“Resolved, That two Battalions of marines be raised, consisting of one Colonel, two Lieutenant Colonels, two Majors, and other officers as usual in other regiments; and that they consist of an equal number of privates with other battalions; that particular care be taken, that no persons be appointed to office, or enlisted into said Battalions, but such as are good seamen, or so acquainted with maritime affairs as to be able to serve to advantage by sea when required; that they be enlisted and commissioned to serve for and during the present war between Great Britain and the colonies, unless dismissed by order of Congress: that they be distinguished by the names of the first and second battalions of American Marines, and that they be considered as part of the number which the continental Army before Boston is ordered to consist of.”²

Two entries just before that order hint at a bolder strategy. They reveal an intriguing story that, if it worked, might have shortened the war and pushed America’s border farther north.

The committee responsible for offering the resolution spent a week working on it. It was in response to a letter received from the inhabitants of Passamaquoddy, Nova Scotia, who “applied to the Congress to be admitted into the association of the North Americans, for the preservation of their rights and liberties”³

The first resolution authorized sending two persons “to Nova Scotia to enquire into the state of that colony, the disposition of the inhabitants towards the American cause…”⁴ The second directed General George Washington to attack Nova Scotia should he judge it “practicable and expedient.”⁵ Congress then ordered a copy of the three resolutions to be sent to Washington.

The General was miffed. As politely as possible, he returned his reply to Congress on November 19, 1775. He wrote, “I beg leave to submit it to the consideration of Congress, if those two battalions can be formed out of this army, whether this is a time to weaken our lines, by employing any of the officers appointed to defend them on any other service? … would it not be eligible to raise two battalions of marines in New York and Philadelphia, where there must be numbers of sailors now unemployed?”⁶

Congress received and read the letter on November 27. By November 30, they agreed with Washington and passed a resolution to suspend the raising of two battalions of Marines from the army.⁷ Oddly, they likely made their decision on November 28. That was the day they commissioned Samuel Nicholas as the first officer of the Marines.⁸

With an amphibious assault of Nova Scotia off the books, attention turned elsewhere. The British suspected the Marines would target New York or Boston. The Marines made the move in Nassau. Not the one in Long Island, but the one in the Bahamas. They seized the British armaments there without firing a single shot.

Legend has it that Nicholas was responsible for recruiting the first few companies of Marines at Tun Tavern. It’s more likely he used his connections with the Schuykill Fishing Company and the Fox Hunting Club to recruit. A look at the membership rolls of those two organizations shows some overlap with the first group of Marines.⁹

After the success of Nassau, Nicholas returned to Philadelphia. In the summer of 1776, Congress tasked him to recruit four companies of Marines. He did something smart. He recruited the recruiters. One of those men, Robert Mullen, inherited Tun Tavern (a.k.a. “sign of the Old Tun”¹⁰) from his father in 1775, Thomas “Mullan” (yes, the names were spelled differently in the primary source material).¹¹ Other contemporary sources spell Robert’s last name as “Mullan.”¹²

Mullen (or “Mullan”) not only ran the Tun, but he was also a member of the Masonic lodge that met there. Between being an innkeeper and active in a fraternal organization with more than 300 members, Mullen was the perfect man to recruit Marines. ¹³

Many histories (including that of the Marine Corps itself) incorrectly associate Mullen and the Tun Tavern with the November 10, 1775, birthdate of the Marines. Some even place Nicholas at the Tun, but he clearly recruited from his sportsman clubs. He may have also recruited from the Tun, especially since it was located on Water Street and frequented by the many sailors from the nearby docks.

While the Tun may be legend—or, more accurately, misplaced history—the shores of Tripoli ring true. Following the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, Congress disbanded the Continental Marines. Their retirement was brief due to the harassment by the French; Congress reestablished the Marines as the United States Marine Corps on July 11, 1798.

The U.S.M.C. earned its stripes—actually, its sword—during the Barbary Wars in 1805. 1st Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon and only eight Marines (but with 500 mercenaries), captured the city of Derna, just outside of Tripoli. Following that battle, the defeated Ottoman Prince presented O’Bannon with a Mameluke sword. Twenty years later, a replica of that sword became part of the ceremonial dress of all Marine officers.

That victory also inspired the line “shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Hymn (which wasn’t made official until 1929). Speaking of songs, “Semper Fidelis” is not only the motto of the U.S.M.C. (adopted in 1883), but it is also the title of the official Marine march. Composed by John Philip Sousa in 1889, it’s featured prominently during the movie Patton. Ironically, the movie is about the Third Army, not about Marines.

It’s funny. I recently shared the Tun Tavern story with an audience. I started by asking any Marines to raise their hands. No one did. Among the several dozen sitting before me, there were plenty of veterans, just no Marines. I guess they really are “the few.”

I never became a Marine. The closest I came—vicariously at least—was my freshman year college roommate. I was such a great roommate that he left school and joined the Marines. He served in Lebanon (but was reassigned before the Beirut barracks attack). Got his picture in Newsweek in some anonymous B-roll shot.

He’s one of the few.

And he’s proud of it.

¹ https://www.marines.mil/Marines250/ [Retrieved November 1, 2025]
² Journals of the Continental Congress 1174-1789, Volume III. 1775 September 21 – December 30, Washington, 1905, p.348 Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789 [Retrieved November 1, 2025]
³ Ibid., p. 316
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Ford, Worthington Chauncey, ed., The Writings of George Washington Vol. III. 1775-1776, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1889, p225-226
⁷ Journals of the Continental Congress 1174-1789, Volume III. 1775 September 21 – December 30, p.393
⁸ Image of actual commission letter from the Marine Corps Museum. https://destroyerhistory.org/fletcherclass/0_449nicholas/commission.html [Retrieved November 2, 2025]
⁹ A History of the Schuylkill Fishing Company of the State in Schuylkill, 1732-1888, Philadelphia: Members of the State in Schuylkill, 1889, pp. 367, 407.
¹⁰ The Pennsylvania Gazette, Wednesday, September 6, 1770, p.4
¹¹ The Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, Wednesday, April 26, 1775, p.4
¹² The Pennsylvania Gazette, Wednesday, May 10, 1775, p.5
¹³ Moore, Rev. Henry D., The Masonic Review, Vol. 77 No. 1, February 1892, p.154

Posted in History, The Compleat Carosa Commentaries Tagged 1775, America 250, American Marines, Bahamas, Contenental Marines, Derna, Fox Hunting Club, George Washington, Gomer Pyle, John Phillip Sousa, Mameluke sword, Nassau, Nova Scotia, November 10, Patton, Philadelphia, Presley O'Bannon, Rat Patrol, Revolutionary War, Robert Mullan, Robert Mullen, Samuel Nicholas, Schuykill Fishing Company, Second Continental Congress, semiquincentennial, Semper Fidelis, Third Army, Thomas Mullan, Tripoli, Tun Tavern, U.S.M.C., United States Marine Corps

My Life With AI—Part VI: How To Spot AI Content – Or – Apparently, I Am A Robot

By Chris Carosa on October 28, 2025

I’ve learned how to spot AI content because I’m never sure if a potential source is real or a computer. Well, not exactly. It’s usually easy to confirm the person is real.

Financial professionals often have public footprints. I find them by perusing firm bios, scrolling LinkedIn’s polished profiles, and searching for prior quotes. A business email helps, too. I rarely consider replies from generic addresses like Gmail or Yahoo.

The problem isn’t the people. It’s their answers. Are they genuine—or pasted from a GenAI platform?

Last Monday, I opened an email from a “retirement planning expert” responding to my Continue Reading “My Life With AI—Part VI: How To Spot AI Content – Or – Apparently, I Am A Robot”

Posted in Great Writing Tips, Memoir of a Real Life, The Compleat Carosa Commentaries Tagged AI, Aristotle, artificial intelligence, Blade Runner, ChatGPT, clickbait, cyborg, Ethos, GenAI, Greece, Holy Trinity, Kelvin Timeline, Kobayahi Maru, Logos, Middle Earth, Pathos, replicant, rhetoric, robot, Rule of Three, Star Trek, Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, three-joke sequence, Tolkien, Vince Lombardi, Voight-Kampff, Winston Churchill, YouTube

My Life With AI—Part V: Why GenAI (And All Search Engines) Fail

By Chris Carosa on October 21, 2025

When generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) platforms first appeared, I tried them all. GenAI fails—but not in the way you’re thinking. They failed to collect the data I requested. Quite simply, the platforms couldn’t search the internet that well.

Ah, 2024. Those were the good old days…

Code that tapped LLMs did achieve—a bit—what I wanted, but the inconsistency drove me Continue Reading “My Life With AI—Part V: Why GenAI (And All Search Engines) Fail”

Posted in Gray Matter Musings, Media, Memoir of a Real Life, The Compleat Carosa Commentaries Tagged AI, artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, Claude, Eddie Valiant, Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, Gemini, GenAI, GIGO, Google, Grok, Hamburger, Hamburger Dreams, Jessica Rabbit, Large Language Model, LLM, Michael Crichton, New York Press Association, Perplexity, The New York Times, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Wikipedia

The Compliment That Caught Me Speechless

By Chris Carosa on October 14, 2025

After moderating the panel, I rushed to gather my materials. The large crowd buzzed in the afterglow of satisfaction. A woman came up to me and said, “I hope you’re still on the radio.” The comment stunned me. It seemed to come out of nowhere.

Then I remembered. We had only one microphone. It was on a cord. My vision for the panel was more of a conversation than a series of mini-presentations. Passing a mic between each panelist would stunt the informal back-and-forth I wanted to achieve. What could I do?

When the panel began, I asked each person to speak without a microphone to test if the audience in the back of the room could hear us. They could, so I told everyone we wouldn’t be using the mic. That’s when a lady sitting in the front said, “Will you be able to keep your voice loud? Whenever a presenter decides to go without a mic, they start loud, but their voice invariably gets quieter as the presentation goes on.”

I stopped dead in my tracks, looking at her straight in the eye. Then, channeling my inner Continue Reading “The Compliment That Caught Me Speechless”

Posted in Great Speaking Tips, Memoir of a Real Life, The Compleat Carosa Commentaries Tagged AM radio, AM640, Animal House, APHNYS, Apollo, audience, Gates Chili, Hall of Fame, Houston, John F. Kennedy, lunar landing, Manning & Napier, Moon, New Haven, read the room, Rice University, Ronald Reagan, Speaking, speaking confidence, WYBC, Yale

Sails of Discovery, Anchors of Defense Celebrate Two Birthdays, One Destiny

By Chris Carosa on October 7, 2025

The U.S. Navy celebrates its 250^th birthday this Monday, October 13. Coincidentally, that day also marks the official celebration of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America on October 12, 1492. These two events, centuries apart, show how this month celebrates our nation’s connection to the water, first through exploration and then through protection.

Columbus has long been revered as a patron saint of our country, long before he became the symbol of pride for Italian immigrants. By the 400^th anniversary of his landing in 1892, you’d be hard-pressed not to find evidence of Continue Reading “Sails of Discovery, Anchors of Defense Celebrate Two Birthdays, One Destiny”

Posted in History, The Compleat Carosa Commentaries Tagged 101st Airborne, 1893, American Colonies, American Exceptionalism, Anthony McAuliffe, Battle of the Bulge, birthday, British Empire, Chicago, Chicago Wheel, Chicago World's Fair, Christopher Columbus, Colonial America, Columbian Exposition, Columbus Day, Continental Congress, Continental Navy, Daniel Boorstin, discovery, discovery of America, Father of Our Country, Ferris Wheel, George Washington, George Washington Gale Ferris, I have not yet begun to fight, Italian immigrants, James Joyce, John Paul Jones, Jr., mistake, Nina, Nuts, Pinta, Ptolemy, resolve, Revolutionary War, Royal Navy, Santa Maria, Serapis, stoic, The Discovers, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, Tony McAuliffe, U.S. Navy, Ulysses, underdog, USS Hannah, W.S.Mallory