George Duke wrote on Mon, Mar 17, 2008 04:59 PM UTC:
Appearances are deceptive. History-text orthodox versions never tell the
whole, or hidden, story. Befitting our larger scheme of things, on the
very same day as the Chicago fire 8.Oct.1871, the greatest recorded fire
in North American history separately took place, over 600 times larger area than that urbanized Chicago Fire, raging across 1.5 million acres, 6666 square kilometres of Northern Wisconsin and upper Michigan. French trappers and Christian fundamentalists had 'opened' the region, nothwithstanding already being occupied, and there followed slash-and-burn methods on old-growth forests, in order to build Chicago, the altered environment then making fires ripe. Now in 1857 Silas Mitchell published in 'Chess Monthly' the secret of the Turk's operation. How worked this 85-year-long intrigue convincingly by mostly Cafe de la Regence Chess professionals fully cooperating with the wily Maelzel? [ Recondite footnote: Each individual year mod 17 equals one(1): 1769(Turk construction), 1837(Morphy), 1854(fire), 1871(fires)...2007; and they all chance to be actual seventeen-year Cicada (order Orthoptera) years entomologically in the field (Brood XIII), a one-month-every-seventeen-years phenomenon still observed spectacularly by inhabitants midcontinent North America. The correspondence to Chessic milestones? Merely useful mnemonics, or literary device not suggestive of latter-day agency. ]
