USS Oberrender (DE-344) was a John C. Butler-class destroyer escort built for the United States Navy during World War II. She was named for Lieutenant Commander Thomas Olin Oberrender, Jr., the engineering officer of the light cruiser USS Juneau, killed when that ship was torpedoed and sunk during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. Laid down in November 1943, launched in January 1944, and commissioned almost four months later, Oberrender commenced convoy escort duty in the Pacific in late 1944, with an interlude protecting escort carriers during the early stages of the invasion of Leyte. She was heavily damaged by the explosion of the ammunition ship USS Mount Hood at Manus and was repaired there during November. Returning to service in December, Oberrender served on anti-submarine patrol during the Battle of Okinawa, during which she was irreparably damaged by a kamikaze attack in early May 1945. She was decommissioned and sunk as a target late that year.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Oberrender

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1915:

World War I: British forces launched the Battle of Aubers Ridge, an offensive on the Western Front, as part of the larger Second Battle of Artois. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Artois

1960:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it would approve the use of Searle's Enovid, the first combined oral contraceptive pill (example pictured). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pill

2018:

The Barisan Nasional coalition, which had governed Malaysia since independence in 1957, was voted out of power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Malaysian_general_election

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

system: 1. A collection of organized things; a whole composed of relationships among its members. 2. (derogatory) Preceded by the word the: the mainstream culture, controlled by the elites or government of a state, or a combination of them, seen as oppressive to the individual. 3. (computing) A set of hardware and software operating in a computer. 4. (mathematics) A set of equations involving the same variables, which are to be solved simultaneously. 5. (music) A set of staves linked by a brace that indicate instruments or sounds that are to be played simultaneously. 6. (physiology) A set of body organs having a particular function. 7. A method or way of organizing or planning. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/system

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

No one knows toward what center human things are going to gravitate in the near future, and hence the life of the world has become scandalously provisional. Everything that today is done in public and in private — even in one's inner conscience — is provisional, the only exception being certain portions of certain sciences. He will be a wise man who puts no trust in all that is proclaimed, upheld, essayed, and lauded at the present day. All that will disappear as quickly as it came. All of it, from the mania for physical sports (the mania, not the sports themselves) to political violence; from "new art" to sun-baths at idiotic fashionable watering-places. Nothing of all that has any roots; it is all pure invention, in the bad sense of the word, which makes it equivalent to fickle caprice. It is not a creation based on the solid substratum of life; it is not a genuine impulse or need. In a word, from the point of view of life it is false. We are in presence of the contradiction of a style of living which cultivates sincerity and is at the same time a fraud. There is truth only in an existence which feels its acts as irrevocably necessary.   --José Ortega y Gasset https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ortega_y_Gasset