My grand parents always called it Armistice Day

Tomorrow is Veterans’ Day, my grand parents always called it Armistice Day, "a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as 'Armistice Day'."
I have never taken the time to list the number of family members that have been in the military but now having done so I am surprised at how long and varied a list it is.
My father and late father in-law, a disabled vet served in the Army in the Philippines during WW2. Four of my uncles and one aunt were in the Air Force, Navy and Army in WW2.One of the uncles, a chief petty officer was in the navy from 1932 to 1968.My sister’s late husband joined the Navy and was sent to Vietnam in 1968. Two cousins are Air force Colonels.

From the Guardian UK a Remembrance Day editorial this past weekend lamenting the erosion of the original purpose behind the Cenotaph war monument.

But it is also a corruption of the original intention of those who commissioned the first, temporary, Cenotaph and put it in the heart of Whitehall.
Their ambitious purpose was to impose on the very centre of imperial power the memory of the millions who had died in order to end war. It was to be a daily warning to the politicians who sent them to fight of the awful cost of war, an ambition whose futility was exposed in 1939. Instead, the dead were recast as soldiers in a just war, defenders of a free world.

A letter from the war to end all wars…………
What follows is part of a 92 year old letter I found in some family papers .
This letter was written in reply to my English great grandfather living in the USA from his brother Amos, fighting with the British Expeditionary Force in France March, 1917.
One final winter still remained in the war to end all wars.
I am hoping that this terrible war will soon cease and & I can settle down again, I think the news are looking fairly well soon [sic] & I sincerely hope this summer will see the close ,for I’m sure I don’t want to spend another winter out here ,the people here say it is the worst winter they have witnessed for many years & I can tell you what with the hard weather & the conditions we have had to put up with has been terrible, but still we must keep smiling & hope ,we long to come out victorious.

Dear Brother you ask me if there are any small comforts you could send me? It seems almost impossible for you to send me anything out here seeing that I was more than 5 weeks getting this letter, but I thank you very much for your offer as anything we receive out here from relatives are a luxury. I am pleased to tell you I get a box from home every fortnight which help me out considerably.
…… but I guess there is scarcely a family in England not represented here, but I do hope we shall see a speedy& victorious conclusion………

I think I must now close for this time with fondest love & best wishes from your loving brother, Amos

Ernie Pyle ,National Newspaper Columnists Day

Today is National Newspaper Columnists Day declared so by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists .April 18th was chosen because it is the day in 1945 when famed World War Two columnist/journalist Ernie Pyle was killed by gunfire while riding in jeep on the island of Okinawa.
Pyle was known to admire the infantry man and referred to them as "the guys that wars can't be won without." After Pyle urged in a column in 1944 that soldiers should get “fight pay” just as airmen got “flight pay” the US Congress passed what came to be known as the Ernie Pyle bill authorizing $10.00 more per month for combat infantrymen.
OpEdNews on line’s Bob Patterson writes each year of National Colunmists Day to keep Pyle’s memory alive, relevant and not just a footnote.

One way to combat the deterioration of journalism in the United States is to promote the work of the greats and to encourage people to make the effort to learn about them, and read their work. This year we will also urge our regular readers to perhaps look up online some of the columnists honing their skills in various college newspapers.

How many national or local papers made note of this observance today? What platform or combination of them might a future Ernie Pyle be found using? What about the Washington Post’s columnist George Will and his recent climate change nonsense ? Given the current state of agony in the newspaper world and doubt about the future a little introspection may not be wasted.
Observing the current readiness of newspaper publishers to blame the internet for all their troubles former journalist/editor turned blogger Alan Mutter writes …....

......As Google and many other savvy online publishers learned how to capitalize on the openness and interactivity of the Internet, newspaper publishers stubbornly spent the last 1½ decades trying to sustain their once-enviable print business model in the face of overwhelming evidence that everything was changing: technology, consumer patterns and advertiser behavior.