A late-in-life star of TikTok, a resident of Lafayette, and one of the country's last surviving veterans of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, "Papa Jake" Larson, died late last week at the age of 102.

"Papa Jake" was a rare commodity when, late last year, he turned 102 and boasted nearly 1 million followers on TikTok who enjoyed his humble, first-hand accounts of D-Day and World War II like the one below, and generally cheerful nature. His social media fame resulted in a deluge of birthday cards from fans, thanks to pleas put out over several years from his granddaughter, McKaela Larson.

He ultimately would gain 1.2 million followers by the time of his death, and as KTVU reports, he passed away Thursday, July 17.

"Please know, he went peacefully and was even cracking jokes til the very end," McKaela Larson wrote in a memorial post to TikTok. "I am so thankful to have shared my Papa Jake with you all. You meant the world to him. When the time is right, I will continue to share Papa Jake's stories and keep his memory alive."

She adds, "As Papa would say, love you all the mostest."

Jake Larson was born on December 20th, 1922, in Owatonna, Minnesota, and as the Associated Press recounts, he enlisted in the National Guard in 1938, lying about his age because he was only 15 at the time. After being stationed in Northern Ireland and helping to plan the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach, he would end up being one of the 160,000 Allied troops who stormed the beach on June 6, 1944.

Larson was also a soldier in the Battle of the Bulge, in Belgium and Luxembourg, and he would later earn a Bronze Star and a French Legion of Honor award.

He traveled to D-Day commemorations many times over the decades, and last year, at age 101, he encountered TV journalist Christiane Amanpour. Her interview with Larson went on to win an Emmy for outstanding TV interview, short form, and he celebrated the win in this video, showing off his own Emmy trophy.

In March, Larson was invited to throw out the first pitch at a San Francisco Giants game at Oracle Park.

You can see Amanpour's interview with Papa Jake below.

The presenting organization Curious Flights took off in 2013 to feature the rarely heard corners of the modern music repertory. Over the weekend, at the San Francisco Conservatory, they introduced the West Coast premiere of the seventy year old Airborne Symphony by Marc Blitzstein, who wrote this monumental work while serving in the Air Force in the early forties. (Blitzstein, who was openly gay, was later murdered in a homophobic attack in 1964). Blitzstein's music was championed by Bernstein, whose contemporary On The Town was performed at the same time at Davies.

Tenor Brian Thorsett, after an early career kicked off at Merola that saw him work through the classic repertory, is now focused on modern works and other forgotten oddities. He and another Merolini, baritone Efrain Solis,were the soloists in the Airborne Symphony. Thorsett will also sing another massive choral piece based upon WWII events, Britten's War Requiem with the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra in early June. We asked him to introduce us to these pieces.

Can you tell us about the ?

It's a great narrative of ingenuity and this man's desire to learn how to fly when seeing birds up in the sky. It is the story of how he tried many times and failed and failed, and eventually succeeded. Of course, the consequences of acquiring the technology is ability to go and travel and explore and it opens up the world to you. It is a propaganda piece too on the surface. Hitler is bad, and we have this great technology and we're going to come and get you. It was originally written for a film commissioned by the Air Force that never got produced.

The first whole section of the tenor coming in at the very top of the show, talking about the wonder of flying and telling all these old stories: Mesopotamia, and flying on the back of the eagle, and she could not master that and tumbled down; the story of Icarus and how he failed because man isn't meant to fly; and Leonardo came up with plans for an helicopter and that failed; and man keeps trying to fly, and keeps on failing and failing and trying to do it.

That's the whole opening narrative, how man keeps to innovate and innovate. Then, there is this idea of how Hitler is a horrible person and we developed flight and America has the best planes in the world and we're going to go and take care of business. Then there is a famous baritone aria, the ballad of the bombardier, a section when you're in the Air Force, you're always prepared to go into battle, you get ready and wait. The bombardier talks about — this is the baritone's big aria — writing a letter to his love about doing these things, going to fly, what he's about to do. He's about to go on his first night flight as a bomber. It's a very heart rending thing. If anything is ever excerpted from the show, or pieces by Blitzstein, this is one of the most famous.

He wrote the hand that rocks the cradle, which is probably the most famous thing he did, and this one solo from the show, that's the most famous number. He's nineteen year old soldier getting ready to go in battle, not sure if he wants to do it, not quite certain.

The music is unabashedly American, it's this interesting style of early American musical theater, it reminds me somewhere between Richard Rogers and Leonard Bernstein. It does not have the rhythmic or harmonic complexity of Bernstein and it's a little more advanced than Richard Rogers' music. They are all overlapping in this time period. Harmonically, it's much more daring than Rogers, the modulations and the use of time signature, and the use of an all-male quartet, there is barbershop quarter feel.

My opening aria is a very blue note character song, a patter song where they tell the story over the same melody over and over again, just exposing plot. An oratorio would have a recitative. Blitzstein uses the musical theater convention of patter song to get the narrative out. The baritone has the love song, a slow musical theater ballad, and there are this Copland-esque wide open harmonies, very Americana, think Rodeo or Appalachian Springs, there are actually recitatives that have the wide open harmonies, and he's trying to capture that, the wide open space of the sky. It's obviously an homage to Copland, who again was writing at that time too. His tone amalgam of Rogers, Bernstein, Copland, that's what people hear, that sounds like that. It's a unique style, that borrows from a lot of people. I'm not saying he's not innovative, but he's not doing anything new. I'm shocked his opera Regina is not produced more.

You are also singing some Korngold songs, from the same time period, are there similarities?

Not so much. I think Korngold was by far the much more individual and advanced composer than Blitzstein. Korngold, in his movie music obviously did not try to push the music too far (he did it with orchestration, but not with harmony and melody). There is that similarity where they weren't trying to challenge things to much.

Two of the Korngold's songs [on the program] are from a score he wrote called "Give us this night." All the text are by Hammerstein, it was an actual musical movie, the entire movie is a musical, it's not a picture that has songs, or a movie that has orchestrated scenes, and maybe has one song in it. This was a through-composed musical that had very little talking to move from scene to scene and was mostly composed music, and lots of songs in it. It was written as a vehicle as a Met mezzo named Gladys Swarthout and a Polish tenor Jan Kiepura who was a phenomenal star in Eastern Europe, and had this matinee idol good looks and who could sing. His English wasn't terribly good, people didn't forgive him that, he didn't do much afterwards.

You will sing in the Britten War Requiem in June, you seem to have a special affinity for this composer.

Britten is a right of passage for every tenor. He wrote most of his music for Pears and his operas are very tenor-centric as the lead character. As a tenor, somewhere in your training, you will be assigned a Britten song. Either you love it or you hate it. All my tenor colleagues are on one side of the aisle.There's no 50/50. I just happen to love it. It's very intellectually challenging. The harmonic language, the tonal language, his choice of poems. Technically it's very challenging.

Peter Pears had such an individual voice, technically he had things he could do not many singers could do, and Britten would exploit those. If you don't have this, which I don't have the same ability that Pears did, you have to find a way to honor what Britten wrote. So it's this great musical jigsaw puzzle that challenges you at every level. And it's so satisfying when you come to the end of the road, and you perform this. I just think his music is the pinnacle of the 20th century. I think he's going to be the greatest composer of the 20th century when we look back many years from now.

Last year, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors fought back against the mayor of an SF sister city in Japan who appeared to excuse wartime atrocities. Now that fight is entering another round.

In June of 2014, Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto said that "Comfort Women" — the sickening euphemism for the estimated 200,000 women and young girls from China and Korea who were enslaved and raped by Japan during WWII — were "necessary to maintain discipline" at the time.

For context, one victim of enslavement was Jan Ruff-O'Herne, a Dutch woman, who gave the following testimony to a US House of Representatives committee.

Many stories have been told about the horrors, brutalities, suffering and starvation of Dutch women in Japanese prison camps. But one story was never told, the most shameful story of the worst human rights abuse committed by the Japanese during World War II: The story of the “Comfort Women”, the jugun ianfu, and how these women were forcibly seized against their will, to provide sexual services for the Japanese Imperial Army. In the “comfort station” I was systematically beaten and raped day and night. Even the Japanese doctor raped me each time he visited the brothel to examine us for venereal disease.

As a result of Hashimoto's internationally criticized remarks and led by Supervisor Jane Kim, the Board of Supervisors passed a symbolic resolution condemning his words. The Osaka Mayor later sought to have that resolution retracted after he walked back some of his language according to Kyodo News International.

Hashimoto even canceled a trip to San Francisco in the wake of the controversy, and once again, it looks like the politician shouldn't schedule any Bay Area travel. Reigniting the feud last month, Supervisor Eric Mar introduced a resolution to create a "comfort women" memorial in San Francisco, as has been done in Glendale and Rohnert Park. That resolution, which received mixed support and objections (more on those later) during public comment, has been sent to committee.

So, in a predictable result, The Japan Times reports that Hashimoto has been speaking out against the proposed memorial. Yes, he's even threatening to write another angry letter. "It's true that women's human rights were abused during World War II, but it’s not fair to say only Japan did something special,” Hashimoto said at a news conference last month. His purported objections to a memorial also include the vague prediction that such a move could harm relations between the US and Japan as well as those between San Francisco and Osaka. But isn't he doing that single-handedly?

Perhaps not. The Japanese-U.S. Feminist Network for Decolonization writes that "Japanese right-wing activists are waging a mass email campaign in opposition to the resolution. They are also seeking their supporters in the area to show up and voice their opposition at the meeting." Of course the feminist group is in favor of the memorial, writing that it "applauds and supports San Francisco’s leadership in acknowledging and remembering the victims and survivors of “comfort women” system."

Scientists announced yesterday that they have completed the first ever survey of a 623-foot-long World War II aircraft carrier sitting 2,600 feet below the ocean's surface, a full 30 miles off the coast of Half Moon Bay. It's pretty cool, and also radioactive, but it's not necessarily something to worry about.

After seeing combat against Japan in 1944 and 1945, the USS Independence was contaminated with radiation in two South Pacific nuclear tests and deliberately sunk in 1951, but it's exact location had not been released by the Navy. Though the U.S. Geological Survey has been pretty sure of its location since mapping the sea floor in 1990, news of the official discovery comes from The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and was reported on by The San Jose Mercury News.

The location expedition was led by the NOAA with assistance from the Navy and Boeing. They mapped the sunken ship last month with a robotic underwater vehicle that used sonar to render three-dimensional images of it. "By using technology to create three-dimensional maps of the seafloor and wrecks like Independence, we can not only explore, but share what we've learned with the public and other scientists," Frank Cantelas, archaeologist with the NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, explained the significance of the work.

After the Independence was damaged heavily during 1946 nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll, it was repurposed as a nuclear decontamination lab and stationed at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. In time, it was set out to sea containing an unknown number of barrels of radioactive waste.

Yes, that sounds concerning, but the barrels of waste were filled with concrete, then sealed in the thick steel walled engine and boiler rooms of the ship. After it mapped the Independence, scientists tested the submarine and the water on its instruments for radioactive isotopes, finding only normal background levels of radiation.

That said, the general safety of the area is a concern to some. The Farallon Islands Radioactive Waste Dump is a large area where the federal government dumped almost 48,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste from 1946 and 1970. That probably wasn't a good idea, and Quentin Kopp, a retired judge and state legislator, has been known to question its safety and the lack of research into the matter. "If I were an elected legislator, state or federal, I would be pounding the table," Kopp told the Mercury News.

From a purely historical standpoint, though, NOAA official James Delgado, chief scientist of the Independence mission, is enchanted. "This ship is an evocative artifact of the dawn of the atomic age, when we began to learn the nature of the genie we'd uncorked from the bottle," he said. "It speaks to the 'Greatest Generation' — people's fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers who served on these ships, who flew off those decks and what they did to turn the tide in the Pacific war."

Related: There's A 'Graveyard Of Ships' West Of San Francisco: Photos
Is There A Lot To Fear With Fukushima Radiation In The Pacific?

A reader, who sent in the above photo, tells us, "Most of Fort Funston is closed due to the discovery of an old, possibly active bomb." Twitter user fiercekitten reports: "Half of [Fort Funston] is closed because they found a live shell from the old fort."

We're also getting word that a bomb squad just detonated the old bomb.

SFist talked to someone at the Parks & Rec Department who explained that from time to time they "still do turn up WWII pieces and bombs" at Fort Funston, old explosives "covered with sand that nobody noticed."

We'll update as soon as we know more.

Update: According to the police, the area has reopened.

SFist sources tell us that the bomb squad has been called to Golden Gate Park at JFK and 30th Avenue Carl Street in Cole Valley at around 6 p.m. Now, which one of you accidentally left your pack back in the park? But seriously, folks, we're not sure what the entire story is yet, or if there even is one, but we'll update when we know more. Stay tuned.

Update 6:56 p.m.: Well, we're not sure what's going on exactly. Some people on NJudahChron are saying they heard it was a shooting, that's a "man cleaning out his garage found an old WWII mortar shell" (another one? Jesus fucking Christ, old men. Seriously. Get rid of that shit, will ya? Or call someone who can take care of it for you), or...who knows.

Update: 7 p.m.: Ah, the news knows what's up. According to KGO, "Residents have said they have heard that a mortar shell was discovered inside an apartment, but this has not been confirmed by San Francisco police. Officials have rolled out a remote-controlled bomb robot." No confirmation? Then by all means, readers, go ahead and make wild assumptions until we know for sure! (But, please, stay out of the Carl Street/Cole Valley area for now.)

Update: 7:03: Jim Herd, who told us about the bomb squad, snapped up this shot of it all going down. (Really, Herd is a San Francisco treasure. He's everywhere all at once.) Also, yeah, it was a mortor. Jim tells us "they picked up the mortar at 200 Cole and then went on a caravan." What a way to kick off the 4th, eh? Eh? Eh?