Waldo At Home.

Dismantling Ted Kennedy's playhouse

2011-06-21T06:40:00.000-04:00

The green paint, green carpets, sailing mementos and elegant armchairs gave it the feel of an upscale clubroom:

Located on the third floor of the Capitol building, it offers easy access to the neighboring radio and television press gallery and the Senate floor.

The memorabilia is now gone, and Senate custodial staff hauled away the furniture after Kennedy died in August 2009. The walls have been painted white and the floor is now varnished wood. It seems more like a Protestant chapel.

Solstice

2011-06-21T05:55:00.002-04:00

It's the longest day of the year.

When gentlemen didn't read other people's mail

2011-06-21T05:26:00.000-04:00

On July 11, 1941, with the United States not yet at war, F.D.R. created the post of Coordinator of Information, and inserted Donovan into the position. The job description was a little vague, which suited both men. At first, Donovan reported directly to the President. Spying was still regarded with distaste by many people in the foreign-policy establishment: in 1941, while Hitler was overrunning Europe and threatening Great Britain, the State Department had eighteen people working in intelligence.

Here people run for president who deny science; there we mock him for driving a Dodge Dartre

2011-06-21T05:19:00.000-04:00

Only in France:

In 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, but he refused it. When he died in 1980, 50,000 people turned out on the streets of Paris to pay their respects.

Time spins, doesn't it?

2011-06-21T05:12:00.000-04:00

Time flies- Ronald Dworkin has another book out. And he's nearly 80.

A good business model

2011-06-18T18:53:00.000-04:00

IBM just celebrated its 100th anniversary.

IBM isn't in the headlines every day for its innovations, but it's an idea factory. For 18 years, it has received the most patents of any company. In 2010, it received 5,896 in all -- 16 patents a day.

Its current success is its ability to make use of those ideas, and to apply technology to help its customers, rather than trying to manipulate situations to convince those customers to buy specific products that might soon be outdated in a rapidly shifting environment.

Time out

2011-06-14T20:45:00.000-04:00

Not that anyone will particularly care, but I anticipate a break in posting as I relocate. Back, well, eventually.

Who knew?

2011-06-12T18:04:00.000-04:00

Back when I had a really good health care plan, I was scheduled for a physical.

It took all day.

Among the features of the experience was an electrocardiogram. That's where they put electrodes all over you and twist dials and something results.

A small Asian woman came in to prep me. She had trouble pasting electrodes on me. "You so hairy," she complained.

I apologized. It's one of many things I wasn't consulted on before I was born. Until I hit high school, I had no idea it would become an issue.

Apparently, in the offspray of Weinergate, it is.

Homelandzombie Security

2011-06-11T18:35:00.000-04:00

For a blogfriend who's a part-time zombie, a warning: they're onto you guys:

The oncoming zombie apocalypse might sound like the chance to write off your debt and be the badass you were always born to be, but for fans of stuff like "not killing loved ones" and "still having skin" it's going to be a rough ride. So what have you done to prepare? Hell, what has the government done? These guys can't even handle the living, never mind the undead.

These were the thoughts of a concerned citizen from Leicester who, through the Freedom of Information Act, forced his city council to reveal it was woefully unprepared for a zombie uprising. "Having watched several films," he wrote, "it is clear that preparation for such an event is poor and one that councils throughout the kingdom must prepare for." You tell 'em, concerned citizen.
Leicester city council could, of course, take some tips from America's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, whose Ali Khan recently issued a zombie survival guide in order to publicise its site. But with its tongue so firmly in cheek, can people really trust such advice? No, but you can trust us. Here are five tips:

1. Be prepared with supplies

An obvious point to start off on, but essential all the same. Every house by now should have a "zombie emergency kit" that consists of food, water, medication, gas, duct tape, a battery-powered radio, clothes, copies of important documents, first-aid supplies and guns – lots of guns. Remember: fail to prepare and prepare to be eaten alive, screaming.
2. Get out of town.

Your first instinct when the news of a zombie uprising breaks will be to get the hell out of town – after all, the countryside is less populated than big cities and will be easier for survival. This is fine, but if you're in a big city it creates a problem: with everyone rushing to escape at the same time, it will cause a deadlock – only this time with more emphasis on "dead". Plan your route out of the city in advance to avoid traffic.
3. If you're staying at home or are stuck somewhere else, then fortify your base.
If you're put in a siege situation, you better make sure your hideout is defended. Barbed wire, weapons and gas-filled bottles are all very useful along with alarms – which can make with some cans and pots on a wire. A word of warning though: you only survive a siege if there's a possibility the invading horde will stop, weigh up the pros and cons and leave – but zombies don't do that. Zombies do not tire, nor can they be reasoned or bargained with. They are relentless and will not leave your base until your supplies run out and you die a horrible, horrible death.
4. Search for survivors.
Safety in numbers: when you can, make sure you are part of a group or let other people know you're still alive – if you remain on your own you will, eventually, go mad. Be careful about using big signals though – you may attract unwanted attention. And finally ...
5. Relax – it'll all be fine.

Have you noticed that in most zombie films, by the time we join our heroes, the military and government are already wiped out and the streets are lost? The reason for that is because what with so many natural predators, the armed forces and biting being a rubbish way spreading disease, zombies would probably all be re-dead before we know it. So don't be too worried, Concerned Citizen of Leicester – it might not be so bad after all.

2011-06-11T16:56:00.000-04:00

25 years ago this weekend, Ferris Bueller's Day Off opened in theaters.

A Washington Post article picks some of the lasting cultural effects of the film:

15. A preview of things to come for Charlie Sheen.

“Why are you here?” “Drugs.”

Back then you could wear your uniform to school and not be ridiculed

2011-06-11T04:27:00.001-04:00

I became an Eagle Scout in 1970. Things under the BSA's policy shift of the 1990s has hollowed out the once vibrant organization:

BSA membership, 4.8 million in the 1970s, slipped last year to 2.7 million. It is difficult to see how much longer the Scouts can hold onto the past when open-minded youth and parents increasingly cross off from consideration organizations that openly discriminate. Last year alone, the number of Cub Scout leaders dropped nearly 6 percent (full disclosure: I am a Scout volunteer).

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom Scouting Association enjoyed its biggest single-year increase in 38 years in 2009 with a comprehensive strategy of making outdoor activities cool again and saying clearly that scouting is for every child, including girls and gay youth. UK chief scout commissioner Wayne Bulpitt recently did a video for an anti-gay-bullying campaign.

Marking time

2011-06-04T23:09:00.000-04:00

So it's been thirty years since AIDS assumed a form that warranted a diagnosis.

There's been an odd sort of commemoration, largely by medical professionals and long-term survivors. There've been no end of movies.

But if you had to live through it, these three decades were an era of indifference, and occasional hatefulness, among the general population.

The government didn't really recognize the disease back then, and the flip side was people in power wishing more of "them" would die.

In the early 80s people suddenly got sick and in a few weeks they were dead. As time went on and the drugs got a little better, people got diagnosed and killed themselves.

I went to a remarkable number of funerals.

I couldn't tell where I was going at work. It'd get me fired, even when I was a partner in my own business. Just a funeral, I had to say. The law had nothing to say for me. Got handed my hat by my church.

Then in the 90s people took longer to die. I remember a couple coming for lunch in the late 90s. One had been sick for a long time and it was clear to me that we'd never see Gene again. He was there for short periods, and then gone from the conversation.

In a few weeks he was dead.

Over the decades I've had people urge me, somehow, not to get infected, and other, less charitable sorts, urge me to get it and die. Sooner the better.

Family- well, no need to get into all that. Some good, most not so good.

Thirty years.. So many lives.

Matt Dillon needed all those comps at the Long Branch

2011-06-03T20:16:00.000-04:00

Over the years, the marshal was shot 30 times.

Those were the days, my friend

2011-06-03T12:02:00.000-04:00

A remembrance of a great writer I once knew.

Headline of the Day

2011-06-01T12:35:00.000-04:00

Toronto man accused of beating raccoons with shovel

Take THAT, Bruce Chatwin-

2011-06-01T10:20:00.000-04:00

Travel writer Paul Theroux has a fascinating article in The Financial Times on travel books- some written by people who were clearly mad, others who made the most of being trapped in awful circumstances, some who manufactured challenges as though they were a theme park ride.

But he makes it clear what sort of travel narrative he prefers. A must read article:

The world is full of jolly places but these do not interest me at all. I hate vacations and luxurious hotels are no fun to read about. I want to read about the miserable, or difficult, or inhospitable places; the forbidden cities and the back roads: as long as they exist the travel book will have value.

Jump!

2011-04-28T03:32:00.000-04:00

Time flies, and here is author Michael Chabon celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Norton Juster's fable, The Phantom Tollbooth:

I am the son and grandson of helpless, hardcore, inveterate punsters, and when I got to Milo getting lost in The Doldrums where he found a (strictly analog) watchdog named Tock, it was probably already too late for me. I was gone on the book, riddled like a body in a crossfire by its ceaseless barrage of wordplay—the arbitrary and diminutive apparatchik, Short Shrift; the kindly and feckless witch, Faintly Macabre; the posturing Humbug, and, of course, the Island of Conclusions, reachable only by jumping. Puns—the word’s origin, like the name of some pagan god, remains unexplained by etymologists—are derided, booed, apologized for.

A Wild Animal Encounter

2011-03-24T05:04:00.001-04:00

Panda kiss

I was at the National Zoo in DC. Saw the pandas. "They look wild," I thought.

People Magazine will dim its lights for 37 seconds

2011-03-23T19:45:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth Taylor died this morning and in no time flat the cable news shows- even TCM- were thawing out and running prepared obits.

This is nothing particularly new- my dad told me once the local paper sent him his obit for fact-checking.

But in the age of instant everything, it also came out that Taylor outlived her NYT obituarist by a number of years:

This note appears at the end of the New York Times' obituary of Elizabeth Taylor:
Of course, newspapers keep files on hand of obituaries to run instantly upon their death. Gussow's obituary can be found here. It contains this only-in-New York correction:

Mel Gussow, the principal writer of this article, died in 2005. William McDonald and the Associated Press contributed updated reporting.

Because of an editing error, an obituary on Sunday and in some copies on Monday about Mel Gussow, a theater critic and reporter for The New York Times, referred incorrectly to the Greenwich Village house next to his that was destroyed in 1970 by explosives belonging to the radical political group the Weathermen. The building was a town house, not a brownstone.

Taylor was an astonishingly beautiful woman and a modestly-talented actor. Mostly she was good in roles that required screaming and shrieking. Bowdlerized versions of Tennessee Williams plays were her forte' in the 1950s. She had a talent for comedy that was woefully underutilized. Cleopatra was full of sly bits of business, and a made for TV movie, Malice In Wonderland, featured her in a hilarious portrayal of Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons.

She also made some howlingly bad movies. As with Jack Nicholson's last two decades or so, she became famous for playing herself- or herself as she was perceived by herself. One of her worst- another vehicle with Burton- was an incomprehensible fantasy called Boom! One review described it as a film that:

Explores the confrontation between the woman who has everything, including emptiness, and a penniless poet who has nothing but the ability to fill a wealthy woman's needs.

From 1968's Boom!: Medusa, meet Noel Coward

In the 1960s and '70s she scandalized decent people with her jewels the size of grapefruits and her serial marriages to Richard Burton. She and Burton became a sort of Lucy & Desi on acid, the plots of their hairpulling, boozy life overlapping with their hairpulling, boozy movies and scantily-clad romps on rafts in sunny tropical climes. In a three-network TV universe, the couple was inescapable. Among moralists, Taylor and Burton took up where Bergman and Rosellini left off.

After she married Virginia Senator John Warner, Taylor's career on film slowly petered out. She reinvented herself as a perfumier, and AIDS activist, and a person well known for being well known.But no one can deny that she had the ability to hold the public's attention- something she did, relentlessly, for nearly seventy years.

She was also a doting mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, survived by her offspring and several of her seven ex-husbands.

Somewhere, Jeff Bezos is laughing

2011-03-22T15:46:00.000-04:00

When I was a wee lad, forty-plus years ago, the library in the small town where my family lived sponsored a summer reading contest. It was a way to keep kids off from school occupied in a place where there was nothing else to do.

The trophy always went to a classmate of mine called Charlene because she went to massive hauls of kids' books. If a book has thirty pages and lots of pictures, racking up a hundred or more is a no-sweat task.

Now bookstores are closing right and left and the British government is closing libraries but simultaneously calling on UK kids to read fifty books a year.

Utopia, limited

2011-03-22T15:20:00.000-04:00

The man who coined the concept "net neutrality" remembers- as do I- when the Internet wasn't mostly a freak show/corporate monopoly:

Back at the restaurant in Washington, I press Wu a bit more on the future. What happens if your nightmare comes to pass? What's your science-fiction-like vision of what the Internet might look like?

You can imagine a world where a few people are once again the anointed creators, he responds, and the rest of us spend our time watching what they produce. Say Apple becomes the dominant platform. Want to start a new company? They decide which companies are good. People like blogs? OK, we'll have auditions for bloggers. Newspapers? Maybe we'll have two of them, one liberal and one conservative.

Then he tells me another story, one from the past. It's sometime around the early 2000s. Craigslist is young. Strangers trust it. Wu, then living in San Francisco, posts an ad: "Who wants to climb Mt. Shasta next week?" Three people answer, and he climbs the volcano with one of them.

"We may look back at this era, the last 15, 20 years, as that early utopian, exciting era of the open Internet," he says.

"I've been happy to be alive during the Internet revolution. And I hope I will not live to see its death."

Reinventing the first president

2011-03-22T15:12:00.002-04:00

In these pages Mr. Lengel seems to have set out to entertain the lay reader by creating what is essentially a compendium of amusing folk legends that have come to adhere around poor George. There is the story about a spiritualist in the 1940s who claimed to have spent 110 days conversing with Washington, who supposedly confessed that he liked to swig hard cider and struggled with alcoholism as a result. There is “a popular advocate of past-life regression” who contended that Washington had been reincarnated as Gen. Tommy Franks (“although Franks apparently remains unaware of his true identity”). And there’s the story that circulated on the Internet involving an “independent Scots historian” who claimed that Washington had received valuable intelligence at Valley Forge from creatures from another planet.

Headline of the Day: "Wull, dayum"

2011-03-22T03:55:00.000-04:00

Deputy: Strip Search Finds Crack Between Buttocks

Just wondering. Or as T-Paw says when he comes to SC, 'wondern''

2011-03-21T21:21:00.000-04:00

On television, why do ghost hunter shows have to be shot at night? Is there a ghost union contract that bars daylight sightings?

Both have weird hair

2011-03-21T21:19:00.003-04:00

Met conductor James Levine has held his post almost as long as Gadaffi in Libya. Both have failed to recognize the two sides of the Cary Grant/Bette Davis coin: leave the audience wanting more, not wishing you'd just leave.

A God who speaks to His people through fear and loathing

2011-03-21T21:16:00.000-04:00

The American ministry wastes immense pastoral resources making themselves feel not scared, as congregations age and life passes them by outside their gated churches:

Mr. Almlie, 37, has been shocked, he says, at what he calls unfair discrimination, based mainly on irrational fears: that a single pastor cannot counsel a mostly married flock, that he might sow turmoil by flirting with a church member, or that he might be gay. If the job search is hard for single men, it is doubly so for single women who train for the ministry, in part because many evangelical denominations explicitly require a man to lead the flock.

Mr. Almlie, an ordained evangelical minister who lives in Petaluma, Calif., has also had to contend with the argument, which he disputes with scriptural citations of his own, that the Bible calls for married leaders. “Prejudice against single pastors abounds,” Mr. Almlie wrote in articles he posted on a popular Christian blog site in January and February, setting off a wide-ranging debate online on a topic that many said has been largely ignored.

My Favorite Museum

2011-03-20T02:11:00.001-04:00

guggenheim

The Guggenheim in New York: it turns the experience of viewing art- and other people viewing art- on its head.

The Blair Sex Project

2011-03-19T11:31:00.002-04:00

With each year that passes, the Blairs become creepier and creepier. One wouldn't be impertinent enough to compare them to swingers Dan and Ceri Moody, the "sex people" who fail to entice a traumatised Alan Partridge into their bed. But if you did happen to visit Tony and Cherie in any one of their 137 homes, the last thing you'd want to hear is your car keys slipping through a pocket hole and clinking on to the priceless carpet Mr Mubarak gave them on their last visit to Sharm-el-Sheikh.

Frogs and comics

2011-03-19T04:02:00.000-04:00

The co-founder of the Brookstone store chain had a life like a character in a Fred and Ginger movie from the '30s:

If it seems incongruous that so fundamentally Yankee an enterprise was conceived by a French count (for that, technically, was what Mr. de Beaumont was, though he did not noise it about, and, as his brother-in-law said on Tuesday, “he didn’t think much of it”), then it bears noting that he was also a trained engineer who had worked for the Packard Motor Car Company.

Equally incongruous — and even less widely known — was the fact that Mr. de Beaumont happened to own the rights to an emblematic American art form, the “Mutt and Jeff” comic strip, which he had inherited from his mother, a countess and occasional Broadway chorus girl. She had obtained them after a marital dispute that was widely covered in the newspapers and also involved frogs.

Pierre Stuart de Beaumont, familiarly known as Pete, was born in New York on Aug. 1, 1915, while his mother, a French beauty who had married a count, was on a visit there. After Pierre’s father, Count de Beaumont, was killed in World War I, his mother, the former Aedita Stuart, settled in New York with her son.
Under the name Gypsy Norman, the countess found work in the chorus of early-1920s Broadway revues, including “Bombo,” starring Al Jolson, and “The Whirl of New York.”

Pierre de Beaumont attended Harvard, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1938; he later worked for Packard, General Motors and other companies.

Meanwhile, the Countess de Beaumont had married — and, in a welter of wooings and suings avidly chronicled in the press, separated from — the cartoonist Harry C. Fisher. Mr. Fisher, known as Bud, had created what became “Mutt and Jeff,” the long-popular comic strip about two mismatched tinhorns, in 1907.

In 1925, Mr. Fisher married Countess de Beaumont aboard a trans-Atlantic liner. In 1927, a New York judge granted her a legal separation after she testified, as The New York Times reported, to “her husband’s cruelty” in “permitting her to be neglected by his servants while they looked after a number of live frogs he maintained in their former apartment on Riverside Drive.”

Mr. Fisher died in 1954. Mrs. Fisher, who apparently never divorced him, retained the rights to “Mutt and Jeff.” These later devolved on Mr. de Beaumont.
“Mutt and Jeff” is currently reprinted in syndication in about 40 newspapers worldwide.

"We're having a garbage strike in New York. I just gift wrap mine and leave it in my car."

2011-03-16T10:57:00.000-04:00

The Writer's Almanac remembers comedian Henny Youngman, born this day in 1906:

It's the birthday of the man whose most famous line was "Take my wife — please": comedian Henny Youngman, born in London (1906). He said, "I was so ugly when I was born, the doctor slapped my mother." He grew up in New York City, and he made his first appearance at an amateur night when he was 16. His father didn't approve — he called the cops and had his son pulled off the stage, and sent him to vocational school. But Youngman persevered, and after he became a comedian he traveled an average of 500,000 miles a year to perform. He delivered one-liners while playing a 19th-century violin, telling at least 50 jokes in an eight-minute routine. He said, "If a joke is too hard to visualize, I tell the young comics, then what the hell good is it?"

He said, "When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading."

And, "A man says to another man, 'Can you tell me how to get to Central Park?' The guy says no. 'All right,' says the first, 'I'll mug you here.'"

And, "The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret."

And, "Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means."

And, "My grandmother is over 80 and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle."

And, "A Jewish woman had two chickens. One got sick, so the woman made chicken soup out of the other one to help the sick one get well."

And, "I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up — they have no holidays."

And, "I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places."

And, "Why do Jewish divorces cost so much? They're worth it."

And, "You have a ready wit. Tell me when it's ready."

And, "My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that's not so bad; but New York City?"

And, "If at first you don't succeed ... so much for skydiving."

Rocker who dug amongst rocks

2011-03-15T17:28:00.000-04:00

A man who could be described as the Indiana Jones of Iraq has died, and the world has lost a scholar and a wit:

He grew up fishing with his father, hunting with his grandfather and leading scout expeditions. He was sent to study English literature at Baghdad University but was steered toward a French literature class that held no interest for him. He went to see the assistant dean, who told him the only other opening was in archaeology.

“I asked if that meant living in tents and excavating sites, and when he said yes, I jumped at the opportunity,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2006. He earned undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees in archaeology from Baghdad University, then went to work for the government antiquities board. Fluent in English, he was sent to many international conferences, where he developed a web of contacts.

He became a member of Saddam’s Baath Party, which meant praising the dictator in public. Professor Stone said it would have been impossible for him to hold the high positions he did without participating in the party in at least minor ways. He would often joke that he worked at faraway digs to avoid party meetings.
But Dr. George believed that even this degree of loyalty was enough to make him a target for revenge by the conservative Shiites, who came to dominate Iraqi politics after the invasion.

Dr. George, who was a drummer in a rock band in his spare time, is survived by his wife, Najat Sarkees; his daughter, Mariam George; and his sons Steven and Martin.

Iraqi government officials dismissed Dr. George’s criticism that they had not done enough to safeguard the country’s ancient relics. They called his complaints a ruse to flee to the United States. He shrugged this off, saying archaeologists take a longer view.

“There are stages such as these, and then there are stages of calm,” he told The Times. “Each can last 100 years, but it passes. A famous Sumerian writer described the scene here in 2000 B.C., saying that people are looting and killing and nobody knows who the king is. So you see, nothing is new.”

How I Got My Name

2011-03-15T08:11:00.001-04:00

My parents. I wasn't there to be consulted.

Drear and gloom

2011-03-15T07:11:00.000-04:00

From The Writer's Almanac, a Michael Heffernan poem begins with what it's like to wake up every damned day:

Another day's stint in the free world

"You've got mail!" All bills.

2011-03-13T09:45:00.001-04:00

"For the past year or so, AOL has been trying to reinvent itself as a content company, using the river of cash its Internet access business continues to produce as a lever to buy assets like TechCrunch and video service 5Min Media, and finally The Huffington Post. It has also spent $100 million on building out its Patch.com hyper-local news operation to almost 1,000 towns and cities, and is expected to spend as much as $120 million more this year. As I’ve described before, Armstrong is feverishly trying to build new businesses that can replacethe ones that are disintegrating, before the cash from its legacy businesses runs out and the company collapses under its own weight."

The art of preserving ephemera, including this blog

2011-03-13T08:32:00.000-04:00

"...The task of preserving what's put online has proved, to no one's surprise, monumental. And it's only getting more so as the Internet expands, as Web sites become more dynamic, and as concern grows over online privacy. Increasingly, much of what people put online is being diffused across social networks and distributed through personalized apps on smartphones and tablet computers. The classic Web site, it seems, is already starting to slide toward obsolescence. "I'm convinced the Web as we know it will be gone in a few years' time," Illien says. "What we're doing in this library is trying to capture a trace of it." But to do even that is requiring engineers to build a new, more sophisticated generation of software robots, known as crawlers, to trawl the Web's vast and varied content.

"Illien sees himself as a steward of an ancient tradition; he believes he is helping pioneer a revolution in the way society documents what it does and how it thinks. He points out that since the end of the 19th century, the French National Library has been storing sales catalogs from big department stores, including the famous Galeries Lafayette. "Today," he says, "this exceptional collection…is the best record we have of how people dressed back then and who was buying what." One day, he insists, the archives of eBay will be just as valuable. Capturing them, however, is a task that's very different from anything archivists have ever done.

"The Web is regularly accessed and modified by as many as 2 billion people, in every country on Earth. It's a wild bazaar of scripting languages, file formats, media players, search interfaces, hidden databases, pay walls, pop-up advertisements, untraceable comments, public broadcasts, private conversations, and applications that can be navigated in an infinite number of ways. Finding and capturing even a substantial portion of it all would require development teams and computing resources as large as, or probably larger than, Google's..."

"I didn't amount to much personally but I knew everyone."

2011-03-09T22:55:00.000-05:00

A former Susan Sontag typist dines out on her most excellent connections.

RIP Douglas Adams

2011-03-08T21:11:00.000-05:00

Another indication of the relentless march of time:

On this day in 1978, the first episode of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was broadcast on BBC radio. It was science fiction comedy, from a writer named Douglas Adams, (books by this author) who was also a writer for the show Dr. Who. The Hitchhiker radio series became popular right away, and so it was turned into a British television series, a movie, and five books: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980); Life, The Universe and Everything (1982); So Long and Thanks for all the Fish (1984); and Mostly Harmless (1992).

The idea for the series came to Adams while he was lying in a field in Austria, drunk and considering the vastness of the cosmos. He imagined a roving reporter who was an alien assigned to write about an "insignificant planet at the unfashionable end of the universe" — Earth — which is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. The story goes from there.

In 1978 I was a grad student in England listening to the first episode of the Hitchhiker's Guide on the radio. I thought it hilarious. My landlady was annoyed I was laughing so loudly in my top floor bed-sit. She was famously humor-deficient- rather like Margot in Good Neighbours but without the dress sense.

Publishers get greedier

2011-03-06T17:02:00.002-05:00

But as more people ditch printed books in favor of e-books that can be downloaded directly to a computer, the rules are changing.

As of Monday, HarperCollins, publisher of authors such as Anne Rice, Sarah Palin and Michael Crichton, will not allow its e-books to be checked out from a library more than 26 times.

After that, the license on the e-book will expire and libraries will have to decide whether to buy a new one.

Is Chivalry Dead?

2011-03-02T02:30:00.001-05:00

Given that both men and women have trouble with ordinary civility- witness all the court TV shows and Maury Povitch's paternity slugfests- chivalry seems a grace too far.

The future of publishing

2011-03-01T21:09:00.000-05:00

Amanda Hocking is a 26 year old author. She has published nine books and sold nearly a million copies in paper and electronic form.

Noe were with a traditional publisher. She did it all herself. He most expensive book costs $2.99.

Here's a summary she wrote of her extraordinary initiative.

Retrofitting

2011-03-01T14:11:00.000-05:00

(Reuters) - Workers at a Google data center combined 12 century know how and space age technology to trigger a medieval weapon that was used to hurl rocks, balls of fire and dead animals over castle walls.

They used an Android cellphone, a computer the size of a credit card and a Blue Tooth receiver to trigger the wooden weapon, known as a trebuchet, during the first "Storm the Citadel Trebuchet Competition" in Charleston over the weekend.

The trebuchet was used during medieval times to break down fortifications.

"They also threw dead people," said Dennis Fallon, dean of engineering at The Citadel, a military college with about 2,100 male and female cadets. "What we have done in military history is not always something to be proud of."

More powerful than the ballistas and catapults of ancient empires, the trebuchet used a long swing arm, triggered by the pull of gravity on a counterweight placed at the other end, to slingshot its payload into the air.

Inside the teeming id of the Republican Party

2011-02-25T02:50:00.000-05:00

Box Turtle Bulletin:

Tennessee Lawmakers Propose Ban on Mentioning LGBT People in Schools

Jim Burroway

February 23rd, 2011

Tennessee State Sen. Stacey Campfield (left) and Rep. Bill Dunn (right), both R-Knoxville

Two Tennessee lawmakers, State Sen. Stacey Campfield and Rep. Bill Dunn, have introduced a bill in the state’s legislature that would ban schools from discussing any sexual orientation other than heterosexuality. The bill, House Bill 229 and Senate Bill 49 (PDF 36KB/1 page), says in part: “No public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.”

The “Don’t Say Gay” bill presents serious problems for students whose family members may be gay, or who may be gay themselves:

“The Don’t Say Gay bill raises all kinds of issues about anti-gay bias, free speech and government overreach,” said Ben Byers with the Tennessee Equality Project. …”It limits what teachers and students are able to discuss in the classroom,” Byers said. “It means they can’t talk about gay issues or sexuality even with students who may be gay or have gay family.”

Meantime, a Georgia legislator has proposed making miscarriages punishable by death as a threat to "prenatal citizens."

Ere long, male legislators will carry the unborn citizens logic a step back and declare their testicles voting districts.

Most boring headline of the week

2011-02-25T02:33:00.000-05:00

Schedule for Pope's June visit to San Marino

One can only imagine what it is to live in such a place.

2011-02-23T03:55:00.000-05:00

He is survived by his sister, of Niceville, Fla.

It gives him something to do

2011-02-16T01:47:00.001-05:00

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is to sick to work but not too sick to tear down a landmark home

"Are my eyes really brown?"

2011-02-15T14:25:00.000-05:00

Casablanca was on TCM last night. It's hard to believe it started off as a standard, wartime B pic with mid-level studio players.

A new bio sums up the miraculous alchemy that can be film:

By one account, his first 45 movies had him getting hanged or electrocuted eight times, sentenced to life imprisonment nine times, and cut down by bullets a dozen times.

Bogart’s big break came when George Raft turned down starring roles in “High Sierra,” and then “The Maltese Falcon,” and from there, it was on to the movies with which he has become synonymous, including “Casablanca,” “To Have and Have Not,” “The Big Sleep” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

Of “Casablanca,” Mr. Kanfer writes: “It was, and would remain, a Humphrey Bogart movie because he was the one who furnished the work with a moral center. There was no other player who could have so credibly inhabited the role of Rick Blaine, expatriate, misanthrope, habitual drinker, and, ultimately, the most self-sacrificing, most romantic Hollywood hero of the war years. To watch him in this extraordinary feature was not only to see a character rise to the occasion. It was to see a performer mature, to become the kind of man American males yearned to be. When Humphrey Bogart started filming ‘Casablanca’ on May 25, 1942, he was a star without stature; when he finished, on August 1, he was the most important American film actor of his time and place.”

Men are from Mars, and Mars seemed to be a man

2011-02-15T06:46:00.000-05:00

There's nothing quite as funny as a running gag, and actor Kenneth Mars was a master of them.

In 1968 he was the crazy Nazi-loving playwright of The Producers.

In the 1972 movie What's Up, Doc?, he played a Croatian musicologist Hugh Simon, Mars repeatedly invoked a strangled, pompous accent to announce, "I am Hugh." Invariably the reply was, "You are me?"

Two years later he appeared as Inspector Kemp, the mumbling, one-eyed cop with the wooden arm ("Off to the lumber yard!") in Young Frankenstein.

He just defined taste differently

2011-02-15T06:32:00.000-05:00

A schlock film maker has died, after decades of splattering all the way to the bank:

Mr. Friedman was proud of his work, in a manner of speaking.

“ ‘Blood Feast’ is probably the most maligned motion picture American critics have ever ripped asunder,” he wrote boastfully in his 1990 autobiography, “A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King.” He went on to quote the review in Variety:

“Incredibly crude and unprofessional from start to finish, ‘Blood Feast’ is an insult even to the most puerile and salacious audiences. The very fact that it is taking itself seriously makes the David F. Friedman production all the more ludicrous. It was a fiasco in all departments.”

Mr. Friedman then wrote: “Herschell and I have often wondered who told the Variety scribe we were taking ourselves seriously.”

Somwhere, Elizabeth Kuhbler-Ross is laughing

2011-02-15T01:48:00.000-05:00

GOP PBS NPR DOA?

The nine stages of not eliminating public broadcasting's subsidy.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011, at 3:03 PM ET

The new chairman of the House appropriations committee, Harold Rogers, R-Ky., has proposed zeroing out the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds public television and radio. This is far from the most troublesome of the GOP's proposed budget cuts (among other things, the plan also calls for zeroing out Americorps and family-planning funds, and it slashes the Environmental Protection Agency's budget), but it's getting big headlines because everybody has a television and a radio and nobody wants to see Scott Simon's children go hungry. In singling out CPB, Rogers and other House Republicans are initiating a familiar Washington ritual: the nine stages of not eliminating government broadcast funds.
Stage 1. Scream and yell about an unacceptably liberal gesture by NPR or PBS. In this case that was the baseless firing of Juan Williams. In years past, it was PBS giving aid and comfort to Bill Moyers,Frontline, and Stanley Karnow.
Stage 2. Threaten to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which collects and distributes federal funds to public broadcasters. (See Gingrich, Newt, 1995.)
Stage 3. Introduce legislation to eliminate CPB. (See Crane, Phil, 1997.)
Stage 4. Discover CPB's annual appropriation looms pretty small (currently $445 million) in a federal government whose annual spending is in the trillions.
Stage 5. Discover that CPB, in a time-tested Washington trick, gives most of its money to local stations, which in turn give money to the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. This (legal) money-laundering scheme makes congressional districts around the country consciously dependent on and loyal to CPB.
Stage 6. Discover that NPR and PBS have developed a deep interest not merely in your conservative political views but in your entire Weltanschauung and put you on the air all the time.
Stage 7. Discover that most public broadcasting officials, no matter what their politics, would rather die than be identified publicly with liberalism and will strangle overtly left-leaning content long before you hear about it. (See Allen, Woody, squelched Nixon parody, 1972.)
Stage 8. Discover that despite their terror of anything that might be labeled left-wing propaganda, public broadcasters will, after remarkably little bullying, gladly broadcast more right-wing propaganda than even Grover Norquist can tolerate.
Stage 9. Decide you have bigger fish to fry, and make your peace with public broadcasting. They're not such bad folks after all!

Birdland at last, after a career well-earned

2011-02-14T22:48:00.002-05:00

Pause, if you will, to remember George Shearing, the jazz pianist who has died at 91.

Somewhere, Max Bialystock is laughing

2011-02-10T11:59:00.000-05:00

The Broadway musical "Spiderman" has sucked up $65 million while not making it out of previews.

It's like the Mel Brooks movie "The Producers," which he then made into a play and back into a movie again, has come to life.

Justice

2011-02-09T04:43:00.000-05:00

Maria V. Altmann, a Jewish refugee who in her 80s waged a successful legal battle all the way to the United States Supreme Courtto force the Austrian government to return paintings by Gustav Klimtthat had been seized from her family by the Nazis, died on Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94.

Why I'm Thankful for Caller ID

2011-02-08T07:03:00.001-05:00

Pretty much everyone. The curse of cell phones is that people can drop into your life whenever the please. Not because they need to, just because they are bored and have fidgety fingers. When we had one national phone system and long distance that was relatively expensive, you didn't have to put up with endless crap from people who now call and then call again to complain you didn't answer the first call fast enough. And don't get me started on texting....

That'll show ya

2011-02-08T05:24:00.002-05:00

Except for the untimely but, tragically, far-from-unusual death of one sibling in a Nazi camp, the worst instance of anti-Semitism that Brandon uncovers in “Madame” Rubinstein’s life is the “no-Jews policy” of a Park Avenue co-op she wanted to move into. (In this case, moreover, Rubinstein had the last laugh: “Enraged, Madame bought the building.”)

The future's hard to predict

2011-02-08T05:08:00.000-05:00

One of the founders of computing has died.

Ken Olsen built DEC into a massive corporation but still couldn't adapt to changing technologies:

At its peak, in the late 1980s, Digital had $14 billion in sales and ranked among the most profitable companies in the nation.

But its fortunes soon declined after Digital began missing out on some critical market shifts, particularly toward the personal computer. Mr. Olsen was criticized as autocratic and resistant to new trends. “The personal computer will fall flat on its face in business,” he said at one point. And in July 1992, the company’s board forced him to resign.

Leaving well enough alone

2011-02-08T04:59:00.000-05:00

Here's one of those things you gotta wonder about- after Christina Aguilera hashed The Star Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl- does anyone ever just single it the way it was written? Why do pop singers and high schooolers alike seem to feel they need to add their personal stylings to it?

Besides not being able to remember the words, the Aguilera Anthem sounded, over all, like an AutoTuner being run through a pasta maker.

The Gettys: todays they'd be a reality show

2011-02-07T23:16:00.000-05:00

J. Paul Getty III has died at age 54.

Persons of a certain age might remember his kidnapping back in the 70s, but may not remember what a rat bastard his grandfather was:

The eldest Mr. Getty refused to pay the kidnappers anything, declaring that he had 14 grandchildren and “If I pay one penny now, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.” His son said he could not afford to pay.

Three months after the abduction, the kidnappers, who turned out to be Calabrian bandits with a possible connection to organized crime, cut off Mr. Getty’s ear and mailed it, along with a lock of his hair, to a Roman newspaper. Photographs of the maimed Mr. Getty, along with a letter in which he pleaded with his family to pay his captors, subsequently appeared in another newspaper. Eventually the kidnappers reduced their demands to around $3 million. According to the 1995 book, “Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty” by John Pearson, the eldest Mr. Getty paid $2.2 million, the maximum that his accountants said would be tax deductible. The boy’s father paid the rest, though he had borrow it from his father — at 4 percent interest.

The teenager, malnourished, bruised and missing an ear, was released on Dec. 15; he was found at an abandoned service station, shivering in a driving rainstorm. Nine men eventually were arrested. Two were convicted and sent to prison; the others, including the man prosecutors said was the head of the Calabrian Mafia and the mastermind behind the abduction, were acquitted for lack of evidence....

Some time after Mr. Getty’s release, his mother suggested he call his grandfather to thank him for paying the ransom, which he did. The eldest Mr. Getty declined to come to the phone.

Nice work if you can get others to pay you for it.

2011-02-06T14:28:00.004-05:00

The undemocratization of technology continues apace. Here's an article about how young kids are all over electronic reading devices like Kindle and Nook.

The trouble is that you have to spend- or your parents have to- a lot of money to get one. Then you have to keep the thing batteried up. Then you have to go buy access to a book from a giant media corporation.

In the meantime, as the big media corporations make even more money on books when they don't have to be actually print and store and distribute, they are cutting author royalties for the actual content they parse and exploit in the new media.

The opposition to net neutrality paves the way for giant media corporations to decide who fast your internet service is based on how much you can pay- and anyone who's ever had cable TV bills knows what a rigged game that will be.

Similarly, cable giants neglect the very places where good internet access is most needed: rural towns and farmsteads in thinly populated areas, and regions where most people aren't well off. In New Jersey a state fund to provide universal cable access collected nearly $10m but was never used and the current governor scooped it all up to spend on other things.

No money to be made there.

The continued migration of internet applications to fancy cell phones is another money suck that cuts out a chunk of the population. Another internet bill to pay. The poor and the old and kids who picked the wrong parents in life get left behind again.

What's interesting is how in developing countries technology is being harnessed to actually improve the lives of the less well off- cell phones can leapfrog the infrastructure requirements of land lines. They can host apps that allow credit and payment transactions where there are no banks.

Quite a contrast.

Praise be!

2011-02-02T23:24:00.000-05:00

Google has unveiled its Art Project, offering a virtual tour of 17 of the great museums of the world.

This is the sort of thing the Internets were meant to be- a way to visit cultural institutions too far- or financially prohibitive- to visit.

Unplug

2011-02-01T08:04:00.000-05:00

A writer has discovered he can cut himself off from being bombarded by electronic communication.

That's a lotta ants

2011-01-30T06:55:00.000-05:00

The man who invented the ant farm fifty plus years ago has died after selling some 20 million of the little home science units:

Mr. Levine certainly appreciated Pogonomyrmex californicus. “I found out their most amazing feat yet,” he said. “They put three kids through college.”

A Lesson I Learned the Hard Way

2011-01-29T10:36:00.001-05:00

Being born. Life followed.

Never cross Johnny

2011-01-28T23:33:00.000-05:00

Carson was also impressed by Mr. Callas, inviting him to appear on the “The Tonight Show” nearly 50 times. Then came the night of Sept. 21, 1982.

With Mr. Callas bombing, Carson made a whistling-buzzing sound — as if tracing a bomb’s trajectory. In comic desperation, Mr. Callas leaned over and shoved Carson. Carson, almost always amiable on the air, was so annoyed that on the spot, in front of his television audience, he told Mr. Callas that he’d never appear on the show again. Carson kept his word.

My Fitness Routine

2011-01-28T07:21:00.001-05:00

Ikon Vodka and Shaker

Vigorous workouts with my martini shaker.

My Childhood Idols

2011-01-27T02:54:00.001-05:00

Charles Lindbergh, wearing helmet with goggles up, in open cockpit of airplane at Lambert Field, St. Louis, Missouri

The Boy's Own Adventure hero of my childhood was aviator Charles Lindbergh. He wrote two memoirs and Jimmy Stewart made a movie of his flight over the Atlantic. Most people in those days still had not traveled by air, and it was only a few decades since he had made his flight. He had largely retired from public life so his Nazi sympathies were not a big issue. He was just a young flier who figured out how to do something nobody else had, and did it all alone.

A Book that Changed My Life

2011-01-25T01:25:00.001-05:00

Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964)

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. It made me an environmentalist.

The last Friday with Thurber

2011-01-22T13:16:00.000-05:00

Sadness:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Shoulda left Ernest Shepard's drawings alone

2011-01-18T07:10:00.000-05:00

From the Writers' Almanac a couple of noteworthy literary birthdays

It's the birthday of the physician and lexicographer Peter Mark Roget, (books by this author) born in London, England (1779). He was 61 years old, and had just retired from his medical practice, when he decided to devote his retirement to publishing a system of classifying words into groups, based on their meanings. And that became the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, published in 1852.

It's the birthday of children's writer A.A. Milne, (books by this author) born in London (1882). He's the author of Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). He wrote, "Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing."

On my desk is a copy of Roget's Thesaurus my mother gave my dad in 1959. I often regret the Disneyfication of Pooh and his comrades. Life's a mixed bag.

Jumping the sharktopus

2011-01-16T11:54:00.000-05:00

“Sharktopus,” the blood-soaked tale of a hybrid shark-octopus developed as a secret military weapon, was one of Syfy’s biggest hits last year. (The monster goes haywire and terrorizes bikini-clad women along Mexican Riviera beaches; 2.5 million people tuned in.)Roger Corman, known as the King of the B’s for pumping out movies like “The Wasp Woman” and “Humanoids From the Deep,” said he reluctantly agreed to produce the film, which got its start when a Syfy marketing executive, brainstorming ideas for new creatures, came up with the aquatic crossbreed.

“It’s not easy to take a computer-generated shark that can walk on a beach with octopus legs and make it seem believable,” Mr. Corman said. “My theory is that you can go up to a certain level of insanity and still keep the audience intrigued. Go beyond the insanity barrier, and people turn against you. In my opinion ‘Sharktopus’ breaks that barrier.” The results showed him that “even at my age you can learn something.”

Time, frozen, still marches ahead

2011-01-12T23:22:00.000-05:00

Because it can be run over and over, television has a way of freezing actors in time that, somehow, movies don't.

David Nelson always seemed to be somewhere between high school senior and a young married career guy on "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet", which a local station still carries.

Hard to imagine he has died, age 74.

Global Issues that Deserve More Attention

2011-01-12T02:23:00.001-05:00

Economic inequality, the linking of food to energy prices, communications in the poor nations, highways in Africa. Just to name a few.

Snow diary

2011-01-11T03:35:00.000-05:00

There were rumors of snow Sunday night and I sat up with one of the housemates to see it start. It finally did, about 1:35 am- insomnia has its pluses- and when I woke up again at 4:00 am the ground was covered.

I woke up again about 7:30 and looked out the window. Piles of the stuff everywhere,. still coming down.

Oh well, no getting out today. So I piled up the pillows, pulled up the covers, and tuned in BBC Radio 7 on the Internet.

Around noon I got up and got organized. Watched the news for a bit- all snow and assassins. No good movies on TCM.

Mid afternoon I bundled up and went for a walk, as I've not been out in snow for several years and it reminded me of childhood snowfalls when it was fun rather than just stuck at home and lonely for some company.

6-8 inches on the ground, drifts even higher. Enterprising drivers compressed snow into the street into a flat compacted sheet of ice. Lots of kids' feet in the snow- a plastic child's swimming pool rests below my bedroom window with racks of where they slid down the hill in it till it got boring, or they got cold and wet, or they got a better offer. Snow is rare here, so it's good that they've had two big snows in three weeks.

I ventured out of the immediate neighborhood for a bit and saw animal and bird tracks. Around the house bird feeders were doing a brisk business. The local gas station manager was out of sorts- he'd gotten to work and gotten the drive cleared- two big piles of snow attested to his enterprise- but most of his staff hadn't made it in. Business seemed slow. There were young persons on off-road four wheelers fueling up and firing away way to fast what seemed safe conditions to a middle aged man.

Most drivers seemed to be in trucks or SUVs- the kind of people you can decide about- are they actually needing to be somewhere, or just driving around because they can? Or think they can.

My local off-license dealer was, to my surprise and relief, open, though worried about getting up his driveway when he went home. Almost a 45 degree angle, he said. Then he added if he had five more men my size in the truck bed it would be a piece of cake. I want to be of help, I replied, but I don't want to go home with you. Not my type at all. Besides, it looks like you've got more than enough snow in back to weigh you down.

The local grocery was open as well. I bought neither bread nor milk, the odd staples people flock to get when there is a weather panic.

The governor gave state workers two extra hours to get in tomorrow. Schools are generally closed still, and more Christian academies than one could imagine existing report closures in the now-ubiquitous crawlers at the bottom of TV screens.

It began to rain on my way home but I got back before the worst of it. Happily, it didn't last. The hard question is whether it will start up again the these wee hours when it's really cold.

A bag of trash, I decided, will wait a bit before its delivery to the dumpster down the hill. I'm at the age where a slip- piled on old, increasingly arthritic injuries- could leave me lying in the middle of the steep, downhill street, yelling, "I've fallen, and I can't get up!"

Funny how we get cautious as we get old.Thirty years ago I was sledding down an incredibly steep hilly street the dead-ended into a chain link fence. You had to navigate a very hard-right turn just at the end. The gravity effect of the turn was such that after a few days we had to scrap the sled- the right-side runners were bending underneath the carriage.

I didn't do my laundry. I watched some more news. I went to bed. I can't sleep.

My Stress Level

2011-01-10T03:21:00.001-05:00

I'm badgered to death emails and cell phone calls from people who believe they can drop into my life whenever they feel like it and demand that I do things. Prices are going through the roof. TV news is unwatchable, it's so vitriolic. Republicans want to undo health care and financial reform and take us back to the good old days of a collapsing economy and the good news days of 50 million uninsured. I could go on....

Snow

2011-01-10T03:01:00.001-05:00

An hour and a half and everything is covered, including the streets.

Somewhere, Sartre is laughing

2011-01-08T10:03:00.000-05:00

The manic-depressives at The Gallup Organization have released their annual Global Barometer of Hope and Despair.

No, really.

Among developed nations, the French are the most gloomy.

The report came up on the latest episode of BBC Radio 4's "News Quiz," where one of the panelists explained, "When all you do is riot, shrug, and refuse to work, it'll eventually grind you down."

Next selection- The Inferno

2011-01-05T08:32:00.000-05:00

I thought SC ETV had reached a new low a couple of years ago when The Radio Reader performed an excruciating rendition of a book about the Donner Party, but now it's exceeding that with an extraordinarily depressing memoir by the spoiled kids of a woman who died- at length- of cancer.

He seems a little grumpy, though

2011-01-01T11:14:00.000-05:00

He's not dead yet but this 96 year old Indian writer has a hilarious obit.

Crazed genius

2010-12-30T13:23:00.000-05:00

“The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl,” he writes in “Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter.” Barry Hannah knew how to howl too — howl, in fact, like a southbound freight train on a northbound track.

RIP, Doc

2010-12-30T00:09:00.002-05:00

Back when NPR showcased music, not just blabbery talk news shows, Dr. Billy Taylor was an expositor of jazz without parallel.

Alas, he has died at the great old age of 89.

The downside of growing old is all your cultural landmarks precede you. Ahead- a sort of desert wasteland.

Sad days

2010-12-29T20:35:00.000-05:00

Arts and Letters Daily has gone black in mourning for its founder, Denis Dutton.

Grief in the A&L community

2010-12-28T23:26:00.000-05:00

The Internet has been a fun, sad, illuminating experience the last fifteen years, but only one website can I call life-changing.

It's Arts & Letters Daily, founded in 1998. It's content aggregator from hundreds of newspapers and magazines. Reading it every day is like an education that would take months if not years otherwise.

Some years after it started the site went broke and I felt like a family member had died. Happily, after a hiatus, The Chronicle of Higher Education acquired it and it has gone from strength to strength.

Sadly, its founder, Denis Dutton, has died.

I feel like a family member has died all over again. Only this time it's permanent.

Never cross The Michael

2010-12-28T16:11:00.000-05:00

Michael Kinsley dissects President Bush's memoir.

The Top Three Funniest People in the World

2010-12-27T21:17:00.001-05:00

1. Jon Stewart. He knows political satire is best served with a stiletto. And against both parties, without fear or favor.

2. Eddie Izzard. His "Dressed To Kill" special on HBO ranges over world history, Star Wars, and how to explain English standup comedy in French ("et le sange et sure le branche").

3. Lewis Black: watching him work up into a rage is priceless.

Honorable mention: Kathy Griffin. Hey she cons CNN to make gay jokes with the allegedly closeted Anderson Griffin every New Year's. A far cry from that Dick Clark (mumble, mumble)/Little Ryan Seacrest ("I'm on TV somewehre 24/7") schtick.

OK. I feel better now.

Verses under the tree

2010-12-25T05:51:00.000-05:00

The Poetry Foundation has an omnibus poetry collection about Christmas.

Happy Christmas, one and all

2010-12-25T05:16:00.000-05:00

It helps if you're an insomniac, but one of the most interesting, smart and gracious Facebook communities is that of MPR's classical music program, Music Through The Night. And no more so than in this holiday season.

"Oxford in the Snow", by the improbably named Sir Muirhead Bone

Is making reactionaries happy what museums are for?

2010-12-24T05:23:00.000-05:00

WaPo:

Clough's decision, made hastily and, it seems, over the objections of his curators and the Portrait Gallery's Sullivan, ran counter to this history of reform and showed an astonishing lack of perception about the humanities as well as the dynamics of museum culture. It was tactically, strategically and historically stupid.

It was tactically stupid because the culture wars were effectively over, at least in the museum world. Clough has re-empowered forces that will soon be back for more symbolic acts of contrition and subservience. It was strategically stupid because it harms not just the Smithsonian, but all museums. Clough may have saved his own institution from the immediate discomfort of political controversy, but he has exposed museums across the United States to new threats.

The airing of grievances especially

2010-12-24T05:14:00.000-05:00

Remember Festivus!

Irrationality, War-Style

2010-12-24T04:23:00.002-05:00

The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1914 that the last known Christmas truce occurred, during World War I. German troops fighting in Belgium began decorating their trenches and singing Christmas carols. Their enemy, the British, soon joined in the caroling. The war was put on hold, and these soldiers greeted each other in "No Man's Land," exchanging gifts of whiskey and cigars. In many areas, the truce held until Christmas night, while in other places the truce did not end until New Year's Day.

How to sell papers the Herald-Journal way

2010-12-23T04:37:00.002-05:00

Hedge those bets

2010-12-23T04:36:00.001-05:00

Snow will fall in Upstate, forecasters say, but amount unclear

It's Wright Brothers Day in North Carolina

2010-12-17T03:18:00.002-05:00

-and there is no word in English that rhymes with "orange"

2010-12-17T01:30:00.000-05:00

h/t Jonathan Chait,a found poem consisting of excerpts from Larry King's USA Today columns, offered in honor of his retirement last night:

Dick Van Dyke is the most enduring of television superstars.
Burt Reynolds improves the screen by being on it.
Kris Kristofferson never fails to move me.
Tommy Lasorda's pasta sauce is very, very good.

RIP Jacob Lateiner

2010-12-14T05:39:00.000-05:00

One of the most remarkable pianists I ever saw has died.

It wasn't me, it' the comic pages that got small.

2010-12-14T00:46:00.000-05:00

Brenda Starr's calling the copy runner for the last time, after 70 years on the beat. Mary Worth sent her a note on tasteful vellum.

Now tell me something I don't already know

2010-12-13T23:20:00.000-05:00

A scientific study confirms reality:

There are two points in the novel-writing cycle when authors are particularly vulnerable, he believes. "Almost every writer I know goes through the same reaction after a novel is finished – there are 24 hours of euphoria and then all the negative thoughts you have shut out while finishing it come out, and either you get drunk or depressed or get the flu.

"The other point is two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through a novel, when almost all writers get what I call the 'three-quarters sag', when the only thing you like less about what you've written so far is the ideas you have for finishing the book. My books are written quite quickly, so it only lasts a week or two, but for people who spend two years writing, it can take months."

Homage to the Great Man and Helen, His Daughter

2010-12-08T03:33:00.001-05:00

I have a 29 cent stamp framed on my desk.

It's the birthday of the godlike, if tortured, James Thurber, pretty much from the 1920s to World War II, one of the funniest and serious Americans alive.

James Grover Thurber was born on this day in 1893 in Columbus, Ohio.He was the age of my grandparents. I miss them all.

They just can't leave well enough alone.

2010-12-08T01:33:00.000-05:00

Cate Blanchett had better start brushing up on her Elvish. The Australian actress has signed on to the cast of director Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic The Hobbit, reprising the role of the ethereal elf Galadriel that she played in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The announcement of Blanchett’s casting comes as something of a surprise, since the character of Galadriel doesn’t actually appear in Tolkien’s novel. Then again, there are virtually no female characters in the book whatsoever, so Jackson is clearly looking to balance out the two-part film somewhat in terms of gender.

You can just see how he was a threat to marriage

2010-12-08T00:52:00.001-05:00

How is we only celebrate the unique accomplishments of people when they are dead? And what can you say of the optimism- and lack of threat the the fabric of the society- of a man who debuted at The Met at 84 and entered into a civil union at 104?

Hugues Cuénod, a Swiss tenor who dazzled critics in his Metropolitan Opera debut a quarter-century ago, not only because he sang extremely well but also because he was nearly 85, the oldest person to sing there before or since, died on Monday at his home in Vevey, Switzerland. He was 108 and also had an ancestral chateau nearby in Lully.

His death was confirmed by the American tenor Robert White, a friend of many years.

Mr. Cuénod (his given name is pronounced “oog,” in an umlauted way — say “eeg” with lips rounded — his surname “kweh-NOH”) was originally a concert singer. He addedopera to his portfolio in the late 1920s and had a long, distinguished international career before making his Met debut on March 12, 1987, as the Emperor Altoum in Puccini’s “Turandot.”

The production, which also starred Plácido Domingo and Eva Marton, was directed by Franco Zeffirelli and conducted by James Levine. Writing about it in The New York Times,John Rockwell said Mr. Cuénod “remains the best Emperor this writer has heard.”

Mr. Cuénod’s only Met appearances were in the role, which he sang a total of 14 times in 1987 and 1988.

Mr. Cuénod, who continued to sing publicly until he was in his early 90s, did not have a large voice or, as he cheerfully admitted, the world’s most beautiful. But it was those very attributes, he often said, that let him sing to so ripe an age.

“He never pushed the instrument,” Mr. White said in an interview on Tuesday. “He didn’t put it under strain and pressure, which a lot of singers do.”

Or, as Mr. Cuénod told The New York Times in 1987, “I never had a voice, so how could I lose one?”

That premise, however, was far from true. In his performances and many recordings, Mr. Cuénod was praised for his light, clean, almost ethereal tenor; refined musicianship; and faultless diction.

He was also known for his breathtaking musical ecumenicalism: a champion both of early music and 20th-century fare, he performed the work of composers as diverse asMonteverdi, Stravinsky and Noël Coward.

If it took Mr. Cuénod six decades to find his way to the Met, it might have been, at least in part, because he simply did not have time:

He was an active participant in the early-music revival of the 20th century, singing on seminal 1930s recordings of Monteverdi led by Nadia Boulanger.

He sang the role of Sellem in the world premiere of Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress” in Venice in 1951. He also appeared on the stages of La Scala, Glyndebourne, Covent Garden and the Opera Society of Washington, as the Washington National Opera was then known.

He taught at the Geneva Conservatory and gave master classes worldwide. He gave recitals in cities around the globe, including New York. He even sang on Broadway.

Hugues-Adhémar Cuénod, familiarly known as Huguie, was born in Corseaux-sur-Vevey, Switzerland, on June 26, 1902, to a family of bankers. He studied voice in Lausanne, Geneva, Basel and Vienna — he began as a baritone but with training became a tenor — before embarking on a concert career. As a recitalist, he became renowned as an interpreter of French song.

Mr. Cuénod made his operatic debut in 1928 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in “Jonny Spielt Auf” (“Jonny Strikes Up”), an opera about a jazz violinist by the Austrian composer Ernst Krenek.

The next year, he appeared on Broadway, singing a small role in “Bitter Sweet,” an operetta with book, music and lyrics by Coward that ran for 159 performances.

His recordings include the work of Bach, Couperin, Haydn, Brahms, Schubert, Debussy, Satie and Honegger.

Mr. Cuénod is survived by his companion, Alfred Augustin, with whom he entered into a civil union in 2007, when he was 104 and Mr. Augustin about 64.

When Mr. Cuénod finally took the stage at the Metropolitan Opera House, “Turandot” seemed an unlikely vehicle to bring him there. His Swiss training had emphasized musical restraint; for him and his compatriots, he said, Puccini’s emotional excesses were unpalatable.

“I didn’t like the music,” Mr. Cuénod told The Times in 1987. “People would compete with each other to say ‘Puccini, bah.’ ”

But something about Mr. Zeffirelli’s “Turandot” — which, like most Zeffirelli productions, was itself a thing of abundant excess — tempted him, so much so that he turned down a competing offer to sing with the Geneva Opera.

Mr. White was in the audience for Mr. Cuénod’s Met debut. Sitting beside him was the philanthropist Alice Tully, born, like Mr. Cuénod, in 1902.

As Mr. White recalled on Tuesday, Miss Tully turned to him and said, “Bobby, Huguie may be the oldest one on that stage, but he’s the only one whose words I can hear clearly.”

Somewhere, Norman Mailer is demanding to know why he wasn't considered again

2010-12-05T17:37:00.000-05:00

The Literary Review has given its annual bad sex writing awards.

Best opening line of the week

2010-12-05T15:53:00.002-05:00

Not far away, above a dubious shop selling remaindered paint...

Waldo At Home.

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Solstice

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Here people run for president who deny science; there we mock him for driving a Dodge Dartre

Time spins, doesn't it?

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