Day: July 5, 2009

July Fifth

Robbie Robertson of The Band is 66.

Julie Nixon Eisenhower, daughter of one president and granddaughter-in-law of another, is 61. (It’s her husband David Eisenhower for whom presidential retreat Camp David is named.)

Huey Lewis is 59. No news on the ages of The News.

Rich “Goose” Gossage is 58.

David Farragut was born on July 5th in 1801. He entered the U.S. Navy as a 9-year-old; as a 12-year-old he took command of a prize ship and brought her to port during the War of 1812. Though a native of Tennessee, Farragut honored his oath to the United States and remained with the Union. A naval force under his command took control of New Orleans in 1862. In August 1864 he led the victory at Mobile Bay where he is reported to have said, “Damn the torpedoes, Full speed ahead!”

Aboard Hartford, Farragut entered Mobile Bay, Alabama, 5 August 1864, in two columns, with armored monitors leading and a fleet of wooden ships following. When the lead monitor Tecumseh was demolished by a mine, the wooden ship Brooklyn stopped, and the line drifted in confusion toward Fort Morgan. As disaster seemed imminent, Farragut gave the orders embodied by these famous words. He swung his own ship clear and headed across the mines, which failed to explode. The fleet followed and anchored above the forts, which, now isolated, surrendered one by one. The torpedoes to which Farragut and his contemporaries referred would today be described as tethered mines.

Famous Navy Quotes

Phineas Taylor Barnum was born on this date in 1810.

In his 80 years, Barnum gave the wise public of the 19th century shameless hucksterism, peerless spectacle, and everything in between — enough entertainment to earn the title “master showman” a dozen times over. In choosing Barnum as one of the 100 most important people of the millennium, LIFE magazine dubbed him “the patron saint of promoters.”
. . .

In 1841, Barnum purchased Scudder’s American Museum on Broadway in New York City. He exhibited “500,000 natural and artificial curiosities from every corner of the globe,” and kept traffic moving through the museum with a sign that read, “This way to the egress” — “egress” was another word for exit, and Barnum’s patrons would have to pay another quarter to reenter the Museum!
. . .

One of Barnum’s biggest successes — literally! — came in 1882 with his acquisition of Jumbo. Dubbed “The Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race, Whose Like the World Will Never See Again,” Jumbo arrived in New York on April 9, 1882, and attracted enormous crowds on his way to his name becoming a part of the language.

The Greatest Show on Earth

55 years ago today

… Elvis Presley recorded “That’s All Right, Mama.” During a break in a recording session consisting mostly of slow ballads, Elvis, Scotty Moore and Bill Black began fooling around.

Sun Studio

Sam recognized it right away. He was amazed that the boy even knew Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup — nothing in any of the songs he had tried so far gave any indication that he was drawn to this kind of music at all. But this was the sort of music that Sam had long ago wholeheartedly embraced, this was the sort of music of which he said, “This is where the soul of man never dies.” And the way the boy performed it, it came across with a freshness and an exuberance, it came across with the kind of clear-eyed, unabashed originality that Sam sought in all the music that he recorded — it was “different,” it was itself.

They worked on it. They worked hard on it, but without any of the laboriousness that had gone into the efforts to cut “I Love You Because.” Sam tried to get Scotty to cut down on the instrumental flourishes — “Simplify, simplify'” was the watchword. “If we wanted Chet Atkins,” said Sam good-humoredly, “we would have brought him up from Nashville and gotten him in the damn studio!” He was delighted with the rhythmic propulsion Bill Black brought to the sound. It was a slap beat and a tonal beat at the same time. He may not have been as good a bass player as his brother Johnny; in fact, Sam said, “Bill was one of the worst bass players in the world, technically, but, man, could he slap that thing!” And yet that wasn’t it either — it was the chemistry. There was Scotty, and there was Bill, and there was Elvis scared to death in the middle, “but sounding so fresh, because it was fresh to him.”

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

NewMexiKen photo, 2006

One Mississippi, two Mississippi

You see the sky rocket explode, but the boom doesn’t come for seconds. The lightning flashes, but the thunder is moments behind. The reason, of course, is that sound moves much, much, much slower than light.

Light is so fast — 186,000 miles per second — that everything we can see on Earth, we see almost instantaneously. Sound, however, travels at just 1,125 feet per second (more or less, depending on temperature, altitude, humidity). The source of the sound doesn’t need to be very far away for us to sense the lag.

Rule of thumb, it takes just less than 5 seconds for sound to travel a mile. If lightning flashes, count the seconds until you hear the thunder to calculate how far away it struck.

A bolt of lightning can be over five miles in length, have temperatures of 50,000 degrees F., and contain 100 million volts.

In 2007, 45 people were struck and killed by lightning in the U.S.; hundreds of others were injured. Of the victims who were killed by lightning:

• 98% were outside
• 89% were male
• 30% were males between the ages of 20-25
• 25% were standing under a tree
• 25% occurred on or near the water

The reported number of injuries is likely far lower than the actual total number because many people do not seek help or doctors do not record it as a lightning injury. People struck by lightning suffer from a variety of long-term, debilitating symptoms, including memory loss, attention deficits, sleep disorders, numbness, dizziness, stiffness in joints, irritability, fatigue, weakness, muscle spasms, depression, and an inability to sit for long.

National Weather Service

That’s funny, I don’t remember being struck by lightning and I have all those symptoms. Oh wait, including memory loss.

Best line of the day

“First, implicit in this characterization of Franken is the notion of the Senate as a decorous gentlemen’s club. I doubt that club ever existed in reality; but in any case, these days the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body is, not to put too fine a point on it, chock full o’ nuts. James Inhofe: I rest my case.”

Paul Krugman commenting that Al Franken is a policy wonk.

“In fact, the only elected official I know who’s wonkier than Al Franken is Rush Holt, my congressman — and he used to be the assistant director of Princeton’s plasma physics lab. (The campaign’s bumper stickers read, ‘My Congressman IS a rocket scientist.’)”