Month: November 2008

Legacies

Roger Angell reminds us of the way we were. Read the whole three paragraphs, but here’s the nub:

I found him again in an old reunion report, and filled in the blank: Lucien Victor Alexis, Jr., of New Orleans. In our junior year, he’d been briefly in the news, when the Navy lacrosse coach refused to allow his team to take the field at Annapolis, because of Lucien’s presence as a player on the visiting Harvard team. Lucien was black—the only black player on the team, just as he was the only black member of our class. The Harvard lacrosse coach refused to withdraw him, but was overruled on the scene by the Harvard athletic director, William J. (Bill) Bingham. Alexis was sent back to Cambridge on a train; Harvard played and lost, 12–0. There was a subsequent campus protest at Harvard, a petition was signed (I can’t remember if I signed it), and soon afterward the Harvard Athletic Association announced that Harvard would never again withdraw a player for reasons of race. Harvard’s president, James B. Conant, had been away in Europe at the time of the lacrosse incident, but when he came back he apologized to the commanding admiral at Annapolis for the breach of cordial relations that Harvard had occasioned by bringing Lucien Alexis along.

November 9th

Cardinals hall-of-fame pitcher Bob Gibson is 73.

Over 17 seasons with the Cardinals, Bob Gibson won 20 games five times and established himself as the very definition of intimidation, competitiveness, and dignity. One of the best athletes to ever play the game, the ex-Harlem Globetrotter posted a 1.12 ERA in 1968, the lowest figure since 1914, and was named the National League Cy Young Award winner and Most Valuable Player. Known as a premier big-game pitcher, Gibson posted World Series records of seven consecutive wins and 17 strikeouts in a game, and was named World Series MVP in 1964 and 1967.

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

Mary Travers, Mary of Peter, Paul & Mary, is 72.

The Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno, is 56.

Carl Sagan was born on this date in 1934. He died in 1996.

Gail Borden, the inventor of condensed milk, was born on this date in 1801. His timing was perfect. He patented the milk just before the civil war when it’s use as part of the field ration made it a success. Borden was also instrumental in requiring dairy farmers to maintain clean facilities if they wanted to sell their milk to his company — Eagle Brand.

The first of seven African-Americans to be nominated for a best actress Oscar, Dorothy Dandridge was born on this date in 1922. She was nominated for Carmen Jones in 1955.

And 70 years ago the Holocaust began:

Today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when Hitler ordered a series of supposedly spontaneous attacks on Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. The idea was to make the attacks look random, and then accuse the Jews of inciting the violence. In all, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or destroyed. Rioters looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. The event was used to justify barring Jews from schools and most public places, and forcing them to adhere to new curfews. In the days following, thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps. The event was called Kristallnacht, which means, “Night of Broken Glass.” It’s generally considered the official beginning of the Holocaust. Before that night, the Nazis had killed people secretly and individually. After Kristallnacht, the Nazis felt free to persecute the Jews openly, because they knew no one would stop them.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Double take line of the day

[F]ormer Bear Stearns chief risk officer Michael Alix has landed a job in the office of the Federal Reserve charged with assessing the safety and soundness of domestic banking institutions.

We suppose that Alix at least has plenty of experience with unsound banking institutions. He was the chief risk officer of Bear Stearns from 2006 until 2008. So, basically, he was the guy on the mast charged with yelling “iceberg” just before the titantic introduced its bow to a floating hunk of ice. …

Clusterstock

Thanks to Bob Ormond for the pointer.

It’s the Housing Bubble, Not the ***** Credit Crunch!

The bursting of the housing bubble damaged both consumer confidence and the card house of the credit markets. These in turn led to the bursting of the stock bubble, which has led to even more loss of consumer confidence.

This excerpted from a posting by Dean Baker — Beat the Press:

The news media almost completely missed the housing bubble. They relied almost entirely on sources who either had an interest in not calling or attention to an $8 trillion housing bubble or somehow were unable to see it. As a result they did not warn the public that their house prices were likely to plunge in future years.

Having dismally failed in their jobs to inform the public, reporters are still relying almost exclusively on sources that completely missed the housing bubble. As a result, they are still badly misinforming the public, first and foremost by attributing the economic downturn to a credit crunch.

This is truly incredible. Homeowners have lost more than $5 trillion in housing wealth. There is a very well established wealth effect whereby $1 of housing wealth is estimated as leading to 5 to 6 cents of annual consumption. This implies that the loss of wealth to date would cause consumption to fall by $250 billion to $300 billion annually (1.7 percent to 2.0 percent of GDP). If you add in the loss of around $6 trillion in stock wealth, with an estimated wealth effect of 3-4 cents on the dollar, then you get an additional decline of $180 billion to $240 billion in annual consumption (1.2 percent to 1.6 percent of GDP).

These are huge falls in consumption that would lead to a very serious recession, like the one we are seeing. This would be predicted even if all our banks were fully solvent and in top flight financial shape.

I wonder if they insulted each other’s mamas

I mentioned that I was reading David Hackett Fischer’s Champlain’s Dream. I found this passage interesting. It describes the scene in the hours before a battle in 1609 between Champlain’s Indian allies and the Mohawk. They were on the shores of the lake Champlain had named for himself just days before.

“We were on the water,” he wrote, “within bow-shot of their barricades.” Songs and cries pierced the night. The Mohawk shouted insults at their enemies. “Our side was not lacking in repartee,” Champlain recalled, “telling them that they would see feats of weaponry that they had never known before, and a great deal of other talk as is usual at the siege of a city.”

In other words, trash talking has been around for a while.

[It’s interesting to learn from Fischer that according to Champlain’s reports, woodland Indians at that time entered battle pretty much as Europeans did — mass, coordinated movements, armored warriors (albeit wooden armor). It was, he says, firearms that caused the Eastern Indians to adopt the type of warfare historians (and novelists) associate with them, the hit-and-run, hiding in the woods, kind of warfare.]

The Obama states

Obama’s three best states (percentage of vote) were:

Hawaii (71.8%)
Vermont (66.8%)
Rhode Island (63.1%)

Seven other states and the District of Columbia gave Obama more than 60% of their vote. They were:

D.C. (92.9%)
New York (62.1%)
Massachusetts (62.0%)
Illinois (61.7%)
Delaware (61.3%)
California (61.1%)
Maryland (60.9%)
Connecticut (60.2%)

Of the 15 states with the most people, all but Texas (#2) and Georgia (#9) went for Obama. Interestingly enough, the other 13 most populous states have exactly half of all electoral votes.

The McCain states

McCain’s three best states (percentage of vote) were:

Oklahoma (65.6%)
Wyoming (65.2%)
Utah (62.9%)

Two of Utah’s 29 counties went for Obama. Two of Wyoming’s 23 counties went for Obama.

None of Oklahoma’s 77 counties went for Obama.

Alaska (61.5%), Idaho (61.5%) and Alabama (60.4%) were the only other states that gave McCain more than 60% of their vote.

November 6th

Mike Nichols is 77 today. Nichols has been nominated for four best director Oscars, winning for “The Graduate.”

Sally Field is 62. Field has won two best actress Oscars (because the Academy really likes her); one for “Norma Rae” and the other for “Places in the Heart.”

Glenn Frey of The Eagles is 60.

Blues singer Rory Block is 59. So is jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.

California’s first lady, Maria Shriver, is 53.

Ethan Hawke is 38. Hawke has been nominated for two Oscars, one for supporting actor, “Training Day,” and one for co-writing, “Before Sunset.”

Thandie Newton is 36. Miss Newton’s mother is Zimbawbean, her father English.

New Yorker founder Harold Ross was born in Aspen, Colorado, on November 6, 1892.

Walter “Big Train” Johnson was born 121 years ago today. Johnson was one of the first five players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame — along with Cobb, Ruth, Mathewson and Wagner.

There were no sophisticated measuring devices in the early 1900s, but Walter Johnson’s fastball was considered to be in a class by itself. Using a sweeping sidearm delivery, the Big Train fanned 3,508 over a brilliant 21-year career with the Washington Senators, and his 110 shutouts are more than any pitcher. Despite hurling for losing teams most of his career, he won 417 games – second only to Cy Young on the all-time list – and enjoyed 10 successive seasons of 20 or more victories.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

James Naismith was born on this date in 1861. He’s the guy that created basketball and for whom the basketball hall-of-fame is named — and basketball’s most prestigious trophies. Dr. James Naismith’s 13 Original Rules of Basketball.

John Philip Sousa was born on November 6, 1854.

Sousa said a march ‘should make a man with a wooden leg step out’, and his surely did. However, he was no mere maker of marches, but an exceptionally inventive composer of over two hundred works, including symphonic poems, suites, songs and operettas created for both orchestra and for band. John Philip Sousa personified the innocent energy of turn-of-the-century America and he represented America across the globe. His American tours first brought classical music to hundreds of towns.

Naxos.com

Abraham Lincoln was elected president on this date in 1860.

Best line of the day, so far

Mr. King ended his Hawaii speech by quoting a prayer from a preacher who had once been a slave, and it’s an apt description of the idea of America today: “Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

Martin Luther King Jr. in 1959 quoted by Nicholas Kristof.