Author: NewMexiKen

Quincy Jones and Michael Caine are 77 today.

Jones has 79 Grammy nominations and 27 wins to his credit. He produced “Thriller,” which has sold more than 100 million copies.

Caine has six Oscar nominations and two wins, both for best supporting actor — Hannah and Her Sisters and Cider House Rules. His first best actor nomination was for Alfie in 1967; his most recent for The Quiet American 36 years later.

Albert Einstein was born on this date in 1879. The following is from his New York Times obituary in 1955.

In 1904, Albert Einstein, then an obscure young man of 25, could be seen daily in the late afternoon wheeling a baby carriage on the streets of Bern, Switzerland, halting now and then, unmindful of the traffic around him, to scribble down some mathematical symbols in a notebook that shared the carriage with his infant son, also named Albert.

Out of those symbols came the most explosive ideas in the age-old strivings of man to fathom the mystery of his universe. Out of them, incidentally, came the atomic bomb, which, viewed from the long-range perspective of mankind’s intellectual and spiritual history may turn out, Einstein fervently hoped, to have been just a minor by-product.

With those symbols Dr. Einstein was building his theory of relativity. In that baby carriage with his infant son was Dr. Einstein’s universe-in-the-making, a vast, finite-infinite four-dimensional universe, in which the conventional universe–existing in absolute three-dimensional space and in absolute three-dimensional time of past, present and future–vanished into a mere subjective shadow.

Dr. Einstein was then building his universe in his spare time, on the completion of his day’s routine work as a humble, $600-a-year examiner in the Government Patent Office in Bern.

A few months later, in 1905, the entries in the notebook were published in four epoch-making scientific papers. In the first he described a method for determining molecular dimensions. In the second he explained the photo-electric effect, the basis of electronics, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1921. In the third, he presented a molecular kinetic theory of heat. The fourth and last paper that year, entitled “Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” a short article of thirty-one pages, was the first presentation of what became known as the Special Relativity Theory.

Today is the birthday

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Mike Stoller. He’s 77.

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller have written some of the most spirited and enduring rock and roll songs: “Hound Dog” (originally cut by Big Mama Thornton in 1953 and covered by Elvis Presley three years later), “Love Potion No. 9” (the Clovers), “Kansas City” (Wilbert Harrison), “On Broadway” (the Drifters), “Ruby Baby” (Dion) and “Stand By Me” (Ben E. King). Their vast catalog includes virtually every major hit by the Coasters (e.g., “Searchin’,” “Young Blood,” “Charlie Brown,” “Yakety Yak” and “Poison Ivy”). They also worked their magic on Elvis Presley, writing “Jailhouse Rock,” “Treat Me Nice” and “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care)” specifically for him. All totaled, Presley recorded more than 20 Leiber and Stoller songs.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Leiber wrote the lyrics. Stoller wrote the music.

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Neil Sedaka. He’s 71.

Singer, songwriter, and pianist Neil Sedaka enjoyed two distinct periods of commercial success in two slightly different styles of pop music: first, as a teen pop star in the late ’50s and early ’60s, then as a singer of more mature pop/rock in the 1970s. In both phases, Sedaka, a classically trained pianist, composed the music for his hits, which he sang in a boyish tenor. And throughout, even when his performing career was at a low ebb, he served as a songwriter for other artists, resulting in a string of hits year in and year out, whether recorded by him or someone else. For himself, he wrote eight U.S. Top Ten pop hits, including the chart-toppers “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” “Laughter in the Rain,” and “Bad Blood.” The most successful cover of one of his compositions was Captain & Tennille’s recording of “Love Will Keep Us Together,” another number one.

All Music

… of William H. Macy. He’s 60. Macy was nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar for his performance in Fargo.

Percival Lowell was born March 13th in 1855. Lowell is credited with the discovery of Pluto, but Pluto isn’t even mentioned in his obituary. The foremost “discovery” of Professor Lowell’s career concerned Mars. The following is an excerpt from his obituary in 1916:

The great controversy among astronomers, in which he played a leading part, began in 1907 after his announcement that the observations made by his astronomical station, the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Ariz., proved that Mars was inhabited. Professor Lowell had put the theory forward tentatively as early as 1895. Many eminent astronomers in this country and Europe accepted his conclusions of 1907 as unassailable. Others were skeptical. Professor Lowell continued from year to year to produce fresh evidence in favor of his theory by his observations at Flagstaff, where is located the best astronomical plant in the world for the observation of Mars.

Professor Lowell’s theory begins with the demonstration that the primary requisites for human life exist on the planet–water, heat, and atmosphere. His positive proof of the existence of human life on Mars is the network of lines which mark certain areas of the planet’s face, indicating the digging of artificial canals, which would require an intelligence and engineering skill as great or greater than that possessed by the inhabitants of this earth.

The New York Times

The playwright Edward Albee is 82 today.

Barbara Feldon, Agent 99 of the “Get Smart” TV series, is 77.

James Taylor is 62 today. He’s seen a lot of fire and he’s seen a lot of rain by now.

Liza Minnelli is 64.

Jon Provost is 60. Who? Timmy on Lassie.

Courtney B. Vance is 50.

Dave Eggers is 40.

While he was in college at the University of Illinois, his mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Then, just after his mother went through severe stomach surgery, his father was diagnosed with cancer. Six months later, both of his parents were dead. Eggers was just 21 years old.

Of the experience of losing both of his parents so suddenly, Eggers later said, “On the one hand you are so completely bewildered that something so surreal and incomprehensible could happen. At the same time, suddenly the limitations or hesitations that you might have imposed on yourself fall away. There’s a weird, optimistic recklessness that could easily be construed as nihilism but is really the opposite. You see that there is a beginning and an end and that you have only a certain amount of time to act. And you want to get started.”

Eggers had to drop out of college to become the guardian of his 8-year-old younger brother. They moved to San Francisco, and Eggers used the insurance money from his parents’ deaths to start his own magazine with some high school friends. They called their publication Might Magazine, because the liked the fact that the word “might” conveyed both strength and hesitation. The magazine developed a cult following for the way it satirized the magazine format. Each issue included an erroneous table of contents, irrelevant footnotes, and fictional error retractions. In one issue, they wrote, “On page 111, in our ‘Religious News Round-up,’ we reported that Jesus Christ was a deranged, filthy protohippy. In fact, Jesus Christ was the son of God. We regret the error.” To raise money for the magazine, they sold the contents of their recycle bins to readers.

Excerpt above from The Writer’s Almanac (2008)

If you have never read Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, stop what you’re doing, get a copy and read it. NOW!

I’ve also been told that Eggers new book, Zeitoun is a must read.

Jean-Louise Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on this date in 1922.

The story about how Kerouac composed On the Road is well-known: He cut up strips of tracing paper so that they’d fit in the typewriter, and taped them all together so he wouldn’t have to interrupt his flow of writing to adjust or add paper. He wrote the whole thing from start to finish in three weeks, with no paragraph breaks and minimal punctuation; and when he got up from his typewriter, he had in his hands a 119-foot-long scroll of a book that defined his generation.

The Writer’s Almanac

The above is an excerpt. Click the link for a better look at how the book was created.

Today Rupert Murdoch is 79 and Justice Antonin Scalia is 74. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Ralph Abernathy was born on this date in 1926. Abernathy was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s friend and associate and assumed leadership of the the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when King was killed in 1968. Abernathy was with King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis that day. This photo of the two was taken in 1961.

Lawrence Welk was born in North Dakota on this date in 1903. He died in 1992.

One of television’s most enduring musical series, The Lawrence Welk Show, was first seen on network TV as a summer replacement program in 1955. Although the critics were not impressed, Mr. Welk’s show went on to last an astonishing 27 years. His format was simple: easy-listening music, what he referred to as “champagne music,” and a “family” of wholesome musicians, singers, and dancers.

The show ran on ABC for the first 16 years and was known in the early years as The Dodge Dancing Party. ABC canceled the show in 1971, not because of lack of popularity, but because it was “too old” to please advertisers. ABC’s cancellation did little to stop Welk, who lined up more than 200 independent stations for a successful syndicated network of his own.
. . .

There were many show favorites throughout the years including the Lennon Sisters, who were brought to his attention by his son Lawrence Jr. who was dating Dianne Lennon in 1955. Other favorites included the Champagne Ladies (Alice Lon and Norma Zimmer); accordionist Myron Floren, who was also the assistant conductor; singer-pianist Larry Hooper; singers Joe Feeney and Guy Hovis; violinist Aladdin; dancers Bobby Burgess and Barbara Boylan; and Welk’s daughter-in-law, Tanya Falan Welk.

Most of the regulars stayed with the show for years, but a few moved on–or who were told to move on by Mr. Welk. In 1959, for example, Welk fired Champagne Lady Alice Lon for “showing too much knee” on camera. After receiving thousands of protest letters for his actions, he attempted to have Alice return, but she refused.

The Museum of Broadcast Communications