Author: NewMexiKen

February First

Isaac Donald Everly is 73 today (Phil Everly was 71 last month). The brothers broke up in 1973 and did not speak to each other until they reunited in 1983.

Garret Morris of “Saturday Night Live” is 73 today.

Sherman Hemsley of “The Jeffersons” is 72.

Lisa Marie Presley is 42.

Four-time Oscar winner for best director John Ford was born on this date.

It’s the birthday of American movie director John Ford, born Sean Aloysius O’Fearna, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine (1895), the youngest of 13 children. He made more than 120 films, most of them Westerns. On the sets of his movies he wore old khaki pants, tennis shoes with holes in the toes, a worn-out fedora, and a dirty scarf around his neck. He always had poor eyesight. He started wearing an eye patch like a pirate after he went blind in one eye. He usually worked with a glass of brandy in his hand and was always smoking a cigar.

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

Clark Gable was born on this date in 1901. He won the Best Actor award in 1935 for It Happened One Night. He was nominated for Best Actor for Mutiny of the Bounty and Gone With the Wind.

Langston Hughes was born on this date in 1902. This from his obituary in 1967.

Mr. Hughes was sometimes characterized as the “O. Henry of Harlem.” He was an extremely versatile and productive author who was particularly well known for his folksy humor.

In a description of himself written for “Twentieth Century Authors, a biographical dictionary, Mr. Hughes wrote:

“My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Henry Armstrong.”

“I live in Harlem, New York City,” his autobiographical sketch continued. “I am unmarried. I like ‘Tristan,’ goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike ‘Aida,’ parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.”

The New York Times

Victor Herbert was born Dublin on this date in 1859.

He studied music in Germany, where he became a cellist and composer for the court in Stuttgart and joined the faculty of the Stuttgart Conservatory of Music. In 1886, he and his wife, opera singer Therese Foerster, immigrated to New York where they worked for the Metropolitan Opera and became active in the musical life of the city.

Herbert, a composer of symphonic music and chamber string pieces, joined the faculty of the National Conservatory of Music. In 1893, he became leader of the 22nd Regiment Band of New York after the death of the celebrated Patrick S. Gilmore. Herbert wrote a number of marches while he was the leader of the band.

From 1898 to 1904 he directed the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and then formed the Victor Herbert Orchestra which performed lighter music. Herbert was most famous as a composer of light operetta. Between 1894 and 1924 he composed more than forty comic operettas which had lengthy runs on Broadway and on tour around the country. His best known remains Babes in Toyland, which opened in 1903, a fantasy inspired by Frank L. Baum’s popular The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Library of Congress

February One

From PBS FEBRUARY ONE:

In one remarkable day, four college freshmen changed the course of American history. On February 1, 1960, Ezell Blair, Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil—later dubbed the Greensboro Four—began a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in a small city in North Carolina. The act of simply sitting down to order food in a restaurant that refused service to anyone but whites is now widely regarded as one of the pivotal moments in the American Civil Rights Movement.

The Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter was integrated in July 1960.

February

… from the Roman republican calendar month Februarius, named for Februa, the festival of purification held on the 15th. The name is taken from a Latin word, februare, meaning “to make pure”.

Best redux line of the day

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. “In English,” he said, “A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”

First posted three years ago today.

Best line for a cold day

“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. . . .”

Annie Savoy

Pitchers and catchers begin reporting in two weeks.

The Last Day of January

Ernie Banks plaqueToday is the birthday

… of Carol Channing. Broadway’s Dolly Gallagher Levi is 89.

… of Ernie Banks. The baseball hall-of-famer is 79. Let’s play two.

… of composer Philip Glass. He’s 73.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

Philip Glass: Biography

… of Queen Beatrix. She’s 72. Do you know what country is she queen of?

Nolan Ryan plaque

… of Nolan Ryan. The baseball hall-of-famer is 63.

… of KC. He’s 59. And his band was?

Minnie Driver is 40. Justin Timberlake is 29.

Suzanne Pleshette, Emily on the ”The Bob Newhart Show” and Annie (the teacher) in The Birds, would have been 73 today. She died two years ago.

Jean Simmons would have been 81 today; she died nine days ago. The actress was in such classic films as The Robe, Spartacus, Elmer Gantry and was twice nominated for an Oscar — Hamlet (supporting) and The Happy Ending (leading).

Norman Mailer was born 87 years ago today. He died in November 2007. Here’s a previous NewMexiKen entry on Mailer.

Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born on this date in 1919.

As a competitor, Robinson was the Dodgers’ leader. In his 10 seasons, they won six National League pennants–1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1956. They lost another in the 1951 playoff with the New York Giants, and another to the Philadelphia Phillies on the last day of the 1950 season.

In 1949, when he batted .342 to win the league title and drove in 124 runs, he was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player Award. In 1947, he had been voted the rookie of the year.

“The only way to beat the Dodgers,” said Warren Giles, then the president of the Cincinnati Reds, later the National League president, “is to keep Robinson off the bases.”

He had a career batting average of .311. Primarily a line drive hitter, he accumulated only 137 home runs, with a high of 19 in both 1951 and 1952.

But on a team with such famous sluggers as Duke Snider, Gil Hodges and Roy Campanella, who was also black, he was the cleanup hitter, fourth in the batting order, a tribute to his ability to mover along teammates on base.

But his personality flared best as a baserunner. He had a total of 197 stolen bases. He stole home 11 times, the most by any player in the post-World War II era.

The New York Times

Thomas Merton was born on this date in 1915. Here’s a previous NewMexiKen entry on Merton.

John O’Hara was born on this date in 1905.

[O’Hara] went on to become one of the most popular serious writers of his lifetime, writing many best-selling novels, including Appointment in Samarra (1934) and A Rage to Live (1949). Most critics consider his best work to be his short stories, which were published as the Collected Stories of John O’Hara (1984). He holds the record for the greatest number of short stories published by a single author in The New Yorker magazine.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

And Pearl Zane Grey, the first American millionaire author, was born on this date in 1872. Here’s a previous NewMexiKen entry on Grey.

Hey, that’s funny

When I am at home and check some websites there are ads saying Albuquerque mom make $567 (or some such figure) a week working at home. I am on the road tonight, far from home, and on the web there’s a photo of a woman making money working at home and she looks identical to the Albuquerque woman.

Must be her twin sister.

The best film of the decade

“Synecdoche, New York” is the best film of the decade. It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives. After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its purpose and by the end was eager to see it again, then once again, and I am not finished. Charlie Kaufman understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.

The mind is a concern in all his screenplays, but in “Synecdoche” (2008), his first film as a director, he makes it his subject, and what huge ambition that demonstrates. He’s like a

novelist who wants to get it all into the first book in case he never publishes another. Those who felt the film was disorganized or incoherent might benefit from seeing it again. It isn’t about a narrative, although it pretends to be. It’s about a method, the method by which we organize our lives and define our realities.

Roger Ebert’s Journal (December 30, 2009)

January 26th

Jules Feiffer is 81 today.

He said of his childhood: “The only thing I wanted to be was grown up. Because I was a terrible flop as a child. You cannot be a successful boy in America if you cannot throw or catch a ball.” He decided early on that he wanted to be a comic-strip artist, and when he was a teenager, he went to work for cartoonist Will Eisner. Then, he started drawing his own cartoons in the pages of The Village Voice. His strip in The Village Voice was one of the first cartoon strips to deal with adult themes such as sex, politics, and psychiatry. For most of his career, he has drawn and written all of his work in Central Park, which he considers his office.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Bob Uecker is 75.

Scott Glenn is 69 today.

One-time Oscar nominee David Strathairn is 61.

Lucinda Williams is 57.

Eddie Van Halen is 55.

Ellen DeGeneres is 52.

Wayne Gretzky is 49.

Paul Newman was born 85 years ago today. Newman was nominated for the Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar eight times, winning for The Color of Money in 1986, but not for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Absence of Malice, The Verdict, or Nobody’s Fool. He was also nominated for the Best Supporting Actor for Road to Perdition at age 78.

The most overrated — especially by himself — person in American history was born on this date in 1880. That’s Douglas MacArthur.

Julia Morgan was born in San Francisco on January 26, 1872.

Miss Morgan was one of the first women to graduate from University of California at Berkeley with a degree in civil engineering. During her tenure at Berkeley, Morgan developed a keen interest in architecture which is thought to have been fostered by her mother’s cousin, Pierre Le Brun, who designed the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower in New York City. At Berkeley one of her instructors, Bernard Maybeck, encouraged her to pursue her architectural studies in Paris at the Ecole Nationale et Speciale des Beaux-Arts.

Arriving in Paris in 1896, she was initially refused admission because the Ecole had never before admitted a woman. After a two-year wait, Julia Morgan gained entrance to the prestigious program and became the first woman to receive a certificate in architecture. While in Paris, Morgan also found a mentor in her professor, Bernard Chaussemiche, for whom she worked as a drafter.

Soon after her graduation from the Ecole, Julia Morgan returned to her native San Francisco and began working for architect John Galen Howard. At the time Howard was the supervising architect of the University of California’s Master Plan, the commission of which he won by default from Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Morgan worked on the Master Plan drawing the elevations and designing the decorative details for the Mining Building built in memory of George Hearst. During this time Morgan also designed the Hearst Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus.
…

Over the course of the next 28 years, Morgan supervised nearly every aspect of construction at Hearst Castle including the purchase of everything from Spanish antiquities to Icelandic Moss to reindeer for the Castle’s zoo. She personally designed most of the structures, grounds, pools, animal shelters and workers’ camp down to the minutest detail. Additionally, Morgan worked closely with Hearst to integrate his vast art collection into the structures and grounds at San Simeon. She also worked on projects for Hearst’s other properties including Jolon, Wyntoon, Babicore, the “Hopi” residence at the Grand Canyon, the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Memorial Gymnasium at Berkeley, the Los Angeles Examiner Building, several of his Beverly Hills residences and Marion Davies’ beach house in Santa Monica.

Hearst Castle

Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)

… is celebrating its 95th anniversary today.

Established on January 26, 1915, Rocky Mountain National Park is a living showcase of the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. With elevations ranging from 8,000 feet in the wet, grassy valleys to 14,259 feet at the weather-ravaged top of Long’s Peak, a visitor to the park has opportunities for countless breathtaking experiences and adventures.

Elk, mule deer, moose, bighorn sheep, black bears, coyotes, cougars, eagles, hawks and scores of smaller animals delight wildlife-watchers of all ages. Wildflower-lovers are never disappointed in June and July when the meadows and hillsides are splashed with botanical color. Autumn visitors can relax among the golden aspens or enjoy the rowdier antics of the elk rut (mating season).

National Park Service

“The oldest person to summit Longs Peak was Rev. William Butler, who climbed it on September 2, 1926, his 85th birthday. In 1932, Clerin ‘Zumie’ Zumwalt summited Longs Peak 53 times.”

Michigan

… joined the Union as the 26th state on this date in 1837.

  • “Derived from the Indian word Michigama, meaning great or large lake.”
  • The State Nickname is the “Great Lake State”. Others include “Wolverine State” or “Water Winter Wonderland”.
  • Michigan
  • The State motto is “Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice” (If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you).
  • The Michigan state flower is the apple blossom, the tree the white pine and the bird the robin.
  • Indigenous people in Michigan at the time of contact were the Ojibwa, Ottawa and Potawatomi.

Click image for larger version.

Addendum: The first bullet above is a quotation from michigan.gov, the “Official State of Michigan Portal.” It should be corrected. It is the equivalent of saying, “Derived from the European word …”

There are no “Indian” words. Indian is not a language.

Today’s Photo

OK, I’m cheating.  I didn’t take this photo (and neither did Jill).  It comes from the AP.

Number 85, Pierre Garçon is American-born of Haitian parents.  Yesterday he caught more passes than any receiver in AFC championship game history; 11 for 151 yards.  The record was nine.  

And then there is this, from the Palm Beach Post:

Even amid the bedlam of 67,650 screaming fans Sunday, that rang true. Dwight Lowery was one of a few Jets who took a shot at containing Garcon, the two of them fighting for something only one could have, yet even then, even amid the usual trash-talk, Lowery pulled Garcon aside.

“He said he was going to help me out with Haiti,” Garcon said. “He told me during the game, man. He said to get in contact with him and a couple of guys on their team.”

The techno-peasant’s computer

Slate’s tech writer Farhad Manjoo has slurped from the Apple tablet Kool-Aid.

The reader wondered whether that would ever change. “In short, when will the computer become an appliance?”

If we’re lucky, it’ll happen this week.

Later he continues.

So why should we expect Apple’s new tablet to set us free from all this? Because as Gizmodo’s Diaz points out, Apple already makes the one computer in the world that can be described as an appliance—the iPhone.

… Other than charging it, the iPhone requires no maintenance. Backups and OS upgrades occur automatically, and because all programs are approved by Apple (and because even third-party programmers aren’t given deep access to the phone), you never have to worry about malware. And look how easy it is to install a program: Choose one from the store, press “Install,” and type in your password to authorize the purchase—and that’s it. The iPhone doesn’t ask you where you want to put the new program, or how you’d like to launch it, and whether you’d like it to be the default program for doing a particular kind of task. It just puts up a little icon on the screen. To run the program, click the icon. To do something else, hit the home button.

Click for larger version.

Intellectual Man vs. Instinctive Man

More broadly, the conference championships came down to Intellectual Man, in the person of Peyton, in one game, and Instinctive Man, in the person of Brett Favre, whose Vikings played the Saints in the other. For once, blessedly, Intellectual Man won the day. Instinctive Man, to be a little hard on him—though it’s my own view that you can never be too hard on Instinctive Man—cost his team a title for the second time in three years, throwing an interception (this one right across the grain of the play) that was not merely ill-timed, but dim-witted. Credit to Favre for getting them there, but let us have no doubt that he throws those things not because he thinks he should, but because he feels inside that he can, with predictable results.

Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Gopnik has another good line in referring to the Jets, “just when they needed the Audacity of Audacity. (Larger life-political lesson here, of course.)”

Yup, a little less audacity of hope and a little more audacity of audacity, that’s what we need.

When the media is the disaster

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Rebecca Solnit, Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

I urge you to read Solnit’s entire essay, especially where she asks, “What Would You Do?”

Laissez les bons temps rouler

At least one New Orleans-based Who Dat, who goes by the name of “Jimbeaux61”, has already made his plans for Super Bowl Sunday, which happens to be nine days before Mardi Gras.

Says Jimbeaux61: “Breakfast will be beignets and café au lait at the French Market. A two-block walk for Bloody Marys at Margaritaville. Catch a Mardi Gras parade on Canal Street. A shrimp po-boy at Johnny’s in the Quarter. A Hurricane at Pat O’Brien’s. Stroll over to the Superdome parking lot for tailgating. Early dinner at Galatoire’s. More Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s. Watch the Saints beat the Colts at the Absinthe House. Back to Canal Street for another parade. Close out the night on Bourbon Street. Sleep till Tuesday. Get ready for the draft. Geaux Super Bowl Champions.”

Peter Finney, Times-Picayune

Sounds like a good day.