Author: NewMexiKen

We Feel Fine

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings . . .

Interesting, very interesting. The planetary village.

We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar

The Essential Bessie Smith

April 15th is the birthday of Bessie Smith. This from a review of The Essential Bessie Smith.

. . . Bessie could sing it all, from the lowdown moan of “St. Louis Blues” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” to her torch treatment of the jazz standard “After You’ve Gone” to the downright salaciousness of “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl.” Covering a time span from her first recordings in 1923 to her final session in 1933, this is the perfect entry-level set to go with. Utilizing the latest in remastering technology, these recordings have never sounded quite this clear and full, and the selection — collecting her best-known sides and collaborations with jazz giants like Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and Benny Goodman — is first-rate. If you’ve never experienced the genius of Bessie Smith, pick this one up and prepare yourself to be devastated.

allmusic

There are no lyrics today that surpass “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” for sexual imagery.

In listening to the earliest recordings, keep in mind there were no microphones until 1925. The artists sang or played and the sound was recorded acoustically.

Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith

. . . was born on this date in 1894.

Bessie Smith earned the title of “Empress of the Blues” by virtue of her forceful vocal delivery and command of the genre. Her singing displayed a soulfully phrased, boldly delivered and nearly definitive grasp of the blues. In addition, she was an all-around entertainer who danced, acted and performed comedy routines with her touring company. She was the highest-paid black performer of her day and arguably reached a level of success greater than that of any African-American entertainer before her.
. . .

Some of her better-known sides from the Twenties include “Backwater Blues,” “Taint Nobody’s Bizness If I Do,” “St. Louis Blues” (recorded with Louis Armstrong), and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” The Depression dealt her career a blow, but Smith changed with the times by adapting a more up-to-date look and revised repertoire that incorporated Tin Pan Alley tunes like “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” On the verge of the Swing Era, Smith died from injuries sustained in an automobile accident outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, in September 1937. She left behind a rich, influential legacy of 160 recordings cut between 1923 and 1933. Some of the great vocal divas who owe a debt to Smith include Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin. In Joplin’s own words of tribute, “She showed me the air and taught me how to fill it.”

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Emma the actress day

April 15th is the birthday of Emma Thompson and Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson. The actresses are 48 and 17.

Emma Thompson has been nominated four times for an acting Oscar, winning best actress in a leading role for Howards End. She also won the screen adaptation Oscar for Sense and Sensibility.

Emma Watson has played just one character so far in her acting career, that of Hermione Granger.

Jackie Robinson

. . . appeared in his first major league game 60 years ago today. He went hitless but scored the winning run.

The front page of the Pittsburgh Courier, once the country’s most widely circulated African-American newspaper, conveys the significance of that day.

Click on image to enlarge.

 Pittsburgh Courier

What about Molly Brown, we’ve heard she’s unsinkable

Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg;
866 Rescued By Carpathia, Probably 1,250 Perish;
Ismay Safe, Mrs. Astor Maybe, Noted Names Missing

Biggest Liner Plunges to the Bottom at 2:20 A.M.
RESCUERS THERE TOO LATE
Expect to Pick Up the Few Hundreds Who Took to the Lifeboats.
WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST
Cunarder Carpathia Rushing to New York with the Survivors.
SEA SEARCH FOR OTHERS
The California Stands By on Chance of Picking Up Other Boats or Rafts.
OLYMPIC SENDS THE NEWS
Only Ship to Flash Wireless Messages to Shore After the Disaster.

From The New York Times story of the sinking.

April 15 (another form of Ruination Day)

Click here to access IRS Form 4868, Application for Automatic Extension of Time to File U.S. Individual Income Tax Return. You may apply for the extension electronically.

Actually filing your federal taxes is not due this year until Tuesday, April 17th. Most states, however, require filing tomorrow, Monday, April 16th.

An income tax was first collected during the Civil War from 1862 to 1872. During the administration of President Grover Cleveland, the federal government again levied an income tax, enacted by Congress in 1894. However, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional the following year. Supporters of an income tax were forced then to embark on the lengthy process of amending the Constitution. Not until the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913 was Congress given the power “to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census of enumeration.”

Library of Congress

Will Rogers said, “The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf.”

The Great Dust Storm

On the 14th day of April of 1935,
There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky.
You could see that dust storm comin’, the cloud looked deathlike black,
And through our mighty nation, it left a dreadful track.

From Oklahoma City to the Arizona line,
Dakota and Nebraska to the lazy Rio Grande,
It fell across our city like a curtain of black rolled down,
We thought it was our judgement, we thought it was our doom.

The radio reported, we listened with alarm,
The wild and windy actions of this great mysterious storm;
From Albuquerque and Clovis, and all New Mexico,
They said it was the blackest that ever they had saw.

From old Dodge City, Kansas, the dust had rung their knell,
And a few more comrades sleeping on top of old Boot Hill.
From Denver, Colorado, they said it blew so strong,
They thought that they could hold out, but they didn’t know how long.

Our relatives were huddled into their oil boom shacks,
And the children they was cryin’ as it whistled through the cracks.
And the family it was crowded into their little room,
They thought the world had ended, and they thought it was their doom.

The storm took place at sundown, it lasted through the night,
When we looked out next morning, we saw a terrible sight.
We saw outside our window where wheat fields they had grown
Was now a rippling ocean of dust the wind had blown.

It covered up our fences, it covered up our barns,
It covered up our tractors in this wild and dusty storm.
We loaded our jalopies and piled our families in,
We rattled down that highway to never come back again.

Lyrics as recorded by Woody Guthrie, RCA Studios, Camden, NJ, 26 Apr 1940
Transcribed by Manfred Helfert
© 1960, Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY

More on Black Sunday

Today is the anniversary of Black Sunday, the day in 1935 when a windstorm hit a part of the Great Plains known as the Dust Bowl. When the day started, the weather was sunny and calm. People were on their way home from church, or out visiting friends for lunch, when they saw huge flocks of birds flying south, away from a dark black cloud on the northern horizon. As the cloud approached, people realized that it wasn’t a storm cloud, but a cloud of dirt, blown up by the wind. Witnesses said it was like a black tidal wave came down from the sky. It became as dark as night as soon as the cloud descended. Static electricity stalled cars and shorted out telephone lines. People standing a few yards away from their homes got lost in the darkness, and grabbed onto fence posts to keep from being blown to the ground. It was later estimated that the storm carried 300 million tons of soil through the air.

The Writer’s Almanac

Those on the road had to try to beat the storm home. Some, like Ed and Ada Phillips of Boise City, and their six-year-old daughter, had to stop on their way to seek shelter in an abandoned adobe hut. There they joined ten other people already huddled in the two-room ruin, sitting for four hours in the dark, fearing that they would be smothered. Cattle dealer Raymond Ellsaesser tells how he almost lost his wife when her car was shorted out by electricity and she decided to walk the three-quarters of a mile home. As her daughter ran ahead to get help, Ellsaesser’s wife wandered off the road in the blinding dust. The moving headlights of her husband’s truck, visible as he frantically drove back and forth along the road, eventually led her back

The American Experience

. . . And the old house was just a-vibratin’ like it was gonna blow away. And I started tryin’ to see my hand. And I kept bringin’ my hand up closer and closer and closer and closer and closer and I finally touched the end of my nose and I still couldn’t see my hand. That’s how black it was. And we burned kerosene lamps and Dad lit an old kerosene lamp, set it on the kitchen table and it was just across the room from me, about — about 14 feet. And I could just barely see that lamp flame across the room. That’s how dark it was and it was six o’clock in the afternoon. It was the 14th of April, 1935. The sun was still up, but it was totally black and that was blackest, worst dust storm, sand storm we had durin’ the whole time.

A lot of people died. A lot of children, especially, died of dust pneumonia. They’d take little kids and cover ’em with sheets and sprinkle water on the sheets to filter the dust out. . . .

Melt White, The American Experience

See earlier entry by NewMexiKen with photo.

And, again, I strongly recommend The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan.

Recommended reading

Stray Shopping Carts

In a week in which attention has been focused on the big names and big money of the Man Booker International prize, the 29th winner of arguably the most original literary prize has also been quietly announced.

The Diagram Oddest title of the year award – for which content is irrelevant and the prize is a bottle of wine – has had a surprise winner this year: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague.
. . .

With 1,866 votes of the 5,500 polled via the Bookseller website, Shopping Carts beat the bookies’ favourite How Green Were the Nazis? Second prize went to Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan, while Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence took third.

Guardian Unlimited Books

Ruination Day!

Stephen W. Terrell reminds us:

Yes, today is the anniversary of the assassination of President Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic and the Great Dust Storm of 1935 — as lamented in those mysterious songs by Gillian Welch I played in my set on The Santa Fe Opry last night . . .

Ruination Day Set
April the 14th Part 1 by Gillian Welch
The Great Dust Storm (Dust Storm Diaster) by Woody Guthrie
The Titantic by Bessie Jones, Hobart Smith & The Georgia Sea Island Singers
Booth Killed Lincoln by Bascom Lamar Lunsford
Lincoln and Liberty by Oscar Brand
Waltzing on the Titantic by Lonesome Bob
My Heart Will Go On (Theme from Titanic) by Los Straitjackets
Ruination Day Part 2 by Gillian Welch

Mozart doesn’t make you smarter

News item:

Passively listening to Mozart — or indeed any other music you enjoy — does not make you smarter. But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child’s IQ in the long term, concludes a report analysing all the scientific literature on music and intelligence, which was published last week by the German research ministry.

news @ nature.com

Mozart makes you feel better, though. And, NewMexiKen learned in This Is Your Brain on Music that listening to many types of music in early childhood is a key to enjoying and appreciating music more later in life.

Best line of the day, so far

“Why you’re seeing all this dust thrown up about rap music is because people don’t want to concentrate on the kind of polite obscenity that white talk show hosts, particularly white conservative talk show hosts, have been trafficking in for fifteen years.”

Charles Pierce on NPR’s “It’s Only a Game,” as quoted at Daily Kos, which has more.

Quacks me up

Amusing photo.

And this, amazing photo.

Meanwhile:

An angry Romanian doctor has cut off a patient’s penis during surgery and chopped it into small pieces.

Surgeon Naum Ciomu was operating on patient Nelu Radonescu, 36, to correct a testicular malformation when he suddenly lost his temper.

Grabbing a scalpel, he sliced off the penis in front of shocked nursing staff, and then placed it on the operating table where he chopped it into small pieces before storming out of the operating theatre at Bucharest hospital.

AOL Lifestyle

Couldn’t he have just counted to ten? Great plot for Grey’s Anatomy, though, especially if the victim is one of those asinine male doctors. Karev, Shepherd or O’Malley, any will do.

Some good advice:

1. Styrofoam cups
Styrofoam is forever. It’s not biodegradable.
* I can’t remember the last time I used a styrofoam cup but for all those takeaway coffee drinkers, it’s worth finding an alternative.

2. Paper towels
Paper towels waste forest resources, landfill space, and your money.
* I couldn’t imagine going without paper towels. I do buy the eco friendly variety but I should probably use old clothes or towels to clean up.

3. Bleached coffee filters
Dioxins, chemicals formed during the chlorine bleaching process, contaminate groundwater and air and are linked to cancer in humans and animals.
* I’m not a coffee drinker which looks to be a good thing if this is what is used to make coffee.

Top 10 Products to Avoid | Buy Organic

And:

Want to stay safe on the roads? Then avoid listening to Guns N Roses, Meat Loaf and Bruce Springsteen behind the wheel.

The trio are among the artists featured on a top 10 of tracks that get people’s blood pumping and in the mood to drive aggressively.
. . .

It includes classic rock tracks, such as Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out Of Hell” and Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” as well as tracks such as Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” and Guns N Roses’ “Paradise City.”

Reuters via Yahoo! News

Abstinence Classes Don’t Stop Sex

Students who took part in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not, according to a study ordered by Congress.

Also, those who attended one of the four abstinence classes that were reviewed reported having similar numbers of sexual partners as those who did not attend the classes. And they first had sex at about the same age as other students 14.9 years, according to Mathematica Policy Research Inc.

ABC News

Who knew?

Is It Better To Be a Jock Or A Nerd?

You’ll have to click here to find out if it is “Better To Be a Jock Or A Nerd,” but here’s just a few of the facts you can learn:

– Michael Jordan having “retired,” with $40 million in endorsements, makes $178,100 a day, working or not.

– If he goes to see a movie, it’ll cost him $7.00, but he’ll make $18,550 while he’s there.

– He makes $7,415/hr more than minimum wage.

– Assuming he puts the federal maximum of 15% of his income into a tax-deferred account (401k), his contributions will hit the federal cap of $9500 at 8:30am on January 1st.

Black Sunday

It was on this date 72 years ago that the largest of the dust storms of the 1930s swept the western plains.

BlackSunday.gif

Cyclic winds rolled up two miles high, stretched out a hundred miles and moved faster than 50 miles an hour. These storms destroyed vast areas of the Great Plains farmland. The methods of fighting the dust were as many and varied as were the means of finding a way to get something to eat and wear. Every possible crack was plugged, sheets were placed over windows and blankets were hung behind doors. Often the places were so tightly plugged against the dust (which still managed to get in) that the houses became extremely hot and stuffy.

Quotation and photo from the Cimmaron Heritage Center, Boise City, Oklahoma. Boise City is in the Oklahoma panhandle near Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas and Texas.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan is a history of the Dust Bowl that won the National Book Award last year. It is outstanding.

April 14th is the birthday

… of Loretta Lynn. The coal miner’s daughter was born in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, 72 years ago.

Loretta Webb was born in a one-room log cabin and was the second of eight children. At thirteen she attended a pie social, bringing a pie she had baked using salt instead of sugar. The highest bidder not only won the pie but also got to meet the girl who had baked the pie. Mooney Lynn had just returned home after having served in the army. A month after they had first met, still three months short of her fourteenth birthday, Loretta and Mooney married.

Country Music Hall of Fame

… of three-time Oscar nominee for best actress Julie Christie. She’s 67. Miss Christie won the Oscar for Darling.

… of Pete Rose. You can bet that Pete is 66 today.

… of Brad Garrett, 47. Garrett is 6-8½.

… of Greg Maddux, 41.

… of Adrien Brody. The Oscar winner (best actor for The Pianist) is 34.

… of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Buffy is 30.

… of Abigail Breslin. The Oscar-nominated actress is 11.

Three time Oscar-nominated actor Rod Steiger was born on this date in 1925. Steiger won for Best Actor for his portrayal of the sheriff in the movie In the Heat of the Night. He was nominated for best actor for The Pawnbroker and for best supporting actor for On the Waterfront. The Pawnbroker (1964) was one of the first films to deal with the emotional aftermath of the Nazi concentration camps. Steiger died in 2002.

James Cash Penney opened his first retail store, called the Golden Rule Store, in the mining town of Kemmerer, Wyoming, on this date in 1902. In 1913, the chain incorporated as J.C. Penney Company, Inc.

Penney Store

The first store, as seen in 1904.

RMS Titanic hit an iceberg at 11:40 PM (Titanic time) on this date in 1912. She was at 41° 46′ north latitude , 50° 14′ west longitude in the Atlantic. The ship went under at 2:20 AM on the 15th.

Most prescient line of the day, so far

“Bell said Domenici’s idea is not to respond [to Iglesias’s charges], and hopefully make this a one day story. Unfortunately, I do not think that they can make an allegation such as this goes away so easily.”

Special Assistant to the President J. Scott Jennings in an email to Karl Rove and others, February 28, 2007, regarding Steve Bell, Senator Domenici’s Chief of Staff.

The TPM DOCUMENT COLLECTION

Update: Also via TPM:

The day AFTER the above email, AP reported this:

In a brief interview Thursday, Domenici also denied the accusation. “I don’t have any comment,” he told The Associated Press. “I have no idea what he’s [Iglesias] talking about.”

So, best-case scenario Domenici lied; worst-case scenario, he’s senile.