As a former film major, I can understand why someone would look at that photo of me and Juliet from 2001 and imagine a Pretty in Pink backstory: a teenage boy hopelessly in love with his best friend, but never able to tell her. When you’re interpreting art, you’re supposed to take cues from limited information and make assumptions about what exists outside of the frame. But real people and real relationships are never as simple as characters in movies and books. Even I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I put my arm around Juliet for that photograph at a summer camp reunion. I can only guess that it was something similar to what ran through my mind all the other times I’ve put my arm around friends for photos: cheese.
Jeff Deutchman from a series mostly by Juliet at Slate on platonic friendships. I haven’t been reading the series, but this caught my attention.
“Even as voters rage and candidates put up ads against government bailouts, the reviled mother of them all — the $700 billion lifeline to banks, insurance and auto companies — will expire after Sunday at a fraction of that cost, and could conceivably earn taxpayers a profit.”
“I’m not good at buying gifts. I start worrying about Christmas in April, and by the time October rolls around I’m in full panic mode. Call me spontaneous, but I prefer when my failures surprise me, not when they are scheduled for December 25th every year. By this time of year I feel as if I’m tied to the railroad tracks, I hear a whistle in the distance, and it probably isn’t Santa.”
… of Bonnie Parker, the Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde, born 100 years ago today. She died 23 years and 7⅔ months later.
… of Jimmy Carter. The 39th President is 86 today.
[T]he first American president to be born in a hospital. He grew up in a house where everyone brought a book to the dinner table, and then the family sat there together at dinner eating and reading in silence. He started selling boiled peanuts from a red wagon by the side of the road when he was six, around the same age that he started winning all sorts of prizes for being the top reader in his rural grade school.
He played basketball in high school, joined the Future Farmers of America club, and went off to the United States Naval Academy, where he taught Sunday school to the officer’s kids and graduated 59th in his class of 820. While in the Navy, he did graduate work in nuclear physics. Then, after his dad died, he left the Navy and took over the family peanut farming business. For a while, he was a wealthy peanut farmer.
… of Tom Bosley. Richie Cunningham’s father is 83.
… of Julie Andrews. Mary Poppins is 75. Ms. Andrews won the Best Actress Oscar for Mary Poppins; she was nominated for The Sound of Music and Victor/Victoria. Of course, her claim to fame really was as Eliza Doolittle in the stage version of My Fair Lady.
… of Rod Carew. The baseball hall of fame player is 65.
Rod Carew lined, chopped and bunted his way to 3,053 career hits. His seven batting titles are surpassed only by Ty Cobb, Tony Gwynn and Honus Wagner, and equaled only by Rogers Hornsby and Stan Musial. He used a variety of relaxed, crouched batting stances to hit over .300 in 15 consecutive seasons with the Twins and Angels, achieving a .328 lifetime average. He was honored as American League Rookie of the Year in 1967, won the league MVP 10 years later and was named to 18 straight All-Star teams. He remains a national hero in Panama.
… of Tim O’Brien. The novelist is 64. O’Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato, winner of the 1979 National Book Award in fiction, and The Things They Carried, which was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of 1990, received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction, and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the Lake of the Woods was named by Time as the best novel of 1994. The book also received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times.
The title story of The Things They Carried begins:
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.
… of Randy Quaid, 60.
… of Youssou N’Dour, 51.
… of Mark McGwire, 47.
Vladimir Horowitz was born on this date in 1903.
Vladimir Horowitz, the eccentric virtuoso of the piano whose extraordinary personality and skill overwhelmed six decades of concert audiences, died suddenly early yesterday afternoon [November 5, 1989] at his home in Manhattan, apparently of a heart attack. Though standard biographies list his birth date as Oct. 1, 1904, Mr. Horowitz recently celebrated what he called his 86th birthday.
Held in awe by aficionados of the instrument, Mr. Horowitz virtually cornered the market on celebrity among 20th-century pianists. His presence hovered over several generations of pianists who followed him.
The actor Stanley Holloway was born on October 1, 1890. Holloway is known foremost as Alfred P. Doolittle in the stage and film productions of My Fair Lady. He was nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar for the role and he was the only lead actor to do his own singing. This story was found at Wikipedia:
Holloway appeared with Rex Harrison in the stage production of “My Fair Lady”. Harrison had a reputation for being very abrupt with his fans. One night after a performance of the show, Holloway and Harrison left by the stage door. It was late, cold and pouring rain and there was an old woman standing alone outside the door. When she saw Harrison, she asked him for his autograph. He told her to “Sod off”, and she was so enraged at this that she rolled up her program and hit Harrison with it. Holloway congratulated him on not only making theater history, but, for the first time in world history, “the fan has hit the shit.”
The very first World Series game was played 107 years ago today. The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Boston Pilgrims 7-3. Cy Young was the losing pitcher that day but went on to win two games as Boston—later the Red Sox—won the best-of-nine series, five games to three.
Walt Disney World opened in 1971. Johnny Carson debuted as regular host of The Tonight Show in 1962. The first Model T went on sale in 1908.
but a shrine to human foresight, strength of granite, power of glaciers, the persistence of life, and the tranquility of the High Sierra.
Yosemite National Park, one of the first wilderness parks in the United States, is best known for its waterfalls, but within its nearly 1,200 square miles, you can find deep valleys, grand meadows, ancient giant sequoias, a vast wilderness area, and much more.
NewMexiKen’s very own grandfather, John Louis Beyett, was born in Alvord, Texas, 129 years ago today. He died before I was born, but I met his mother, my great-grandmother when I was 8-years-old. She was born in 1865 and was just 15 when my grandfather was born; the first of her nine children. She was 87 when I met her (and lived to be 93). It has always amazed me that I met an ancestor who was born the year Abraham Lincoln died.
My grandfather was French-Canadian on his father’s side; Scots-Irish from Kentucky on his mother’s. His first wife died in 1918 giving birth to their sixth child. That child died then too, but the older five lived normal lifespans, though three had no children of their own. I met my four half-aunts and one half-uncle, but just a few times.
Mom and her DadA few years later, at age 42, my widower grandfather married my 33-year-old never married grandmother, Lulu Cook. Only she too, his second wife, died in childbirth. That was in 1925 and that child survived. It was my mother. Mom ended up being raised by her mom’s brother and his wife (grandpa and grandma to me growing up).
Though I’d never met my grandfather or knew much about him, I always thought how tragic (if not uncommon) to lose two wives in childbirth. What a melancholy man he must have been by the time he died of a heart attack at age 62.*
And then a few years ago, thanks to the internets, I discovered all was not as it had seemed. Just 10 weeks before my mother was born to his wife of just one year, my grandfather had another daughter born. Her mother’s name was Hernandez and it was their third child together. This was in Laredo, Texas.
It’s a miracle any one of us is here at all.
_______
* My mother, grandmother and grandfather died at ages 48, 35 and 62. I don’t include them in any life expectancy charts. My dad, grandmother and grandfather died at 83, 90 and 90. That’s THE family I use.
“As somebody once told me, the English language is as rich and as full of invective as any language ever devised. Therefore, if someone cuts you off in traffic, and the first club out of your bag is a racial epithet, then you’re a racist, and your vocabulary needs work, too.”
“So kudos to the new documentary ‘Waiting for Superman’ for ratcheting up the interest level. It follows the fortunes of five achingly adorable children and their hopeful, dedicated, worried parents in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., as they try to gain entrance to high-performing charter schools. Not everybody gets in, and by the time you leave the theater you are so sad and angry you just want to find something to burn down.”
… of the poet laureate of the United States, W.S. Merwin. He’s 83 today. W.S. is for William Stanley.
He won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Carrier of Ladders and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for The Shadow of Sirius (published in 2008). He also won the 2005 National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems.
He started writing poems when he was four or five years old, he said — at first, they were mostly hymns to give to his father, a Presbyterian minister. He studied literature and Romance languages at Princeton, gained the admiring attention of W. H. Auden, and published his first book of poems, A Mask for Janus, the year he turned 25.
. . .
He lives in Hawaii on the lip of a dormant volcano in Maui, on what used to be a pineapple plantation. He’s devoted to cultivating endangered palm trees and reforesting his land with native Hawaiian plants. He’s deeply interested in Buddhism.
Angie Dickinson, 2009… of author and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, 82.
… of Angie Dickinson. “Pepper” is 79 today.
… of Johnny Mathis. Chances are the singer is 75 today.
… of Barry Williams. Greg Brady is 56 today.
… of Fran Drescher, 53. (Really, only 53?)
… of Dharma. Jenna Elfman is 39.
… of Faheem Rasheed Najm. T-Pain is 25.
Truman Capote was born in New Orleans on this date in 1924.
Mr. Capote’s first story was published while he was still in his teens, but his work totaled only 13 volumes, most of them slim collections, and in the view of many of his critics, notably his old friend John Malcolm Brinnin, he failed to join the ranks of the truly great American writers because he squandered his time, talent and health on the pursuit of celebrity, riches and pleasure.
Yup, Truman Capote should have lived the life of Ebenezer Scrooge and forsaken that celebrity, riches and pleasure shit.
James Dean was killed on this date 55 years ago at the junction of California Highways 41 and 46. He was 24.
[Dean] and his mechanic, Rolf Wuetherich, were traveling in Dean’s new Porsche Spyder 550, which he planned to race that afternoon in Salinas. Dean had traded in his Porsche Speedster just nine days earlier, purchasing the Spyder for $6,900 and naming it “Little Bastard.”
Die Zauberflöte — The Magic Flute — premiered in Vienna 219 years ago tonight; libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. That night Mozart conducted the orchestra, Schikaneder played Papageno.
My niece Amylynn proves better than DNA could that we’re related when she grumbles, “What the hell is with greeters in every single store?” Read what she has to say — They make me mean – I can’t even help it.
The Melbourne, Australia, Catholic archbishop wants funerals to be about God and not a celebration of the deceased, so he’s banning football club songs and popular music at funerals — Catholic Church bans footy theme songs at funerals. It’s an interesting little discussion, but I link so you can scroll down and see the list of “Most unusual funeral songs.” *
And in Reefer Gladness Timothy Egan discusses California’s Proposition 19. He begins:
It was early still, and daylight, so when I called up The Dude to get his take on new polls showing California on the verge of becoming the first state to legalize, tax and regulate recreational use of marijuana, I knew he wouldn’t be, um, distracted. Not just yet.
Who’s opposed (other than the moralists)? The liquor industry, the medical marijuana industry and the drug cartels.
* I don’t want a funeral, but if there is one, please play Cee Lo Green’s current hit.
Monkeys may possess cognitive abilities once thought unique to humans, raising questions about the nature of animal awareness and our ability to measure it.
In the lab of University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Luis Populin, five rhesus macaques seem to recognize their own reflections in a mirror. Monkeys weren’t supposed to do this
. . .
It was once thought that only humans could pass the mark test. Then chimpanzees did, followed by dolphins and elephants. These successes challenged the notions that humans were alone on one side of a cognitive divide. Many researchers think the notion of a divide is itself mistaken. Instead, they propose a gradual spectrum of cognitive powers, a spectrum crudely measured by mirrors.
Hey, maybe less than an infinite number of monkeys with less than an infinite number of keyboards could duplicate Shakespeare. Or at least write their own memoirs.
“While most respondents across the board crushed the questions regarding the Bible, the fact that only about half knew that the Golden Rule is not one of the Ten Commandments is pretty weak. It’s straight out of the Onion story about the area man who’s a ‘Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be.’ ”
Ten years of education in Catholic schools has left its mark on me. I find myself blushing just posting this information — which is from the friggin’ Scientific American after all — but post it I must.
Because it is simply fascinating — and not for the suggestive connotations. But how truly remarkable is evolution when we discover its finer points. To wit:
Now, medical professionals have known for a very long time that the vagina is an ideal route for drug delivery. The reason for this is that the vagina is surrounded by an impressive vascular network. Arteries, blood vessels, and lymphatic vessels abound, and—unlike some other routes of drug administration—chemicals that are absorbed through the vaginal walls have an almost direct line to the body’s peripheral circulation system.
. . .
Perhaps the most striking of these compounds is the bundle of mood-enhancing chemicals in semen. There is good in this goo. Such anxiolytic chemicals include, but are by no means limited to, cortisol (known to increase affection), estrone (which elevates mood), prolactin (a natural antidepressant), oxytocin (also elevates mood), thyrotropin-releasing hormone (another antidepressant), melatonin (a sleep-inducing agent) and even serotonin (perhaps the most well-known antidepressant neurotransmitter).
In other words, “a sort of natural Prozac.” Women having sex without condoms have “significantly fewer depressive symptoms” than those who use condoms or abstain. The chemistry may also explain certain unprotected homosexual male practices.
This from the Scientific American blog Bering in Mind and posted just the other day. Read the article for the details. If I continue, some unhappy nun will smack me with a ruler.
“Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them.”
If you care to understand politics in 2010 I urge you to take time to read Taibbi’s fine, scary but — it being Taibbi — amusing and insightful analysis. It’s the best look at political America I’ve read in some time.
Goodness gracious, great balls of fire, Jerry Lee Lewis is 75 today.
Jerry Lee Lewis is the wild man of rock and roll, embodying its most reckless and high-spirited impulses. On such piano-pounding rockers from the late Fifties as “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” Lewis combined a ferocious, boogie-style instrumental style with rowdy, uninhibited vocals.
. . .
Through a life marked by controversy and personal tragedy, Lewis has remained a defiant and indefatigable figure who refuses to be contained by politesse or pigeonholes. As he declared from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in 1973, “I am a rock and rollin’, country & western, rhythm & blues singing [expletive deleted]!”
Ian McShane is 68. McShane played that c***s**k** Al Swearengen on Deadwood.
Bryant Gumbel is 62.
Gwen Ifill — interruption here for non sequitur question — is 55.
Stanley Berenstain was born on September 29th in 1923 (he died in 2005). Together with his wife Jan, they created the Berenstain Bears, a series with more than 200 books since 1962.
Gene Autry was born in Tioga, Texas, on this date 103 years ago today. The following is from the biography at the Official Website for Gene Autry:
Discovered by humorist Will Rogers, in 1929 Autry was billed as “Oklahoma’s Yodeling Cowboy” at KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He gained a popular following, a recording contract with Columbia Records in 1929, and soon after, performed on the “National Barn Dance” for radio station WLS in Chicago. Autry first appeared on screen in 1934 and up to 1953 popularized the musical Western and starred in 93 feature films. In 1940 theater exhibitors of America voted Autry the fourth biggest box office attraction, behind Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy.
Autry made 635 recordings, including more than 300 songs written or co-written by him. His records sold more than 100 million copies and he has more than a dozen gold and platinum records, including the first record ever certified gold [That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine]. His Christmas and children’s records Here Comes Santa Claus and Peter Cottontail are among his platinum recordings. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the second all-time best selling Christmas single, boasts in excess of 30 million in sales.
… Autry’s great love for baseball prompted him to acquire the American League California Angels in 1961. Active in Major League Baseball, Autry held the title of Vice President of the American League until his death [1998].
… Autry is the only entertainer to have five stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, one each for radio, records, movies, television, and live performance including rodeo and theater appearances.
Autry’s Melody Ranch radio show aired from 1940 to 1956. His television program from 1950 through 1955 (91 episodes), and long after in syndication.
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome 109 years ago today.
More than any other man of his time, Enrico Fermi could properly be named “the father of the atomic bomb.”
It was his epoch-making experiments at the University of Rome in 1934 that led directly to the discovery of uranium fission, the basic principle underlying the atomic bomb as well as the atomic power plant. And eight years later, on Dec. 2, 1942, he was the leader of that famous team of scientists who lighted the first atomic fire on earth, on that gloomy squash court underneath the west stands of the University of Chicago’s abandoned football stadium.
That day has been officially recognized as the birthday of the atomic age. Man at last had succeeded in operating an atomic furnace, the energy of which came from the vast cosmic reservoir supplying the sun and the stars with their radiant heat and light–the nucleus of the atoms of which the material universe is constituted.
Enrico Fermi was the chief architect of that atomic furnace, which he named “pile,” but has since become better known as a nuclear reactor, the technical name for an atomic power plant.
And, according to many sources, Miguel de Cervantes may have been born on this date in 1547.
In 2002, one hundred writers polled overwhelmingly chose Don Quixote as the World’s Best Work of Fiction. Votes for Cervantes’ novel came from Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Milan Kundera, Nadine Gordimer, Carlos Fuentes, and Norman Mailer.
Dostoyevsky wrote in his diary that Don Quixote was “the saddest book ever written … the story of disillusionment.” American novelist William Faulkner reportedly read Don Quixote every year.
. . .
When Edith Grossman published her translation of Don Quixote in October 2003, it was hailed as the “most transparent and least impeded among more than a dozen English translations going back to the 17th century.”
Grossman has translated many living Latin American authors, and has done every one of Gabriel García Márquez’s books since Love in the Time of Cholera. When García Márquez learned that Grossman was translating Cervantes, he joked to her: “I hear you’re two-timing me with Miguel.”
Today’s photo was taken Saturday at sunset at Delicate Arch, Arches National Park. Delicate Arch is Entrada sandstone. It’s 52 feet high. This vantage point is reached via 1½-mile trail with an elevation change of about 500 feet. There were approximately 200 people there Saturday, all with the courtesy to stay away from the arch during sunset (prime time for photographers). Six-, soon to be seven-, year-old Sofie made the trek with ease. Grandpa made the trek.
Click the image for a larger version.
This photo was taken with a Nikon D70. The wider-angle photo now in the masthead was taken with an iPhone 4.
Mr. Obama, who has been criticized by conservative pundits who have questioned his Christian faith, gave a lengthy discourse on it in response to a woman [in Albuquerque today] who said she had three “hot topic questions” for him. The first was: “Why are you a Christian?” The second was on abortion — the president said it should be “safe, legal and rare” — and her third was whether Mr. Obama would accept her husband’s chili pepper. He said he would.
