June 27th

Today is the birthday

… of Ross Perot. He’s 80.

… of Bruce Babbitt. The former Governor of Arizona and Secretary of the Interior is 72.

… of Vera Wang. The designer is 61.

… of Tobey Maguire. Peter Parker is 35.

Helen Keller was born on June 27 in 1880. The following is from her obituary in The New York Times when she died in 1968.

For the first 18 months of her life Helen Keller was a normal infant who cooed and cried, learned to recognize the voices of her father and mother and took joy in looking at their faces and at objects about her home. “Then” as she recalled later, “came the illness which closed my eyes and ears and plunged me into the unconsciousness of a newborn baby.”

The illness, perhaps scarlet fever, vanished as quickly as it struck, but it erased not only the child’s vision and hearing but also, as a result, her powers of articulate speech.

Her life thereafter, as a girl and as a woman, became a triumph over crushing adversity and shattering affliction. In time, Miss Keller learned to circumvent her blindness, deafness and muteness; she could “see” and “hear” with exceptional acuity; she even learned to talk passably and to dance in time to a fox trot or a waltz. Her remarkable mind unfolded, and she was in and of the world, a full and happy participant in life.

What set Miss Keller apart was that no similarly afflicted person before had done more than acquire the simplest skills.

But she was graduated from Radcliffe; she became an artful and subtle writer; she led a vigorous life; she developed into a crusading humanitarian who espoused Socialism; and she energized movements that revolutionized help for the blind and the deaf.

Photo of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan, 1888.

James Smithson

… died on this date in 1829.

Smithson’s will left the bulk of his estate to his nephew, Henry James Hungerford. But should his nephew die without children—legitimate or illegitimate—a contingency clause stated that the estate would go to “the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge…”

Source: The Smithsonian Institution

The nephew did indeed die without children and in 1838 approximately $500,000 in gold was brought to the United States. After a decade of indecision and debate about how best to carry out the bequest, the Smithsonian Institution was created by Act of Congress (1846).

Here’s what that gift has led to:

According to the Smithsonian:

Senator John C. Calhoun opposed acceptance of the Smithson bequest, largely on the grounds that to do so on behalf of the entire nation would abridge states’ rights. He maintained that Congress had no authority to accept the gift. He also asserted that it would be “beneath [U.S.] dignity to accept presents from anyone.”

Petroglyph National Monument (New Mexico)

… was authorized on this date in 1990. It is owned and managed jointly by the National Park Service, the city of Albuquerque and the state of New Mexico.

Petroglyph National Monument

As you walk among the petroglyphs, you are not alone. This world is alive with the sights and sounds of the high desert – a hawk spirals down from the mesa top, a roadrunner scurries into fragrant sage, a desert millipede traces waves in the sand. There is another presence beyond what we can see or hear. People who have lived along the Rio Grande for many centuries come alive again through images they carved on the shiny black rocks. These images, and associated archeological sites in the Albuquerque area, provide glimpses into a 12,000 year long story of human life in this area.

Petroglyph National Monument stretches 17 miles along Albuquerque’s West Mesa, a volcanic basalt escarpment that dominates the city’s western horizon. . . .

Petroglyph National Monument protects a variety of cultural and natural resources including five volcanic cones, hundreds of archeological sites and an estimated 25,000 images carved by native peoples and early Spanish settlers. Many of the images are recognizable as animals, people, brands and crosses; others are more complex. Their meaning, possibly, understood only by the carver. These images are inseparable from the greater cultural landscape, from the spirits of the people who created them, and all who appreciate them.

Petroglyph National Monument is a place of respect, awe and wonderment.

Petroglyph National Monument

Pecos National Monument (New Mexico)

… was redesignated Pecos National Historical Park on this date in 1990. It had been made a national monument in 1965.

Pecos National Historical Park

Pecos preserves 12,000 years of history including the ancient pueblo of Pecos, two Spanish Colonial Missions, Santa Fe Trail sites, 20th century ranch history of Forked Lightning Ranch, and the site of the Civil War Battle of Glorieta Pass.

Pecos National Historical Park

Best soccer-related line of the day

“Everybody, it seems, is stricken with World Cup fever. Heck, even Gen. Stanley McChrystal got a red card last week.”

Sideline Chatter

Runner-up sports line of the day:

“You don’t want to be a draft pick that should have did something but never did nothing.”

John Wall of the University of Kentucky, drafted as the first overall pick by the Washington Wizards, quoted at Sideline Chatter.

The Writer Who Couldn’t Read

Engel had suffered a stroke. It had damaged the part of his brain we use when we read, so he couldn’t make sense of letters or words. He was suffering from what the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene calls “word blindness.” His eyes worked. He could see shapes on a page, but they made no sense to him. And because Engel writes detective stories for a living (he authored the Benny Cooperman mystery series, tales of a mild-mannered Toronto private eye), this was an extra-terrible blow. “I thought, well I’m done as a writer. I’m finished.”

Learn how The Writer Who Couldn’t Read learned to read and write again.

Link via Andrew Sullivan

I’ve seen our future and it ain’t pretty

Last evening my friend Donna got back from Washington and we decided to meet for some pie at a Flying Star, one of the local coffee shop chain. It was nearing 9.

I had to make a left turn on the way and it required a wait for traffic to clear. Opposite me turning left from the oncoming traffic was a vehicle with its bright lights on. I tried to avoid looking at the lights, of course, but couldn’t help it somewhat as I watched the oncoming traffic in the adjacent lanes. Finally I was able to turn left, then I took the first right.

It was an unlit street and the glare from the bright lights was still bouncing around my retinas. At first I thought I was seeing things. And then I did see it.

It was an elderly man in a wheel chair crossing the street. No lights, no reflecting tape, only my headlights barely illuminating him. I slowed and went around; by the time I passed he was nearly on the dirt next to the street along a large undeveloped field. He was moving slowly, Fred Flintstone style.

I continued the quarter mile or so to the parking lot of the Flying Star, recovering from being startled and wondering what to do. There were two long-term care facilities back where the man was. One was assisted care apartments; the other what used to be called a nursing home. It might be he was fine; it might be he was not. Was it my business?

Donna arrived and I told her about it. We decided to go back and see if he was still there.

He was, just about where he’d been a few minutes earlier. We drove past and went to the nursing care facility.

I wandered in. No locks, no receptionist. But it was clean and it was nice and it was as scary as hell. (Perhaps it is hell.)

I continued back, finally seeing a nurse or orderly down the hall. I called to him, eventually got his attention and told him about the man. We ran out a back door and I showed him my apparition in the dark on the other side of the street about 100 yards away.

The attendant went and got John and wheeled him back across the street. John did not want to come this way; it was “goddam this and goddammit that”. His arms were heavily bruised and bandaged. I helped lift John, a big man, and his wheelchair over a curb. The attendant thanked me for saving the man’s life. I told him there was no need to get dramatic, but I was glad I saw him and could help. I left them there, outside the door we’d come out. The attendant called someone to unlock the door. It was raining lightly.

We had coconut cream pie.

The battle at Little Bighorn

Little Bighorn … was 134 years ago this afternoon. This report is from The New York Times a few days later:

Custer.jpg

On June 25 Gen. Custer’s command came upon the main camp of Sitting Bull, and at once attacked it, charging the thickest part of it with five companies, Major Reno, with seven companies attacking on the other side. The soldiers were repulsed and a wholesale slaughter ensued. Gen. Custer, his brother, his nephew, and his brother-in-law were killed, and not one of his detachment escaped. The Indians surrounded Major Reno’s command and held them in the hills during a whole day, but Gibbon’s command came up and the Indians left. The number of killed is stated at 300 and the wounded at 31. Two hundred and seven men are said to have been buried in one place. The list of killed includes seventeen commissioned officers.

It is the opinion of Army officers in Chicago, Washington, and Philadelphia, including Gens. Sherman and Sheridan, that Gen. Custer was rashly imprudent to attack such a large number of Indians, Sitting Bull’s force being 4,000 strong.

Custer, often a reckless but previously a lucky commander, was to have his reputation rescued by what became the life-long work of his widow.

The best book about Custer is Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn.

“Son of the Morning Star makes good reading—its prose is elegant, its tone the voice of dry wit, its meandering narrative skillfully crafted. Mr. Connell is above all a storyteller, and the story he tells is vastly more complicated than who did what to whom on June 25, 1876.” Page Stegner

This book is generally considered one of the half-dozen best written about the American west.

The best book attempting to tell the vastly more important Indian side of the story is James Welch’s Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians.

Nor does this picture change. Whether Custer is portrayed as a hero, as Errol Flynn did it in the World War II-era They Died with Their Boots On, or as a genocidal nut, as in the Vietnam-era Little Big Man, he is still the center of attention. The recent miniseries Son of the Morning Star depicted Custer as a naughty, hot-blooded, fratboy type-but he is still the character that the cameras follow, the man whose death has always been the point of telling the story. No matter that in fact his famous hairline was beginning to recede, that his remaining hair was cut short, and that it was too hot to wear buckskin that summer day. Or that the Lakotas and the Cheyennes had no idea who had attacked them or which particular army commander they were fighting. More than a century after his death, Custer has the kind of name recognition that would make any aspirant for national political office jealous.

But if you switch the focus, the story becomes infinitely richer. Late on a cold November night, with the wind howling outside his trailer on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Johnson Holy Rock began talking to us about Crazy Horse. Nearly eighty, Johnson is a former tribal chairman whose father was a young boy in Crazy Horse’s camp at the Little Bighorn. “Traditional history tells us that Crazy Horse could ride in front of a line of soldiers and they could all take a potshot at him and no bullet could touch him,” Johnson said, moving his arms back and forth for emphasis. “He’d make three passes, and after the third pass, then his followers were encouraged to make the charge. ‘See, I haven’t been wounded. I’m not shot.’ We would charge.”

Landscape photo credit: Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Custer marker photo: NewMexiKen 1995.

Line of the day

“Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising. My views are critical but that shouldn’t be mistaken for hostile – I’m just not a stenographer. There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues but that was hard-earned through experience, not something I learned going to a cocktail party on fucking K Street. That’s what reporters are supposed to do, report the story.”

Michael Hastings, Rolling Stone’s McChrystal Profiler

Idle thought

There’s some concern going around the internets about how if you hold the iPhone 4 a certain way you compromise the antennas and degrade the phone signal. (Apple’s position is, all phones do that, don’t hold it that way.)

Are we so ignorant that we can’t remember six or seven years ago when cell phones had pull-out antennas and came with instructions not to touch the antenna while making a call as it would degrade the signal and cause the phone to use more power (giving you brain cancer and reducing battery life)?

Geez, grip the iPhone loosely and you won’t have a problem.

The Stringer and the Snake-eater

From David J. Morris at The Virginia Quarterly Review Blog, as good a summary as you’ll find about what they were thinking and why. A key excerpt:

It is still a little difficult to believe that an accomplished fifty-five-year-old officer would say and allow his staff to say the outrageous things in the Rolling Stone article. You can just hear the chorus in Washington: “What was he thinking?” But then, I think McChrystal and his buddies didn’t expect that Hastings would actually write down everything they said and put it into print. It’s an unfortunate staple of Beltway journalism that has bled over into war reporting that most reporters are loathe to burn their sources by writing derogatory things about them. To be blunt, most reporters are as career-obsessed as the officers they’re interviewing and they don’t want to poison the well. This is doubly true if the officer being interviewed is a four-star general. There is a simple reciprocity involved: if you want to be invited back to ride on The Boss’s helicopter, if you want continued access, you’d better not write about his soft spot for strippers and gin. That said, it’s a naturally antagonistic relationship and most officers hate reporters because they represent a threat to their reputations. There are no medals awarded for conspicuous gallantry in a press conference. . . .

Enter into this mix Michael Hastings, a reporter who apparently had made a decision at some point to not play by the normal rules; who can be friendly, interested, and reasonably non-threatening in-person; whose brother is an army officer; and who was writing for what is primarily a pop culture magazine. McChrystal and his staff, jangled and beat-down after literally years of being in and out of various combat zones, probably thought they were coming across as hip and irreverent in front of the Rolling Stone guy, knowing that there was a far better chance their teenage daughters were going to read about them there than in the back pages of the National Review. Of course, many of those staff officers are now dealing with what amounts to the final mistake of their careers within an organization that doesn’t forgive much in the way of media fiascos.

Link via Andrew Sullivan.

June 24th

Al Molinaro of “Happy Days” is 91 today.

Mick Fleetwood is 63. “Rumours” has sold more than 19 million copies, the 9th best-selling album of all time*.

Minka Kelly of “Friday Night Lights” is 30 today. Old for high school wouldn’t you say?

Jack Dempsey was born on this date in 1895 in Manassa, Colorado, which makes him about the most famous native-son of the San Luis Valley.

*

  1. Thriller, Michael Jackson, 29 million
  2. Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, The Eagles, 29 million
  3. The Wall, Pink Floyd, 23 million
  4. Led Zeppelin IV, Led Zeppelin, 23 million
  5. Back in Black, AC/DC, 22 million
  6. Double Live, Garth Brooks, 21 million
  7. Greatest Hits Volume I & II, Billy Joel, 21 million
  8. Come On Over, Shania Twain, 20 million
  9. Rumours, Fleetwood Mac, 19 million
  10. The Beatles, The Beatles, 19 million

Be not too swift to categorize people

The fact, revealed in Rolling Stone, that Gen. Stanley McChrystal voted for President Obama may well have been a planted nugget designed to show how receptive McChrystal was to Obama’s worldview. But several people who worked for, and continue to work for, Gen. McChrystal say that it’s true. McChrystal told his subordinates about his ballot choice in November of 2008. More surprisingly, this choice did not surprise them. McChrystal was a hard core operator, aggressive as hell, a JSOC ninja — but he was also a social liberal who tolerated, nay, welcomed gay people into his inner circle, who disdained Fox News, and who grew increasingly frustrated with his reputation as Dick Cheney’s hired assassin. 

Marc Ambinder – The Atlantic

Redux post of the day

First posted here five years ago today.

It’s my first day in the building, I have not taken a single vote, I have not introduced one bill, had not even sat down in my desk, and this very earnest reporter raises his hand and says:

“Senator Obama, what is your place in history?”

I did what you just did, which is laugh out loud. I said, place in history? I thought he was kidding! At that point, I wasn’t even sure the other Senators would save a place for me at the cool kids’ table.

U.S. Senator Barack Obama in commencement address at Knox College

Land ho!

On June 24th 503 years ago today, the Italian Giovanni Caboto, sailing for the English as John Cabot, made landfall. He and his English crew were the first reported Europeans to see North America. (Leiv Eiriksson had been in the area nearly 500 years previously, but left no record.)

Cabot’s own log and maps, if he had them, have never been located, and scholars have debated his route. He may have landed first in Labrador or Newfoundland or even Nova Scotia.

Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage has a good presentation.

Top Raising Arizona lines

Here, at Luis’s suggestion, the top lines from Raising Arizona:

  1. Smalls: You want to find an outlaw, hire an outlaw. You want to find a Dunkin’ Donuts, call a cop.
  2. Gale: H.I., you’re young and you got your health, what you want with a job?
  3. H.I.: Edwina’s insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.
  4. Policeman: Do you have any disgruntled employees?
    Nathan Arizona Sr.: Hell, they’re all disgruntled. I ain’t running no damn daisy farm. My motto is “Do it my way or watch your butt!”
    Policeman: Well, do you think any of them could’ve done it?
    Nathan Arizona Sr.: Oh, don’t make me laugh. Without my say-so they wouldn’t piss with their pants on fire.
  5. Evelle: Gale? Um, Junior just had a … an accident.
    Gale: What’s that, pardner?
    Evelle: He had hisself a little ol’ accident.
    Gale: What do you mean? He looks okay.
    Evelle: No. You see, moving though we are, he just went and had hisself a little ol’ rest stop.
  6. Evelle: You know how to put these things on?
    Grocer: Well, around the butt and up over the groin area.
    Evelle: I know WHERE they go, old timer. I just want to know if I need pins or fasteners.
    Grocer: Well, no, they got them tape-ettes already on there. It’s self-contained and fairly explanatory.
  7. Policeman in Arizona house: What did the pyjamas look like?
    Nathan Arizona Sr.: I don’t know – they were jammies! They had Yodas ‘n’ shit on ’em!
  8. H.I.: But I saw an old couple being visited by their children, and all their grandchildren too. The old couple weren’t screwed up. And neither were their kids or their grandkids. And I don’t know. You tell me. This whole dream, was it wishful thinking? Was I just fleeing reality like I know I’m liable to do? But me and Ed, we can be good too. And it seemed real. It seemed like us and it seemed like, well, our home. If not Arizona, then a land not too far away. Where all parents are strong and wise and capable and all children are happy and beloved. I don’t know. Maybe it was Utah.