The Supremes

Timothy Egan suggests we need a little diversity on the Supreme Court. He begins:

At last count, there were about 200 law schools in the United States accredited by the American Bar Association, but apparently only two of them — Harvard and Yale — can be a path to serving on the highest court in the land.

It was surprising enough to see that with the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court will not have a single Protestant among its black-robed elite. But equally jaw-dropping was the fact that without Stevens, every member of the court has attended Harvard or Yale law school.

In a Shasta State of Mind

“All maps have a purpose, perhaps even an agenda,” Michael J. Trinklein writes at the beginning of “Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States that Never Made It.” Agendas abound in this fascinating, funny book. Some are of a practical nature: why are North Dakota and South Dakota not just one big Dakota, as many nineteenth-century legislators wanted them to be? Because the distance on horseback from the capital to outlying regions was prohibitive. Some are born of fear (or greed): in 1957, the residents of northern California, concerned that dry-as-a-desert southern California was stealing too much of their water, proposed seceding and forming their own state, to be named “Shasta.” Some were religious, as in the case of the state of “Hazard,” proposed in the seventeen-fifties by a group of Presbyterians, whose charter stipulated that it would not have any “Mass Houses or Pope-ish chapels.”

The Book Bench: The New Yorker

The five accompanying maps are worth a click.

Iceland’s disruptive volcano

Today, British civil aviation authorities ordered the country’s airspace closed as of noon, due to a cloud of ash drifting from the erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. The volcano has erupted for the second time in less than a month, melting ice, shooting smoke and steam into the air and forcing hundreds of people to flee rising floodwaters. The volcanic ash has forced the cancellation of many flights and disrupted air traffic across northern Europe, stranding thousands of passengers. Collected here are photos of the most recent eruption, and of last month’s eruptions, which were from the same volcano, just several miles further east. (17 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

Awesome!

Well, not awesome for Jill. The aviation shutdown has Byron stranded in the U.K. “Flights have been canceled because volcanic ash contains silicates, or glass fibers, which can melt inside jet engines, causing them to flame out and stall.” (NY Times)

‘Death, taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.’

In the 1950s and early 1960s the top tax rate — on taxable incomes over $400,000 — was 91%.

Ninety. One.

[Caveat: $400,000 in 1960 dollars would be about $3 million in 2009 dollars.]

The Revenue Act of 1964 reduced the top rate to 70%.

Today’s top rate is 35%.

The rate for death is still 100%.

The title of this post is a quotation attributed to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

Income Tax

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

Arguing that the income tax is unconstitutional, as some do, is simply ignorance. It’s in an amendment, just like freedom of speech, right to bear arms and women’s suffrage.

Mind Games

At CJR Todd Gitlin takes a look at What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism by Jack Fuller. An excerpt:

So he starts by identifying “four separate forces that came together at the close of the twentieth century to reshape the way people take in news.” There is, first of all, popular suspicion of experts who claim to be objective. There is, second, the even deeper suspicion of whether it is possible to know anything about the world. There is, third, the emergence of information technology that “presented the human mind with unprecedented cognitive and attention challenges.”

But the force that most deeply engages the author—the one that absorbs the plurality of his pages—predates modernist skepticism, postmodernist cynicism, and Craigslist by hundreds of thousands of years. It traces back, he insists, to “Homo sapiens’ prehistoric origins on the African savannah.” What Fuller is talking about is the fact that human beings are simultaneously emotional as well as rational creatures. Thanks to natural selection, our brains are hard-wired to pay attention to novelty . . . Moreover, the more information flies at our brains, the more we are aroused by emotions, including emotions triggered by the sheer energy it takes to navigate through a torrent of information. The more aroused we are by emotions, the more emotions it takes to drive our attention. Meanwhile, the brain gets skewed by all these efforts and the emotions they generate.

Consider the previous paragraph a set of factual dots that Fuller is trying to connect to a second set of dots, as follows: Distracted Americans are turning away from dead-tree newspapers in droves. They are now in possession of electronic devices that are better at gaining attention than newspapers.

The single mother’s manifesto

My god, I do love this woman.

J.K. Rowling writes about the British election. An excerpt:

Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money. If Mr Cameron’s only practical advice to women living in poverty, the sole carers of their children, is “get married, and we’ll give you £150”, he reveals himself to be completely ignorant of their true situation.

How many prospective husbands did I ever meet, when I was the single mother of a baby, unable to work, stuck inside my flat, night after night, with barely enough money for life’s necessities? Should I have proposed to the youth who broke in through my kitchen window at 3am? Half a billion pounds, to send a message — would it not be more cost-effective, more personal, to send all the lower-income married people flowers?

Go read it all. It’s time well spent.

Thanks to Avelino for the link.

Cormac McCarthy doesn’t know the American south-west

Christine Granados thinks despite what he has said, plenty of writers before Cormac McCarthy had written about this region, and many did so a lot better. An excerpt:

Had George Sessions Perry or Leslie Marmon Silko been quoted as saying, “I moved to the north-east because I knew no one had ever written about it,” the literary establishment would have laughed and rained intellectual expletives upon them. However, when Rhode Island-born and Tennessee-reared McCarthy stated last year in the Wall Street Journal that he moved to the south-west because “he knew no one had ever written about it”, not one voice was raised. McCarthy’s misinformation was treated as fact and as if writers such as Perry, Katherine Anne Porter, O Henry, J Frank Dobie, John Graves, Larry McMurtry, and Elmer Kelton did not exist.

His misstatement in the Journal took me back to a college course I took where All The Pretty Horses was touted as one of the best works of south-western US literature. But I didn’t understand what was so special about the stereotypical John Grady Cole, a silent 16-year-old ranch-hand orphan from Texas who spoke Spanish and fell in love with the Mexican Americans and Mexicans he encountered on both sides of the border – yet treated them as colourful props and scenery by relegating them to the role of minor characters in the novel. I won’t discuss the stereotypes and archetypes he used for “them darkies” in his book.

How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons

Richard Bausch makes the case against writing manuals. An excerpt:

The trouble of course is that a good book is not something you can put together like a model airplane. It does not lend itself to that kind of instruction. Every day books are published that contain no real artfulness in the lines, books made up of clichés and limp prose, stupid stories offering nothing but high concept and plot—or supra-literary books that shut out even a serious reader in the name of assertions about the right of an author to be dull for a good cause. (No matter how serious a book is, if it is not entertaining, it is a failure.) I’m not talking about the books we write or publish in the attempt to answer the need for entertainment at whatever level one chooses. And I have no quarrel with the genres, because to help people escape from life is harmless, and honorable enough, and in its way just as valuable as helping them escape into it.

Books ahoy!

“Given that men have sailed the seas for thousands of years, it’s perhaps surprising how few great works of literature have been inspired by the seafaring life. Sailing may have promised adventure, but in reality it was a dangerous profession that attracted only the toughest, few of whom were equipped with a talent for writing. Their yarns remained fixed in the oral tradition, and in general, writers directed their attention elsewhere. But the exceptions are majestic.”

Carsten Jensen’s top 10 seafaring tales

Today’s Photo

This photo of Delicate Arch in Arches National Park was taken 16 days ago. Delicate is the arch depicted on the Utah centennial license plate. We arrived too late to make the three-mile roundtrip hike to the Arch (you can see a few people who did in the photo). This was taken at the end of a half-mile uphill climb with a telephoto lens from another vantage point approximately 0.6 miles from the Arch. Hand-held, no tripod.

Best line of the day

“There’s just nothing quite like watching a major world religion screw up on a level rarely seen outside the banking industry.”

Mary Elizabeth Williams — Slate

She continues:

“So hats off the Catholic Church, which keeps trotting out grumpy old men to say terrible things on a pretty constant basis these days.”

Ms. Williams has details of the latest attempt to dig the hole even deeper.

Best ‘never thought about it before, but good question’ line of the day

“Opening Day is all about renewal: same old white lines, same old thin sunshine, same old wondering how those F/A-18 fighter planes time their screech-by to coincide with the end of the anthem.”

Roger Angell : The New Yorker

Go read Angell’s whole Opening Day blog post. It’s only two paragraphs. If you love baseball, you love Angell.

Best line of the day

I am not part of the suicidally depressed left that is sure Sarah Palin is going to be the next presidential nominee.

I think she’s too smart to even try — she is very smart, in an uncurious, intellectually lazy way. Sort of what George Bush would be like if he’d been sent to Wasilla High instead of prep school. In fact, let’s give Sarah some credit here. If George W. had her background, he’d be serving fast food and cursing the day he got fired from the overnight shift at the canning factory.

Gail Collins

April 14, 1865

Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on this date in 1865. Lincoln died the next morning.

As Atzerodt and Paine fanned out to seek their targets, Booth, a celebrated actor, familiar to everybody who worked at Ford’s Theatre, had no trouble in slipping upstairs during the performance of Our American Cousin. Moving quietly down the aisle behind the dress circle, he stood for a few moments near the President’s box. A member of the audience, seeing him there, thought him “the handsomest man I had ever seen.” John Parker, the Metropolitan policeman assigned to protect the President, had left his post in the passageway, and the box was guarded only by Charles Forbes, a White House footman. When Booth showed Forbes his calling card, he was admitted to the presidential box. Barring the door behind him, so as not to be disturbed, he noiselessly moved behind Lincoln, who was leaning forward, with his chin in his right hand and his arm on the balustrade. At a distance of about two feet, the actor pointed his derringer at the back of the President’s head on the left side and pulled the trigger. It was about 10:13 P.M.

When Major Rathbone tried to seize the intruder, Booth lunged at him with his razor-sharp hunting knife, which had a 7¼-inch blade. “The Knife,” Clara Harris reported, “went from the elbow nearly to the shoulder, inside, — cutting an artery, nerves and veins — he bled so profusely as to make him very weak.” Shoving his victim aside, Booth placed his hands on the balustrade and vaulted toward the stage. It was an easy leap for the gymnastic actor, but the spur on his heel caught in the flags decorating the box and he fell heavily on one foot, breaking the bone just above the ankle. Waving his dagger, he shouted in a loud, melodramatic voice: “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants” — the motto of the state of Virginia). Some in the audience thought he added, “The South is avenged.” Quickly he limped across the stage, with what one witness called “a motion…like the hopping of a bull frog,” and made his escape through the rear of the theater.

Up to this point the audience was not sure what had happened. Perhaps most thought the whole disturbance was part of the play. But as the blue-white smoke from the pistol drifted out of the presidential box, Mary Lincoln gave a heart-rending shriek and screamed, “They have shot the President! They have shot the President!”

From David Herbert Donald’s outstanding biography of Lincoln.

Booth Wanted Poster
 
 
On April 26, Booth and co-conspirator David Herold were surrounded while hiding in a tobacco shed in Port Royal, Virginia. Herold surrendered to Union troops, but Booth held out and was shot while the shed burned down around him.

Click on the image to see a larger version of the poster. Photo at top is from a Library of Congress exhibit showing the content of Lincoln’s pockets that evening plus a newspaper report of the assassination. Click image for larger version.

Read The New York Times story from the day after the assassination, headlined Awful Event.
 
 
 

Black Sunday

It was 75 years ago today 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.

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

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

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

April 14th

Today is Ruination Day, but still we celebrate the birthday

… of Loretta Lynn. The coal miner’s daughter was born in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, 75 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 four-time Oscar nominee for best actress Julie Christie. She’s 70. Miss Christie won the Oscar for Darling but be sure to see the film Away from Her from 2007.

… of Pete Rose. You can bet that Pete is 69 today.

… of Brad Garrett, 50. Garrett is 6-8½.

… of Greg Maddux, 44. A friend has a grandson named, Maddux.

… of Adrien Brody. The Oscar winner (best actor for The Pianist) is 37.

… of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Buffy is 33.

… of Abigail Breslin. The Oscar-nominated actress is 14. That means she was born in 1996.

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.

Helen Keller’s teacher Anne Sullivan Macy was born on April 14 in 1866.

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.

Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language on April 14, 1828. The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor has some of the story.

Ruination Day

And the great barge sank.
And the Okies fled.
And the great emancipater
took a bullet in the head.

in the head…
took a bullet in the back of the head.

It was not December.
Was not in May.
Was the 14th of April.
That is ruination day.

That’s the day…
The day that is ruination day.

— Gillian Welch, “Ruination Day Part 2”

Lincoln assassinated, the Titanic hit the iceberg, Black Sunday on the Great Plains.

April 14th.

How do movie theaters decide which trailers to show?

As many as six trailers play before features at major chains, like AMC and Regal. The studio releasing a given film typically has automatic rights to two of these slots, and theater executives (in consultation with higher-ups from various studios) select the remaining four. Though theoretically studios and theaters could attach any trailer to any movie, they usually decide which releases to promote by using the “quadrant” system, which divides potential audiences into four different categories: men under 25, women under 25, men over 25, and women over 25.

There’s more info at Slate Magazine.