‘The open question is whether we’re in for a bad couple of years, or a bad decade.’

Something has clearly gone wrong with the economy. But how bad are things, really? And how bad might they get before better days return? Even to many economists who recently thought the gloom was overblown, the situation looks grim. The economy is in the midst of a very rough patch. The worst is probably still ahead.

From a good survey of current conditions in today’s New York Times.

July 19th

Howard Schultz, the developer of Starbucks, is 55 today. The Writer’s Almanac has an interesting profile that includes this:

On a vacation to Italy in 1983 he had an epiphany. Sitting at an espresso bar in Milan, he realized that there strong fresh brewed coffee was an integral part of people’s daily lives, that the coffeehouse was a third place for people after home and work. He decided that this could happen in Seattle.

George McGovern, a very good man if a very poor presidential candidate, is 86 today. This also from today’s Writer’s Almanac.

A bomber pilot in World War II, he flew 29 combat missions before his plane was badly damaged over Vienna and his navigator killed. He survived a crash landing on an island in the Adriatic Sea and won a Distinguished Flying Cross before returning for five more missions. Although both of his parents were Republicans, McGovern ran for Congress in 1956 as a Democrat and won, the first South Dakota Democrat to go to the House of Representatives in 22 years. After a losing campaign in 1960, he was elected to the Senate in 1962, and, upon re-election in ’68, emerged as a leading opponent to the war in Vietnam. He said, “I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”

Anthony Edwards, “Goose,” is 46 today.

Sam Colt was born on this date in 1814.

Sam Colt’s success story began with the issuance of a U.S. patent in 1836 for the Colt firearm equipped with a revolving cylinder containing five or six bullets. Colt’s revolver provided its user with greatly increased firepower. Prior to his invention, only one- and two-barrel flintlock pistols were available. In the 163 years that have followed, more than 30 million revolvers, pistols, and rifles bearing the Colt name have been produced, almost all of them in plants located in the Hartford, Connecticut, area. The Colt revolving-cylinder concept is said to have occurred to Sam Colt while serving as a seaman aboard the sailing ship Corvo. There he observed a similar principle in the workings of the ship’s capstan. During his leisure hours, Sam carved a wooden representation of his idea. The principle was remarkable in its simplicity and its applicability to both longarms and sidearms.

Colt History

“Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal.”

Arm pits and the environment

NewMexiKen first posted this from Andrew Tobias two years ago today.

Not everybody uses it, and this is a very important point. Even with just a billion people using it, a few decades back … and some of those billion using roll-on deodorant … the emission of chlorofluorocarbons still made a giant hole in Earth’s ozone layer.

And it was widening.

The global community was alarmed and took action and now three things are true:

* More people than ever use deodorant (praise the Lord)

* None of it emits chlorofluorocarbons (an alternative propellant was found — likewise for refrigerants)

* The hole in the ozone layer gradually disappeared (but you should still use SPF 15 or higher this weekend)

Okay? Do you see my point?

No?

My point is that if a little Right Guard can threaten our atmospheric equilibrium, isn’t it just really dumb to bet that the literally trillions of pounds of carbon dioxide we dump into the air each year will have no effect? Be honest: don’t you use more gasoline than deodorant?

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

“If you ask me, there isn’t much suspense in this year’s election: barring some extraordinary mistakes, Mr. Obama will win. Assuming he wins, the real question is what he’ll make of his victory.”

Paul Krugman in Friday’s column.

Krugman also says “If the current housing slump runs on the same schedule, we won’t be seeing a recovery until 2011 or later.”

And he predicts a slow rebound from the current recession: “If the current slump follows the typical modern pattern, the economy will stay depressed well into 2010, if not beyond …”.

Paper Clips

Below is a link to the award-winning 2004 documentary Paper Clips, the story of a middle school in a small town in Tennessee that began a project to teach its homogenous student body about diversity and the Holocaust. It’s really quite interesting, in the documentary way.

I recommend you take the time to view it, though it is 82 minutes.

The video is made possible through a new web service called SnagFilms that features documentaries in full for free, though with some annoying but quite brief advertisements. It looks promising.

Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War began on July 17, 1936 as a series of right-wing insurrections within the military, staged against the constitutional government of the five-year-old Second Spanish Republic. Because it was the first major military contest between left-wing forces and fascists, and attracted international involvement on both sides, the Spanish Civil War has sometimes been called the first chapter of World War II.

The rebels, or Nationalists as they came to be known, were backed by a spectrum of political and social conservatives including the Catholic Church, the fascist Falange Party, and those who wished to restore the Spanish monarchy. They received aid in the form of troops, tanks, and planes from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and Germany field-tested some of its most important artillery in Spain. With the rise of General Francisco Franco as leader of the Nationalist coalition, the threat of fascism’s spread across Europe visibly deepened.

The Republicans were backed by Spanish labor unions and a range of anti-fascist political groups, from communists and anarchists to Catalonian separatists to centrist supporters of liberal democracy. The Republicans received aid from the Soviet Union and from Mexico, but their most likely European allies signed a joint agreement of nonintervention. The most visible international aid came in the form of volunteers. Estimates vary, but as many as 60,000 individuals from over fifty countries joined the International Brigades to fight for the cause of the Spanish Republic. Between two and three thousand of these volunteers were men and women from the United States—most served with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
. . .

The Spanish Civil War, especially the anti-fascist side, became a cause célèbre in the United States. Writers and artists including novelist Ernest Hemingway, poets Muriel Rukeyser and Langston Hughes, and painter Robert Motherwell paid homage to the struggling Republic in their work. Baritone Paul Robeson sang for the international brigades. The anarchist Emma Goldman led an English-language publicity campaign. Fictional character Rick Blaine, protagonist of the 1942 film classic Casablanca, struggled against fascism in Spain, as did Robert Jordan, the hero of Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Library of Congress

Franco’s forces won in 1939 and he remained in power until 1975. As the Philadelphia Daily News editorialized at the time (this is the complete editorial): “They say only the good die young. Generalissimo Francisco Franco was 82. Seems about right.”

NewMexiKen was in Madrid in 1992. A crowd had gathered to watch and listen to some Peruvian pan-flutists (they were still a novelty then). The crowd was just enjoying itself when the police told us to disperse — and to my eternal amazement everyone did without a murmur of protest. In the U.S., the police would have been verbally abused at a minimum; in Madrid, nothing.

Repression comes on fast but leaves only slowly.

(Actually I did murmur a little, but I was traveling on a diplomatic passport and decided discretion was more important than valor, even if I was immune from prosecution.)

‘Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.’

Phyllis Diller is 91 today. Before she became a kind of parody of herself she was actually very, very funny. The Writer’s Almanac has a good profile with a little bit of classic Diller material.

They also have a good piece today on Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the Perry Mason mysteries, born on July 17th in 1889.

Fifties TV host Art Linkletter is 96 today. He’s the one that said “kids say the funniest things” and had a panel of them on many of his shows to prove it.

Diahann Carroll , the first African-American actress to appear in a TV series and not portray a domestic worker, is 73 today. The show was Julia and she was a nurse and single mom. Ms. Carroll was nominated for a best actress Oscar for Claudine in 1975.

Kiefer’s dad Donald is 73 today. Donald Sutherland’s breakthrough role was as Vernon Pinkley in The Dirty Dozen, then as “Hawkeye” Pierce in M*A*S*H. He has 150 credits listed at IMDb.

Camilla is 61.

And one of my favorites, Andre Royo, “Bubbles,” is 40 today.

Elbridge Gerry was born on this date in 1744. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Article of Confederation, but was one of three delegates who did not sign the Constitution, in Gerry’s case because it did not include a Bill of Rights. Gerry was the fifth U.S. vice president, serving the first year-and-a-half under Madison’s second term before dying. And, of course, he is the person for whom gerrymandering is named. He was the Massachusetts governor who signed a particularly egregious redistricting plan in 1812.

Joltin’ Joe

Joe DiMaggio did not get a hit on this date in 1941. Too bad, if he had his consecutive game hitting streak would have been 73. As it was, he hit safely in 56 consecutive games up to this date — and 16 after. (44 is the best by anyone else.)

At AmericanHeritage.com a couple years ago, John Steele Gordon told two good DiMaggio stories:

A few years before he died, in 1999, when baseball salaries had been going through the roof, a reporter asked DiMaggio what he thought he might be paid if he were playing baseball then. DiMaggio smiled and answered, “I’d just knock on Mr. Steinbrenner’s door and say, ‘Howdy, pardner.'”

The other story concerns his brief, disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was a film actress, used to working in front of cameras and technicians, not audiences. After their wedding, DiMaggio and Monroe went to Korea to entertain the American troops fighting there against the Chinese communists. There were perhaps 5,000 soldiers on the air-base runways waiting to greet them, and when they stepped out of the plane, the soldiers started cheering. Monroe, startled by the ovation, turned to her husband and said, “I bet you’ve never heard such cheering, Joe.” DiMaggio, who had brought a sold-out Yankee Stadium screaming to its collective feet more times than he could count, just said quietly, “Oh, yes I have.”

Then he beat her.

It’s only been 49 years. We should still be in mourning.

Billie Holiday died on this date in 1959. She was 44.

Considered by many to be the greatest jazz vocalist of all time, Billie Holiday lived a tempestuous and difficult life. Her singing expressed an incredible depth of emotion that spoke of hard times and injustice as well as triumph. Though her career was relatively short and often erratic, she left behind a body of work as great as any vocalist before or since.

American Masters

Indeed. Treat yourself.

Update: iTunes has a 65-track DRM-free Billie Holiday album for $10 (I cannot locate any background on this album, released Tuesday, but it seems an incredible buy.)