Joan of Arc…

was born on this date in 1412.

Jeanne d’Arc, called the Maid of Orléans, national heroine and patron saint of France, who united the nation at a critical hour and decisively turned the Hundred Years’ War in France’s favor.

Joan was born of peasant parentage in Domrémy (now Domrémy-la-Pucelle). When she was 13 years old, she believed she heard celestial voices. As they continued, sometimes accompanied by visions, she became convinced that they belonged to St. Michael and to the early martyrs St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Margaret. Early in 1429, during the Hundred Years’ War, when the English were about to capture Orléans, the “voices” exhorted her to help the Dauphin, later Charles VII, king of France. Charles, because of both internal strife and the English claim to the throne of France, had not yet been crowned king. Joan succeeded in convincing him that she had a divine mission to save France. A board of theologians approved her claims, and she was given troops to command. Dressed in armor and carrying a white banner that represented God blessing the French royal emblem, the fleur-de-lis, she led the French to a decisive victory over the English. At the subsequent coronation of the Dauphin in the cathedral at Reims, she was given the place of honor beside the king.

Although Joan had united the French behind Charles and had put an end to English dreams of hegemony over France, Charles opposed any further campaigns against the English. Therefore, it was without royal support that Joan conducted (1430) a military operation against the English at Compiégne, near Paris. She was captured by Burgundian soldiers, who sold her to their English allies. The English then turned her over to an ecclesiastical court at Rouen to be tried for heresy and sorcery. After 14 months of interrogation, she was accused of wrongdoing in wearing masculine dress and of heresy for believing she was directly responsible to God rather than to the Roman Catholic church. The court condemned her to death, but she penitently confessed her errors, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Because she resumed masculine dress after returning to jail, she was condemned again—this time by a secular court—and, on May 30, 1431, Joan was burned at the stake in the Old Market Square at Rouen as a relapsed heretic.

Twenty-five years after her death, the church retried her case, and she was pronounced innocent. In 1920 she was canonized by Pope Benedict XV; her traditional feast day is May 30.

“Joan of Arc, Saint,” Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2004
http://encarta.msn.com — 1997-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Tug McGraw…

died yesterday of brain cancer at age 59. Tug was a relief pitcher for the Mets and Phillies and was the closer when the Phillies won their only World Series in 1980. He is the father of country music star Tim McGraw.

McGraw will always be remembered by NewMexiKen for his answer when asked what he would do with his World Series share — “Ninety percent I’ll spend on good times, women and Irish Whiskey. The other ten percent I’ll probably waste.”

On the twelfth day of Christmas

Today is the Epiphany, one of the three major Christian celebrations along with Christmas and Easter. The Epiphany is celebrated by most Christians on January 6 to commemorate the presentation of the infant Jesus to the Magi or three wise men.

The celebration of the Epiphany began in the Eastern Church and included Christ’s birth. However, by the 4th century, the various calendar reforms had moved the birth of Christ to December 25, and the church in Rome began celebrating January 6 as Epiphany.

Epiphany is derived from the Greek epiphaneia and means manifestation or to appear. In a religious context, the term describes the appearance of a divine being in a visible or revelatory manifestation.

In Mexico, today is Día de los Santos Reyes, the day Mexicans exchange Christmas presents to coincide with the arrival of the three gift-bearing kings or wisemen.

Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi
The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1445
Samuel H. Kress Collection
National Gallery of Art

The $5 day

As The New York Times reported, on this date in 1914…

Henry Ford, head of the Ford Motor Company, announced…one of the most remarkable business moves of his entire remarkable career. In brief it is:

To give to the employees of the company $10,000,000 of the profits of the 1914 business, the payments to be made semi-monthly and added to the pay checks.

To run the factory continuously instead of only eighteen hours a day, giving employment to several thousand more men by employing three shifts of eight hours each, instead of only two nine-hour shifts, as at present.

To establish a minimum wage scale of $5 per day. Even the boy who sweeps up the floors will get that much.

Before any man in any department of the company who does not seem to be doing good work shall be discharged, an opportunity will be given to him to try to make good in every other department. No man shall be discharged except for proved unfaithfulness or irremediable inefficiency.

Read the complete Times article.

2003 Year-End Zeitgeist

From Google

The 2003 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year’s major events and hottest trends based on more than 55 billion searches conducted over the past year by Google users from around the world. Whether you are tracking the global progression of the latest news or learning about healthy searches in Japan, the 2003 Year-End Zeitgeist enables you to look at the past year through the collective eyes of the world on the Internet.

Zeitgeist Explained
The term “zeitgeist” comes from the German “Zeit” meaning “time” and “Geist” meaning “spirit”. The term is defined in English by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as “the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.”

55 billion searches — 55 Billion!

And 65 vehicle polishers

Effort behind the scenes at the 2004 North American International Auto Show (aka the Detroit Auto Show).

• Fourteen semi-trailers are required to carry the 75,000-plus yards of carpet used for the exhibits and aisles at the NAIAS. If the carpet was made into a two foot-wide runner, it would be 66 miles long. With the average home using 125 yards, the carpet used at the NAIAS would cover the equivalent of 600 homes.

• Auto show exhibits, theatrical lighting and sound equipment will use enough electricity to power a 360-home subdivision for six months.

• Equipment needed to set up the show includes over 1,000 semi-trucks, 14 million pounds of freight, 75 forklifts, 18 45-foot booms, 20 scissor lifts, and 12 miles of electric wires.

• In the 10 weeks it takes to prepare the NAIAS for the media and public, more than 1,500 carpenters, stagehands, electricians, Teamsters, riggers and ironworkers will be employed full time (12-14 hour days; some double shifts) until the job is done.

• It takes many other personnel to prepare the auto show including: 200 janitorial workers, 500-700 catering personnel, 65 vehicle polishers, 135 car porters, 87 full-time Cobo Center staff members and 20 additional part-time Cobo Center staff members.

Umberto Eco…

was born in Alessandria, Italy, on this date in 1932. Look here for an interesting web site devoted to Eco.

“But why doesn’t the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed?” I asked, for no good reason. “Is Jorge right?”

“Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn’t interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. . . .”

— The Name of the Rose

Choices

“American auto buyers, who had about 100 models available to buy in the 1950s and 1960s, now have more than 1,400 choices.”
Source: Columnist Tom Walsh in the Detroit Free Press.

Football factories

Over the past 58 seasons (1946-2003) 76 teams have won or shared in the “national championship” of Division I-A college football. Fourteen schools have won the championship or been co-champions more than once. Together they account for 60 of the 76 champion teams (78.9%).

Oklahoma (6 outright, 1 tie)
Notre Dame (5 outright, 3 ties)
Miami (4 outright, 1 tie)
Alabama (2 outright, 5 ties)
USC (3 outright, 3 ties)
Nebraska (3 outright, 2 ties)
Ohio State (2 outright, 4 ties)
Texas (2 outright, 1 tie)
Penn State, Florida State, Tennessee (2 outright each)
Michigan State (1 outright, 2 ties)
Michigan (1 outright, 1 tie)
LSU (2 ties)

Conference standings for all 76 champions and co-champions (teams included in the conference they played in during 2003):

Big 12 (11 outright, 5 ties)
SEC (6 outright, 10 ties)
Big 10 (6 outright, 9 ties)
Big East (6 outright, 1 tie)
Independent (5 outright, 3 ties)
Pac 10 (3 outright, 5 ties)
ACC (4 outright, 1 tie)
Mountain West (1 outright)

[See also here.]

Diane Keaton…

who has a brief nude shot in Something’s Gotta Give, was born in Los Angeles on this date in 1946. Keaton’s first major role was in the Broadway rock musical Hair — where she did not remove her clothing. As for her nude scene in Something’s Gotta Give she says, “At this point, does it really matter? Nobody is looking at me the way I once imagined people would look at me, like with deviant thoughts. I think they just go, ‘Huh. There it is. Intact.'”

Diane Keaton won the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Annie Hall in 1977.

She has never married but has adopted two children. Her real name is Diane Hall; she changed to Keaton, her mother’s maiden name, because there was already a Diane Hall in the Actor’s Guild.

Robert Duvall…

was born in San Diego on this date in 1931. Duvall won the best actor Oscar for his portrayl of Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies in 1983. Among other characters he has portrayed are Boo Radley, Frank Burns, Tom Hagen, Lt. Col. William ‘Bill’ Kilgore, Bull Meechum and the unforgettable Augustus McCrae.

‘Obviously, some parents do value education, but it’s not the norm’

The Santa Fe New Mexican reports on minority achievement levels in schools.

A new study of how Santa Fe students scored on a state standardized test confirms what local educators know and what national studies show.

Hispanic students score lower than Anglos at all grades and in all subjects. But what hasn’t been apparent until now is that the gap continues to show up when poverty and language are discounted….

Sandra Rodriguez, an education professor at the College of Santa Fe, drew similar conclusions in a published dissertation based on her study of eight students in Española Public Schools in the late 1990s.

“Damn it, it’s true. People say it’s poverty, but it’s not. People say it’s language, but it’s not,” she said.

Rodriguez has another idea. Native New Mexico Hispanics, she said, tend to distrust the education system because of bad experiences of their relatives, and that could explain the gap in motivation….

Gwen Perea, a bilingual teacher at Nava Elementary School, said that the most important factor in success of her students — more than money or divorce — is parental involvement. [emphasis added]

Well read, redux

Elsewhere Debby takes exception to some of the “well read” list posted below.

I think that a lot of the titles offered ought to be required (or perhaps suggested) college reading, but high school? In fact, I think to require high school students to read some of those titles would only turn them off to reading–perhaps permanently. It could even effect their self-concept (or GPA) in a negative fashion when they couldn’t muddle through the complexities of Karl Marx or the language of Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles. Of course they were polling a bunch of brainiacs and elitists (educators, businessman, politicians and journalists) 😉 and, in all fairness, not all of the titles got high marks.

One hundred years ago bright young people read Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles in Greek. Have we come so far that young people can’t even read them at all now for fear their GPA or self-image would be upset? Can’t education require effort on the part of the student?

Well read

Some years ago the National Endowment for the Humanities polled educators, businessman, politicians and journalists for the books they felt high school students should read (or should have read). The leading works are listed with the percentage of responses for each.

71 Macbeth, Hamlet — Shakespeare
50 Declaration, Constitution, Gettysburg Address
49 Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
48 Bible
28 Iliad, Odyssey — Homer
26 Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens
21 The Republic — Plato
19 Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
17 Scarlet Letter — Hawthorne
17 Oedipus — Sophocles
13 Moby Dick — Herman Melville
13 1984 — George Orwell
13 Walden — Henry David Thoreau
12 Collected Poems — Robert Frost
11 Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman
9 Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
9 Canterbury Tales — Chaucer
9 Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx
9 Politics — Aristotle
7 Collected Poems — Emily Dickinson
7 Crime and Punishment — Dostoevsky
7 Collected Works — William Faulkner
7 Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
7 Democracy in America — de Tocqueville
6 Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
6 Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson
6 The Prince — Niccolo Michiavelli
6 Paradise Lost — John Milton
5 War and Peace — Tolstoy
5 Aeneid — Virgil

Zap!

NewMexiKen was pleased to see he’s not alone in finding the world too complex. In a Christmas letter a colleague wrote:

Sometimes the routine can be confusing. One morning last month, Lauren was juggling kids, the cordless portable phone, and her Starbucks coffee (carefully bought the day before and refrigerated). She punched 30 seconds into the microwave to warm the coffee, started to glance at the paper, saw her coffee on the counter, and became the first in our family to smell microwaved phone. Which leads to the question—what was more expensive, frying the portable phone, or the week’s previous purchases at Fourbucks?