Gone With The Wind…

premiered in Atlanta, Georgia, on this date in 1939.

Hattie McDaniel, who won a supporting-actress Oscar for her portrayal of Mammy, was not present in segregated Atlanta.

Martin Luther King, Jr., sang in the “negro boys choir” from his father’s church at the Gone With The Wind Ball the evening before the premiere.

The 2,000 tickets were $10 and up.

When the news of war is announced in the film, the audience in the theater rose to its feet with rebel yells.

Laurence Olivier reportedly proposed to Vivien Leigh on their flight from Atlanta to New York after the premiere. Their marriage lasted 20 years.

The Loew’s Grand Theater, where the premiere was shown, was destroyed by fire in 1978.

The film, however great as a motion picture, forever ruined America’s understanding of what the War of the Rebellion was all about.

The Bill of Rights…

was ratified by Virginia on this date in 1791, and thereby became part of the Constitution of the United States as its first ten amendments.

Twelve amendments were proposed to the legislatures of the several States by the First Congress on September 25, 1789. Numbers three through twelve were ratified by New Jersey, November 20, 1789; Maryland, December 19, 1789; North Carolina, December 22, 1789; South Carolina, January 19, 1790; New Hampshire, January 25, 1790; Delaware, January 28, 1790; New York, February 24, 1790; Pennsylvania, March 10, 1790; Rhode Island, June 7, 1790; Vermont, November 3, 1791; and Virginia, December 15, 1791. The amendments were ultimately ratified by the legislatures of Massachusetts, March 2, 1939; Georgia, March 18, 1939; and Connecticut, April 19, 1939.

The draft first amendment concerned the numbers of constituents for each representative. It has never been ratified. The draft second amendment was ratified by the required number of states in 1992. It took effect as Amendment XXVII (“No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”)

The Bill of Rights

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Technology is too slow

NewMexiKen is ready to go strictly cellular, but why can’t I buy a device so that when I’m home my cellular service will work through my existing home telephones? Who wants to go from the relative convenience of six phones to one? According to The Mossberg Solution, it’s coming but it’s not here yet.

The other needed device is one that will enable me to play music from the computer on the home music system or show photos from the computer on the television without a lot of cables and effort. According to Fast Forward, “Multimedia Sharing Just Isn’t There Yet” either.

Carnegiea gigantea

The saguaro is the largest cactus in the United States, commonly reaching 40 feet (12 m) tall; a few have attained 60 feet (18 m) and one was measured at 78 feet (23.8 m).

The saguaro’s range is almost completely restricted to southern Arizona and western Sonora. A few plants grow just across the political borders in California and Sinaloa. Saguaros reach their greatest abundance in Arizona Upland. Plants grow from sea level to about 4000 feet (1200 m). In the northern part of their range they are most numerous on warmer south-facing slopes.

A tap root extends downward to more than 2 feet (60 cm). The rest of the extensive root system is shallow, as is the case for most succulents. Roots are rarely more than 4 inches (10 cm) deep and radiate horizontally about as far from the plant as the plant is tall.

In the Tucson Mountains, which averages 14 inches (355 mm) annual rainfall, a saguaro takes about 10 years to attain 1½ inches (3.8 cm) in height and 30 years to reach 2 feet (61 cm). Saguaros begin to flower at about 8 feet tall (2.4 m), which takes an average of 55 years. Compare this with 40 years to first flowering in the wetter eastern unit of Saguaro National Park (16 inches, 406 mm, average annual rainfall) and 75 years in the drier Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (9 inches, 230 mm).

Saguaros may begin to grow arms when the plant is between 50 and 100 years of age (in the Tucson Mountains), usually just above the stem’s maximum girth at about 7 to 9 feet (2.1 to 2.7 m) above-ground. The number of arms and overall size of a plant seem to be correlated with soil and rainfall. Saguaros on bajadas with finer, more water-retentive soils tend to grow larger and produce more arms than do those on steep, rocky slopes. A few saguaros have been observed with as many as 50 arms; many never grow arms. Saguaro arms always grow upwards. The drooping arms seen on many old saguaros is a result of wilting after frost damage. The growing tips will turn upwards in time. There is a myth that arms are produced so as to balance the plants, but research shows arm-sprouting to be random. Many saguaros can be found with several arms all on the same side of the main stem.

The chief agent of mortality of mature saguaros in the Arizona Upland is freezing temperatures. The saguaro is a tropical cactus with limited frost tolerance, and it reaches the northern, coldest limit of its range in Arizona Upland….It is difficult to determine the lethal temperature for a saguaro or other plant. The seasonal timing and duration of freezing temperatures are at least as important as the minimum temperature. Healthy middle-aged saguaros have survived 10ºF (-12ºC) for a few hours in mid-winter, while 12 hours of 20ºF (-7ºC) in late fall have caused widespread damage and death.

The imminent demise of the saguaros is a recurring rumor dating back several decades. Its most recent incarnation began in the early 1990s and refuses to die, despite having been soundly refuted….The saguaro doom story first surfaced in the 1940s; at that time little was known about saguaro ecology. Saguaro National Monument was established in 1933 east of Tucson. That bottomland area was chosen because it had a tremendous population of giant old saguaros. (It had few young or middle-aged saguaros, due to the effects of livestock grazing and the cutting of potential nurse trees since the late 1800s.) But there was a catastrophic freeze in 1937, and during the next decade the giant forest was suffering massive mortality from bacterial necrosis. The Park Service bulldozed and buried thousands of rotting cacti in the hope of stopping what it mistook as a new, virulent disease. These efforts failed, and the alarm over the presumed fate of the saguaros became a factor in the establishment of the West unit of Saguaro National Monument on the other side of Tucson in 1961. This location in the Tucson Mountains did not have a cohort of giants so the impact of the freeze of 1937 was less evident, or according to the view of that time, the bacterial necrosis disease had not infected this population. (The western unit had mature stands of giants by the mid 1970s; this cohort was devastated by the freeze of 1978.) This first misinterpretation of the ecology of saguaros had a positive outcome—it engendered the preservation of another tract of splendid desert. Both units of the National Monument were designated Saguaro National Park in 1994.

So are saguaros declining? The answer is, yes, most of the time. So are most species of desert plants and animals—that’s the nature of this ecosystem. In most years there is slightly higher mortality than recruitment (the successful establishment of new individuals), so populations decrease. In years of severe droughts or freezes the mortality can be dramatic. In the occasional wet years mass recruitment reverses the trend of decline with a reproductive boom. In the case of saguaros these episodes of net recruitment seem to occur less than a half-dozen times per century in Saguaro National Park (west), and less often in the drier regions.

All of the text above excerpted from The Arizona Sonora Desert Museum — Cactaceae.
[NewMexiKen photos, 2003]

Don’t you just love stories with happy endings?

Woman Claims Thurmond As Father

A 78-year-old retired Los Angeles schoolteacher said she is breaking a lifetime of silence to announce that she is the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of former U.S. senator James Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), once the nation’s leading segregationist. In an interview, the woman said that Thurmond privately acknowledged her as his daughter and provided financial support since 1941.

Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves

The eminent historian Gordon S. Wood reviews:

INVENTING A NATION
Washington, Adams, Jefferson.
By Gore Vidal.
198 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $22.

AN IMPERFECT GOD
George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America.
By Henry Wiencek.
Illustrated. 404 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

‘NEGRO PRESIDENT’
Jefferson and the Slave Power.
By Garry Wills.
274 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $25.

JEFFERSON’S DEMONS
Portrait of a Restless Mind.
By Michael Knox Beran.
Illustrated. 265 pp. New York: Free Press. $25.

THOMAS JEFFERSON
By R. B. Bernstein.
Illustrated. 253 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $26.

The esteemed senior historian Edmund S. Morgan reviews the historical works of Gore Vidal, including Inventing a Nation, in The New York Review of Books: A Tract for the Times.

I wanna be like Mike

From Morning Briefing in the Los Angeles Times:

Steven Vanderpool of Stats, Inc., said LeBron James already has had five games in which he didn’t score in double figures. “In comparison,” Vanderpool e-mailed, “in the 930 regular-season games he played with the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan failed to score in double figures only once — during the 1985-86 season shortly after returning from a broken foot.”

Tiger’s strength

From Morning Briefing in the Los Angeles Times:

Peter Kostis, working the Target World Challenge for the USA network, said, “If you want to find out where Tigers Woods has had his dinner on the PGA Tour — during his entire career he’s 16 under par on the par-threes, 89 under on the par-fours and 1,066 under part on the par-fives.”

The Big Dipper…

was Wilt Chamberlain’s preferred nickname (not Wilt-the-Stilt). The Morning Briefing in the Los Angeles Times has this —

Several readers e-mailed to say Chamberlain’s most amazing accomplishment may have been that he averaged 48.5 minutes a game in 1961-62. He averaged more than the maximum because the Philadelphia Warriors played a few overtime games that season.

He missed eight minutes all season — when he was ejected from a game against the Lakers after his third technical.

Chamberlain scored 50 or more points in a game 118 times during his NBA career.

Trivia questions: Chameberlain left college before his senior year at a time when it was unheard of and the NBA wouldn’t accept players until their class graduated. What did he do that year? What college did he leave?

Football playoffs

From Morning Briefing in the Los Angeles Times

There is a 16-team college football playoff after all. Except the games are video games. CSTV and EA Sports got together to create a fantasy playoff that involves the top 15 BCS-ranked teams and Boise State.

Results of the first-round games will be announced on CSTV today at 4:30 p.m., with quarterfinal results coming Dec. 17, and semifinals Dec. 27. The champion will be crowned in the Crystal Bowl Jan. 4.

It’s another possible title for USC, which opens up against Purdue.

Scotts Bluff…

was designated a national monument on this date in 1919. According to the National Park Service, “A prominent natural landmark for emigrants on the Oregon Trail, Scotts Bluff, Mitchell Pass and the adjacent prairie lands are set aside in a 3,000 acre national monument. This site preserves the memory of the historic Oregon, California and Mormon Trails.”

Founding father…

John Jay was born on this date in 1745. Jay, a delegate from New York, served in the First and Second Continental Congresses. During the War for Independence Jay served as president of the Continental Congress, minister plenipotentiary to Spain, and peace commissioner (in which he negotiated vital treaties with Spain and France). He was Secretary of Foreign Affairs under the Articles of Confederation. During the ratification of the Constitution Jay was author of the Federalist Papers, along with Madison and Hamilton. John Jay was the first Chief Justice of the United States.

While Chief Justice, Jay negotiated a vital, though flawed treaty with Great Britain in 1794, the Jay Treaty. The U.S. Department of State provides this history of the Jay Treaty —

The most important problem was British retention of a string of small military posts in northwestern U.S. territory that London had explicitly agreed to vacate as part of the treaty of 1783. In addition, British hindrance of American trade and shipping was causing serious tensions between the two countries. Because Jay was a Federalist and considered pro-British, Jefferson’s followers only reluctantly agreed to his mission. They were not amused when the U.S. envoy kissed the hand of the Queen as he was presented at court. In reality, Jay had little bargaining power in London. The British were at war with revolutionary France and little prone to compromise. Once they learned that the United States would not join a league of smaller European nations prepared to defend their neutrality by force of arms, the British realized they held all the cards. The only concessions Jay obtained was a surrender of the northwestern posts–already agreed to in 1783–and a commercial treaty with Great Britain that granted the United States “most favored nation” status, but seriously restricted U.S. commercial access to the British West Indies. All other outstanding issues–the Canadian-Maine boundary, compensation for pre-revolutionary debts, and British seizures of American ships–were to be resolved by arbitration. Jay even conceded that the British could seize U.S. goods bound for France if they paid for them and could confiscate without payment French goods on American ships. The treaty was immensely unpopular; “Sir John Jay” became one of the most hated Americans, “damned and double damned” for caving in to the British. The treaty squeaked through the Senate on a 20 to 10 vote on June 24, 1795. President Washington courageously implemented the treaty in the face of popular disapproval, realizing that it was the price of peace with Great Britain and that it gave the United States valuable time to consolidate and rearm in the event of future conflict.

‘Significant erosion of free speech’

Easterblogg has a negative assessment of the McCain-Feingold Act and the Supreme Court decision this week upholding it.

Meanwhile the Court has created what feels like a very dangerous new limitation on free speech. The majority opinion holds that spending for free speech can be restricted if the spending creates “the appearance of undue influence.” The appearance! Free speech protection may now be overridden if judges feel it appears to offend a very vague sensibility. The bulwark of the First Amendment is the idea that speech you don’t like must be protected; only by granting privilege to all forms of political and artistic expression can society be assured that government censors will not pick and choose the kinds of speech that suit those in power. Now the Supreme Court has declared it fine for Congress to pick and choose among permissible forms of speech, and to do so only on the flighty grounds of the appearance of that which is “undue,” whatever “undue” may mean. This is a major diminution of the First Amendment–and done in the name of exempting members of Congress from criticism!

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site…

was established on this date in 1963.

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site honors the life and work of the nation’s 17th President and preserves his two homes, tailor shop, and grave site. Andrew Johnson’s life exemplifies many struggles faced by Americans today. He worked his way from tailor to President. He stood strong for his ideals and beliefs. His presidency, from 1865 – 1869, illustrates the United States Constitution at work following Lincoln’s assassination and during attempts to reunify a nation that had been torn by civil war. His work helped shape the future of the United States and his influences continue today.