May 16th is the birthday

Henry Fonda was born May 16, 1905, in Grand Island, Nebraska. Seems hard to believe but Fonda was only nominated for an acting Oscar twice — for Grapes of Wrath and On Golden Pond. He won for the latter in 1982, a few months before his death. Particular favorite Fonda films (other than those two): 12 Angry Men, Mister Roberts, My Darling Clementine (he played Wyatt Earp), The Ox-Bow Incident (with sidekick Harry Morgan, aka Col. Sherman Potter) and, maybe best of all, as Clarence Earl Gideon in Gideon’s Trumpet (made when Fonda was 75).

Actress Debra Winger and gymnast Olga Korbut both turn 56 today. Winger has been nominated for the best actress Oscar three times — Shadowlands (1993), Terms of Endearment (1983) and An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). Korbut is the Belarusian gymnast who, pixie-like, revolutionized gymnastics. She became it’s first TV superstar while winning three gold medals and one silver at the 1972 Olympic Games. For a few days she was the talk of the planet.

Elsewhere, Rep. John Conyers from Detroit is 82, Pierce Brosnan is 58, Janet Jackson is 45, Gabriela Sabatini is 41 and Tori Spelling is 38.

Megan Fox is 25.

Woody Herman (1913) and Billy Martin (1928) were born on May 16. So was William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state. Seward was also governor of New York (1839-1842) and U.S. senator (1849-1861). Seward was stabbed several times in the head and neck as part of the Lincoln assassination plot but recovered. He was born in 1801.

“Pet Sounds” was released 45 years ago today; so was “Blonde on Blonde.”

Paul Simon and a Moment of Pure Sobbing Joy

“Paul Simon has brought joy to so many for so long, but on this night he made Rayna Ford’s dream come true. During a show in Toronto on May 7, Rayna Ford, a fan from Newfoundland, called out for Simon to play ‘Duncan,’ and said something to the effect that she learned to play guitar on the song. In a moment of astonishment and disbelief, Paul Simon invited her on stage, handed her a guitar and asked her to play it for the crowd.”

All Songs Considered Blog : NPR

And here is the video:

Best line of the day

“For this fan, one of the compelling traits about baseball at its top level is its insatiable difficulty, which shows itself most ferociously to arriving rookies and to older players, no matter how celebrated, on their way out. The rest of us, coming or going, need not face six-foot-seven pitchers throwing ninety-five-mile-an-hour heat and diving two-seamers, or the din of crowds or the terrifying silence of R.I.S.P. statistics while we try to separate who we are from who we think we are. Pride and status matter to ballplayers more than money, which makes them more like us than perhaps we’re ready to admit.”

90-year-old Roger Angell, The Sporting Scene: Time Out: The New Yorker, discussing Jorge Posada.

Growing old is a bitch, whatever age you are.

The National Jukebox

The National Jukebox is spinning tunes – and you don’t have to drop any coin to get it to play. Today [May 10th] the Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment announced the launch of what’s being billed as “the largest collection of historical recordings ever made publicly available online.”

The new website provides access to more than 10-thousand historical recordings for free on a streaming-only basis – no downloads. It covers the first quarter of the twentieth century and includes music, poetry, political speeches and other spoken word recordings. Right now, it only includes recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company, which Sony controls.

Above from NPR.

The website itself is here.

More from NPR:

There is more well-known stuff: the first recording of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” with composer George Gershwin at the piano, Parts 1 & 2, from 1924; Woodrow Wilson’s speech on labor from September 24, 1912; Theodore Roosevelt’s speech on the farmer and the businessman from that same month and year; and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s 1917 recording of, “Livery Stable Blues,” considered to be the “first jazz recording ever released.”

And the song below was recorded 110 years ago today.

Skull and Crossbones as Branding Tool

Interesting look at the origins and purpose of the skull and crossbones. An excerpt from near the beginning of the report:

Captain Cranby’s report is one of the first recorded sightings of a pirate’s flag emblazoned with a human skull and pair of diagonally crossed bones. During the early 1700s, those symbols were adopted (usually without the hourglass) by pirates worldwide in an astonishingly successful exercise in collective branding design.

The key to its success was clarity of meaning, which is an essential element in every effective branding project, and any other form of communication design. Just as Nike’s “swoosh” logo makes us think of speed and the horse-drawn carriage in Hermès’s identity screams posh, the sight of a skull and crossbones on a ship’s flag signaled one thing to 18th-century sailors like those on the Poole or the merchant vessels they were protecting: terror.

The Army in WWII

Ten Things Every American Student Should Know About Our Army in WWII by Rick Atkinson.

Rick Atkinson is author of The Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle, and is currently at work on the third volume in his trilogy on the role of the U.S. military in the liberation of Europe in World War II. He joined the Washington Post, from which he is now on book leave, in 1983, where he has served as reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor. He has won the Pulitzer Prize three times.

I’ve read both of the books cited above and recommend both, especially the Pulitzer-winning The Army at Dawn.

Atkinson begins his talk (which he gave in May 2009):

The U.S. Army in World War II is obviously a big subject. It was a big war with a lot going on. For example, on this very date, May 2, in 1945, Berlin fell to the Red Army, and, in Italy, the war ended, as the surrender of German forces there took effect. That’s just one day, in a war that lasted 2,174 days and claimed an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every three seconds. One, two, three, snap. One, two, three, snap.

In an effort to get our arms around this stupendous catastrophe, the greatest calamity in human history, let’s examine ten points every American student ought to know about the U.S. Army in the Second World War. This is a malleable list, and we can probably all agree that we’d like students to know more than only ten things. But let’s give it a shot.

Good stuff.

Best line of the day

“Purely from a political-theater standpoint, Gingrich brings several really outstanding qualities to this race. For one thing, he’s a legit threat to win the nomination. He wouldn’t be in any normal year, but when the field is Donald Trump, Michelle Bachman and Rick Santorum, anyone who can successfully lick a postage stamp without an instruction booklet is going to be a contender.”

Matt Taibbi