Four Minutes

Reading lately...

Every decade or so, I like to review my world history. I've recently started reading Andrew Marr's A History of the World. This is in the early pages...

Mother 

She had a different name. No one has known it for around seventy thousand years. She had one; for she lived among talkative and highly social people. ‘Mother’, for reasons that will become obvious, will do. She was probably young, tough, stocky and dark-skinned. She was a traveller, part of a people always on the move. She was also heavily pregnant. Her tribespeople were hunters and expert gleaners of berries, shellfish, roots and herbs. They carried tools and hides and a couple of babies with them, tied with sinews and skins around adult backs, but there were surprisingly few children in the group. Those who didn’t learn early to walk, keep quiet and keep up tended to die, picked off by predators following the group. 

In their own way the travellers were, however, formidable, armed with spears and razor-sharp chipped-stone cutting edges that had been developed over around a hundred thousand years of hunting, and (if they were anything like later hunter-gatherers) while fighting rival tribes. Their average age was relatively young, something that would remain true of all human societies until very recent history. But there would have been people in their fifties or sixties. It is now thought that the female menopause may have been a useful evolutionary adaptation to provide grandmothers, who could care for the young while younger women were breeding: tribes with grandmothers would be able to support more children to adulthood, and therefore would grow at the expense of tribes without older women.

[...] 

History and Photography

Stuff like this just gives me chills.

Alice Herz-Sommer Redux

I posted about this incredible woman before, but I recentlly ran across another wonderful video on the shiksa, and it's worth posting an update...

Video from KarmaTube

Titanic!

Well, today is both my father's 81st birthday and the 100th anniversary of the ship Titanic's collision with an iceberg. Since he's an awesome yet humble guy, I thought I'd cut him a break on his birthday and not go on in a way that might embarrass him. Happy birthday, Daddy!

Instead, my plan has been for quite some time to do a post about Titanic, and I've been collecting links for a while. Unfortunately, when I opened up this saved, yet unpublished post, all my saved links were gone.  :-(

But here are a few things that have come across my virtual desk since then. It's still an interesting list, and I may even dig around and find some of the lost material over the course of the weekend...

National Geographic Coverage
The Laroche Family
The Last Survivor
Margaret Bechstein Hays and the Titanic Orphans
Two Tennis Aces Who Survived
The Canines
The Big Picture: @100 Years
Composite Image
Heretofore Unseen Photos
Survivor's great-grandaughters mark the occasion
Unsinkable Love
The Untold Gay Story
Lakes and Oceans
... and the Inevitable Idiots

Updates: Body Found in Shipwreck?
Gizmodo: 100 Years of the Titanic
Dispatch from the Memorial Cruise
Five Curious Stories
What They Ate
The Last Supper, Again

Also, does anyone else remember this song? I think I sang it at camp, but maybe it was just with my family on car trips...

(We also had our own lyric... we alternated between "husbands and wives/little children lost their lives" and "uncles and aunts/little children lost their pants" in the chorus.)

Tap, tap, tap. Is this thing on?

Hey there, internet. I'm still here, though I've missed a few opportunities for posts lately:

This past Monday was Dyngus Day, which is awesome in its own right (especially if you are, like me, from western New York). And now, it's become famous for making Anderson Cooper giggle like a little girl, and then apologize for seeming to be kind of a dick about Dyngus Day.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13. The 6-day voyage, intended to land on the moon, went horribly wrong two days in and then turned into a rescue mission. It's hard to imagine what those four days of not knowing if the crew would survive could have been like (though the film account makes a good attempt at it).

And then there was the great mole story over on Gawker. Part one introduced the Fox Mole. The second installment commented on a Thin White Line and Billy O'Reilly. Fox launched a mole hunt. And then they nailed him (he was a producer). And I think now is maybe when the real story begins to unfold...

Tuskeegee

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DB Cooper

Forty years ago tomorrow DB Cooper disappeared. This article says the skyjacker's identity is still a secret, but I thought that issue was solved a while ago:

11/22

Forty-eight years ago today, John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. This year, the bookish amongst us can add several new related tomes to our xmas lists: one from Caroline, another from Chris Matthews, and a very intriguing fiction/history treatment from Stephen King.

Does it seem like it's been that long?

Happy Veterans Day tomorrow...

This iconic image might be my favorite of all the wartime photos that are out there -- triumph of the human spirit well depicted. Joe Rosenthal done good.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day

(image from newgrounds)

It looks like nice weather for a bonfire tonight, but first I should make sure I have my history straight...

Columbus Day, Redirected

I spent some time during my lunch this afternoon trying to come up with something to post for Columbus Day, which is without a doubt my least favorite holiday on the US calendar (I even like xmas better). But I didn't have much luck. Everyone who cares already knows that Columbus was no hero and that he doesn't deserve to be honored with a holiday (he instead deserved to be locked up for his crimes).

I realized that my commentary where Columbus Day is concerned probably peaked last year, when Columbus Day and Coming Out Day both fell on the same date, and I encouraged my friends on facebook to "Be gay, not genocidal!" (my favorite followup was from a neighbor: "I thought that I was the only one constantly reminding myself to be gay and not genocidal. One is fabulous and the other is not.").

But back to today's post. As I navigated the labyrinthine warren that is the internet while nibbling on last night's leftovers, I was distracted from my quest by this awesome video of Widespread Panic opening their 25th Anniversary Party earlier this year with Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," just as they had at their first show in 1986.

And then as I listened, I realized that this is a perfect song to put up here today. For, even now, thousands of people are out in the streets, all over the world, protesting the ongoing oppression that continues to this day, which is still (and ever) motivated by greed and enabled by corruption.

So, instead of honoring a cruel, genocidal terrorist, I'd like to redirect our attention to the great, brave people who are standing up to the powerful, worldwide. One of the many places where this is happening is in New York, where the Occupy Wall Street protests have morphed into a movement that is spreading across the country (including Chattanooga). It's a relief to see that the sleeping giant has finally (re)awakened here in the US. Our leaders and the media would be wise to pay attention. I don't think these people are going to go home quietly.

photo of Occupy Wall Street on the Brooklyn Bridge by Mat McDermott

Alice Herz-Sommer

My sister sent me a link to this delightful video back in March. It features Alice Herz-Sommer, the world's oldest known Holocaust survivor, who insists that she never hated the nazis. She personally knew Franz Kafka and Gustav Mahler, and currently spends several hours a day playing the piano. She attributes her longevity to her optimism, which she says is fueled by music. She talks about her life here.

"I have had such a beautiful life. And life is beautiful, love is beautiful, nature and music are beautiful. Everything we experience is a gift, a present we should cherish and pass on to those we love."

Ngrams + lots of books

This is so cool. An n-gram is a sequence of n items. Google Labs applied the ngram to their colossal book database (15 million!), and has given us access to the results. It allows for a fascinating glimpse at our cultural history via the trends found in the data. If you want to dig right in, you can go to the Google Labs Ngram viewer. Or you can get a better sense of how it works here, or with this video from TED Talks:

Here are a few samples I ran through the gears: liberal, conservative; religion, science; evolution, creation; compassion, responsibility; jesus, santa -- but oops! be careful... this thing is case sensitive... try that one again: Jesus, Santa; Beethoven, Beatles; jazz, blues; football, baseball, basketball, soccer, cricket, hockey, rugby

Happy Labor Day

Here's what sounds like a good read -- a new biography of Joe Hill, songwriter of the IWW, the Wobblies, and apropos of the day...

The IWW ignited his sense of social justice and equality and his songs gave voice to those beliefs and a voice to the workers. His songs were parodied gospels, rewritten hymns that the Salvation Army (or, the Starvation Army as Hill would call them) used to drown out the worker's protests. As he explained in a letter from jail:

"A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over; and I maintain that if a person can put a few cold, common sense facts into a song, and dress them... up in a cloak of humor to take the dryness off them, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read a pamphlet or an editorial in economic science."

Hill was accused, tried and executed for a murder he didn't commit.

25 years ago today...

Space Shuttle Challenger Mission

Miracle on Ice!

It was thirty years ago tomorrow that the US Hockey Team defeated the Soviets in one of the greatest upsets in sports history. I watched from my grandparents' house and I'll never forget the excitement. Looking back on it from thirty years on, it seems like an especially innocent time. We lost my grandmother later that year, and my grandfather died in the year that followed, but during that week of ice, we were all together, cozy and warm in the midst of the brutal western New York winter, and filled with so much joy...

The March 3, 1980 cover of Sports Illustrated, which, to this day, is the only one in the magazine's history to run without a caption or headline.

Howard Zinn

Oh, this is a hard one to take.

Back when Emmie was in high school, she really, really, really hated the girls' prep school she was attending. And when I say hated, I mean she started out disliking the place and eventually learned to hate it with the burning hot passion of a thousand suns. And I have to admit, I can't blame her. What seemed at first like a rigorous academic institution turned out to be more about indoctrination into southern conservative values. So, after several years of giving it one more try, she finally decided after the 10th grade to strike out on her own. We looked at other options, but didn't find anything else that felt like a good fit, so Emmie ended up just finishing up high school on her own.

And that's where Howard Zinn came in. This amuses me now, because when I was in college I read all the traditional stuff, but always felt that I learned more about history from Howard Zinn and Gary Trudeau than anyone else. So, when my kid was rolling her own when it came to high school history, I suggested that she read Zinn and Trudeau, and she did -- which eventually led her to reading all the traditional stuff that I slogged though in college. Zinn was a great thinker, historian and humanist, and while he liked to look at history from a perspective that didn't follow the traditional model, he was, above all, an advocate of being well-informed. And I'm glad that he passed that imperative on to my daughter.

I feel like we've lost a friend. A high school teacher. And -- need I say it? The progressive movement has lost one of its fiercest advocates. This is a devastating loss.

The Top 10 News Stories of the Last 4.5 Billion Years

From The Onion.

Getting Into Auschwitz

Today the BBC did a feature on Denis Avey, a British soldier who smuggled himself into Auschwitz, so that he could see its horrors firsthand (via Oliver Willis). It's an incredible story.