Libraries

John Scalzi on libraries. (Spoiler: he's in favor of them.)

Andalusia

Okay, I guess you can say /ˌændəˈluːʃə/, though /ˌændəˈluːsiə/ is closer to the Spanish [andaluˈθi.a] or [andaluˈsi.a]. So I guess I'll cut Alex some slack on this one...

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Carmen at the Met. Quite good.

DVD: Several of the "Perry Mason" movies, those odd (to someone who grew up with Raymond Burr) films with Warren William playing Mason. In the first one, we meet Perry as the head of a huge firm (!) of lawyers and staff who call him "chief" (and Paul Drake is called "Spudsy"!) and he's so busy he "can't be bothered" with "every little case"... and who goes out and does his own investigating. Also, his client in the first one is (probably) guilty - Perry thinks so - but he gets her off! Radical! Also, in the third one, he is discovered lying on his office floor, hungover! Yikes!

TV: Usual Wednesday viewing, its usual entertaining self.

Read: The Woman Who Wouldn't Die by Colin Catterill - a Dr Siri and a fascinating (as usual) look at lat 70s Laos. A number of cozies by Jessica Beck, light and amusing. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a fascinating look at mid-8th century America, not to mention a rather amazing man

Happy Birthday, Sam

Today in 1633 Samuel Pepys (pronounced "peeps") was born. Well known for his diary, Pepys was a Londoner to the bone, rarely leaving the city, and a civil servant who helped shape England's navy. His diary, covering only six years of his life, was abandoned by him when he began to fear the loss of his sight - the work of keeping it up threatened blindness, and so he stopped and gave it to his college - Magdalen at Cambridge, where it remains to this day (and where I got to see it a couple of years ago!). As the College says,

Pepys's diary is not so much a record of events as a re-creation of them. Not all the passages are as picturesque as the famous set pieces in which he describes Charles II's coronation or the Great Fire of London, but there is no entry which does not, in some degree, display the same power of summoning back to life the events it relates.

Pepys's skill lay in his close observation and total recall of detail. It is the small touches that achieve the effect. Another is the freshness and flexibility of the language. Pepys writes quickly in shorthand and for himself alone. The words, often piled on top of each other without much respect for formal grammar, exactly reflect the impressions of the moment. Yet the most important explanation is, perhaps, that throughout the diary Pepys writes mainly as an observer of people. It is this that makes him the most human and accessible of diarists, and that gives the diary its special quality as a historical record.

Here's the entry for 23 Feb in the "current" year of the diary (a hypertext, annotated version is here) (note on the date - if you follow the link you'll see it says 1659/1660 - this is because until 1752 the new year began on March 25 in England, slow to adopt the new calendar, so for Sam himself it was still 1659):

Thursday, my birthday, now twenty-seven years.

A pretty fair morning, I rose and after writing a while in my study I went forth. To my office, where I told Mr. Hawly of my thoughts to go out of town to-morrow. Hither Mr. Fuller comes to me and my Uncle Thomas too, thence I took them to drink, and so put off my uncle. So with Mr. Fuller home to my house, where he dined with me, and he told my wife and me a great many stories of his adversities, since these troubles, in being forced to travel in the Catholic countries, &c. He shewed me his bills, but I had not money to pay him. We parted, and I to Whitehall, where I was to see my horse which Mr. Garthwayt lends me to-morrow. So home, where Mr. Pierce comes to me about appointing time and place where and when to meet tomorrow. So to Westminster Hall, where, after the House rose, I met with Mr. Crew, who told me that my Lord was chosen by 73 voices, to be one of the Council of State. Mr. Pierpoint had the most, 101, and himself the next, too. He brought me in the coach home. He and Mr. Anslow being in it. I back to the Hall, and at Mrs. Michell’s shop staid talking a great while with her and my Chaplain, Mr. Mumford, and drank a pot or two of ale on a wager that Mr. Prin is not of the Council. Home and wrote to my Lord the news of the choice of the Council by the post, and so to bed.

Find the whole of Pepys' diary, day by day with hyperlinked annotations here, and in plain text here at Project Gutenberg (also downloadable, and in Kindle format, too).

Happy Birthday, WEB

Born today in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, W.E.B. DuBois. He went to Fisk University in Nashville and then to Harvard, where he was the first African-American to get a Ph.D. He taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and he carried out the first serious sociological study of African-Americans, which showed that poverty and crime in black communities were a result of racial barriers in education and employment. In 1909, he founded NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."

Happy Birthday, Edward

Born today in 1925, in Chicago, Edward Gorey, master of the disturbingly macabre illustration and story.
I definitely recommend you read his three Amphigorey collections.



The "life is sweet" sweatshirt gets a lot of grins and compliments.

Here's a fan animation of the Ghastlycrumb Tinies.


And by all means, take this quiz: Which Horrible (Edward) Gorey Death will you die?

Happy Birthday, WH

Born today in York, England, in 1907, W.H. Auden. Here is one of his poems - most are too long for posting here.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.


II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.



III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.


Find more Auden at Poetry.org

Happy Birthday, Ansel

Ansel Adams was born today in San Francisco in 1902. This photograph, The Tetons and the Snake River, is one of the 116 images recorded on the Voyager Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft. These images were selected to convey information about humans, plants and animals, and geological features of the Earth to a possible alien civilization.

Happy Birthday, Nicolaus

Born today in 1473, the originator of the theory which bears his name - the Copernican, or heliocentric, system, which challenged and then (for most people) replaced the geocentric system, which held that the earth was the center and everything revolves around it. Nicolaus Copernicus was a brilliant polymath who merely dabbled in astronomy, and yet he removed the geocentered (and anthrocentered) universe from the realm of science.

He died in 1543, apparently, of a stroke, and legend has it that he regained consciousness in time for the first printed copy of his, if you'll pardon the pun, revolutionary work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) to be placed into his hands, allowing him to see his life's work before he died. It's only a legend, but it's a nice one, isn't it?

(painting by Jan Matejko, displayed in the Nicholaus Copernicus Museum in Frombork)

And let's not forget to teach the controversy! Ha

Also - nice Google Doodle for today!

Happy Birthday, Amy

Today is Amy Tan's birthday; she was born in 1952 in Oakland. She's written several books, all good - The Kitchen God's Wife is one of my favorite novels.

Happy Birthday, Audre

Audre Lorde was born today in New York City in 1924. She worked in a series of low-paying jobs between high-school and her eventual attendance at college, earning a BA in literature and philosophy from Hunter in 1959 and an MLS from Columbia University in 1960. Being gay, she was unable to find a home in the Harlem Writers Guild - being gay and black and a woman, she was an outsider in many ways, and her collection of essays "Sister Outsider" is widely acclaimed and taught. Here is one of her poems.

The Black Unicorn

The black unicorn is greedy.
The black unicorn is impatient.
The black unicorn was mistaken
for a shadow or symbol
and taken
through a cold country
where mist painted mockeries
of my fury.
It is not on her lap where the horn rests
but deep in her moonpit
growing.
The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.

(more poems and info on Audre Lorde here)

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Flashdance at the Hippodrome, a lot of fun.

DVD: Dil Bole Hadippa! (Heart Says Hurray!) with Shahid Kapoor and Rani Mukerji; loosely based on "She's the Man" and - ultimately - "Twelfth Night", it's a story of a woman who wants to play cricket and ends up disguising herself as a man in order to do so. It's fun. Also Trimurti (Three Powers), with Jackie Shroff, Anil Kapoor, and a very young Shahrukh Khan as the three brothers of a framed policewoman, who reunite and avenge her in the end. The scene when Anand realizes that Romi is his brother is quite astonishingly touching - Kapoor pulls it off without a single word - and Shroff is wonderful, as always. Also, having the Himalayas as your daily view must be breathtaking. A bunch of old Philo Vance movies - I was surprised to see that Basil Rathbone had played him; I always associate Willam Powell with that role (though he was played by a quite a few others, like a very bizarrely cast Paul Lukas and Warren William of Perry Mason-movie fame (if 'fame' is the right word). It was funny in The Bishop Murder Case to see the professor call the district attorney to report a murder, and the DA immediately call Vance - no cops! (Although to be fair, the cops did show up.) All those little girls with their short skirts up to their butts - I remember that from Shirley Temple movies; even in a coat and muffler and gloves, her little legs were totally bare!

Read: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has been on my to-read list for a few years now. I'm glad I got to it - it's a dazzling tour-de-force trip through a Dominican family's possibly cursed past and present.

Sweetly awesome

At Dinosaur Comics, the last episode ever. Awesome and oddly sweet.

A teaser:

She's Not?

So, Rex and June Morgan flew to Californiato investigate why an old woman's nephew wasn't managing her rental property well. In story terms, they've been there one day. In real life, it's been months - so long that the writer forgot that the old woman already owned the building, in fact. It's been a wild ride of strippers who quit their jobs to support another stripper who has cancer which is why they haven't been paying rent (yes, keeping their jobs would have made more sense), June being pregnant, and Rex turning into an unlikely folk hero for giving CPR to someone on the beach - and amid all the wackiness one of the ex-strippers has fallen so hard for Rex that she's actually picked fights with others who have flirted with him.

Yesterday in the strip, Rex went up to the apartment to find Honey reliving the heavenly moment when she first met him - her using the shower in that apartment because hers wasn't working. Today we get this tiny (well, of course, it's RMMD) bit of plot advancement:



There seem to me to be only two ways this could go: either Honey (despite her very feminine figure) is really a transwoman who hasn't completed her reassignment surgery, or - more likely - she'll put out. Given tht RMMD is a family soap, I'm curious which it will be. Though I expect June to interrupt before we find out.

UPS is, again, indifferent at best

I am SO annoyed - no, angry - at UPS right now. AGAIN, an InfoNotice stuck to my door, with a box checked saying they'd try again the next day "after 5". Well, that's better than the morning, sure, but I don't get home nowadays till nearly 6, and often a hour later than that. (My job moved from College Park to Linthincum.)

So I called and had the package held. Then I got a ride from a friend out to Burtonsville where I handed in the InfoNotice and got a package. Today I get an email from Amazon that a package was returned as undeliverable.

UPS's website informs me that it was held for me to pick up but I never did.

Because it was on the same InfoNotice as the other one. Not that that notice said there were two packages, of course. And not that UPS bothered to notify me in any way before returning the other package. Which I have had to reorder.

UPS's business model is broken. I am not their customer, they don't care whether I get anything delivered or not. They utterly refuse to hand out as many notices as there are packages and they don't bother to check to see if more than one package is waiting (they probably file by tracking number or something). And they refuse to acknowledge any of this.

So although I have sent them an email, and will call them tomorrow when they have someone answering their phones (M-F, that's when they work, and if you don't have a maid or housewife waiting for them, too bad for you), I expect that nothing at all will change.

Perhaps if they were paid COD by us, the recievers, instead of up front by the sellers (whom, after all, WE pay), they would care a bit more?

Happy Birthday, Andre

And one more birthday: Alice Mary Norton, who wrote as Andre Norton and also Andrew North, was born today in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1912. Norton wrote more than 130 novels (and I think I've read them all) in her 70 years as a writer, as well as nearly a hundred short stories. She was the first woman to receive the Grand Master Award from the World Science Fiction Society. A month before her death in March 2005 at age 93, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America created the Andre Norton Award for an outstanding work of science fiction or fantasy for young adults. Her books were among the first science fiction I ever read as child, and I still like them - especially the Solar Queen novels and the Beast Master books (no real relation to the movies no matter what they say). Her books were the first ones I remember (first SF, I should say) featuring non-white and non-male protagonists, too.

Eating horses and kittens

The ex-child-star turned (oops, clearly I was thinking of his sometimes partner Kirk Cameron!) evangelical "rock star", Ray Comfort, recently posted:

There was a big fuss recently in Sweden about lasagna and burgers containing horse meat. Sweden is atheist heaven, and so there shouldn’t be any hard and fast table manners—other than “if it tastes good, eat it.”

So why aren’t cats and horses on restaurant menus in most countries? It’s because Judeo/Christian nations base what is right and wrong to eat on the rules God gave to the Jews. But if atheism has its way, we can expect restaurants to expand their menus to include eagle-wings, double-double whale burgers, fresh cat casseroles, and tasty little kitten fingers. When any nation forsakes God, it defaults to mob rule (what society dictates) and that can go anywhere it wants

I just have a few comments about that somewhat incoherent argument (after all, if Sweden is such an "atheist heaven" and if atheists don't care what God wants them to eat, why are the Swedes making such a "big fuss"?).

First, "the rules God gave to the Jews" don't ban just horses and cats. They ban a lot of thing that Christians eat happily - Comfort among them, I'll wager: rabbits and lobsters and shrimp and clams and pork in all its varieties from bacon (baaaacon) to sausage to pork chops.

After all, as most Christians are aware, the Jewish dietary laws don't apply to Christians. In Acts 10, God sent Peter a dream which, in the most narrow interpretation possible, means that Christians can in fact eat anything that "tastes good". Many denominations interpret that dream more widely, but you really can't interpret it more narrowly than that.

"Judeo/Christian nations" - whatever he means by that - don't really exist. And the countries he puts the label on - they're hardly monolithic. Christian nations have eaten horses for a very long time now. France, for instance, Mexico, and Italy - and you can't get much more Christian than that! In Scandinavia, eating horse meat was condemned by the church because it harked back to pagan sacrifices; in Britain horses were sacred to Epona and Rhiannon. Comfort's cultural revulsion isn't based on his god's commandments, but his culture's pagan past.

I and the Bird: What is a Falcon?

Over at 10,000 Birds they've put together a brilliant "I and the Bird" on Falcons - starting with the (to me, very) startling news that falcons aren't closely related to hawks at all - they're actually closer ot parrots!

Once separated from the hawks and eagles, we begin to see falcons as they really are.  Yeah, the diurnal hunting thing was a huge reason they were put together in the first place, but falcons have a range of adaptations to their unique and remarkable lifestyle that are not shared by any of the other diurnal raptors. For starters, they have the little notch in their bill that delivers the killing blow to spinal cords.  They have small bony protuberances in their nostrils that baffles air flow and allows them to breathe while flying at high speeds.  And there are those remarkable pointed wings, and their reputation for intelligence not shared with the rest of their former family.  These are special birds.

This is just one nugget of information you can find, along with spectacular photos, in "I and the Bird: What is a Falcon?" Definitely check it out.

Oh, Kathie!!

"Portu-gals and Guys"? I can't way, and I bet you can't either!

So let's see...

Carmen Miranda was from Portugal? I did not know that, but I certainly recognized her s.

Ah well, not a difficult category after all (Henry the Navigator, Nellie Furtado, Mozambique) though John XXI's book "Liber de Oculo" being a book about eyes seems ... very tangentially a "Portu-guy" question to me.

ps - how weird was Alex's reading of that "have you no sense of decency?" question?

Happy Birhtday, Banjo

Today Andrew Barton Paterson, known as Banjo to his readers, was born in Narrambla, New South Wales, 1864. I expect most Americans only know "The Man from Snowy River", and that from the movie, but he also wrote the words to "Waltzing Matilda". For a time this prolific poet was one of the most popular in the English-speaking world. And look - the Australians even put him on their money! Many of his works are here, and here's a nice one to go on with:

The Wind's Message

There came a whisper down the Bland between the dawn and dark,
Above the tossing of the pines, above the river's flow;
It stirred the boughs of giant gums and stalwart iron-bark;
It drifted where the wild ducks played amid the swamps below;
It brought a breath of mountain air from off the hills of pine,
A scent of eucalyptus trees in honey-laden bloom;
And drifting, drifting far away along the Southern line
It caught from leaf and grass and fern a subtle strange perfume.


It reached the toiling city folk, but few there were that heard—
The rattle of their busy life had choked the whisper down;
And some but caught a fresh-blown breeze with scent of pine that stirred
A thought of blue hills far away beyond the smoky town;
And others heard the whisper pass, but could not understand
The magic of the breeze's breath that set their hearts aglow,
Nor how the roving wind could bring across the Overland
A sound of voices silent now and songs of long ago.


But some that heard the whisper clear were filled with vague unrest;
The breeze had brought its message home, they could not fixed abide;
Their fancies wandered all the day towards the blue hills' breast,
Towards the sunny slopes that lie along the riverside,
The mighty rolling western plains are very fair to see,
Where waving to the passing breeze the silver myalls stand,
But fairer are the giant hills, all rugged though they be,
From which the two great rivers rise that run along the Bland.


Oh! rocky range and rugged spur and river running clear,
That swings around the sudden bends with swirl of snow-white foam,
Though we, your sons are far away, we sometimes seem to hear
The message that the breezes bring to call the wanderers home.
The mountain peaks are white with snow that feeds a thousand rills,
Along the rive banks the maize grows tall on virgin land,
And we shall live to see once more those sunny southern hills,
And strike once more the bridle track that leads along the Bland.

It must be spring!

Happy Birthday, Susan

Susan B. Anthony was born today in Adams, Massachusetts in 1820.

This speech was given by Anthony after her arrest for casting an illegal vote in the presidential election of 1872. She was tried and then fined $100 but refused to pay.


Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any state to deny.

The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:
"We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government - the ballot.

For any state to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, or, an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity.

To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters, of every household - which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every home of the nation.

Webster, Worcester, and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several states is today null and void, precisely as is every one against Negroes.

Happy Valentine's Day

I love these!

source

I ♥ my readers

(from here. Spread sciency love for Valentines Day.)

The Gingham Dog and "this animal"

For some reason, I remembered this as "side by side on the mantle sat" - but I knew it instantly!

The Duel (Eugene Field

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink!
     The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
     Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
     (I was n't there; I simply state
     What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went "bow-wow-wow!"
And the calico cat replied "mee-ow!"
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
     While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
     Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
     (Never mind: I'm only telling you
     What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, "Oh, dear! what shall we do!"
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
     Employing every tooth and claw
     In the awfullest way you ever saw—
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
     (Don't fancy I exaggerate—
     I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!
     But the truth about the cat and pup
     Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
     (The old Dutch clock it told me so,
      And that is how I came to know.)

Darwin Day: a personal offering

Iver at Scientific American Blogs, a very nice Darwin Day post, called A personal offering, by chemist Ashutosh Jogalekar

When it comes to evolution, attaching the label of “Darwinism” has obscured the importance and power of the theory of natural selection. On one hand, those who defend the label sometimes make it sound as if Darwin was the beginning and end of everything to do with evolution. This is simply untrue; in his creation of the theory of natural selection, Darwin was a little like Martin Luther King. The Civil Rights movement owed an incalculable debt to King, but King was not the Civil Rights movement. On the other hand, those who oppose the Darwinist label make it sound like all of us who “believe” in evolution and natural selection have formed a cult and get together every weekend to worship some Darwin idol.

Unfortunately both these positions only serve to obfuscate the life and times of the man himself, a simple, gentle and brilliant soul who painfully struggled with reconciling his view of the world with prevailing religious sentiments and who thought it right to cast his religious views aside in the end for the simple reason that his findings agreed with the evidence while the others did not. Darwin Day should be a chance to celebrate the life of this remarkable individual, free from the burdens of religion and political context that his theory is embroiled in today. Because so much has been said and written about Darwin already, this will be more of a personal and selective exposition. Since I am a lover of both Darwin and books, I will tell my short story of Darwin as I discovered him through books.

A gutsy bet

Whoa! $18,000 in a single Daily Double bet!

Leonard is gutsy - and he's probably locked in the win - but that wasn't a very hard Daily Double.

(In the classic "12 Angry Men" the characters are all part of one of these.)

Still, I like Leonard. I hope he wins. He'll have to really blow the wagering not to.

And he didn't. He wagered nothing - which means his huge $37,000 (more than the next guy won over both days) is added to his $3000 from yesterday to get him ... well, here's his answer to the Final (Military Heroes: on June 6, 1945, he said "the eyes of the world are on you"): "Some guy in Normandy but I just won $75,000".

Here's the Slylock Fox puzzler for today - you can see the date. Count Weirdly is flying to .... Rome!! It's the next papal conspiracy!

Two Worlds on a Rainy Morning

Once again, a look into two worlds. One story's the same ... Rubio. Interesting...

WaTimes:

• BUDGET Obama threatens severe cuts if no agreement White House pushes for more tax hikes, but GOP is opposed
• Military warns cuts would create 'hollow force' akin to 1970s
• CAPITOL HILL Graham's hold presses White House on Benghazi CIA, Pentagon picks tied to more disclosure
• REPUBLICANS State of Union role carries risk for Rubio 2016 bid 'on the line'
• ENVIRONMENT Emissions pledge seen within reach More Obama Edicts expected
• Big Photo: Five aircraft carriers in harbor at Norfolk

WaPost:

• Charters' growth raises questions They continue to climb toward enrollment total of traditional schools
• Iran is building militias in Syria A joint effort with Hezbollah | Retaing influence post-Assad seen as goal
• STATE OF THE UNION Looking for an answer, Republicans turn to Rubio
• In Va,, an executioner's changee of heart
• Cyber-spying said to target U.S. business
• Big Photo: Chinese New Year

 

Happy Birthday, Abraham

Today is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Here are some of his words:

This passage comes from a letter he wrote before his death:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.

The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.

And this, from his days in the Illinois legislature:

The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me.

Not a perfect man, not a perfect president, but perhaps the best we could have had at such a time, and better than we have often had in such times - or any times.

Happy Birthday, Charles

Charles Darwin was born 203 years ago today. Of course, a couple of years ago was the big celebration all over the web, including the terrific stuff linked at blog for Darwin and what the Digital Cuttlefish came up with.

This year's not a big round number, so there's less. But the man is still worth celebrating. Why? Not because he was perfect, infallible, or laid down a sacred text. No. Because he opened our eyes to understanding out place in nature; because nothing in biology makes sense without his insight; and because his work was so good that 150 (oops, 152) years later, it still stands up. So here's to you, Charles Darwin! And here's a bit from Verlyn Klinkenborg's essay last year in the New York Times - it's still good, especially that last paragraph.

His central idea — evolution by means of natural selection — was in some sense the product of his time, as Darwin well knew. He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, who grasped that there was something wrong with the conventional notion of fixed species. And his theory was hastened into print and into joint presentation by the independent discoveries of Alfred Russel Wallace half a world away.

But Darwin’s theory was the product of years of patient observation. We love to believe in science by epiphany, but the work of real scientists is to rigorously test their epiphanies after they have been boiled down to working hypotheses. Most of Darwin’s life was devoted to gathering evidence for just such tests. He writes with an air of incompleteness because he was aware that it would take the work of many scientists to confirm his theory in detail.

I doubt that much in the subsequent history of Darwin’s idea would have surprised him. The most important discoveries — Mendel’s genetics and the structure of DNA — would almost certainly have gratified him because they reveal the physical basis for the variation underlying evolution. It would have gratified him to see his ideas so thoroughly tested and to see so many of them confirmed. He could hardly have expected to be right so often.

....Darwin recedes, but his idea does not. It is absorbed, with adaptations, into the foundation of the biological sciences. In a very real sense, it is the cornerstone of what we know about life on earth.

Update: Here's a video a friend of mine sent me:

The Week in Entertainment

TV: Iron Man 2, which I figured I might as well watch since I watched The Avengers. It was on FX - I have to say, I really have gotten to hate watching movies on tv - it was three hours on tv with all the commercials. The Wednesday trio - loved them all, The Middle actually got me teary at the end, and how cool is it that Luke can do something? Also, loved Phil signing the deal on the trampoline with his dad watching.

DVD: My Name Is Khan, with a standout performance by Shahrukh Khan in the title role. What a good movie that is. Also a couple of earlier SRK films - one with Jackie Shroff and the utterly adorable Juhi Chawla, One 2 Ka 4 (One Times 2 Is 4), a remake of One Good Cop, and his very first film - Deewana (Crazy) (which earned him a Filmfare Best Debut award), though he's not the lead - that's Rishi Kapoor). Was there ever a better introduction than the young widow asking "What will I do?" and the scene cutting to SRK?  I  really prefer it when they subtitle the songs, too - especially when they're serving as narration!

Read: A couple more of the Goldsborough Wolfe novels - I think I'd read a lot of them before, though I don't remember them well. What I do remember - or at least notice - is that he hits hard in every book things that Stout hit once in a while. For instance, Lily Rowan is in every single one of them, while she was only in three or four of the originals.

Happy Birthday, Boris

Today is the birthday of Boris Pasternak (Борис Леонидович Пастернак), who was born in Moscow in 1890. Although he had begun as a supporter of the Revolution, he later - after colliding with reality - became a quiet dissident. He ceased writing original work, supporting himself as a translator. But towards the end of WWII he began to work in secret on his masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago. It took him approximately a decade, and when he was done he smuggled it out of the Soviet Union to a publisher in Italy. The novel came out in 1957. It was immediately banned in the Soviet Union, but it became an international best-seller, selling 7 million copies worldwide. The next year, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was forced to refuse it. (The Academy announced: "This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place.") He died, in 1960, without ever having seen his novel in print (it was only published in the USSR in 1988) - but he felt it was worth it.

What most Americans don't know is that he was a poet - quite celebrated in Russia, especially for his influential first collection, My Sister Life, written in 1917 and published in 1921. He wrote two other collections of poetry before his pen became secret, and then silent. I just recently read a novel about Mandelstam, one of Pasternak's friends - The Stalin Epigram. It covers that crucial point in Stalin's Russia when the arrests began to spiral out of control. Pasternak is a character in it, and I highly recommend it.

Here are a couple of his shorter ones. (They're an interesting look at translating poetry, too, if you read Russian):

Ветер

Я кончился, а ты жива.
И ветер, жалуясь и плача,
Раскачивает лес и дачу.
Не каждую сосну отдельно,
А полностью все дерева
Со всею далью беспредельной,
Как парусников кузова
На глади бухты корабельной.
И это не из удальства
Или из ярости бесцельной,
А чтоб в тоске найти слова
Тебе для песни колыбельной.

Wind

I am no more but you live on,
And the wind, whining and complaining,
Is shaking house and forest, straining
Not single fir trees one by one
But the whole wood, all trees together,
With all the distance far and wide,
Like sail-less yachts in stormy weather
When moored within a bay they lie.
And this not out of wanton pride
Or fury bent on aimless wronging,
But to provide a lullaby
For you with words of grief and longing,

1953

Зимняя ночь

Мело, мело по всей земле
Во все пределы.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

Как летом роем мошкара
Летит на пламя,
Слетались хлопья со двора
К оконной раме.

Метель лепила на стекле
Кружки и стрелы.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

На озаренный потолок
Ложились тени,
Скрещенья рук, скрещенья ног,
Судьбы скрещенья.

И падали два башмачка
Со стуком на пол,
И воск слезами с ночника
На платье капал.

И все терялось в снежной мгле,
Седой и белой.
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.

На свечку дуло из угла,
И жар соблазна
Вздымал, как ангел, два крыла
Крестообразно.

Мело весь месяц в феврале,
И то и дело
Свеча горела на столе,
Свеча горела.


Winter Night

It swept, it swept on all the earth,
At every turning,
A candle on the table flared,
A candle, burning.

Like swarms of midges to a flame
In summer weather,
Snowflakes flew up towards the pane
In flocks together.

Snow moulded arrows, rings and stars
The pane adorning.
A candle on the table shone
A candle, burning.

Entangled shadows spread across
The flickering ceiling,
Entangled arms, entangled legs,
And doom, and feeling.

And with a thud against the floor
Two shoes came falling,
And drops of molten candle wax
Like tears were rolling.

And all was lost in snowy mist,
Grey-white and blurring.
A candle on the table stood,
A candle, burning.

The flame was trembling in the draught;
Heat of temptation,
It lifted up two crossing wings
As of an angel.

All February the snow-storm swept,
Each time returning.
A candle on the table wept,
A candle, burning.

1946


Translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater

Happy Birthday, JM

Today in 1940, in Cape Town, South Africa, J.M. (John Maxwell) Coetzee was born. He's a Nobel laureate, winning for Literature in 2003. His books often deal with South Africa, though he no longer lives there, but not always: Waiting for the Barbarians is set in an empire that never existed, where the author explores the concepts of duty and civilization. He also wrote a quite lovely essay on translation (no longer on line, alas), exploring it from the viewpoint of the original author. Here's a taste:

"It would be highly appreciated," wrote my translator, "if you could help clarify what Summer Palace and globe surmounted by the tiger rampant ... refer to. I wonder if [they] refer to the Old Summer Palace in Beijing that was destroyed by British and French allied force in 1848." The question may seem simple, but it holds surprising depths. It may mean: Are the words Summer Palace intended to refer to the historical Summer Palace? It may also mean: Do the words refer to the historical Summer Palace?

I, as sole author, am the only person able to answer the first question, and my answer must be that I did not consciously intend to refer to the palace in Beijing, and certainly did not intend to evoke the historical sack of that palace, with its attendant national humiliations.

At the same time, I did intend that enough of an association with imperial China should be evoked to balance and complicate, for instance, the association with imperial Russia evoked elsewhere in the book by the phrase Third Bureau, the arm of the security forces for which Colonel Joll works.

As for whether the words in question do refer to the palace in Beijing, as author I am powerless to say. The words are written; I cannot control the associations they awaken.

But my translator is not so powerless: a nudge here, a nuance there, and the reader may be either directed towards or headed off from the Beijing of 1848.

Happy Birthday, Marie

Dorothy Parker wrote a poem called "Comment"

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.

This is all I know about Marie of Romania.

But she was born today in 1875.

We need more time to tell

In today's Washington Post, Ann Hornaday wonders if, and hopes that, movie viewers are rejecting violence. Her argument for is that, after Sandy Hook, although "Django Unchained" was a smash hit, "in short order, "Gangster Squad," "The Last Stand," "Parker," "Bullet to the Head," and "Stand Up Guys" tanked."

Yeah, maybe so. But it's way too early to tell if that means anything other than those movies had abysmal luck with opening dates. After all, "The Bourne Identity" was in post-production in September 2001. Frank Marshall, the producer, quickly determined that a new ending (no building being blown up) needed to be filmed immediately. On the special features part of the DVD he said,

"We all had to take a step back and reconsider everything, and I think everyone in the movie business did."

Tony Gilroy, screenwriter, added,

"Everyone pretty much accepted that explosions in movies were over, that there would probably never be another film that had an explosion in it."

Sounds good, sounds convincing. But they themselves were blowing up all kinds of things in the next movie, and frankly I'm not sure anybody could really tell that explosions were ever out of favor.

So sure, in the two months immediately after Sandy Hook people were revolted by gunplay in movies. The question is: how long will that revulsion last? It didn't linger long after Columbine.

Maybe this time is different. But probably it's not. And either way, it's far too early to call.

Happy Birthday, Jules

Today in 1828, in Nantes, Brittany, Jules Verne was born. Among his best loved novels are From the Earth to the Moon (1865, A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).... It's amazing to think that he was writing about traveling to the moon while the American Civil War was being fought.

He is the second most translated individual author in the world, according to Index Translationum.

Yep.

Krugman schools Boehner on his '22 years' of fiscal irresponsibility (there's a graph and everything):

this is important. Republicans have invented a history in which it has been fiscal irresponsibility all along — and far too many centrists have bought into the premise. The reality is that we had low debt and no fiscal problem before Reagan; then an unprecedented surge in peacetime, non-depression deficits under Reagan/Bush; then a major improvement under Clinton; then a squandering of the Clinton surplus via tax cuts and unfunded wars of choice under Bush. And yes, a surge in debt once the Great Recession hit, but that’s exactly when you should be running deficits.

The point about the fake history that expunges the Clinton years is that it turns the budget into a story in which nobody is at fault because everyone is at fault, and the problem is a generic issue of runaway spending. No, it isn’t; we would have come into this crisis with very little debt if the GOP hadn’t always insisted on tax cuts.

Wow. A wildcard!

Final Jeopardy, Teen Tournament semi-final. Category: Capital Cities. Clue: It's criss-crossed by dozens of "peace walls" that separate its Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods.

All three of them guessed Dublin (instead of Belfast). All three bet everything they had.

Result: three way tie with $0 - so the tournament finals will have a wild card from yesterday or tomorrow...

Happy Birthday, James

Today in Denholm, Scotland, Sir James Murray was born in 1837.

He left Scotland for the sake of his first wife's health (the move to London didn't save her), and lived in England until his own death in 1915. He was the president of the Philological Society in London, and in 1879 he became the editor of a 10-year project called the New English Dictionary (later known as the Oxford English Dictionary - the OED). He continued working on the Murray had compiled roughly half of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here's a tidbit, taken from Wikipedia:

Murray was primarily interested in languages and etymology. Some idea of the depth and range of linguistic erudition may be gained from a letter of application he wrote to Thomas Watts, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, in which he claimed an ‘intimate acquaintance’ with Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish and Latin, and to a lesser degree ‘Portuguese, Vaudois, Provençal & various dialects’. In addition, he was ‘tolerably familiar’ with Dutch, Flemish, German and Danish. His studies of Anglo-Saxon and Mœso-Gothic had been ‘much closer’, he knew ‘a little of the Celtic’ and was at the time ‘engaged with the Slavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of the Russian’. He had ‘sufficient knowledge of Hebrew & Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito’ and to a lesser degree he knew Aramaic, Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician.

Argh!

Butler? Butler???

Jeeves was not a butler. Jeeves was a gentleman's gentleman, or a valet. To be a butler you have to have servants under you!!!!

Cripes, guys.

Agenda Driving? Or what?

The giant headline on the Commentary page of the Washington Times reads: Preserving the Scouts' anchor to noble values: Preserving corporate support is less important.

I braced myself, but guess what? The actual column this was over was about Evangelical support for immigration reform.

There is a frothing column further down the page (headlined Boy Scouts must stand firm for their values: Saving funding is not worth moral compromise) all about how letting "the homosexual community" into Scouting will mean Eagle Scouts no longer stand for being "a person of true character and high moral standards", but that's a different column altogether.

This is ... well, it's odd.It's like somebody decided to move that column down below the fold, and even wrote it a new set of headlines, but forgot to write one about how immigration reform is a Good Thing....

ps: It's trivially easy to disprove the whole "true character and high moral standards" bit. Just try Googling Arthur Gary Bishop, Mark Hofmann, John Edward Robinson, or Charles Whitman...

Happy Birthday, Christopher

Today in New York City Christopher Haden-Guest was born in 1948. (Yes, he's a British peer; his father was a diplomat.) He's better known as Christopher Guest, actor, director, and screen writer. His directorial gems include A Mighty Wind, Waiting for Guffman, This is Spinal Tap, Best in Show, and For Your Consideration (in my preferred order), and his turn as Count Rugen, the six-fingered man, in The Princess Bride was perfect.

He dislikes the term "mockumentary" because his films aren't meant to mock but to explore. All I can say to that is, I thought the "mock" was because they were "mock documentaries", that is, fictional, rather than "mocking documentaries". So it's not so bad, eh?

"I rarely joke unless I'm in front of a camera. It's not what I am in real life. It's what I do for a living."

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Jab Tak Hai Jaan (While there is life) from 2012, director Yash Chopra's final film. Shahrukh Khan carries this complex (if somewhat hackneyed) story and makes it soar; his scenes with Anushka Sharma, when he's the older, damaged army major, really shine, and he's wonderful (of course) as the younger, happy lover with Katrina Kaif. It's Yash Chopra, so of course it ends happily, true love triumphing at the end. Maybe not his best film (I much prefer Dil To Pagal Hai and Veer-Zaara), but a fitting swan song to a career that began over 50 years ago. (And how lovely to see the great Rishi Kapoor in the cameo of the faithful lover to Kaif's character's mother.)

TV: Just The Neighbors this week. It was pretty funny, especially when Larry Bird ran them off the road in his golf cart.

Read: Michaelbrent Collings' Billy, Seeker of Powers (I reread Billy, Messenger of Powers since it had been so long since I read it); a very engaging, even thrilling YA fantasy - I think it's going to be a trilogy, it certainly is shaping up to a final conclusion. Speaking from among the Bones, the latest (and, I think, penultimate) Flavia de Luce novel - loads of fun, like all of them, and ending with a real punch to the gut. Also Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, one of Robert Goldsborough's continuations. This one is, well, about how Archie and Wolfe met. Not bad.

Happy Birthday, Sydney

Today in 1842 in Macon, Georgia, Sydney Lanier was born. (My father went to Sydney Lanier High in Montgomery, where the poet lived before moving to Baltimore to teach at Johns Hopkins; they were 'The Fighting Poets'.)

I can't remember how old I was when I first learned the Song of the Chattahoochee:

    Out of the hills of Habersham,
    Down the valleys of Hall,
I hurry amain to reach the plain,
Run the rapid and leap the fall,
Split at the rock and together again,
Accept my bed, or narrow or wide,
And flee from folly on every side
With a lover's pain to attain the plain
    Far from the hills of Habersham,
    Far from the valleys of Hall.

I can remember reciting that with my parents on long car trips... And here's another I love, The Mockingbird

Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray
That o'er the general leafage boldly grew,
He summ'd the woods in song; or typic drew
The watch of hungry hawks, the lone dismay
Of languid doves when long their lovers stray,
And all birds' passion-plays that sprinkle dew
At morn in brake or bosky avenue.
Whate'er birds did or dreamed, this bird could say.
Then down he shot, bounced airily along
Sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made song
Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art again.
Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain:
How may the death of that dull insect be
The life of yon trim Shakespeare on the tree?


You can find his works at Project Gutenberg.

Happy Birthday, Freddie

Fred Lynn - my all time favorite player - was born today in Chicago, in 1952.

Freddie played three and a half years for Baltimore - '85-'88. I was a season ticket holder back then and I was thrilled - he'd been my favorite player for so long, ever since the "Gold Dust Twin" days in Boston. He never played more than 140 games in any season, but he played every game full tilt. Many people thought he'd have been a bigger star if he'd been able to throttle back, but he couldn't. (I wrote a letter to the Sun once when one of their sportswriters complained about his "wreckless abandon" in the outfield. Oh, I said, if only it were wreckless; alas, it was too often wreck-full.) There were outfield poles in Memorial Stadium that were bent from him crashing into the fence. Man, I loved to watch him play....

I wrote this about him ... geeze, more than twenty years ago now. Supply your own cliché about time flying...

The Centerfielder

In mind's eye he is forever poised
Above the earth; all lift of air,
All blaze of fire and liquid grace of water,
And short, just barely short, of flight.
Earth claims, but cannot hold, him:
He belongs to other, lighter, elements:
Fire which possesses and defines him,
And the air in which he almost flies.

(It occurs to me that my guy from yesterday throve after leaving Fenway. This is one of the reasons baseball is different...)

A leetle snow

Not much, but totally unforcasted.

I and the Raven

The "I and the Bird" web carnival passed away a couple of years ago, but over at 10,000 Birds Mike missed it, so he's revived it in a different format - each focuses on a single family of birds. The first two (which I forgot to post on here, shame on me) were Cormorants and Jays.

And this time, a quick-for-the-Super-Bowl edition, is on Ravens. (Too bad they couldn't do falcons or seahawks, too , isn't it? From an birding pov, anyway.)

So head over to 10,000 Birds and catch up on the largest, probably the smartest, and without a doubt the most imbued-with-personality of the corvids. You won't regret it.

Hah. Amtrak rules, airlines.

First off, when you change to a cheaper train you get a refund. And there is no change fee.

But more than that, in the past half year I've accumulated enough points to go to New York twice. And was able to book the trains I wanted, on the dates I wanted, quite simply and with no hoops. Just put in 'use points'.

I love the train. I have always loved trains, but I really love it here in the Northeast Corridor.

Wow - new trains

So, I was watching Jab Tak Hai Jaan (Yash Chopra's final film), and there's a scene set at Charing Cross station on the Underground. Now, it's been a few years since I was in London, but I do remember the tube. So I was quite startled when this sleek, red-white-and-blue train pulled in. Wow, I thought; did they pretty up the underground for the Olympics? (It's a 2012 film, and there was a least one glimpse of the rings in the background). So I Googled it. And the answer is no: they upgraded to air-conditioned trains starting in 2010. Now maybe it's climate change and maybe it's not, but I rode the underground in July 2008 and damn near died from the heat - it was miserable, especially when the cars were packed with commuters. Apparently some lines were measured at over 95F (35C). This is a change they really needed to make.

Happy Birthday, Joh

If dictionaries really worked like the saying, this is the picture that would be next to crafty lefthander. John Tudor, one of my favorite pitchers of all time, was born today in 1954 in Schenectady, New York (only a month younger than me!).

In 1985 Tudor pitched 10 shutouts, two of them ten-inning games. In fact, I clearly remember the game where he went head to head with Dwight Gooden, both of them pitching shutout ball for nine innings. The Mets manager put in a relief pitcher, who gave up a home run, and Tudor came in and wrapped up the game. He pitched three times in the World Series that year, brilliantly in Game One and even better in Game Four, but then he fell apart in Game Seven, leaving in the third inning.

In 1987 Mets catcher Barry Lyons crashed into the dugout chasing a pop fly and broke Tudor's leg. The next year, despite a good ERA, he was traded to Los Angeles, where he again posted a great ERA and got a World Series ring, but he blew out his elbow doing it and retired a year later.

"Deep fences and fast outfielders," he said once when asked why he was so much better in St Louis than he had been in Boston; his style was not made for Fenway.

Happy Birthday, Tom

Born today in 1937 in New York, New York, Tom Smothers. I'm old enough to remember them on television (The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour) - that's Tom with the guitar, and Dick with the bass... Here's a bit from a long interview with Ken Paulson on "Speaking Freely":

And Dick was doing an introduction. I came out in a bunny suit with just my face showing with these big ears and a pink bunny suit. He says, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm protesting our policies in Central America." "So, wearing a bunny suit doesn't make any sense." I said, "Neither does our policy in Central America." "Well, that looks stupid." "So does our policy!" "Well, get out of that bunny suit!" "We ought to get out of Central America!" Big laughs, very funny. And that was at dress rehearsal. The guy says, "Well, now, you've got to say at the end there, 'But it's up to our elected officials to get us out of this.'" (Laughter) So I said, "OK." Then that was even funnier, like they're gonna do that.

Thanks, Tom - for the songs, the jokes, and the passion.

Groundhog Day, or Candlemas

"Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and mistletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all,
Wherewith ye dress'd the Christmas Hall;
That so the superstitious find
No one least branch there left behind;
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected there, maids, trust to me,
So many goblins you shall see."
— Robert Herrick (1591–1674), "Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve"

Today is Candlemas, the day to take down all the Christmas finery. As Pope Innocent XII (1691 to 1700) explained, it's another feast day stolen from the pagans (though since it dates to very early 4th century it predates attempts to Christianize the Celts, so it's not likely to be a cooption of Imbolc, but rather of Lupercalia):

Why do we in this feast carry candles? Because the Gentiles dedicated the month of February to the infernal gods, and as at the beginning of it Pluto stole Proserpine, and her mother Ceres sought her in the night with lighted candles, so they, at the beginning of the month, walked about the city with lighted candles. Because the holy fathers could not extirpate the custom, they ordained that Christians should carry about candles in honor of the Blessed Virgin; and thus what was done before in the honor of Ceres is now done in honor of the Blessed Virgin.

Candlemas is also a day for foretelling the end of winter:

"If Candlemas Day is clear and bright,
winter will have another bite.
If Candlemas Day brings cloud and rain,
winter is gone and will not come again."

Sound familiar? In Serbia, they say that on this day the bear will awake from winter sleep, and if in this half-waking state it sees its shadow, it will flee in fear and return to sleep, thus prolonging the winter. At least we don't think Punxsutawney Phil has the power to control the winter - just predict it. (Though we really know that the predictions are right actually not quite half the time...)

4 February 1841 (from Morgantown, Berks County, Pennsylvania storekeeper James Morris' diary) "Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate."

Both worlds, again

February 1 in the papers. Note that the Times continues to use bold rubrics that emphasize the danger of living in America nowadays, while the Post uses them rarely - some days they have none at all, and today only one, while the Times has one on every single story. Also, once again they do not share a single story, though the Post's picture links to a Hagel story inside.

WaTimes:

• NATIONAL SECURITY: Governor halts deal with bomb supplier in Pakistan; Indiana partners in Defense probe
• CABINET: Hagel roughed up by friendly fire; GOP colleagues blast Pentagon pick
• FEDERAL DEBT: Congress gets 3½ months to run up debt
• FOREIGN POLICY: Biden to use Obama's postelection 'flexibility' on weapons with Russia
• PENTAGON: Workers prepare budgets because Congress won't
• TERRORISM: Jihadist threat: Just website bluster? 'Earth-shattering' payback for Mali
• Their big picture: the Hagel hearing

WaPo:

• GUNS IN AMERICA: 2005 law frustrates shooting victims; NRA-backed measure shields firearms makers from liability suits
• Deal on migrants faces big obstacle; The Question Of Citizenship; Tensions rise in both parties at pivotal time
• VA study finds more veterans committing suicide; Iraq, Afghanistan wars no necessarily linked to increase in deaths
• A compelling canvas or a Kateastrophe? Duchess of Cambridge's official protrait draws save criticism, but artist believes in his work
• Johns Hopkins redevelops surrounding area, school
• Their big picture: Hagel 'in the hot seat'

I notice both papers are saying "migrants" when they mean "immigrants". Is this some new trend, perhaps trying to emphasize that many of them go back to their native lands, some even on a regular basis? Because to me, a "migrant" is someone who travels around, usually on a regular circuit, to do seasonal work.

Candlemas Eve

Here's a poem by Robert Herrick about what to decorate with now that Christmas-tide is over...
CEREMONIES FOR CANDLEMAS EVE

Down with the rosemary and bays,
Down with the misletoe;
Instead of holly, now up-raise
The greener box, for show.

The holly hitherto did sway;
Let box now domineer,
Until the dancing Easter-day,
Or Easter's eve appear.

Then youthful box, which now hath grace
Your houses to renew,
Grown old, surrender must his place
Unto the crisped yew.

When yew is out, then birch comes in,
And many flowers beside,
Both of a fresh and fragrant kin,
To honour Whitsuntide.

Green rushes then, and sweetest bents,
With cooler oaken boughs,
Come in for comely ornaments,
To re-adorn the house.
Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth

Today is the birthday of one of my best friends ever. May it be wonderful!