The Misforgotten (A Novel)

Today it would be "Like, like me do"

2013-10-04T11:31:00.001-07:00

On October 4, 1962, the Beatles released "Love Me Do" on Parlophone Records. Their manager, Brian Epstein, bought 10,000 copies. The song went to the Top 20, and the Fab Five were on their way in England. In America, however, Capitol Records, who owned the rights to "Love Me Do," sold it cheap to Vee Jay Records. VJR later released it as part of an album, "Introducing the Beatles." In May 1964, "Love Me Do" became a Number-One hit in the U. S. of A.

Not World Serious

2013-10-02T10:41:00.002-07:00

Event of the Month: World Series.

"A ball is man's most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel." -- Robert Morley.

...If there was stupider game in the world than football it was golf. The last time Sully had gone out it had taken him five or six hours to go around. Billowby kept wanting to put a tournament together. The Hi-Note Classic. Sully told him he’d show up if he could drive the cart with the keg on it. And then Billowby had talked about putting in a golf machine, of all things, but had never gotten around to it. But then he still hadn’t gotten around to filling the pothole out back. (The Misforgotten, Chapter 38.)

Moon of the Day

2013-07-20T09:54:00.002-07:00

Man landed on the moon on this day in 1969.

"The sun and the moon and the stars would have long ago disappeared...had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands." -- Havelock Ellis.

Be sure and don't move your lips when you read Proust

2013-07-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

July 9: Romance novelist Barbara Cartland was born on this day in 1901.

"If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves." -- Don Marquis.

Yesterday: French novelist Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

"I think he (Proust) was mentally defective." -- Evelyn Waugh.

They smelled a Surratt

2013-07-07T11:05:00.001-07:00

A blow was struck for equality on this day in 1865. Mary Surratt became the first woman executed by hanging by the federal government. She was the proprietress of a boarding house in Washington, D. C. Her son was a friend of the actor John Wilkes Booth. Those two and some other conspirators met in the house to plot the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, which was carried out on April 14, 1865. Mary Surratt was arrested and tried for conspiracy, and sentenced to death by a military commission. Whether she was guilty is still is a controversy. She and four others were hanged on July 7. Her son, who had fled, was found and later brought to trial, but released when the government failed to bring an indictment.

The story is the subject of an excellent 2010 movie called "The Conspirator." Robin Wright (shown in picture), the former Mrs. Sean Penn, played Mary Surratt.

He'll float among the stars forever

2013-07-02T08:58:00.000-07:00

On July 2, 1982, Larry Walters made aviation history, or infamy. Walters tied 42 helium-filled weather balloons to his lawn chair and sailed aloft from the back yard of his girlfriend's house in San Pedro, California. His plan was to enjoy a leisurely cruise across the desert, but he went straight up instead. As he lost his breath, he panicked. He tried to shoot out some of the balloons with a pellet gun he'd brought (presumably to take potshots at desert critters, etc.), but dropped the gun after hitting only seven of them. He then called for help on his CB radio. (At least he went prepared.)

A police copter followed Walters until he flew into some power lines, blacking out a Long Beach neighborhood for a half-hour. He then crashed into a driveway.

Walters broke the world altitude record for clustered balloon flight, but it wasn't official because it was unlicensed. And the FAA fined him $1,500. He did make appearances on the Tonight Show and Letterman.

In 1993, Walters took his own life--with a gun, not by sailing off to eternity.

It takes a lot to shake up a Russian

2013-06-30T11:46:00.001-07:00

On June 30, 1908, either a comet or a meteorite touched down in the Vanavara neighborhood of the Stony Tunguska River in Siberia, causing one of the greatest natural catastrophes in history. The explosion devastated an area of 1,500 square miles, blowing away millions of trees, two towns, and a whole host of reindeer. The shock was felt more than 600 miles away; even so, scientists did not get around to investigating until 1927.

It's an okay old flag

2013-06-14T11:03:00.001-07:00

On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress approved a resolution creating a national flag. It hardly made a ripple. No one outside of the government knew about it until a blurb in a Pennsylvania newspaper mentioned it three months later.

Happy Flag Day!

Tune in, turn on--and not your radio or TV

2013-06-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

Put me in, Coach

On June 12, 1970, Major League pitcher Dock Ellis took a trip to the mountaintop. He pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Fourteen years later Ellis revealed that he had realized every pitcher's dream while under the influence of LSD.

Ellis had dropped out about noon that day, under the impression that the Pirates had an off-day. When he found out there was a game and that he was scheduled to pitch, he decided, what the heck, you only go around and around once.

"I was psyched," Ellis recounted. "I thought the ball was talking to me." Despite the feat, Ellis never pitched on acid again. After he retired, he was treated for drug dependency and later ran an antidrug program in Los Angeles. He died in 2008, of cirrhosis.

Success takes drive

2013-06-06T11:55:00.000-07:00

On June 6, 1933, Richard Hollingsworth opened the world's first drive-in movie theater, in Camden, New Jersey. More than 600 people drove in, at 25 cents a head plus 25 cents per car, to see Wives Beware, starring Adolphe Menjou.

Hollingsworth had come up with the idea some years before, when he took some friends outside to show them home movies, because it was too hot indoors. He set up his projector atop his Model A and showed his movies on a sheet draped from his garage door. It was a hit. His first impulse was to show movies at gas stations, but he found that gas-station owners wouldn't pay for it. So he built his own theater, which featured ramps that tilted cars up so that people could see over the cars in front of them.

Relevant trivia: Adolphe Menjou had earlier starred in the movies Road Show, A Kiss in the Dark, and Open All Night.

I can see queerly now

2013-05-23T11:43:00.001-07:00

On May 23, 1785, Ben Franklin wrote from France to a friend of his, "I have only to move my eyes up and down as I want to see distinctly far and near." Old Ben was describing his latest invention, bifocal glasses. His glasses consisted of a frame with lenses in two parts, each with different focusing powers. Eyeglass frames had been invented in London in 1727.

Not many citizens in the colonies wore glasses of any sort, as they cost about $100.

Somewhere, across the ocean

2013-05-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

On May 20, 1932, Amelia Earhart flew solo across the Atlantic, five years to the day after Lindbergh's flight. She was not only the first woman to do it solo, she was also the first person to cross the Atlantic twice. Her time of flight beat a 13-year record set by two British fliers.

Earhart disappeared in 1937 while attempting to be the first person to fly around the world.

Russelling, part 2

2013-05-19T09:33:00.004-07:00

Bertrand Russell’s 140^th birthday was yesterday. (See yesterday’s entry.)

“I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue,” Russell wrote. “I think all the great religions of the world—Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam—both untrue and harmful.”

The problem with religion, Russell thought, was that it was based on faith instead of evidence. “A habit of basing convictions on evidence,” he wrote, “…would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering. But at present, in most countries, education aims at preventing the growth of such a habit…” (Are you listening, you purveyors of creation “science”?)

In 1925, Russell published a small book called What I Believe. In it, he wrote that there were forces making for happiness and ones making for misery in the world, and he classed religion among the latter. He likened religion—religious dogma, that is--to a kind of armor that shielded its wearer against “the shafts of impartial evidence.”

“Fear is the basis of religious dogma,” he wrote. Fear of nature gave rise to religion, and the fear of death—and life—perpetuates it. “Religion, since it has its source in terror, has dignified certain kinds of fear and made people think them not disgraceful. In this it has done mankind a great disservice: all fear is bad.” Russell said that while he didn’t welcome death, he had no terror of it, even though he denied the possibility of immortality. “Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.”

A major defect of religion as Russell saw it was its individualism; the defect, if it is one, is even more glaring today, when everyone claims to have a personal relationship with God. The dialogue, or duologue, between one’s soul and God was, Russell granted, at one time a thing devoutly to be wished, because to do the will of God, which led to virtue, was possible and even desirable in a society dominated by the state.

“This individualism of the separate soul had its value at certain stages of history,” Russell insisted, “but in the modern world we need rather a social than an individual conception of welfare.”

In short, Russell might have put it, ask not what God can do for you; ask what you can do for your God.

Russelling with religion

2013-05-18T12:04:00.001-07:00

Bertrand Russell, the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century, was born on May 18, 1872. He is best known for his works on logic, knowledge, and mathematics; his A History of Western Philosophy is an elegant and entertaining overview of the thoughts and thinkers of the Western world from pre-Socratic times down to his day. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

In 1927 Russell gave a speech in London called “Why I Am Not a Christian.” He defined a Christian as one who a) believes in God and immortality, and b) believes, at the very least, that Jesus Christ was “if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men.”

Addressing the first condition, Russell laid out some of the arguments for the existence of God. In short order he demolished:

The First-cause Argument. “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause,” Russell said. “If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God.”
The Argument from Design. (Everything in the world has been created so that we can live in it and appreciate it, and if it weren’t made just so, we could not live in it.) “It is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world…should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years,” Russell said.
The Moral Argument. (There would be no right or wrong unless God existed.) Russell pointed out that if God created both right and wrong, then there was no difference in quality or truth between the two, and therefore it became meaningless to say that God is good.

Turning to the second condition, concerning the character of Christ, Russell first admitted that Jesus said some wonderful things, among them “Turn the other cheek,” “Judge not lest ye be judged,” and “Sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor.” But he noted that he was consistently less than wise, as he firmly believed that his second coming would happen within the lifetimes of those he was addressing. And because he believed in hell, and angrily condemned those who did not heed his warnings about eternal punishment, Russell judged Jesus to be far less than a paragon of virtue. In fact he placed Socrates and Buddha above him.

“The Christian religion, as organized in its churches,” Russell concluded, “has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world…

“When you hear people in church debasing themselves…it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings…"

And finally:

“A good world needs knowledge, kindliness and courage; it does not need…a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”

Just the fax

2013-05-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

The first fax service, between the cities of Paris and Lyon, France, a distance of over 200 miles, was established on this date in the year—got a guess? How about 1865, eleven years before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone?

Better than that, the fax machine was actually patented in 1843, by Alexander Bain, a Scottish clockmaker. He called it a pantelegraph, because he envisioned it transmitting messages over telegraph lines. His invention used pendulums at each end of the line to transmit messages, and he never could them to synchronize, so he threw in the towel.

Twenty years later, a Catholic priest named Giovanni Caselli and his partner, Gustav Froment, got the bugs out and unveiled a fax that sent messages written on ordinary paper, and could send several simultaneously. They demonstrated their device to Emperor Napoleon III of France, who liked it so much he passed a law establishing the world’s first fax service.

2013-05-13T11:09:00.001-07:00

On May 13, 1787, eleven ships left England with a cargo of 730 convicts, including over 100 women, bound for the sunny shores of Australia. The Mother Country had formerly unloaded their surplus prisoners on the American colonies, but that ended with the Revolution. Nine months later, the ships landed in New South Wales and founded the settlement that would become Sydney.

It was hardly a hardy bunch of pioneers. Some were hardened criminals, but many were simply poor folk who had taken to stealing food or clothing. They found life even harder in the new land. Many were turned into slaves. In the aptly named Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, the worst criminals were put to work in chain gangs and in quarries. Life was so brutal that suicide pacts were common.

In 1822, convict named Alexander Pearce escaped with some other prisoners. When he was apprehended after several months, he was asked what had happened to his companions. He confessed that he’d eaten them.

The book to read on the subject of the settling of Australia by convicts is The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes.

Rossetti, stoned again

2013-05-12T05:12:00.000-07:00

Italian painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born on this day in 1828. He wrote:

The hour when you learn that all is vain
And that Hope sows what Love shall never reap.

Just this one line makes us slightly ill

2013-05-11T02:07:00.000-07:00

American writer Stanley Elkin was born on this day in 1930. He wrote:

"If you can't make people miserable by writing, what's the point?"

He’d set out to be a writer, once and for all. Thirty-six years old, turning over a new leaf. He’d sworn off drinking for a while. Sober, industrious as a squirrel, he didn’t answer the door. He ate soup and crackers, potpies, Spam. Holed up in his garret, he wrote and wrote. Short stories, poems, a novel, and then another. The memoirs of a rat, the one who’d started the Great Plague. Essays. Epistles, letters of defamation, of denunciation. Diatribes. He was angry. Athletic career over, Cutterback dead, Rae Ann done for. His marriage a smoldering ruin. Like Achilles’, his anger encompassed the cosmos, he imagined. -- Chapter 11, The Misforgotten.

Which is how long it takes, approximately, to read The Story of Civilization

2013-05-10T09:05:00.000-07:00

Historian Ariel Durant was born on this day in 1898. She and her husband, Will, wrote The Story of Civilization, the tenth volume of which, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968.

Ariel Durant wrote:

"It is good that a historian should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity."

A Bloody bold theft

2013-05-09T11:24:00.000-07:00

On May 9, 1671, Col. Thomas Blood stole the British Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. Blood had posed as a preacher in order to win the confidence of Talbot Edwards, the 77-year-old keeper of the Crown Jewels. On the morning of the heist, Blood showed up at the Tower with three friends and somehow talked Talbot into letting them see the Crown Jewels. Once he did, they bound and gagged the old man, and stuck an iron hook in his nose for good measure. As he kept struggling, they conked him on the head with a mallet and stabbed him in the stomach.

Blood used the mallet to flatten out St. Edward’s Crown, and stuck it inside his preacher’s cloak. He and his pals stuck as many jewels in their pockets as they could and fled. Somehow, Talbot got ungagged and cried out. Blood shot one pursuer, and the frightened drawbridge guard let the crooks go out. Blood was chased and caught by a Captain Beckman, after a “robustious struggle.” He and the other thieves, also nabbed, were held prisoners in the Tower. Blood refused to talk to anyone but the king himself, and during an audience granted by that august personage, the silver-tongued Blood wangled not only a royal pardon, but a pension of 500 pounds a year.

Also, persuading people that nonsense is sense

2013-05-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

Harry S Truman was born on this day in 1884.

"I sit here all day," Truman said, "trying to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them. That's all the powers of the President amount to."

Sounds modest enough, but to read another take on the matter, see Gore Vidal on Truman

We'd like to see more blood, though

2013-03-19T12:46:00.000-07:00

The first Academy Awards presentation to be shown on TV was on this day in 1953.

"We are drawn to our television sets each April the way we are drawn to the scene of an accident." -- Vincent Canby.

Happy day after St. Patty's Day!

2013-03-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

"Saint, n.: A dead sinner revised and edited." -- Ambrose Bierce.

Today's Perverse Verse:

It's a sad fact but one that we secretly relish
That those whose wholesomest words and deeds we most embellish
And whom we venerate as a saint,
Ain't.
Everyone, it seems, has one skeleton in his or her closet or another,
Including that most saintly of all figures you can think of--
Your mother.
Even Mother Teresa, we now know, had her moments of doubt and misgiving,
Times when she exclaimed to herself: "This is a hell of a way to make a living!"

Relatively speaking, that is

2013-03-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

This is the birthday of Albert Einstein, born 1879.

"I have never met a man yet who understands in the least what Einstein is driving at...I very seriously doubt that Einstein himself knows what he is driving at." -- William Henry Cardinal O'Connor.

Today's Perverse Verse:

Apparently, E=MC squared
-- Has anyone ever cared?
It may be a gas
That energy is mass
To some;
But what's Einstein to us,
Who can't tell minus from plus?
-- A bum.

Beat from all that typing

2013-03-12T11:48:00.002-07:00

American beat writer Jack Kerouac was born on this day in 1922.

"That's not writing, that's typing." -- Truman Capote, on Kerouac's famous novel, On The Road.