Welcome to Thursday, April 11, 2024, and National Cheese Fondue Day, a day of cultural appropriation from the oppressed people of Switzerland. It’s a pity that you don’t see this served much these days, as it’s very good. Here, from Wikipedia, is a cheese fondue with bread and potatoes. (The original fondue was cheese, but now there are also meat and chocolate fondues.) Excellent on a cold evening with a good white wine!
It’s also Barbershop Quartet Day, National Pet Day, National Poutine Day (in Canada), International Louie Louie Day (I still remember the first time I heard the 1963 hit version by the Kingsmen), and World Parkinson’s Day.
Here’s some poutine I had in Montreal in 2016; and yes, I know it’s not good for my diet but no, I almost never eat it (after all, I’m in Chicago, not Canada):
Here are the Kingsmen lip-synching to their version, the biggest cover of the song (written by Richard Berry). From Wikipedia:
The “extraordinary roller-coaster tale of obscurity, scandal, success and immortality” and “remarkable historical impact” of “Louie Louie” have been recognized by organizations and publications worldwide for its influence on the history of rock and roll. A partial list (see Recognition and rankings table below) includes the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, National Public Radio, VH1, Rolling Stone Magazine, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Recording Industry Association of America. Other major examples of the song’s legacy include the celebration of International Louie Louie Day every year on April 11; the annual Louie Louie Parade in Philadelphia from 1985 to 1989; the LouieFest in Tacoma from 2003 to 2012; the ongoing annual Louie Louie Street Party in Peoria; and the unsuccessful attempt in 1985 to make it the state song of Washington.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 11 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The Torygraph has reported that Russia is using illegal chemical weapons against Ukraine. (archived link)
Russian troops are carrying out a systematic campaign of illegal chemical attacks against Ukrainian soldiers, according to a Telegraph investigation.
The Telegraph spoke to a number of Ukrainian soldiers deployed in positions across the front line who detailed how their positions have been coming under near daily attacks from small drones, mainly dropping tear gas but also other chemicals.
The use of such gas, which is known as CS and commonly used by riot police, is banned during wartime under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Ihor, the commander of a Ukrainian reconnaissance team who is deployed near the front line city of Chasiv Yar, in Donetsk Oblast, told The Telegraph: “Nearly every position in our area of the front was getting one or two gas grenades dropped on them a day.”
He said that because of how embedded many Ukrainian troops are now it was difficult for the Russians to attack with conventional artillery or drones firing missiles, adding: “The only way for them to successfully attack us was with gas.”
Even when not lethal or immediately incapacitating, these gas attacks usually cause panic. “Their first instinct is to get out,” Ihor said. They can then be attacked with more conventional weapons.
. . . One of these CS gas grenades was provided to The Telegraph for verification by Rebekah Maciorowski, an American combat medic and a qualified nurse serving in the Ukrainian army.
Marc-Michael Blum, a chemical weapons expert and former head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons laboratory, confirmed the recovered munition was a K-51 gas grenade, which are typically filled with tear gas.
. . . Marc-Michael Blum, a chemical weapons expert and former head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons laboratory, confirmed the recovered munition was a K-51 gas grenade, which are typically filled with tear gas.
A Russian drone dropped two munitions containing an unknown gas that had a “crushed almond aroma” on soldiers in Donetsk Oblast, she said.
Two people were killed and 12 required hospital treatment. In an interview with Le Monde in JanuaryYuriy Belousov, the head of investigations for Ukraine’s prosecutor general, referred to one of the deaths as being caused by an “unknown gas”.
. . . There have also been reports of the use of chlorine and chloropicrin – a substance typically used as a pesticide that was deployed by the Germans as a chemical weapon in the First World War.
The Ukrainian government has reported 626 gas attacks during the war, but the Torygraph says that this is certainly an underestimate. Is anybody going to take Russia (or Bashar al-Assad, for that matter) to the ICJ for war crimes?
*After Iran threatened Israel (and that was after Israel was probably the attacker that killed several Iranian and Hezbollah officials inside the Iranian embassy in Syria), Israel began preparing for an attack coming directly from Iran instead of its proxies. Now Israel is issuing a warning back at Iran.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Foreign Minister Israel Katz on Wednesday both threatened that if Iran launches an attack from its own soil then Israel would strike back inside Iran, amid increasingly belligerent rhetoric between the two countries.
The warnings came after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Israel “must be punished and it shall be” for allegedly attacking an Iranian consular building in Syria’s Damascus, killing two generals among several Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers. The IRGC is a US-designated terrorist organization.
Khamenei said that in bombing an embassy site, Israel “attacked our territory.”
Speaking to troops at an Iron Dome air defense system battery in northern Israel, Gallant said any attack on the country would face a strong defense, before a “powerful response in its territory.”
“In this war, we are being attacked from more than one front… from different directions. Any enemy that tries to attack us, will first of all be met with a strong defense,” Gallant said.
“But we will know how to react very quickly with a decisive offensive action against the territory of whoever attacks our territory, no matter where it is, in the entire Middle East,” he said.
“We have this ability,” Gallant continued, saying that a potential Israeli response would be “very, very effective, very powerful. One of the things we excel at over the years is that the enemy never knows what surprises we are preparing for it.”
Earlier, Katz posted in Hebrew to his official account on social media platform X that “If Iran attacks from its territory, Israel will react and attack in Iran.”
Of course Iran is attacking Israel by proxy on several fronts, so the embassy attack was retribution, not initiation. And, as Iran well knows, Israel has nukes. I predict that Iran will not attack Israel directly, for the consequences (including the possible destruction of their nascent bomb-building program) could be dire. In fact, the U.S. may well get involved, and that means Big Time War.
*The negotiations between Hamas and Israel appear to have stalled (some say that Hamas can’t even locate 40 of the hostages), but in the meantime a targeted Israeli strike killed 3 sons of the big Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh. He lives in Doha (the capital of Qatar), of course, and, since Haniyeh has seven wives, he has many sons. These, and perhaps his grandsons, appear to be fighting for Hamas, as they’re characterized as martyrs, and the NYT says this:
The Israeli military confirmed that its forces killed Mr. Haniyeh’s sons, saying that the three were all active in Hamas’s military operations. In a brief statement, the military did not say where the strike took place or address reports on Hamas-affiliated media that three of Mr. Haniyeh’s grandchildren also were killed.
The head of Hamas’s political leadership, Ismail Haniyeh, said an Israeli airstrike killed three of his sons on Wednesday, the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid-al-Fitr, an attack that could complicate a U.S.-led plan for a cease-fire in the six-month-old conflict in Gaza.
The Israeli military didn’t immediately comment on the statement.
Hamas said five people died in the strike, which the group said hit a car making social visits for Eid, the holiday marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
Haniyeh, in a separate statement, said some of his grandchildren also died.
“I thank God for this honor that he bestowed upon us with the martyrdom of my three sons and some grandchildren,” Haniyeh said in a video statement posted on X by Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera. The Hamas official, who is based in the Qatari capital Doha, didn’t name his children or grandchildren.
The U.S. is pushing Israel and Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, to negotiate on the terms of a temporary cease-fire, but Hamas has largely rejected the U.S. plan, mediators said earlier Wednesday. Hamas said instead it would put forward its own road map for a permanent end to the war with Israel.
The dismissal illustrates the wide disagreement between the two parties on the contours of a deal and reflects Hamas’s growing confidence that diplomatic and domestic pressure on Israel to end the war gives the U.S.-designated terrorist group the upper hand in negotiations.
Hamas is seeking a permanent cease-fire and the full withdrawal of Israeli soldiers from Gaza in return for the release of hostages held in the strip. Israel has expressed openness to negotiating on the U.S. proposal for a temporary truce but wants the option of continuing its military campaign afterward.
The problem is that Biden and Blinken are running the war now, and have more or less ordered Israel not to finish their job by attacking Rafah. The IDF could evacuate Rafah, except that Hamas won’t let civilians leave and there’s only one IDF brigade in southern Israel. With a full force, they could evacuate civilians out of Rafah and then finish off Hamas (some Gazans would of course not leave, but they would be liable to be “collateral damage”). The biggest problem in this war is the United States and Biden’s ambition to be re-elected.
*Meanwhile Tom Friedman, the absolute worst journalist anywhere covering the war, has his own solution: “Israel: Cease-fire, get hostages, leave Gaza, rethink everything.” One statement from this moron:
Which takes us to this fork in the road. My preference is that Israel immediately change course. That is, join with the Biden administration in embracing that pathway to a two-state deal that would open the way for Saudi normalization and also give cover for the Palestinian Authority and moderate Arab states to try to establish non-Hamas governance in Gaza in Israel’s place. And — as the Biden team urged Netanyahu privately — forget entirely about invading Rafah and instead use a targeted approach to take out the rest of the Hamas leadership.
He’s still on the two-state solution (where would it be? who would run it? Is this numbskull aware that neither the Palestinians nor Israelis want a two-state “solution”?) And what kind of “targeted approach” to taking out the Hamas leadership, which appears to be sequestered in Rafah, work if Israel forgets about invading Rafah? Does Friedman know that Gazans do not want to be rule by the Palestinian Authority?
I have no respect for this chowderhead, who apparently thinks he knows better than the Palestinians, or anyone else, how the area should be governed after the war. I think he’s ruled by the mentality that Hamas and the Palestinians are like little children that have no agency; i.e., he has “the bigotry of low expectations”. The great tragedy of Thomas Friedman is that anybody listens to him.
*A happy animal story: a mountain goat named Chug, apparently stolen from his original owners, flew the coop and somehow found his way onto a bridge in Kansas City, where people couldn’t figure out how to rescue him. He apparently fell but wasn’t seriously injured, and is going back home:
An escaped mountain goat that somehow got stuck under a Kansas City bridge has survived a rocky rescue effort and now may be reunited with the owners who suspect he was stolen from their farm two months ago.
“It’s the story that captured the hearts of Kansas City,” said Tori Fugate, of the KC Pet Project, a nonprofit that handles animal control for the city and operates shelters. “Forget a solar eclipse. We were on goat watch.”
After Monday’s eclipse, people spotted the animal, believed to be a missing goat named Chug, hopping around on the pillars that support the bridge, high above the ground below.
Hoping to guide it to safety, a driver managed to get a rope around the goat’s neck, but that only added to the danger, Fugate said. When firefighters tried to rappel over the side of the bridge to capture the goat, he spooked and tried to jump to the next platform. But his hooves slipped and the rope caught, causing the goat to hang from his neck, not moving.
Firefighters managed to undo a snag in the rope, creating slack in the line. The goat then fell as much as 15 feet (4.5 meters) to the ground, landing in a spot where crews had added padding in an attempt to soften the impact, Fugate said.
A waiting veterinarian sedated the goat and crews carried him in a sling to the top of a rocky hill, where firefighters gave him oxygen. Then he perked up and was taken for X-rays, Fugate said.
She said this was just the latest part of the goat’s adventure. He entered the shelter as a stray on March 13, was dubbed Jeffrey and was adopted later that month. But he immediately jumped the fence at his new home, she said.
“Thanks to his media fame, yesterday we had somebody reach out and they said that he is very similar to their goat that went missing back in February,” she said.
The family lives two hours away and plans to came to come to the shelter Wednesday to confirm he is their stolen goat. If he is, they plan to bring Chug home with them, and the goat’s adoptive owners say that is OK with them.
“He seems to be very particular about his living situation,” Fugate said.
I love that last line. Anyway, Chug is okay and here’s a news video giving some details. I also love the fact that they had a vet and rescuers below him, and had cushioned the area lest he fell.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron (inside) tries the impossible: eliminating the mutual hatred between Hili (outside, right) and Baby Kulka (outside, left). Hili’s not having it.
Szaron: Why are they quarrelling all the time?Hili: Do you have more comments?
Szaron: Dlaczego one ciągle się kłócą?Hili: Masz jeszcze jakieś komentarze?
*******************
What I saw on the way home yesterday. It’s legal free speech, of course, and has university permission to be posted, but it still disquiets me. And it will accomplish nothing; it’s pure “virtue” flaunting. If they think U of C will change its investments because of a poster, they lack sufficient neurons.
From Lynne:
From Science, Reason, and Secular Values. Squint a bit to see Jesus:
From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:
From Masih: An Afghani woman speaks eloquently of gender apartheid. Did anybody believe the Taliban when they said they’d begin treating women more equally in Afghanistan? And where are the feminist organizations in the West speaking out?
“Women are now only domestic slaves and sex slaves under Taliban. Girls have no access to education. Women are prohibited from work or travel. If this isn’t Gender Apartheid, what is it then?#UnitedAgainstGenderApartheid is a campaign where women of Iran and Afghanistan are… pic.twitter.com/wNIv6fYdkT
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 10, 2024
From Barry; one of the puns surrounding the death of Nobel Laureate Peter Higgs. (The NYT headline for his obituary called him the predictor of the “God particle”!).
I wonder whether there will be a mass at his funeral? https://t.co/BsqlJtEdb7
— Dr Helen Ingram (@drhingram) April 9, 2024
(The NYT headline via Simon; click to read):
Here’s a tweet, one of many similar ones I’ve seen (go here for a summary) suggesting that Hamas set up the World Kitchen humanitarian workers to be killed by the IDF. It’s a theory that has some credibility, too. (See here for another one in writing.) I asked Malgorzata if this was credible, and she said this:
About the first video tweet: all facts are correct and it could have gone like the man described. But I have one question. When the Hamas fighters left this lone truck, why didn’t people inside call either the IDF or their employer? Perhaps their phone rang but they were prevented by Hamas from answering. Unless, of course, terrorists took their phones. The missing information is whether any phones were found on the bodies. If not, the scenario looks very convincing. If yes, questions remain.
A lie travels around the world before the truth has got its boots on. https://t.co/pLKGF4TjhT
— Hugo Gurdon (@hgurdon) April 10, 2024
This is one ominious vulture:
Walk of the cinereous vulturepic.twitter.com/5zlvxmx2sm
— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) April 9, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I retweeted:
He survived the war but his wife and son were gassed to death. https://t.co/o3MjQCXRJG
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 11, 2024
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a time-lapse video of the eclipse shadow:
That was UNREAL!
Total #solareclipse timelapse from Burlington, VT. Watch the darkness roll in from Lake Champlain. pic.twitter.com/Kn371CRpvE— Ryan Breton (@RyanBretonWX) April 8, 2024
And a lovely swan reunion after the pair was temporarily separated (second video has more info):
Toronto Wildlife Centre pic.twitter.com/3h63lpkvU3
— KOJAMF🤘 🤘 (@jimstep260853) April 8, 2024
On this day:
1713 – France and Great Britain sign the Treaty of Utrecht, bringing an end to the War of the Spanish Succession (Queen Anne’s War). Britain accepts Philip V as King of Spain, while Philip renounces any claim to the French throne.
1727 – Premiere of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion BWV 244b at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Electorate of Saxony (now Germany).
1814 – The Treaty of Fontainebleau ends the War of the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon Bonaparte, and forces him to abdicate unconditionally for the first time.
1881 – Spelman College is founded in Atlanta, Georgia as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, an institute of higher education for African-American women.
1909 – The city of Tel Aviv is founded.
1945 – World War II: American forces liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp.
1951 – Korean War: President Truman relieves Douglas MacArthur of the command of American forces in Korea and Japan.
1951 – The Stone of Scone, the stone upon which Scottish monarchs were traditionally crowned, is found on the site of the altar of Arbroath Abbey. It had been taken by Scottish nationalist students from its place in Westminster Abbey.
1961 – The trial of Adolf Eichmann begins in Jerusalem.
1968 – President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.
1970 – Apollo Program: Apollo 13 is launched.
1976 – The Apple I is created.
1981 – A massive riot in Brixton, south London results in almost 300 police injuries and 65 serious civilian injuries.
1990 – Customs officers in Middlesbrough, England, seize what they believe to be the barrel of a massive gun on a ship bound for Iraq.
2002 – Over two hundred thousand people march in Caracas towards the presidential palace to demand the resignation of President Hugo Chávez. Nineteen protesters are killed.
2006 – Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announces Iran’s claim to have successfully enriched uranium.
2021 – Twenty year old Daunte Wright is shot and killed in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota by officer Kimberly Potter, sparking protests in the city, when the officer allegedly mistakes her own gun for her taser.
Births:
1722 – Christopher Smart, English actor, playwright, and poet (d. 1771).
1749 – Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, French miniaturist and portrait painter (d. 1803). [An advocate for women to receive the same opportunities as men to become great painters, she was one of the first women to become a member of the Royal Academy, and was the first female artist to receive permission to set up a studio for her students at the Louvre.]
1755 – James Parkinson, English surgeon, geologist, and paleontologist (d. 1824). [Best known for his 1817 work An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, in which he was the first to describe “paralysis agitans”, a condition that would later be renamed Parkinson’s disease by Jean-Martin Charcot.]
1798 – Macedonio Melloni, Italian physicist and academic (d. 1854). [Notable for demonstrating that radiant heat has similar physical properties to those of light.]
1819 – Charles Hallé, German-English pianist and conductor (d. 1895).
1864 – Johanna Elberskirchen, German author and activist (d. 1943).
1869 – Gustav Vigeland, Norwegian sculptor, designed the Nobel Peace Prize medal (d. 1943).
1908 – Jane Bolin, American lawyer and judge (d. 2007). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]
1908 – Masaru Ibuka, Japanese businessman, co-founded Sony (d. 1997).
1908 – Dan Maskell, English tennis player and sportscaster (d. 1992).
1914 – Dorothy Lewis Bernstein, American mathematician (d. 1988). [Known for her work in applied mathematics, statistics, computer programming, and her research on the Laplace transform, she was the first woman to be elected president of the Mathematics Association of America.]
1919 – Raymond Carr, English historian and academic (d. 2015).
1925 – Viola Liuzzo, American civil rights activist (d. 1965).
1930 – Anton LaVey, American occultist, founded the Church of Satan (d. 1997).
1935 – Richard Berry, American singer-songwriter (d. 1997). [Best known as the composer and original performer of the rock standard “Louie Louie”. The song became a hit for The Kingsmen and others, and it is one of the most recorded songs of all time; however, Berry received little financial benefit for writing it until the 1980s, having signed away his rights to the song in 1959. He also wrote and released “Have Love, Will Travel” which has been recorded by many other artists.]
1938 – Reatha King, American chemist and businesswoman. [A research chemist for the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., she was the first African American female chemist to work at the agency. She received a Meritorious Publication Award for her paper on fluoride flame calorimetry. This research was important to the NASA space program.]
1941 – Ellen Goodman, American journalist and author.
1945 – John Krebs, Baron Krebs, English zoologist and academic
1946 – Bob Harris, English journalist and radio host. [“Whispering Bob” is probably most famous for presenting The Old Grey Whistle Test.]
1953 – Andrew Wiles, English mathematician and academic. [ Best known for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, for which he was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize and the 2017 Copley Medal by the Royal Society.]
1954 – Ian Redmond, English biologist and conservationist.
1966 – Lisa Stansfield, English singer-songwriter and actress
1969 – Cerys Matthews, Welsh singer-songwriter.
1987 – Joss Stone, English singer-songwriter and actress.
In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life. (Jeffrey Eugenides):
1626 – Marino Ghetaldi, Ragusan mathematician and physicist (b. 1568). [He was the constructor of the parabolic mirror (66 cm in diameter), kept today at the National Maritime Museum in London. He was also a pioneer in making conic lenses.]
1890 – Joseph Merrick, English man with severe deformities (b. 1862).
1895 – Julius Lothar Meyer, German chemist (b. 1830). [One of the pioneers in developing the earliest versions of the periodic table of the chemical elements. The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (his chief rival) and he had both worked with Robert Bunsen.]
1906 – James Anthony Bailey, American businessman, co-founded Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (b. 1847).
1906 – Francis Pharcellus Church, American journalist and publisher, co-founded Armed Forces Journal and The Galaxy Magazine (b. 1839).
1926 – Luther Burbank, American botanist and academic (b. 1849). [Developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants over his 55-year career.]
1985 – Enver Hoxha, Albanian educator and politician, 21st Prime Minister of Albania (b. 1908).
1987 – Primo Levi, Italian chemist and author (b. 1919).
1996 – Jessica Dubroff, American pilot (b. 1988). [A seven-year-old American trainee pilot who died while attempting to become the youngest person to fly a light aircraft across the United States, despite the fact that at the time of her trip, there was no record-keeping body that recognized any feats by underage pilots. She wasn’t flying the plane when it crashed.]
2001 – Harry Secombe, Welsh-English actor (b. 1921).
2003 – Cecil Howard Green, English-American geophysicist and businessman, founded Texas Instruments (b. 1900).
2006 – June Pointer, American singer (b. 1953).
2007 – Kurt Vonnegut, American novelist, short story writer, and playwright (b. 1922).
2010 – Julia Tsenova, Bulgarian pianist and composer (b. 1948).
2014 – Jesse Winchester, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1944).
2017 – J. Geils, American singer and guitarist (b. 1946).
2020 – John Horton Conway, English mathematician (b. 1937). [His career was intertwined with that of Martin Gardner. When Gardner featured Conway’s Game of Life in his Mathematical Games column in October 1970, it became the most widely read of all his columns and made Conway an instant celebrity.]
Woman of the Day
[Text from Wikipedia]
Jane Matilda Bolin (born on this day in 1908, died January 8, 2007) was an American attorney and judge. She was the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the first to join the New York City Bar Association and the first to join the New York City Law Department. Bolin became the first black woman to serve as a judge in the United States when she was sworn into the bench of the New York City Domestic Relations Court in 1939.
Jane Matilda Bolin was born on April 11, 1908, in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was an only child. Her father, Gaius C. Bolin, was a lawyer and the first black person to graduate from Williams College, and her mother, Matilda Ingram Emery, was an immigrant from the British Isles who died when Bolin was 8 years old. Bolin’s father practiced law in Dutchess County for fifty years and was the first black president of the Dutchess County Bar Association.
As the child of an interracial couple, Bolin was subject to discrimination in Poughkeepsie; she was occasionally denied service at businesses. Bolin was influenced as a child by articles and pictures of the murders, by extrajudicial hanging, of black southerners in The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
After attending high school in Poughkeepsie, Bolin was prevented from enrolling at Vassar College as it did not accept black students at that time. At 16 years old, she enrolled at Wellesley College in Massachusetts where she was one of only two black freshmen. Having been socially rejected by the white students, she and the only other black student decided to live off campus together. She graduated from Wellesley in 1928 in the top 20 of her class. A career adviser at Wellesley College tried to discourage her from applying to Yale Law School due to her race and gender. Nevertheless, in 1931, she became the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School and passed the New York state bar examination in 1932.
She practiced with her father in Poughkeepsie for a short period before accepting a job with the New York City Corporation Counsel’s office. She married attorney Ralph E. Mizelle in 1933, with whom she practiced law in New York City. Mizelle went on to become a member of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet before dying in 1943. Bolin subsequently remarried Walter P. Offutt, Jr., a minister who died in 1974. Bolin ran unsuccessfully for the New York State Assembly as a Republican candidate in 1936. Despite the loss, securing the Republican candidacy boosted her reputation in New York politics.
On July 22, 1939, at the New York World’s Fair, Mayor of New York City Fiorello La Guardia appointed 31-year-old Bolin as a judge of the Domestic Relations Court. For twenty years, she was the only black female judge in the country. She remained a judge of the court, renamed the Family Court in 1962, for 40 years, with her appointment being renewed three times, until she was required to retire aged 70. She worked to encourage racially integrated child services, ensuring that probation officers were assigned without regard to race or religion, and publicly funded childcare agencies accepted children without regard to ethnic background.
Bolin was an activist for children’s rights and education. She was a legal advisor to the National Council of Negro Women. She served on the boards of the NAACP, the National Urban League, the City-Wide Citizens’ Committee on Harlem, and the Child Welfare League. Though she resigned from the NAACP due to its response to McCarthyism, she remained active in the Civil Rights Movement. Bolin also sought to combat racial discrimination from religious groups by helping to open a special school for black boys in New York City. She received honorary degrees from Tuskegee Institute, Williams College, Hampton University, Western College for Women and Morgan State University.
After she retired in 1979, Bolin volunteered as a reading instructor in New York City public schools for two years and served on the New York State Board of Regents, reviewing disciplinary cases. After a life of groundbreaking achievements, Jane Bolin died on Monday, January 8, 2007, at the age of 98 in Long Island City, Queens, New York.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Bolin
O.J. Simpson, football player, actor and murderer, has died of prostate cancer.
Yes, bizarrely it was the lead story on BBC Radio 4’s news earlier.
Higgs: “I wonder if there will be a mass at his funeral”. Ha! Good one Dr. Ingram.
Israel should demand that Hamas provide proof of life for all the hostages, on video and with proof of its currency.
On the Chicago protest, I would just put up a sign next to that sign that says “no it doesn’t”.
I couldn’t see the Jesus, either, until I went to move that window and accidentally let my mouse drift up to the Windows tiling options, which shrunk it down to a preview and made it a little more obvious. I uploaded a screenshot to my website:
https://www.jefflewis.net/graphics/Jesus_Burger.png
Thank you for that! Could not quite get anything clear enough. Is this a special computer program or AI?
I don’t like your peaches
They are full of stones
I like bananas
Because they have no bones!
https://youtu.be/bRyLsMv2clU?si=NEwARygSG9tDr9Ke
Thanks! My father (b.1918) used to sing this to my son (b.1988) and I never knew where it came from.
You’re welcome!
I have a similar story, a song about being a “fool for beans” that my grandfather used to sing.
Then years later I heard it on the Dr. Demento radio program, same way I knew the banana tune.
https://youtu.be/SNPI9t6ovDo?si=DEkaoJvushCVQfni
I couldn’t see the baby saviour 🙂 The fondue reminded me of Asterix in Switzerland: if you lose your bread once, you get five juicy ones with a stick; lose it twice, you get twenty lashes; lose it thrice, you get tossed into the lake with weights on your feet 🙂
+1
Has anyone else read Asterix the Gaul?
I have; and I saw Jesus.
Very cool scene on Lake Champlain! And most of the rest of the news is awful, as always. I, too, have been following the one-piece-of-good-news goat story. That is one tough, stubborn goat!
And why does Thomas Friedman still have a platform? He’s not helping. Explain.
Ah, fond memories of romantic dinners at Geja’s Cafe in Chicago!
https://www.gejascafe.com/
This just in – I think you’ll like it. The very best, the smartest guy out there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oevcTSV0tO8&t=306s
Stephen Kotkin on today’s geopolitics.
You can not use your time better today, except possibly on my own articles. hehehe
D.A.
NYC
> ” . . .except possibly on my own articles.”
That’s a high bar, David.
If Haniyeh feels “the martyrdom of my three sons and some grandchildren” is an “honor” “bestowed” upon him, who am I to argue?