Good morning on Friday October 18, 2019: National Chocolate Cupcake Day. It’s also World Menopause Day, National No Beard Day (more than half the population is already participating), and, in Canada, Persons Day. This, according to Wikipedia, is an equality holiday:
Persons Day is an annual celebration in Canada, held on October 18. The day commemorates the case of Edwards v. Canada (Attorney General), more commonly known as The Persons Case – a famous Canadian constitutional case decided on October 18, 1929, by the Judicial Committee of the Imperial Privy Council, which at that time was the court of last resort for Canada. The Persons Case held that women were eligible to sit in the Senate of Canada.
Remember that I am leaving for five weeks on Monday, so please do not email me after Sunday, as emails will be spotty at best. I will give one more reminder. Save your photos and tips until early December, please.
Stuff that happened on October 18 includes:
- 320 – Pappus of Alexandria observes a solar eclipse.
- 1851 – Moby-Dick is first published as The Whale.
A first edition of this puppy will cost you about $65,000. Call me Impecunious!
- 1867 – The United States takes possession of Alaska after purchasing it from Russia for $7.2 million.
- 1922 – The British Broadcasting Company (later Corporation) is founded by a consortium, to establish a national broadcasting service.
- 1944 – World War II: The state funeral of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel takes place in Ulm, Germany.
- 1945 – Argentine military officer and politician Juan Perón marries actress Eva Duarte.
- 1954 – Texas Instruments announces the first transistor radio.
How many of you remember transistor radios? I had one in a leather case that I’d listen to under the covers at night. They looked like this:
How many of you can name a rock song that mentions transistor radios?
- 1963 – Félicette, a black and white female Parisian stray cat becomes the first cat launched into space.
Here’s the brave cat, who was cruelly euthanized two months after her return. How could they do that to her?
- 2007 – A suicide attack on a motorcade carrying former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto kills 139 and wounds 450 more. Bhutto herself was uninjured. [She of course was killed in just that way on December 27 of the same year]
- 2011 – An Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit of the Israel Defense Forces is released by Hamas as part of a prisoner exchange deal, after being held captive for over five years.
Shalit was exchanged for 1,027 (!) incarcerated Palestinians, some of them multiple murderers and terrorists.
Notables born on this day include:
- 1859 – Henri Bergson, French philosopher and theologian, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1941)
- 1904 – A. J. Liebling, American journalist and author (d. 1963)
Liebling is one of my favorite writers on food and Paris, and his masterpiece is the book Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, which describes some awesome meals with the gourmands of yesteryear. Here’s one:
In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, Parisian actor and gourmand Yves Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot — and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. “And while I think of it,” I once heard him say, “we haven’t had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace — no more ’34s and hardly any ’37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.”
What a meal!! I recommend that if you love food (and who doesn’t?), you should read this book immediately.
- 1919 – Anita O’Day, American singer (d. 2006)
- 1919 – Pierre Trudeau, Canadian lawyer, academic, and politician, 15th Prime Minister of Canada (d. 2000)
- 1926 – Chuck Berry, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2017)
- 1926 – Klaus Kinski, German-American actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 1991)
- 1939 – Mike Ditka, American football player, coach, and sportscaster
- 1939 – Lee Harvey Oswald, American assassin of John F. Kennedy (d. 1963)
- 1950 – Wendy Wasserstein, American playwright and author (d. 2006)
- 1956 – Martina Navratilova, Czech-American tennis player and coach
- 1961 – Wynton Marsalis, American trumpet player, composer, and educator
- 1984 – Milo Yiannopoulos, British journalist and public speaker
- 1984 – Lindsey Vonn, American skier
Here’s O’Day with one of her favorite jazz musicians, the great jazz trumpeter Roy Eldredge, collaborating on the famous son “Let Me Off Uptown“. The orchestra is Gene Krupa’s with Krupa on the skins:
Those who “passed on” on October 18 include:
- 1871 – Charles Babbage, English mathematician and engineer, invented the mechanical computer (b. 1791)
- 1931 – Thomas Edison, American engineer and businessman, invented the light bulb and phonograph (b. 1847)
- 1973 – Walt Kelly, American illustrator and animator (b. 1913)
- 2000 – Gwen Verdon, American actress and dancer (b. 1925)
- 2012 – Sylvia Kristel, Dutch model and actress (b. 1952)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being demanding and obnoxious about her “cat sausages”:
Hili: When you finish washing dishes get busy with something serious.A: And what would that be?Hili: I think that you still have some cat sausages.
Hili: Jak pozmywasz to zajmij się czymś poważnym.
Ja: To znaczy?
Hili: Zdaje się, że masz jeszcze te kocie kiełbaski.
From the always-entertaining folks at the Dover Public Library:
From Ant. Yes, the “m” in melanogaster should be in lower case, but who cares?
From Jinx the Squirrel:
Yes, this is what’s inside your skull. Doesn’t it look fragile? Didn’t you flinch when they cut into it?
Something disturbing about watching the repository of someone’s hopes and dreams sliced through so brutally https://t.co/F9QN28PqUu
— Prof Hugo Spiers (@hugospiers) October 12, 2019
Tweets from Heather Hastie: First turtle therapy:
"pull yourself together, Graham, you're embarrassing us both"
📹: https://t.co/syLOQs6tym pic.twitter.com/gNLr9VtG3o
— Paul Bronks (@SlenderSherbet) October 6, 2019
This is a kitten doing “paw play,” and Maru getting measured:
Cat intelligence pic.twitter.com/N5K0IHoy06
— gab.ai/TheCol🇮🇳 (@desertfox61I) October 2, 2019
Tweets from Matthew Cobb. This is why I like cats: in many ways they’re like humans.
this is the most cat thing ive ever seen pic.twitter.com/EXrVuNfhog
— serena⁷🍓 (@disharryland) October 16, 2019
I think I’ve posted this before, but it’s worth seeing again.
‘In 1964, Ringo Starr snapped a photo of some high school students who skipped class to see the Beatles during their first trip to the US. The group had no idea the photo existed until Ringo published his book of photos. Nearly 50 years later, they recreated the photo.’ pic.twitter.com/vAfyDZ0dZt
— Marina Amaral (@marinamaral2) September 3, 2019
This is very good: Erdogan is a pissed-off cat!
I staged a dramatic reading of Trump’s letter to Erdogan.
The part of Erdogan is played by my cat – Ow, Fuck. pic.twitter.com/cbTvskZFWu
— Myke Cole (@MykeCole) October 16, 2019
. . . and a very frustrated cat! Be sure to turn the sound on.
"i see you, motherfucker" 🔊
📹: https://t.co/e3j7DiU1B8 pic.twitter.com/DW3JoMTeD8
— Paul Bronks (@SlenderSherbet) October 17, 2019
Bad sneakers and a Piña Colada, my friend
Stompin’ on the avenue by Radio City with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend
Yes! First Bad Sneakers reference on the site. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Hope they play this song when I see them. Though I’ll probably have octopus at the restaurant despite the free chicken.
I can think of so many songs that mention radio (I mean, obviously), but no others besides Ken’s that mention “transistor” specifically.
Elvis Costello’s Radio Radio sounds like he’s talking about a transistor in the first part.
Got another one! Belle and Sebastian’s Act of the Apostle II, from my favorite album of their’s, The Life Pursuit.
I meant to say Act of the Apostle I & . So that’s two songs.
Damn it. I & II! I’m sorry, I’m very tired this morning.
OK, I went through my whole iTunes and I can come up with only two more: Joni Mitchell’s I’m a Radio You Turn Me On and Frank Zappa’s The Adventures of Greggery Peccery.
That’s all I’ll come up with because those are all the songs in my library that mention a transistor radio, at least as far as I’m aware/can remember.
Greggert Peccery’s a weird song to enjoy, but the instrumentals reference so many previous Zappa songs that it makes it pretty cool. Hell, it even references Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man and instrumental songs by others, every time just briefly enough for the keen listener to catch it. It’s like a combination of an enormous number of instrumental songs and a Zappa song like Billy the Mountain.
Not just a transistor radio, but a six foot pile of transistor radios, each one tuned to a different station!
Yup. And I realized the Herbie Hancock instrumental reference I was thinking of was Chameleon.
On Tuesdays that were so slow, Van the Man gunned down the old man with a transistor radio in “Brown-Eyed Girl”.
I really like Jimmy Buffett’s version a lot, too.
L
Summer of ’67, when I was 14, an older kid from a couple doors down in the neighborhood was back for a month’s leave between tours of duty in Vietnam. He’d brought home some newfangled stereo system from the PX (a sort of karaoke machine avant la lettre), with a big amp that gave off thunderous bass and a microphone you could sing along with or talk over the records. He set it up upstairs in his old bedroom, and would play a stack of 45s while sitting at a DJ station he’d built, wearing a pair of shades with the lights turned low, introducing all the records and sometimes singing along. (Maybe he was doin’ an Adrian Cronauer impression, though I’d never heard of Cronauer until years later.) Anyway, one of his favorites tunes, that he’d play over and over again, was “Brown-Eyed Girl.”
Way I remember it, he spent nearly the whole month up there spinning his disks. His kid brother, who was about my age, and I would go hang out there with him, and we thought it was the coolest thing. He kept one of the speakers in the front window, practically hanging over the street. It made a hell of a racket through the neighborhood, but he was way past givin’ a fuck, and nobody ever thought to complain, as far as I know.
Thanks for that ad for the PX. Lots of electronics sold over the years. Your neighbor sounds like a few I knew when living in the barracks way back in those days. We referred to them as barracks rats, because they spent all their money on electronics and music and listened to it day and night. Living in a foreign country with the whole world out there and those guys hardly came out to see it. They really missed out.
Impecunious- having little or no money; penniless. My new word for today
I love Canadians, but the “Imperial Privy Council” makes me giggle in the most juvenile way.
Then you’re going to love the Lord Privy Seal, which is the title of one of the great offices of state in Britain. One erstwhile holder of the title commented that he was neither a Lord, nor a Privy, nor a Seal.
Moby Dick ain’t worth the money. I can’t stand Melville.
In Philip Roth’s novel The Great American Novel, in a discussion of great American literature during a deep-sea fishing trip with a fictional Ernest Hemingway, Papa disparages Moby Dick to the narrator as “a hundred pages of good writing, another hundred pages about how handy darkies are with harpoons, and three hundred pages of whale blubber, with a madman thrown in for excitement.” 🙂
Brilliant! That sounds just about right. I’m going to have to read that. I loved The Human Stain, and they made an excellent movie out of it too.
How about Van Morrison – Brown eyed girl
Whatever happened
To Tuesday and so slow
Going down the old mind
With a transistor radio
Standing in the sunlight laughing,
Hiding behind a rainbow’s wall,
Slipping and sliding
All along the water fall, with you
My brown eyed girl,
You my brown eyed girl.
Am I the only one who’s mildly alarmed to learn that cat sausages are a thing?
Just been a surfing the interweb ,found a photo of a grease filled pan with a impression of a sausage in it ,next to it is a impression of a paw .
Found it at the web site
TYWKIWDBI
Always something on there .
How about ‘Tiny Blue Transistor Radio’ by Connie Smith.
“Transistor Radio” songs:
The Beach Boys have two & Benny Hill has one!
If that fragile brain was a fruit, it would be over ripe.
Liebling also was a wonderful writer on the sport of boxing, and his “The Sweet Science” is also a masterpiece.
From his wiki:
“In 2002, Sports Illustrated named The Sweet Science, a collection of Liebling’s essays on boxing, the number one sports book of all time.”
In it, IIRC, he distills the essence of the sport down to ‘the art of hitting without being hit’. Simple, right?
Nah, didn’t flinch at the brain-slicing video. Morbidly thought to myself, “Got Fava beans?” (sorry for the goulishness – almost Halloween!)
Fava beans go well with liver, I hear…can’t think of a good side for brains…maybe cardoons. 😉
Oooh, cardoons… I learned something new, thanks!
According to this fab-sounding recipe, the lowly potato is a fine accompaniment:
https://www.greatbritishchefs.com/recipes/veal-brains-recipe
The name of the cat that tried to maim its staff as it suffered through the dramatic reading of Trump’s letter to Erdogan isn’t “Erdogan,” it’s “Ow Fuck.”
In another post he explains how he came to be Ow Fuck’s staff: “I fostered her as shelter overflow because she was the hardest case they had and I can handle a violent cat. She’s unadoptable (severe hyperesthesia, unpredictably violent, can’t tolerate other pets), so I kept her.”
With a cat like that, he’s a true hero. It’s obvious how she got her name; they were probably the first words out of his mouth when he picked her up for the first time.
“Transistor Sister” (Freddy Cannon, 1961).
She’s my transistor sister
With a radio on her arm
No one can resist her
Cause she’s loaded with
A musical charm….
Wait, Bergson, the person who prevented Einstein for getting a Nobel for relativity (emphasis on “for relativity”), using sophistry that William Lane Craig would use, is himself a Nobel laureate?
-Ryan
Joni Mitchell was my first thought, but since you beat me to her, I’ll add Tracey Ullman’s Sunglasses, and The Move with Hello Susie. The transistors aren’t explicit in Roger Water’s Radio K.A.O.S nor in Queen’s Radio Gaga, but assuredly, they are there.
I drained many batteries by falling asleep whilst trying to listen right through Radio Luxembourg’s Top Thirty under the covers late on a Sunday night.