Greetings on The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, September 12, 2023, and, sadly, I’m nearly halfway through my visit to Israel.
Hili: I think I can see a vegetarian mouse.A: Come home. I have something tastier for you.
Hili: Mam wrażenie, że widzę wegetariańską mysz. Ja: Chodź do domu, mam dla ciebie coś smaczniejszego.
To see the Oddity of the Day; go here.
More later; I’m going to the art museum today, which is said to have a decent collection of Impressionists and post-Impressionists.
From the Auschwitz Museum, a girl gassed upon arrival at age 3.
12 September 1939 | A Dutch Jewish girl, Hanna Harriët Samson, was born in Emmen.
In December 1942 she was deported from #Westerbork to #Auschwitz. She was murdered in a gas chamber after selection. pic.twitter.com/jLiZ5OgEEi
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) September 12, 2023
More hijabless women from Masih:
“I rather wash dead body, but not to obey, compulsory hijab laws.”
The woman who took this video told me; the authorities sentence unveiled women to jail, washing dead bodies in a cemetery and undergoing therapy, we remove our hijab & say no to our barbaric regime.#MahsaAmini pic.twitter.com/SUHRqQR3wd— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) September 11, 2023
On this day:
490 BC – Battle of Marathon: The conventionally accepted date for the Battle of Marathon. The Athenians and their Plataean allies defeat the first Persian invasion force of Greece.
1846 – Elizabeth Barrett elopes with Robert Browning.
1848 – A new constitution marks the establishment of Switzerland as a federal state.
1857 – The SS Central America sinks about 160 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, drowning a total of 426 passengers and crew, including Captain William Lewis Herndon. The ship was carrying 13–15 tons of gold from the California Gold Rush.
1897 – Tirah Campaign: In the Battle of Saragarhi, ten thousand Pashtun tribesmen suffer several hundred casualties while attacking 21 Sikh soldiers in British service.
1910 – Premiere performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 in Munich (with a chorus of 852 singers and an orchestra of 171 players. Mahler’s rehearsal assistant conductor was Bruno Walter).
1915 – French soldiers rescue over 4,000 Armenian genocide survivors stranded on Musa Dagh.
1933 – Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, conceives the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.
1938 – Adolf Hitler demands autonomy and self-determination for the Germans of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.
1940 – Cave paintings are discovered in Lascaux, France.
1958 – Jack Kilby demonstrates the first working integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments.
1959 – The Soviet Union launches a large rocket, Lunik II, at the Moon.
1959 – Bonanza premieres, the first regularly scheduled TV programme presented in colour.
1962 – President John F. Kennedy delivers his “We choose to go to the Moon” speech at Rice University. [It was also his wedding anniversary – he married Jackie on this day in 1953.]
1966 – Gemini 11, the penultimate mission of NASA’s Gemini program, and the current human altitude record holder (except for the Apollo lunar missions).
1970 – Dawson’s Field hijackings: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorists blow up three hijacked airliners in Zarqa, Jordan, continuing to hold the passengers hostage in various undisclosed locations in Amman.
1974 – Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, ‘Messiah’ of the Rastafari movement, is deposed following a military coup by the Derg, ending a reign of 58 years.
1977 – South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko dies in police custody.
1992 – NASA launches Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-47 which marked the 50th shuttle mission. On board are Mae Carol Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, Mamoru Mohri, the first Japanese citizen to fly in a US spaceship, and Mark Lee and Jan Davis, the first married couple in space.
1994 – Frank Eugene Corder fatally crashes a single-engine Cessna 150 into the White House’s south lawn, striking the West wing. There were no other casualties.
2013 – NASA confirms that its Voyager 1 probe has become the first manmade object to enter interstellar space.
Births:
1768 – Benjamin Carr, English-American singer-songwriter, educator, and publisher (d. 1831).
1812 – Richard March Hoe, American engineer and businessman, invented the Rotary printing press (d. 1886).
1818 – Richard Jordan Gatling, American inventor, invented the Gatling gun (d. 1903).
1829 – Anselm Feuerbach, German painter (d. 1880).
1880 – H. L. Mencken, American journalist and critic (d. 1956).
1888 – Maurice Chevalier, French actor, singer, and dancer (d. 1972).
1894 – Dorothy Maud Wrinch, Argentinian-English mathematician, biochemist and philosopher (d. 1976).
1897 – Irène Joliot-Curie, French chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1956).
1902 – Marya Zaturenska, Ukrainian-American poet and author (d. 1982). [She wrote eight volumes of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cold Morning Sky, and she edited six anthologies of poetry.]
1907 – Louis MacNeice, Irish poet and playwright (d. 1963).
1913 – Jesse Owens, American sprinter and long jumper (d. 1980).
1931 – Ian Holm, English actor (d. 2020).
1931 – George Jones, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2013).
1940 – Linda Gray, American model and actress.
1944 – Barry White, American singer-songwriter (d. 2003).
1952 – Neil Peart, Canadian drummer, songwriter, and producer (d. 2020).
1956 – BA Robertson, Scottish songwriter.
1957 – Rachel Ward, English-Australian actress.
1957 – Hans Zimmer, German composer and producer.
1994 – RM, South Korean rapper, songwriter and record producer. [A member of BTS.]
Mon Dieu! Qu’est-ce que ce monde? (‘My God! What is this world?’)
1642 – Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis of Cinq-Mars, French conspirator (b. 1620). [A favourite of King Louis XIII of France. He led the last and most nearly successful of many conspiracies against the Cardinal Richelieu, the king’s powerful first minister. His attempt to persuade the king to execute Richelieu failed and it was he who got beheaded. I’ve used his last words in the heading of this section.]
1810 – Sir Francis Baring, 1st Baronet, English banker and politician (b. 1740). [The eponymous Barings Bank collapsed in 1995 due to the actions of rogue trader Nick Leeson. It was later purchased by ING for £1.]
1819 – Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Prussian general (b. 1742).
1869 – Peter Mark Roget, English physician, theologian, and lexicographer (b. 1779). [Now he’s dead, we’ll never know why there’s only one word for thesaurus.]
1927 – Sarah Frances Whiting, American physicist and astronomer (b. 1847).
1977 – Robert Lowell, American poet (b. 1917).
1986 – Charlotte Wolff, German-English psychotherapist and physician (b. 1897).
1992 – Anthony Perkins, American actor, singer, and director (b. 1932).
1993 – Raymond Burr, Canadian-American actor and director (b. 1917).
1995 – Jeremy Brett, English actor (b. 1933).
1997 – Judith Merril, American-Canadian science fiction writer, editor and political activist (b. 1923).
2003 – Johnny Cash, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor (b. 1932).
2005 – Serge Lang, French-American mathematician, author and academic (b. 1927).
2008 – David Foster Wallace, American novelist, short story writer, and essayist (b. 1962).
2012 – Derek Jameson, English journalist and broadcaster (b. 1929).
2013 – Ray Dolby, American engineer and businessman, founded Dolby Laboratories (b. 1933).
2013 – Candace Pert, American neuroscientist and pharmacologist (b. 1946).
2014 – John Gustafson, English singer-songwriter and bass player (b. 1942).
Jeremy Brett is my favourite Holmes; David Suchet, my favourite Poirot; and Joan Hickson, my Jane Marple.
According to Wikipedia, Brett also:
Charlton Heston as Holmes?!
That’s an abomination! It’s bad enough having Charlton Heston as Holmes. Maybe the casting director (if no one murdered him directly, or if God hasn’t recalled him through ‘natural’ means) thinks that Linda Evans would make a good Jane Marple and William Shatner a superb Poirot.
And David Mitchell and Robert Webb have both played both Holmes and Watson in the course of one four minute sketch.
Christopher Lee played both Sherlock and his brother Mycroft in different movies.
The Crucifer of Blood was filmed for TV in 1991. Heston actually wasn’t bad as Holmes. Richard Johnson took over from Brett as Watson.
After Brett I haven’t been able to fully accept anyone else as Sherlock Holmes, though I also liked Peter Cushing, Ian Richardson, and Basil Rathbone. The rediscovery of William Gillette’s 1916 Sherlock Holmes film also showed how good he was. The film itself is badly made but Gillette’s acting (and underplaying) is startlingly modern—he immediately grasped how to act for the camera.
I’ll never forgive ITV for butchering The 4.50 From Paddington by pandering to the American market. Joan Hickson therefore wins by default.
David Suchet, however, is the only Poirot worth mentioning, in spite of the fact that ITV butchered The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Christie’s masterpiece IMO). I forgive them for that because I think it’s practically unfilmable.
I’m agnostic on Sherlock Holmes. I’ve never seen any of the Brett adaptations. I liked Benedict Cumberbatch’s incarnation at first but Sherlock lost its way. I like Elementary because of the way they characterise Watson as not an idiot but their Sherlock is quite annoying.
I’d like to take the opportunity presented by the anniversary of DFW’s death to urge our host to reject the suggestion of certain philistines 🙂 and to read Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest for himself. At the very least, before making a final decision, I would entreat him to read the brief (15 paragraph) essay by DFW’s contemporary Dave Eggers — an author who himself knows a thing or two about writing a heartbreaking work of staggering genius — that served as the introduction to the 2006 reissue of Wallace’s novel.
Eggers’s brief introduction can be accessed, gratis, as a standalone essay here.
The title of Egger’s wonderful memoir was besmirched by being echoed by transwoman Grace Lavery’s Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Please_Miss
I wasn’t aware of that book, Jez … er, thanks, I guess. 🙂
Blücher? Blucher? https://youtu.be/ZAYVIY1izho?si=UXKuqwAv3JDFOstv
Maybe it’s a meatless snack, like a tofuna fish salad sandwich?
Aren’t all mice vegetarian? (Indeed, probably vegan, as I think the cheese thing is a bit of a myth…)
Are vegan mice from Vega?
Interestingly enough, the dominant intelligent species in the start system Vega are obligate carnivores…so Vegans only eat meat. 😉
No, many will eat insects, snails, or other animal food.
You must be thinking of the Hezbollah-like splinter faction of mice. Many mice eat meaty things like insects and other small critters.
Thanks, all – I stand corrected!
Yes, I think if you are laying around you might be lunch.
Nice Anthony Bourdain allusion, Darrell!
I thought at first that you wrote a Hepzibah-like splinter faction, but THAT would have to be skunks, not mice. I think I need new glasses or something.
Huh. Did not know that name. Thanks, Robert.
I had no idea Hezekiah was married to a skunk. This is the problem I have with the bloody Bible: Just when I start believing it, some implausible bit gets me.
Well they, mice do like chocolate, I suppose it classes as vegetarian.
I speak from personal experience after when in the RAF I kept finding my favourite Cadbury fruit and nut bars nibbled in my bedside locker and one morning one jumped out. Little rascals!
Beyond mouse?