Fred Astaire Week: One for My Baby

August 21, 2012 • 3:33 pm

There are really more than a week’s worth of Fred Astaire videos worth highlighting, so “Astaire Week” may go on for ten days or so.

This video starts with Astaire, drunk and dolorous, singing, and then segues into a wonderful dance routine where he breaks real glasses (and a mirror) during the dance. It’s said that he cut his ankle quite badly during the filming. As the YouTube notes say:

Fred Astaire dancing and singing to “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)”. Song written for him to perform in the movie “The Sky’s the Limit” (1943). Words by Johnny Mercer and music by Harold Arlen, dance by Fred Astaire.

The dancing and singing stop at 5:45, so you may want to quit watching at that time.

Dancers and choreographers on Astaire (from WikiQuote):

  • He is terribly rare. He is like Bach, who in his time had a great concentration of ability, essence, knowledge, a spread of music. Astaire has that same concentration of genius; there is so much of the dance in him that it has been distilled.
    • George Balanchine in Nabokov, Ivan and Carmichael, Elizabeth. “Balanchine, An Interview”. Horizon, January 1961, pp. 44-56. (M)
  • He is the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times… you see a little bit of Astaire in everybody’s dancing–a pause here, a move there. It was all Astaire’s originally.
    • George Balanchine, quoted in Thomas, Bob. Astaire, the Man, The Dancer. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1985. ISBN 0297784021 p.33.
  • What do dancers think of Fred Astaire? It’s no secret. We hate him. He gives us a complex because he’s too perfect. His perfection is an absurdity. It’s too hard to face.
    • Mikhail Baryshnikov at the 1978 Kennedy Center Honours for Fred Astaire and George Balanchine, as quoted in Satchell, Tim. Astaire, The Biography. Hutchinson, London. 1987. ISBN 0-09-173736-2 p.255.
  • He’s a genius…a classical dancer like I never saw in my life.
    • Mikhail Baryshnikov in “Interview with Mike Wallace”, 60 Minutes, CBS Television. February 18, 1979
  • He was not just the best ballroom dancer, or tap dancer, he was simply the greatest, most imaginative, dancer of our time.
    • Rudolph Nureyev quoted in Cooke, Alistair. “Fred Astaire Obituary”, Letter From America, BBC World Service, June 1987
  • When I was in the Soviet Union recently I was being interviewed by a newspaperman and he said, “Which dancers influenced you the most?” and I said, “Oh, well, Fred Astaire.” He looked very surprised and shocked and I said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “Well, Mr. Balanchine just said the same thing.”
    • Jerome Robbins in Heeley, David, producer and director. Fred Astaire: Puttin’ on his Top Hat and Fred Astaire: Change Partners and Dance (two television programs written by John L. Miller), PBS, March 1980. (M)
  • The history of dance on film begins with Astaire.
    • Gene Kelly in Heeley, David, producer and director. Fred Astaire: Puttin’ on his Top Hat and Fred Astaire: Change Partners and Dance (two television programs written by John L. Miller), PBS, March 1980. (M)

Is Markuze back?

August 21, 2012 • 10:03 am

As many of us know, Dennis Markuze, a Canadian with problems, used to send tons of bizarre and threatening emails to many atheists. I’d often get several per day, some threatening removal of my head.  See here and here for a discussion of his behavior. Here’s a photo of him taken by Tessa Brown at the October 2010 AAI convention and posted, I recall, by P. Z. Myers:

So I started a bit this morning when I saw this post up for approval, which I of course put into the trash. What freaked me out was that it was from “drmabus”, for “Davis Mabus” was Markuze’s pseudonym for many of his threats.

Submitted on 2012/08/20 at 10:39 pm

5000 whining atheists vs the Great Prophet

clubconspiracy.com/forum/showthread.php?p=81388

youtube.com/watch?v=s3lwG4MytSI

one applicant right here…

get the POINT, Randi….

That style is pure Markuze. The video links to the atheist discussion hosted by Cara Santa Maria (a nice one; watch it), while the other links to a “David Mabus” post, which notes “what if I told you that I am not who you think I am….Not Dennis Markuze – but a FAN!”

I’m a bit suspicious, though, and so, given the history of the real Markuze, will put up the information associated with the post:

drmabus
ftbully@rushpost.com
81.94.201.82

The IP address appears to be from the UK, and the email address is probably fake, but if anyone can trace these things, I’d appreciate any help.  Markuze is noted for his facility in changing IP addresses, which made it almost impossible to keep him out of websites or email spam filters.

As RationalWiki notes:

After an August 2011 online petition attracted more than 5000 signatures, each resulting in an e-mail to the Montreal police,the police took action and announced they were finally investigating years of complaints (after pleading with people to stop sending them emails) and arrested Markuze on August 16. The story of how the petition came about, with organization taking place via Twitter, has been documented in a detailed blog post that includes much of the history. Markuze was charged with 16 counts of criminal harassment on August 15 and August 17, 2011. To the relief of many concerned for his well-being, the criminal court ordered him to undergo a 30 days psychological evaluation. After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, compounded by alcohol and substance abuse, Markuze was sent to rehab while awaiting the next court date but may now be out and doing his usual stuff. After pleading guilty to issuing threats, he received a suspended sentence of 18 months. Less than two months from the news of his sentencing, Markuze now appears to be violating the terms of his suspended sentence, which required him to abstain from internet discussions and forums.

My guess is that this is indeed Markuze, pretending to be a “fan”.  If it is, then he still needs help.

Kentucky Republicans realize that they screwed up: students will have to learn evolution!

August 21, 2012 • 7:37 am

Three years ago the Kentucky legislature approved a measure to make the state’s high-school standards appropriate to those tested by the countrywide ACT (American College Testing) exams. I guess they didn’t realize that the ACTs, which are used to measure students’ proficiency in four areas and also are used as a criterion for college admission, require knowing evolution in the science section.  OMG! That has Kentucky legislators—the Republicans, of course—up in arms.  As usual, they utter their barrage of moronic statements. As HuffPo reports:

. . . state Republicans are now recoiling at their decision. They claim it doesn’t give the theory of creationism a fair shake and places undue emphasis on the teaching of evolution, which they maintain exists only as a “theory.”

“I would hope that creationism is presented as a theory in the classroom, in a science classroom, alongside evolution,” state Sen. David Givens (R) said in an interview with the Herald-Leader. “We’re simply saying to the ACT people we don’t want what is a theory to be taught as a fact in such a way it may damage students’ ability to do critical thinking.”

Teaching creationism in the school classroom is, of course, unconstitutional in America.

And what kind of amazing ignorance is displayed by this statement:

“The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science — Darwin made it up,” state Sen. Ben Waide (R) said. “My objection is they should ensure whatever scientific material is being put forth as a standard should at least stand up to scientific method. Under the most rudimentary, basic scientific examination, the theory of evolution has never stood up to scientific scrutiny.”

Darwin “made it up”?  Yeah, just like Einstein “made up” the theory of relativity and Pasteur and others “made up” the germ theory of disease, and Newton “made up” the theory of gravity.  Does Waide know nothing about evolution? Is he aware of the thousands of observations, just in the fossil record alone, that show that the theory does indeed “stand up to the scientific method”?  I feel like sending him a copy of my book, except that I doubt he’d read it.

And another:

State Sen. Mike Wilson (R) said he thinks the system could allow students to be “indoctrinated” by the study of evolution.

Yep, just like we indoctrinate students with the theory of gravity.  What they’re afraid of, of course, is that the scientific facts may turn students away from religion.  Pity, that, for evolution is indeed a central concept of biology that must be required in any decent education in science.

Sadly, even the state commissioner of education is showing some cowardice here. Although he avers that creationism can’t be taught in public schools, he shows that his pedal extremities are getting cold:

Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday responded to the lawmakers’ inquiry, telling them that the test is “based on evolution as a theory, not as fact.”

Do these people know what a scientific theory is? Apparently, to Holliday it’s equivalent to a guess or a wild speculation, for he’s reassuring parents here that the theory isn’t really all that true.

Well, at least my colleagues at the University of Kentucky are standing up for scientific truth:

While the debate has been rehashed countless times, Vincent Cassone, chairman of the University of Kentucky biology department and a member of the committee that helped developed ACT’s testing curriculum, told the Herald-Leader that the Republicans’ rejection of evolution was incomprehensible.

“The theory of evolution is the fundamental backbone of all biological research,” he said. “There is more evidence for evolution than there is for the theory of gravity, than the idea that things are made up of atoms, or Einstein’s theory of relativity. It is the finest scientific theory ever devised.”

That may be a bit of an exaggeration, since every time something falls on Earth (or we look at the Moon or the planets) we get evidence for gravity, but Cassone gets kudos for emphasizing the importance of evolution. It is, after all, the true story of our origins, and therefore the greatest of all human tales. It’s something that everyone needs to know.

Someone in Kentucky send Waide a copy of my book; I’ll reimburse you! (Self-promotion: Amazon has the hardback of WEIT on sale as a “bargain book” for only $11.18, only a few cents more than the paperback.)

What do animals know of death?

August 21, 2012 • 5:32 am

I doubt there’s an organismal biologist alive who hasn’t wondered if some other species of animals know of their own mortality, and if so which ones.  I’ve always thought it was the great and unique tragedy of the human species that we alone know that our own lives are finite. That of course, has given rise to all sorts of peculiar behaviors, including much religious doctrine.

Not having access to the consciousness of any creature except H. sapiens, we’re not sure.  Certainly some animals act as if they understand death: dying chimps are surrounded by what looks to be caregivers, elephants fondle the bones of other elephants, and mother primates can cling to dead infants for days.  I even  once saw a squirrel dragging the carcass of another squirrel across the quad of my university, but had no idea what that meant.  But none of these acts mean that these creatures conceive of death the way humans do. A piece at New Scientist, discussing the behavior of a mother gorilla and her dead infant, said this:

It could be grief, but it could equally be a morbid fascination with death. Or it could just be confusion.

A lifeless corpse of a conspecific could just engender curiosity, and a gorilla mother’s clinging to her dead baby could reflect maternal instinct gone awry.  And even if animals do feel a kind of mourning, that doesn’t mean that they know that they themselves will one day pass on. In fact, I still think that we’re still the only species aware of our individual finitude.

But Matt Walker, editor of BBC Nature, has just revived this question in a piece called “Curious incident of a dead giraffe,” a summary of a paper by Fred Bercovitch that was just published online in the African Journal of Ecology (reference and link below).  Bercovitch’s paper reports three incidents in which giraffe’s show “mourning behavior” similar to that of elephants and chimpanzees.

Here’s one report from the paper:

At the Soysambu Conservancy, Kenya, Muller (2010) observed a Rothschild’s giraffe, G. c. rothschildii, cow remaining vigilant in proximity to her dead calf over a period of four consecutive days. The neonatal calf had a deformed hind leg and its mother had remained within 20 m of her offspring for the duration of the calf’s life. When little over a month old, the calf apparently died from natural causes. When sighted, the calf carcass was surrounded by 17 extremely vigilant and agitated female giraffe, one of which was the calf’s mother. On the third day following the death, the half-eaten carcass was found about 50 m from the original location, with the mother standing vigilant next to it. On the next day, the carcass was no longer in the vicinity, but the mother was still in the area. Muller (2010) concluded that the extensive vigilance, nuzzling, sniffing and inspection of the carcass by the mother, as well as by other giraffe, indicates that closer family ties characterize giraffe than often assumed.

In a second case, a herd of giraffe stopped to inspect the 3-week-old carcass of a young female Namibian giraffe (G. c. angolensis), bending down in a way giraffes do only when drinking or feeding on soil or bones.  The third case involved a young female giraffe who had just given birth to an infant, apparently stillborn.  She sniffed the dead calf and apparently stayed in the vicinity of the calf for over two hours.  Here’s a photo of her inspecting her infant:

(from the paper): (b) The same female sniffing the carcass of the newborn calf, partially hidden behind the tall grass

The BBC Nature report says that this may imply that animals have a “mental model of death”:

The behaviour is striking for a number of reasons.

Females giraffes rarely spend any time alone, yet this individual spent hours with her dead calf away from other females.

Giraffes rarely splay their legs to bend down, apart from when to drink or feed.

And apart from two other similar incidences, giraffes have not been seen intensively investigating their dead.

But none of that convinces me that this is anything other than simple curiosity (“what is that thing that looks like us lying on the ground?”) or maternal behavior and puzzlement over a newborn not moving.  Indeed, Bercovitch himself urges caution, calling for scientists to collect more data from other species on the reaction of animals to dead conspecifics.  All he concludes from these observations is that “a mother/offspring bond develops from birth and is more pronounced than often presumed.”

Yet I’m not sure that even that collection of data can tell us what we want to know, which is what resides in the consciousness of animals faced with a dead conspecific.  If primates show behavior similar to human mourning, though, one might at least conclude that they feel the loss of an individual they knew well. Whether that means that they know death in the way we do, though, would remain unresolved, as would the question of whether any animals besides us knows that our own lives are finite.  To know that means probing the consciousness of other species, something that’s nearly impossible to do.

I am curious whether readers have experiences with animals that bear on this question.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

_______
Bercovitch, F. B. 2012.  Giraffe cow reaction to the death of her newborn calf.  African J. Ecology. Online: DOI: 10.1111/aje.12016

Boot weather!

August 21, 2012 • 4:17 am

It’s actually cooling down in Chicago these days—a harbinger that school will start in a month—and so it’s time to don the stylish footwear. This is my latest pair: hand-tooled boots from the estimable purveyor Falconhead, whose boots are actually handmade by an outfit in El Paso called Tres Outlaws.

If you want to see some really fancy boots—footwear that can cost upwards of $25,000 per pair!—check out Falconhead’s Museum Collection (three pages of masterpieces).  Mine, of course, come much more cheaply, for I buy most of them on eBay.

Fred Astaire week: Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails

August 20, 2012 • 6:06 pm

This is absolutely classic Astaire: wonderful dancing in the full formal regalia, avec cane, which becomes part of the tap routine.  The song, which you’ve surely heard, is by Irving Berlin, who wrote it for the 1935 film Top Hat. The choreography is, as it so often was, by both Astaire and Hermes Pan.

Near the end, the tempo of Astaire’s feet is almost like that of a machine gun.

An anniversary for evolution

August 20, 2012 • 10:25 am

It was 154 years ago today—August, 20, 1858—that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published their joint papers on natural selection in Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. Zoology (3: 46-50).  The history of these papers, reflecting Darwin’s and Wallace’s simultaneous writing about the discovery of natural selection, is well known and recounted at the Wikipedia link in the first sentence.  The letters between Darwin, Wallace, Lyell and Hooker that dealt with the publication of these papers can be found here.

In short, Wallace, in the throes of malarial fever, wrote his paper on natural selection on the Indonesian island of Ternate in February, 1858, and sent it to Darwin with a letter asking him to forward it to the geologist Lyell. (That letter was lost, and has led to dark speculations that Darwin got the letter well before he said he did [June 18] and destroyed it so he could delay matters; but historians have shown that is almost certainly wrong). Darwin, of course, had been pondering and working on the idea of natural selection for a long time before 1858, and was understandably disturbed that his priority had been threatened by an upstart naturalist.  But he was still a gentleman, and had to weigh how to maintain his priority while still behaving ethically. He sought the advice of his friends and mentors Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, who came up with the idea of a jointly publishing Wallace’s letter along with a quickly-written abstract by Darwin. Lyell and Hooker then wrote a letter introducing the two papers.  As Wikipedia notes:

Wallace wrote his paper On The Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type at Ternate in February 1858 and sent it to Darwin with a request to send it on to Lyell. Darwin received it on 18 June 1858 and wrote to Lyell that “your words have come true with a vengeance,… forestalled” and “If Wallace had my MS. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract!” While Wallace had not asked for publication, Darwin would, “of course, at once write and offer to send [it] to any journal” that Wallace chose. He sadly added that “all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed”.  Lyell’s immediate response urged Darwin to publish his own ideas, and in his reply of 25 June Darwin agreed that he could point to his own Essay of 1844 which Hooker had read in 1847, and a letter to Asa Gray of 1857 showing that he was still developing the ideas, “so that I could most truly say and prove that I take nothing from Wallace. I should be extremely glad now to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so. But I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably… I would far rather burn my whole book than that he or any man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit”, also requesting that Hooker be invited to give a second opinion.Darwin was overwrought by a deepening crisis of illness of his baby son Charles Waring Darwin, who died of scarlet fever on 28 June. On the morning of the 29th he acknowledged Hooker’s letters, writing “I cannot think now”, then that night he read the letters, and though “quite prostrated”, got his servant to take to Hooker Wallace’s essay, the letter to Asa Gray and the Essay of 1844, leaving matters in the hands of Lyell and Hooker.

Lyell and Hooker had decided on a joint publication at the Linnean Society of London of Wallace’s paper together with an extract from Darwin’s essay and his letter to Asa Gray, The last meeting of the society before the summer recess had been postponed following the death of former president the botanist Robert Brown on 10 June 1858, and was to be held on 1 July. On the afternoon of 30 June Mrs. Hooker copied out extracts from the handwritten documents they had just received from Darwin, then that evening Lyell and Hooker handed them in to the secretary with a covering letter.

The papers were read to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, by the Secretary John Joseph Bennett. Neither author was present. Darwin was attending the funeral of his son, and Wallace was still in Borneo. The meeting was chaired by the President of the society, Thomas Bell, who had written up the description of Darwin’s reptile specimens from the Beagle expedition.

The cover letter and two papers were then published on this date in 1858. Darwin began writing On the Origin of Species ten days later, obviously eager to get his expanded ideas into print as soon as possible.

You can find the text of both Darwin’s and Wallace’s 1858 papers here.  Here’s the introduction to the joint Darwin/Wallace papers by Lyell and Hooker: