Month: January 2012

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On This Day: January 10

Updated January 9, 2012, 1:28 pm

NYT Front Page

On Jan. 10, 1946, the first General Assembly of the United Nations convened in London.

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On Jan. 10, 1910, Galina Sergeyevna Ulanova, one of the greatest ballet dancers of the 20th century, was born. Following her death on Mar. 21, 1998, her obituary appeared in The Times.

Go to obituary » | Other Birthdays »

 

On This Date By The Associated Press

1776 Thomas Paine published the pamphlet “Common Sense.”
1861 Florida seceded from the Union.
1863 London’s Metropolitan, the world’s first underground passenger railway, opened to the public.
1870 John D. Rockefeller incorporated Standard Oil.
1920 The League of Nations was established as the Treaty of Versailles went into effect.
1957 Harold Macmillan became prime minister of Great Britain following the resignation of Anthony Eden.
1964 The Beatles’ first album in the United States, “Introducing the Beatles,” was released.
1967 Republican Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, the first black elected to the U.S. Senate by popular vote, took his seat.
1971 “Masterpiece Theatre” premiered on PBS.
1984 The United States and the Vatican established full diplomatic relations.
2000 America Online agreed to buy Time-Warner for $162 billion. (Time-Warner decided to spin off AOL in 2009.)
2003 North Korea withdrew from a global treaty barring it from making nuclear weapons.
2005 CBS issued a damning independent review of mistakes related to a “60 Minutes Wednesday” report on President George W. Bush’s National Guard service.
2007 President George W. Bush announced he would send a “surge” of 21,500 U.S. forces to Iraq.
2011 A judge ordered former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to serve three years in prison for his role in a scheme to illegally funnel corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002. (DeLay remains free on bond as he appeals.)

Current Birthdays By The Associated Press

Rod Stewart, Rock singer

Rock singer Rod Stewart turns 67 years old today.

AP Photo/Joel Ryan

Willie McCovey, Baseball Hall of Famer

Baseball Hall of Famer Willie McCovey turns 74 years old today.

AP Photo/Ben Margot

1935 Ronnie Hawkins, Rock singer, musician, turns 77
1939 Scott McKenzie, Singer, turns 73
1944 Frank Sinatra Jr., Singer, turns 68
1948 Donald Fagen, Rock singer, musician (Steely Dan), turns 64
1948 William Sanderson, Actor (“Newhart”), turns 64
1949 George Foreman, Boxing Hall of Famer, turns 63
1950 Roy Blunt, U.S. senator, R-Mo., turns 62
1953 Pat Benatar, Rock singer, turns 59
1956 Shawn Colvin, Rock singer, turns 56
1961 Evan Handler, Actor, turns 51
1963 Mark Pryor, U.S. senator, D-Ark., turns 49

 

Historic Birthdays

Galina Sergeyevna Ulanova 1/10/1910 – 3/21/1998 Russian prima ballerina.Go to obituary »
48 Nicolaus Steno 1/10/1638 – 11/26/1686
Danish geologist and anatomist
68 John Emerich, Lord Acton 1/10/1834 – 6/19/1902
English historian
66 Yukichi Fukuzawa 1/10/1835 – 2/3/1901
Japanese educator and publisher
41 John Wellborn Root 1/10/1850 – 1/15/1891
American architect
71 Frederick Gardner Cottrell 1/10/1877 – 11/16/1948
American educator and scientist
83 Francis X. Bushman 1/10/1883 – 8/23/1966
American actor
94 Dumas Malone 1/10/1892 – 12/27/1986
American historian; wrote authoritative biography of Thomas Jefferson
87 Uri Zvi Greenberg 1/10/1894 – 5/8/1981
Hebrew and Yiddish poet
72 Dame Barbara Hepworth 1/10/1903 – 5/20/1975
English sculptor
83 Ray Bolger 1/10/1904 – 1/15/1987
American dancer and actor
84 Paul Henreid 1/10/1908 – 3/29/1992
Austrian-born American actor

 

via learning.blogs.nytimes.com

 

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Mexican Pottery: Beautiful on the Walls

Some years back, I had the pleasure of crossing over the American border in the city of San Diego over to the busy town of Tijuana, Mexico.  While there, like many a tourist, I browsed the wares in the very busy shopping district teeming with everything from textiles, crafts, jewelry, furniture, and pottery.  This is a lovely piece that caught my eye and one that I quickly picked up.  It hangs in my foyer, and is a lovely example of intricate work in unglazed ceramics.

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The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

“You loved it, because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.”  The game in question is baseball, and I daresay the title of this story now makes immediate sense if you were ever wondering about it. 

This is a story that opens and closes with a baseball game, but it is not so much about the intricacies of a game which happens to be America’s national pastime as much as it is a universal story about the “human condition.”  As to how that condition is to be defined, it is in the most simplest as well as the most grandiose of ways, encompassing everything that makes us who we are and how we tick.  And that means every human emotion from the most mundane to the most sublime, including the most irrational and illogical as well.

Oh, and the frame of reference and anchor to this great examination is not just the game of baseball; it is all the imagery and characters from one of the greatest novels ever written, Moby Dick.  With grand Melvillean themes and references sprinkled liberally throughout, this is a fine example of the marriage of the old and the new in the genre of the novel that seems to transcend time and space, with such superb fluidity is the construct and narrative delivered.

In this new millennium, the novel is certainly very much alive and well thanks to writers such as Chad Harbach, who has already established himself as a writer to be reckoned with, especially when you consider this to be his debut offering.  Jonathan Franzen, another novelist whose style Mr. Harbach very much adopts, gives his own personal kudos by way of brief remarks on the dust jacket.  Even otherwise, it would be difficult to dispute the talent and good form of this story and its author, and one can only hope that the there will be more where that came from.

Incidentally, I had the pleasure of reading the unabridged version of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick last year, and had offered up a brief review of it at the time which might be found here.

Artoffielding

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The New Scapegoats of Europe & Other Thoughts on the Integration of Muslims in Europe

One afternoon in November, Océane Sluijzer, a 13-year-old Belgian Jewish girl, was beaten up after soccer practice by a group of schoolmates. Her tormenters, girls of Moroccan descent, called her a “dirty Jew” and told her to “go back to her own country.”

Two weeks later, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium mentioned the beating in a speech about the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. Howard Gutman, himself a Jew, saw Océane’s plight as symptomatic of a larger problem: Jews and Muslims in Europe are caught in a proxy war that mirrors events in the Middle East, especially between Israel and the Palestinians.

“[E]very new settlement announced in Israel, every rocket shot over a border or suicide bomber on a bus, and every retaliatory military strike exacerbates the problem and provides a setback here in Europe for those fighting hatred and bigotry,” Gutman said.

He’s right: Politics in the Middle East refract into tensions between Jews and Muslims in Europe. Violence against Jews on the Continent tends to increase when violence rises between Israelis and Palestinians, for example. The National Consultative Commission on Human Rights counted 815 acts of anti-Semitic violence in France in 2009, compared with 459 the year before, and found that the uptick was a response to Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s bloody incursion into Gaza in early 2009.

But while incidents in the Middle East are relevant, the root cause of the problem between Jews and Muslims in Europe isn’t simply the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it is primarily the failure of European states to integrate immigrants, Muslims in particular.

Governments throughout Europe have struggled for the last half-century to expand their notion of citizenship. Muslims who came from North Africa and Turkey as workers in the 1960s and early 1970s were expected to go home eventually. But they stayed and built families in Europe. Today, their children and grandchildren are still defined as second- and third-generation immigrants rather than as Belgian, French or German.

This is partly because many Europeans cannot quite imagine how Islam and a secular European identity might co-exist. It is also because the once-marginal anti-Muslim ideas of the far right have become more mainstream; Muslims have replaced Jews as the scapegoats of Europe. If Muslims in Europe so thoroughly identify with the Palestinian cause today — posters at rallies for the right to wear the hijab often call for a free Palestine — it is partly because a weak Palestine subs in for their own maligned population.

And so while Gutman’s diagnosis of the problem rings true, his fix for it is misguided. In that speech in late November, he said that the solution to tensions between Jews and Muslims in Europe “is in the hands of Israel, the Palestinians and Arab neighbors in the Middle East.”

In fact, the real answer lies much closer to home: according to a position-paper by the Brookings Institution, if Muslim communities in Europe felt less marginalization and had more economic opportunities, they would resort less to misdirected violence. Although attacks on Jews are scary and hard to explain away, there is no broad and systematic anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe, neither among Muslims nor among the rest of the population. This is not 1936.

The key to helping Belgians understand the attack on Océane is not to sit down with Benjamin Netanyahu. It is to sit down with the girls who punched her and find out how to make them feel welcome in Belgium.

 


Sarah Wildman writes about the intersection of culture and politics, and history and memory in Europe and the United States.

 

via latitude.blogs.nytimes.com

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Fettuccine w/ a Peanutty Sauce & Mushrooms, Broccoli, Spring Onions, Tofu and Scraps of Chicken-65

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"Are you dumb because you know me not, Or dumb because you know?"

Flower-Gathering by Robert Frost

I left you in the morning,
And in the morning glow,
You walked a way beside me
To make me sad to go.
Do you know me in the gloaming,
Gaunt and dusty gray with roaming?
Are you dumb because you know me not,
Or dumb because you know?

All for me? And not a question
For the faded flowers gay
That could take me from beside you
For the ages of a day?
They are yours, and be the measure
Of their worth for you to treasure,
The measure of the little while
That I’ve been long away.

Ig

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On This Day: January 9

Updated January 8, 2012, 1:28 pm

NYT Front Page

On Jan. 9, 1968, the Surveyor 7 space probe made a soft landing on the moon, marking the end of the American series of unmanned explorations of the lunar surface.

Go to article »

On Jan. 9, 1913, Richard Milhous Nixon, the first American president to resign from office following his involvement in the Watergate scandal, was born. Following his death on April 22, 1994, his obituary appeared in The Times.

Go to obituary » | Other birthdays »

 

On This Date By The Associated Press

1788 Connecticut became the fifth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
1861 Mississippi seceded from the Union.
1968 The Surveyor 7 space probe made a soft landing on the moon. It was the last of America’s unmanned explorations of the lunar surface.
1972 Reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes said a purported authorized biography of him by Clifford Irving was a fake.
1987 The White House released a memorandum prepared for President Ronald Reagan in January 1986 that showed a definite link between U.S. arms sales to Iran and the release of American hostages in Lebanon.
2001 Apple Computer Inc. introduced its iTunes music management software at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco.
2005 Mahmoud Abbas was elected Palestinian Authority president by a landslide.
2006 “The Phantom of the Opera” became the longest-running show in Broadway history, surpassing “Cats,” which ran for 7,485 performances.
2007 Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone.
2009 The Illinois House voted to impeach Gov. Rod Blagojevich. (The Democratic governor was removed from office by the state Senate later in the month.)

Current Birthdays By The Associated Press

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Wife of Britain’s Prince William

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, the wife of Britain’s Prince William, turns 30 years old today.

AP Photo/Mike Nelson

J.K. Simmons, Actor

Actor J.K. Simmons turns 57 years old today.

AP Photo/Matt Sayles

1928 Judith Krantz, Author, turns 84
1934 Bart Starr, Football Hall of Famer, turns 78
1935 Dick Enberg, Sportscaster, turns 77
1941 Joan Baez, Folk singer, turns 71
1944 Jimmy Page, Rock musician (Led Zeppelin), turns 68
1950 David Johansen, Rock singer (New York Dolls, “Buster Poindexter”), turns 62
1951 Crystal Gayle, Country singer, turns 61
1965 Joely Richardson, Actress, turns 47
1978 Chad Ochocinco, Football player, turns 34
1978 A.J. Mclean, Singer (Backstreet Boys), turns 34

 

Historic Birthdays

Richard M. Nixon 1/9/1913 – 4/22/1994 37th president of the United States (1969-74).Go to obituary »
80 Lemuel Shaw 1/9/1781 – 3/30/1861
American jurist
88 Carrie Chapman Catt 1/9/1859 – 3/9/1947
American feminist leader
68 Joseph B Strauss 1/9/1870 – 5/16/1938
American civil engineer; designed the Golden Gate Bridge
67 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 1/9/1875 – 4/18/1942
American sculptor and arts patron
75 Giovanni Papini 1/9/1881 – 7/8/1956
Italian journalist and novelist
81 Dame Gracie Fields 1/9/1898 – 9/27/1979
English entertainer
39 Richard Halliburton 1/9/1900 – 3/23/1939
American travel writer
72 Chic Young 1/9/1901 – 3/14/1973
American cartoonist
78 Simone de Beauvoir 1/9/1908 – 4/14/1986
French feminist writer
71 Kenny Clarke 1/9/1914 – 1/25/1985
American drummer
56 Gypsy Rose Lee 1/9/1914 – 4/26/1970
American striptease artist

 

via learning.blogs.nytimes.com