The Good, the Awful, and the Utterly Odd - September 6, 2010

 

Welcome once again to The Spark, your guide to the week's events, anniversaries, and commemorations.

We'll be frank about this week in particular, though; it's always tough to find events around September 11. It's not easy to maintain our (hopefully) snarky tone around such an anniversary, but we'll do our best.

Monday:

Well, obviously, it's Labor Day, which leads us to ask just where in the world the summer went. Wasn't it Memorial Day about ten minutes ago?

We also look at a couple of deaths today. In 1901, anarchist Leon Czolgosz went to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY, and shot President William McKinley. McKinley didn't die right away; he lingered for a couple of days before passing. 

Czolgosz never expressed remorse for the murder and was electrocuted on October 29, 1901. So outraged were people by the murder, though, that his family was refused the right to take the body for interment, and it was buried in the prison grounds, where it was dissolved with a combination of quicklime and acid.

In 2007, Alex, the African Grey parrot who was trained by Dr. Irene Pepperberg, died of sudden and unexplained causes. Alex had a vocabulary of about 150 words, and his intelligence was rated at about the level of a five-year-old human. He could distinguish between shapes, colors, and numbers; had an understanding of the concepts of "zero," and personal pronouns; and could lie and joke.

Two TV premieres tonight. One is The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That on PBS. It's another one of those public television shows that teaches things to kids, but we have to ask when the Cat, who's nothing but a disruptive anarchist in his books by Dr. Seuss, became an authority figure to be listened to. The other premiere is a show on Cartoon Network based on Mad Magazine. Guess there's just not enough content out there for adolescents with undeveloped senses of humor. What hath Judd Apatow wrought?

Tuesday:

In 1921, 16-year-old Margaret Gorman won the Golden Mermaid pageant in Atlantic City, NJ. The pageant was a publicity stunt designed to keep tourists in the city after Labor Day, and officials, no slouches when it came to hyperbole, named Gorman "Miss America." 

The pageant, which morphed from a beauty contest to a scholarship event, used to be a major part of American pop culture, but in recent years has faded to become a failed reality show followed by yet another Vegas spectacle. Sic transit gloria mundi. (Though we don't know if Gloria ever won the crown.)

On this day in 1930, the Blondie comic strip debuted. We've all run across Blondie in our time, but we'll wager you didn't know that Blondie's maiden name was Boopadoop, that she started out life as a gold-digging flapper, or that Dagwood was the son of a millionaire, who disowned him for marrying Blondie. Regardless, the Bumsteads have been married since 1933. That’s a heckuva lot of sandwiches.

Wednesday:

So, Monday, we were talking about Leon Czolgosz, and today we'll mention the 169th birthday of Charles J. Guiteau, who shot President James Garfield in 1881. Guiteau was probably the craziest of all Presidential assassins, shooting Garfield because he had never been appointed consul to France, despite his lack of any qualification.

Speaking of unusual political figures, Lyndon LaRouche turns 88 today. LaRouche, is a perennial Presidential candidate who holds, shall we say, "unique" views, including his belief that Queen Elizabeth is the head of an international drug cartel.

While it’s easy to laugh at LaRouche for the wrong reasons, it's also the birthdays of two men at whom it's easy to laugh for the right reasons: Sid Caesar (1922) and Peter Sellers (1925). 

Caesar was a television superstar in the 1950s, headlining two comedy programs that, thanks to writing staffs that included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, and Larry Gelbart, turned out 90 minutes of classic live comedy every week -- just like Saturday Night Live, only funny!

Sellers came to fame as a writer and actor on the legendary Goon Show, whose crazy comedy paved the way for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, among others. He soon moved on to films, playing multiple roles in such classics as The Mouse That Roared and Dr. Strangelove, before finding film immortality as the blithely incompetent Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films.

A couple of musical anniversaries today. In 1932, Patsy Cline was born. Her soulful singing style made her one of the first country singers to cross over to the pop charts. Unfortunately, she was killed in a plane crash at the age of 30. 

In 1935, a 19-year-old Frank Sinatra made his radio debut as a member of the "Hoboken Four" on Major Bowes' Amateur Hour. The Amateur Hour was a fixture of American entertainment for nearly 40 years and was the American Idol of its day; the only difference being that Major Bowes’s contestants were usually talented.

Speaking of talent, it was on this day in 1504 that Michelangelo's statue David was unveiled in Florence. The 17-foot-tall statue of a naked male soon became iconic, and has probably been as mocked and imitated as any work of art since.

While the David was quite an invention, it's not quite as useful as Scotch tape, which made its debut in 1930, when Richard Drew was trying to come up with a product that would allow for the painting of sharp lines on automobiles.

In 1892, an early version of the Pledge of Allegiance appeared in The Youth's Companion magazine. Suffice it to say, the original did not include the phrase, "One nation under God," which was added by Congress in 1954 at the height of the Red Scare, in order to distinguish America from the Godless Communists of the Soviet Union. 

Those very Communists were provided with some kind of help -- divine or not -- starting in 1941, when the Siege of Leningrad began. For 872 days, the second-largest city in the Soviet Union was besieged by the German army. No supplies got in or out, and Leningrad's citizens were forced to scavenge everything they could in order to survive harsh winters and constant bombardment. There are stories that they even had to resort to cannibalism. Regardless, their withstanding of the Nazis is one of the great stories of perseverance in world history.

Not as heroic, but certainly persistent and hard to avoid is Star Trek, which premiered in 1966. Trekkies may be nerdish and obsessed (for example, we're sure there are those of them who would object to not being called "Trekkers"), but they're certainly literate. And they may well be celebrating International Literacy Day today.

Finally, we note that it's Rosh Hashanah and the beginning of the Jewish high holidays.

Thursday:

A number of birthdays today, including two that run from the sublime to the ridiculous -- which man fits into which category, we leave to you. Colonel Harland Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken was born in 1890, and Mario Batali, the chef who revolutionized American cooking, by, for nothing else, his use of offal and internal organs in his recipes.

To our uncultivated palates, such a diet would lead to a mutiny, which is ironic in that it's also the 256th birthday of William Bligh, whose harsh treatment of his crew led to the mutiny on HMS Bounty. 

On the other hand, such victuals may well have appealed to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the diminutive French artist who died in 1901. (We can’t speak as to whether such a diet led to either his diminished stature or his death. We just report 'em.)

In more baffling events, the NFL season begins tonight with the Minnesota Vikings taking on the New Orleans Saints. (It's baffling because football is a sport for the fall and winter months, and we're still a couple of weeks from the Autumnal Equinox). 

Also, the new season of The Vampire Diaries begins tonight, and we have to wonder just what we have to do to stop this mania for vampires and zombies! Enough already! (Although, maybe Viking quarterback Brett Favre's eerie longevity is due to his being either a vampire or a zombie. Just sayin'.)

Friday:

It's a day for things we like and admire. For example, it's Raymond Scott's 102nd birthday. Scott was a composer and bandleader in the 1930s and '40s who wrote avant-garde songs, many of which (most notably "Powerhouse") were used by composer Carl Stalling when writing the scores for Warner Bros. cartoons. 

We're also glad to celebrate the big 5-0 with actor Colin Firth, who always turns in good work, but who especially endeared himself to many a Janeite with he portrayal of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice. 

Musician Jerry Lee Lewis will perform on Broadway tonight with the cast of The Million Dollar Quartet. And we like the "Stand Up to Cancer" telethon, which will take over the television airwaves tonight in order to raise funds to beat cancer.

Of course, not everything today is likeable. For example, you may recall that last week we mentioned the anniversary of the shooting of Louisiana politician Huey Long. Well, after a couple of days of being hospitalized, Long died-- though whether the fatal bullet came from the alleged assassin or his own bodyguards, no one knows.

Saturday:

As we alluded to earlier, it's hard to be snarky this week, and this day, especially, but we'll try.

First of all, we note the coincidence of ground being broken on this day in 1941 for the construction of the Pentagon, when 60 years later, it would be attacked along with the World Trade Center.

When we were kids, we all knew the words to "Oh, Susanna." (You know, "I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee ...") Well, it was first performed by its composer, Stephen Foster, in 1847 at the Eagle Saloon in Pittsburgh, PA. And how was Foster paid for the song? With a bottle of whiskey, which is an ending appropriate for the work of O. Henry, the writer who specialized in twist endings, and who was born in 1862.

Sunday:

We have a mixed bag to end the week.

First, the birthdays of two groundbreaking men. In 1880, H.L. Mencken was born. Mencken, "the Sage of Baltimore," was a reporter, critic, and etymologist, whose acid coverage of politics and the Scopes "Monkey Trial" alone would have assured him immortality, but who crowned those accomplishments with his investigations into the roots of American English and by coining such maxims as "No one in this world, so far as I know -- and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me -- has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." -- usually misquoted as "No one ever went broke underestimating the good taste of the American public."

The other is Jesse Owens, born in 1913, Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, forever destroying Hitler's dream of using the Games to establish his myth of Aryan superiority.

As groundbreaking as those men were, though, their accomplishments fade in contrast to the French artisans who, 17,000 years ago, created a series of cave paintings in Lascaux, France, that were discovered in 1940. The paintings, which depict thousands of human and animals, give paleontologists irreplaceable insights into the lives and psychology of paleolithic humans.

Speaking of human psychology, we’ll note that today in Russia is the Day of Conception. The Russian government is encouraging citizens of the Motherland to propagate today in hopes that there will be a baby boom on Russia Day, which is nine months from now, on June 12.

We'll close this somewhat somber week by noting the 1995 death of actor Jeremy Brett. Brett labored in relative obscurity until in 1985, when he was cast as Sherlock Holmes. Almost overnight, he became the definitive Holmes for many of us, as his strong and quirky characterization matched the downright oddness of the literary Holmes.

See you next time.

Suggested Sites...

• The Alex Foundation - Polly want a donation.
• Seussville - would you click upon this link? Would you do it with a drink?
• Miss America Organization - combining brains and beauty.
• The Mencken Society - honoring the Sage. 
• Sherlock Holmes.com - the world's greatest detective. Makes Batman look like a bumbler.