Film: The Sting

It still works, after all these years (1973). Fun.

Sahara

A Bogart film; pretty much what I expected: minimalist sets, gritty acting, a bit (nay, more) propaganda; fun.

Why Evolution Is True

Why Evolution Is True
By Jerry A. Coyne
(Viking, 282 pages, $27.95)

In a couple of weeks, on Feb. 12, biologists the world over will celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday. Throughout the year, at festivals galore marking his bicentennial, "On the Origin of Species," a mere 150 years old, will be hailed as one of the greatest works in the history of the sciences. News of these events is likely to leave many American citizens bemused, possibly even irritated, for, as public-opinion surveys reveal, most of our countrymen have grave doubts about the truth of Darwin's theory. The skeptics are not just rustic provincials, people deprived of serious educational opportunities. Prominent politicians and recent presidents are among them.

That would be one George Walker Bush, surely.

Despite what you might have heard, the mere fact that a majority of Americans would prefer to have Darwinism "balanced" in the biology classroom with "rival theories" is not one of the major tragedies of our time. For thoughtful and accomplished scientists, however, the public's inclination is a sign of a dismal attitude toward science, a blind stubbornness in responding to evidence -- in short, the triumph of prejudice over reason.

How refreshing to read such words: not one of the major tragedies of our time. Too often leftists and liberals and academics make it seem that unless their opinion is heeded the universe will collapse.

Darwinism is thus a claim with several basic components, and the book is structured by carefully exhibiting the evidence for each. Making that structure explicit allows readers to recognize just where they are in the argument. As they follow Mr. Coyne's parade of evidence -- his discussions of the fossil record, of vestigial traits, of the ways in which living things constantly make novel use of the bits and pieces they have inherited, of the distribution of plants and animals -- the components of Darwin's thesis are sequentially supported. We have a list of things to be shown, they are shown and the truth of evolution is established.

Of course, then there is bumper-sticker expression that the faithful simply accept as true: God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.

Monarch Migration

PBS program: Alien Empire

Monarch butterflies have one of the world’s most fascinating migration paths. Every fall, thousands of the black-and-orange butterflies fly west to their wintering grounds in California

and Mexico, covering the trees there with their bright shimmering wings. The remarkable sight attracts scores of tourists: Pacific Grove, CA, has earned the nickname “Butterfly Town, U.S.A.” for the host of Monarchs that gather there every year. Come spring, the butterflies fly back to their summer homes, where they will lay eggs and die. A typical butterfly will make just one round trip during its lifetime.

For centuries, people puzzled over exactly where the millions of Monarchs that spend their winters in Mexico and California came from. But in 1937, a researcher named F. A. Urquhart began putting wing tags on the butterflies, allowing him to track some of the travelers. In the 1950s, he expanded the project, enlisting more than 3,000 volunteers across the country in his Insect Migration Association. For more than 20 years, the volunteers helped track the marked insects, contacting Urquhart whenever they found or saw a marked Monarch.

The results of the tracking project astounded many people. One tagged butterfly was tracked along a 1,870-mile route. Originally tagged on September 18, 1957 in Highland Creek, Ontario, it was spotted again in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, four months later. Of course, the butterfly’s actual flight distance was even longer than a map suggests, because the insects don’t fly in a straight line. They must dodge mountains, fight against winds, and flee predators on their perilous journeys.

Today, thousands of people continue to tag monarchs in an effort to study their migration. In 1997, for instance, the research organization Monarch Watch helped volunteers place small sticky wing tags on more than 75,000 butterflies. And in 1998, it distributed more than 200,000 tags to people interested in helping out with the annual tracking project. While the group isn’t sure how many of the 1998 tags actually made it onto butterflies’ wings, at least 35 marked monarchs were spotted at their wintering grounds in Mexico. One had flown at least 1,844 miles southwest from where it was tagged in Campbell, MN, to its roosting spot in El Rosario, Mexico. But some tagged monarchs took off in unexpected directions. One butterfly flew about 550 miles due west from western Kentucky to Lindsborg, KS, where trackers Grant Linder and Hannah Giles spotted it.

FDR quote

In gathering books for a display) Obama, FDR, Lincoln and ML King)on the main floor of the Library, I researched FDR a bit, and found this great quote.

Some Roosevelt critics in the wealthy business community said he was leading the United States into communism. During the Great Depression he said to his business detractors: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Emphasis added.

Praise song for the day.

Elizabeth Alexander's poem for the Inauguration of Barack Obama as POTUS.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009
THE POEM

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

Ladri di biciclette

Bicycle Thiefs - Vittorio de Sica's 1948 film. A fascinating aspect of it is seeing how poor and devastated Italy was after WW2. In black and white, it has a stark feel, an almost desperate air at times, enhancing its impact. Early on there is a scene where the lead character, Antonio Ricci, leaves his bicycle to be watched by a kid, and the anticipation of its being stolen is palpable. As an aside, I mention that when Ricci returns the kid is nowhere to be seen, though the bicycle is still there.

Funny Face

Always wonderful to hear Gershwin music. Yet this film tries my credulity: Astaire was 58 when the 1957 movie was released; Audrey Hepburn 28; they were paired romantically, a concept that really does not work all these many years later. 30 year difference; did it ever work? The music is good. Paris look great. Cliches abound: swans and white doves are merely the beginning; berets, smoky clubs, syrupy accents. Still, buy the premise, buy the film. If you analyze it, you ain't gonna enjoy it. Just suspend cynicism. It does work. Audrey Hepburn dancing bebop, beatnik dance; Astaire doing softshoe; they are wonderful. Kay Thompson, an actress I did not know, and an actress who made very few films (four?) does a really nice job.

The Wizard of Tuskegee

Up From History (excerpt)
By Robert J. Norrell
(Harvard University Press, 508 pages, $35)

After decades of neglect, Booker T. Washington is the subject of a timely reappraisal

A century ago, the most consequential black person in America was a biracial man who had been abandoned by his father and raised by his mother, and who favored a nonconfrontational style of politics. Sound familiar?

Eerily so. Booker T. Washington was seen as a sort of Uncle Tom in times when radicalism and defiance were the orthodoxies. But ...

Washington went on to advise four U.S. presidents and he dined at the White House with fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt, a black first. His 1901 autobiography, "Up From Slavery," was translated into seven languages and became the best-selling book ever written by a black. Andrew Carnegie called him the second father of the country. Many of America's other moneyed men, including John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, were admirers and major benefactors. Harvard and Dartmouth gave him honorary degrees. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells sang his praises, the latter calling him "a public man second to no other American in importance."

Must recall that TR was an heir to Lincoln; Republicans both. Progressives. Democrats had bee Copperheads, Dixiecrats. As for B.T. Washington, there was more, much more.

For two generations after his death, Booker T. Washington remained widely appreciated. Numerous schools, parks, streets and black-owned businesses were named in Washington's honor. He was the first black to have his likeness appear on a U.S. postage stamp and commemorative coin. In 1942, a Liberty ship was christened the Booker T. Washington. And in 1956, marking the 100th anniversary of Washington's birth, President Dwight Eisenhower created a national monument to the former slave.

Think: in 1942 the Army was segregated, and a ship was named for Washington. But then came the protests.

But Washington's star began to dim in the 1960s, when the style of civil-rights advocacy was given over to protest, condemning authority and challenging the status quo at every turn. The thrust of Washington's message was self-improvement. His focus was the development of the black population of the rural South. His unwillingness to practice protest politics, however, has earned him the scorn of many modern-day critics, who dismiss him as too meek in his dealings with whites.

Why couldn't he be respected, and built on? Ideologic orthodoxies require conformity to the party line.

In "Up From History," a compelling biography, Robert J. Norrell restores the Wizard of Tuskegee to his rightful place in the black pantheon. Just as important, Mr. Norrell explains how ideological imperatives can cloud clear thinking, even among historians who should know better.

Mr. Norrell, a history professor at the University of Tennessee, says that this "present-mindedness of historians writing about race" is a function of the fact that many had themselves been activists and admired the accomplishments of civil-rights protest. "A presumption entered the thinking and writing that protest was correct," he writes, "and for most the only legitimate, means of improving minority conditions. By the mid-1960s Washington was understood to have been the enemy of activism, the Uncle Tom who delayed the day of freedom."

Victory by Longbow

Agincourt
By Bernard Cornwell
(Harper, 451 pages, $27.99)


Reviewed by Ron Maxwell
Mr. Maxwell has written a cinematic trilogy on Joan of Arc titled "The Virgin Warrior." He wrote and directed the motion pictures "Gettysburg" and "Gods & Generals." His Web site can be found at www.ronmaxwell.com.

Wyeth's White Wonder

Film: The Earl of Chicago

It worked, barely; and beside learning that Robert Montgomery was not only a Republican but a friendly witness before witch-hunting anti-Communist committees, it's okay. Barely. Saw it on TCM.

Film: Kite Runner

Well done.

Names in film: Rostam and Sohrab.

Rostam (Persian: رستم, pronounced [ɾostæm],[ɾʊstæm]) is a mythical hero of Iran and son of Zal and Rudaba.

Sohrab or Suhrab (Persian: سهراب) was the son of Rostam, and Rostam was from Samangan who later married Thahamina daughter of Shah Kabul, "king of Kabul". In that time the ancient name of Afghanistan was Irna pronounce "err-na", Aryana. He fought Sohrab in Balkh, which is in Afghanistan.

Rostam

The Obama Generation

New York : Doubleday, 2009.


An interesting excerpt from what promises to be a good book. A couple of interesting phrases.

"I'd like Barack Obama to be president," Mr. Young said, to a burst of applause from a small hometown audience in 2007. But then he added: "In 2016." The applauders were caught up short. A few booed. At that point, Mr. Young was still supporting his old friend Hillary Clinton. Mr. Obama, he decided, wasn't even close to ready. "It's not a matter of being inexperienced," Mr. Young said in a matter-of-fact tone. "It's a matter of being young."

In 1968 he was 36. Being young didn't get in his way.

What Mr. Young exposed that night in Atlanta was a rift between black politicians born in the 1930s and 1940s and those born in the 1960s and 1970s. "I had a hard time believing the Obama phenomenon," he admitted a year later. The world view of the older politicians, many of them preachers like Mr. Young, was defined by limitation. They couldn't eat at lunch counters. They couldn't sit where they liked on buses or vote how and for whom they liked. They couldn't attend the schools they preferred or aspire to the jobs they believed they were qualified to hold. Every time one of those barriers fell, it was power seized, not given. They marched, they preached, and they protested.

Excellent point: Andrew Young had to fight for power; he couldn't understand that Obama didn't have to, in good part because of what he had done.

Another reason Mr. Obama had some trouble convincing black voters is because it had seldom been done this way before. Most black elected officials would never have been elected to office if they had to rely on white voters. Instead, they benefited from a civil-rights movement that created power through artfully drawn black majority districts. Once inside the circle, officials elected from these districts -- especially in Congress -- acquired a power of incumbency that virtually guaranteed re-election, year after year after year. The white political power structure, happy with separate but equal, generally looked the other way to protect their own politically safe preserves.

Separate but equal; a fascinating phrase.

Mr. Obama and other new generation politicians like him correctly saw the change coming. The most well-known black leaders had begun to age out. The big names -- Jesse Jackson Sr., Vernon Jordan and Colin Powell -- are in their sixties and seventies.

Joseph Lowery is 87. Martin would have been 80.

The Obama generation is, for the most part, in their thirties, forties, or at most fifties, with their own networks and ideas about the best way to seize power.

At most 50s; whew! I just make it.

With few exceptions, most younger black politicians around the country embraced Mr. Obama immediately as a kindred spirit. For the civil-rights icons, it was more complicated. Oakland, California Mayor Ron Dellums, 72, chose to support Mrs. Clinton over Mr. Obama, but even he acknowledged the shifting winds. Black leaders, he said, have got to stop treating change as a threat. "You have to update your analysis, update the nature of your politics," he says. "You can't be 1958, you can't be 1968, you have to be 2008, but you build on those realities."

Meanwhile, civil-rights luminaries like Roger Wilkins, a 76-year-old historian, journalist and veteran activists saw Mr. Obama's rise as a natural evolution. "I love this transition," he said, "because my generation has done its work. Whatever one thinks of the result of that work, it was consequential work, and it did help change the nation."

"But now we're old," he continued, "and there are people whose path we made possible who see the country very, very differently than we did."

A Reading List That Shaped a President

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

Lincoln in the telegraph office

Read about him and his book in caption to picture in James McPherson's new book: Tried by war : Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief

Lincoln in the telegraph office : recollections of the United States Military Telegraph Corps during the Civil War / by David Homer Bates ; introduction to the Bison books edition by James A. Rawley

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Lincoln, c1995

Black Men Built The Capitol

Guilford, Conn. : Globe Pequot Press, c2007

Saw author on the telly.

Technology: 2008 in Review

#5 - Ebook readers
#4 - Clouds, clouds, everywhere
#3 - Microblogging
#2 - The Rise of the Netbook
#1 - iPhone 3G

A find

Eye disease gave great painters a different vision of their work, Stanford researcher says.

In searching for a poem about Monet having refused an operation on his eyes, I found this item. The poem is Monet Refuses the Operation, by Lisel Mueller.

Folks Are Flocking to the Library, a Cozy Place to Look for a Job

HWPL certainly has been busier lately, the last few weeks, or so, compared to months ago. I can not know why.









Shamika Miller works on a computer at the Stockton-San Joaquin County Library in Tracy, Calif., a town that has been ravaged by mortgage foreclosures.

The financial crisis has caused a lot of withdrawals at the public library.

A few years ago, public libraries were being written off as goners. The Internet had made them irrelevant, the argument went. But libraries across the country are reporting jumps in attendance of as much as 65% over the past year, as newly unemployed people flock to branches to fill out résumés and scan ads for job listings.

Of course, the Internet itself is no replacement for actual research, not entirely. But I myself criticized the old model, and doing so got me in a lot of trouble In Library school.

Other recession-weary patrons are turning to libraries for cheap entertainment -- killing time with the free computers, video rentals and, of course, books.

Books, too, of course.












An average of 230 people a day line up to use the 27 computers at Randolph County Public Library in Asheboro, N.C.











A patron browses the science fiction and fantasy section of the Tracy library, which has seen an increase in the number of people using their materials.