BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Rejoice! Rejoice! Edward Heath, 1990, on hearing of Mrs. Thatcher's resignation. When asked whether he had been accurately quoted, he responded that he had said Rejoice! three times, not twice.

Edward Heath was born at home, in Broadstairs, Kent, 100 years ago, on July 9, 1916. His father was a carpenter, but also a contract builder, and the family occupied that subtle and shifting English frontier between the working and middle class. It was becoming less unusual for such a boy to get into Oxford or Cambridge, but it was still a struggle. It took Heath two years to land a place at Balliol, Oxford, and then it was without a scholarship. But the money was got together (mainly a loan from his local authority) and he went. It was even more unusual for such a lad to win a position of authority (Secretary) at the Oxford Union, become president of the university’s Conservative Association, and yet back a socialist (the Balliol master, A. D. Lindsay) in the Oxford by-election of 1938. It was a protest vote against the Munich Agreement, and while the experience did not shake Edward Heath’s Conservative loyalties it did mark him out as a young man who could learn from experience (including in Spain, during the Civil War, as part of a student delegation, where he saw fascism first-hand). He wore his other oddities quite well, including bachelorhood and music (he was very accomplished at both), was certainly a competent student (in “PPE”, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) and after the war Major Edward Heath graduated up through the Tory ranks to become, in 1966, Leader of the Conservative opposition and, in 1970, Prime Minister. Economic crises, oil embargoes, Northern Ireland, and Europe conspired to make it a troubled and short premiership, but as Prime Minister Edward Heath continued to show that ability to learn from experience (notably his disillusion with the infamous Barber budgets of 1971-2) that in modern politics is deemed a weakness and in which his successor, Margaret Thatcher, did not and perhaps could not share. ©

[Stanley]

I leave you love. I leave you hope. Mary McLeod Bethune, Last Will and Testament.

One hesitates to pronounce any patient dead, but it really does look as if the historic association of the Republican Party with its black, southern base is now over, departed, expired, petrified, and six feet under. Exactly when it died is in some dispute. In 1960, in my first political campaign, I found it apparently alive and well in Des Moines, as I canvassed a black neighborhood on behalf of Richard Nixon and was encouraged to find many people who “always” voted Republican, who had pictures of Lincoln (and even Eisenhower) on the wall. Perhaps the mortal blow was struck in 1964, with the Goldwater candidacy. But in reality, by 1960, the patient was already poorly. A symbolic beginning of the end could have been when in 1936 Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt asked lifelong Republican Mary McLeod Bethune to join his so-called “Black Cabinet” (as volunteer, for it was a highly unofficial body) and to serve (for pay) as Director of the Division for Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration. Bethune, born in southern rural poverty on July 10, 1875, had already accomplished miracles as an education pioneer in Florida, had founded a school which had through struggle (and often against racist threats and taunts) become an accredited four-year college (now Bethune-Cookman University), and had served in at least two Republican administrations (Coolidge’s and then Hoover’s). But in the 1930s Ms. Bethune (the lady with the hats) became bosom buddies with Eleanor Roosevelt and trusted advisor to Franklin. She continued that role through the war and with Harry Truman was an honored guest at the White House, entering through the front door just like folks. For all that Mary McLeod Bethune might have stayed a Republican, but Joe McCarthy said she was a Communist, and thereby hangs our moral tale. If they don’t love you, don’t join them. ©

[Stanley]

For my part, I must say that science to me generally ceases to be interesting as it becomes useful. Sir William Robert Grove, 1891.

It’s been my good luck to know scientists who were gentlemen (or gentlewomen), but the species known as the gentleman-scientist is extinct, its supporting ecology long since evaporated. Their discoveries ‘made’ modern science, though, as they pottered along, often working at home, or on the estate, or in the country rectory, corresponding with each other, sometimes even clubbing together. The most famous of them was undoubtedly Charles Darwin, but today we should give a thought to another of the type, William Robert Grove, born in Swansea, Wales, on July 11, 1811. The son of a gentleman, Grove was privately educated until he went off to Oxford to study classics. But along the way and by design he learned quite a bit of science, helped to form a club of the like-minded in Swansea, and began to be known as a tinkerer. He joined the Royal Institution in 1835, married a young woman he found there and took her on a European honeymoon which was a kind of scientific sabbatical. Grove was an adept at electricity, inventing a new battery (the Grove Cell), producing but not perfecting an incandescent electric light, and showing some genius in understanding what electricity had to do with chemical bonding. Light, too, occupied his attention, both in photography and in what happens to light in the vastness of the universe, and he speculated fruitfully on the conservation (or not) of matter and energy. But Grove wasn’t quite as well off as Darwin, and so he found a day job as a barrister, and then a high court judge, and finally, now Sir William Robert Grove, as Privy Councilor to Her Majesty Queen Victoria. From this eminence Grove urged public funding of science, the opening up of scientific societies, and the advancement of science education, and so helped to bring about the end of the gentleman-scientist as a distinctive species. ©

[Stanley]

Are the Knossos and Pylos tablets written in Greek? Work Note 20, sent around to other language scholars on June 1, 1952, by Michael Ventris.

Not many great discoveries in linguistics have been announced over national radio, but this is how the world learned (on July 1, 1952) of Michael Ventris’s decoding of ‘Linear B,’ the ancient language (circa 1450 BCE) of Minoan Crete. An academic outsider (not yet thirty, and an architect by trade and training), Ventris broadcast his findings on the BBC’s Third Program (a nightly potpourri of music and the arts). But Michael Ventris was an unusual fellow. Born on July 12, 1922, he grew up in a multi-lingual household (inter alia, English from dad and Polish from mom), and at about age 7 taught himself German by reading a book (in German) on Egyptian hieroglyphics by Adolf Erman. (This, by the way, might be a good working definition of “precocious.”) He became interested in Minoan B at about the age of 12 and worked on this surreptitiously at Stowe School, in England, where otherwise he compiled a mediocre record. It was just good enough to get him into architecture school, where he met and married another architect before heading off to war in an RAF Halifax bomber. He returned to civilian life to take up architecture and parenthood and the Minoan B problem. On this latter, despite its being something of an obsession, he was collaborative in his approach, and surprised himself by deciding that Minoan B was actually Ancient Greek (he had, earlier, thought it to be Etruscan). His BBC talk was heard by John Chadwick, at Cambridge, and Alice Kober, at Oxford, and they joined Ventris to produce a full decipherment of the Minoan script. Sadly, depression was another inheritance of Ventris’s (from his Polish mother), and he died a likely suicide in September 1956, just weeks before the publication of their revolutionary study. ©

[Stanley]

There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory. The Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787.

Twice upon a time, relatively unknown politicians from Illinois made speeches that propelled them towards the American presidency. The first of these prairie comets was Abraham Lincoln, his speech the “Cooper Union Address” (February, 1860), and his purpose to show that the Founding Fathers had deliberately and with moral purpose given the national government the power to prohibit slavery in the territories. It was an extraordinary speech, over an hour long, at once scholarly and eloquent. Lincoln adduced much evidence, but his ‘Exhibit A’ was the Northwest Ordinance of July 13, 1787 by which the national government had barred slavery from the Northwest Territories (today the five states east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio). Through analysis of their actions and their writings, Lincoln reasoned that 36 of the 39 signers of the Constitution (ratified in September 1787) had actually voted for or otherwise demonstrated their support for this exclusionary power and on the grounds that slavery was contrary to the principles of the republic. As important as this single provision of the Ordinance was (and still is, despite current efforts to “prove” that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War), the Ordinance as a whole is of huge significance in many other ways, notably in establishing the principles of simple land titles (limited only by public domain concepts), public support for public education, the portability of the inalienable rights of citizenship, and the replication of republican institutions in new territories. So the territorial expansion of the USA would be democratic rather than imperial. At the Cooper Union, Abraham Lincoln joined together the Ordinance of 1787, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to argue that ours was, by design, a union of freedom. ©

[Stanley]

Is everybody happy? F. L. Maytag's morning question at his Newton factory.

My son Daniel’s research on small-town economic planning in the American Midwest has turned up many facts new to me, including that three of the four states most dependent on manufacturing employment are Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin. So the life of Frederick Louis Maytag—who made the small town of Newton, Iowa, the “Washing Machine Capital of the World”—becomes something more than a curiosity. Maytag, eldest son of German immigrants, was born on a farm near Elgin, Illinois, on July 14, 1857. The family moved to Iowa when “F. L.” was in his teens, and in the 1880s he partnered in a small Newton company that manufactured and retailed farm implements. Twenty years later he owned the company, renamed it, and looked around for a product that would sell throughout the year. He credited his “engineer,” Howard Snyder, with the inventions (notably the “gyrafoam” agitator) that transformed the Maytag company into a maker of washing machines, and by the 1920s Maytag was the town’s largest employer (and very nearly the largest in Iowa), and was also established as Newton’s leading philanthropist, benefactor, gadfly, and town booster. He paid good wages, too, and doubled down on the benefits by building houses for his employees, selling them the properties at a discount. He retired in 1926 but went on tinkering with the company’s products, the town’s amenities, and “his” workers’ lives, becoming perhaps the best-loved millionaire in America. The company kept its employees on pay during the Great Depression, and when F. L. died in 1937 10,000 of them and their families attended his funeral, Maytag sales and service staff coming on special trains from around the country. The company was buried when Whirlpool bought it in 2005 and closed its Newton works in 2006. And thereby hangs a different tale. ©

[Stanley]

We need to return from the self-centered concept of sincerity to the other-centered concept of truth. Iris Murdoch.

Calvinism (aka Presbyterianism and its variants in the Anglophone world) has produced some brilliant novelists. Perhaps writing a novel—creating a world and then arbitrarily working out its characters’ fates—mirrors the problematic Calvinist mix of God’s fated foreknowledge and our (usually perverse) free will. Right now, Marilynne Robinson writes Calvin into her fiction (notably in Gilead, 2004) and (in real life) is a pillar of her Iowa City church and a profound commentator on the moralities of American politics. Another woman novelist of intensely Calvinist leanings was Iris Murdoch, whose Irish families (she was born in Dublin on July 15, 1919) were, variously, Presbyterians or Plymouth Brethren. And although she abandoned her Christianity altogether (after a brief flirtation with Catholicism), her (many) novels are said to return again and again to essentially Calvinistic themes, pilgrimages, fate, free will, as her characters struggle (usually valiantly if futilely) against a world not of their making. Murdoch was also, characteristically, a philosopher, best known in that guise for her 1967 essay “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts.” After a tempestuous studenthood (in war’s shadows) at Somerville College, Oxford, Murdoch worked for several years with relief agencies in war-torn Europe and engaged in several passionate affairs, all the while learning more than anyone needs to know about undeserved fates, and she began writing it all up in the 1950s. One might say (and Peter Conradi has said) that her novels are peopled by her acquaintances and shaped by her experiences. Her long, intimate, and intellectually productive relationship with the philosopher John Bayley (they married in 1956) ended only with her death in 1999 and is lovingly chronicled in the movie Iris (2001) starring Kate Winslet as the young and Judi Dench as the aging Murdoch. ©

[Stanley]

The English have loudly and openly told the world that skis and dogs are unusable in these regions and that fur clothes are rubbish. We shall see — we shall see. Roald Amundsen.

It is one of the minor ironies of history that the tragedy (in several ways a noble one) of the Robert Scott expedition has almost completely obscured the success of the Roald Amundsen group in reaching the South Pole first, in December 1911. Scott and his men reached their goal 34 days later, exhausted, malnourished, and already fearing that they could not make it back, the Norwegian tent and flag at the pole mocking their failure and marking their fate. Part of the Norwegian success owed to Amundsen’s learning in the arctic the usefulness of dogs as transport and (grisly thought) as diet. Of the 52 dogs that set out to carry Amundsen and his four comrades to the pole, eleven survived the journey in, so to speak, dog form. The rest made it back as protein supplement for the humans. It is not yet fully clear what provoked the exploration mania of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some human flaw no doubt, but young Roald Amundsen, born on July 16, 1872, caught the disease big time (probably from reading about the Greenland exploits of Fridtjof Nansen) and after 1905 tied it to a strong desire to celebrate Norway’s independence from Sweden. His mother had disapproved, and until she died in 1893 Roald kept up the myth of his medical studies, but once she was gone he was off, first on a Belgian expedition, later on Norwegian ones. His wide experience in Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland exploration taught him the importance of nutrition and transport, and he saw a solution of both problems in sled dogs. His successful jaunt to the South Pole was not without its problems and crises, but his men and a few of his dogs survived them all, planted their flags, and returned safely to his famous ship of exploration, the Fram. Amundsen would meet his own end searching for missing air crew in the Arctic, in 1928. ©

[Stanley]

The challenge for me has been to see things as they are. Berenice Abbott.

In 1959, Des Moines Roosevelt was one of few schools chosen (in our post-Sputnik panic) to pilot a new physics course, “PSSC Physics” (for the Physical Science Study Committee at MIT). The 23 of us chosen for the class had a new teacher, too, Herman Kirkpatrick, “Mr. K.,” (he actually had a Ph.D.), who was very young, rather homely, highly intelligent, and utterly marvelous in lab and classroom. What we didn’t know but may have noticed was that the course text (which came out in installments) had great b&w pictures showing (among other things) light diffraction, gravitational effects, something called wave length, and “A Bouncing Ball In Diminishing Arcs.” Most of these photos were the work of Berenice Abbott, and Mr. K. really should have taken some time to teach us about her. Herself the child of a small Midwestern city, born on July 17, 1898, Abbott shook the Ohio dust from her feet and moved to Greenwich Village, where she took up poetry with Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, and then to Paris, where she was converted to photography by Man Ray. She worked for peanuts in Ray’s Montparnasse studio and speedily developed an independent talent. By 1925 she’d got her own studio and had become fashionable amongst the Parisian avant garde and its expatriate coterie. The Joyces sat for her, so did Gide and Cocteau, but her forte was the city, its streets, its habitants, its structures large and small, its raindrops, its shadowed, shuttered windows. Abbott worked in black and white and although technologically innovative she returned again and again to picture “the real” in large format, highly exact photos. By the late 1940s, her definition of “the real” included the physical universe, and Berenice Abbott’s association with MIT (which had begun in the early 1950s) virtually guaranteed that we would see her work in the PSSC textbook as Mr. K. struggled, brilliantly and with missionary zeal, to make us love physics when, really, some of us should have fallen in love with Berenice Abbott. ©

[Tizer]

Liberty was a jewel which was handed down to man from the cabinet of heaven, and is coeval with his existence. Lemuel Haynes, ca. 1776.

In 1774, as revolutionary enthusiasm spiced the New England air, one of the first recruits to the Hartford, Connecticut Minutemen wrote a fevered poem in the title of which he described himself as “Lemuel a young Mollato who obtained what little knowledge he possesses, by his own Application to Letters." That was accurate enough, although by age 21 Lemuel Haynes already possessed quite a lot of knowledge. Born illegitimately on July 18, 1753, this child of an African father was regarded by his mother’s “respectable” family as a blot on the escutcheon, and as was customary in New England Congregationalism was bound over to a local farmer who, in return for his trouble and expense, was to hold Lemuel as an indentured servant until he reached adulthood. So he joined the militia as a free man, but by then he was already a convicted Christian, having experienced an intense conversion some years earlier. After his war service, he was offered the chance to enroll at Dartmouth College, but instead apprenticed himself to a Congregationalist minister to continue his studies in Latin, Greek, and theology. By the time of his death (in 1833) Haynes had pastored three Congregational churches (in Connecticut, Vermont, and New York), achieved some eminence in Congregational church affairs (especially during his long Vermont tenure), married and fathered a family, and received an honorary degree from Middlebury College. These were important accomplishments for a man of African ancestry, and should be regarded as such, but as Haynes often reflected, sometimes wryly, sometimes bitterly, he was never fully accepted even by his own congregations. His anger survives in some important anti-slavery writings and in his life’s story, one to be told “against the odds.” ©

[Tizer]

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. Edgar Degas.

Among the artists of Paris’s fin de siècle, some were born poor but others learned how to be bohemians. Among the latter was Edgar Degas, born into wealth on July 19, 1834. His family possessed money and pretentions, and as Edgar moved into the art world he changed his name from De Gas to Degas, probably in order to become more like the rest of us. Nor did his descent from budding lawyer to artist please his banker father, although his early ambition to become an historical painter (depicting grand events or persons from the past) may have pacified dad somewhat. But as the art world was increasingly gripped by the impressionist insurrection, Degas moved from historical to contemporary subjects and developed what seems to have been a fascination with ballet and horse racing. At about the time his father died, his brother René (with whom Edgar had lived, in New Orleans, for several years) went spectacularly bankrupt, and Edgar sold off his inheritance (property and capital) to meet René’s debts, thus achieving bohemian status the hard way. It didn’t last too long. He had adopted some aspects of impressionism and quite a stable of impressionist friends, and his now contemporary subject matter found a market. As he sold his own, he bought others, and amassed a distinctive collection. But the artistic community always regarded Degas as a difficult person, quarrelsome to a fault, and his style never fully absorbed impressionism’s genius with light or its obsession with the moment of perception. His alienation from the impressionist school deepened with the anti-Semitic position he took on the Dreyfus affair and was symbolically consummated by his blindness. His works survive, and you can see several of them, including draft sketches and two sculptures (a dancer and a horse) at the St. Louis Art Museum. ©

[Tizer]

20 July
The second ingredient of Watergate, an amoral alacrity to do the president's bidding, was traceable less to flaws in his own political character (although it was reinforced by them) than to the political and cultural evolution of twentieth century ...

When during the ‘Watergate Affair’ the US Attorney General resigned his post, The Guardian’s man in Washington thought it to required a special explanation for English readers, and wrote that Richardson was “a New England man,” a descendant of the first settlers. This was more puzzling than enlightening, but it was a fact. Elliot Lee Richardson, born on July 20, 1920, was indeed a child of the Puritan purple, his father a professor at Harvard medical school. He duly attended Harvard, edited The Lampoon, graduated cum laude, fought with exemplary courage at Omaha Beach and after, returned to civilian life to edit the Law Review at Harvard. He then clerked for Judge Learned Hand and Justice Felix Frankfurter (a formidable pair) before embarking on a career in public service (elective and appointive) that has few parallels. He was, inter alia, US Attorney for and Attorney General and Lt. Governor of Massachusetts, then (in the Nixon administration) assistant Secretary of State. He subsequently held four cabinet posts (a record), among which his third, as Attorney General, was the shortest. Appointed in May 1973 to bring credibility to an administration already (we now know) suicidally wounded, he resigned on October 20 rather than carry out President Nixon’s order to fire Archibald Cox, Special Prosecutor in the Watergate Case, who had sought access to the ‘Watergate tapes.’ Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused the order and had the satisfaction of being fired before Cox himself was sacked by Robert Bork. The tapes nevertheless surfaced, in the process submerging (or, if you wish, exposing) Nixon’s and his cronies’ criminalities and crudities. Nixon resigned and was pardoned. Several of his hacks went to prison. Elliott Richardson went on to further public service, initially as Gerald Ford’s Secretary of Commerce, and continued his life as a New England man. ©

[Tizer]

My dear Ray[mond Massey], in my time I have played every part in The Prisoner of Zenda except Princess Flavia. C. Aubrey Smith.

Hollywood in its heyday, after the advent of talkies but before the onslaught of TV, not only dealt in cultural stereotypes but created a few of its own. Some of these, e.g. the childlike, perpetually happy, and mentally negligible black slave, did real damage and are now seen as embarrassing at best, museum pieces of prejudice . Others have survived, notably the gallant Englishman whose stiff upper lip (often partly concealed by a moustache) delivers an exaggerated accent, whose aristocratic bearing sees him through the most appalling challenges, whose dry humour [sic] and phlegmatic courage bring relief to those in peril, and who has a superlative command of the art of understatement. Sean Connery’s James Bond was a latter day example, but the founding father of the species was C. Aubrey Smith, a magnificent chap who knew how to be a magnificent chap, taller than anyone on Rodeo Drive, moustached and eyebrowed almost to caricature, and withal the leading light in the Hollywood Cricket Club, a sanctuary where he and his select friends could practice at being English. Born in London on July 21, 1863, Smith was really too old to be in the movies at all, but he carried his years well and could say that he’d seen it all, Charterhouse School and Cambridge University, prospecting for gold in frontier South Africa, playing cricket for his native country and then for the Transvaal, being pronounced dead (and surviving the experience), and then taking up acting as a kind of second career, stage first, in England, then the silents, mainly in England, but along came the talkies just in time to make this ancient and angular man into Hollywood’s favourite [sic] Englishman. If you keep your eye on the cable schedules, you can still see Smith at work. I recommend his Colonel Zapt in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), but there are plenty of choices. ©

[Stanley]

Thanks Peter for keeping the topic going. I am back in the hutch and on the case so you are relieved of this onerous duty!

Will I ever be able to free myself from this man . . . and the love I felt for him. Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, November, 1955.

Of all the myriad influences that shape lives, for most of us “family” is defining, the warp and woof, the underlying terrain. It also, for many, becomes a yardstick, a standard against which we may measure the qualities and quantities of our present state. “For better or for worse.” It was certainly thus for playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) and, sadly, for his sons too. (His daughter Oona escaped into the happier company of Charlie Chaplin.) Several of his plays depend on family for scene, plot, and character, but his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night, is about nothing else. Although each of the Tyrones tries to be loving, kind, caring, the family fates (their very own Irish stew) render these efforts pathetic and doomed. And yet by the same token they provide a “what might have been” for the family had their fates been kinder. This deep ambiguity gives the play its tragic character and helps us to understand why it was that O’Neill dedicated it to his wife, Carlotta, and indeed delivered it to her on their 12th anniversary, July 22, 1941. “Some anniversary gift!!” you might say, but listen to his dedication and recall that the play was written during their happiest years.

Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play -- write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones. These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light -- into love....

Fully aware of the play’s autobiographical depths, O’Neill directed that it should not be published until 25 years after his death (and “never” performed). Carlotta disobeyed, and (having by then her own demons to exorcise) released the play for its (posthumous) Pulitzer Prize run in 1955, just two years after O’Neill’s death. ©

[Pluggy]

Welcome back Stanley.

[Tizer]

No problem, Stanley, but it's good to have you back!

[Stanley]

Thanks. Nice to be back in my own house and bed!

[Stanley]

There is no use saving the Negro from being lynched . . . if he is to die prematurely as a result of murderous neglect by America's health agencies. Louis T. Wright, 1937.

Louis Tompkins Wright was born (on July 23, 1891) to be a medical doctor. Of course, not too many infants born in Lagrange, Georgia, would become doctors, but his father was one (valedictorian at his medical school), and then his step-father, too, was a physician, a graduate of Yale. And so, unsurprisingly, Louis himself went to Harvard, graduated fourth in his medical school class, served as a battlefield surgeon in the American Expeditionary Force in WWI, and returned to become (eventually) lead surgeon at a big New York City hospital, where he pioneered important treatments in cancer and brain surgery and published much research. Wright died at 61, probably from the long-standing complications of a wartime gas attack, but his daughters Jane and Barbara had by then completed the family circle by becoming research physicians. If we stopped there the Wright story would be unusual but unsurprising. Many young people follow family footsteps in making their careers, but in the Wrights’ cases the path was made more difficult because they were African-Americans. Wright’s father was born a slave. His step-father was the first African-American to attend Yale medical. And while a student at Harvard medical, Louis Wright himself raised a bit of hell, for instance by picketing (for three weeks!!) a cinema showing Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Much more emblematic of the racist challenges facing him was Wright’s (successful) protest when one of his Harvard professors barred him from attending the birth of a white baby. As a surgeon, Wright continued his civil rights career in myriad ways (he was a living miracle of time management), both in New York City and in the nation, where he served for years as chairman of the board of the NAACP. Dr. Louis T. Wright was a man of many parts and an example for us all. ©

[Tripps]

Had to look it up valedictorian
Thought for a moment that it was related to valetudinarian, but seems not. I heard that word used yesterday on an old episode of Miss Marple.

I heard an American guy on the radio this morning say that private health insurance in USA today, costs $700 per month, with a $6,000 excess. That's lot of money.

[Tizer]

That had me looking up valetudinarian. The first meaning given in Collins is `a person who is chronically sick, an invalid'. The second is `a hypochondriac' and the third is `an old person in good health'. So it seems to mean whatever you want it to mean. A useful word for politicians, I should think. I look forward to hearing the Health Minister using it!

[Tripps]

I never knew that - I always thought it was a synonym for hypochondriac - however

A valetudinarian is unduly anxious about his health. The everyday word for this condition might be thought to be hypochondriac, but there’s a subtle difference: the hypochondriac thinks he’s always ill, but the valetudinarian takes great care to ensure he never is.

A bit off piste, but have we space to squeeze this in? From Mr Rees Mogg who is currently in transit between young fogey, and old fogey -

Jacob Rees-Mogg has made the record books with the use of floccinaucinihilipilification in the House of Commons - now the longest word in Hansard.
The Conservative MP told Andrew Neil the 29-letter word meant the "act or habit of estimating as worthless" and that it "came to mind as it does from time to time".

[Stanley]

It may not be similar to human joy or even comparable, but it is elephantine joy and it plays a very important part in their whole social system. Cynthia Moss, describing elephant 'greeting' behavior.

As a child, I devoured the nature stories of Thornton W. Burgess (1874-1965), came to know Peter Rabbit, Little Joe Otter, and Jimmy Skunk and took as gospel Burgess’s “Mother West Wind” books with their anthropomorphic explanations of animal behavior. I then moved on to Disney nature films, with their ‘almost human’ suspense stories: plot, crisis, and resolution. Such theatrical treatments of nature are perfect for children, and in today’s market for nature documentaries they have transmogrified into new “adult” plot lines, nature bloody in tooth and claw and full of sinister threats, music and narration to match. One hopes for a more scientific approach, one that might lead to a better understanding of our world, and finds it in the brilliant work of such as David Attenborough and Jane Goodall. Another pioneer who treats animals as they are is Cynthia Moss, who today celebrates her 75th birthday, probably on the Amboseli Elephant Reserve in Kenya. Born in Ossining, New York, on July 24, 1940, Moss majored in philosophy at Smith College and then became a Newsweek journalist before going on an African holiday in 1967 where she met with wild elephants for the first time, learned something of their natural lives and the human threats around them, and the next year, aged 28, moved permanently to Africa to become research assistant to Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton. Philosophers learn quickly, and by 1972 Moss was director of her own elephant project, at Amboseli, and already on the way to fashioning, for us, a sensible, scientific view of what makes those magnificent creatures tick, of the constituents of their natural intelligence, of the structures of their animal societies, and of her deeply human appreciation of them. For all that, Cynthia Moss deserves a very happy birthday, so let’s hope that she has one. ©

[Stanley]

The ordinary punishments of slaves, for the common crimes . . . are cart whipping . . . the breaking of bones . . . the slitting of ears, the beating out of eyes, and castration. James Ramsay, 1784.

In the 18th century, the Scottish universities far outshone “Oxbridge” as centers of vigorous intellectual life, one reason that American universities that date from our revolutionary era took Scots’ higher learning as their model. Moreover, Scottish moral philosophy—the “common sense” philosophy—was of considerable appeal to our Founding Fathers, despite (or more likely because of) the religious skepticism demonstrated by such as David Hume and Adam Smith. Smith’s idea of deriving moral principles from observations of human interaction was appealing to those who dared to think that all men might be created equal. Another product of Scots moral philosophy was James Ramsay, born on July 25, 1733. The son of a ship’s carpenter, he was plucked out of school by an Aberdeen University bursary scholarship and deposited in the care of philosopher Thomas Reid. Ramsay took this moral perspective to the West Indies where he served as a surgeon and, observing the brutalizing effects on both poor whites and black slaves of the plantation system, became an outspoken reformer and, in due course, an abolitionist. This rendered him unpopular with the planters who paid his salary and he returned to Britain where he became involved with naval reforms (he showed similar ‘common sense’ sympathies with common seamen, to whom he famously referred as “a band of brothers”) but also a leading light in the growing abolitionist movement, friend of the younger Pitt and mentor to William Wilberforce. Ramsay endured much personal abuse from the planter interest, which may have contributed to his early demise (in 1789) but his anti-slavery publications, based on close, clinical, common-sense observations of slavery in action, are accorded seminal importance in the eventual abolition of slavery in the British empire. ©

[Worth noting that Uncle Bob's Bits has passed 100,000 page views. He is delighted....]

[Stanley]

America . . . conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but can think of nothing to do once it gets there. Will Rogers.

A demographic analysis of the recent Republican National Convention is a dream project that remains to be done, but visually and ideologically it might have been made up of Vergil Gunch, Sheldon Smeeth, Mrs. Opal Mudge, the Reverend John Dennison Drew and most of the other good paleface citizens of Sinclair Lewis’s Zenith, that fictional town inhabited by men (and women) who were even then (1922) beginning to think that big cities had become “notoriously so overgrown that no decent white man . . . who loves his wife and kiddies . . . would want to live in them.” And above all it was the eponymous Babbitt whose life embodied these ideals, or fears, George F. Babbitt by name, a man “nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.” No slouch he, for he won Lewis the Nobel Prize in Literature and gave us a new word, “babbitry,” still useful in describing a certain (shallow, pious, resentful and rambling) kind of public rhetoric. How unfair this usage is, though, to the “real” Babbitt, the entrepreneurial and inventive Isaac Babbitt, about whom far too little is known other than his birth date, July 26, 1799 (in Taunton, Massachusetts), his professions (goldsmith and self-taught engineer and metallurgist), his commercial creations (inter alia the silversmithing firm of Reed & Barton), and above all his leading industrial invention, the “journal box” for train car axles and, more especially still, the ingeniously constituted metal (not so much a compound as a composite of tin, antimony, and copper) that lined those journal boxes and gave them an inner surface that wore so perfectly as to create minute channels through which lubricant could flow and keep the axles rolling coolly along. Babbitt’s metal, it’s called, even though Isaac Babbitt neglected to patent it. But it’s still used, chances are, as the super thin surface of your car’s wheel bearings. ©

[Stanley]

What's Up, Doc? Bugs Bunny.

As Stephen Jay Gould once brilliantly pointed out, cartoon characters actually evolve. It is not an evolution that replicates the natural history of species (after all, cartoon characters do have “Designers”), but there are interesting parallels. As a result, it’s often difficult to say exactly when Mickey Mouse (Gould’s main example) became, well, Mickey. He went “back to the drawing board” too many times. But despite those hazards, we can exactly date the emergence of another cartoon character, with longer ears, cockier bearing, and a sharper tongue than the good-natured Mickey. For it was on July 27, 1940, that a recognizable Bugs Bunny first appeared on the silver screen, directed by Tex Avery, drawn by (among others) Fritz Freleng and Chuck Jones, and voiced by the irrepressible (and long-lived) Mel Blanc. Like Mickey, Bugs had his progenitors, and Freleng and Jones themselves traced his origin to a much more rabbity rabbit in a Tex Avery cartoon of 1938. But besides being less humanoid that ancestral rabbit was more retiring than the real Bugs, and was moreover a country rabbit, voiced (by Blanc) as a comic hayseed sort of bunny. My Bugs, the one I grew up with, was a smart aleck, ‘smoking’ a carrot (out of the side of his mouth), and tormenting his pursuers (classically, Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam) in Blanc’s Bronx-Brooklyn voice (also evolved, since Blanc was from San Francisco and grew up in Portland). The real Bugs’s first real cartoon, the July 1940 one, was entitled A Wild Hare, and it won the director, the real Tex Avery, an Academy Award nomination. By the time I came around, Bugs was an established star, had singlehandedly fought Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, and although there was still some evolutionary distance to travel, he was well on the way to his 1950s classics What’s Opera, Doc? and those encounters with his classic Nemesis, a duck named Daffy. ©