BOB'S BITS

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"Physics is what physicists do." (Unofficial) motto of the Cavendish Laboratories.


Before the word was in use real “science” was being done, and it produced fascinating contrasts between sophisticated discoveries and primitive methods. At a time when identification was a major concern, some scientists tasted their way to fame and death. Henry Cavendish was another early pioneer, and though his family wealth enabled him to build, or have built, some surprising lab equipment, it was still stone age stuff and with it he made space age discoveries. Born on October 10, 1731, in the south of France, Cavendish returned to the family seats (plural) and was educated at Cambridge. His father, Lord Charles Cavendish, himself a “scientist,” brought the boy up to be curious, and Henry was soon a member of the Royal Society and trustee of the British Museum. Working alone and with others (whom he credited fully, for he was pleasant if reclusive), he made basic discoveries about the weight, distribution, and nature of atmospheric gases, notably hydrogen, determined that water was made of two gases, and made several accurate predictions about electricity. Most amazingly to me, in 1798, in his back garden, he weighed the earth (and came within 1% of the modern measurement). Henry died in 1810. In 1874, the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge was named for him in honor of his discoveries (and to address the equipment issue!!). It was paid for by another Cavendish, and has produced 30 Nobel Prizes.

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"[In Cretan excavations] there are no masculine deities, not a single one . . . No woman worth her salt . . . could fail to be intrigued.² Alison Fell.
Harriet Ann Boyd was born October 11, 1871, in Boston. Today, her papers can be studied at leisure at the “Five Colleges Archives” in Massachusetts, for Harriet spent a good deal of her career teaching at Smith, where (in 1892) she earned a distinguished BA in Classics. She then studied ancient archaeology at the American School in Athens, but (as a woman) was frustrated to be typecast there as a classics librarian. Being independently minded she left the school library to serve, first, as a nurse in the Greco-Turkish War (1897, for which she won a military decoration from Greece) and then, before it was very safe at all, returned to Crete to work an archaeological site (at Gournia) where she made important discoveries. Back at Smith, she bagged an MA, taught classics, and went to Crete summertimes to continue her excavations. While there she met and (aged 35) married an English scholar, Charles Hawes, and brought him back to the US where they had two children (Alex and Mary). Both continued their academic and archaeological careers, Charles at Harvard and Harriet at Wellesley. She took time off to nurse allied troops in Corfu and France during WWI but wrote two path-breaking studies (one jointly authored with Charles) and continued to break ground and break tradition as a woman in charge of important digs, not to mention of herself. Harriet died in 1945. In 1992 her daughter and granddaughter memorialized her in a biography entitled Born to Rebel. Indeed so. ©

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Oktober what?


Today we salute the festival which gives more people a better excuse to drink more beer than nearly anything else, for it’s the 203rd anniversary of the first Oktoberfest, October 12, 1810, in Munich, Bavaria. Nowadays the Oktoberfest is celebrated for the hell of it, but the rationale for Oktoberfest I lies in the name of the place where Oktoberfest CCIII will start, the Theresienwiese: “Theresa’s field”. The first Fest was held to celebrate the wedding of Ludwig, Crown Prince of Bavaria, to Therese, Princess of Saxe-Hildburghausen. Oktoberfest I included consumption of beer, but appears to have been mainly the setting for a horse race. During Ludwig’s reign (he became King Ludwig I) Munich added an agricultural fair, a carnival, and a civic parade, among other things, although heaven knows what they do in Hermann, MO, where they have their own Oktoberfest (you can go this month). Other innovations (the famous beer mugs, for instance) came in later, after Ludwig I’s death. Ludwig I was a true eccentric, putting up weird castles and walking about in old clothes that made him look like the gardener. Still, in the eccentricity stakes his grandson Ludwig II romped home the clear winner. Whether or not Bavarians enjoyed their lunatic Ludwigs, they have certainly enjoyed their Oktoberfests. An old-fashioned “Prosit!!” for Crown Prince Ludwig, the Princess Therese, and their Oktoberfest. ©

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"Please look after this bear. Thank you." [sign on a small bear abandoned at Paddington Station, London.)


It might be said that children’s tales become classics once they successfully cross national, linguistic, and generational barriers. This test radically cuts down the number of possible classics, but one that makes the grade is Paddington Bear, a London bear (albeit an immigrant) who was born “by publication” on this day, October 13, in 1958 and is still going strong at 55. Paddington Bear attracts young readers (and hearers), for he understands that when you are a small, abandoned orphan from darkest Peru it’s a particularly good idea to be polite, yet he has courage and character: he is a spirited bear. Paddington does right by people who are good to him (especially the Brown family who found him in Paddington Station), often against the odds. But don’t mess with this bear; when someone wrongs him or a friend he ripostes with his patented “hard stare”, a glare which—small children know very well—can knock the knees of even the biggest adult. By now, Paddington and his family the Browns have had 70 adventures in 30 languages. He has a market presence, too; his new boots (1984) caused a world boom in children’s “Wellies.” Paddington is a very franchised bear. He is shortly, one hears, to be voiced by Colin Firth in a Warner Brothers extravaganza celebrating his characterful life and exciting adventures. Happy Birthday to Paddington, and also to Michael Bond, who bought a bear for his wife on Christmas Eve, 1956, and then had the good sense to write a story about it. ©

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"The monarchy must be either more absolute or quite abolished. " Dismal Jimmy (The scots' nickname for James II/VII).

Those who think it a sensible tactic to test government to destruction might well ponder the example of James II of England. James Stuart, born on October 14, 1633, first watched his father, Charles I, test England to destruction, lose his head (1649) as a result, and then did it himself. With his brother’s death (April 1685) James became king on the crest of a Tory reaction that embodied the nation’s willingness to buy stability even at the price of a Catholic king. James’s first parliament (in the spring and early summer of 1685) made him the richest monarch in English history, with an income that meant he would never have to ask parliament for more. Within four years James had thrown it all away, and he symbolically (and cravenly) sealed the deal by throwing the Great Seal of the Kingdom into the tidal Thames before fleeing to France. His miscalculation was that he could bully parliament into repealing the anti-Catholic laws that defined the Protestant Reformation, and towards that end he invaded the constituencies, narrowed the franchises to secure “false” majorities, and insisted on loyalty oaths in parliament, the army, the towns, and in the judiciary. At first dismayed and then angered, the Tories who loved James in ’85 abandoned him in ’88, and insured with the Revolution Settlement of 1689 that James would be the last English king to rule by divine right. His daughter Mary and his nephew William came to the throne by contract, governed by consent, and played party politics as an art of the possible.

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"I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled." Wodehouse, 'The Code of the Woosters'


October 15, 2013 is the 132nd birthday of P. G. Wodehouse, a humorist for sure, but also a master craftsman of prose and plot. His prodigious output in novels, short fiction, plays, musicals, and journalism was drafted and redrafted until it was just right. Taken together, his humor and his craftsmanship have excited the admiration of a disparate literary list from Rudyard Kipling through Douglas Adams to Zadie Smith, Hugh Laurie, and J. K. Rowling.Wodehouse was famous also for his collaborations with Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, Cole Porter, and George and Ira Gershwin, and he is said to have been the creator of the modern Broadway musical. Politically naïve (at best), Wodehouse invented several fictional worlds in which readers can revel in ludicrous plots, precise prose, and memorable characters. The Wodehouse worlds best known are those of Bertie Wooster, mainstay of London’s Drone’s Club, his good aunt Dahlia and his bad aunt Agatha, and Jeeves, his imperturbable valet of huge intellect; the Earl of Emsworth, Emsworth’s fearsome sister Lady Constance, their romantically inclined progeny, and the Earl’s prize sow, the Empress of Blandings; and the Anglers’ Rest, the riverside pub where Mr. Mulliner tells stories of his innumerable nephews’ misadventures in Hollywood, where most of them served as yes-men to dictatorial movie moguls. Read a Wodehouse (pronounced “wood-house”) and be converted to a life of inconsequent pleasure. ©

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"Lux et Veritas." (Yale motto. ) "I knew it, I knew it. Born in a hotel room and, God damn it, died in a hotel room." Last words of Eugene O'Neill.

On 16th October we celebrate the birthdays of Yale University and the dramatist Eugene O’Neill, which would have been a nicer coincidence had O’Neill attended Yale, or even Harvard. Instead, he went to Princeton, whence he was soon expelled for tossing a brick through the station-master’s window at Princeton Junction. Yale was founded on 16th October 1701 as “the Collegiate School at Killingworth” to counteract liberalism at Harvard (founded 1636), and Yale long remained a bastion of Congregationalist conservativism and a pillar of the Connecticut establishment. Eugene O’Neill would not have approved of either role. Born on 16th October 1888 to an actor-impresario-hotelier father and an apparently domestic mother, O’Neill’s formal education came to a juddering halt with his expulsion from Princeton, although he did later attend a writing course at Harvard. O’Neill enjoyed his first big success with Beyond the Horizon, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920. He was to win two more Pulitzers, but not for his most famous plays, which were a bit too rich for the Pulitzer committees. These included The Hairy Ape, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, which he directed should not be staged until 25 years after his death. O’Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, and died in 1953, but not before he married his daughter Oona off to Charlie Chaplin (1943). Yale still lives, and is, arguably, still rather more conservative than Harvard, and certainly much more so than Eugene, Oona, or Charlie. ©

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³We are what we eat² (Ayurveda saying).
October is food month, for it saw the birth of H. J. Heinz (October 11, 1844) and then, as we needed something with our ketchup, gave us Charles Kraft on October 17th, 1880. Today Heinz & Co seems very proud of old H. J., but it’s hard to learn about the human beings (Charles and brother James) who founded Kraft Foods. Maybe Kraft has forgot its human roots and would like us to think it was created on the 6th day, just before God rested. A Just-So Story of the food industry. But what they do tell you is interesting. Between 1960 and 1988, Kraft bought Baker’s Chocolate (founded 1780), Philadelphia Brand Cheese (founded 1880), Oscar Mayer Pork Butchers (founded 1883), Calumet Baking Powder (founded 1889), Maxwell House Coffee (founded 1892), C. W. Post Cereals (founded 1895), JELL-O (founded 1897), and the Edwin Perkins Company (makers of KOOL-AID, dummy!!—founded in 1927). But in the market economy, big fish eat little fish and then are eaten by even bigger fish, and in another part of the aquarium, Phillip Morris Tobacco and General Foods were dining well. Then, in 1985, Phillip Morris inhaled General Foods and, still starving, went on to ingest Kraft in 1988, and in 1989 this megacompany became Kraft General Foods,which in 1993 gobbled Nabisco and in 1995 became Kraftfoods. Voila!!! So next time you eat your Cream Cheese, remember where it came from. Or try a small dairy, organic brand. It will taste better, traveled less, and was probably made by human beings.

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"L'état, c'est moi." Lately attributed to Senator Theodore Cruz, but really it was Louis XIV
On this day we mourn one of many high water marks of religious intolerance, Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 18th October 1685. The original edict (issued by Henry of Navarre in 1598), meant to end France’s destructive “wars of religion.” Henry had been raised a Protestant, and had converted to Catholicism in order to become king, famously saying “Paris is well worth a Mass.” Henry’s attitude, and his Edict, arose from the humanism, skepticism and realism of a Renaissance prince. Henry’s Edict was sustained by successive monarchs, but Louis XIV was of a different kidney. Not so much a devout Catholic as he was a devout monarchist, Louis saw the Edict (and French Protestantism) as inimical to his sovereignty. But the ill winds the “Sun King” unleashed on France blew good to other parts, in the emigration of 500,000 of France’s most progressive folk. These were the Huguenots: haute bourgeois, ships’ captains, crafts-men and women. Most went to Britain and Holland, where they strengthened ideologies that equated Catholicism with arbitrary power and stimulated economies already more dynamic than France’s. But many fetched up in Britain’s American colonies, where they gave us New Rochelle, Faneuil Hall, the du Ponts of Brandywine, and many revolutionary heroes including Paul Revere and Henry Laurens. Better still, the Huguenots contributed, from deep in their collective memory (including the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572), to America’s evolving separation of Church and State. ©

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"The only real satisfaction [in climbing] is to go where no man has been before and where few can follow." Annie Peck.


Annie Smith Peck was born in Providence, RI, on October 19, 1850, the only girl in a family of three successful boys. She’d wanted to follow her brothers to Brown but it was men only, so she left home after high school (she was a whiz at math and Latin), moved to Michigan, and taught those subjects at Saginaw High School. When (1871) the state university opened its doors to women she walked in (over her father’s objections), then walked out with a BA and MA in Greek and sailed to Europe to continue her studies at Hannover and Athens. In Athens she caught two bugs, archaeology and mountain climbing, which odd pursuits (odd for a mid-Victorian female) brought her back to Purdue and Smith (to teach archaeology) and to the American west to climb more peaks. Then, in 1895, she climbed the Matterhorn and began to be noticed, not least because she wore trousers. (The New York Times took time out from printing all the news fit to print to disapprove of her trousers.) Soon Annie specialized in South American peaks, where she got the idée fixe that Aconcagua was not the continent’s tallest. It was, but she climbed several good candidates, including some first ascents, and some of those in her 70s. And, oh yes she was, Annie became a famous campaigner for votes for women, easily the least surprising thing about her extraordinary life. Annie Peck died in 1935 and is buried near her brothers in Providence. I think they never left home.

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"There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.”― John Dewey
20th October is an important day for UMSL and its Honors College. For on this day in 1859, in Burlington, Vermont, was born John Dewey, often called “the father of progressive education” in the USA. He was also a philosopher, and is associated with the peculiarly American philosophy of pragmatism. Dewey insisted that education should aim to build democracy. Nor should it be restricted to an elite, and while the educational process was in some ways inherently elitist, it should not have elitist goals, but democratic ones. Dewey was also a proponent of “learning by doing,” opposed to teaching by rote, and urged a student-centered, “outcomes” model of education. We see Dewey’s influence especially in land-grant universities with their public service ideal and (relatively) open admissions criteria, but also in such elements of our Honors syllabus as direct reading of original sources, open discussions, undergraduate research, and internship programs. Possibly dominant after WWI, Dewey’s school faced a conservative backlash, led by Robert M. Hutchins at Chicago and Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia University (where, by the way, Dewey wasprofessor). John Dewey survived Butler and died in New York City in 1952. Butler’s conservatism was discredited by his racism and Pecksniffian morality, but other elements of our program owe something to Hutchins’ canonical “Great Books” approach and, arguably, to his abolition of football at Chicago.

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"How rich will we be when we have converted all our forests, our soil, our water resources, and our minerals into cash?" --Ding Darling

Jay Norwood Darling was born in Norwood, Michigan, on October 21, 1876. After a lifetime drawing cartoons, some of which would win Pulitzer Prizes, he spent his declining years in a mansion (not his own) near my parents’ house and to which I delivered papers. I never saw him, although he made guest appearances at my dad’s journalism classes. He got his BA at Beloit where he edited the yearbook and signed his pieces D’ing, and it was as Ding Darling that he cartooned for the Des Moines Register and the New York Herald Tribune from 1917 to 1949. Today he would be difficult to classify, for he was a “progressive Republican,” a defunct genus born of Teddy Roosevelt but rooted in the Midwest. Since calling someone a progressive Republican, these days, would range between oddity and insult, it might help to know that he was a leading conservationist. Indeed, he was appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a Democrat) to head up the US Fish and Wildlife Service, founded the National Wildlife Federation, and has state parks and national wildlife refuges named after him in Iowa, West Virginia, and Florida. Ding also invented the U S Duck Stamps, and drew the very first design of the very first duck stamp. His cartoons advocated conservation, contour plowing, crop rotation, clean water, fiscalresponsibility, isolationism, and, from time to time, both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. Ding was friendly with both, from time to time, but this was before Republican politics fell prey to testosterone andcertainty, a heady mix.

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"O what a piece of work is man?" "Too bad to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!" Imagined chat between W. Shakespeare and D. Lessing.


If Doris Lessing is alive—and one hopes that she is indeed lively—she will be 94 years old today. She only received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, when she was (at 88) the oldest person ever to receive that award. So one might well ask, what took the Nobel committee so long? Possibly it was because Lessing took a long time to get up a body of literary work. Of English nationality, she was born Doris Tayler in Iran, October 22, 1919, educated (mostly by herself) in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), married a man called Wisdom, had two kids, divorced, became an agitator against racism and apartheid, and married a German (Herr Lessing) before she ever published a novel. But she had something to say and a compulsion to say it. So strongly did she feel that she left her second husband and her children and moved to London in order to write. And write she did, starting with The Grass Is Singing (1950),Retreat to Innocence (1956), and The Golden Notebook (1962). While many would call her a feminist, she rejects the label on several grounds and, indeed, went through a Sufi period after she shed her Marxism (and after a spell of science fiction writing). She has now decided she doesn’t like religion much either, regarding religion, feminism, and for that matter Marxism as prone to “oversimplified statements.” Happy birthday, then, to a complicated writer who seems to have stood the test of time in several ways.

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"I wanted to teach everyone about everything." Pierre Athanase Larousse.


I missed Noah Webster (October 16, 1758) and by way of amends I will celebrate Pierre Athanase Larousse, born on this day, October 23, in 1817. One thinks of lexicographers as dour folks, rigid, conservative to a fault, but this would wrong Webster and Larousse both. Perhaps their radicalism derived from their impatience with sloppy, inexact diction. The rigor mortis of establishments often shows in their language, stilted and false, depending rather on dead authority than lively sense. Or perhaps it stemmed from their humble origins, Webster the son of a farmer, Pierre Larousse a blacksmith’s boy in a small, isolated village somewhere between Troyes and Orléans. But he won a scholarship to a teaching school and there chafed at the authoritarian methods he was asked to employ. In 1851 he formed a partnership with Augustin Boyer and they began publishing (at Librairie Larousse et Boyer) books urging teachers to cultivate students’ creativity. But they had bigger game in mind, publishing the Petit Larousse in 1856 and then, in 1863, beginning the long publication history of the Grand dictionnaire universel de XIXe siècle. The Petit and the Grand helped to shape modern France. The multi-volume Grand was finished by Larousse’s nephew in 1876, a year after Pierre’s death “by exhaustion.” A brave effort with at least as big an effect as Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language. Vive Larousse!!!!! Bravo Webster!!!!! Let our motto be, “look it up.” ©

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I`ve got the Jewish guilt and the Irish shame and it`s a hell of a job distinguishing which is which." Kevin Kline.


October 24 offers riches indeed, including the Wall Street Crash (the 1929 edition) and the birth, also 1929, of composer George Crumb (still composing at Arizona State, thus proving the staying power of eccentricity). But the Cards lost last night so we’ll defiantly settle on a St. Louis birthday, that of Kevin Kline who (believe it or not) is 66 today. Life began for Kevin Delaney Kline (to clarify his Irish-Jewish parentage) on October 24, 1947. After Priory School, he packed off to Indiana University where he wasn’t a great student but did catch the acting bug. Drama turned out well for Kevin, but not before quite a bit of journeyman work in traveling companies, commercials, and in the awful soap Search for Tomorrow. He made his big breakthrough in the late 70s on the New York stage in light roles and musicals, including an unlikely musical version of The Return of the Native, which I must remember not to attend if it ever comes to town. Soon Frank Rich dubbed our Kevin “The American Olivier”, and he may deserve it. Kline brings a good acting presence to whatever role he plays, and since he has been at least as choosey as Olivier “Which Kevin Kline is your favorite?” would be a great acting-out parlor game. I would be torn between his elegantly sad Cole Porter (in De-Lovely, 2004) and his awful Otto West, a minor hood with major flaws, in A Fish Called Wanda (1988). Kline’s versatility would suggest that he has a lot more left in him than we have yet seen, so many, many returns to our St. Louis B-day Boy. ©
Robert M. Bliss

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"They saw their sun standing at its zenith and assumed it was there to stay." Arnold Toynbee.


The Cardinals won last night, 4-2, and this morning on ESPN and in the Post-Dispatch, the experts are telling us how it happened. Their patterned narratives tend towards the inevitable result. Listening, or reading, we too easily forget the anxiety (for fans, the agony) that during the real game attended every pitch, every swing, every catch. For baseball is a game of chance, as well as skill, and one game’s result can hardly be “right.” Why all this on October 25? That’s because it’s the 213th anniversary of Thomas Babington Macaulay, born on this day in 1800, whose History of England from the Accession of James the Second, is rightly regarded as a classic, but a classic of “Whig history.” Macaulay’s whiggish sins were not venial. For him the Protestant and parliamentary supremacy that attended James’s downfall was, in some sense rightly, inevitable. Whether whiggish inclined historians write about a race, an empire, a class (or, in our own time, about a market economy), they repeat our sportswriters’ fallacy. Their problem was sensed by Arnold Toynbee when, as a boy, he watched Queen Victoria’s Jubilee parades. “History”, he thought, was something that happened to someone else in some other part of the world or at some other place in the social order. And if you write about it magisterially, as Macaulay surely did, in vivid detail, in full command of the evidence, and with great narrative skill, whig history assumes a force that is felt today, as we read about the fated triumph, in Game 2, of the St. Louis Cardinals or as you might read Macaulay’s tale of James II’s rise and fall. Take it with salt, and enjoy it. Next time it could turn out differently.

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Clinton's Ditch


American politicians are not famed for the pith and vigor of their sound-bites, but one such utterance has attained symbolic status, and that is that government is not the solution but, rather, the problem. Today would be an appropriate time to reconsider that inanity, for it’s the 188th anniversary of the opening of the Erie Canal, assuredly a government exercise in problem solving. After eight years of slog, taxes, and bonds, on October 26, 1825, Governor DeWitt Clinton pulled the plug and water flowed from Lake Erie to the Atlantic, and with it a tidal wave of goods, people, and money. Erie transformed the upper Midwest, spurred the growth of our capital markets, made New York our largest city and, several historians have shown, injected entrepreneurship into American culture. It was built by the state of New York, and its dramatic success led to a rash of capital improvements by other states and to demands that the national government get into the act. Such ideas were opposed by the South, but southern secession in 1861 fixed that problem and immediately congress turned to use public resources to build railways and roads, to create state universities, to improve harbors, to make our great rivers into highways of trade, to explore new methods of taxation, to print paper money by the bushel, and, not incidentally, to win the Civil War. It’s known as problem-solving.

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on attending a Paganini concert.


October 26, 2013 is the 231st anniversary of the birth, in Genoa, in 1782, of Niccoló Paganini, certainly the greatest violin virtuoso of his time and, in addition, a fine composer, guitarist and violist. Indeed it was he who commissioned Hector Berlioz to compose the viola concerto “Harold in Italy” which, if you haven’t heard it yet, you should. Ironically, Paganini never performed the concerto, although he continued to send Berlioz money and believed the young Frenchman to be the Beethoven of his age. So Paganini could also spot talent in others, not always a strong point of artists who, like Paganini, were also gifted self-publicists. He began on the mandolin, became (with his father) a refugee from the French invasion of Italy, but adeptly then became court violinist for Napoléon’s sister, installed as the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. But most of his fairly short life (these Romantics lived hard and died young) was spent as a freelance, and he commanded top performance fees and composing commissions. An interesting sidelight to his career is that he became associated with famous instruments, some of which he owned, including three Stradivari, two Amati, and a Guarneri. These instruments now command stratospheric prices, partly because of their association with the maestro. Paganini died of syphilis, or the treatments for it, in 1840. Since some associated his great talent with the devil, it took some time for his body to find a churchyard. The Pope allowed burial in 1844. ©

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³The chief element of happiness is . . . to want to be what you are.² Erasmus, In Praise of Folly.
We will forsake both the Statue of Liberty and the Jefferson Memorial Arch (October 28th coincidentally ties them together) for Desiderius Erasmus, probably born October 28, probably 1466, and probably in Rotterdam. The author of In Praise of Folly (1511) would have enjoyed our uncertainty and told us to stick to the facts. His parents (a Catholic priest and a serving woman) did stick together to raise their boy, and his brother, but they died before he was grown. By then, Erasmus was a student in Holland’s best school, had Latin and was getting Greek, and disliked the rules of the Brothers who ran the place. But poverty drove him into the priesthood where he would become one of the leaders of the North Europe Renaissance, operating out of Paris, Cambridge, Leuven, and Basel, among other places, usually at a university, and usually pressing for reform of the church but not for its “Reformation.” Erasmus worked for a good translation of the New Testament, for wholesale changes in monastic orders, for inner piety rather than sacrificial duties, for reason over tradition, for taking seriously secular literature, for the end of priestly celibacy, but he always drew up short of (for instance) endorsing Luther (or any other Protestant). The unity of the Catholic Church and temperance in debate were two of his touchstones. He would be damned by the Protestants for not going far enough and he would be damned by the Catholics for going too far. An optimist might conclude that Erasmus outlasted them all. ©

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"When we realize finally that we aren¹t God¹s given children, we will understand satire". Bill Mauldin.

One of our more gifted cartoonists was born on 29th October, in 1921, in New Mexico. Bill Mauldin was born into a military family and educated at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He volunteered for the army in 1940, and quickly joined the 45th Infantry’s newspaper, where he created “Willie” and “Joe”, grizzled enlisted men who ironically commented on the bad lot that war was for the ordinary soldier. Their attitudes (and their stubble) offended General George Patton, who threatened a court martial until General Dwight Eisenhower ordered Patton to lay off. The realist Ike thought Willie and Joe were good for morale. Mauldin’s wartime cartoons (in Stars and Stripes) won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, making him the youngest-ever Pulitzer. After the war, Mauldin’s cartoons proved too liberal for many, and he rolled around Hollywood, ran for congress (in rural New York), and did special issues (as for the funerals of Generals Omar Bradley and George Marshall, thought by Mauldin to be popular generals with Willie and Joe). If this was obscurity, Mauldin was rescued from it by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which he joined in 1958 (and immediately won another Pulitzer). By 1963 he had moved to the Chicago Sun-Times, where he famously memorialized Kennedy’s assassination by depicting Lincoln’s statue weeping, head in hands. Bill Mauldin, who died in 2003 with the new rank of First Sergeant, is himself memorialized by a “Willie and Joe” postage stamp and a plaque in the St. Louis Walk of Fame. He is buried at Arlington.

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"Music is neither old or modern; it is either good or bad." Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine).

One of the odder, sadder stories in classical music is that of Peter Warlock, and we begin with the fact that his real name was Philip Arnold Heseltine and that he was born in a posh London hotel, The Savoy, on 30 October 1894. His parents, wealthy and cultivated, used the hotel as their main residence. His father died in 1897, but a more formative influence came when Philip heard a Frederick Delius concert in London in 1908. In the same year Philip began an academic career that would take him to Eton, Oxford, and Cologne, sometimes pursuing Delius but from age 17 writing perceptively about other modern composers like Arnold Schoenberg. He arrived at Oxford “a young Greek God” but quickly decamped to London where he continued to see Delius and secured a position as music critic for a major newspaper. Here he began to conduct, to make friends with literati like D. H. Lawrence and musicianslike Thomas Beecham, and fall in love with interesting women. He continued his music scholarship with a book on Carlo Gesualdo, an eccentric choice perhaps, and began to compose, mainly songs and choral pieces. His songs are lovely, lyrical pieces often rooted in folk music, some mysterious, some dark, still others (e.g. setting Hilaire Belloc to music) lightly humorous. He had also become fascinated with his Celtic (Welsh) roots and the occult, and composed most of these works as Peter Warlock. Peter Warlock is today still well worth a listen.

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"Here I stand. I can do no otherwise." Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, 1521.

On 31st October 1517, a mere 496 Halloweens ago, a trick-or-treater all togged out in black robes and a funny hat knocked on the door of the Castle Cathedral in Wittenberg and, instead of shouting “trick or treat” (or soaping the windows) he left a piece of paper, nailed to the door, with 95 “theses” written on it. It was not a late essay, although he was already worried that he might be too late, and his simple act caused a lot of trouble (from one point of view) or heralded a new birth of freedom (from another). One could say that the message on the cathedral door effectively announced THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION, THE CATHOLIC COUNTER-REFORMATION, THE SPANISH INQUISITION, THE RELIGIOUS WARS OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE (INCLUDING FRANCE AND THE LOW COUNTRIES), and in its own sweet time helped further to fuel the Renaissance, the English Civil War, the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, and a few other interesting changes (including, arguably, the rise of capitalism and secularism) that helped to bring about what we (lacking perspective) are pleased to call the modern world. That early trick-or-treater was, of course, Father Martin Luther, then (but not for much longer) a priest of the Roman Church, and soon to be the father (pardon the pun) of the Lutheran confession, itself later to split, schismatically . . . It just goes to show, I guess, that some graffiti artists are more influential than other graffiti artists. ©

[Stanley]

"How would you like a job where, every time you make a mistake, a red light goes on and 18,000 people boo?" Jacques Plante.

1st November 2013 is the 402nd(!!!!) anniversary of the first staging of Shakespeare’s comedy The Tempest, probably at The Globe (there’s pun on the theatre in the text), but let’s not talk trivialities. The better story, and one that has also to do with masks (that’s a pun, too), is that today is the 54th anniversary of the first occasion on which a National Hockey League goalie wore a face mask. The goalie in question was Jacques Plante of the Canadiens, who had been arguing over the mask with his coach, Toe [sic] Blake (who opposed it on grounds of “tradition”). Then the argument was settled. On November 1, 1959, playing against the Rangers at Madison Square Garden, Plante (maskless) was hit in the face by the puck and cut badly (the main cut running from the corner of his mouth up into his nostril). Plante was stitched up by the phlegmatic MSG surgeon Dr. Kazuo Yanigisawa (who could “stitch a wound, smoke a cigar, and play gin rummy all at the same time”) and returned to the ice wearing his mask. At first, Plante was mocked for his “cowardice”, but gradually his idea took hold. Besides the slow spread of sports sanity (still in progress, one faintly hopes), among the reasons were Plante’s own eminence (he won the league’s most valuable goalkeeper prize six years running) and his eccentricity (he also knitted all his own woolens). As for cowardice, forget it. Before Plante donned the mask, he had suffered four broken noses, a broken jaw, two broken cheekbones, and over 200 stitches. After all that, he said, “I didn’t care how the mask looked.” Bravo, Jacques Plante, whose good sense allowed him to play hockey for another 16 years.

[Stanley]

"Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge." George Boole.
“In all probability”, to coin a phrase, a man named Boole had a connection with algebra. And it was so. George Boole was born into respectable poverty in Lincolnshire, England on November 2, 1815. His parents, active in radical politics and the local Mechanics’ Institute, encouraged their boy to develop his talents. So young George was given time to teach himself Latin, Greek, Italian, German, and French, to count Dante as his favorite poet, and to become familiar with the works of Aristotle and Spinoza. But he loved math and logic and, pretty much self-taught, published his first mathematical paper at age 24. He had wanted to get a Cambridge degree, but having to conform to the Church of England seemed too much trouble, and a second major publication (extending Leibniz’s work on logic and math) won him appointment to the faculty at Queen’s College, Ireland. His work there came to the attention of Charles Peirce, at Harvard, who in turn helped to make Boole world famous, at least in some sets. Boole’s next two papers, in 1859 and 1860, basically invented Boolean Algebra. By this time, the British establishment knew they had a genius on their hands, and Boole had honorary degrees from Trinity Dublin and Oxford, election to the Royal Society, and five daughters who would find their road to intellectual notice somewhat easier than that trod by their dad. George Boole died, still a young genius, of pneumonia, in 1864. ©

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"All sedentary workers . . . suffer from the itch, are a bad color, and in poor condition." Ramazzini, De Morbis Artificum (1700)

Most would say that occupational medicine is a modern field, and they would be right as long as they include the 17th century in the “modern” era (and since it’s the century of Hobbes, Newton, and Leibniz, why not?). Today’s birthday is that of the founder of “occupational medicine,” Bernardino Ramazzini, born on the isle of Capri on November 3, 1633, comfortable but not opulent circumstances. His schoolers sent him to university at Parma, where he first studied philosophy and then medicine. Although the medical profession in Italy didn’t have a formal structure, we could say that Ramazzini did his residency in Rome where he found an interest in the connections between workplaces and diseases. Italian medicine was still dominated by Galen and the ancients, but Ramazzini was a cause-effect sort of thinker, as befit the modern era, and counted Gottfried Leibniz among his wide-flung correspondents as he tried to puzzle out why people became ill, and with specific symptoms. Practicing in Modena, he wrote on “epidemic” diseases of the region, from chick-pea poisoning to malaria, and then in 1700 produced his masterwork, De morbis artificum diatriba (roughly, Diseases of Artificers), in which he identified maladies specific to 52 crafts and trades and urged that one of the first questions to ask a patient was, “where do you work?” By now famous throughout Europe, Ramazzini lived out his career in the chair of medicine at Padua, working on epidemic diseases in the Veneto, and a member of (among others) the Royal Prussian Academy.