Morning Open Thread: This Lion Shapes All Shadow On His Paws

officebss

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday January 20, 2025 · 3:22 AM PST

2025/01/20 · 03:22

no image description available — "If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter" – George Washington

______________________________________________________

“If liberty means anything, it means the right to
tell people things they do not want to hear.”
– George Orwell

______________________________________________________

If a nation values anything more than freedom,
it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it
is that if it is comfort or money that it
values more, it will lose that too.
– W. Somerset Maugham,
Strictly Personal

______________________________________________________

Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post
with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic
for the day's posting. We support our community,
invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful,
respectful dialogue in an open forum. That’s a
feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.

Morning Open Thread is looking for
contributors — either occasional, or
weekly. If interested, please contact
officebss for more information.

__________________________________________

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

__________________________________________

13 poets born in January,
some speak from experience,
others are philosophical,
but they all bring light
to this winter month of
new beginnings and
the not-yet-known

__________________________________________

January 19
__________________________________

1809 – Edgar Allan Poe born, major American author, poet, short story writer, and master of the macabre. He was one of the first Americans to live by writing alone, but he was hampered by the lack of an international copyright law. American publishers often refused to pay their writers or paid them much later than they promised, and Poe repeatedly resorted to humiliating pleas for money and other assistance. On October 3, 1849, Poe was found semiconscious in Baltimore, “in great distress, and… in need of immediate assistance”, according to Joseph W. Walker, who found him. He was taken to the Washington Medical College, where he died at age 40 on October 7, 1849, at 5:00 in the morning. Poe was not coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition or why he was wearing clothes that were not his own.

Epigram for Wall Street

by Edgar Allan Poe
^.
I’ll tell you a plan for gaining wealth,
Better than banking, trade or leases —
Take a bank note and fold it up,
And then you will find your money in creases!
This wonderful plan, without danger or loss,
Keeps your cash in your hands, where nothing can trouble it;
And every time that you fold it across,
‘Tis as plain as the light of the day that you double it!

__________________________________________

January 20
__________________________________

1885 – Ozaki Hōsai born as Ozaki Hideo in Tottori, in the westernmost region of Japan’s Honshu Island; Japanese poet of the late Meiji and Taishō periods, during the beginning of modern free verse haiku. Ozaki attended the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University, graduating in October 1909. During this period, he proposed to Yoshie Sawa , a long-time friend and distant maternal relative, but her older brother opposed the marriage. Ozaki’s heavy drinking, which spiraled into alcoholism, began soon after this rejection. After graduation, he was quickly fired from his first job for incompetence, but in 1919, he was hired by the Tōyō Life Insurance Company, and did well for a time, being promoted several times, and marrying. But as his drinking problem grew worse, he left the company in 1920, becoming a lay mendicant monk. He wrote over 4,000 haiku between 1916 and 1926. In 1926, he settled on the island of Shōdoshima, in the Inland Sea, as rector of a small hermitage at the temple of Saiko-ji, where he died at age 41 in April 1926. The only book of his poetry, Daikū (大空, Big Sky), with poems selected by Ogiwara Seisensui, was published posthumously.

lonely

by Ozaki Hōsai
^.
feeling so lonely
I go to bed
I don’t have even a book to read
^.

__________________________________________

1944 – Pat Parker born as Patricia Cooks, African American lesbian feminist poet and activist. She wrote poetry about her tough childhood, sexual assault, her older sister’s murder, and an abusive relationship which ended with her being pushed down a flight of stairs, causing her to miscarry. She later came out as a lesbian, and became a political activist with the Black Panther Party, Black Woman’s Revolutionary Council, and was a founder of the Women’s Press Collective. Noted for her powerful poem Womanslaughter, about the murder of her sister Shirley, shot and killed by her husband. He was convicted of manslaughter, but only served a one-year sentence in a work-release program. Her poetry collections include Jonestown and other madness; Movement in Black; and Woman Slaughter. Pat Parker died of breast cancer in 1989 at age 45.

For the white person who wants to know how to
be my friend

by Pat Parker

^.
The first thing you do is to forget that i’m Black.
Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.
^.
You should be able to dig Aretha,
but don’t play her every time i come over.
And if you decide to play Beethoven – don’t tell me
his life story. They made us take music appreciation too.
^.
Eat soul food if you like it,
but don’t expect me to locate your restaurants
or cook it for you.
^.
And if some Black person insults you,
mugs you, rapes your sister, rapes you,
rips your house, or is just being an ass –
please, do not apologize to me
for wanting to do them bodily harm.
It makes me wonder if you’re foolish.
^.
And even if you really believe Blacks are better lovers than
whites – don’t tell me. I start thinking of charging stud fees.
^.
In other words – if you really want to be my friend – don’t
make a labor of it. I’m lazy. Remember.
^.

__________________________________________

January 21
__________________________________

1942 – Cheon Yang-hui born in Busan, South Korea; Korean poet and essayist; she graduated in the 1960s from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, and has published several poetry collections, including Old Alley; Too Many Mouths; and Sometimes I Stand Motionless, but they haven’t yet been translated into English. Her works appear in translation in Korean Literature Today, Winter 1999 issue and Poems, volume 59. She has one several Korean literary prizes, including the 1998 Hyundae Munhak (Contemporary Literature) Award for “Old Alley.”

Rice

by Cheon Yang-hui
^.
To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely,
To you who sleep a lot because you are bored,
To you who cry a lot because you are sad,
I write this down.
Chew on your feelings that are cornered
like you would chew on rice.
Anyway, life is something that you need to digest.
^.

– translator not credited

__________________________________________

1946 – Gretel Ehrlich was born in Santa Barbara, CA; American poet, essayist, and travel writer. She studied at Bennington College and the UCLA film school. Ehrlich began writing full-time in 1985 while living on a ranch in Wyoming, where her first novel, Heart Mountain, is set. She is noted for works on nature, including Islands, The Universe, Home; The Solace of Open Spaces; and This Cold Heaven. In 1991, she was struck by lighting and incapacitated for some time, but wrote about the experience in A Match to the Heart (1994). Arctic Heart is a collection of her poetry, but she has also included poems in her prose works.

A geography of possibility

by Gretel Ehrlich
^.
Tumbled and twisted
startled out of a deep sleep
thrown into pure light
^.
Sheep drift, surge, spill
snowdrifts or clouds billowing
across open space
^.
Wind, meticulous
gardener: raising dust,
pruning sage
^.
Sandhill cranes gather
with delicate legwork, slice
through stilled water
^.
At night, by moonlight
land is whittled to slivers:
ridge, river, range
^.

__________________________________________

January 22
__________________________________

1788 – George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, born in London, England; leading English Romantic poet and British peer. His parents had an unhappy and debt-ridden marriage due ti his father’s extravagance, until his father died in 1791. In 1798, when Byron was 10 years old, his great uncle died, and the boy became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale. Byron was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived and travelled in Europe, including spending seven years in Italy. He was usually in debt, because of his extravagant love affairs, often with married women, gambling, and drinking. In 1821, while living it up in Ravenna, he was threatened with lynching for his openly scandalous lifestyle, and fled the city. But by 1823, at the height of his fame as a poet, he felt unfulfilled, and joined the Greek fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire. In 1824, just before he was to take part on the attack on the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, he fell ill. He was further weakened by the excessive bloodletting his doctors insisted on, and died at age 36 in Missolonghi, Aetolia, in the Ottoman Empire in April 1924. Byron is best known for his long poems Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and shorter poems like “She Walks in Beauty” and “So We’ll Go No More a Roving.”

She Walks in Beauty

by Lord Byron
^.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
^.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
^.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
^.

“She Walks in Beauty” from George Gordon, Lord Byron: Selected Poems, Dover Thrift Edition

__________________________________________

1922 – Howard Moss born in New York City; American poet, dramatist, and critic. He studied at the University of Michigan. Moss was poetry editor of The New Yorker (1948-1987), and is credited with discovering poets Anne Sexton and Amy Clampitt. His Selected Poems won the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. His other collections include: The Toy Fair; A Swimmer in the Air; Finding Them Lost; Buried City; and Rules of Sleep. Howard Moss died of a heart attack at age 65 in September 1987.

The City Lion

by Howard Moss
^.
This lion shapes all shadow on his paws.
Through streets and markets his alien repose
Stirs city parks; on the highway glare
His two eyes yellow as traffic lights
That will not stop or go, since all his weight
Is shiftless, hanging in the tepid air.
^.
His sides wake up when all his center sleeps.
How graceful, watery, his depths and heights!
A circus in himself, he parts his hair
From ear to ear, and when he laughs, his roar
Breaks glass, blows fuses, and condemns the poor.
He leaps when he’s quiet; when he runs, he sleeps;
If you watch him closely he may disappear.
^.
If you meet him, give him all our best regards,
Trick hats and valentines, handouts, cigars;
If he takes them, thank him, for you’ll get them back
Years later perhaps. When you least expect
His leap to be sleeping, his sleep to run,
He’ll turn on you lovingly, and do you in.
^.

“The City Lion” appeared in Poetry magazine’s November 1948 issue

__________________________________________

1949 – Cilla McQueen born Priscilla Muriel McQueen in Birmingham, England; her family moved to New Zealand when she was four; New Zealand poet and artist.She won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 983, 1989, and 1991, and the Prime Minsite’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2010. She served as New Zealand’s Poet Laureate (2009-2011). Among her many volumes of poetry are: Homing In; Wild Sweets; Markings: Poems and Drawings; Fire-Penny; An Island; and Qualia. In 2016, she published In a Slant Light: A Poet’s memoir.

An Imp

by Cilla McQueen
^.
Not the tin shed in the empty section
nor the immediate white cat with the patch
^.
on its side like a hole,
but the imp in my eye his eye spat.
^.
Imagination closed on it
quick as a fist, a black spar.

^.
It queers my inner sight.
It cannot be dissolved by time.

__________________________________________

January 23
__________________________________

1859 – Katharine Tynan born in Dublin, Ireland; prolific Irish novelist, poet, and short story writer, whose work was greatly influenced by Roman Catholicism, Irish patriotism, and Celtic mythology. She wrote over 100 novels; five autobiographical volumes, and over a dozen books of poetry, including Shamrocks, Ballads and Lyrics, Irish Poems; he Flower of Youth; The Flower of Peace; and Late Songs. She died at age 72 in April 1931.

Turn O’ The Year

by Katharine Tynan
^.
This is the time when bit by bit
The days begin to lengthen sweet
And every minute gained is joy –
And love stirs in the heart of a boy.

^.
This is the time the sun, of late
Content to lie abed till eight,
Lifts up betimes his sleepy head –
And love stirs in the heart of a maid.
^.

This is the time we dock the night
Of a whole hour of candlelight;
When song of linnet and thrush is heard –
And love stirs in the heart of a bird.
^.
This is the time when sword-blades green,
With gold and purple damascene,
Pierce the brown crocus-bed a-row –
And love stirs in a heart I know.

__________________________________________

1930 – Derek Walcott born on Saint Lucia Island in the West Indies; Caribbean poet and playwright. He wrote poetry from an early age – a local paper published one of his poems when he was 14 – but he originally studied painting. In 1962, his first major collection of poems, In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960, was published by the prestigious Jonathan Cape publishing house. Walcott resisted being labeled a “black writer” insisting that he was a Caribbean writer. From the 1970s on, Walcott taught creative writing at top U.S. universities like Harvard and Columbia, while also publishing collections of his plays and poetry. In the mid-1970s, he had an affair with Norline Metivier, a young dancer in one of his plays. He married her in 1976, but it quickly ended in divorce. From 1981 to 2007, he taught literature and creative writing at Boston University, and established the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre to promote plays by new playwrights. In 1987, Walcott met Sigrid Nama, a Danish-Flemish-American art dealer, and they mostly lived together for the rest of his life. In spite of his success, both his professional and domestic lives were stormy and complicated. He was often short of money until he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Derek Walcott died at age 87, after a long illness, on the island of Santa Lucia, in March 2017.

Map of the New World

by Derek Walcott
^.
I Archipelagoes
^.
At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.
At the rain’s edge, a sail.
^.
Slowly the sail will lose sight of islands;
into a mist will go the belief in harbours
of an entire race.
^.
The ten-years war is finished.
Helen’s hair, a grey cloud.
Troy, a white ashpit
by the drizzling sea.
^.
The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp.
A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain
and plucks the first line of the Odyssey.
^.

__________________________________________

January 24
__________________________________

1936 – Marilou Awiakta born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but grew up in nearby Oak Ridge, one of the sites of the Manhattan Project; American writer, poet, essayist, and children’s author. Her heritage is part Appalachian and part Eastern Band Cherokee, but she is not a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. She graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1958 receiving a B.A. magna cum laude, in both English and French. Known for Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet; her children’s book, Rising Fawn and the Fire Mystery; and SELU: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom. She has been honored with the 1989 Distinguished Tennessee Writer Award and the 2000Appalachian Heritage Writer’s Award.

When Earth Becomes an “It”

by Marilou Awiakta
^.
When the people call Earth “Mother,”
They take with love
And with love give back
So that all may live.
^.
When the people call Earth “it,”
They use her
Consume her strength.
Then the people die.
^.
Already the sun is hot
Out of season.
Our Mother’s breast
Is going dry.
^.
She is taking all green
Into her heart
And will not turn back
Until we call her
By her name.
^.

__________________________________________

January 25
__________________________________

1759 – Robert “Rabbie” Burns born near Ar, in Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland, the eldest of seven children of a tenant farmer. A poet and lyricist, he is known as the Bard of Scotland, and his birthday has been celebrated throughout Scotland and by poetry lovers around the world with Burns Night suppers and recitations since 1802. Regarded as a pioneer in the Romantic movement, many of his works became beloved songs in Scotland, and “Auld Lang Syne” is sung in many parts of the world on New Years Eve. He died, probably from a rheumatic heart condition, at age 37 in Dumfries, Scotland in July 1796.

(a’ = all / gowd = gold / birkie = foolish posturer / coof = silly or stupid person / gree = degree, station in life)

For a’ That and a’ That

by Robert Burns

^.
Is there, for honest poverty,
That hings his head, an’ a’ that?
The coward slave, we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Our toils obscure, an’ a’ that;
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp;
The man’s the gowd for a’ that,
^.
What tho’ on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin-gray, an’ a’ that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man’s a man for a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Their tinsel show an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.
^.
Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that:
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
His riband, star, an’ a’ that,
The man o’ independent mind,
He looks and laughs at a’ that.
^.
A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;
But an honest man’s aboon his might,
Guid faith he mauna fa’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Their dignities, an’ a’ that,
The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,
Are higher rank than a’ that.
^.
Then let us pray that come it may,
As come it will for a’ that,
That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth,
May bear the gree, an’ a’ that.
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s coming yet, for a’ that,
That man to man, the warld o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.
^.
__________________________________________

1885 – Hakushū Kitahara born as Kitahara Ryūkichi, Japanese tanka poet, regarded as of the most important poets in modern Japanese literature. He began publishing his poems in 1906 in Myōjō (Bright Star), the magazine of the Shinshisha (New Poetry Association), then formed his own literary group the Pan no kai (The Society of Pan), which expanded to also include painters, musicians, and actors. He edited essays, 5 Pairs of Shoes, written by five different writers who all went on to become notable poets, in 1907. In 1909, he was a founder of the literary magazine, Subaru (The Pleiades), and published Jashumon (Heretics), his first collection of poetry, followed in 1912 by Omoide (Memories). He published several other poetry collections, and also lyrics for children’s songs, and translations of Mother Goose. In 1935, he founded Tama (Right), a tanka magazine, regarded as the spearhead of the Japanese symbolist movement. He almost lost his sight in 1937 from complications of diabetes, which worsened, and caused his death in 1942.

A Tanka

by Hakushū Kitahara
^.
We are well into spring
And I have thought of peonies
For several days now
How many years have passed
Since my eyesight failed?

_________________________________________________

G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

_________________________________________________

Sunday Morning Open Thread With Music from the Beatles' Blue Album (1967-1970)

Ice Blue

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday January 19, 2025 · 3:30 AM PST

2025/01/19 · 03:30

Good morning, crew. Today’s diary includes a few of the Beatles’ later hits. Okay, so they aren’t all the exact recordings that went into the making of their Blue Album but all these songs are all on it. In any case, I hope you enjoy them.

Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.

Join us, please.

Its’s going to be a cold one here today. It’s only supposed to get up to about zero. I’m planning on staying inside. Except for feeding the birds, of course. I have to do that before dawn. They especially need fuel to withstand these cold temps. Everyone who frequents this series knows how much I care about my critters.

Speaking of critters, one or more of my cats has been tearing down the suede drapes I have over my living room picture window. Somebody has been yanking them clean out of those clip-on curtain rings. This old shack is so old and leaky that I freeze without a heavy covering on my larger windows. Seriously, the whole room felt much cozier once I made and hung those drapes. It’s quieter, too. They also save me on my propane bill. If only I could convince my cats of their benefits. But no. They have to look out the window in the middle of the night. Ergo, the drapes get yanked out of their way.

Anyway, that’s about it for my problems. Now on with the Beatles.

Editor’s Note: Morning Open Thread is looking for community members willing to take on hosting duties—whether it’s a day here and there or a regular weekly post. If you’re interested, just reach out to Officebss. And thank you.

YouTube Video

So what’s on your mind this morning?

Morning Open Thread Saturday Jan. 18, playing doctor songs

Ozarkblue

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday January 18, 2025 · 3:16 AM PST

2025/01/18 · 03:16

Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.

This diary is about songs whose main topic is ‘doctor’.

>>>>Loosely related to the ‘doctor’ theme, here’s some information on ‘Good Samaritan’ laws. Nothing in this bunch of words should be used as a basis for your Doctoral Dissertation HA!. Nor for helping with your kids’ homework. Many details unwritten, to limit wordiness by the diarist.

All statements are gleaned from Wikipedia, link: Wiki Good Samaritan laws

>>>>Good Samaritan laws offer legal protection to people who give reasonable assistance to those who are, (or whom they believe to be) injured, ill, in peril, or otherwise incapacitated. The protection is intended to reduce bystanders' hesitation to assist, for fear of being sued or prosecuted for unintentional injury or wrongful death.

Good Samaritan laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, as do their interactions with various other legal principles, such as consent, parental rights and the right to refuse treatments.

In some jurisdictions, no person is required to give aid of any sort to a victim. Good Samaritan statutes in some states do require a person at the scene of an emergency to provide reasonable assistance to a person in need.

>>>>If a responder begins rendering aid, she or he must not leave the scene until it is necessary to call for needed medical assistance, a rescuer of equal or higher ability takes over, or continuing to give aid is unsafe. A responder is never legally compelled to take risks to aid another person. The responder is not legally liable for any harm to the person assisted, as long as the responder acted rationally, in good faith, and in accordance with their level of training.

>>>>In some jurisdictions, Good Samaritan laws only protect those who have completed basic first aid training and are certified by health organizations, such as the American Heart Association, or American Red Cross, provided that they have acted within the scope of their training. In these jurisdictions, a person who is neither trained in first aid nor certified, and who performs first aid incorrectly, can be held legally liable for errors made. In other jurisdictions any rescuer is protected from liability so long as the responder acted rationally.

>>>>By contrast, a ‘duty to rescue’ law requires people to offer assistance and holds those who fail to do so liable.

To illustrate the concept of duty to rescue, in the Canadian province of Ontario, the Occupational Health and Safety Act provides all workers with the right to refuse to perform unsafe work. There are, however, specific exceptions to this right.

When the "life, health or safety of another person is at risk", then specific groups, including "police officers, firefighters, or employees of a hospital, clinic or other type of medical worker (including EMS)" are specifically excluded from the right to refuse unsafe work.

>>>>Here in Missouri, the legal system protects medical professionals, but does not protect non-trained persons. link: MO Good Sam laws.

>>>>CPR (Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation) is beyond the scope of this diary, but here’s Wikipedia’s words about it: CPR

So onward to the songs:

Doctor My Eyes:

YouTube Video

I Don’t Need No Doctor

YouTube Video

Doctor Doctor Give Me The News (Bad Case Of Loving You)

YouTube Video

Morning Open Thread: TODAY is ... January 17, 2025

officebss

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday January 17, 2025 · 3:30 AM PST

2025/01/17 · 03:30

_________________________________________

Morning Open Thread is looking for
contributors — either occasional, or
weekly. If interested, please contact
officebss for more information.
__________________________________________

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

____________________________________

TODAY is:

Cable Car Day

Hot Buttered Rum Day

International Mentoring Day

Kid Inventors’ Day

Popeye the Sailor Day

_______________________________________

Bulgaria – Antonovden: (St. Anton’s name day)

Republic of the Congo – Patrice Lumumba Day

_______________________________________

395 – Theodosius I, Roman Emperor, dies at the age of 48, leaving rule of the Roman Empire divided so his son Arcadius rules the eastern half, while his younger brother Honorius is to rule in the west, even though he is only 10 years old – the Empire was never again united

1377 – The Papal See moves back to Rome from Avignon, France

1562 – In France, Catherine de’ Medici promulgates the Edict of Saint-Germain to recognize the Huguenots, giving limited guarantees of freedom of conscience and private worship, but the Parliament of Paris made remonstrances to the crown concerning conflicts with previous laws, delaying its ratification until after the Massacre of Vassy: on March 1, 1562, 63 Huguenots — armed only with stones — were killed and their place of worship burned, beginning the French Wars of Religion

1600 – Pedro Calderón de la Barca born, Spanish Baroque playwright and poet; La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream)

1648 – In response to hearing that Charles I entering an engagement with the Scots, England’s Long Parliament passes the Vote of No Addresses, breaking off negotiations with the king, leading to the second phase of the English Civil War

1659 – Antonio Veracini born, Italian violinist and composer

1706 – Benjamin Franklin born, American statesman-scientist-inventor-author, U.S. ‘Founding Father.’ Kid Inventors’ Day is celebrated on his birthday because Franklin invented the first swim flippers when he was 12 years old!

1734 – François-Joseph Gossec born, French composer and conductor

YouTube Video

1773 – Captain James Cook’s expedition becomes first to sail south of Antarctic Circle

1795 – The Dudingston Curling Society is organized in Edinburgh, Scotland

1806 – James Madison Randolph, grandson of U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, is the first child born in the Executive Mansion, now called the White House

1814 – Ellen Wood born, English novelist who published as Mrs. Henry Wood; several of her books became international bestsellers, including The Channings, and East Lynne, for which she
is most remembered

1820 – Anne Brontë born, English author and poet, the youngest of the Brontë sisters; notable for Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

1829 – Catherine Booth born, co-founder of the Salvation Army, with her husband William. As a young woman, she was a supporter of the national Temperance Society. She began her career as a social worker and preacher working with young people, and speaking at children’s meetings. In 1859, she wrote a pamphlet, Female Ministry: Woman’s Right to Preach the Gospel, in defense of American revivalist preacher Mrs. Phoebe Palmer, whose preaching had caused a great stir in England, since only men stood in the pulpits or spoke in meetings at that time. In the pamphlet, she declares that women are neither naturally nor morally inferior to men; that there was no scriptural reason to deny a public ministry to women who felt a calling; and maintained that what the Bible urged, the Holy Spirit had ordained and blessed and so must be justified. Booth also complained that the “unjustifiable application” of Paul’s advice, ‘Let your women keep silence in the Churches’ (1 Corinthians 14:34), “has resulted in more loss to the Church, evil to the world, and dishonor to God, than any of [its] errors.” She was a partner in her husband’s work, but also helped alcoholics make a new start, held cottage meetings for converts, and initiated her own campaigns, including lobbying Queen Victoria to seek legislation for safeguarding females, in the form of the “Parliamentary Bill for the protection of girls.” She became an eloquent speaker, and a fine writer, proof positive of her contention that women had the right to preach the Gospel on the same terms as men. But in spite of her exhortations that women should be equal, male officers in the Salvation Army received a third more pay than women officers until just before WWII

1852 – Great Britain signs the Sand River Convention, recognizing the independence of the South African Republic

1858 – Tomás Carrasquilla born, Columbian author whose works were little-known until he was in his late 60s, and was awarded the 1936 National Prize of Literature in Columbia; noted for his story Simón El Mago (Simon the Magician) and the novel La Marqueza de Yolombó (The Marquesa of Yolombo)

1863 – David Lloyd George born, British Liberal politician, U.K. Prime Minister (1916-1922), spearheaded creation of Britain’s social welfare system; led U.K. during WWI

1863 – Constantin Stanislavski born, Russian director-actor; creator of the Stanislaski system of actor training, preparation and rehearsal technique; co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, where he directed several premieres of play by Anton Checkov and Maxim Gorky; author of An Actor Prepares and Building a Character

1871 – Cable Car Day: Andrew Smith Hallidie receives the first cable car railway patent

Clay Street Cable Car (1887) in San Francisco

1875 – Florencio Sánchez born, Uruguayan playwright, and journalist; considered Uruguay’s leading playwright; noted for M’hijo el dotor (My Son, the Doctor), Canillita (The Newspaper Vendor) and La pobre gente (The Poor People); he died from tuberculosis in 1910 at age 35

1877 – Marie Zdeňka Baborová-Čiháková born, the first Czech woman botanist and zoologist

1877 – May Gibbs born in England, Anglo-Australian children’s author, illustrator and cartoonist; her family moved to Australia when she was four; she studied art in England; noted for her “gumnut babies” and the book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie; while in England, she drew cartoons for the Common Cause, published by the Suffragettes

May Gibbs: ‘Scottie in Gumnut Land’ and a self portrait

1879 – Zulu King Cetshwayo addressed 20,000 of his warriors at the great military kraal of Nidwengu: “I am sending you out against the whites, who have invaded Zululand and driven away our cattle. You are to go against the column at Rorke’s Drift and drive it back into Natal.”

1886 – Glenn Martin born, American aviation pioneer; his company, which produced the WWI MB-1 and MB-2 bombers, would later merge with Lockheed

1888 – Babu Gulabrai born, notable Indian Hindi author of philosophical works, literary essays and satires, including his humorous autobiography, Meri Asafaltain (My Failures)

1893 – Lorrin A. Thurston, along with the so-called Citizens’ Committee of Public Safety, and the American troops sent to “protect” them, leads the overthrow the Kingdom of Hawaii and the government of Queen Liliʻuokalani

1899 – Nevil Shute born, English engineer and novelist; best known for On the Beach

1900 – Yaqui Indians in Texas proclaim their independence from Mexico

1905 – Peggy Gilbert born, American Dixieland jazz saxophonist and bandleader; beginning in 1928, she appeared in movies and toured in vaudeville shows; in 1933, she founded an all-girl jazz band, which used several different names, including “Peggy Gilbert and Her Metro Goldwyn Orchestra” and “Peggy Gilbert and her Symphonics.” The band often played in famous Hollywood nightclubs, including the Cocoanut Grove. She also toured in USO shows, and was an advocate for women musicians. Gilbert had several lean years after WWII, but found a new audience in the 1950s on radio and television. In 1974, at age 69, she started her last great all-female band, “The Dixie Belles,” with musicians from vaudeville and the Big Band era. The group performed on TV and at jazz festivals, and in the 1980 Rose Parade in Pasadena, California. In 1985, the band recorded “Peggy Gilbert & the Dixie Belles.” Gilbert lived to the age of 102

YouTube Video

1912 – English explorer Robert Falcon Scott reaches the South Pole, only to discover that Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten him there by a month. Scott and his party die during the return trip

1914 – William Stafford born, American poet and pacifist, the 20^th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1970)

1917 – The United States pays Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands

1922 – Betty White born, American actress, TV personality, animal rights activist and national treasure. Her television career is considered the longest in entertainment history, spanning over 80 years. She was also one of the first women to have control both in front of and behind the camera, and is recognized as the first woman producer of a TV situation comedy series, Life with Elizabeth (1953-1955)

1923 – Rangeya Raghaw born, Indian Hindi author; noted for Kab tak pukaroon (How Long Do I Call)

1924 – Jewel Plummer Cobb born, great-granddaughter of a freed slave; American biologist, cancer researcher, professor, dean and academic administrator; earned a B.A. in biology in 1945, but had to fight for a fellowship for graduate study in biology; worked on finding a cure for melanoma as an independent researcher at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory; advocate for women and students of color being admitted to universities and graduate school

1926 – Moira Shearer born, internationally renowned British ballet dancer; best known for her starring role in the classic ballet film, The Red Shoes

1927 – Eartha Kitt born, American multi-talented performer, peace and civil rights activist, founder of a non-profit to help disadvantaged youths in Los Angeles; her career in the U.S. took a nosedive in 1968, after Ladybird Johnson asked her about the Vietnam War and she made frank anti-war statements before the press; she was falsely branded as a “sadistic nymphomaniac” and other slanders in a CIA dossier (discovered in 1975) and blacklisted; she left the U.S to make a living in Europe and Asia; when she stepped in as a replacement in London’s West End production of the musical Follies, she stopped the show singing “I’m Still Here.” Kitt made a triumphal return to the U.S starring on Broadway in Timbuktu! in 1978

YouTube Video

1929 – Popeye the Sailor Day: Popeye makes his first public appearance in Elzie Segar’s then 10-year-old comic strip, Thimble Theatre, which originally revolved around Olive Oyl’s family

1933 – Shari Lewis born as Phyllis Hurwitz, American ventriloquist, puppeteer, and pioneer in children’s television, best known as the original puppeteer of Lamb Chop. She and Lamb Chop made their debut appearance on Captain Kangaroo in 1956, and continued until the PBS program Lamb Chop’s Play Along ended in 1997. Lewis and her husband Jeremy Tarcher then created The Charlie Horse Music Pizza show (1998-1999), which was designed to teach elementary school children about music at a time when one-third of elementary schools were cutting music classes from their curriculum. The program was canceled when Lewis died at age 65, from pneumonia while undergoing chemotherapy in August, 1998

1934 – Ferdinand Porsche submits design for a people’s car, a “Volkswagen,” to the new German Reich government

1935 – Ruth Ann Minner born, American Democratic politician and businesswoman; first woman governor of Delaware (2001-2009) after serving as Lieutenant Governor (1993-2001) and in the Delaware General Assembly (1975-1982)

1942 – Muhammad Ali born as Cassius Clay; 1960 Olympic gold medalist; first fighter to be World Heavyweight Boxing Champion three separate times (1964, 1973, 1978); philanthropist, humanitarian and civil rights activist; 2005 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient (see also 2016 entry)

1942 – Ita Buttrose born, Australian journalist and author; founding editor of Cleo (1972-1975), magazine and editor of Australian Women’s Weekly (1975-1978); first female editor of a major Australian newspaper, the Daily Telegraph (1981-1984)

1944 – Ann R. Oakley born, distinguished English sociologist, author, and feminist; Founder-Director of the Social Science Research Unit at the Institute of Education, University of London; has published numerous academic works, but also several best-selling novels, including The Men’s Room

1945 – Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews in Hungary from the Holocaust during WWII, is detained by SMERSH, Soviet Red Army counter-intelligence, on suspicion of espionage, and all trace of him disappears

1946 – The UN Security Council holds its first session

1949 – Anita Borg born, American computer scientist; pioneer in email communication; founder of Systers (1987), the first email network for women; as well as the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (1994), and the Institute for Women and Technology (1997). Honored with the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing for her work on behalf of women in the computing field in 1995

1957 – Ann Nocenti born, American comic book editor for Marvel Comics, journalist, writer and filmmaker; outspoken commentator on sexism, racism, nuclear proliferation and other societal issues

1961 – U.S. President Eisenhower delivers a televised farewell address three days before leaving office, in which he warns against the accumulation of power by the “military–industrial complex” as well as the dangers of massive deficit spending

1961 – Patrice Lumumba is killed, independence leader, first democratically elected Congolese prime minister. Arrested during a coup d’état, he was imprisoned, starved, beaten and tortured, then finally driven to an isolated location and shot with two others

1964 – Michelle Obama born, American lawyer and university administrator, first African-American First Lady (2009-2017)

1971 – Sylvie Testud born, French actress, writer and film director; she made her directing debut with the 1998 short film, Je veux descendre (I Want to Get Off), and directed the 2012 feature film, La Vie d’une autre (Another Woman’s Life)

1977 – Capital punishment in the U.S. resumes after a ten-year hiatus, as convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by firing squad in Utah

1981 – Philippine President and kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos lifts martial law eight years and five months after declaring it

1992 – During a visit to South Korea, Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa apologizes for Japan forcing Korean women into sexual slavery during World War II

1996 – The Czech Republic applies to the European Union for membership

1997 – An Irish court grants the first divorce in the Catholic country since it gained its independence from Britain in 1922.

2001 – During an electricity crisis, California used rolling blackouts, cutting power to hundreds of thousands

2007 – The Doomsday Clock is set at five minutes to midnight because of North Korea’s nuclear testing

2012 – Kelly Clarkson single “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” released in the U.S.

YouTube Video

2016 – International Mentoring Day: launched by the National Mentoring Partnership in partnership with the Muhammad Ali Center and Epicenter Community’s Mentoring for Change initiative to support and applaud mentors everywhere, raise awareness of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and honor the memory of Muhammad Ali

2017 – Three of Donald Trump’s nominees for Cabinet positions faced sharp questions over ethical issues. Democrats hammered Representative Tom Price (Republican-Georgia) for past stock trades and “sweetheart deals.” Senator Elizabeth Warren (Democrat-Massachusetts.) asking how he could push legislation to “help the company that you now own stock in.” Price bristled, saying he was “offended by the insinuation.” Rep. Mick Mulvaney (Republican-South Carolina), Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, has been grilled for his failure to pay more than $15,000 in employment taxes for a household employee, while Commerce Department nominee Wilbur Ross revealed that he had hired a housekeeper who was an undocumented immigrant

2021 – Two women judges working for the Afghan supreme court were assassinated in Kabul. Violence has surged across Afghanistan, in spite of the peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Afghan officials blamed the wave of violence on the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters last year, following a peace deal between the group and the Trump administration. In return, the Taliban pledged not to attack international forces. But in recent months, suspected Taliban militants have instead targeted and killed several prominent Afghans including politicians, journalists, activists, doctors, and prosecutors. The murdered women have not been named. Gunmen riding a motorcycle ambushed the women in the early morning in the Taimani area of Kabul as they were being driven to work in a court vehicle. After firing several shots, the gunmen sped off. A crowd gathered at the scene, where shattered glass and a trail of blood lay on the road. “Unfortunately, we have lost two women judges in today’s attack. Their driver is wounded,” said Ahmad Fahim Qaweem, a spokesperson for the supreme court. He added that there were over 200 female judges working for the country’s top court

Everybody have a free speech Friday

Morning Open Thread Thursday January 16, 2025

Ozarkblue

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday January 16, 2025 · 3:30 AM PST

2025/01/16 · 03:30

Our prolific contributor P Carey has become an esteemed MOT emeritus, so there are slots available for bloggers on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If interested contact officebss or Ozarkblue via KOSmail. Blank-slate diaries like this one will fill in those unused slots.

Morning Open Thread: "My Attorney Bernie"

Youffraita

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday January 15, 2025 · 3:30 AM PST

2025/01/15 · 03:30

Some songs that always make me grin. Hope they brighten up your day today! Feel free to add your own favorite funny songs in the comments.

My Attorney Bernie (Dave Frishberg)

YouTube Video

Born 90 yrs ago today, Dave Frishberg had an enviable career in jazz as a composer & performer. In the early 1970s, he joined the late Bob Dorough on the Schoolhouse Rock project. Frishberg, for example, composed “Conjunction, Junction” & “I’m Just a Bill” Frishberg died in 2021. pic.twitter.com/oBp0lyru3F
— Steve and Dave's 🇺🇦🌻 (@SteveandDaves1) March 23, 2023

Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.

Join us, please.

* * *

Editor’s Note: Morning Open Thread is looking for community members willing to take on hosting duties—whether it’s a day here and there or a regular weekly post: Saturdays and Tuesdays are open. If you’re interested, just reach out to P or Officebss. And thank you.

Ozarkblue

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday January 14, 2025 · 3:15 AM PST

2025/01/14 · 03:15

Instead of the Tuesday blank slate diary (in lieu of MOT emeritus P Carey) , I wrote this one about a topic I found to be interesting. The song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ has an interesting history, here’s a summary of that, with a lot of words redacted for ‘fair use’.

All words below from this Wikipedia link: Wiki Lion

"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is a song originally written and first recorded in 1939 by Solomon Linda under the title "Mbube" (the Zulu word for ‘lion’).

According to journalist Rian Malan: "'Mbube' wasn't the most remarkable tune, but there was something terribly compelling about the underlying chant, a dense meshing of low male voices above which Solomon yodeled and howled for two exhilarating minutes, occasionally making it up as he went along. The third take was the great one, but it achieved immortality only in its dying seconds, when Solly took a deep breath, opened his mouth and improvised the melody..."

It was first recorded in the United States by The Weavers in November 1951, and published under the title "Wimoweh" in December of the same year.

In 1961, a version named “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, adapted into English by the doo-wop group The Tokens, became a number-one hit in the United States.

Lyrics of Linda's original version were written in Zulu, while those from The Tokens' adaptation were written by George David Weiss.

Issued as a 78-rpm phonograph record and marketed to black audiences, "Mbube" became a hit and Linda a star throughout South Africa. By 1948, the song had sold over 100,000 copies in Africa and among black South African immigrants in Great Britain.

In 1949, Alan Lomax, then working as folk music director for Decca Records, brought Solomon Linda's 78-rpm recording to the attention of his friend Pete Seeger, leader of the folk group The Weavers.

In November 1951, The Weavers recorded an adapted version with brass, string orchestra and chorus and released it as a 78-rpm single titled "Wimoweh", a mishearing of the original song's chorus of "Uyimbube" ("You are a lion" in Zulu). Their version contained the chanting chorus "Wimoweh" and Linda's improvised line.

In 1961, RCA Records hired Weiss to arrange a Doo-wop cover of "Wimoweh", sung by group The Tokens. Weiss wrote the English lines "In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight..." and "Hush, my darling, don't fear, my darling...".

“The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was issued by RCA in that year, and it rocketed to number one on The Billboard Hot 100. It earned millions in royalties from cover versions and film licensing.

Here are several version of this song, with its various titles:

Solomon Linda Mbube

YouTube Video

The Weavers Wimoweh

YouTube Video

The Tokens The Lion Sleeps Tonight

YouTube Video

Morning Open Thread: We All Need Something to Push Against

officebss

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday January 13, 2025 · 3:18 AM PST

2025/01/13 · 03:18

“No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn” – Hal Borland, American writer, journalist, and naturalist

______________________________________________________

“One kind word can warm three winter months”
– Japanese proverb

______________________________________________________

“… here’s what I’ve learned – people will hurt
you, but you don’t have to respond – not every
comment or cruel act deserves to be noticed …”
– John Geddes,
author of A Familiar Rain

______________________________________________________

Morning Open Thread is looking for
contributors — either occasional, or
weekly. If interested, please contact
officebss for more information.

__________________________________________

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

__________________________________________

13 poets born in January –
a month of hardship,
and new beginnings —
giving birth to seekers,
cynics, and survivors

__________________________________________

January 12
__________________________________

1915 – Margaret Danner born in Pryorsburg, Kentucky, but she grew up in Chicago’s South Side; American poet, editor, and African-American cultural activist. In 1951, she was the first Black woman on the staff of Poetry magazine. She lived for many years in Detroit, where she co-founded Boone House, a cultural center for black writers, artists and musicians. In the 1960s, she joined the Baháʼí Faith, and toured as a poet and writer sponsored by the Baháʼí Teaching Committee. Danner died at age 68 on January 1, 1984, in Chicago. A retrospective of her work, These Blazing Forms: the Life and Work of Margaret Danner, was published in the March 2022 issue of Poetry magazine.

(This poem is Danner’s tribute to Bushman, a Western Lowland Gorilla from Cameroon, the first gorilla at the Lincoln Park Zoo, who died in captivity on January 1, 1951.)

Best Loved of Africa

by Margaret Danner
^.
It is New Year’s day.
The blasé people rise.
They face a sleet-like ray
Of light. The low slung skies
Send shadows down. It’s dark.
^.
The earth is treacherous to the tread.
And deep in the upstairs bedroom
Of his terraced suite in Lincoln Park
Lies Bushman, best loved of Africa, huge
And beautifully black as he ever was, but dead.
^.

__________________________________________

1929 – Turner Cassity born as Alan Turner Cassity in Jackson, Mississippi; American poet, playwright, and short story writer. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and stationed in Puerto Rico (1952-1954), then attended Columbia University on the GI Bill. From 1962 to 1991, Cassity taught poetry at Emory University, and worked at Emory’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. He died at age 80 in July 2009. His poetry collections include Steeplejacks in Babel; Hurricane Lamp; No Second Eden; The Destructive Element; and Devils & Islands.

Watching the Stopwatch Stopping

The great fear of the Maya was that
Time would stop. – Robert Kaplan
^.
And if it should? The seasons calmly would continue
But be no longer measure. Keeping to it venue,
High tide reverse and go unnoticed, no erosion
Confirm the ages of its beaches; drying, Ocean
Become no saltier; rain born of it not freshen;
The rising of the blood not ever reach to passion;
Eternal present merge the later and the sooner;
Our racing solar year fall back to match the lunar;
Radioactive or our own, decay not threaten;
The lower reaches of a water clock not wetten.
Section the tree to count its rings and you will see there
A disc as featureless as porcelain might be there.
Become a tabulated list of random numbers,
A calendar is not some duty that encumbers,
Though Julian, Gregorian, if we endow them,
Exact from us as much of Time as we allow them.
The Maya need not worry; of such bits and pieces
As we spare – and Creation – Time before it ceases
Will bear its sons away. Hearts old and fortunes wilting,
The sand-glass turns. It is Time’s stream, its threat of silting.
^.

__________________________________________

January 13
__________________________________

1921 – Dachine Rainer born as Sylvia Newman to Polish Jewish immigrants in New York, American-English writer of prose and nonfiction, poet, and anarchopacifist; best known for A Room at the Inn; Outside Time; Rise and Fall; Prison Etiquette: The convict’s compendium of useful information; and Giornale Di Venezia.

^.
“Ich lebe mein Leben in waschsenden Ringen” – Rilke
(“I live my life in growing circles”)

in the search for a center

by Dachine Rainer
^.
in the search for a center,
there is only the speeding train and the distance
transpired and ahead, only the smoke shadows
that fall on and snow like clouds
of formless birds; and the petrified river, stiff
like a mud frozen soldier
^.
suck the green out of stems
and spit a white foam back at them
like spring throwing its promise into the midst
of red sedge on shore
with hint of tufted grasses
uselessly cleansing the air
^.

“in the search for a center” appeared in Retort: an anarchist review in 1947

__________________________________________

1957 – Claudia Emerson born in Chatham, Virginia; American poet; 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Late Wife; Poet Laureate of Virginia (2008-2010). Her poetry collections include Pharaoh, Pharaoh; Pinion: An Elegy; Figure Studies; and Late Wife, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Lifeguard

by Claudia Emerson

^.
She perches high on the stand, gleaming whistle
dangling, on her suit a dutiful,
^.
faded red cross. Mine her only life
to guard, she does for a while watch
^.
the middle-aged woman who has nothing better
to do than swim laps in the Y’s indoor pool
^.
on a late Friday afternoon. I am slow,
though, boring, length after predictable
^.
length of breaststroke or the duller lap
of elementary backstroke perfectly
^.
executed within the taut confines
of the brightly buoyed lane. So she abandons me
^.
to study split-ends, hangnail, wristwatch,
until—the body of the whistle cupped
^.
loosely in her palm—her head nods toward
shallow dreams. I’ve never felt so safe in my life,
^.
making flawless, practiced turns, pushing, invisible
to reenter my own wake, reverse it.
^.

__________________________________________

January 14
__________________________________

1914 – Dudley Randall born in Washington DC; African-American poet and poetry publisher. From age nine, he grew up in Detroit, where his first poems were published in the Detroit Free Press. He worked in Ford’ River Foundry before serving in the South Pacific during WWII. Randall earned a BA in English from Wayne University and a MA in library science from the University of Michigan, and became the reference librarian for Wayne County. He was fluent in Russian; visited Europe, Africa, and Russia; and later translated many Russian poems into English. Between 1965 and 1977, he was the founder, editor, and publisher of Broadside Press, which became a forum for almost every major Black poet who began their careers during those years, among them Melvin Tolson, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, and Margaret Walker. His own poems appeared in collections which included Poem Counterpoem; Cities Burning; More to Remember: Poems of Four Decades; and After the Killing. He died at age 86 in August 2000.

Laughter in the Slums

by Dudley Randall
^.
In crippled streets where happiness seems buried
under the sooty snow of northern winter,
sudden as bells at twilight,
bright as the moon, full as the sun, there blossoms
in southern throats rich flower of flush fields
hot with the furnace sun of Georgia Junes,
laughter that cold and blizzards could not kill.
^.

__________________________________________

1919 – Kaifi Azmi born to a Shia Muslim family of artists in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, India; Indian Urdu language poet, writer, and lyricist-songwriter. He wrote his first ghazal when he was 11, but his first poetry collection, Jhankar, was published in 1943 when he was 24. During the partition of India in 1947, he was hounded by the British police for being a “card-carrying communist,” and was denied a visa for Pakistan for several years. Many of his lyrics and songs were written for over 50 films, from 1951 until 2003, and he is regarded as the one who brought Urdu literature to Indian motion pictures. In 2000, he was conferred the first Millennium Award by the Government of Delhi and the Delhi Urdu Academy. He died in May 2002 at age 83.

Habit

by Kaifi Azmi
^.
For aeons, I was imprisoned in a blind well
I kept beating my head, kept muttering to myself:
I want the sunlight, I want the moonlight, I want life itself
The sunlight of love, the moonlight of friends, the freedom of death.
^.
Day and night I heard only my voice
And gradually I came to believe
In this lonesome world
In the disloyalty of friends
In the lap of the gallows
There is no sunlight
There is no moonlight
There is no life,
Life is one long night
The world an illusion
Man transient
People dwarfed
Towns, citadels of envy
Villages even worse.
When this darkness had completely crushed me
The well, suddenly, ejected me
From its depths it expelled me.
^.

__________________________________________

1968 – Caroline Maun born in Lansing, Michigan, but her family moved to Englewood, Florida, when she was a toddler; American poet, author, lyricist, and musician. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1998, and teaches creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her poetry collections include: The Sleeping; What Remains; and Greatest Hits. After her partner had a serious motorcycle accident in March 2012, she wrote Accident, a collection of poems about the accident and the aftermath.

Passenger

by Carolyn Maun
^.
I’m on the back of this bike
wrapped around you, trying
not to think about the ground
^.
or the sky, the curb or asphalt
or the summer-weight denim,
the yard or two of skin underneath
^.
I can’t think about falling
or how to be here and not here.
^.
When I look ahead, I see a reflection
of myself in the shining of your helmet,
the center of a blurring world.
^.

__________________________________________

January 15
__________________________________

1850 – Mihai Eminescu born in Moldava; Romanian poet of the Romantic school regarded as the most well-known and influential poet of his country. He was also a novelist, and a journalist. Eminescu was an active member of the Junimea literary society and worked as an editor for the newspaper Timpul, the official newspaper of the Conservative Party. His poetry collections include Luceafărul (The Vesper) and Poesii. He died at age 39 of cardio-respiratory arrest, possibly caused by mercury poisoning, in June 1889.

And If …

by Mihai Eminescu
^.
And if the branches tap my pane
And the poplars whisper nightly,
It is to make me dream again
I hold you to me tightly.
And if the stars shine on the pond
And light its sombre shoal,
It is to quench my mind's despond
And flood with peace my soul.
^.
And if the clouds their tresses part
And does the moon outblaze,
It is but to remind my heart
I long for you always.
^.

“And If” translated by Corneliu M. Popescu

__________________________________________

1936 – Kate Llewellyn born in Tumby Bay, South Australia; Australian poet, author, diarist, and travel writer. She trained at the Royal Adelide Hospitla to be a registered nurse, and graduated in 1958, but she married in 1960 and had two children. She owned and directed the Llewellyn Galleries in Dulwich, Adelaide (1965-1972), then went back to school to earn a BA in history and Classics from the University of Adelaide in 1978 before working in the Women’s Advisory Unit of the South Australian government. She was the first National Secretary of the Poet’s Union of Australia. Llewellyn won the 1975 Bundey Prize for Teeth and Other Verses; was a joint winner of the 1982 Anne Elder Award for her poetry collection Trader Kate and the Elephants; and was honored with the 2006 Australian Book of the Year for Playing With Water.

Frost

by Kate Llewellyn
^.
Three frosts in a row
all welcome for sweetening
the blood oranges.
Also, somehow making me cheerful.
We all need something
to push against.
^.
Eve showed that,
when fed up with Adam, no work
and eternal bliss,
she took her chance.
^.
I leap up, take the engineless mower
and rush at the sea of grass like a racing yacht
among the waves of frost leaving a green wake
steered by my hands.
once like lilies,
now mallee roots.
^.

__________________________________________

January 16
__________________________________

1816 – Frances Browne born in Stranorlar, County Donegal, Ireland; Irish poet, novelist, and children’s short story writer. Stricken with small pox when she was 18 months old, she lost her sight. Frances learned from her siblings reciting their lessons aloud in the evening, and doing their chores to bribe them to read to her. She memorized everything she could. She composed her first poem at age 7, but her work began to be published in 1841, by the Irish Penny Journal and then the London Athenaeum. Browne’s first volume of poetry was published in 1844. By 1845, she was a regular contributor of short stories to Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal. A second book of poems was printed in 1847, and she became known as ‘The Blind Poetess of Ulster.’ That same year, she moved to Edinburgh with one of her sisters as reader and amanuensis. Browne was welcomed in the city’s literary circles and wrote essays, reviews, stories, and a third poetry collection, this time for children, Pictures and Songs of Home. In spite of increasing health problems, she moved to London in 1852, where Browne wrote her first novel, My Share of the World, and was a regular contributor to the Ladies Companion magazine. Her last poem, “The Children’s Day” was written shortly before her death in August 1879 at age 63.

To a Beautiful, Vain Young Lady

by Frances Browne
^.
Your request, my dear girl, is a delicate task;
Pray what would you wish me to say? let me ask.
Must I tell you your eyes are of heavenly blue?
That your face and your features are beautiful, too?
Must I tell you all this? Nay, more, must I say
These serve but your sweetness and sense to display?
No! a flatterer might tell you all this, but a friend,
Believe me, will ne’er to such meanness descend.
^.
A beautiful person, we constantly find,
Is not always adorned by a beautiful mind;
And though a fair face admiration excite,
The effect it produces is transient and slight;
Disappointed, we turn with contempt and disdain
From a form, though angelic, if heartless and vain;
But if mind and if heart correspond with the face,
To love and esteem admiration gives place;
’Tis the mind which alone can illumine the whole;
Beauty attracts the sight, but sweetness wins the soul.
^.

“To a Beautiful, Vain Young Lady” from Frances Browne’s book Poems

__________________________________________

January 17
__________________________________

1820 – Anne Brontë born, English novelist and poet, the youngest of the Brontë sisters; author of Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She was educated at home, mostly by her sisters, until she was 15, when she came to Roe Head, the school where Charlotte was teaching. After two years of formal education, she was in a religious crisis, became ill, and went home. At 19, she went to work as a governess, but her employers blamed the continued bad behavior of their spoiled children on her, and she was dismissed in December 1839 after only seven months. She later used the traumatic experience in her novel Agnes Grey. A legacy of £350 left to each of the Brontë sisters by their aunt Elizabeth Branwell gave them a small amount of independence, the sisters pooled their poems, and self-published them under the pen name ‘Acton Bell’ but the book didn’t even return the cost of publication. The Brontë sisters then turned to novel writing with far more success, although initially all were published under pen names as the Bell “brothers” – Acton, Currer, and Ellis. In 1846, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was the first of their novels to be accepted, and was a great success. Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey were both published in December 1847. Agnes Grey initially sold more copies. Anne’s second book, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, came out in June 1848, stirring controversy and speculation on the identity and gender of the author, because it’s about a woman who leaves her abusive husband, goes into hiding with their son, and earns a living as a painter under an assumed name. It highlighted the unfairness and brutal consequences of the British social and legal system of the time. In 1849, Anne died of tuberculosis at age 29.

Lines composed in a Wood on a Windy Day

by Anne Brontë
^.
My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.
^.
The long withered grass in the sunshine is glancing,
The bare trees are tossing their branches on high;
The dead leaves, beneath them, are merrily dancing,
The white clouds are scudding across the blue sky.
^.
I wish I could see how the ocean is lashing
The foam of its billows to whirlwinds of spray;
I wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,
And hear the wild roar of their thunder today!
^.

__________________________________________

1914 – William Stafford born in Hutchinson, Kansas; American poet and pacifist; the 20^th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1970-1971). His many poetry collections include Traveling Through the Dark, which won the 1963 National Book Award; Another World Instead; Ask Me; Down in My Heart; The Darkness Around Us is Deep; and Stories That Could Be True. Stafford died at age 79 in 1993.

Traveling through the Dark

by William Stafford
^.
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
^.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
^.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
^.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
^.
I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
^.

__________________________________________

January 18
__________________________________

1950 – Grace Nichols born in Georgetown, Guyana; Guyanese poet, teacher, journalist, and novelist; she moved to the UK in 1977. Her first poetry collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman, won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Her other poetry collections include: The Fat Black Woman’s Poems; I Have Crossed an Ocean; Passport to Here and There; and Asana and the Animals – a collection of poems for children.

Cat-Rap

by Grace Nichols
^.
Lying on the sofa
all curled and meek
but in my furry-fuzzy head
there’s a rapping beat.
Gonna rap while I’m napping
and looking sweet
gonna rap while I’m padding
on the balls of my feet
^.
Gonna rap on my head
gonna rap on my tail
gonna rap on my
you know where.
^.
So wave your paws in the air
like you just don’t care
with nine lives to spare
gimme five right here.
^.
Well, they say that we cats
are killed by curiosity,
but does the moggie mind?
No, I’ve got suavity.
When I get to heaven
gonna rap with Macavity,
gonna find his hidden paw
and clear up that mystery.
^.
Nap it up
scratch it up
the knack is free
fur it up
purr it up yes
that’s me.
^.
The meanest cat-rapper you’ll ever see.
Number one of the street-sound galaxy.
^.

__________________________________________

G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

__________________________________

_{As of this morning, our neighborhood is still outside the fire zone

— see update on the fires in the comments.}

Sunday Morning Open Thread With Music by Sam Cooke

Ice Blue

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday January 12, 2025 · 3:30 AM PST

2025/01/12 · 03:30

Good morning, early risers. This morning’s diary presents the smooth sounds from musician and civil rights activist Sam Cooke. But first,

Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.

Join us, please.

This Sunday feels strange for me. I couldn’t get a hold of my weekly Wegovy injection. I drove clear to the pharmacy only to hear that my insurance company required a prior authorization for the refill and the pharmacy hadn’t heard back from my provider yet. I don’t know if I’m going be left to gain my weight loss back or what. The Wegovy really was slashing my appetite down to near nothing. I guess even patients on Medicaid are at the mercy of the whims of our health insurers.

In other news from Casa Blue I just accidentally wiped out about 30 open windows from this new laptop. I really don’t like this finger pad. Since I’m not using the computer as a portable laptop I think I’m going to start using a mouse.

Not much else has been going on around here. Other than that quick run to the pharmacy last Thursday I’ve been home alone. This computer has been my snorkel on the world. Thank you folks for being there for me.

Editor’s Note: Morning Open Thread is looking for community members willing to take on hosting duties—whether it’s a day here and there or a regular weekly post. If you’re interested, just reach out to Officebss. And thank you.

So what’s on your mind this morning?

YouTube Video

So what’s on your mind this morning?

Morning Open Thread featuring oldie songs about smoking

Ozarkblue

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday January 11, 2025 · 3:16 AM PST

2025/01/11 · 03:16

>>>>As many of you remember, cigarette smoking was a common accepted practice until the middle 1960’s. And in the previous decades to the 60’s, it was a crucial aspect for belonging to the culture. So some old songs had lyrics about smoking, I’ll post a few. Just for something different, for your brain cells to inhale (oops).

>>>>These are memories from the years 1957 through 1962, when I was in 5^ththrough 10^th grades. In a small working-class town (pop. 6000) in North Central Illinois, 90 miles west of Chicago (but a vast cultural distance from there).

My exposure to smoking was extensive, because, starting in 5^thgrade, I was a drummer in combos that played ‘old-standard’ songs. The other guys in the combos were older, usually in their thirties. I was a skilled drummer, kept steady tempo, played all the standard rhythms, and did not drink, nor smoke!, nor chase women. So my memories are different from the other kids because my experiences with ‘grown-ups’ were different. In particular with the smoke-filled bars.

Camel, Chesterfield, Kent, Kool, Lucky Strike, Marlboro, Old Gold, Pall Mall, Parliament, Winston. We kids knew all the brands, there were cigarette vending machines (25 cents a pack) at stores, bars, gas stations, etc. And there was a lot of cigarette advertising on TV and posters in stores.

Cigarette smoking scenarios were subdivided into several genres, known to us from advertisements and our own experiences.

>>>>The ‘upper class’ was typically portrayed by a scene with a slim ‘socialite’ woman in a fancy dress, elegantly handling a long cigarette holder. Sitting with a suit-wearing man who held his cigarette between thumb and forefinger. They were usually shown in a ‘cabaret’, with elegance and high-class apparent in the surroundings. We kids did not know anyone like this, nor any place like it either. We only saw it in TV ads and on posters.

The ‘middle class’ was portrayed by ‘active’ people who went to local ‘night clubs’ to dance to the local combos (like mine). The ladies had ‘cigarette purses’ that held a pack and a lighter. The men had their ‘cigs’ in the pocket of their ‘dress shirt’. Both held their cigarettes between first and second fingers of the right hand, as did all other members of the genres described below.

Many of the WWII returnees fit this type, as well as did some of the older siblings of our friends. These are the most common type that I saw during my gig experiences.

>>>>Off to the side, probably best assigned to the ‘upper’ lower class, there was the ‘Marlboro Man’ genre. The muscular, hard-living, swaggering, macho, patriotic, salt-of-the-earth male. Completely world-savvy, he understood the real essence of life, through the cloud of smoke that he suavely exhaled into the air. Cigarettes might be rolled up in the sleeve of his t-shirt, above his brawny biceps.

>>>>Next, there were two types of the ‘lower class’. Other than the Marlboro Man, lower class smokers were not portrayed in the ads, their lifestyle was not glamorous enough.

There were the ‘middle and upper’ portions of the lower class, which is what most kids like us knew, that was our family niche. These men worked at some ‘skilled labor’ job, such as plumbing, delivering mail, electrical repair, butchering, local truck driving, etc. They took a break about every two hours, to step away for a breath of fresh air, and to have a smoke!. Their cigarettes were often flattened or bent, due to being in their shirt pocket and getting crushed by work circumstances.

Finally there were those whose life circumstances put them into the ‘lower’ part of the lower class. Commonly exemplified by the first-generation refugees from Eastern Europe, and high-school dropouts from very poor family upbringing. They worked at the coal furnaces in the zinc factory, or handling picks/shovels in the quarries, or loading barges with grain, or working on the trash-pickup truck.

They were tasked with trying to fit a ‘smoke’ in during the work process. Often seen with a cigarette dangling from the side of their mouth. Smoking was one of the few pleasant moments in their lives.

>>>>But another unadvertised classification was ‘we kids’, breaking the rules and passing around a few cigarettes in the evening at the park, to show how cool we were. Followed by chewing two sticks of Doublemint or Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, so our folks could not smell cigarettes on our breath when we got home. Juicy Fruit gum did not have enough aroma to handle that requirement.

OK here’s some songs about smoking. Links to the lyrics provided.

Smoky Places: Smoky Places

YouTube Video

Smoke Rings: Smoke Rings

YouTube Video

Smoke That Cigarette: Smoke

YouTube Video

Morning Open Thread: TODAY is ... January 10, 2025

officebss

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday January 10, 2025 · 3:29 AM PST

2025/01/10 · 03:29

TODAY is

Save the Eagles Day

Bittersweet Chocolate Day

Cut Your Energy Costs Day

Houseplant Appreciation Day

League of Nations Day

Oysters Rockefeller Day

Peculiar People Day

________________________________________

Bahamas – Majority Rule Day

Bénin – Fête duVaudoun/Traditional Day

Falkland Islands – Margaret Thatcher Day

________________________________________

49 BC – Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, signaling the start of civil war; the year before the Roman Senate, led by Pompey, had ordered Caesar to disband his army and return to Rome because his term as governor of Gaul had finished, but Caesar thought he would be prosecuted if he entered Rome without the immunity enjoyed by a magistrate; Pompey then accused Caesar of insubordination and treason

9 AD – Wang Mang, a Han dynasty official, seizes the throne from the Liu family and founds the Xin dynasty. His reign (9-23) is the beginning and the end of the Xin dynasty. Emperor Wang Mang dies in battle defending the capital city, Chan’an, which is overrun and sacked. Liu Xiu reestablishes the Han dynasty, taking the throne as Emperor Guangwu

1480 – Archduchess Marguerite (Margaret) of Austria, daughter of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, and Mary, Duchess of Burgundy; Governor of the Habsberg Netherlands (1507-1515 and 1519-1530), After a broken engagement, and two short marriages, each ended by the death of her husband, she vowed at the age of 24 never to marry again. In 1506, she became the only woman to be elected by the representative assembly of the Franche-Comté (an eastern French region) as their ruler. In 1507, her father named her Governor of the Low Countries and guardian of her seven-year-old nephew, the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. She acted as intermediary between her father and her nephew’s subjects in the Netherlands, and negotiated the restoration of a treaty of commerce with England favorable to the Flemish cloth interests. After his majority in 1515, Charles rebelled against her influence, but he soon recognized her as one of his wisest advisers, and she became the only regent ever re-appointed indefinitely by the ruler who dismissed her. She was again governor of the Netherlands from 1519 until 1530. Her reign was a period of relative peace and prosperity for the Netherlands, but the Dutch were beginning to rebel against Roman Catholicism, and the first Protestant martyrs were burnt at the stake in 1523. In 1529, together with Louise of Savoy, she negotiated the Treaty of Cambrai, called the Ladies’ Peace. In November 1530, a maid broke a glass goblet, and a glass splinter lodged in Margaret’s foot. When the wound became gangrenous, her doctors strongly urged the amputation of her foot. She gave her consent for the operation, received the sacrament, and revised her will. Before the amputation could be performed, she died at age 50, apparently from an overdose of opium given to her in preparation for the operation, on December 1, 1530. She appointed Charles V as her universal and sole heir

1573 – Simon Marius German astronomer; his work Mundus lovialis describes Jupiter

1776 – Thomas Paine publishes his pamphlet Common Sense

1838 – Peculiar People Day: ‘The Peculiar People’ founded by John Banyard in Rochford Essex, a Christian movement. The name comes from Deuteronomy 14-2: “For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.”

1839 – Indian tea becomes available in Britain for the first time, which is much less expensive than Chinese tea, and quickly increases tea’s popularity

1840 – The penny post, a standard rate paid for by the sender instead of the recipient, begins in Britain

1861 – Florida secedes from the union

1863 – The London Underground, the world’s oldest underground railway, opens between London Paddington Station and Farringdon Station

1863 – Katherine Gibbs born, founder of the Katharine Gibbs Schools, the most famous and prestigious secretarial institution in the U.S. She insisted that, “Young women have to be trained beyond the technical to act as a personal representative, to display initiative, and to assume larger responsibilities.”

1870 – John D. Rockefeller incorporates Standard Oil

1879 – The first Anglo-Zulu War begins when British troops enter Zululand

1887 – Robinson Jeffers born, American poet-playwright-philosopher

1889 – Jules Alciatore of Antoine’s in New Orleans creates Oysters Rockefeller

1889 – After French officer and explorer Louis-Gustave Binger traveled from the Niger River to the Gulf of Guinea, France declares the Côte d’Ivoire as a French Protectorate, and Binger is appointed as its first colonial governor

1898 – Katharine Burr Blodgett born, American physicist and engineer; first woman to earn a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge; inventor of low-reflectance “invisible” glass

Katharine-BurrBlodgett-wonder-glass-newspaper-clipping.jpeg

1900 – Violette Cordery, English race car driver; set a long distance record at the 1926 Autodromo Nazionale Monza, Italy, co-driving a 19.6 hp Invicta for 10,000 miles (16,000 km) at 56.47 miles per hour (90.88 km/h); and averaged 70.7 mph (113.8 km/h) for 5,000 miles (8,000 km) at Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry, Paris, becoming the first woman to win the Dewar Trophy of the Royal Automobile Club

1900 – Second Anglo-Boer War: During the siege of Makeking, Barolong Chief Wessel Montshiwa advises his people not to help the British

1901 – The first great Texas oil gusher is discovered at Spindletop in Beaumont, Texas

1903 – Barbara Hepworth born, English Modernist artist and sculptor, one of the few women artists of her generation to achieve international prominence. She was a leading figure in the colony of artists at St. Ives during WWII. Hepworth was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1959 São Paulo Art Biennial, and the Freedom of St Ives award in 1968 for her significant contributions to the town. She died at age 72 in St. Ives, in a accidental fire at her studio in 1975. There are two museums named for her: the Barbara Hepworth Museum in St. Ives, and the Hepworth Wakefield Museum in Wakefield, the place of her birth, in West Yorkshire

1915 – Cynthia Freeman born as Bea Feinberg, American novelist; after ill-health forced her to give up her interior design business, she turned to writing to earn her living, specializing in multi-generational stories of Jewish families, centering on women protagonists; noted for A World Full of Strangers, Come Pour the Wine, and her best-selling No Time for Tears

1917 – The Silent Sentinels, organized by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, begin their six-day-a-week vigil in front of the White House, wearing purple, white and gold sashes, and holding banners addressed to Woodrow Wilson, “Mr. President – How long must women wait for liberty?” and “Mr. President – What will you do for Woman Suffrage?” The protest will continue until June 4, 1919, when the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is finally passed by both Houses and sent to the states for ratification. But before that, opponents of the suffragists will grab banners and destroy them, throw rotten fruit, and shout insults. Nearly 2,000 women participate in the protests during these 2 ½ years, and many of them will be harassed, arrested, and mistreated by local and federal authorities, including being subjected to violent forced-feedings to stop their hunger strikes in protest of their imprisonment, and even beatings and chokings. The sentences for “obstructing traffic” grow longer and longer, because the women refuse to pay bail, and insist on serving their sentences. Eventually, newspapers across the country print accounts of how the women are being brutalized, and support for the Suffrage Movement grows. In January 1919, President Wilson announces his support of the women’s suffrage amendment

1920 – League of Nations Day: the Treaty of Versailles takes effect, officially ending World War I; and the League of Nations holds its first meeting in Geneva

1920 – Rosella Hightower born, American ballerina of Choctaw heritage; danced with the Ballet Ruse de Monte Carlo and the American Ballet Theatre; the first American, and the first woman, to direct the Paris Opera Ballet, the world’s oldest company. After retiring from the stage, founded École supérieure de danse de Cannes, a leading European school

Rosella Hightower & Andre Eglevsky (1950) — Serge Lido photo

1924 – Max Roach born, American jazz percussionist-composer

YouTube Video

1924 – Lumilla Chiriaeff born in Latvia, Canadian ballet dancer, and choreographer of over 300 ballets for stage and television. She was the founder and Company Director of Les Ballets Chiriaeff in 1952, which became Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in 1957. In 1966, Chiriaeff established the first fully professional ballet school in the province of Québec. Her ballet, Suite Canadienne, was one of the most popular and frequently performed by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. After training in Berlin, during WWII, she was suspected by the Reich of being Jewish, although she wasn’t, and was confined in a Nazi labor camp until she escaped during a bombing raid, and was helped by the Red Cross to get to Switzerland, where she was able to establish her career as a dancer. In 1952, she emigrated to Canada, and settled in Montréal

1927 – Fritz Lang’s futuristic film Metropolis is released in Germany

YouTube Video

1928 – The Soviet Union orders the exile of Leon Trotsky

1931 – Rosalind Howells born in Grenada, Baroness Howells of St Davids; a Labour Life Peer of the House of Lords since 1999, and a race relations and social justice activist. Formerly the Director of the Greenwich Racial Equality Council (GLC), the first black woman to sit the GLC’s Training Board, and also the first woman member of the Court of Governors of the University of Greenwich. She was also the Vice Chair at the London Voluntary Services Council

1939 – Michaela Odone born, American journalist; co-developer of Lorenzo’s Oil for their son Lorenzo, who was diagnosed with adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) at age five, which some studies have shown may slightly delay development of symptoms of the disease in asymptomatic patients

1943 – Jim Croce born, American singer-songwriter

1944 – Jeffrey Catherine Jones born as Jeffrey Durwood Jones, transgender American fantasy artist, with more than 150 covers for many different types of books to her credit, and full-page comics for National Lampoon, as well as venturing into fine art. Jones won the Hugo for Best Professional Artist in 1970, 1971, and 1972. In 1976, Jones was one of the founding artists of The Studio. In 1986, she was honored with the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist. In the 1990s, she moved away from commercial art, and concentrated on painting. She died at age 67, after suffering from severe emphysema, in 2011

1946 – The first General Assembly of the United Nations opens in London, attended by representatives from fifty-one nations, and the League of Nations is dissolved

1946 – The U.S. Army Signal Corps successfully conducts Project Diana, bouncing radio waves off the Moon and receiving the reflected signals

1953 – Pat Benatar born, American singer-songwriter

1956 – Elvis Presley records “Heartbreak Hotel,” “I Was the One,” “I’m Counting On You,” “I Got a Woman” and “Money Honey” in Nashville

1960 – Gurinder Chadha born in Kenya of Sikh Indian parents, Kenyan-English film director and screenwriter; she began her career at the BBC, first in radio, then moving to television news, and segued into making documentaries for the BBC, the British Film Institute, and Channel Four. By 1990, Chadha had founded her production company, Umbi Films. Her first independent film was a short subject, Nice Arrangement, about a British Asian wedding, which selected for the Cannes Film Festival Critic’s section in 1991. Her first feature film, Bhaji on the Beach, won numerous international awards including a BAFTA Nomination for Best British Film of 1994. It was the first feature film directed by a British Asian woman. In 2002, her best-known film, Bend It Like Beckham, became the highest grossing British-financed, British-distributed film, ever in the UK box-office, until it was surpassed by Slumdog Millionaire in 2008

1962 – NASA announces plans to build the C-5 rocket launch vehicle, which became known as the Saturn V Moon rocket, which launched every Apollo Moon mission

1962 – Kathryn S. McKinley born, American computer scientist, noted for research on compilers, runtime systems and computer architecture; a Principle Researcher at Microsoft; Senior Research Scientist at Google; ACM Fellow (2008)

1966 – Tashkent Declaration, a peace agreement signed between India and Pakistan that resolved the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965

1970 – Alisa Marić born, Serbian chess player, FIDE Woman Grandmaster and International Master; elected as Serbian Minister of Youth and Sports (2012-2013)

1971 – Masterpiece Theatre premieres on PBS with host Alistair Cooke; its debut drama series is The First Churchills (it was first seen in the UK in 1969)

1975 – Ugandan diplomat Bernadette Olowo becomes the first woman ambassador to Vatican City in over 900 years of Holy See history

1978 – The Soviet Union launches two cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz capsule for a rendezvous with the Salyut VI space laboratory

1984 – The United States and Holy See (Vatican City) re-establish full diplomatic relations after almost 117 years, overturning the U.S. Congress’s 1867 ban on public funding for such a diplomatic envoy

1985 – Sandinista Daniel Ortega becomes president of Nicaragua and vows to continue the transition to socialism and alliance with the Soviet Union and Cuba; American policy continues to support the Contras in their revolt against the Nicaraguan government

1990 – Time-Warner is formed by the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications

2007 – President George W. Bush announces he will send a “surge” of 21,500 U.S. forces to Iraq

2011 – A judge orders former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to serve three years in prison for his role in a scheme to illegally funnel corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002; in 2013, a Court of Appeals ruling by two Republican justices, with a dissent by the Democratic Chief Justice, overturned his convictions and entered an acquittal, which became final in 2014

2018 – Governors and other leaders in California, Oregon, South Carolina, New York, and other coastal states protested the Trump administration’s announcement of a major expansion of offshore drilling, especially after it was reported that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had assured Rick Scott, Florida’s Republican governor, that his state would be excluded. The other coastal governors said they also have attractive coastlines, tourist economies, and local opposition to drilling. “New York doesn’t want drilling off our coast either,” tweeted New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. “Where do we sign up for a waiver?”

2019 – Jayme Closs, age 13, escaped from her kidnapper, 88 days after he murdered her parents. After the killings, he bound her wrists and ankles using duct tape and dragged her out of her house, and into the trunk of his car, then took her to a remote house, 70 miles from her home in Barron, Wisconsin. Closs said he thought she was too afraid of him to attempt to escape, so he didn’t put any special locks on the doors, but forced her under the bed and boxed her in with his belongings before leaving the house. On this day, she escaped from the house, wearing a pair of her kidnapper’s shoes, and found a woman walking her dog, who took her to a neighbor’s house, and called the police. The man was arrested quickly, and Closs was released from the hospital to the custody of her aunt. Hormel, the parent company of the Jennie-O store where her parents worked, announced that they were giving $25,000 of the reward money they offered to Closs for rescuing herself

2021 – Following its historic decision to legalize abortion, the government of Argentina announced it will drop criminal charges against women accused of having an abortion. The announcement offers hope to the mostly poor and marginalized women facing criminal sanctions. The new law, passed on December 30, 2020, allows abortion for any reason during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, making Argentina the largest country in Latin America to broadly allow the procedure. It is unclear how many women will have their cases dismissed as a result of the new law. One recent report – by Argentine human rights group Cels, abortion rights campaigners and San Martín University Centre – identified 1,532 abortion cases in the past eight years that could potentially be covered. But not all provinces replied to the researchers’ request for information, and other campaigners say the total is probably substantially higher. “All those women who have been criminalized ... will have the benefit that their cases will be dismissed, because there’s a retroactive application of the most favorable criminal law,” said Argentine minister for women, gender and diversity, Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta. The Cels report identified several women serving lengthy jail sentences who were charged with such crimes as aggravated homicide after experiencing obstetric problems such as stillbirths and miscarriages late in their pregnancies. Most of these women were extremely poor, and women’s rights campaigners are calling for reevaluation of their cases.

Women’s Rights Activists celebrating — **Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta,** minister for women

Morning Open Thread Thursday January 9, 2025

Ozarkblue

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday January 09, 2025 · 3:31 AM PST

2025/01/09 · 03:31

Newer
Older

RSS