History – Page 8

The Real January 20, 2009 Post

January 20, 2009 by John 4 Comments

In the previous post, I sort of blew off the significance of the day as if I didn’t take it seriously.

It’s not a joke. I’m trying real hard not to get too puffed up and all “Gee aren’t we Americans wonderful?!?” (As a column in today’s paper said, we don’t even know yet whether he”ll be a good President, let alone a great one.)

And yet, and yet…

I’ve been with my current employer since 1993; until today, they’ve never offered the use of conference rooms and video facilities to watch an Inauguration — except possibly for the simple but godawful swearing-in in November 1963.

And truthfully, I have not been able to stop smiling.

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Near-Misses: The Legend of 1900

December 13, 2008 by John 7 Comments

The Missus roamed the aisles of the video store a few nights ago, not looking for anything in particular. (Which is to say, she’d ceased looking for anything in particular: it was one of those in-between times when all the “new releases” on our must-see list had already been claimed by renters with more disciplined calendars and schedules.)

Knowing me to be a fan of director Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, she brought home his 1998 English-language debut, The Legend of 1900. Which we (well, I) watched last night.

What an interesting premise, with all sorts of opportunities for metaphor and sentiment:

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Happy Birthday, Mr. Milton

December 9, 2008 by John 2 Comments

Wow — four hundred years, and (many) people still don’t even furrow their brows when you say the name “John Milton.” Most of us aspire to be remembered for one-fourth of that span, if that much.

Today, Milton’s memory is honored (if not read, exactly) principally for his epic works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained — and, to a lesser extent, for his other poetry.

But in his time he was also something of a political gadfly. Wikipedia speaks of his “radical, republican politics and heretical religious views,” which — coming, as they did, before, during, and after the English Civil War — ensured either his popularity (during Cromwell’s Commonwealth) or his ostracism (during the monarchy).

Among the forward-thinking issues which Milton made a point of espousing was freedom of written expression (what we’d call freedom of the press, today).

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Mr. and Mrs. WS Go for a Walk

November 29, 2008 by John 4 Comments

Yesterday would have been William Shakespeare’s and Anne Hathaway’s 426th anniversary. Whew.

Per yesterday’s Today in Literature newsletter, which I’ve just got around to reading, we have this excerpt from Chapter 3 of Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works, “Richard Nye’s fictional send-up of their marriage”:

When Mr William Shakespeare asked me that idle question as to whether I desired him to compare me to a summer’s day, and I said thank you no, we were standing together on the bank by London Bridge. I say together because together is worth remark in a marriage like ours was.

Himself had been picking his nose for at least five minutes, dreaming. As for me, I was counting the heads of the traitors up there on the poles. It was cold, I might tell you….

“Winter,” my husband said suddenly.

He swept off his hat with a flourish, as if he had just discovered some important new truth. I thought he’d read my mind about the day not knowing what season it belonged to. Then, from the green spark in his eyes, I knew there was worse to come.

“Winter what?” I demanded.

“Winter you,” Mr Shakespeare said. “Anne Hathawinterway with her,” he went on, grinning. “You’re more like a day in December,” my husband concluded.

I hit him.

Well, what would you have done?

What a great exercise: inventing dialogue — a whole life — for a famous person whose biography is documented poorly, or not at all.

Dad (and Others), Somewhere and Sometime

November 11, 2008 by John 5 Comments

(1) Me — during work hours. Just came up for a breath of air.

(2) It’s me again. Actually working! See, I told you so!

(3) Here I am still working. I don’t know how I can work so hard!!

The above photos (taken somewhere in France, sometime in 1944), their captions penned in ink on the back, the handwriting in which the captions appear, and the voice in which I can hear the captions spoken — all are exquisitely familiar and completely alien to me. And I bet they are to some of you, too, even if the faces, places, and years are different.

Thanks, Dad.

Paying Attention to History

November 9, 2008 by John 1 Comment

If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta kinda like about writing? Oh, well, all right, yes I do post — but less often! — about tech stuff, and politics, and art and photography and poetry…

When working on a large-scale project like a book, similarly, I sometimes wander off the main road, suddenly absorbed in distractions of landscape and weather and architecture.

Oddly, this sometimes works to the advantage of the book in question (although, all right all right fine, it sometimes does not — and probably just as oddly).

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Rome, and the Day It Wasn’t Built In

November 5, 2008 by John 6 Comments

My head keeps saying This isn’t a political blog… this isn’t a political blog…

My heart, though, can’t deny the huge chunk of me myself which is political…

Short version: I have voted in ten Presidential elections. That’s 36 years. For nine of those elections, I have watched the returns on TV and read about them the next day and thought to myself, alternatively:

Oh no. The evil bastard won…!
OR
Well, maybe he’s not perfect — but at least the evil bastard didn’t win…!

We were at a “watch party” last night. When the clock rolled over at 11:00 — when the West Coast polls closed — and the networks started making their calls, I completely lost it: sobbing, laughing, fighting the sobs and giving into the laughter. (The Missus finally suggested that I go into the bathroom and splash some cold water on my face. It helped.) But the tremors continued, off and on, until I fell asleep at around 1:30am. (They resumed this morning, every time the reality struck me anew.)

[getting a grip on self]

I just want to share a little bit of classical history with you right now. It goes back to at least the third century BC, in the ancient city of Rome.

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What’s in a Song: Blue Moon

November 3, 2008 by John 8 Comments

[This is the first in a series of every-now-and-then posts about popular songs with long lives.]

Some great songs go through subtle changes over time: the original lyrics are updated to correspond to more modern diction and taste; rhymes get improved or dropped altogether; refrains are added and subtracted; and of course new arrangements can, with the slightest addition of an instrumental passage, change our very understanding of what a song means.

“Blue Moon” didn’t begin as a classic — not in the form it eventually acquired. While the music remained unchanged, its lyrics didn’t simply evolve: they mutated almost overnight, going through three versions before finally settling down into their fourth and (more or less) final variation.

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Beacon

October 21, 2008 by John 8 Comments

[In the wake of yesterday’s post (which began as a study of someone else’s neurosis but ended as a study of my own), I’m really feeling the need today to just write about something completely free (for me) of any, y’know, import. Here’s what floated to the surface, as it were.]

A while back, I participated in one of those “blog parties” which seem to come along periodically. The topic (selected by the party’s organizer, Rebecca Ramsey) was Wonders of the World, in which participants celebrated, well, wonderful things or occasions which held some special appeal for them.

My topic was waterfalls. As I explained in an aside there, for some unknown reason I’ve been fascinated by the country of Wales, which I’ve never visited. (Nor, as far as I know, has anyone I know ever visited there.) (Okay, you can all announce yourselves now.) Although I’m not actively looking for information on the Welsh language, Welsh countryside, Welsh history or folklore, whatever, my mind still goes into heightened-interest mode when I come across any of that stuff.

The lighthouse shown here has not been operational for some time. It’s referred to as the Whitford (or alternatively Whiteford) lighthouse. Built in 1866 to replace the original (which was in turn erected in 1854), it was deactivated in 1926. It’s 130 feet high, made of cast iron, and at low tide — as shown here — requires a five-mile walk to reach. The Whitford lighthouse watches over the Burry Inlet, on the southern coast of Wales.

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Well, We Were All Innocent Children Once

October 16, 2008 by John 2 Comments

Baby Krishna As of this moment, this (from Maggie, as it happens) is the one inarguably interesting (albeit inarguably geekoid) item I’ve found among the Twitterings I’ve seen so far: the first page posted on the infant World Wide Web.

The page was last updated Thursday, December 3, 1992, at 3:37:20 a.m. EST.

The Web was originally a project of CERN, the Swiss nuclear research organization more recently in the news for its work on the black-hole-creating, universe-destroying Large Hadron Collider. It grew out of a paper written by one Tim Berners-Lee (a/k/a “TBL,” often referred to in terms such as “the father of the Web”) and Robert Cailliau.

From the introduction to that paper, entitled “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project”:

The attached document describes in more detail a Hypertext project.

HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.

The project has two phases: firstly we make use of existing software and hardware as well as implementing simple browsers for the user’s workstations, based on an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments. Secondly, we extend the application area by also allowing the users to add new material.

Phase one should take 3 months with the full manpower complement, phase two a further 3 months, but this phase is more open-ended, and a review of needs and wishes will be incorporated into it.

The manpower required is 4 software engineers and a programmer, (one of which could be a Fellow). Each person works on a specific part (e.g. specific platform support).

Each person will require a state-of-the-art workstation , but there must be one of each of the supported types. These will cost from 10 to 20k each, totalling 50k. In addition, we would like to use commercially available software as much as possible, and foresee an expense of 30k during development for one-user licences, visits to existing installations and consultancy.

We will assume that the project can rely on some computing support at no cost: development file space on existing development systems, installation and system manager support for daemon software*.

Ah, youth.

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* Aside to His Dark Materials fans: not that kind of daemon. This kind: programs which run in the background. I told you this was geekoid.