"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
"I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown. Remember!"
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"O Holy King, Whose Severed Head"
by The Honourable Mrs. Ermengarda Greville-Nugent,
Foundress of The Society of King Charles the Martyr;
Tune: St. Stephen (English Hymnal 337)
O holy King, whose severed head
The Martyr’s Crown doth ray
With gems for every blood-drop shed,
Saint Charles for England pray!
For England’s Church, for England’s realm
(Once thine in earthly sway),
Lest storms our Ark should overwhelm,
Saint Charles of England, pray!
Thou for thy murderers didst plead
That January day;
O still, in this our hour of need,
Saint Charles for England pray!
Let us with him whose crown is won,
Meet adoration pay
To God the Father, God the Son,
And Paraclete alway.
Defying threats of suicide bombers and assassinations, millions of Iraqis went to the polls yesterday in the country's first free and fair nationwide election since 1953.
Wire reports from Baghdad said the streets were for the first time in months filled with children playing soccer in many parts of the besieged capital. Voters proudly displayed their fingers stained in blue ink to prove they had voted and prevent them from voting twice.
One report from Iraq said a 90-year-old woman was pushed to a Baghdad polling station on a wheelbarrow. Another said that women who had survived Saddam Hussein's 1988 campaign against the Kurds were celebrating at polling places in northern Iraq. Mr. Bush quoted a dispatch about a man who had lost a leg in a terrorist attack last year. "I would have crawled here if I had to. I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me. Today I am voting for peace," Mr. Bush quoted him as saying.
The Associated Press quoted an Iraqi election official, Mijm Towirish, as saying his country had "broken a barrier of fear."
The words and pictures of yesterday's election in Iraq tell the story of a remarkable achievement by the Iraqi people. It is an achievement that took place with the aid of America and its partners in the coalition that liberated Iraq. And in the face of the skepticism of a host of figures and institutions, on both the left and the right, in America and abroad.
"Iraq confounds the prophets of doom," opines The Telegraph:
That elections are a better thing than tyranny seems a truth so obvious as not to be worth stating. Yet such were the passions aroused by the Iraq war that many Western observers now find themselves hoping, disgracefully, that that country's first free poll will fail…
[Y]esterday, Iraq became the most democratic country in the Arab world. What a pity that so many writers who, in other circumstances, are optimists about human progress, should shut their eyes to what is happening. In their determination to say "I told you so", they are coming perilously close to siding with jihadi murderers. Shame on them.
This photo of Hib shows a much rougher looking man than the photos of his time in Pittsburgh. Perhaps the years of rough play and drinking were beginning to take their toll.
-- From LostHockey.com's profile of Hib Milks, who scored a team-leading 17 goals for the Philadelphia Quakers, perhaps the worst team in NHL history, in their one season of play in 1930-31.
With former referee Cooper Smeaton as their coach the Quakers were made up of a bunch of toughs that preferred to fight rather then play. The ugliest incident involving the Quakers came on Christmas Day when police had to come onto the ice and break up a fight they were having with the Boston Bruins. The Quakers goon squad would put together one of the worst season in NHL history as they won just 4 games on the way to finishing in last place with a horrible 4-36-4 record.
Another Quaker profiled at LostHockey.com is D'arcy Coulson:
Despite not being a "big" man, he was obviously not afraid to throw his weight around. He managed to rack up a league leading 89 penalty minutes in 20 regular season games, another 26 minutes in the 6 post-season games, and yet another 23 in his 7 games in Chicago. This trend continued in his only NHL season with the Philadelphia Quakers, where in only 28 games, roughly a half season, he was third in penalty minutes in the league with 103. His granddaughter claims that on the night his second child was born, D'arcy was away playing hockey, and took his frustration about missing the event out on his opponents.
Quaker Stanley Crossett went on to serve as sergeant of a gun crew in the Second World War and was photographed receiving the king and queen of England on an inspection tour.
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The Hockey Hall of Fame multimedia gallery has a collection of vignettes on the Legends of Hockey that aired a few years back, I believe, on ESPN Classic. (Scroll down to "Legends Spotlight.") The small size of the clips is a bit annoying, but the tributes to old-time hockey greats are wonderful: I particularly appreciated the installments on Bobby Orr and Milt Schmidt, and on old-school goalies Gump Worsley and Glenn Hall, who played more than 500 consecutive games without a mask. The piece on Terry Sawchuk is rather sad.
* * *
More old-time hockey:Goalies Archive chronicles the goaltending history of every NHL team * Gerry Cheeverssans trademark stitched mask, and looking about 12 as a Leafs rookie * All 809 players to wear the Spoked B are profiled at Bruins Legends * Goalies in ball-caps and Montreal Maroons galore at the Bee Hive Hockey Photo Museum * USA Today hockey columnist Ted Montgomery calls Bobby Orr the best player of all time. No argument here.
In the seventh and eighth grades in the mid-1950s, I was an unruly student. Particularly when the teacher would demand of her class "silence" I became oddly loquacious. Thus I was forever being banished to the back of the room, where behind a partition of some sort the teacher maintained her third "library," piles of old magazines such as Life and Look that featured photographs of current events. As my school was a Catholic grammar school, we had regular classes in religion, the grisliest moments of which were when our teacher told us about how the Romans martyred the early Christians.
It was after one of these lectures that I made the discovery that marked my political views indelibly. I was sent off to the "library," with my head full of tortured and murdered bodies from some gruesome Roman slaughter in the Coliseum. Inevitably I turned to the pages of Life and Look, and there I discovered still more tortured and murdered bodies. There were piles of corpses, shirtless men with skeletal upper bodies exposed, and American soldiers, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, greeting the survivors. Faraway Romans had not committed this atrocity; German European totalitarians had.
And Walter Reich, former director of the US Holocaust Museum, on images of Auschwitz:
One of those photos is installed in front of the remains of another of the gas chamber buildings; it's of Jews - mostly elderly men, women and children - who, a few minutes after the camera's shutter was snapped, would be ordered to undress and get into the building for "showers." Four young girls, including a girl of 4 or 5 with clasped hands, stare into the camera's lens. Larry Rivers, the American artist, saw that photo and painted the scene on a large canvas. When I was the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I hung that painting on the wall facing my desk so that I'd never forget the individuals for whom that museum was a memorial - and each morning those young girls would make eye contact with me. This past week, in Auschwitz, staring out from the same photo planted in the ground in front of the gas chamber in which they were gassed, those girls were able to make eye contact with world leaders.
One day, while I was the Holocaust Museum's director, a visitor to the museum, an Auschwitz survivor, looked at another photo from that set, which is on the wall of the museum's permanent exhibition. It's a photo of Jews getting out of cattle cars and lining up for selection. The visitor was convinced that, in the photo, she saw herself, her mother, and her baby daughter. She also said she saw the prisoner who had told her that it would be better if she were to hand her baby to her mother. Confused and uncomprehending, she did that. That act, it turns out, saved her life. Had she not given the baby to her mother, all three would have been killed, since women holding babies were automatically sent to be gassed, as were older women, such as her mother. Having given her baby to her mother, she was ordered to move to the line that turned out to be for those who were "fit to work" - and only her mother and baby were sent into the other line, the one that was destined, she later learned, for the gas chamber. When she saw the image of her child on the Holocaust Museum's wall she broke down. Sobbing, she said it was the only picture that existed of her child. She touched it, caressed it, wouldn't leave it. The other museum visitors nearby also broke down and wept, and so did a staff member. This was the Holocaust summarized in a single story contained in a single photo.
This illustration by Elliott Banfield for today's NY Sun is evocative of the 18th century. Banfield, whose distinctive drawings enlivened the old American Spectator, and who designed the look of the current Claremont Review, is one of my favorite illustrators. See his beautiful design for a 9/11 monument.
The sheet music cover above reminded me of my youngest, carried to sleep each night by his "dream owl."
Birds are the order of the day at the Library of Congress' Today in History site, which is marking the anniversary of the death of John James Audubon.
Boston art dealers Haley & Steele have established a sumptuous site devoted to the naturalist-painter, JJAudubon.com. Thirty-thousand will fetch a fine print of a sea eagle.
George Will is must-reading on the Larry Summers brouhaha at Harvard, and Ruth Marcus is good, too.
The Financial Times' Amity Shlaes advises Mr. Summers: Stop apologizing. At Slate, William Saletan criticizes the "pseudo-feminist show-trial" of the Harvard president.
The NY Times, meantime, reports on faculty dissatisfaction with a president they say has created ill will by "humiliating faculty members in meetings, shutting down debate and dominating discussions."
I particularly like this excerpt: "Larry is stimulating to argue with one on one and would be admirably controversial as a colleague," said Daniel S. Fisher, a Harvard professor of physics and applied physics, who has observed Mr. Summers in many meetings. "But with Larry as president, the rules are clear. For the president, it is fine to be provocative, but for faculty, serious questions and constructive dissent are squelched."
Serious questions and constructive dissent are squelched? Considering the reaction to Summers' breach of PC group-think, and the Harvard president's repeated forced apologies, one wonders: Who exactly is doing the squelching, and who is the squelchee?
The truth is that the average schoolmaster, on all the lower levels, is and always must be...next door to an idiot, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation?
The essential difficulty of pedagogy lies in the impossibility of inducing a sufficiency of superior men and women to become pedagogues. Children, and especially boys, have sharp eyes for the weaknesses of the adults set over them. It is impossible to make boys take seriously the teaching of men they hold in contempt.
* * *
Hamilton College outdoes itself, downshifting past moral vacuity to willful and grotesque offensiveness in the guise of "fostering different points of view." Roger Kimball takes note.
To echo Mr. P:How [can] anybody…really, truly be a modern liberal [?] You just can't go around doing real, constructive good without a concept of what Good is.
Amazingly, he never lost any teeth, although he broke his nose at least ten times. According to his wife, he would reset the broken nose himself: “He’d put a little Vaseline on his finger, stick it up his nose and just put it back in place again.” He also preferred to play without thigh pads.
Raise a Schaefer to the memory of the old Pat Patriot, seen at upper left, described by his cartoonist creator as looking like "a lopsided Chinaman."
The football-hiking minuteman lives on at the Helmet Hut, an online museum of vintage gridiron headgear, and at the Coniglio family's shrine to the old AFL.
* * *
Contrarian Llama Butcher Steve grew up in Connecticut liking neither the Patriots nor, for some reason, the Giants, the ur-team of choice in New England, and is unenthused over the Super Bowl.
If you were a Pats fan when they sucked, if you got arrested throwing wing nuts at real NFL teams coming out of the visitor's clubhouse at Schaeffer Stadium, enjoy the party for the next two weeks. I'm sure Son of Nixon, the Irish Elk and others fit into this category, and I wish them well in their well deserved period of annoying gloating.
What was my old recipe for a Headhunter? I think it called for rum, ice, Coco Lopez, pineapple juice and milk, tossed in a blender, and served in a coconut shell.
And Esther Wilberforce-Packard wins the award for Best Headline:
Animal Hoarders Should be Hurled into Mexico with Gigantic Bamboo Catapults
* * *
The blizzard brought two feet of snow out our way. The drifts were knee-high on the way to the birdfeeder, thigh-high on the way to the mailbox, chest-high against the side door. Another four-to-six inches predicted tomorrow.
Salem got 38 inches during the weekend storm, while Nantucket reported wind gusts of up to 84 mph, and all power was cut off to the island.
New York City's lost Dewey Arch is paid tribute by Andrew Cusack.
The image above of pachyderms promenading below the arch comes via the wonderful KJA circus-poster site. I also like their Congress of Giant Birds of the World.
Meantime, PJ O'Rourke offers an alternate address for the non-compassionate conservative:
MY FELLOW AMERICANS, I had intended to reach out to all of you and bring a divided nation together. But I changed my mind. America isn't divided by political ethos or ethnic origin. America isn't divided by region or religion. America is divided by jerks. Who wants to bring a bunch of jerks together with the rest of us? Let them stew in Berkeley, Boston, and Ann Arbor.
Today's listening at Perfessor Bill's: "Under the Double Eagle" at the Pre-Ragtime page and James Sylvester Scott's "Calliope Rag" – the calliope version – at Classic Ragtime Composers.
* * *
I'm with Thos Fitzpatrick -- the Conservative or Tory color is Blue, the color of the Left is Red. Let's get those state colors right!
"We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom.
"Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner “Freedom Now” — they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.
"When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, “It rang as if it meant something.” In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof."
President Bush's eloquent Inaugural Address committing America to the advance of freedom around the world had definite Kennedy-esque overtones. Deacon at Power Line agrees:
The MSM, I expect, will rip this uncompromising and single-minded assertion of our values and ideals. But that's because it won't acknowledge that we're at war. Those who know that we are will welcome the echoes of Churchill and Kennedy as just the kind of rhetoric demanded by the times.
[T]he president has formally declared that we at least will be on the right side of history and thus we have to let his critics sort...their own moral calculus.
A just-married colleague and I stopped at a smoke shop over lunch for celebratory cigars. Inspired by the morning's oratory, we bought Churchills.
The Reuters photo above taken this morning recalls a Lifecover photo from 40 years ago (only jollier), saying something of the grandeur as well as the orderliness of American democracy.
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The Washington Post takes a look at the best and worst of presidential inauguration speeches. (Via Fr Tucker)
Warren G. Harding's is counted among the Worst. Here's an excerpt:
We would not have an America living within and for herself alone, but we would have her self-reliant, independent, and ever nobler, stronger, and richer. Believing in our higher standards, reared through constitutional liberty and maintained opportunity, we invite the world to the same heights. But pride in things wrought is no reflex of a completed task. Common welfare is the goal of our national endeavor. … We want the cradle of American childhood rocked under conditions so wholesome and so hopeful that no blight may touch it in its development …
He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle.
For his 1905 swearing-in, President Theodore Roosevelt wore a ring containing a lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair. More than 35,000 celebrants marched in the ensuing parade, from coal miners, cowboys, Native Americans, and African-American cavalry troops, to Roosevelt’s old Spanish-American War regiment, the Rough Riders.
Ken Burns' latest on Jack Johnson was quite good. NY Sun reviewer Allen Barra writes:
There are no heroes in the Jack Johnson story: not the great fighters of the early gloved era who drew the color line, like John L. Sullivan and Jim Corbett; not the early white progressives who approved of the idea of a black champion but were appalled at Johnson's preference for white women; and not Johnson himself, a self-centered hedonist who had no time for blacks devoted to elevating the race. The contradictions in American life that Johnson embodied can't be smoothed over, and the controversies he exacerbated remain unresolved. In many ways, his story seems more contemporary than Muhammad Ali's.
Historical consultants to the program include the jazz critic and essayist Stanley Crouch, who the reviewer writes "can do these kinds of shows standing on his bald head":
You just never know what's going to come out of Mr. Crouch's mouth; his favorite Jack Johnson story is a reply the champion made to a white journalist who asked him why white women were attracted to black men like him. "We eat cold eels," Johnson replied, "and think distant thoughts." "Now what does that mean?" asks Mr. Crouch rhetorically, convulsing with laughter. "It doesn't mean anything, but it's the perfect answer."
The reviewer previously wrote for the Sun on the Geoffrey C. Ward biography of Johnson:
Mr. Ward’s biography is far — very far from hagiography. Biographers are supposed to decide at some point whether or not they like their subjects. Mr. Ward has settled for being fascinated by Johnson without admiring him. He allows Johnson’s greatness without ever trying to make a case for his goodness. Engrossing and definitive, “Unforgivable Blackness” brings its subject to life in all his vulgar, splendid glory.
Woodrow Wilson doesn't come out well in the Jack Johnson documentary or in this Corner post by Jonah Goldberg, in whose opinion Wilson "was the worst president of the 20th century and did more damage to that century than any other American statesman."
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Here's the Squaring the Globe blog on the un-PC remarks by Harvard's president that had feminists seeing crimson:
In Massachusetts we no longer display transgressors in the stocks. Instead, our form of social scolding by holders of the Sole Progressive World View is to publish a page 1 story in the Boston Globe (above the fold) with the lede “Summers’ remarks on women draw fire”.
Actually it should have been entitled:
“Harvard President Ignores Academic Speech Codes”.
Reliably enough, today's Globe floods the zone on the Harvard president who departed from Ivy League & Morrissey Boulevard groupthink. A follow-up story on Harvard women's outrage links to an accompanying editorial and to dudgeon from columnists Eileen McNamara and Derrick Jackson.
By contrast, the Harvard Crimson actually interviews a psychology professor, Harvard's own Steven Pinker, who offers a useful perspective on the controversy.
CRIMSON: Were President Summers’ remarks within the pale of legitimate academic discourse?
PINKER: Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa.
CRIMSON: Would it be normal to hear a similar set of hypotheses presented and considered at a conference of psychologists?
PINKER: Some psychologists are still offended by such hypotheses, but yes, they could certainly be considered at most major conferences in scientific psychology.
CRIMSON: Finally, did you personally find President Summers’ remarks (or what you’ve heard/read of them) to be offensive?
PINKER: Look, the truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is “offensive” even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry.
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As it was eight degrees outside this morning, and the remarkablePatriots are rolling again, it's time to Eskimo Up with a bit of Harry Reser. The Pats inspire more than one "Hallelujah."
The sainthood cause of First World War chaplain Rev. William Doyle, SJ, was championed in the English paper the Catholic Times in December 2003. The writer, Rob Doyle, no relation, kindly sends along the article.
A new movement that reflects the teachings of King would be, like a great jazz band, inclusive and democratic. It would understand history and build on tradition. It would cherish individuality but respect the social collectivity upon which freedom thrives. It would defend those rules (like the Bill of Rights) that affirm human dignity and work to change those other rules that stifle the creative spirit.
The trumpet player Art Farmer...explains that jazz treats musicians who have passed as if they are all still living. We speak of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Lester Young in the present tense as if they were with us, he said, because when we play their records we hear their spirit.
And so it is with Martin Luther King whose spirit is still shining and still very much needed.
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The only sin's/In my skin: Hear "(What Did I Do to be So) Black and Blue," performed by Ethel Waters and Louis Armstrong.
On a related front, congratulations to classicist David Kubiak, one of St. Blog's most astute commentators, on his election as vice-president of the Latin Liturgy Association.
Forget the sedevacantist hyperventilation: What I take away from these images of natives taking Communion (on the tongue) is that they appear to approach the Sacraments more seriously than some clergy, not to mention lay NCRcontributors.
Moe Roberts, first Jewish goalie in Boston Bruins history, went 18 years between games in the NHL.
He hung up his skates as a player in 1934, but then in 1951, as a 46-year-old assistant trainer for the Black Hawks, was called into goal for the last 20 minutes of a game against Detroit in 1951, and made a point-blank save on Gordie Howe.
What are future generations gonna say about us? My God, y'know, someday we're gonna be like him [the skeleton]. I mean, y'know, he was probably one of the beautiful people ... and now look, this is what happens to us. Y'know, it's very important to have some kind of personal integrity....I'll be hanging in a classroom one day, and I want to make sure that when I thin out, I'm well thought of.
-- Woody Allen, Manhattan
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Erik Keilholtz, on the Pleistocene gourmet's approach to Megaceros Hibernicus:
The recipe they would have used is simple. Given the era, they would have preferred the cut known as the Filet Magnon, served with a Chausseur and Gathereur sauce.
* * *
While we're quoting movies:
A line from Broadcast News comes to mind at word a film romanticizing Che Guevara has been produced by Robert Redford:
AARON: What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing...he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance...Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen. (seeing he's not reaching her) And he'll get all the great women.
I've liked Robert Redford quite a bit in movies like The Natural and The Sting, and A River Runs Through It, which he directed, is among my favorite films. That he has devoted his talent, in this case, to the glorification of a brutish cause, is disappointing.
NR's Jay Nordlinger has the first and last word on Che Chic:
The fog of time and the strength of anti-anti-Communism have obscured the real Che. Who was he? He was an Argentinian revolutionary who served as Castro's primary thug. He was especially infamous for presiding over summary executions at La Cabaña, the fortress that was his abattoir. He liked to administer the coup de grâce, the bullet to the back of the neck. And he loved to parade people past El Paredón, the reddened wall against which so many innocents were killed. Furthermore, he established the labor-camp system in which countless citizens — dissidents, democrats, artists, homosexuals — would suffer and die. This is the Cuban gulag. A Cuban-American writer, Humberto Fontova, described Guevara as "a combination of Beria and Himmler." Anthony Daniels once quipped, "The difference between [Guevara] and Pol Pot was that [the former] never studied in Paris."
It’s absurd the way it is in New York: William Buckley’s phrase, the “averted gaze” — “I notice you, but I’m not going to look at you.” Or, “I’m going to snub you and make it a point that you know I snubbed you.” A lot of people get demonized. Hilton Kramer in person is incredibly agreeable, funny, and knowledgeable about New York intellectual life of the past 50 years, but if you were to mention him in certain circles — it’s not that they don’t want to read Hilton Kramer, it’s [that they believe] people like him should not be allowed to exist. Why can’t he just go away? Oh yeah, let’s just leave it all up to Arthur Danto and the October crowd! I don’t take my disagreements with people personally, I really don’t. If someone disagrees with me about a movie or a writer, I don’t pretend they don’t exist if I’m introduced to them. I thought New Yorkers supposedly thrived on give-and-take. All this stuff you read about the Partisan Review gang, how they would argue into the late hours and get vocal but still keep coming to each other’s parties. Now it’s like, “Oh no, you won’t be invited if you say something that somehow doesn’t fit.”
Google is a fickle mistress: The Berkeley palaeontologists have retained the lead on Irish elk, but add quote marks and, voila.
* * *
Megaceros Hibernicus figures into this poem by James Brunton Stephens on love amid the natural-history exhibits:
Through the Museum-windows played
The light on fossil, cast, and chart;
And she was there, my Gwendoline,
The mammal of my heart.
She leaned against the Glyptodon,
The monster of the sculptured tooth;
She looked a fossil specimen
Herself, to tell the truth.
She leaned against the Glyptodon;
She fixed her glasses on her nose;
One Pallas-foot drawn back displayed
The azure of her hose.
Few virtues had she of her own--
She borrowed them from time and space;
Her age was eocene, although
Post-tertiary her place.
The Irish Elk that near us stood,
(Megaceros Hibernicus),
Scarce dwarfed her; while I bowed beneath
Her stately overplus…
* * *
Naturalist and writer Richard Ellis of the American Museum of Natural History, interviewed by the NYT, on the prospects of a real-life Jurassic Park:
The technology of today is not advanced enough to recreate a dinosaur from a drop of blood preserved in amber, but it might really be possible to recreate a Tasmanian tiger. If they succeeded, I'd certainly want to see it. I'd love to see a recreated Irish elk. I'd be first in line for that.
Paul Donnelly writes in the NY Sun the story of Pat Tillman puts him in mind of two legendary NY athletes. The first is Christy Mathewson, biggest star of the deadball era:
Mathewson was 38 years old when he volunteered - not merely for the Army, in 1916. That would have been extraordinary enough, but Matty volunteered for the chemical warfare division - surely the most dangerous and repulsive and, therefore, heroic thing he could think of, kind of like Tillman going to Afghanistan. When the Army wouldn't send him to France, Matty used his clout to get a personal meeting with President Wilson. "I can't send you to France, Matty," Wilson is reported to have told him. "You're a national icon."
"I know that, Mr. President," Matty replied. "And that's exactly why I have to go."
The other is "Harvard" Eddie Grant, the only major-leaguer killed in action in the Great War:
In the old Polo Grounds at West 155th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, gone 40 years now, there was a 5-foot-tall block of granite in centerfield, nearly 480 feet from home plate. It was dedicated to the memory of "Harvard Eddie," Captain Edward Leslie Grant, class of 1906, who while on patrol with the 307th infantry unit of the 77th Division, in the Argonne Forest, was shot on October 5, 1918, and died four days later. Inexplicably, the Eddie Grant memorial vanished when the Polo Grounds was torn down. (How do you lose a half-ton block of granite with a bronze plaque?)
Eddie Grant was killed in the Argonne as he led a mission to rescue the "Lost Battalion" trapped behind German lines. Each Memorial Day a wreath-laying ceremony was held at his plaque in deep centerfield at the Polo Grounds. The plaque may be seen in this photo of Willie Mays' famous catch in the 1954 World Series.
In December 2001, the Great War Society and the Western Front Association - US Branch approached the San Francisco Giants Baseball Club with an offer to help defray costs of installing a replacement for Eddie Grant's plaque at the new Giants Stadium. The team's President and Managing General Partner declined the offer. In the subsequent seasons, the Giants blew a sixth game lead and ultimately the 2002 World Series, and were eliminated early in the 2003 playoffs. Their previous World Series appearances following the loss of Eddie's plaque were notably odd. In the 1962 rain-plagued series, the last out of the seventh game was a crushing line drive with the Series' winning runs in scoring position that went as if guided by radar to the Yankees second baseman. The 1989 earthquake-plagued series ended with a four-game sweep by the Oakland A's. The Giants last won a championship in 1954 -- three years before Captain Eddie's plaque disappeared. Could there be a jinx or a curse associated with the plaque?
If the Great War Society's account is accurate, you do have to wonder at the Giants' declining (three months after 9/11) to honor an old hero. If a granite monument in the outfield isn't feasible, a small plaque in the outfield wall would be.
My sense is the steroid scandal is going to hurt the Giants more than an affront to the memory of a fallen ballplayer-soldier.
But if the Curse of the Bambino is no more, might a Curse of Eddie Grant remain?
Varia: In Sri Lanka, the recovery of the statue of Our Lady of Matara is celebrated * Random Pensées has strikingphotos taken in Guatemala, a moving post on sorrow, and an affecting item on a girl and her dog * Maureen Mullarkey offers an appreciation of Mary Cassat * An offhand exchange between Amy and her pilot husband points up that airline personnel have concerns most of us don't when we head out to work in the morning. Thank a pilot today.
Angels Flight, a Los Angeles tram dubbed the "Shortest Railway in the World," is hailed at the University of Southern California's Regional History Collection and at the LA in the 1900s site.
Meantime, the baseball Angels (long flown from Los Angeles) have gone back to the future, sort of, announcing a name change to the LA Angels…of Anaheim. Somewhere, Bill Rigney winces on. As long as they bring back the halos.
The Washington Nationals will become The Washington Nationals of Anacostia after a Brief Sojurn Somewhere Else
The Boston Red Sox will become The Boston Red Sox of What the Hell Do We Complain About Now
The New York Yankees will become The Kings of All They Survey (To always be said with an evil laugh by MLB mandate)
The Atlanta Braves will become These Are the Atlanta Braves (to always be said by James Earl Jones by MLB mandate)
The Florida Marlins will become The Is This One of the Crappy Years or Do We Win the World Series?
The Chicago White Sox will become the South Side White Sox Who Haven't Sniffed a Series Since They Threw One
The Cleveland Indians will become the Cleveland Indians of Kill Us, Kill Us Now, For God's Sake Put Us Out of Our Misery and Kill Us Now
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The NY Sun's Will Friedwald writes on the Third Reich jazz scene, including the swing band that provided musical interludes for Lord Haw Haw:
It's possible some members of the British Union of Fascists were swayed by Lord Haw Haw. But it's hard to imagine any Allied civilians, listening to Charlie's bad English, awkward accent, and terrible lyrics, regarded him as anything but a bad joke - one more frightening than funny. This is one band from the swing era whose work I don't want reissued in a complete edition.
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I'd been searching for a recording of "Hell's Bells," and finally found one, by the Sid Peltyn Orchestra, 24-and-a-half minutes into this old 78s show from last August on WFMU. The host Old Codger is a piece of work. "Louis Jordan is still dead, so is Ukulele Ike, but – but – my erotic memories of Sophie Tucker are very much alive," he says.
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Images:
* Of the current site of the future DC ballpark, including junk cars where second base one day will lie (via Nats Blog);
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
