For ninety minutes, Tony Joe White made a Portlandia audience believe it was in the swamps of Louisiana.
Willie and Laura Mae Jones
Rainy Night in Georgia
and of course
Category: Persons
People who interest me
A Man Ahead of His Time
The Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series in 1955. Two years later, after the team played what was to be its last game at Ebbets Field, the Dodgers announced they were moving west to Los Angeles. Brooklyn has never forgiven them.
Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley began construction on the only privately-financed baseball park since Yankee Stadium in 1923 and until the Giants’ Whatever-Is-the-Current-Phone-Company Park in 2000. (The 2008 version of Yankee Stadium cost taxpayers $1.2 billion.)
When the new $23-million, 56,000-capacity, stadium opened, featuring an “unobstructed view of home plate from every seat,” fans noticed there were only two drinking fountains, one in each dugout. O’Malley said it was merely an oversight and denied that the reason was to increase beer and soft-drink sales. His remedy was to place Dixie cups in the rest rooms. The city Health Department considered that a code violation and ordered drinking fountains be installed.
(When Disneyland opened in 1955, Walt Disney claimed a plumbers strike forced him to choose between rest rooms and drinking fountains. Disney reasoned, “People can buy Pepsi Cola but they can’t pee in the street.”)
Walter O’Malley, were he still alive, would have the last laugh. Public drinking fountains are out of fashion and fans now pay $5.75 for a bottle of water at Dodgers Stadium.
Calvin Trillin – Part 1 and Part 2
Part 1
Calvin Trillin, longtime contributor to the New Yorker magazine, has a new book out: Jackson 1964 & Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America. It’s a collection of his pieces from the sixties and seventies, covering the civil rights movement. The timing of its release couldn’t be better. He reported not only the conflicts in the South, but all over the U.S.
“I couldn’t pretend that we were covering a struggle in which all sides — the side that thought, for instance, that all American citizens had the right to vote and the side that thought people acting on such a belief should have their houses burned down — had an equally compelling case to make.”
Part 2
Years of travel for the New Yorker’s “U.S. Journal” sent Trillin on another quest: something decent to eat in an unfamiliar town. Growing up in Kansas City, “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.” His first food essays were gathered in American Fried, published in 1974.
Mr. Trillin has also poked fun at wine aficionados, questioning whether a person can really tell the difference between red and white.
“I should probably tell you a little something about my background in the field. I have never denied that when I’m trying to select a bottle of wine in a liquor store I’m strongly influenced by the picture on the label. (I like a nice mountain, preferably in the middle distance.)”
Mark Twain on American Exceptionalism
Mark Twain was a resolute opponent of imperialism in general and the Philippine-American War in particular. Take a few minutes to read his report on military action against the Moro tribe in the Philippines.
Cheney Heart Factoid
This is not about the million-plus taxpayer dollars spent on Dick Cheney’s heart. This is about Internet security and privacy. Just kidding! We know – and have accepted – that neither exists.
It’s about the Internet of Things: “… devices that interact with the Internet, such as watches, refrigerators, pacemakers, robotic vacuum cleaners, baby monitors, video cameras at street intersections, and more. Security researchers have exposed security vulnerabilities in everything from Hello Barbie dolls, which allowed hackers to intercept a child’s communication, to cars that can be remotely hacked so their brakes and transmission are disabled.”
Hackers can even get into medical devices. This was enough of a concern that Dick Cheney’s physician turned off his pacemaker while he served as vice-president … to prevent his being attacked from within, so to speak.
Richard Nixon’s Other Legacy
Playing devil’s advocate here…
How evil was Richard Nixon? He resigned in disgrace. But he left us with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. Oh yeah, he also initiated diplomatic relations with China.