Words and music

Observing the birth of Gerard Manly Hopkins on this date in 1844 and looking for the text of one my favorite Hopkins poems, I stumbled across this gem on YouTube – the wonderful Natalie Merchant singing the poems of both lesser and greater poets.  Hopkins comes at about the 16 minute mark, but if you have 25 minutes, watch to the end.

Text of Hopkins’ Spring and Fall:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Natalie at the TED conference:

‘Myne owne ground’

In 1635, in late July, Anthony Johnson claimed 250 acres along the Eastern Shore of the colony of Virginia, a claim granted in recognition of his acquisition of five indentured servants – settlers were given ‘headrights’ of 50 acres per indenture.

18th century depiction of a tobacco plantation.

Johnson himself had started life in Virginia as an indentured servant and, after serving his six or seven years, set up on his own and prospered.  Some twenty years later he was still farming and still using indentured servants, but one of them – John Casor – went to work for Johnson’s neighbor, claiming that he had served his indenture and was free. Johnson sued the neighbor and won.  The court also ruled – though it’s not clear why – - that John Casor was no longer indentured, but must work for Johnson for the rest of his life.  That he was, in fact, a slave.

That opinion, issued on March 8, 1654, institutionalized slavery in America for the first time.  Until then, no laws regarding slavery existed and most Africans were treated just like indentured servants, eventually creating a class of free black colonists.

Curiously, the man who triggered that event – Anthony Johnson – had been kidnapped in Angola and sold to a Virginia planter.  He had been ‘Antonio, a Negro,’ when he arrived in the colonies.  Having served his indenture, he became a free black man and called himself Anthony Johnson.

Not long after the court case, Johnson and his wife were swindled out of half of their land – what Johnson had called ‘myne owne ground.’ They moved to Maryland where again Johnson prospered.  When he died, he set another sad precedent, which deprived his wife and children of their inheritance: the court ruled that Anthony Johnson was ”a negro and by consequence, an alien” and thus his property was forfeit to the state.

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Many happy returns on his 67th to Mick Jagger – remember when you watch the video that these people are in their early sixties.  Maybe they’ve been cloned somewhere along the way…

Getting a move on

Taking some time off to work on my animated gif project – trying to create a bunch of them featuring Miguel Juarez (a certified personal trainer) demonstrating various simple exercises I can put on my desktop to remind me to get out of my chair and MOVE.

Can’t find any good gif software online – any recs? I made these on gickr.com and they work fine (although I can’t seem to get the text to go flush left), but I want to work on them off line. Back next week….

Falling objects

Life got pretty exciting in the small town of Holbrook, Arizona, on July 19 in 1912 – a meteorite disintegrated right above the town and hundreds of stones rained down on the surprised inhabitants.

The Willamette meteorite

That particular meteorite was unusual in its ability to get so far into Earth’s atmosphere, since most meteoroids break up between 40 and 75 miles above the surface and their arrival is rarely noticed. Millions of meteors burn up in the atmosphere every day.

There’s actually no such object as a meteor – the word refers to the visible path of a meteroid.  If a meteroid makes it to the ground, it is then called a meteorite. Observed meteorites that can be located are called falls, those discovered long after the fact are called finds and the Holbrook event was one of just over a thousand falls, as opposed to nearly 40,000 finds.

One of the most famous finds ever involved an Oregon meteorite called the Willamette Meteorite, the sixth largest in the world.  It was discovered in 1902 by a settler who recognized it for what it was, but who also realized it was on land belonging to the Oregon Iron and Steel Company, so he hauled it onto his own land – it took him three months to move the 15-ton iron and nickel rock three quarters of a mile.

One of the Holbrook meteorite bits.

Unfortunately for the finder, the company noticed its absence and took him to court.  They won and sold the rock to Mrs. William Dodge for $26,000; she donated it to the American Museum of Natural History.

But the Willamette’s day in court wasn’t over – Native Americans had been venerating the 13,000 year-old rock for centuries and sued for its return in the 1990s. An agreement was made – once a year the meteorite is made available for religious ceremonies and should the museum ever close, it will be returned.

Below, a fabulous photo from NASA of the Perseid meteor showers.

Happy days

Fireworks at Disneyland, photo by Cloned Pickle.

Groundbreaking for Disneyland took place on this date in 1954 and one year and one day later, it opened -three more years and they can celebrate their 60th anniversary.

Walt Disney had been planning his park for a long time.  He’d started with an idea for a modest park near the Burbank studios, but the plan grew over the years and after touring the great parks of Europe and a few here, he started looking for space.  Consultants advised him to shop Orange County, so he bought 160 acres in Anaheim.

The rest of course is history. Having never visited the place, I have no opinion as to whether or not it really is the happiest place on earth, but I have always found the idea of paying money to walk miles, spend more money and stand in long lines a guarantee of unhappiness.

In addition to a happy castle picture, here is a graph of the price increase over the years – since that $12 ticket in 1982 should be about $28 now, perhaps someone can tell me what one gets for the additional fifty bucks these days.

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The happiest place on earth is actually any place Jimmy Cagney is dancing – he was born 111 years ago today, an event we can all celebrate.

Classics

Many happy returns to Pinchas Zukerman, born on this date in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1948. He was discovered by Isaac Stern in 1962 and wound up at Juilliard.  He has had a stellar career, three wives – the second was Tuesday Weld – and I’m assuming that the violin he plays in this clip is his Guarnerius from 1742:

Bakumatsu

Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay on this date in 1853 and and he parked himself at the mouth of the bay, the big guns he carried trained on the city of Uraga. He insisted that he be allowed to deliver a letter to the emperor.

The Japanese demanded that he remove himself to Nagasaki, far down the coast, where Dejima Island had been created for the exclusive use of foreigners. All foreigners, though at the moment most of its inhabitants were representatives of the Dutch East India Company and a few Chinese traders.

The rest of Japan was closed to outsiders and had been for centuries.

Nothing doing, was Perry’s response. He had a letter to the Emperor from his president and it better get delivered.  The Japanese, who represented the Shogun and had nothing to do with the emperor, agreed to deliver the letter.

Perry sailed away towards China, but sailed back a few months later.  He had more ships with him. but the Shogun had agreed to all of his demands and a treaty was signed.

Sakoku – the official policy of  isolationism – had ended. Bakumatsu – the end of the curtain – had begun.

japanese portrait of Perry.

Perry’s tactics had been well thought out, based on the experiences of previous Westerners who had tried to get past the Dejima Island restriction and failed.  Before he sailed east, he studied up on all the history of the country and even made a point of corresponding with Philipp Franz von Seibold, the world’s leading expert on the subject of Japan.

The story of von Seibold is much more interesting than Perry’s, actually.  A military doctor and botanist, von Seibold had been sent to Dejima by the Dutch East India Company in 1823 and stayed eight years.  In that time he collected thousands of samples of the flora and fauna of the country (his servants brought samples to the island for him), as well as objects given as payment for his medical services.

He collected enough stuff to create a herbarium in Holland (now part of the University of Leiden), to start a National Museum of Ethnology (in his house in Leiden) and to inspire similar institutions in Japan.  He is not only well–known in Europe, but he is so famous in Japan that  Seibold University of Nagasaki was not only named for him, but opened on the 175th anniversary of his arrival there.

Otaki Kusumoto, von Seibold's wife

von Seibold had to leave his Japanese wife and daughter behind when he left (in disgrace – he was accused by the shogun of stealing maps of the country) and didn’t return for 30 years.  By that time, his daughter had grown up, been educated as a physician by Seibold’s successor and become the first woman doctor in Japan to practice western medicine.

He only lasted three years the second time around, infuriating his Dutch employers who again sent him home.  After that, he focused on the study of his botanical specimens until his death. We have Seibold to thank, btw, for the hosta.  Gardeners will no doubt recognize his name from the scores of plants labeled seiboldi or seiboldiana.

Much more about him can be found here.  Below, the small island in the foreground is Dejima, in Nagasaki Bay.

Dejima Island in Nagasaki Bay.

Update

So, the monitor is on the fritz, can’t be repaired and could go any minute – I have to type fast…

Venice campanile composite panorama by Scartol.

Happy Quatorze Juillet!

Also, this is the anniversary of the 1902 collapse of the Campanile of St. Mark’s in Venice.  It was almost a thousand years old when it fell down, but it was promptly rebuilt, reinforced and carries on.  In addition to being an icon of La Serenissima, it has been the inspiration for a train station in Seattle, office buildings and civic buildings all over Europe. Above, what you can see from the bell tower, and below, an amazing photo of the collapse taken a few days after.

Hardware problems

Literally.  The Mac may have to go in for repairs, so we’re on involuntary hiatus.  Hope to return soon.

 

All heart

And now for a quick round of trivial pursuit:

“The first open-heart surgery was done in which of the following years?”

A. 1670

B.  1891

C.  1947

D.  1962

If you said 1891, then you probably know all about Daniel Hale Williams, but I had no idea it had been a 19th century accomplishment. Dr. Williams, an African-American born in Pennsylvania, wasn’t the first to try cardiac surgery, but he was the first surgeon whose patient survived the operation without dying of an infection.  The surgery, done on this date, was done without anesthetic. We’ve really gotten soft.

Born into a large family, sent out to work at an early age after his father died, he was eventually apprenticed to a barber.  But after he got a job as a barber in Wisconsin – living with the family that owned the shop – he managed to get an education there and then was apprenticed to a surgeon, a Dr. Palmer. The doctor must have been an excellent  teacher – Williams was one of three of his apprentices and all were accepted to the medical school at Northwestern.

Dr. Williams went on to found the Provident Hospital in Chicago – the first unsegregated hospital in the country – and he started a training school for African-American nurses. He was a charter member of the American College of Surgeons and its only African-American.

In short, he was quite a guy – his story would make a great movie. .  .

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This will be a birthday to celebrate in the future, one hopes for many years to come.  Today the country of South Sudan comes into being after a long gestation and difficult birth.  Let’s wish them well.