The way things are going on earth, some people may want to leave. It’s getting pretty crowded up on the ISS though with 5 spacecraft docked there today.
Normally I ignore advice from celebrities, but Samuel L. Jackson has some good advice for all of us on how to beat, or at least mitigate, the current pandemic. Pay attention!
Today is the birthday (in 1938) of Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot. I suppose his biggest hit was The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Punctuation
Defense Attorneys
Actually I’ve been to two of these places.
One sunny day in late January 2021 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he’d been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the U.S. Marine standing guard and said, “I would like to go in and meet with President Trump.” The Marine looked at the man and said, “Sir, Mr. Trump is no longer President and no longer resides here.” The old man said, “Okay”, and walked away. The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, “I would like to go in and meet with President Trump.” The Marine repeated, “Sir, as I told you yesterday, Mr. Trump is no longer President and no longer resides here.” The man thanked him and, again, just walked away. The third day, the old man approached the White House and spoke to the very same U.S. Marine, saying again, “I would like to go in and meet with President Trump.” The Marine, understandably irritated at this point, looked at the man and said, “Sir, this is the third day in a row you’ve been here asking to speak to Trump. I’ve told you each time that he’s no longer the President and no longer resides here. Don’t you get it?” The old man looked at the Marine and said, “Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it.” The Marine snapped to attention and said, “See you tomorrow, Sir!”
On this day in 1960, Patsy Cline recorded ‘I Fall to Pieces’ which would become a number one hit on the Country Charts. I’m not really a country fan but I love Patsy Cline.
Today is the birthday (15 November, 1932) of Petula Clark. Most of us on this side of the pond know her for her iconic 1964 hit ‘Downtown’. She was, however, a very successful performer before her first US hit.
She made her radio debut in 1942 and went on to a series of some 500 performances designed to entertain the troops. She also toured the UK with fellow child performer, Julie Andrews. She was considered a mascot by the British army and troops plastered her photos on tanks and such for good luck in battle.
In the late 50s and early 60s she became a star across Europe, recording hits in German, French, Spanish and Italian and had numerous number 1 hits both in the UK and across the channel. She also began composing film scores.
Her US debut came with the release of ‘Downtown’ in 1964. It went to number 1 on the charts in January of 1965. She also recorded the song in French and the song was a hit in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Australia, India and Rhodesia. Clark went on to record 15 consecutive top 40 hits in the US.
An interesting episode occurred in 1968 when she was invited by NBC to film her own special. While singing a duet with Harry Belafonte, she took hold of his arm, much to dismay of a representative of Chrysler corporation (the sponsor) who feared that the moment would incur racial backlash from southern viewers. He demanded that they re-film the song with the two standing well apart. Clark refused and destroyed all other takes of the song and delivered the show to NBC with the touch intact. The Chrysler rep was fired and the show aired on 6 April, 1968, four days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Enough of my blathering. Here’s Petula!
And this…
and this…
Today is the birthday (14 November, 1840) of one of my favorite artists – Claude Monet. Along with Camille Pissaro, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Édouard Manet he was one of the founders of French Impressionism. Indeed, the movement was named after the above painting – Impression, Sunrise.
Monet was very interested in how changes in light affected what he saw and he often painted the same scene many times to capture the changes. He and other impressionists focused on using broken color and rapid small brush strokes painting en plein air to capture the effects of light.
He may be best known for his paintings of water lilies which he painted some 250 times during the last years 30 years of his life. He suffered from cataracts during part of this period.
One of my favorite Monet paintings is this one of Waterloo Bridge, which hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
I also like this painting of his garden with his son. I think the colors look particularly vibrant.
Both of these paintings are at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Go and see them next time you are in Washington.
I recently finished reading ‘The Testaments’, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her 1985 novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale. It is set 15 years later after Offred, the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale makes her perilous attempt at escape from Gilead to Canada.
Offred has little to say in this book – two or three lines at most. Instead, the tale is left to three narrators: Agnes who grew up in Gilead as the daughter of an important commander, Daisy, an anti-Gilead activist teenager living in Canada and Aunt Lydia who was an important character in the earlier work and who has a lot more to say here.
Gilead, formerly most of the United States, is still a dystopian, highly misogynistic society that it was in the earlier work and we learn a lot more about how it was founded (and it reminds me scarily of some recent events).
Lydia is the leader of the ‘aunts’ – the gender norm enforcers who preside over the lives of the handmaids and train the wives. But Lydia, underneath her outspoken strong support for Gilead is really collecting information on its corruption and deceit with the aim of eventually bringing it down. We learn that, before the creation of Gilead, she was a judge and used some deft political maneuvering to avoid the fate of most other educated women of the time – execution.
The Testaments is more plot-driven than The Handmaid’s Tale and Atwood is very good at releasing little bits of information that move the plot forward and reveal the relationship between the various characters.
I like it a lot and, if you like any of Atwood’s earlier works, you will too. It’s available on the Maryland Digital Library. Give it a try!!
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