It is a truth universally acknowledged that you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need.
And me - and Beethoven and Noel Coward (in no particular order).
What's the reference in the Randy Newman?
Then there's You've Got A Friend In Me and Short People.
I sort of think of Randy as a more accessible type of Tom Lehrer.
Safire prepared a speech called "In Event of Moon Disaster" for President Nixon to deliver on television if the Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the Moon. According to the plans, Mission Control would "close down communications" with the LEM and a clergyman would have commended their souls to "the deepest of the deep" in a public ritual likened to burial at sea... The last line of the prepared text contained an allusion to Rupert Brooke's First World War poem "The Soldier". [It was included] in a list of "The Greatest Doomsday Speeches Never Made".
an English pamphleteer, author, courtier, and press censor.
‘One does not usually discuss these matters in public,’ said Tobermory frigidly. ‘From a slight observation of your ways since you’ve been in this house I should imagine you’d find it inconvenient if I were to shift the conversation to your own little affairs.’
Loads of my family are/were winter babies!
According to David Naughton, (https://www.eightieskids.com/american-werewolf-crew-doubled-for-jenny-agutter-shower-scene/) there were twice as many people as usual on set on the day that he and Agutter filmed their shower scene. The actor recalls, “There were people I’d never seen before – and they were all Jenny Agutter fans.”
As First Lady, Mrs. Johnson broke new ground by interacting directly with Congress, employing her own press secretary, and making a solo electioneering tour. She was an advocate for beautifying the nation's cities and highways ("Where flowers bloom, so does hope").
As a young boy, Unwin served as a test reader for the firm, as his father believed that children were the best judges of what made good children's books. He was paid one shilling for each written report, which as Unwin later remarked was "good money in those days".
Most notable among the reviews he wrote for his father was his 1936 report, aged 10, for the J. R. R. Tolkien book The Hobbit. "Not a very good piece of literary criticism," he later said of the report, "but in those happy days, no second opinion was needed; if I said it was good enough to publish, it was published."
Rayner Unwin entered publishing himself around 1951, and was offered the manuscript for The Lord of the Rings. He thought it ought to be published as well, and writing to his father with the figures, he said he thought they might lose a thousand pounds. Sir Stanley wrote back, saying "If you think this to be a work of genius, then you may lose a thousand pounds."
Having not grown up with The Railway Children, the name
Jenny Agutter
born 20 December 1952
didn't mean anything to me until I saw her getting naughty with Naughton in An American Werewolf in London.
Gregor analyzed a black sand he found in Menacchan, Cornwall. The sand contained iron, manganese, and another substance that Gregor successfully extracted but could not identify. He published his findings in 1791 and proposed the name menacchanine for this new mineral. Martin Klaproth isolated the same element from a different source in 1795 and suggested the name titanium.
You also missed out in not seeing [Jenny Agutter] in "Walkabout".
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” -Albert Einstein
Ada (https://i.imgur.com/Ud2YhYJ.jpg) [Lovelace] in effect fell in love with the machine and became a close friend of Babbage. Although it is impossible to know exactly how their friendship progressed, it is quite clear from the correspondence which survives – which is unquestionably only a small fragment of the letters they actually exchanged with each other, many of which have been lost of destroyed by Lady Byron after Ada’s death – they had a close and even romantic friendship. While this almost certainly never reached a physical dimension, or at least there is no clear evidence that it did, their relationship was about as close to a love affair as it could possibly have been.
Beer is alive. Along with large round yeast cells, [Pasteur] spotted something smaller and more sinister. There were smaller bacteria cells and he concluded that the bacteria were causing the spoilage. Pasteur had discovered bacteria, a previously unknown microscopic life form.
Early in his career [that would be Louis, not Cecil], his investigation of tartaric acid resulted in the first resolution of what is now called optical isomerism. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry)) His work led the way to the current understanding of a fundamental principle in the structure of organic compounds.
If the standing of writers was tradable like stocks, what price would you get for a Kipling? A scant few pennies? Certainly just a fraction of the value of, say, a Churchill. Whereas trade in the former has virtually ceased, Churchills gain in value by the year.
And why should that be? Both were men of their age (that euphemism suggesting the maintenance of views unpalatable to modern tastes). Their lives spanned the pomp of imperialism and witnessed the decline of empire brought about by the horrors of war. Both railed against this erosion and both expended energy and time on fruitless attempts to rebuild the nation’s appetite for influence. Both were militaristic, yet sentimental about the plight of the “Tommy”. Both were prone to depression and garrulousness. Both had seen action and were men of conviction. Both had charm, yet were impatient, irascible and hard-won. Both were men of the people despite erudition and intellect.
Yet, despite all this, Churchill remains a popular folk icon while the legacy of Kipling has hardened and crumbled. A hard man to like, suggested the obituaries of the time, yet few could be found to own up to their dislike.
Each day I rose, dutifully dressed and made the three subway changes to Rockefeller Center. My uniform for Scribner's was taken from Anna Karina in Bande à part: dark sweater, plaid skirt, black tights and flats. I was positioned at the phone desk, which was manned by the kindhearted and supportive Faith Cross. I felt lucky to be associated with such a historic bookstore. My salary was higher, and I had Janet as a confidante. I was rarely bored, and when I got restless, I wrote on the back of Scribner's stationery, like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, scribbling poems on the inside of cardboard boxes.
I still regularly shout out "My gawd, it's Amyl Nitrate!”
"A 'Bummel'," I explained, "I should describe as a journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started. Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes; sometimes we can be spared for a few hours, and sometimes for a few days. But long or short, but here or there, our thoughts are ever on the running of the sand. We nod and smile to many as we pass; with some we stop and talk awhile; and with a few we walk a little way. We have been much interested, and often a little tired. But on the whole we have had a pleasant time, and are sorry when it's over."
The field for this award is vast, and especially amongst the Victorians competition in the category is stiff (and bristly), with Royal Society Fellows Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, Arthur Robertson Cushny and Conwy Lloyd Morgan all competing at the highest level.
However, in recognition of his understated yet strangely compelling side-whiskers, the award goes to a young and brooding Thomas Henry Huxley:
Bly’s trailblazing, era-defying career in journalism began at the tender age of twenty, when she responded to a patronizing letter from the father of five girls published in her hometown newspaper, the Pittsburg Dispatch, under the headline “What Girls Are Good For” (the unsubtly implied answer being birthing babies and tending households). The man even evoked China’s then-policy of killing female babies, intimating that such an act would allegedly save girls from the drudgery of their destiny.
continues (https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/04/30/nellie-bly-letter/)
Jhabvala initially was assumed to be an Indian among the reading public
because of her perceptive portrayals of the nuances of Indian lifestyles. Later, the revelation of her true identity led to falling sales of her books in India and made her a target of accusations about "her old-fashioned colonial attitudes"…
In 1963, Jhabvala was approached by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant to write a screenplay for their debut The Householder, based on her 1960 novel. During their first encounter, Merchant later said Jhabvala, seeking to avoid them, pretended to be the housemaid when they visited.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.
And even now, now that I have been countlessly reassured that my figure is a good one, now that I am grown-up enough to understand that most of my feelings have very little to do with the reality of my shape, I am nonetheless obsessed by breasts. I cannot help it. I grew up in the terrible fifties—with rigid stereotypical sex roles, the insistence that men be men and dress like men and women be women and dress like women, the intolerance of androgyny—and I cannot shake it, cannot shake my feelings of inadequacy. Well, that time is gone, right? All those exaggerated examples of breast worship are gone, right? Those women were freaks, right? I know all that. And yet here I am, stuck with the psychological remains of it all, stuck with my own peculiar version of breast worship. You probably think I am crazy to go on like this: Here I have set out to write a confession that is meant to hit you with the shock of recognition, and instead you are sitting there thinking I am thoroughly warped. Well, what can I tell you? If I had had them, I would have been a completely different person. I honestly believe that.
Her lifestyle differed significantly from the ideal of a virtuous Roman woman, a model promoted vigorously by Augustus and his own wife, Livia. Julia entertained her friends at many parties, drank a lot of wine, and behaved frivolously. That much is certain. But Augustus must have known. He was well informed about everything in Rome so we can hardly imagine that all of Rome knew about his daughter’s scandalous life, and he did not. But in 2 BCE, Julia the Elder crossed some sort of line.
According to some accounts, Julia and her male and female companions got very drunk, went to Forum Romanum, and partied on the rostra. Whatever the truth, the bubble burst. Augustus’ reaction was swift and harsh. He punished her lovers and exiled his daughter to the small island of Pandateria. It was a rock surrounded by the ocean.
In the paying respects department:
Kathleen Booth
9 July 1922 - 29 September 2022
(https://i.imgur.com/ODhABaM.jpg)
Patron Saint of old school computer programmers like my wife, who has informed me that assembly language was her favourite, followed by Pascal and C.
I know what none of that means.