Happy birthday to

[sam]

Jesus Christ Superstar
25 December 1 – 3 April 33 – 5 April 33
(I know...)



William Gregor
25 December 1761 – 11 June 1817



Clergyman and patron saint of menacchanine ti droolers.

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.

Here's my new bike – A Sabbath, appropriately enough – on its virgin ride yesterday.


Miracle gear

You also missed out in not seeing [Jenny Agutter] in "Walkabout".

Through the lens of the sinemagoer



(thanks but no thanks Google) storing up images for a certain bank, it's a progression from schoolgirl fantasies to nurse fantasies.

Well reviewed across the pond.

Walkabout for the werewolf didn't end well.

Btw, I fell through your sig –

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” -Albert Einstein

and landed here, where someone has discovered the track stand.

[Wowbagger]

Alastair Cook, cricketer. The first England captain younger than my younger son.

[sam]

Charles Babbage
26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871

Half* of what made him him is resident at the London Science Museum.



The other half is in the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons.

My brain:


previous scan

Let's turn this into a brain-themed post. Random wetware off the street:



Light reading for brainiacs:





The brain of an iPod cyclist:


Two brains in love:



More or less.

Ada [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.

* Left brain Spock, right brain Kirk.

[sam]

Louis Pasteur
27 December 1822 – 28 September 1895



How Beer Saved the World

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.

van Leeuwenhoek would like a word.

There's a documentary by the same name, produced by Australians, who are world-renowned for their expertise in the field.

I was doing a search on "drunk Australian" (gotta start somewhere) when this popped up; now I have little choice but to use it. The Guardian called it "perhaps the pre-eminent Australian meme of the past 10 years".

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. His work led the way to the current understanding of a fundamental principle in the structure of organic compounds.

What science lessons I don't get from drive-by googling I get from Netflix.

[sam]

Arthur Eddington
28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944

[sam]

Ted Danson
born December 29, 1947

Served time in a highly celebrated Boston bar before eventually moving on to The Good Place, where he was very good indeed.

[sam]

Rudyard Kipling
30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936


Carrie's giving me the freeze

At 41, the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. Was a resident of Vermont for a while, so had an understanding of proper snow. I live in his old neighbourhood in East Sussex and have been to Bateman's loads of times, but aside from If and a few other poems, have never read him.

Unquiet Lands

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.

Patti Smith
born December 30, 1946



Vanishing New York

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.

Faith was still around when I started at Scribner's many years later. I was there just long enough to see the end of it, and literally shut the door on its last day of business. That’s also where I met Bob Dylan, if him having to move out of the way while I was carrying an armful of books counts as “meeting”.

Patti would later stand in for Bob at the Nobel ceremony,



which he famously didn’t bother attending.

Here's a song I heard for the first time today.

[sam]

Derek Jarman
31 January 1942 – 19 February 1994

I still regularly shout out "My gawd, it's Amyl Nitrate!”

[Wowbagger]

Greta Thunberg.

No longer will the gammonati be able to froth about that annoying teenage Swedish vegan because she's 20 today.

[sam]

John Warren Geils Jr.
20 February, 1946 – 11 April, 2017

Part of the musical backdrop of my youth.

[sam]

Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman
21 February 1946 – 14 January 2016

First saw him in Die Hard



but first truly appreciated him in Truly, Madly, Deeply



(speaking of those who died too young). Never caught his Severus Snape, as the franchise doesn't interest me.

His turn in Galaxy Quest was Oscar-worthy

[sam]

Gerardus Mercator
5 March 1512 – 2 December 1594


"Nothing is where you think it is." (Nice to see you again, doctor.)

Today's rabbit hole.

[sam]

Dean Stockwell
5 March 1936 - 7 November 2021



Brother Cavil looking a bit like a florid Hitler here. Started off “Tears in rain” but ended up at “prehensile paws”.

[sam]

Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac
6* March 1619 – 28 July 1655



*Date his nose was baptised.

[sam]

Glenn Greenwald
born 6 March 1967

I went looking for something funny rather than serious, but I don't think GG does funny.

[sam]

Neil Postman
8 March 1931 - 5 October 2003

[sam]

Jon Hamm
born 10 March 1971

[sam]

Jerome K. Jerome
2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927

"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."

[sam]

Thomas Henry Huxley
4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895

"Darwin's Bulldog" and noted Royal Society winner of best scientific whiskers.

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:

(I've chosen a portrait where he's moved on from "understated".)

[sam]

Elizabeth Cochran Seaman

(click to show/hide)

When Elizabeth Cochran began in journalism in 1885, it was considered inappropriate for a woman to write under her own name. Cochran's editor chose the name “Nelly Bly” from a Stephen Foster song. However, he also misspelled the name, and she became “Nellie Bly.”

Nellie Bly
5 May 1864 - 27 January 1922

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

[sam]

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
7 May 1927– 3 April 2013

Jhabvala initially was assumed to be an Indian among the reading public

it was news to me that she wasn't, but then I've never read her books or even looked her up before today

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.

[sam]

Suzanne, Duchess of Bourbon
10 May 1491 – 28 April 1521



Take it away, Lou.



I see John Wilkes Booth, Mark David Chapman, and Bono were also born today.

[sam]

Richard Feynman
11 May, 1918 – 15 February, 1988



The book that got me interested in physics. Not to, you know, DO. To read about. (Next up would be Richard Rhodes's The Making Of The Atomic Bomb.)

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.

[Jurek]

The book ^ that got me interested in recreational lock-picking.

[sam]

When I was at university and starving, or at least moderately peckish, I used to force the local vending machine to cough up all manner of sugary goodness. This didn’t require finely honed intelligence, merely observational skills, an arm that wasn’t too muscular (losing quickly at arm wrestling helps), and practice. All one needed do was press a ruler up against the bottom of the spiral arm holding the desired item. Just add it to my years in purgatory, 10,000 for every Twix [5,000 years each].

For today's birthday I could've left it at Florence Nightingale, catapulted into iconic status thanks to Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians and a reissue of her own modest autobiography,



but let's add

Mary Reibey
12 May 1777 – 30 May 1855



if only because I'd never heard of her before this morning.