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75th Anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster (May 6, 1937)

The Hindenburg disaster took place on Thursday, May 6, 1937, as the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, which is located adjacent to the borough of Lakehurst, New Jersey. Of the 97 people on board (36 passengers, 61 crew), there were 36 fatalities, including one death among the ground crew.

The disaster was the subject of spectacular newsreel coverage, photographs, and Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness report from the landing field, which was broadcast the next day. The actual cause of the fire remains unknown, although a variety of hypotheses have been put forward for both the cause of ignition and the initial fuel for the ensuing fire. The incident shattered public confidence in the giant, passenger-carrying rigid airship and marked the end of the airship era.

via en.wikipedia.org

Photo (above): The airship LZ 129 Hindenburg catching fire on May 6, 1937 at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. The airship was manufactured by Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH beginning in 1931; its first flight was March 4, 1936. It flew 63 flights before it exploded.

Photo (bottom): The Hindenburg floats past the Empire State Building over Manhattan on Aug. 8, 1936. The German airship was en route to Lakehurst, New Jersey, from Germany. The Hindenburg would later explode in a spectacular fireball above Lakehurst on May 6, 1937. (AP Photo)

How should Shakespeare really sound? - Telegraph

Inspired by working with Kevin Spacey, Sir Trevor Nunn has claimed that American accents are "closer" than contemporary English to the accents of those used in the Bard's day.

The eminent Shakespearean scholar John Barton has suggested that Shakespeare's accent would have sounded to modern ears like a cross between a contemporary Irish, Yorkshire and West Country accent.

Others say that the speech of Elizabethans was much quicker than it is in modern day Shakespeare productions.

Well, now you can judge for yourself.

via www.telegraph.co.uk

Click on the link for sound clips.

Many linguists point to Ocracoke Island, part of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, as being closest to the English of the time of the first English colonial settlements--an English that is often presumed by the same linguists to have changed little in accent at that time since Shakespeare's era.

Somewhat similarly, American spelling in many regards preserves British spelling of the early 1800s, thanks to Webster, more than current British spelling does. Melvyn Lord Bragg highlights this fact--with examples--in his 2003 documentary, The Adventure of English.

On the ground...but not on the yard

I've recently returned from my annual holiday trip home to central Iowa. While there, a state legislator told me Rick Santorum would carry the local county on Jan. 3rd or come in a close second-place behind Ron Paul.

I was incredulous relative to Santorum doing so well. About 48 hours later, the first polls were released showing that a surge in the former US Senator's popularity had been occurring. I then recalled a pundit on ABC's This Week having said earlier in December to not underestimate the potential dividends of Santorum's months-long hard work in Iowa. It reminded me of the value journalists find in informed, honest, and sufficiently forthright sources near to the action, and in their own experience. We'll see if the legislator’s prediction and the pundit's observation hold true. Based on my own inexpert observations while in Iowa, I think Santorum may in fact win or come in a close second-place in the county that I was in, but I think Romney will win the state.

The only frontline observation of my own that I make with any confidence is that yard signs are thin on the ground! I saw only five signs in four days in and around a town of 15,500 people fairly near Des Moines. Also, I saw not one bumper sticker! When I was growing up in Iowa, forests of candidate yard signs cropped up in neighborhoods. Farmers put them in fields and ditches, and sometimes even painted the sides of barns with their favorite candidate's name. Even in December 2007, while driving along I-80, I recall seeing Clinton, Obama, and Edwards signs galore--at least one barnside proclaiming HILLARY in red, white, and blue, and plenty of signs for Huckabee, McCain and others.

Does the disappearance of the yard sign reflect a lack of voter enthusiasm, or perhaps indecision—an unusually long wait-and-see stance by Hawkeye Republicans? Or maybe smaller campaign budgets? Maybe lesser focus on Iowa by the campaigns? Has the rise of social media or the dominance this cycle of televised debates displaced the need for the valiant foot soldiers of Iowa caucus campaign advertising, those brave little signs that endure wind, snow, the rare defacement attempt, and the more common assault from dog urine? Here's to the return of the humble yard sign.

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UPDATE: Nate Silver's Iowa 2012 GOP caucus analysis - Updated Jan. 2, 2012 at 12:11 PM ET

	Vote Projection	Chance of Win
Mitt Romney	21.8%	42%
Ron Paul	21.0	34
Rick Santorum	19.3	20

UPDATE: Unofficial caucus results from my parents' precinct in Jasper County, Iowa - Updated Jan. 3, 2012

161 votes:
Santorum 48
Gingrich 39
Romney 31
Paul 29
Bachmann 8
Perry 4
Huntsman 2

I still don't know very much about brain scans...

I follow Wil Wheaton on TypePad. I like how he keeps a sense of humor about his accomplishments (some might say "time served," I suppose) as a young actor on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

via wilwheaton.typepad.com

Burgess Meredith's "Don Oiche Ud I mBeithil"

Burgess Meredith's narration of To That Night In Bethlehem on The Chieftains' Bells of Dublin Christmas album (1991) is so good, I almost don't even think of The Penguin. Or Rocky.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Dec. 21, 1937)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered on December 21, 1937. Industry insiders had been calling it "Disney's Folly." Disney's wife Lillian and his brother and business partner Roy tried to talk him out of it. Disney had to morgage his house to finance the $1,488,422 feature--the first animated feature film in history. Lillian remarked, "No one's going to pay a dime to see a dwarf movie."

It opened to rave reviews. During the run of its original release, it grossed approximately $8,000,000 (that includes international box office revenues) and was the highest-grossing film of all time until Gone With The Wind displaced it in 1941. 

Its lifetime gross was reported in 2008 as $184,925,486.

(Image: from the original 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs theatrical trailer.)

Old London Street Scenes (1903)

Mesmerically delightful. The moment at 3m53s is rather profound when one considers the implications.

The horse-drawn public transportation wagon are called omnibuses.

 

This footage shows a number of scenes shot around central London, taking in locations such as Hyde Park Corner, Parliament Square and Charing Cross Station. We see crowds of people disembarking from a pleasure steamer at Victoria Embankment, pedestrians dodging horse-drawn carriages in Pall Mall, and heavy traffic trotting down the Strand..... The dense traffic...is highly reminiscent of today's London rush hour, whilst advertising on public transport is clearly no new phenomenon - in one scene, an advert for Nestlé's Milk seems to be plastered on every other vehicle. (Alex Davidson)

Every Tree in Town (photo series)

Every Tree in Town is a series that documents every spruce tree in the old mill town of Willimantic, Connecticut. The series of 1,017 photographs was created as Matthew Jensen systematically walked the 89 miles of streets within the city limits and documented some 2,187 trees. The trees in the series are cultural artifacts from the town's industrial past and the Victorian-era immigrant population who came from Northern Europe, where the trees are native. Today, Willimantic's population is a third of what it was in its heyday, and the pervasive trees remain as the last living link to the past.

View the photographs in this series, which was featured on the front of the Hartford Courant and was curated by the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art for an exhibition in Ridgefield, CT.

Set of thirty 10" x 14" photographs. Also available in sets of three and six. It's free to register on artspace.com to make your purchase and participate in future sales on ArtSpace.com.

The Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941

On December 12, 1941, Adolf Hitler held a meeting in the Reich Chancellery during which he spoke to approximately 50 high-level Nazi party leaders about the destruction of the Jews. However, the importance of this meeting in the history of the holocaust and the Second World War was brought to light not until 1997, when on December 13, 1997 the German center-left daily Berliner Zeitung published an article by then 34-year-old German historian Götz Aly.

Alan Cowell wrote in The New York Times on January 21, 1998:

For decades, it has been the ultimate enigma among historians of what the Nazis called the final solution: how can it be proved empirically that Hitler ordered the annihilation of Europe's Jews, and when did he do so? Despite a half-century of research, no single document has provided evidence that the Nazi leader gave a written order for the Holocaust.

The December 12, 1941 meeting--five days after the Japanese empire attacked the U. S. naval base at Pearl Harbor--was likely a crucial step towards setting in motion a systematic and state-sponsored program of industrial-scale atrocities against and murder of a Jewish minority--a grotesque act of massive, paranoia-fuelled genocidal scapegoating that would claim the lives of 6,000,000 Jews.

The December 12 meeting is less well known than the January 20, 1942, Wannsee Conference at which the methods of the holocaust's implementation were announced to and discussed among various Nazi departmental heads.

The Wannsee Conference was dramatized in the 2001 BBC/HBO film Conspiracy (photo above) featuring Kenneth Branagh as Lieutenant-General (Obergruppenführer) Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Reich-Protector (Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor) of Bohemia and Moravia, who chaired the infamous meeting, as well as Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann, Ian McNeice, and Ben Daniels.

Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Rememberance Day, will be on April 19 in 2012.

Unflinching Portraits of Pearl Harbor Survivors | Smithsonian Magazine

Just before 8 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, sailors stationed at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu were starting to stir—dressing for church, swabbing the deck, or already sunning themselves at local beaches on their day off—when the first of two waves of Japanese fighter planes attacked the base.

At 8:10 a.m., Japanese bombers dropped a 1,760-pound torpedo on the USS Arizona, and within nine minutes the battleship sank with 1,177 men onboard. In just two hours, the death toll from the attack on the harbor climbed to about 2,400, with nearly 1,200 wounded. “A date which will live in infamy,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it, before declaring war on Japan and entering the United States in World War II.

Seventy years later, only about 3,000 of the 60,000 military personnel estimated to have been at Pearl Harbor that day survive (including William Temple, above). “We are losing this ‘greatest generation’ faster than we can imagine,” says Marco Garcia, a Honolulu-based photographer who has made it his mission to photograph survivors before it is too late.

via www.smithsonianmag.com