Quote of the Day

"Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight."

— Phyllis Diller

Sound of the Moment

Philadelphia (Neil Young)
-Click here-

Sometimes I think that I know

What love's all about

And when I see the light

I know I'll be all right.

I've got my friends in the world,

I had my friends

When we were boys and girls

And the secrets came unfurled.

City of brotherly love

Place I call home

Don't turn your back on me

I don't want to be alone

Love lasts forever.

Someone is talking to me,

Calling my name

Tell me I'm not to blame

I won't be ashamed of love.

Philadelphia,

City of brotherly love.

Brotherly love.

Sometimes I think that I know

What love's all about

And when I see the light

I know I'll be all right.

Philadelphia.

Literary Pick (*)

The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)

Quote of the Day

"Kiss me and you'll see how important I am."

— Sylvia Plath

Literary Pick (***)

It's Always Something (Gilda Radner)

I feel guilty not giving this a 4 or 5 star review because I love Gilda so much. I thought she was hysterical. It wasn't one of the best written biographies, but I couldn't put the book down either. It was interesting to read about her struggle with cancer and her never-ending relapses. She was one amazingly strong person. I know that's what people usually say to describe other people, but you should read this bio so you know what I mean. She lived through one stroke of bad luck after another. I don't even know where she got her strength from. Kudos to her husband Gene for sticking by her side. What a shame how she finally ended up dying. Life can be so cruel sometimes.

I read the 20th "newly revised" anniversary edition with a forward by Alan Zweibel, and I wonder why they didn't give the reader an update on her death later on. Fortunately I had already found out on the internet some months back, but they should definitely add that in future revisions.

We still love you Gilda!!

Lovely Clusters

Literary Pick (****)

Grapefruit  

-Yoko Ono

Recipe

Potato Kugel

Put peeled potatoes through a food mill and add a little dry government issue flour and salt. Grease a mold or ovenproof dish with paraffin or stearin and bake for 2 1/2 hours. Serve with rotten strawberry compote. (Onions not available. Nor oil for mold or dough!)

-Diary of a Young Girl

Art of the Day

Oedipus Cursing His Son, Polynices (Henry Fuseli)

Henry Fuseli's dramatic painting, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1786, depicts the tense climax of Oedipus at Colonus, a drama by Sophocles. In that ancient Greek tragedy, King Oedipus had gone into self-imposed exile at Colonus, a town near Athens, after discovering to his horror that, unwittingly, he had murdered his father and married his own mother. Oedipus, having blinded himself in remorse, is depicted here with blood-red eyes in a thick, scabby paint—the opposite of the normal use of smooth, clear textures for eyes.

The kneeling Polynices, one of Oedipus’ two sons, hopes to win his father's favor over his brother, who had usurped the throne. Outraged at both his unfaithful boys, Oedipus condemns them to die in battle by each other's hand. The blind king extends his powerful arms to curse them, while Polynices recoils as if struck a painful blow. Standing between her father and brother, Antigone seeks reconciliation. In contrast to Antigone’s strength of will, her weeping sister, Ismene, personifies sorrow.

Fuseli, a Swiss clergyman, became a classical scholar before studying art in Rome. After immigrating to London in 1780, Fuseli was elected the Royal Academy’s professor of painting.

-NGA

Literary Pick (*****)

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

I'm really surprised by the number of people who thought this book was boring.
I could understand how an adult man might find the musings of a young girl rather dull, but how can people in general not find this journal utterly fascinating? Here is a teenage girl who up until the end wrote with the same emotional consistency as when she began. Whoever thinks this books is boring, is because they simply fail to realize, or even imagine the conditions in which this diary was written. To think how this young girls personal life continued beyond the details of the war is rather remarkable.
What would anyone else have written about in their diary as young boy or girl in the same predicament as the Franks?
Anne is surprisingly strong and mature for her age, impressively intelligent, and although there was a World War going on, her own particular world never abated. Her personal life was just as important, if not necessary in order for her to survive the day to day living conditions at the Annex.
Yes, there were brief moments of panic, but she had to live life, even if her living space was limited. She carried on as if being in hiding was a mere temporary inconvenience. She wasn't going to let that rob of her of her right to claim her passage into womanhood..her God given right to experience puberty, moodiness, emotions, and even love.

Here I thought I was about to read the semi-interesting scribbles of a blooming young lady, with ambiguous references to the war. But there is nothing cryptic about her diary. She shoots straight from the hip in this incredibly and shockingly honest account of what life was like for her and her family living in hiding during the WW. It's not what I expected. I expected something rather tame, but it's far from it. This young girl was very interesting and quite special.

You can't read this journal and think it's just an ordinary diary of a young girl, because it's not. Anne's diary is a representation of how other Jewish families lived and coped during the Nazi war. That's really powerful. Many people don't realize how fortunate we are (thanks to Anne Frank, her Father Otto Frank and Miep Gies) to have some insight on how it must have been for the Jews to coexist this way. Because of Anne, we can have some sort of idea of how it was like to live under floorboards, in between walls, and behind bookshelves. This diary humanizes and brings back to life the Jewish people who mysteriously disappeared but who had not yet died.
I love this diary and I'm so grateful to have read it.


It must have been extremely difficult for her father Otto Frank, to read his daughters diary after her death.

Quote of the Day

To whom shall I hire myself out?

What beast should I adore? What holy image attack? What hearts break? What lies uphold? In what blood tread?

—A Season in Hell, Rimbaud

Lovers of the Century

Maria Callas and Aristo

Literary Pick (***)

Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier)

Sound of the Moment

Y Como es el (Jose Luis Perales)
-Click here-

Mirandote a los ojos, juraria

que tienes algo nuevo que contarme

empieza ya mujer, no tengas miedo

quiza para manana sea tarde

quiza para manana sea tarde

y como es el?, en que lugar es enamoro de ti?

de donde es?, a que dedica el tiempo libre?

preguntale, por que a robado un trozo de mi vida

es un ladron, que me a robado todo

X2

Arregla te mujer, se te hace tarde

y llevate el paragas por si llueve

el te estara esperando para amarte

y yo estare celoso de perderte

y abrigate, te sienta bien ese vestido gris

sonriete, que no sospeche que has llorado

y dejame, que vaya preparando mi equipaje

perdoname, si te hago otra pregunta

y como es el?, en que lugar es enamoro de ti?

de donde es?, a que dedica el tiempo libre?

preguntale, por que a robado un trozo de mi vida

es un ladron, que me a robado todo

From: http://lyricstranslate.com

Honor Spotlight

 

Gilda Radner
(June 28, 1946 - May 20, 1989) was an American comedienne and actress.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Radner attended the University of Michigan as a drama major and moved to Toronto, Canada. Her first professional stage experience was a Toronto production of Godspell following which she joined the Toronto Second City comedy troupe. She first rose to widespread fame as one of the original "Not Ready For Prime Time Players" on Saturday Night Live. (She was the first actor cast for the show.) On that show from 1975 to 1980 she created such characters as Roseanne Rosannadanna, Baba Wawa, and Emily Litella. She had a knack for combining extreme physical comedy with soft, caring characters that were easy to love. (There is a legend that Radner broke several ribs during one comedy sketch that required her to slam herself against a door repeatedly, but the next day she went on as scheduled.)

After leaving Saturday Night Live, Radner appeared on Broadway in a successful one-woman show that featured racier material, such as the humorous song "Talk Dirty to the Animals". This show was captured on film in 1981 as Gilda Live! and co-starred Paul Shaffer and Don Novello.

In the late 1980s, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Even with the support of her second husband, actor Gene Wilder, (she had previously been married to Saturday Night Live band leader G.E. Smith,) she suffered extreme pain (physical and emotional) as a chemotherapy patient. Eventually she was told she had gone into remission, and she wrote a memoir about her life and struggle with the illness, called It's Always Something. The book was written by Radner in tribute to cancer sufferers everywhere, and she used humor to overcome tragedy and pain. The book's title came from a common catch-phrase from her Saturday Night Live character Roseanne Rosannadanna, who would often quote an elderly relative by saying "My Uncle used to say...it's always something! If it's not one thing, it's something else!"

In 1989 doctors did a more detailed examination and discovered that Radner's cancerous cells had not all been removed and had spread to other areas of the body. She died in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, in 1989, where she had been admitted for a CAT scan. She was given a sedative and passed into a coma. After three days, she died without regaining consciousness but with Wilder at her side.

Wilder has since established the Gilda Radner Ovarian Detection Center at Cedars-Sinai to screen high-risk candidates and run basic diagnostic tests. He testified before a Congressional committee that her condition was misdiagnosed and that if doctors had inquired more deeply into her family background they would have found numerous cases of ovarian cancer and might have attacked the disease earlier.

Wilder has continued his involvement in both detection and treatment of ovarian cancer. In tribute to Radner, Gilda's Club was founded. It is a place where cancer sufferers can go to be around other people in the same situation and embrace one another in life. It grew to multiple locations across the country.

-Bio Base

Quote of the Day

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

— Mark Twain

Instruction

HIDE-AND-SEEK-PIECE

Hide until everybody goes home.

Hide until everybody forgets about you.

Hide until everybody dies.

1964 spring

Yoko Ono

Cultural News

the 20th anniversary of a photograph. It's a very dramatic photo, even though, at first glance, it's mostly dark and seems to show nothing at all.

But if you look closely, you can see a tiny speck of light. That speck is the Earth, seen from very, very, very far away.

Two decades ago, Candice Hansen-Koharcheck became the first person to ever see that speck, sitting in front of a computer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California. "I was all alone, actually, that afternoon, in my office," she recalls.

Her office was dark. The window shades were drawn. She was searching through a database of images sent home by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which at the time was nearly 4 billion miles away. "I knew the data was coming back," she says, "and I wanted to see how it had turned out."

Finally, she found it.

"It was just a little dot, about two pixels big, three pixels big," she says. "So not very large."

But this was the Earth — seen as no human had ever seen it before.

What's more, an accidental reflection off the spacecraft made it look as though the tiny speck was being lit up by a glowing beam of light. "You know, I still get chills down my back," says Hansen-Koharcheck. "Because here was our planet, bathed in this ray of light, and it just looked incredibly special."

And yet, if you weren't searching for it, that special little speck would be almost invisible. The Apollo astronauts had taken photos that showed the Earth as a big blue marble, swirling with clouds and continents. But this picture showed the smallness of Earth in the vastness of space.

A New Perspective On The Planet

The late astronomer Carl Sagan eloquently tried to express how he felt about this photo in his book Pale Blue Dot:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Robert Poole, a historian at the University of Cumbria in the United Kingdom who wrote a book on images of Earth from space called Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, says this particular photo shows what an extraterrestrial might see as it approached our solar system.

"This is not our view. We've managed to go out and get the view that somebody else might have, whereas the early Apollo pictures of the blue marble were our own view of Earth," Poole says. "Like most people, I saw it in the newspaper not long after it was taken and kind of intellectually I thought, 'This is amazing!'"

A Photo That Almost Didn't Happen

Pictures like this are still few and far between. They are not exactly easy to take. In fact, we almost didn't get this one. Carl Sagan lobbied for it early in the Voyager 1 mission. But others objected that taking it might fry the spacecraft's camera. That's because the Earth is so close to our extremely bright Sun. "There was a reluctance to take any kind of risk when we would point back towards the Sun, we didn't want to accidentally damage the cameras in any way," says Hansen-Koharcheck.

"Oh, there was a lot of debate as to what its value would be," recalls Edward Stone, who was — and still is — the chief scientist for the Voyager mission. "It was not a scientific image. It was really, I think, an image to sort of declare that here, for the first time we could take such an image, and second of all it provided a new perspective of Earth and its place in our solar neighborhood."

But the idea was shelved for years, as Voyager 1 flew through the solar system and did its science, sending images back from Saturn and Jupiter.

In 1989, the mission was winding down — some staff was going to leave. And Sagan made a last-minute request to please, please, take this unique photo before the opportunity disappeared forever. The decision went to the top levels of NASA "because it was going to extend the mission in terms of imaging capability for an additional six months or so and that of course did cost money," explains Stone.

"I did get a visit from Carl Sagan. We talked about a lot of things. And somewhere in that conversation he mentioned this idea," recalls the then-head of NASA, retired Vice Admiral Richard Truly. "I thought, heck, with Voyager so far away, if it could turn around and take a picture of the different planets including the Earth, that that would really be cool. And so I was a great advocate of it, although I can't take any credit for it."

In 1990, late on February 13 — or on Valentine's Day, in the time zone used by the Voyager 1 team — the spacecraft turned its cameras to Earth.

A Relatively Tiny Object In The Vastness Of Space

Later, the image was released to the world to great fanfare. But it never really captured the popular imagination like the famous Apollo images.

"I think it was hard, it's still hard, to get really your head around the fact that our solar system is so immense, compared to Earth," says Stone.

To get the full impact of this photo, Stone says, you really have to see it up on a wall, as part of large panorama that Voyager 1 took of the solar system's distant planets.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab used to have just such a display with the full mosaic of photos posted up in an auditorium, says Hansen-Koharcheck. "And to show the whole thing it covered, oh, I don't know, 12 or 14 feet," she says — of mostly empty black space, with just a few pinpricks of light showing the planets. One of them was labeled Earth.

"One of the guys that took care of that display told me one time that he was forever having to replace that picture," says Hansen-Koharcheck, "because people would come up to look at it and they would always touch the Earth."

Voyager 1 is now about three times farther away than it was twenty years ago, says Stone. The spacecraft still routinely phones home, although its cameras no longer take photos. But if it could send back another picture, the little dot that's Earth would look even fainter and even smaller.

Cookography

Art of the Day

Tea Leaves
(William McGregor Paxton)

Quote of the Day

Sta Viator. Amabilem conjugem calcas.

"Halt, Traveler. You are trampling an adored wife"

(inscribed on the tombstone of Emma Bovary)
-Madame Bovary

Literary Pick (*)

Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson)

Sandra Juto

Literary Pick (*)

The Age of Fable  

-Thomas Bulfinch

Cultural News

Giacometti Sculpture Sells For Record $104 Million

A life-size bronze sculpture of a man by Alberto Giacometti was sold Wednesday at a London auction for 65 million pounds ($104.3 million) — a world record for the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction, Sotheby's auction house said.

It took just eight minutes of furious bidding for about 10 bidders to reach the hammer price for L'Homme Qui Marche I (Walking Man I), which opened at 12 million pounds, Sotheby's said.

The sculpture by the 20th century Swiss artist, considered an iconic Giacometti work as well as one of the most recognizable images of modern art, was sold to an anonymous bidder by telephone, the auction house said.

Sotheby's had estimated the work would sell for between 12 million and 18 million pounds.

The sale price trumped the $104.17 million paid at a 2004 New York auction for Pablo Picasso's 1905 Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice). That painting broke the record that Vincent van Gogh had held since 1990, and its sale was the first time that the $100 million barrier was broken.

L'Homme Qui Marche I, a life-size sculpture of a thin and wiry human figure standing 72 inches tall, "represents the pinnacle of Giacometti's experimentation with the human form" and is "both a humble image of an ordinary man and a potent symbol of humanity," Sotheby's said.

The work was cast in 1961, in the artist's mature period. It is rare because it was the only cast of the walking man made during Giacometti's lifetime that has ever come to auction, Sotheby's said. It was bought by Dresdner Bank in the early 1980s.

The last time a Giacometti of comparable size was offered at auction was 20 years ago. That sculpture was sold for $6.82 million, a record for Giacometti works at the time.

-NPR