Who was it who observed that Bugs Bunny is the guy we all hope we are, but Daffy Duck is the guy we fear we really are?
Bugs Bunny is 74 today, having debuted this day in 1940. Read more here, from last year’s commemoration.
Development of Bugs Bunny — third image from left is THE Bugs. Wikipedia image
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Cartoons, History | Tagged: Bugs Bunny, Cartoons, History | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
The genius behind P. D. Q Bach, and the compoaser of the score to Silent Running, is 79 today. Happy birthday, Peter Schickele!
This is a mostly encore post, of course.
Peter Schickele, born July 17, 1935
May he live to be a happy, robust, still-composing, still performing 139, at least.
Some people know him as a great disk jockey. Some people know him as the singer of cabaret tunes. Some people know and love him as a composer of music for symphony orchestra, or to accompany Where the Wild Things Are.
Then there are those happy masses who know him for his historical work, recovering the works of Johann Sebastian Bach’s final and most wayward child, P. D. Q. Bach.
Tip of the old bathtub-hardened conductor’s baton to Eric Koenig.
This is mostly an encore post. It was scheduled to run on time, not sure why it didn’t — problems of being on the road, you know.
3 Comments | Art, History, Music, Parody | Tagged: Arts, Eric Koenig, History, Music, P. D. Q. Bach, Parody, Peter Schickele | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
John Quiggin, co-author of the one of the best and biggest take downs of the DDT hoaxers, caught wind of that nasty piece at the misnomered “Greener Ideals,” and has taken on Mischa Popoff in a post at Crooked Timber.
Masthead at Crooked Timber
John’s audience likes to leave comments; the discussion is robust in places (and off the rails in others, though that’s not Quiggin’s fault).
Leave a Comment » | DDT, Rachel Carson, Science | Tagged: Crooked Timber, DDT, John Quiggin, Rachel Carson, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Another good reason to follow the National Archives on Twitter, Tumblr and other media: Great updates.
Like this one on the explosive arrival of the Atomic Age:
Atomic Age Begins
Trinity atomic device “Jumbo” being positioned at White Sands, New Mexico – National Archives
On July 16, 1945 the United States tested a nuclear device, code named “Trinity”, for the first time in White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico.
Left: [“Jumbo” atomic device being positioned for “Trinity” test at Alamogordo, New Mexico.], 1945
Right: [“Trinity” explosion], 07/16/1945
Source: research.archives.gov
Rare color photograph of the first nuclear test at Trinity site, July 16, 1945. Blurriness is in the original photograph (done when color photography was still fairly new). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is based on an earlier post, and is mostly an encore post.
1 Comment | 1941-1945, Atomic Bomb, Geography - Physical, History, Nuclear weapons, Physics, World War II | Tagged: 16 July 1945, Atomic Age, Atomic Bomb, geography, History, National Archives, Nuclear weapon, Physics, Science, Trinity, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Happy 80/20 Day!
Italian economist, engineer and political activist Vilfredo Pareto was born on July 15, 1848, in Paris, where his father had fled due to political difficulties.
Pareto should be more famous, for his explanation of the 80/20 rule, and for his contribution to making better things, the Pareto chart. Many economic texts ignore his work almost completely. Quality management texts ignore his life, too — generally mentioning the principles they borrow, but offering no explanation.
Vilfredo Pareto, Wikipedia image
His contributions, as accounted at Wikipedia:
A few economic rules are based on his work:
- The Pareto index is a measure of the inequality of income distribution.
- The Pareto chart is a special type of histogram, used to view causes of a problem in order of severity from largest to smallest. It is a statistical tool that graphically demonstrates the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule.
- Pareto’s law concerns the distribution of income.
- The Pareto distribution is a probability distribution used, among other things, as a mathematical realization of Pareto’s law.
And now you, dear reader, having just skimmed the surface of the pool of information on Vilfredo Pareto, know more about the man than 99.99% of the rest of the people on the planet. Welcome to the tip-top 0.01%.
Resources:
This is mostly an encore post.
2 Comments | Biography, Business, Capitalism, Economics, History, Politics | Tagged: 80/20 Rule, Biography, Capitalism, Economics, History, Politics, Vilfredo Pareto | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
It’s called “negative SEO,” the ad agent for a California law firm tells me.
When someone gets a decent presence in blog mentions and other placements of ads on-line, competitors take a legitimate phrase, or a few phrases, from those ads, and they start spamming sites with them. Google then notices a blip in traffic, and tells the original advertiser to stop it or Google will ban them from search engines. Of course, the advertiser doesn’t know who is doing the spamming . . .
The law firm and fancy car dealer seem to have gotten it under control, and I had hoped that would be the end of it.
But the Kia dealer near St. Louis is showing up again — and for some odd reason, an air conditioner service group in Tucson, Arizona. In the past day I’ve got about thousand spam messages on the blog, more than 600 offering air conditioner service.
One might wish these spam hits would boost the traffic numbers on the blog — but they don’t count. Blog spam filters are smart enough not to count these as hits, but not wily enough to figure out how to stop them. 604 messages like this. Rats.
My apologies, Dear Reader. If you posted a comment and it didn’t show up, send me an e-mail, or post another comment without links, and I’ll try to rescue it.
2 Comments | Administrivia | Tagged: Administrivia, Spam | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Fights over genetically-modified organism (GMO) foods take some odd turns. Some anti-GMO people point to the dangers of DDT in the past as a warning to be super cautious; and some pro-GMO people claim DDT wasn’t all that bad.
If there ever was a shortage of DDT in Africa, 40 tons would probably fill the gap, right? The UN Food and Agricultural Organization today struggles to clean up surplus DDT left over in Africa from the past 50 years. There was no shortage. Caption from FAO: TN (Tanzania) before: 40 tonnes of 50 year old DDT were found in Menzel Bourguiba Hospital, TN – : M. Davis
Before we hold up the history and science and law of DDT as an example, can we at least get the facts right? That generally is a failing of the pro-DDT people.
Logo for “greener ideal.” An astroturf group?
Like Mischa Popoff at Greener Ideal.
In its first major action in 1972, the United States Environmental Protection Agency made history by banning dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT). It led to a worldwide ban, all based on the public outcry elicited by marine biologist Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring.
This marks the beginning of the organic movement in America, and remains a badge of honor for organic activists, in spite of the fact that this ban resulted in the deaths of over 41 million people – roughly the same number of people Chairman Mao murdered in his Great Leap Forward – as public-health authorities lost their only effective means of controlling mosquitos that act as a vector for tropical diseases like malaria and dengue fever.
[There’s more, dealing with making the case for GMO foods; feel free to click over and read his opinion.]
8 Comments | DDT, History, Malaria, Science | Tagged: DDT, GMO, Greener Ideal, History, Malaria, Mischa Popoff, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Of course you know how to fold a flag. Right?
A group of Nashville Boy Scouts demonstrate for some Cub Scouts and a local news program, the proper methods.
Did they get it right?
Joshua Maxwell is a reporter with Nashville’s NBC affiliate, WSMV Channel 4; Scouts come from Troop 1914.
Published on Jul 2, 2014
My first on Air segment with WSMV Channel4. The Boy Scouts are teaching me and some Cub Scouts how to fold the American Flag.
More:
Leave a Comment » | Boy Scouts of America, Flag etiquette, U.S. Flag | Tagged: Boy Scouts of America, Flag etiquette, Flag Folding, Joshua Maxwell, Nashville Troop 1914, U.S. Flag, WSMV | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore was elected vice president largely because he was on the ticket with the very popular Gen. Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican War.
About 15 months into his presidency, President Taylor took ill after presiding over July 4 festivities in blazing heat. He died on July 9, 1850; Vice President Millard Fillmore took the oath as president the next day, and served out the term. 164 years ago today, Millard Fillmore served his first day as President.
Fillmore became the second person to take the presidency of the U.S. without having been elected. John Tyler was William Henry Harrison’s vice president when Harrison died of pneumonia a mere 31 days after being sworn in as president.
Millard Fillmore in an 1850 lithograph by Francis D’Avignon after a photograph by Matthew Brady (unclear if this was before or after his ascending to the presidency) – Library of Congress image
Zachary Taylor had encouraged New Mexico and California to draw up state constitutions, which would have disallowed slavery in those states. To southern leaders who threatened secession, Taylor promised to personally lead the army that would hold the union together by force, and personally hang those who had proposed rebellion.
Fillmore had presided over the Senate during months of furious debate on issues that always seemed to come down to slavery. Because he didn’t hold to the views of the Whig Party which had elected the Taylor-Fillmore ticket, even more than Taylor had strayed, the cabinet resigned. Fillmore appointed Daniel Webster as Secretary of State, and proceeded to push for compromise on issues to avoid war. His machinations helped get California admitted as a free state, but left New Mexico as a territory. His support of the Fugitive Slave Act alienated even more Whigs, and by 1852 the Whigs refused to nominate Fillmore for a term of his own. He left office in 1853, succeeded by Franklin Pierce.
Fillmore’s greatest accomplishment as president, perhaps, was his sending a fleet of ships to Japan to force that nation to open up to trade from the U.S. The political furor over the Fugitive Slave Act, the Missouri Compromise, and other issues around slavery, tend to eclipse the memory of the good that Fillmore did.
Nota bene: Controversy surrounded the death of Taylor. Because he had threatened southern secessionists and incurred anger from several other groups, from the time of his death there were rumors he had been poisoned with arsenic. Officially, the cause of death was gastroenteritis; popular accounts note that he had, in the heat of July, drunk milk and eaten cherries and cucumbers. Certainly strep, staph or other bacteria in the milk could have created a problem. In 1991 a team led by George Washington University Law Professor James Starrs exhumed Taylor’s body from his Louisville, Kentucky burial plot, and tested his remains for arsenic at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Analysis presented to the Kentucky medical examiner indicated arsenic levels way too low for a poisoning victim.
[This is an encore post, in parts.]
More:
“An Available Candidate: The One Qualification for a Whig President”. Political cartoon about the 1848 presidential election which refers to Zachary Taylor or Winfield Scott, the two leading contenders for the Whig Party nomination in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. Published by Nathaniel Currier in 1848, digitally restored. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Despite the cynicism of many , Zachary Taylor won the Whig Party nomination, and the presidency. Taylor died just over a year after his inauguration.
Leave a Comment » | History, History images, Millard Fillmore, Presidents, Slavery | Tagged: California Statehood, Compromise of 1850, History, Millard Fillmore, Presidency, Presidential Succession, Slavery | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, The Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States (Artist: Gardener Cox). Born Vienna, Austria, 1894. Died 1965. Associate Justice, 1939-1962
♦ Justice Felix Franfurter, dissenting in
Solesbee v. Balkcom, 339 U.S. 9, 16 (1950)
6 Comments | Famous quotes, Law, Quotes, U.S. Supreme Court | Tagged: Due Process, Famous quotes, Felix Frankfurter, Law, Quotes, Supreme Court | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
President Zachary Taylor died on July 9, 1850. The cause is still not fully clear, but poisoning by arsenic has been ruled out.
What would have happened had Taylor lived?
President Zachary Taylor’s death on July 9, 1850 shocked a nation that was in a heated debate about issues that eventually led to the Civil War. But his sudden passing also sidestepped two constitutional crises.
The details about how and why President Taylor died are still in dispute today. The president attended a ceremony at the site of the Washington Monument on July 4th on a reportedly hot summer day.
He fell ill soon after with a stomach ailment. His doctors gave him relief medication that included opium and later bled the president. Taylor died five days later at the age of 65.
Officially, he died from cholera morbus, and today, the prevalent theory is that Taylor suffered from gastroenteritis, an illness exacerbated by poor sanitary conditions in Washington.
There are other theories, including one where Taylor was poisoned by people who supported the South’s pro-slavery position. (In recent years, Taylor’s body was exhumed and a small, non-lethal amount of arsenic was found in samples taken from his corpse.)
It was Taylor’s unexpected opposition to slavery (he was from the South and was the last president to own slaves) that had caused an immediate crisis in 1850.
Taylor ran as a Whig candidate in 1848 and he wasn’t a professional politician. Taylor was a career military man and a hero in the war with Mexico.
Once he took office in March 1849, it became clear that Taylor, the military man, was more interested in preserving the Union than the art of politics.
Taylor decided to press for statehood for the newly acquitted territories of California and New Mexico, and to let the regions hold their own constitutional conventions. This guaranteed that California and New Mexico would join the Union as anti-slavery states, tipping the balance in the Senate to the North.
In any case, Taylor died on July 9.
And on July 10, 1850, his vice president, Millard Fillmore, was sworn in as president.
No, that doesn’t mean the bathtub tale is true.
More:
1 Comment | History, Millard Fillmore, Presidents | Tagged: Compromise of 1850, History, Millard Fillmore, Presidents, Zachary Taylor | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Few days go by that I don’t hear from some Texas yahoo about the futility of conservation, especially attempts to save sustainable populations of animals near or teetering on the brink of extinction.
American bison galloping. Photos by early motion-studying photographer Eadweard Muybridge, first published in 1887 in Animal Locomotion. Wikipedia image
Conservation works. Conservation works in Texas. How can they ignore stories like this one, about the conservation of the plains bison, at Texas’s Caprock Canyon State Park?
This film from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department illustrates and discusses the work going on at Caprock Canyon SP to keep a herd of bison there healthy and reproducing:
Published on Feb 1, 2013
Caprock Canyons State Park in the Texas Panhandle holds the last remnants of pure Southern Plains Bison that once numbered in the millions on this land. Watch as this historic herd is restored to its native habitat. For details on visiting the park, see http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/state-par…
If we had a national mammal, is there much doubt the noble American buffalo would be it?
Defenders of Wildlife range map, showing where to find bison in North America. DoW said: Bison once roamed across much of North America. Today bison are ecologically extinct throughout most of their historic range, except for a few national parks and other small wildlife areas. Yellowstone National Park has the largest population of free-roaming plains bison (about 4,000), and Wood Buffalo National Park has the largest population of free-roaming wood bison (about 10,000).
You can see that conservation is not easy, that serious conservation of animals takes cooperation between governments, federal, state, county and local. Throw in migratory birds, and you’re talking international efforts.
But it’s worth it, at least to me. Wholly apart from the direct benefits to humans — the discovery of drugs like digitalis and tamoxifen, for example — we learn so much about how the planet operates, how nature operates. We get a view into the ideas of God, if not a direct view into the universe’s creative mind.
There are two recognized subspecies in North America: Bison bison bison and B. b. athabascae. We have populations saved in small plots across the U.S.: In and around Yellowstone National Park; on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake; in Utah’s Henry Mountains in the south central part of the state; at the LBJ Grasslands (National Forest); and at Caprock Canyons State Park. At one time, millions of the plains subspecies migrated for hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles, harvesting grass and turning the soil to make the North American Great Plains one of the most productive habitats for plants and animals on the face of the Earth. We screwed that up a bit. The same area today does not produce equally to 200 years ago in fiber and meat, despite modern farming and ranching.
Maybe we can learn a lot more from these creatures, about how to keep food supplies going for that other common, though self-threatened species, Homo sapiens.
Probably can’t improve on the video, but I hope to get some good photos of these creatures for myself, this summer. Check the map above. If your summer travels take you close to a population of bison, why not stop in and visit?
More:
World Wildlife Fund image of plains bison, mother and calf, and caption: Historically bison were the dominant grazer on the Northern Great Plains landscape. This dominance shaped the landscape by affecting the pattern and structure of the grasses and vegetation that grew, and it was this vegetation pattern that allowed animals to flourish.
2 Comments | Conservation, History, Texas, Wildlife | Tagged: American buffalo, bison, Caprock Canyon State Park Texas, Conservation, History, Texas, Texas Parks and Wildlife, Wildlife | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Kansas finds itself in a big, big pickle.
Republican Governor Sam Brownback managed to get the legislature to make massive tax cuts, claiming it would boost jobs in Kansas and stimulate the Kansas economy, thereby paying for themselves.
Instead the Kansas economy is failing. Massive cuts have gutted Kansas’s once-revered public education system, and deeper cuts will be necessary to keep the state government afloat, unless there is some change in tax policy, or a massive, miraculous influx of business beyond what even the Koch Bros. could arrange.
Gov. Brownback is running for re-election, and finds himself behind in popularity in Kansas — behind even President Barack Obama.
Wow.
And of course, there is comedy of the kind that you couldn’t make up: Brownback blames Obama.
Oy.
Chart from Vox, showing what happened to Kansas’s surplus revenues, promised to balloon with the tax cuts Gov. Brownback asked for, and got.
Turns out Americans, and especially the citizens of Kansas, want government that works. They’d like taxes to be low, but low taxes won’t make voters happy when the roads are bad and the kids’ schools are crappy.
Wonkblog’s chart showing job creation in Kansas is lagging, also, contrary to the GOP promises when tax cuts were instituted.
Government’s first job is to govern; just governments are established among men to secure human rights, old Tom Jefferson wrote. Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness make a snappy line in a patriotic reading on July 4, but when the crowd drives home, they don’t want to be dodging potholes, and they don’t want their kids to complain from the back seat of the car that they don’t know what the Declaration of Independence is or what it says, “and who is Jefferson — I thought it was just a street in Dallas?” When government fails to do basic jobs, voters may not be happy.
Will false advertising be able to bail Sam Brownback out? Watch Kansas.
More:
31 Comments | Economics, Employment, Politics, Taxes | Tagged: Austerity, Budget, Economics, Employment, Kansas, Politics, Sam Brownback, Taxes | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
History item: On July 8,1853 four black ships led by USS Powhatan and commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry, anchored at Edo (Tokyo) Bay. Never before had the Japanese seen ships steaming with smoke. They thought the ships were “giant dragons puffing smoke.” They did not know that steamboats existed and were shocked by the number and size of the guns on board the ships.
President Millard Fillmore, defying H. L. Mencken’s later, crabby, hoax claim of do-little-government, sent Matthew C. Perry to Japan to open Japan as a refuge for shipwrecked sailors, and as a coaling stop for steamships. For the previous 200 years, Japan had been closed to all but a few Dutch and Chinese traders. On July 8, 1853, Perry’s small fleet sailed boldly into restricted waters of Japan and anchored.
Delivering the American presents to the Emperor of Japan, at Yokohama. A. O. P. Nicholson image, 1856 publication, “Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan” – artist not identified (Washington, A. O. P. Nicholson, 1856); Nimitz Museum, Annapolis. A list of the presents can be seen at a link near the end of this post; some of the gifts, such as the model of the steam engine, can be identified in this picture.
After some contretemps, which included Japan’s telling Perry to go to Nagasaki instead (where a military party was probably waiting) and Perry’s shelling a few buildings on shore, the Emperor accepted the letter from President Fillmore. Perry told the Emperor he would return the following year for an answer. Perry returned on March 8, 1854, and within a month concluded the Convention of Kanagawa, opening Japan to trade from the west. Generally unheralded, this may have been one of the more important pieces of U.S. diplomacy in history, especially considering the dramatic rise of Japan as an economic and military power, on the basis of the trade Commodore Perry demanded Japan engage in.
We should make special note of the chain of events over the following 85 or so years, culminating in World War II in the Pacific. Had Fillmore not sent Perry, had the U.S. not insisted Japan open itself to the world, would there have been an attack on Pearl Harbor, and war in the Pacific? Alternative histories we’ll never see. But see the discussion at Salon, in 2014, about this topic (conveniently leaving out Millard Fillmore’s role), “What sparked Japan’s aggression during World War II?”
More:
Documents below the fold
Steam frigate U.S.S. Susquehanna, Matthew Perry’s flagship; the black hull won this small fleet a nickname, “the Black Ships.” Japanese Woodcut, from the University of Indiana
11 Comments | Age of Imperialism, DBQ sources, Diplomacy, Explorers and Exploration, foreign affairs, History, Japan, Millard Fillmore, Trade, Travel | Tagged: Age of Imperialism, Commodore Matthew C. Perry, Convention of Kanagawa, History, Japan, Millard Fillmore | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
All these years I didn’t know.
Some wags designated June 23 as Typewriter Day — the anniversary of the date the typewriter was first patented by Christopher Sholes. (And you know, I did have a post on that event, last year.)
From the U.S. National Archives Administration: Dated June 23, 1868, this is the printed patent drawing for a “Type-Writer” invented by Christopher L. Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and J. W. Soule. Drawing for a Typewriter, 06/23/1868 Drawing for a Typewriter, 06/23/1868 (ARC Identifier: 595503); Patented Case Files, 1836 – 1956; Records of the Patent and Trademark Office; Record Group 241; National Archives.
Will you remind me in 2015, a week or so in advance, so we can get appropriate celebratory posts up here at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub?
Links below can get us into position to commemorate the day adequately, next year.
More:
Historical dispute!
2 Comments | History, Patents, Technology, Typewriters | Tagged: Christopher Sholes, History, June 23, Patents, Technology, Typewriters | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
You are currently browsing the Millard Fillmore's Bathtub blog archives for July, 2014.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
(The Life of Reason, vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense)
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
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