Professor Charles Peabody of Harvard University, an archeologist, made observations regarding the Delta Blues while in Coahoma County, Mississippi, to oversee the excavation of a Choctaw burial mound. The black crew hired to do the war sang in the style and he published his observations under the title "Notes on Negro Music" in the Journal of American Folklore.
Peabody had been captivated by the music.
This was an interesting time in musicology in regard to the Blues, and perhaps to other music styles as well. The blues had undoubtedly been around for a very long time, but this reflected the first effort to really describe the music, which was just about to cross into northern cities in the next decade when the Great Migration began.
The Navy awarded a contract to Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company for the Curtiss A-1 Triad, the first U.S. Navy contract for an airplane.
Curtiss A-1
China agreed to phase out production of opium in an agreement with the United Kingdom which in turn agreed to phase out export of the same drug from India.
Magonistas skirmished with Mexican Federal troops at Tijuana after the Federals refused a demand of surrender.
All but ten of the Magonista force was comprised of Americans or Europeans.
Germany warned France that occupation of the Moroccan city of Fes would be regarded as a violation of the agreement between the two nations.
Legendary and highly influential bluesman Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi.
Johnson was born illegitimately to Julia Major Dodds and Noah Johnson. She was married at the time to Charles Dodds, a semi prosperous landowner and furniture make with whom she had ten children. Charles Dodds relocated to Memphis when he was a baby to avoid lynching due to dispute with farmers and Julia took Robert to live with him, which he did for about eight years. He first attended school there. At some point the marriage fell apart, a person has to wonder if it was due to the illegitimate liaison, and the couple divorced. Julia remarried sharecropper Will "Dusty" Willis and Robert returned to his mother and to the Mississippi. Delta and he continued school there, although he may have returned to Memphis from time to time for school. He started using the last name Johnson when informed of his illegitimate birth.
Johnson took up being a bluesman early. His acquisition of guitar skills suddenly as a teenager lead to rumors that he'd sold his soul for the skill, but it's notable that he was under the tutelage of Son House at the time. He married fourteen year old Virginia Travis in 1929 and the couple lived on the farm of a half sister and her husband but the marriage did not last. He fathered a child with Vergie Mae Smith in 1931 and then in that same year married Caletta Craft. The child, Claud Johnson, would be rasied by his grandparents and be noted for his charity and religious devotion. Caletta would die in 1933, leaving Robert and two children by prior relationships.
By that time Johnson was a dedicated bluesman gaining a reputation as a very skilled artists, a friendly fellow, but extremely shy with stage fright. He had numerous romantic relationships with various women wherever he went. He was recorded in 1936 and 1937 and his first recording did well. He traveled very widely in the Eastern United States and was recognized as a major blues talent He died in 1938 under uncertain conditions with explanations ranging from congenital syphilis to being poisoned. News of his death traveled slowly and it is not actually known where he his buried. John Hammond tried to book him for a major concert in Carnegie Hall only to learn of his death, and Alan Lomax tried to record him as late as 1941.
In 1961, Columbia released King of the Delta Blues Singers, an lp I have, which had a major influence on the rock scene of the era. Rock musicians, including Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Robert Plant and Johnny Winters were heavily influenced by him. Sweet Home Chicago and Crossroads have gone on to become blues and rock standards.
The Trump Administration breaks down crying and asks for help from adults.
The Trump administration is desperately seeking UN intervention in the war it started as the US is on the verge of a complete defeat in the war with Iran.
Remember the much vaunted and completely absurd Board of Peace that Trump rolled out when he liked to pretend he was a peacemaker? The countries that joined were Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
Ask them for help. . .
Go ahead Marco, call them up. . .
Go ahead, have him do it.
Yesterday the Trump Administration rolled back into existence the Presidential Fitness Test which Eisenhower had put into effect in 1956 and Obama did away with in 2012, replacing it with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program. Trump can't have anying Obama. . . like a peace deal with Iran that dealt with nuclear stuff . . anyhow. . .
Secretary of Batshit Crazy Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made a joke about Trump being able to do a fifty mile hike and Trump joked back that he could do it.
Go ahead. Let's see him manage that. . .
Mass Mailings
We've been getting tons of political mass mailings from three candidates. I noted that here:
All three of these candidates essentially have the same message. They love Trump as only Trump loves Trump. They love Trump more than Trump's children love Trump. They love Trump more than Melania, assuming of course that she loves Trump.
Trump retains a hold on the minds of MAGA and the GOP has descended into the Party of Trump. There really aren't real Republicans anymore. As I've noted here already, there's a really good chance that after November the GOP will simply cease to exist.
But is being more Trump, than Trump, a liability in Wyoming? I guess we'll see.
Not that the mailings are all identical. Gray's just asserts his Trumpiness. Rasner, who has a MAGA truckers cap J.B. Welded to his head, takes shots at Gray. Freiss mostly accidentally shows himself to be super rich and not really knowing what, or where, Wyoming actually is.
Anyhow, the mass mailers are so irritating I took a little time to see if I could return them to senders. The USPS Reddit, which isn't an official page, makes it clear that would be pointless. They just throw them away. The topic really irritates mail carriers, as they'd rather you just throw them away yourself. I can see their point.
Apparently a lot of people just throw them on the ground, which really irritates mail carriers also
What do we know about these guys?
It's occurred to me that Wyomingites have been voting for people they know absolutely nothing about.
This isn't true about candidates from other states. We know all about Colorado's BoBo and Alaska's Peltola. Why don't we know more about these people who claim to have all these super duper values that are supposed to reflect the state's?
Take Gray for example Next to nothing about him is publicly known. He could be robbing liquor stores on his off hours and we wouldn't know.
All we know about him is he grew up near Los Angeles and graduated from high school there in 2008, after he went to Wharton, where based on the economic example of Donald Trump, who also graduated from Wharton, must educate its students with Archie cartoons. He spent his summers in Wyoming growing up, and when he graduated from Wharton, he went right to work for his father's radio station where he broadcast political babble. That's pretty darned close to never having had to work in the real world. He rose to his current position by barely beating Tara Nethercott for the Secretary of State by constant hystericaly spewing of lies.
He was a founding member of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus which was heavily funded by out of state and rich carpetbagger money. I know that he's a Catholic, but only because when he lived in Casper I'd see him at Mass on odd occasion. My presumption is that he regularly attended Mass, although I don't know that. He went to a different parish than I do. Frankly, if I'd been a parish priest, I'd have called him out for lying.
He's unmarried at age 36 and nobody is ever mentioned as a love interest. Maybe he has one. For all I know he could be dating AoC. But the question is never asked. It should be, as being unmarried at 36 is frankly odd and we have a right to know if people are personally living up to their declared political values. It's one thing if he's so dedicated to work, or whatever, that he doesn't have time for gals. Maybe he just isn't interested, some percentage of people, a small number, aren't. But if on the other hand he hangs out with the dancers from The Clown's Den every night, and I'm in no way suggesting he is, we ought to be so informed.
Press, you aren't doing your job.
We don't know much about Reid Rasner either, although the fact that he keeps suing people for defamation (and people have said some awful things about him) has revealed a little. In one suit he admitted, if "admission" is the correct word, to being a homosexual. In the suits he's filed he's taken grave exception to being accused of molestation of somebody below 18, or molesting anyone, and I don't blame him a bit for that. I suspect that some people just believe that every homosexual does things like that, which is certainly not the case, but suspecting such a thing is just flat out wrong. The suits therefore make sense, although its really risky for a politician. He's some sort of investment businessman. So all in all, we know a lot more about him than we do Gray, which is really odd. I don't like his politics at all, but the fact that he's been open about these things is really to his credit.
With both of these candidates what we don't know is if their mailing appearance matches anything about them in real life. Chuck likes to wear Western cut wool shirts now, but he looks really uncomfortable appearing that way. His button-down and blue blazer looked a lot more natural. He's been videoed on oilfield locations, where he's never worked, and on a four wheeler, which looks unnatural to him.
Rasner likes to be photographed with firearms. So does Freiss. But do they really use them? Maybe, but do we really know that?
Freiss, I'd note, is another one. His father was a super wealthy carpetbagger and he seems to be the same. Go home, carpetbagger.
Balow, who is the best candidate so far, is from Laramie. As already noted, Gray is a carpetbagger from California. Rasner is from Casper. She was a career educator who took over as Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction after the disastrous Cindy Hill, who brought full blown batshit into that office. Balow held that office and then took the same one in Virginia, where the position is (sensibly) appointed. People have held that against here here, which is really ironic. If that's bad, Brent Bien ought to be exiled to the far side of the moon.
We know a lot more about Hageman, Barrasso, Lummis and Gordon, although I'd even question that to some extent. There's some questions I'd ask Hageman and Barrasso which I think are legitimate, but which just aren't done.
Anyhow, Press, why don't you tell us something about these people? You report on them so little, that it's honestly the case that a triple ax murderer could move into Wyoming.
Route 66 was recorded for the first time, the introductory edition of the Bobby Troup work by Nat King Cole.
Troup was a songwriter and actor, married to actress Julie London
London and Troup in Emergency, a nighttime television drama of the 1970s.
He was also a graduate of Wharton, which produced the unfortunate Trump and Gray, but that's another matter. He served in the Marine Corps in World War Two, by which time he was already a songwriter. The war did not really interrupt his songwriting.
Route 66 was an absolute masterpiece, and has been recorded an innumerable number of times, and was even used for the basis of a television series that ran from 1960 to 1964.
In some very real ways, Route 66 symbolized the post war world and its sense of youth, indicability, and automotive freedom.
Route 66 itself was one of the original U.S. Highways of the United States Numbered Highway System. It was established on November 11, 1926, with road signs erected the following year. It became a huge factor in Depression Era migration to California, which makes the way its nostaglically remembered somewhat ironic, but as
College basketball player George Mikan, who was hugely popular turned pro.
He was a great player, and notably played with glasses. He struggled with diabetes in his final years, which focused attention on the plight of pre big money players.
He died in 2005 at age 80, a basketball great.
The Rocky Mountain News focused again on gambling.
Let's just admit, by this point, the only people who don't think the Trump Administration is the worst administration in American history are in it, and even some of them probably think that.
I'm a Westerner and an Irish Catholic. That informs my vote pretty heavily.
When I first registered to vote Ronald Reagan was President. Marine Corps Raider veteran Ed Herschler, a Democrat, was the Governor of Wyoming. D-Day veteran Teno Roncolio, also a Democrat, was our Congressman. Republicans Malcolm Wallop and Alan Simpson were our Senators.
That was sort of the political landscape here at the time. More Republicans than Democrats, but there were still Democrats, and those Democrats tended to be pretty tough conservative people. Republicans were already tacking off into batshit crazy economic theories but they weren't completely bathed in them yet.
I registered as a Republican.
I didn't stay a Republican for a really long time. I don't recall when exactly I switched parties, but by the time I was at the University of Wyoming, I had registered Democratic. I stayed in the Democratic Party for a long time. I was still a Democrat when I became a lawyer and I know that I was when I was married. However, sometime after that, I couldn't stand the sea of blood the Democratic Party had become. I became an independent.
As an independent you missed the primaries pretty much, however, and starting in the Clinton era in general Wyoming Democrats began to drift over to the GOP. After all, the mainstream of the Democratic Party wasn't all that different from the traditional mainstream of the local GOP. After awhile, I registered as a Republican.
Little far right Dixiecrats like Chuck Gray like to scream that people like me are "RINOs", when in fact they're the malignant innovation into the GOP. That element hadn't entered the GOP at the time I was first in it, and didn't for a long time. Gray himself, who nobody really knew anything about, was probably the first, followed by Jeanette Ward, who served one term in the legislature before losing a bid to retain her seat. While she lost, that showed the direction things were headed in. Carpetbaggers who knew nothing about their state moved in and wanted to convert it into pre 1964 Alabama.
It's not as if the Democrats stood still. As moderate Wyoming Democrats left the party, it too became delusional. If the Republicans became increasingly fascistic or Dixiecratic, the Democrats lived intellectually in the Greenwich Villages' Stonewall Inn in 1969. It made going back into the Democratic Party an outright impossibility for people like myself, particularly as they lashed themselves increasingly to abortion and perversion.
More recently, I'll note, that seems to be wearing off. The Democrats are still "pro choice", but they don't talk much about it. For that matter Republicans who were really gung ho on being pro life have sort of lost their fire for that as well, following the lead of Orange Mussolini.
What the Republican Party, nationally, has become is flat out insane. No thinking person can be a member of it and be comfortable.
There are still good Republicans here in Wyoming. They began a big fight against the Dixiecrats prior to the legislature and largely prevailed this session, in spite of the fact that the diehard adherents of The Lost Cause were theoretically in control of the solons. That should give local Republicans who aren't literally whistling Dixie some hope.
But with the current national Trumpites in control, the line has been drawn.
For years people like Dixiecrat Chuck Gray, or Dixicrat Bextel, have claimed that the Republican Party here was infiltrated with Democrats. Well, it was. They're the Democrats. Democrats from 1960 Alabama. They just don't know it. But the screaming lunacy that they've espoused does have an effect after awhile. Yell at people that "you are a RINO" for long enough, and they'll take it up.
I'm remaining registered in the GOP. Chuck Gray's efforts to disenfranchise voters has been enough for me in and of itself not to change registrations. Frankly, if I was to take a run at the House of Representatives, and I've thought about it, I would switch parties as right now that would give a person a place in the November election no matter what. But I'm not going to do that. I'm old, worn out, and very tired.
So I'm remaining in the GOP in no small part so that I can vote for the decent primary candidates, of which there are some right now.
At this point, merely stating that you are "pro Trump" will be enough to cross my vote for you off the list. At least three House candidates are promising to be Trump's biggest lover, and they're all of the list. I hope I run into some of them during their campaigns. I probably will.
And I've already quit giving MAGAs in my midst slack. Frankly, since the start of the assault on Iran, that's been easy, as the "never war" MAGAs can't explain that one without sounding like hypocrites, and they know it. Even a few have begun to look as if Valentines to Trump weren't a good idea.
But in the Fall. I'm not voting for any Republicans for anything.
That won't exactly be easy. So far here only one candidate from the Democratic Party has signed on to run for a statewide office. He has my vote even though I like the only Republican whose announced for the same position. And just because I'm not voting for a Republican doesn't mean I will vote for Democrats. In my state house district a really decent Republican holds the seat and a young woman from the Democratic Party has announced against him. She's already on the sea of blood ticket. I can't vote for her, but I won't vote for the Republican I've voted for many times before.
To vote for Republicans in 2026 you have to accept that a low IQ, deranged, octogenarian should have complete dictatorial control over the Federal Government, can start major wars on his own, can demolish parts of the White House as he has the tastes of a bordello owner, can cause the hiding of files on a major pedophile ring, and can have a domestic army occupy the streets. It also means you have to be willing to sacrifice the environment of the planet for scientific denial. You have to be willing to endorse lies at a never before seen rate, which makes you a liar yourself if you do.
I can't go there.
On a bright spot, the Confederate dominated legislature went home routed.
This is amusing. Chloe Winters is not unattractive, but the married Galwegian dresses like what she is, a market gardener. It's a dirty job. Her only adornment, normally, is a cross denoting her Christianity.
The fact that she's getting hit on for gardening videos. . . well it's just sad.
It became clear that Donald Trump had committed the nation to war on the concept that the Iranians would just collapse, even though he was warned that they would not.
Introduced on this day in 1926, the cartoon emphasized, in its introduction, electrical appliances and how they made life easier. Power companies used the cartoon figure for decades. I well recall it from when I was a kid.
There'd been a jail brake in Casper.
A railway disaster in Costa Rica resulted in the deaths of 248 people.
One via Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub, 16 year old Maybelle Addington married 27-year old Ezra J. "Eck" Carter, brother of A.P. Carter, in Virginia giving rise to the "first family of country music".
Country music, we'd note, is a bit deceptive in this context. As we've discussed before, Country & Western were actually two categories of music identified by early record companies, as was Rhythm & Blues. Western ballads, associated with cowboys and ranching, was really its own distinct genre, as was "Country", which was sometimes referred to as "Hillbilly Music". The current categories of C&W, Folk, etc, really hadn't set in, in a hard and fast way, either. Folk and Country music were in fact very rapidly evolving. Blues, which of course also had a Southern rural origin, was frequently picked up by Country artists at the time, even while it was breaking out in new directions in the Midwest and East coast, where it has already given rise to Jazz.
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