Friday, October 21, 1921.

 

Premiered on this day in 1921.

Laura Lejeune played tennis.

Gen. Mitchell was checking out aircraft.

Thompson submachine guns made the press

Lt. Gen. Wise & Lt. Brooks Hyde-Pierson, 10/21/21

Some pondered.

And the mountains observed.

Mt. St. Vrain.

Thursday October 6, 1921. Winners and Losers.

On this day in 1921, the New York Yankees beat the New York Giant 3 to 0 in game 2 of the 1921 World Series.

California Here I Come, April Showers and Toot, Toot, Tootsie were introduced in the musical Bombo at Jolson's 59th Street Theatre.  The songs were popular enough that I actually learned the lyrics to all three as a kid somehow, probably from the Lawrence Welk Show.  The production was one of the popular, weird, racist black face musicals of that era.

The dog funeral of Buster Snook, a Spanish poodle, owned by, Selma Snook, of Washington D.C., took place.

A photographer examined the schools and students of West Virginia.

Little Levels High School, Hilsboro West Virginia.

"On the way to school. Country children en route to the Buckeye Grades School, near Marlinton, W. Va. These come from some of the poorer farms and walk from 2 to 3 miles each way. One walked 4 miles all winter."

"The "East Side" of Pocahontas Country. The Aldrich home, - Buckeye, near Marlinton, W. Va. This is one of the worst homes in the county. Note the duck-coop, made out of an old trunk, - in front yard. Mother said "The colt kicked the winders out." She is a no-'count mountaineer from Kentucky and her husband is a shiftless farmer who has let this farm run down to worthlessness. His father ran a prosperous farm here and owned hundreds of acres but the son has run thro[ugh] it all. Typical of worst conditions in the country. Oct. 6, 1921. Location: Pocahontas County--Marlinton, West Virginia."

A Product of the 4 H. Club. Gradie Walton, 17 yrs. old, - is very deficient in most school branches (except in mathematics where he shines). He is much handicapped physically, - lost one eye in an accident and the other is weak. This year he raised 135 bushels of corn on one acre"

Monday September 15, 1941. Things that fly

 

British airborne training, 1941.

British parachute units were officially created on this day in 1941, with the 1st Brigade coming into existence.

British airborne forces came about due to the British being shocked and impressed by German airborne operations in 1940.  Ironically, the Germans themselves had come to the conclusion after Crete that losses were too heavy in airborne operations to be sustained, and determined not to conduct them after that. While German airborne units remained, they increasingly became merely titular as the war went on, although they retained an airborne capacity for some time. By the end of the war, they really lacked one.

In contrast, the British started up airborne forces and went first with commando units before establishing regular army formations.  To some degree this is responsible for the ongoing categorization of airborne units as elite, or sort of commando like, as the British airborne became the inspiration in various ways for almost all airborne units that came after them.

The Germans reestablished the Peenemünde Army Research Center. Its origins went back to the 1930s, but it had been suspended as a facility for a time.  It was reestablished on this date.  The facility would be responsible for German military rocketry.

The Orson Welles Show, which went by a variety of names during its run, went on the air for the first time.   The show was not the same one as the famous Mercury Theater of the Air, which was also on the radio.

Poster Saturday. The traveling record player

 

May 6, 1941. Firsts

Joseph Stalin became the premier of the Soviet Union, replacing Molotov.  Molotov went into second position.

1937 portrait of Stalin.

Not that it would matter, as Stalin was the head of the party, which made him the defacto head of state.

Stalin would form his first government, which would last until 1946, the following day.

Liberty Aircraft plant, Long Island, New York.  May 6, 1941.  I'm unfamiliar with this company, but it apparently lasted until 1987.

Serbs staged a rebellion in Sanski Most against the fascist government of Serbia installed by the Nazis.

The Luftwaffe commenced two nights of bombing on Greenrock, Scotland.

Today was the first flight of the XP47, which would become the legendary P47 fighter.  The plane had been developed in a mere eight months.

The P47 provides a good example of the extraordinary rapid development of aircraft in this period. At the time, the P40 was the USAAC's most significant fighter.  The P47 was different from it in every fashion, including its massive size which accommodated a massive engine.

On the same day, Igor Sikorsky set a new record for helicopter flight endurance, which still wasn't long.

Bob Hope performed his first stand up performance for troops.  He would, of course, famously do this at least throughout the Vietnam War.

Hope is either an acquired taste or one of those acts that's best set in the context of their original times.  I can recall seeing televised performances from the Vietnam War, and they're just not funny.

Vichy France reached an agreement with Germany to provide material support to the Iraqi rebels, although the government never ratified it.  It did allow the Germans to use airbases in Syria to support the Iraqi insurgency, which they would make use of.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 11. Ever Given, Debates, Jeopardy!, Mary Tyler Moore's death reported, Money and Higher Education.

Ever Given

Oops

How did a giant ship get stuck in the Suez Canal?

It's a huge container ship, stuck sideways in the Suez Canal.

There has to be a moment, when  you are piloting something like this, in this situation, when you think "oh pooh".

The owner of the ship has apologized.  But, while no doubt sincere, there's something odd about that.

Perhaps my neighbor down the street who routinely abandons a car in snow days will learn some lesson about this.

The stuck ship has been the subject of an endless number of memes and jokes, but it actually is impacting world commerce.  10% of the globes trade goes through it, and there are now concerns about toilet paper and coffee prices.

A debate on arms

M231 Port Firing Weapon, a fairly short lived machinegun variant of the M16 that was designed for firing from ports of armored personnel carriers.  The concept was short lived, although some are still retained for Bradly AFV crews.  The layout is closer to the AR 556 than to any common M16 or AR15.

I thought about not commenting about this at all, and when I started this most recent edition to this thread it wasn't here, as that was prior to an insane man's assault on a grocery store in Colorado. But as this is now prominent in the Zeitgeist, the history of this blog would provide for commenting in some form, so I'll do it here.

First, the rush to conclusion.

At the point at which I'm typing this out, we still don't know much about the assault other than its tragic consequences.  Both sides in the gun control debate are rushing to conclusions, which means the conclusions will largely be pre made ones rather than any which are the product of analysis.  What we do know is this.

The killer was insane and had a history of violence.  He was short tempered and paranoid.  His condition appears to be progressive, and while he was violent in high school, he wasn't constantly so.

He was born in Syria, but brought to the country as an infant, so he can't really be considered to be a Syrian migrant in the conventional sense.  This is somewhat relevant, however, in that neighbors of his household report that the family lived in a style that's more familiar to immigrants of earlier eras in that it was multigenerational, something common in many places but odd to Americans. This isn't particularly relevant to anything other than that, according to one report, living next to the family was a bit of a nightmare in some ways as they sort of spilled out into the street in an unruly fashion.  So, basically, he lived in a large and somewhat unruly setting.  To the extent that matters, if it does, it would be because living in his family would make a person an outsider simply because of the very non American style of life in an otherwise middle class neighborhood.

He is Muslim but this can't be said to have an obvious tie to Islamic extremism.

Indeed, he simply seems to have gone progressively insane.  Members of his family who have been interviewed noted this.

He was convicted of third degree assault in 2018 and sentenced to 48 hours of community service.

All this should serve to diffuse any suggestion that this has anything to do with his ethnicity, although I'm sure on some quarters of the net, it's not viewed that way.

On this, while the press reports have concluded that his purchase of firearms was legal, it's not immediately apparent that this is in fact the case.  It would depend on the nature of the conviction, but frankly I'd lean towards his purchase actually having been illegal.  If this is the case, the background check system failed to reveal the conviction.  Having said that, I'm not firmly attached to that position. This may be such a "simple assault", i.e., fighting, that it wouldn't register.  If that's the case, the background system didn't fail.  We should assume here it didn't fail.

The firearm used in the event was a Ruger AR-556 pistol.

The AR-556 "pistol" is one of a series of arms produced to dodge the National Firearms Act on short barreled rifles.  There's no doubt about this and while somebody no doubt will eventually log in to state otherwise, this recent trend serves no other purpose. This has allowed for the manufacture of very short barreled rifles, marketed pretextually as pistols, and also semi automatic replicas of submachineguns which would otherwise be illegal under US law.  This is part of the trend we've noted here before of the AR lead militarization and pseudo militarization (tacti-cool) that has become so prominent in the US.

Indeed, the problem with weapons like the AR-556 pistol is that they make it exceedingly difficult for defenders of firearms to do just that.  While fans of the AR15 in general can point to legitimate sporting use for the rifle, finding a real sporting use for a pistol variant of it is extremely difficult to do.  Everyone knows that the configuration is simply a dodge around the law.  A fan of pistols would be better off with a real pistol, a person who wanted a semi automatic carbine variant of the AR can find one easily.  The "pistol" configuration really appeals to a limited market that is buying it mostly based on appearance.  This is all less true for collectors who want something like a firing replica of something like the MP40 in semiautomatic, but even there, because the MP40 is a purely military arm, it gets difficult to really make the argument.  That puts defenders of the Second Amendment in a difficult position as even the defense argument that can be made has to really yield to an offensive argument.  I.e., you can't easily argue you need a AR-556 for self defense.  You can argue it, but you'll always be faced with an argument about a conventional pistol being a better choice.

As added factor that's been discussed is that Boulder recently attempted to ban "assault" weapons, but the ban was struck down as unconstitutional.

So what does that immediately tell us?

1.  The killer is almost certainly insane.

2.  He lived with his family, so not institutionalization occurred that would have alerted anyone.

3.  The firearm was purchased legally.

4. The firearm is a type that's principal appeal is simply its strange looks.  While the description will not doubt be "military style", in fact it is not, unless the briefly manufactured armored vehicle port guns are considered, which did pretty closely resemble this sort of weapon.

So what can we draw from that?

Perhaps not much.

Democrats are crying for the passage of gun control bills that will make it through the House, but they won't make it through the Senate.  The bill with the broadest support, expanding background check to include all firearms, would not have impacted this whatsoever.  This purchased passed the background check and would have passed the proposed expanded one.

More radical measures, such as banning "assault weapons" would have precluded the sale of the AR556 in question.  That can be noted.  Having said that, there's no reason to believe that a man in this mental condition wouldn't have simply switched to something else.  Indeed, no matter how expansive you make such a "ban", it would fail to ban everything that somebody like this would employ.  So that would do nothing.

Having said that, in the case of these "pistols" that are now in this category, here actually is something that those who are wondering what can be done by way of Executive Order fits that bill.  This is only a "pistol" by regulatory interpretation, and its a strained one at that.  The ATF could be directed to reclassify these as long guns as they have features which are overwhelming only appropriate for long guns. That would subject them all to the NFA overnight, which would make the simple retail of them nearly impossible and subject future transfers of them to the NFA.  Indeed, it 'd make the current owning of them subject to NFA requirements.

That would address the arm, but it also wouldn't address the killing.

And frankly, in this particular case, only a massively expanded mental healthy system in the US which reincorporated compulsory institutionalization, and indeed expanded it beyond any scope it ever had, would have prevented this.   That isn't going to happen either and it certainly isn't going to happen in an era in which there's a Democratic Congress.

Which means, once again, probably the only real solution, and its imperfect in the case of the insane, is societal.  Not all evil can be prevented.

Indeed, what this might tell us is something simply about ignoring evil and the violent, but we've always tended to do that.  We constantly read of criminals who commit some horrific act who have a past history of violence, or of people who have no major criminal past but a distinct demonstrated attraction to it.  It's clear the mental health treatment available in the US is lacking, but at the same time even if it were much more extensive, we'd likely not catch something like this.  We'd have to have a much more stable, and probably agrarian, society in order to address much of that, and even then, we wouldn't catch it all.

And that would, I suppose, involve a society that prayed for not being lead into temptation, and to be delivered from evil, but I don't see that coming on any time soon.

Poor Joe Manchin

Joe Manchin, one of the few conservative Democrats left on the planet, is suddenly constantly in the spotlight.

The reason that his is, is because as a conservative Democrat, he's suddenly a power broker simply by occupying a position on the political map that used to be one that was crowded, the middle ground.  Democrats can't really get things through the Senate unless he supports it.

This came up in the context of gun control, as Manchin doesn't support any of the two bills that have passed the House. This called left wing brat, Rachel Maddow, whose style is mostly 100% pure snark to lambast him and accuse him of falling down in front of the "nearly dissolved" NRA.

The NRA is in bankruptcy, but it's far from nearly dissolved. What will happen to it remains to be seen, but the widespread assumption that its now powerless is pretty presumptive.  It's goals are still shared by large number of voters and as a practical matter its influence in the past has been so extensive that it may outlast its current decrepit leadership that needs to go.

Be that as it may, Manchin is actually a supporter of some gun control and recently sponsored his own background check bill.  He has a "D" rating from the NRA.

Maddow, the loudmouthed smart aleck kid in the junior high class we all remember from those days, probably didn't know that.

This is part of the problem with debates such as this, for the reason noted in our first entry.  Arguing that gun control that could realistically be imposed in the US would have prevented this is a lot like arguing that Hitler wouldn't have committed mass atrocities if only more people had bought his art.  The logic train is derailed on it.

And then there's the states

The Flight, Frederic Remington.

At the same time that the Democratic Congress and Administration is seeking to impose gun control, state legislatures all over are attempting to do the opposite, including going so far as to pass obviously unconstitutional statutes.

Wyoming is taking a run at one which, even though its been taken to the weed whacker to the extent that its original drafter, the alt right Wyoming Senator Anthony Bouchard, no longer supports it, pretty clearly violates the Supremacy Clause.  Lots of these statutes do. The only one I've seen that may not is one that has been suggested in, I think, South Carolina which simply proposes to make all the residents of the state members of the militia.

Indeed, that's the cleverest approach I've seen so far.  I haven't read the bill, but there's some logic to a bill that makes everyone a member of the militia and all their arms part of their militia service.  It's grounded in the U.S. Constitution, rather than giving it the middle finger salute like so many of these other bills do.

Irrespective of that, the really interesting thing is that the national legislature is going one way while state ones are going another. That tells us this really is a coastal issue, with some lefty islands dominated by urban areas.  That makes any action on this that those on the left, and even the center left, imagine, pretty much impossible.

But it's not only that. We're not only politically polarized. We're now geographically polarized.  And heavily.

The Intelligent quarter riots.

 

Dr. Oz faces backlash ahead of 'Jeopardy' gig, called a 'disgrace' to Alex Trebek's legacy

So read a headline in the net entertainment news, which I read even though I normally don't, having followed the link from Twitter.

I'm among those who find having Dr. Oz on Jeopardy irritating.  He claims to have been a friend of the late Alex Trebek, which he may have been, but he's also a quack.

Will Jenny McCarthy be next?

As a total aside, maybe we can hope for Kate Upton.  I'm serious on that. She's photogenic, as was Trebek, and by all accounts is highly intelligence, and doesn't sell snake oil.  She's also sort of disappeared off of the cheesecake circuit now that she's a married woman  and a mother.

Anyway you look at it the fact that Jeopardy fans are upset by Oz is a good thing and shows that even in some quarters of the vast wasteland, there are reservoirs of intelligence.

Breaking news

The late Mary Tyler Moore in 1978.

The BBC reported on March 25 that Mary Tyler Moore had died.  It was due to a technical glitch.

Which is correct, she died in 2017.

Money and universities

Isaac Royall, Jr., one of the founders of Harvard law and a man with connections to slavery.

Jeffrey Epstein, it turns out, had connections to several universities.  One professor has now lost his position due to this, as he basically facilitated the Epstein connection.

Well, whatever Epstein's connection with universities may have been, it was probably just money.  That doesn't tell us much other than that universities need money, and that universities are particularly prone to retroactive self righteousness.  They have the money, he's dead, they ought to just leave it at that, absent some suggestion of actual impropriety by members of their staff or that he somehow influenced their work.

If anything, what this ought to tell us is something about money and universities.  Within the past couple of years we've had the "scandals" about bribed admissions, more or less, into well regarded schools by entertainment figures for their children. This is no surprise to anyone really familiar with universities.  And then there's been the flap on the East Coast about the early founders of universities having made lots of money on slavery, which is indeed bad, but they're all dead now.  

Absent all universities being government funded, which has its own problems, this sort of thing will occur.  University funding is a big topic in the US right now, but nobody is really close to figuring it out and the left wing "make it all free" solution wouldn't address this and would devalue university educations further.  Mostly what this is an example of is societal hypocrisy.  We know that universities take money from donors, this isn't new.  The money is already spent, leave it at that.

December 9, 1920. People at their occupations.

Frank Ferera and Anthony Franchini making a recording with vocalist The Crescent Trio, December 9, 1920.

On Wednesdays I try to post a "Mid Week At Work" item, but I don't always do it.  Indeed, I miss that feature more often than not.  Yesterday, oddly enough, I looked for a photograph of a professional singer to post for that theme, getting my days of the week messed up for the second week in a row.

Today, I just happened to stumble across the photo posted above, which is 100 years old, today.

Frank Ferera was a professional musician and was Portuguese Hawaiian.  For those who might not know, the Portugese were and are an important demographic in Hawaii.  Ferera came to the mainland in 1915 and remained there as a musician thereafter.  He died at age 66 in 1951.  While Ferera would always remain a guitar player, he quit being a professional musician, at leat for a time, abruptly in 1927, at which time steel guitars were supplanting conventional guitars in Hawaiian music, which was his genra.

Anthony Franchini was an Italian born guitar player who partnered with Ferera and, even though he was an Italian by birth, he too specialized at first in Hawaiian music.  He'd come to the US as a boy with his immigrant family and was self taught.  He was a veteran of World War One, having served as an artilleryman, and having joined the Army prior to becoming a U.S. citizen.

He continued on with a long and prolific music career after Ferera quit.  He served in the Army again as a Drill Instructor, at which time he became a U.S. citizen.  Late in life he moved to Nevada and re arranged The Star Spangled Banner, with Nevada backing his arrangement in several bills in Congress in an attempt to have them officially adopted.  During this period he was active in Republican politics.  He died 1997 at age 99.

Dr. Oliveira de Lima and his wife Flora on this date in 1920.  He was just 53 years old at the time this photograph was taken, which says something about aging in earlier eras.

Dr. Oliveira de Lima, a Brazilian retired diplomat, was photographed on this day in 1920.   This same year he was the donor of a major Hispanic book collection to the Catholic University of America.

Dr. Olieveira would live until 1928.  Flora until 1940. The book collection remains at the Catholic University.

Freshman members of Congress, December 9, 1920.  Heck, with the average age of American politicians being what it is, these guys are probably all still there.

A new Congress was rolling into Washington D. C.  It's notable that at this point in the nation's history, the Presidential inauguration was still in March.  Given this, this wasn't a lame duck Congress, but they had a lame duck President still for months.

At this point in time visiting delegations from the French and British militaries were still quite common in the wake of the Great War, and the French were still giving decorations to American military figures.

U.S. Army General Peter C. Harris receiving decoration from visiting French delegation.

Gen. Peter C. Harris received one such award on this day.  

Harris had entered the U.S. Army in 1888, after graduating from West Point, and first served as an infantry officer.  He'd been at Kettle Hill during the Spanish American War and was, at the time of this photograph, the Adjutant General.  He would live until 1951.

In Memoriam, Mac Davis and Helen Reddy

I can't say that I was a fan of either, but they were part of the background music of my early late childhood and early teen years. AM radio on local stations featured both, indeed the same channel here played both, in the early 1970s when they were in their prime.

Both died yesterday at age 78.

Davis I remember as a popular singer who had a popular television variety show when there were such things.  My parents liked the show.  I also recall him from North Dallas Forty, the rather unvarnished and critical movie about professional football with Nick Nolte as a broken up football player reaching the end of his career, although I thought Davis looked like an unlikely football player.

He died from complications of heart surgery.

Helen Reddy was part of the era in particular for her anthem, I Am Woman, which was played absolutely everywhere for awhile and which was the standard of the "Women's Liberation" movement.  I didn't realize that she was Australian born until today.  Her health had suffered enormously in recent years.

Blog Mirror. Painted Bricks: Art or vandalism?

Painted Bricks: Art or vandalism?:

Art or vandalism?

We don't like to put up photos of graffiti here as it's not in the same category as what this blog is dedicated to depict.  Here, we make a bit of an exception.

The scenes depicted above are of the backs of two local office buildings.  Both are actively occupied. I.e., there's going businesses in them. They aren't abandoned buildings.

So what, you may ask.

Well, graffiti has been a feature on the back of these buildings for a long time, but it's grown markedly worse in recent years.  The amount of graffiti has increased as the building on the right has been oddly popularized in the local press. And when I say the building, I mean the alley.  For reasons that aren't apparent to me, the fire escape  has become locally celebrated as some sort of a wonder.  That's drawn people to trespass on it and as that's occurred, graffiti has likewise increased as well.  So have high school graduation pictures with the staircase as a backdrop and even wedding photos.

And now a local theater company.

I'm not a big fan of local theater, which speaks poorly of me. When I was very young my parents introduced me to the theater at the local community college which was a real treat for all of us grade school kids.  I can dimly recall seeing You're A Good Man Charlie Brown and The Man From Lamancha at the college theater.  While in high school I was never in theater but about that time I was introduced to the text of plays as literature, and I really like some of those.  I've seen more college production in latter days, including when I was in college, including, by my recollection, The Dark Of the Moon, which I don't particularly care for, and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, which I do.  When our kids were little, we took them to a college play about the Wright Brothers.

Local theater, however, is another deal entirely and you have to admire the people who are willing to do it.  It doesn't get hte same viewership as college theater, for one thing.  And the quality fo the volunteers is bound to be uneven.

Anyhow, there's a couple local theater companies around here and one of them decided to put on a version of a famous Greek play.  I've read the text of the play as a college student, which is a long time ago, but I can dimly recall the outline of it.  In this production of the play, apparently, there's an element that emphasizes the need to put on a play in spite of hte presence of an Athenian plague, which apparently might be a real background story to the original play.  I.e., it was staged during a plague, perhaps, during which the author felt it critical to reopen the Athenian theaters in spite of hte risks.

There's a lot of things that are interesting about that, including that if that's correct, ancient Greeks, while they may not have had the germ theory of disease, grasped that hanging around in groups spread it.  Athens apparently closed up shop to try to combat it, something that might seem familiar to the readers here.  If my understanding of the views at the time are correct, there were also those who dissented from that view. . . which is also interesting in context.

In the current context, it's generally those who are on the left to the center left, politically, who have been for keeping things shut down and a tight quarantine, while on the right to the center right the view is the opposite.  In the middle, where most folks are, the views are nuanced.  On the edges, they aren't.

Anyhow, most theater people are on the hard left.  It's the hard left that generally would really have a really tight quarantine.  Probably most people in local theater on are the left somewhere.

Which makes a play all about protesting quarantines oddly ironic.

Anyhow, that's not why we have posted this here.  Apparently determining to stage this out in the open for a certain sort of street cred feel to it, the producers have added to the graffitti.

This may make the town about hte only town around which graffitti making reference to ancient Greece, but it's still graffitti.  Of course, there was a lot of it before.

I'm not quite sure what to think.

The play on opening day.  I happened to be in the building at the time and so I snapped this photo.  There wasn't a large crowd, but then it was opening day during a time of pandemic too.

One thing maybe the theater company and the audience might think is how gracious the building occupants are.  It's impossible not to notice a thing like this and in a lot of places the reaction would have been hugely negative.  No reaction at all isn't permission, but it is pretty gracious.

And yet. . .

 I ran an old editorial cartoon a couple of days ago from an August 23, 1920 newspaper.

August 23, 1920. Portents

From the Sandusky Ohio Star Journal, August 23, 1920.  "The Sky Is Now Her Limit".

I also cross posted that on Reddit's 100 Years Ago subm where somebody made this observation:

Pretty much everything has been ticked off except presidency and it’s looking like that will likely change soon as well!

I hadn't thought of that, but that's correct.

Which makes me wonder why item number one on the rungs is still around.  The slavery one, that is.

Now, this isn't going to be a feminist manifesto proclaiming that something like marriage is slavery, or some other such nonsense.  No, rather, by slavery, we're referring to concubinage.

That may sound odd, and even impossible in the modern context, but it isn't in this one.  

A concubine, as well all know, is a species of prostitute, the prime thing being different from conventional prostitutes is that their services were bound to a single master rather than simply sold to everyone and, therefore, I am perhaps being polite here.  By way of movies, television, magazines and, most importantly now, the internet, thousands upon thousands of women prostitute their images to those unknown and by extension putting their entire gender into a type of ongoing concubinage.

We've dealt with this before.  Starting in 1953, when Playboy magazine brought photographic prostitution into the mainstream, starting first with Marilyn Monroe.  Monroe managed to overcome the scandal, through the intervention of Life magazine which published her naked photographs first, but she was never really able to overcome the image.  She'd always be, in the eyes of thousands of men, about to take off her clothes, no matter how clothes she might really be.

The way we'd probably like to remember Marilyn Monroe, if we could. We really can't, however, as she built her career on her figure in a more revealing way than still rather obvious here (with a nice Yaschaflex camera by the way).  From this earlier thread here.  Playboy's co-opting of her body, sold several years earlier to a calendar photographer when she was unknown and desperate, nearly ruined her career, which was saved only by Life magazine determining to beat Playboy to the punch and publishing it first.  Life's parry saved her from an immediate ruined career, but the overall publicity launched Playboy.  In the end, of course, she'd be only one of the lives effectively ruined by Playboy, although her own selling of her image in less graphic form, combined with an early tragic history, played a larger measure in that.

Anyhow, since that fateful 1953 publication date, the prostitution of the female form has expanded enormously.  And hence the slavery.

Every Kate Upton who appears for the viewing pleasure of thousands of unknown men strikes a blow at women of achievement.  There's no two ways about it.  So that first rung remains one to be overcome.

And, of course, in some direct ways, the portrayal of young women in anonymous pornography is actual slavery, aided along by drugs, desperation, and social decay.

Novella d'Andrea, a professor in law at the University of Bologna and daughter of canon law professor Giovanni d'Andrea, who gave her lectures from behind a screen lest her beauty distract her students.  Both of Giovanni's daughters were professors of law.  What?  You didn't think that possible in the 1330s and 1340s. . . well it was.

No matter how far women come, until their routine selling of their images ceases, and until women themselves stop participating it when they voluntarily do, and until its no longer tolerated by men and women, true equality will never really be achieved.

August 3, 1920. A mostly grim Tuesday.

The headlines were fully correct.  The Red Army was advancing on Warsaw and a Soviet victory appeared inevitable.

In Center Texas, a mob broke into the jail and lynched 16 year old Lige Daniels who had been in the jail for suspicion of murder since July 29.  The grisly image of his lynching was turned into a postcard.

He was totally forgotten until 1999 when his image appeared on the cover of the book Without Sanctuary which was written by an antique dealer who had collected such images that had seen such use.

On the topic of lynching, this map from a report to Congress shows the "Red Record of Lynching" in this time frame.

Probably some of this is surprising, but in other ways it isn't.  If states show up where lynchings are a surprise, as in the 34 for Wyoming, keep in mind that a lynching is an extrajudicial murder and actually not a racist hanging.  Many, and indeed in the South undoubtedly most, were racist murders, and some of those, as we've recently seen, extended outside of the South. But they'd also include the murders of others by any means that were extrajudicial in nature.

President Wilson's physician, Admiral Cary Travers Grayson, went on faction, the President now being deemed recovered from his stroke.

Admiral Grayson

The news broke that Mildred Harris of Cheyenne, originally, had sued Charlie Chaplin for divorce.

Given her tender years at the time of their marriage, if the whole affair had occurred today it would have been part of the Me Too set of stories.

Enrico Caruso acted a caricature artist at a benefit fair.