Kraftwerk – The Robots
An evening pause: From 1977, some early electronic music.
Tag: history
Itzhak Perlman – Theme from Schindler’s List
An evening pause: He plays this with the verge and style of the best bluegrass fiddlers.
Hat tip again to Phil Berardelli.
Harpo Marx – I Love Lucy (May 9, 1955)
An evening pause: A classic, and even better if you are familiar with the Marx Brothers movies.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli.
The things your kids will never understand
Link here. The one about MTV was especially funny.
Keep Calm and Carry On
An evening pause: On the anniversary of one of the darkest days of both American history and Western civilization, this simple message echoing down from World War II tells us exactly what we should do.
Hat tip to Tim.
Who is buried in the largest tomb ever found in northern Greece?
Excitement continues to build as archeologists dig deeper into a massive tomb discovered two years ago in northern Greece.
This past weekend the excavation team, led by Greek archaeologist Katerina Peristeri, announced the discovery of two elegant caryatids—large marble columns sculpted in the shape of women with outstretched arms—that may have been intended to bar intruders from entering the tomb’s main room. “I don’t know of anything quite like them,” says Philip Freeman, a professor of classics at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.
The curly-haired caryatids are just part of the tomb’s remarkable furnishings. Guarding the door as sentinels were a pair of carved stone sphinxes, mythological creatures with the body of a lion and the head of a human. And when archaeologists finally entered the antechamber, they discovered faded remnants of frescoes as well as a mosaic floor made of white marble pieces inlaid in a red background.
Archeologists believe this tomb is connected somehow to Alexander the Great and could very well be the burial site of one of his relatives or close allies. They will not know more until they actually enter the tomb.
The greatest electronic music of the fifties and sixties
Link here. Many of these could easily be an evening pause, other than the fact that they don’t have visuals. If you want to get a feel for the beginnings of electronic music, check them out. The styles range from space music to jazzy. The sampling even includes the electronic music from Forbidden Planet (1956), one of the best science fiction films ever made. I have put one as an example below the fold.
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One of John Franklin’s lost ships found?
A Canadian expedition thinks it has located one of the ships from John Franklin’s lost 1845 Arctic expedition.
The Canadian government began searching for Franklin’s ships in 2008 as part of a strategy to assert Canada’s sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, which has recently become accessible to shipping because of melting Arctic ice. Expedition sonar images from the waters of Victoria Strait, just off King William Island, clearly show the wreckage of a ship on the ocean floor.
Government takes over healthcare spending
Government spending on healthcare has skyrocketed in the past few decades, and due to Obamacare, will rise much higher in the coming decades.
Note that this spending is not on innovation or the actual care of patients, but on bureaucracy and regulatory bodies based in Washington and elsewhere. And isn’t that just what patients need, more bureaucracy?
Note also that one of the Democratic Party’s justifications for passing Obamacare was to reduce costs, but the data outlined in this article strongly suggests that it is exactly this kind of government interference since the Great Society in the 1960s that has caused healthcare costs to rise. Look especially at the graph at the link.
Jack the Ripper identified
Using DNA evidence from a shawl that is believed to have been at one of the Jack the Ripper’s murders, forensic scientists think they have finally identified the serial killer.
The story is fascinating, but what makes it even more convincing to me is that the person they name is hardly the wild romantic suspect that many books and movies have proposed in past decades. Instead, he was one of Scotland Yard’s prime suspects.
Glenn Miller – In the mood
An evening pause: From the 1954 Jimmy Stewart film, The Glenn Miller Story. They play on, even as a German V1 buzz bomb comes flying in.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Forty badass quotes.
Link here. I especially like Buckley’s comment to Gore Vidal.
The real story behind “The Sound of Music”
Link here. And the story is surprisingly not much different than the movie itself.
The most amazing lie in history.
As Winston Churchill wisely wrote, “In wartime truth is so precious that she should be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
Read it. The story is amazing, especially for the fact that the man who did it did so because he had consciously chosen the right side to support.
First comic book appearance of Superman for sale
Action #1, the first ever appearance of Superman, is for sale on ebay.
The auction itself can be found here. As of Sunday morning, bidding was over $2.3 million. Update: Sold for more than $3.2 million.
“Finally, finally, finally! They had come!”
When American forces liberated Paris from Nazi occupation seventy years ago today, one Parisian schoolgirl described what happened.
An idea took hold – we needed flags; a collective idea, as if everyone had the same thought at the same time. We would make the flags and hang them at the windows. But how were we going to do it? Quick, tea towels, old sheets cut in strips. A piece of luck, there was a shop that sold dyes in the courtyard. We ran down and started boiling water in the tubs. Some red dye. Some blue dye. The red didn’t work very well, the material came out pinkish red, not the flamboyant red we had hoped for. Too bad. How many stars are there on the American flag? But never mind, we’ll have to just put some on, and that will be good enough.
Read it all. It is important to note that this has been the kind of reaction of practically every oppressed nation when American troops have arrived.
A movie of Triton made from Voyager 2’s fly-by 25 years ago
Using restored images taken by Voyager 2 when it flew past Neptune’s moon Triton 25 years ago, scientists have produced a new map and movie of the moon.
A brief history of USB
Link here.
Visiting the memorial to a forgotten astronaut
Link here.
Six common sounds of the past that we no longer hear
Link here. I agree with the first commenter that another sound no longer heard and not included in the list is the sound of a dial-up modem getting online. There is also the sound of rotating the radio dial past many stations.