A happy new year to all, and hopefully stock portfolios the world over look up for 2009!
Had the internet never come around, or perhaps just not YouTube, the video footage seen below would most likely have rotted away in some distant and forgotten television studio vault. I was just a gleam in my mother’s eye when these revelries took place so long ago, a time when there were still two years left in Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, the Beatles were just teenagers in Liverpool, Sputnik 1 was still orbiting the earth and J. Fred Muggs tenure on the Today Show was coming to an end. I’m sure people 51 years from now people will look back on 2008 as a strange time in its own right, laughing quizzically about things such as Facebook, Hannah Montana, reality TV, Sarah Palin, our soon-departing simian-looking chief executive and I’m sure much, much more. How fun hindsight can be…
According to the 1995 Guiness Book of World Records, the most broadcast television program ever was not Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, or Frosty the Snow Man, the Sound of Music or even The Wizard of Oz. It was, and probably still is (the record is no longer tracked), ‘Dinner For One‘, a 15 minute sketch filmed in 1963. The origins of the sketch date back to the 1920s, but in 1963, the sketch was filmed by the German television station Norddeutscher Rundfunk (I had originally assumed it was from the BBC) in black and white and shown on New Year’s Eve that year. Since then it has become a staple for New Year’s Eve in many countries around the world. Countries that regularly view the sketch are Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Faroe Islands, Austria, German-speaking Switzerland, South Africa, Australia and more.
Being Swedish myself, this video has been a part of my New Year’s Eve tradition for many years. The video is ageless and never loses its shine. Enjoy!
The December 28th edition of the New York Times Magazine has their 15th annual ‘Lives They Lived’ issue, which I like to think of more as the “Bring Out The Dead” issue. Many great people passed away this year, and it’s a good review of their interesting lives.
It was inevitable, but within hours of the incident involving an Iraqi journalist throwing shoes at President Bush during a Baghdad press conference on December 14, video games recreating the event immediately sprung up all over the internet. Most of them are pretty lame, but some of them are pretty creative. A few examples include:
Mark Twain’s essay, “Privilege of the Grave”, a dark discussion on the nature of free speech, has been sitting in the The Mark Twain Papers & Project archive at the University of California, Berkeley, never before having been published in any magazine or newspaper since it was written in 1905. Enter this week the New Yorker magazine, which published the short two-page essay for its December 22nd/29th edition. Twain wrote the essay just five years before his death in 1910 and the essay contains the overtones of bitterness and dark humor that marked the last years of his life. The essay is not typical Twain fare, and does not rank with the best of his essays, but it is certainly an interesting peek into the thoughts that Twain had on politics at that time in his life.
Some passages of the essay show that some things never change in that many passages would appear to describe our current political situation today. Take for instance:
When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid and for a time they are mute, reserved, non-committal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.
Twain continues:
The average citizen is not a student of party doctrines, and quite right: neither he nor I would ever be able to understand them. If you should ask him to explain – in intelligible detail – why he preferred one of the coin-standards to the other, his attempt to do it would be disgraceful … And that is not strange, since they are also above the reach of the ablest minds in the country; after all the fus and all the talk, not one of those doctrines has been conclusively proven to be the right one and the best.
I don’t think I need to go into any detail about how our current administration took advantage of the emotions of it’s nation’s citizenry after 9/11 in order to ram through a series of laws and policies that would otherwise not have passed judgement, thanks to the “startled, anxious, timid, mute, reserved and non-committal” politicians in power at that crucial time.
If you find this essay interesting, you will probably want to read his essay, ‘Corn-Pone Opinions‘, written four years earlier in 1901.
I lived in Munich, Germany for five years, and it’s a little strange coming back each and every time. Insignificant memories come back after looking at anything from a building corner, a stairway to the U-Bahn, faces of people on the street, sounds usw…
When looking back on the history of the Apollo program, everyone naturally harkens back to Apollo 11, the first mission to land a man on the moon. That mission will forever be the greatest achievement in the history of space travel and perhaps human history. However close behind that achievement is the mission of Apollo 8, the first time mankind left the confines of Earth orbit and ventured into deep space and to another world. It’s easy to forget the missions that preceded the iconic moment when Neil Armstrong first stepped out onto the lunar surface and uttered his famous phrase and forever etched it in the history books. However Apollo 8’s had its iconic memento with its Earth Rise image taken by Bill Anders.
Apollo 8 wasn’t supposed to go to the moon, as it was originally planned as a low Earth orbit test mission. But the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 lunar orbiter, launched in September of 1968, containing turtles, wine flies, meal worms, plants, seeds, bacteria, other living matter and a 175 cm tall, 70 kg mannequin, prompted NASA to turn Apollo 8 into a mission to reach lunar orbit and return to the Earth safely. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before, and it was certainly a gutsy move on NASA’s part to try and upstage the Soviets in the Space Race. Now 40 years later, NASA is celebrating this mission with a short documentary film with original footage and current interviews with the three surviving crew members.
People tend to forget how crazy these men were in their work on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. They were real heros in that they were testing hardware that had never been used before and had only recently been dreamt up by engineers bent on fulfilling the vow given by President Kennedy (2) in 1961 to put a man on the moon before the decade was out. Many men died in this pursuit, their deaths leaving vacancies in a rotation where other men eagerly hoped to fill their spots in hopes of being selected as the first man to walk on the moon. During these missions, many of them were not aware of the meaning of what they were attempting to do. But in recent years, the 12 men who were lucky enough to walk on the moon, and the additional men who flew into space to prepare for those landings, have become much more philosophical in their views on what they did and have been more willing to give interviews and share their thoughts and memories of those historic flights.
I strongly recommend Andrew Chaikin’s book “A Man On the Moon“, a history of the moon program and interviews with the 12 men who walked on the moon. And by the way, Neil Armstrong did not utter the phrase, “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky!“
A happy new year to all, and hopefully stock portfolios the world over look up for 2009!
The December 28th edition of the 
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