The Consequence of Matters

Today is the birthday of congressman, senator and 45th vice president of the United States, Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., in 1948. He is the son of Albert Gore, Sr., former senator from Tennessee, and Pauline LaFon Gore, the first woman to graduate from Vanderbilt Law School. Gore has a widely varied history. Though he and his father were vocal Vietnam War critics, and though he could have pulled strings to stay out, he went anyway. Gore said that he did not want to be responsible for someone with fewer options than he to go in his place. Gore was widely criticized during his presidential run for allegedly saying that he invented the Internet. He never said that. The Bush campaign said he said that. Gore was one of the "Atari Democrats" who were given this name due to their passion for technological issues, from biomedical research and genetic engineering to the environmental impact of the greenhouse effect. On March 19, 1979, he became the first member of Congress to appea...

Also on this day, in 39 CE, the Roman Senate bestowed the title of Princeps (first citizen) on Caligula, making him emperor of Rome. Some of them would live to regret this. He was born Gaius, the son of the famous general Germanicus and Augustus' daughter Agrippina. He traveled with his father's army while young, acquiring the nickname "Little Boot" which, when you say it in Latin, comes out Caligula. For the first six months of his rule, Caligula was described as a moderate emperor, but then he began working to expand the unrestrained personal power of the Princeps. He seems to have gotten this reputation largely by spending money from the treasury to buy friends. When that money was exhausted, he began to accuse people of trumped up crimes and execute them solely for the purpose of seizing their estates. Suetonius, the gossip columnist of the ancient world, says that some senators were forced to attend Caligula by running alongside his chariot. He staged...

On this date in 1915, the woman known as "Typhoid Mary" was put into quarantine in a cottage in the Bronx. Her name was Mary Mallon, and she was a large and fiery Irish-American woman about 40 years old. She worked as a cook in and around New York City, and every household she worked in seemed to suffer an outbreak of typhoid fever. Typhoid is caused by a form of Salmonella bacteria, and is usually spread by contact with human or animal waste. It was common on battlefields —  it may have killed more than 200,000 soldiers during the Civil War — and in poor and unsanitary housing conditions, but it was rarely seen in the wealthy households like the ones where Mallon worked. The first outbreak associated with Typhoid Mary occurred in 1900, in Mamaroneck, New York. She had been cooking for a family for about two weeks when they started to become ill. The same thing happened the following year, when she took a series of jobs in Manhattan and Long Island. She helped take care o...

The spin machine is in full gear today. Instead of simply releasing Mueller’s own summary of the Mueller report, Attorney General William Barr has decided to release his own summary. I can’t think of any good reason for doing this aside from the possibility that Mueller’s own summary contains some conclusions that Barr and his boss would just as soon not reach the public ear. Barr’s summary to be the rosiest possible interpretation of the Mueller report. But even taken on its  own terms, the Barr summary is a little odd. It spends some considerable effort pointing out that there is no evidence Trump was involved in the Russian disinformation campaign or hacking directly. I don't think any serious person every thought that he was. The suspicions of coordination have mainly revolved around more personal contacts: Manafort’s friends in high places; the Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr. and others; the Carter Page weirdness; the Moscow real estate deal that went south; and so fort...

Today is the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, born in Eisenach in 1685, and Google has a truly remarkable Doodle celebrating this fact. You can write a line of quarter and eighth notes and an AI engine, trained on Bach compositions, will make a short Bach-like tune out of it. My favorite composer when I was young was Beethoven, but over the years it shifted to Bach because I need peace in my life, not more drama. Bach has a certain serenity. To a large extent, Bach's output exists within the conventions of the day. When Telemann and Vivaldi wrote concertos, so did he. When they wrote suites, so did he. One area where he was a full on innovator, though, was in the use of four part harmony. During his life, modal music was being largely supplanted by tonal music, based on a succession of four-note chords. The new system was at the core of Bach's style, and his compositions are to a large extent considered as laying down the rules for the evolving scheme that would do...

Dick Dale died today. A lot of you are saying "Who?" because in 1963 your parents were a gleam in the milkman's eye. Dick Dale essentially invented surf music, which I always detested. That's mainly because of the Beach Boys' version featuring emasculated continuous falsettos. But it isn't widely known that Dick Dale was of Lebanese descent. Surf music originated when he was playing a minor key song that his father had played on the oud, Miserlou (The Egyptian Girl). In an in terview, Dale said he was playing this tune and thought "No, no, that's way too slow." He borrowed Gene Krupa's staccato drum attack, transported it to guitar, and turned the reverb up to 11. This is what came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKpsuGMeqHI And this is the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW6qGy3RtwY YOUTUBE.COM Miserlou Provided to YouTube by Music Video Distributors Inc. Miserlou · Dick Dale King...

The New York Times just reported an explosive piece about President Donald Trump's history with Deutsche Bank, saying the German bank lent the real-estate mogul about $2 billion during their relationship. The president's association with the struggling German lender was born in the late 1990s, when major Wall Street firms stopped loaning Trump money after a series of disastrous ventures such as the Trump Shuttle airline and Trump's Atlantic City, New Jersey, casinos. Trump's  history with Deutsche Bank is part of multiple investigations into the president and his businesses. The special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation is reportedly looking in to the relationship, as are congressional committees and the New York Attorney General's Office. Some of the highlights from The Times: Deutsche Bank cumulatively loaned Trump more than $2 billion over two decades when he was in real estate, according to The New York Times. He reportedly owes the bank abo...

Today is the Vernal Equinox, one day ahead of its usual date. That's because our calendar doesn't quite keep exact track of the solar year. Happy spring, everybody! Be sure to tell the Sun welcome back. It is also the birthday of both Ovid and Henrik Ibsen. I think I've mentioned Henry Gibson recently, so let's talk about Ovid. I'm currently listening to his history on a remarkable podcast called Literature and History. He was born Publius Ovidius Naso in what is now Sulmo, Italy in 43 BCE. He became a famous, beloved poet in Rome, privy to the inner circles of the Augustan court. There is a genre of poetry that has entirely vanished, the didactic poem, but that were quite popular in the ancient world. Virgil's Georgics, for instance, is an extended poem on how to run a farm. There is an extant 100 line fragment teaching women how to put on makeup, Medicamina Faciei Femineae ("Women's Facial Cosmetics"). The recipes are so outlandish that...

Today is the birthday of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (March 31st according to the Old Calendar), born in Great Sorochintsy, Ukraine (1809). His mother was extremely devout, and his father was a bureaucrat who owned a vodka distillery on 3,000 acres and had more than 300 serfs working for him. After graduating from school, he went off to St. Petersburg, ready to take on the world. First he tried acting, but he failed at his audition. So he wrote an idyllic poem glorifying Germany, and self-published it at his own expense. It got nasty reviews, and he was so ashamed that he bought all the copies, burned them, and decided never to write poetry again. But eventually he tried writing prose, short stories rooted in the folklore and culture of rural Ukraine, and his first book, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), was a big success. A few years later, he produced a comic play, The Government Inspector (1836). The satirical play mocked the ineptitude of the Russian bureaucracy, but it w...

Today is the birthday of poet Wilfred Owen, born in Shropshire, England in 1893. When he was young, his family was well-off, living in a house owned by his grandfather, a prominent citizen. But then his grandfather died, it turned out that the old man was broke. The family had to and move into working-class lodgings in an industrial town, and Owen's father worked for a railroad. He started writing poems as a boy, and he was good at literature and science, but he didn't do wel l enough on his exams to get a scholarship at a university. Given his family's economic circumstances, without a scholarship he could not attend. He enlisted to fight in World War I, and he became a lieutenant. Initially Owen held his troops in contempt for their loutish behaviour, and in a letter to his mother described his company as "expressionless lumps". However, his viewpoint was to be changed dramatically by a number of traumatic experiences. He fell into a shell hole and suffered...

One of the biggest problems with the American system of justice is that no method exists for sanctioning a prosecutor for misconduct, or for exploiting the legal system to advance his career or his bigotry. The worst thing that happens to him is that he gets to try the same guy again. "The American legal system pretends to marble-and-mahogany majesty, but is in fact often a rickety, underfunded contraption, run by overworked mortals who are sometimes incompetent and sometimes  actually ill-intentioned. But even amid law’s cratered landscape, sometimes a specific case presents facts simply beyond belief; sometimes the “system” stands revealed as nothing more than one human being tormenting another because he can. "For me, such a case is Flowers v. Mississippi, a death-penalty appeal to be argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The specific issue the Court will hear is whether, during a murder trial in 2010, a Mississippi prosecutor named Doug Evans deliberately ...

Birch Bayh passed away. You've got to be my age to remember that name and what he did. If you voted between the ages of 18 and 21 or benefited in any way from the Title IX program banning gender discrimination in higher education, Birch Bayh had an impact on your life. He became a power on the Judiciary Committee and chairman of its Constitution Subcommittee. In that role he became one of the last great advocates for constitutional amendments, co-authoring the 25th amendment providing for appointment of a vice president upon a vacancy in that position, and the 26th amendment lowering the voting age to 18 in federal and state elections. Bayh was also the chief Senate sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, which cleared Congress in 1972 only to succumb to a powerful backlash closely associated with the rising conservative movement when the drive to ratify it stalled (there’s still an effort underwayto complete ratification of the ERA, though some argue the deadline for state approv...

It was on this day in 1881 that Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts opened on the London stage. Ghosts was a revolutionary and controversial play with references to incest and sexually transmitted diseases, and Ibsen refused to give his audiences the happy endings they were used to. The play had already been banned in St. Petersburg on religious grounds when it premiered in London. The first performance alone of Ghosts caused more than 500 printed articles to be written in response to  it, and Ibsen became a household name even to people who had never seen the play or read a book. He died a national hero in 1906 when he was 79. He was given a state funeral, and King Haakon of Norway attended. Ghosts is an amazing play. I used to collect in a notebook interesting and thought provoking quotes, and one of the is from Ghosts in Act 2: "I almost think we're all of us Ghosts. ... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts ...

It's also the birthday of science fiction writer Douglas Adams , born in Cambridge, England (1952). He was unemployed, depressed, living in his mother's house, when he remembered a night from years before. He was a teenager traveling around Europe with his guidebook The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe, and that night he was lying in a field in Innsbruck, drunk, looking up at the stars, and he thought somebody should write a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy as well. And so years  later, he wrote the radio play The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, chronicling the adventures of the kindly and boring Arthur Dent, who is still wearing his dressing gown when he is whisked away from his suburban English home just in time to escape Earth being demolished by an interstellar highway. In 1978, the radio broadcasts were such a success that Adams turned them into a series of five successful novels: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), The Restaurant at the End of t...