The Consequence of Matters

It was on this day in 1954 that the Battle of Berne, also known as the 1954 FIFA World Cup, occurred. Brazil’s international coming out party at the 1938 World Cup was marred by a brutal quarterfinal match against Czechoslovakia, which has been termed the Battle of Bordeaux. Two Brazilians and one Czechoslovak were thrown out of the game for rough play. Each side had three players suffer injuries, but the Czechoslovak’s got the worst of it. Two of their star players, Oldrich Nejedly and Frantisek Planicka were gravely injured. Nejedly who scored his team’s lone goal of the game suffered a broken right leg which effectively ended his career. Planicka broke his right arm when he was kicked by the Brazilian striker Peracio in the midst of a shot. The wounded Planicka actually played out the game which ended in a draw, but was unable to show for the rematch which Brazil subsequently won. The referee in the Battle of Bordeaux was a Hungarian, Pal von Hertzka. What von Hertzka witnessed ...

It was on this date in 1928 that Louis Armstrong and his band, the Hot Five, recorded "West End Blues." The "West End" of the title refers to the westernmost point of Lake Pontchartrain within Orleans Parish, Louisiana. In its heyday, it was a thriving summer resort with live music, dance pavilions, seafood restaurants, and lake bathing. Armstrong was 26 years old at the time, and living in Chicago, where he'd been for six years. He'd moved there from New Orleans as part of J oe "King" Oliver's band; Oliver had been a friend and mentor to the young singer and trumpeter since Armstrong was a teenager. They parted ways in 1925. Oliver composed "West End Blues" and had just recorded his own version a few weeks earlier, but Armstrong's cover, recorded in Chicago's OKeh studio, is legendary. It features Earl "Fatha" Hines on piano, and it's one of the first recorded examples of Armstrong's trademark "scat...

It was on this day (well, yesterday which is when I started writing this) in 1901 that the College Board ruined higher education. Before standardized tests, many universities had their own college entrance exams, and prospective students were required to come to campus for a week or more to take exams. Since each college's exam demanded a different set of knowledge, high schools offered separate instruction for students based on which colleges they hoped to attend. Some colleges accepted applicants based on how well previous graduates of the same high school were doing at the college. Other colleges sent faculty to visit high schools, and if the high school met their criteria, then they would admit any graduate of that school. It was a confusing system, and as more Americans began to attend college, it was no longer practical. Between 1890 and 1924, the number of college students grew five times faster than the growth of the general population. In 1885, the principal...

On this day in 2013, Sam I Am passed away. He and his sister Sugar were my first two border collies. My ex got some border collies for her kids when we left Myrtle Beach. It was to help them with the move since they had only known the one home. It's a long story how they ended up with border collies, but I fell in love with those two. They just wanted someone to be with them and do things. Whenever they saw me drive up, they got so excited. I was the only one who ever really took them for walks or taught them things. When she broke up with me, I thought I'd never see them again. After about six months, I bought a house and, figuring that was as stable as I'm ever likely to be, thought about getting dogs of my own, and border collies since I remembered them. I couldn't afford purebred puppies but I found the Border Collie Rescue of Georgia on line. People used to make fun of me for looking for everything on Google. That's before everybody started looking fo...

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite writers, William Butler Yeats, born in Dublin, Ireland in 1865. He lived during great political and social changes in his home country, but he spent much of his life obsessed not with politics but with mysticism. His aunt gave him a popular book of the era called Esoteric Buddhism (1884), about Eastern mystical philosophy, and Yeats especially loved its idea that the world of matter was an illusion. When he was 20, he and a group of  friends formed the Dublin Hermetic Society, in order to conduct experiments into the nature of ghosts and psychic powers. He got involved in the London Theosophical Society in 1887 and later joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, a group that performed a variety of ancient magic rituals. He attended séances and tarot card readings. Seeing the performances of mediums and learning about reincarnation inspired him to study Celtic myths and folklore. In 1889, he met Maud Gonne, a beautiful actress who had bec...

Dr. John died today. He had only one hit, Such a Night, and wasn't famous much outside of New Orleans. But around New Orleans, he was a god. From his Night Tripper Hoodoo man persona in the 60's, through his blues sideman and producer role in the 70's to his personification of all that is New Orleans music in the 90's and 00's, he cut a path of originality that could never be matched. He began his career as a guitar player, and was more gangsta than gangsta. He was a drug dealer, a pimp, a heroin addict, and the model for Dr Teeth, the Muppet bandleader.The guitar career was cut short when he was shot in the hand during a bar fight. He switched to piano and I've never heard anyone who can play New Orleans piano better, not even Professor Longhair. For a long time, he was legendary for his solo piano skills, but he would never record as a soloist. He had a pathological fear of ending his life as a lounge act. But some time in the 1980's, someone talke...

Friend Requests See All Eric Barr Eric Barr is a mutual friend. Delete Suggested Pages See All The Tenderlillies 251 people like this.   Everybody knows what happened on this day in 1944. Or if you don't, shame on you. So I'll leave that to the big news media. On this day in 1822, Alexis St Martin was accidentally shot in the stomach. St. Martin was a n employee of the American Fur Company on Mackinac Island in Michigan. He was the victim of a shotgun blast of buck shot that injured his ribs and stomach. He was treat by Dr. William Beaumont, an Army surgeon stationed at Fort Mackinac, who expected St. Martin to die. He didn't, but Beaumont explains in a later paper that the shot blew off fragments of St. Martin's muscles and broke a few of his ribs. After bleeding him and giving him a cathartic, Beaumont marked St. Martin's progress. For the next 17 d...

Just after midnight on this day in 1968, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant. Kennedy had just won California's Democratic presidential primary, and he was exiting through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. Juan Romero, a 17-year-old busboy, was shaking his hand when Sirhan began firing. Several of the men with him tackled Sirhan, including writer George Plimpton, Olympic athlete Rafer Johnson, and foo tball star Rosey Grier. Romero knelt by Kennedy, and put a rosary in his hand. His brother Edward "Ted" Kennedy delivered the eulogy: "My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished f...

There were several important things that happened on this day. Henry Ford completed his first automobile. The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded. It's Dr. Ruth's birthday (did you know she was once a sniper?). But let's focus on an important civil rights milestone - on this day in 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote. The United States Constitution, adopted in 1789, left the boundaries of suffrage undefined. The only directly elected body created under the original Constitution was the U.S. House of Representatives, for which voter qualifications were explicitly delegated to the individual states. While women had the right to vote in several of the early colonies in what would become the United States, after 1776, with the exception of New Jersey, all states adopted constitutions that denied voting rights to women. New Jersey's constitution initially granted suffrage to property-holding residents, includ...

It's the birthday of poet Allen Ginsberg in 1926 as well as the death day of Czech bizarro writer Franz Kafka two years earlier. Kafka had written to his friend Max Brod: “Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me [...] in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread. [...] Yours, Franz Kafka.” But Brod had already told him that he would never destroy any of Kafka’s manuscripts — not even if Kafka himself told him to — and critics are skeptical about the sincerity of Kafka’s request. The three novels Kafka left behind — The Trial, Amerika, and The Castle — were all published by Brod, who made substantial changes to the manuscripts. He corrected Kafka’s odd spelling and punctuation, moved chapters and paragraphs around, and gave the works cleaner endings. It was not until the 1970s that the originals were translated into English as Kafka wrote them. Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, and g...