ALAN LOMAX, THE ETHNOMUSICOLOGIST OF FOLK MUSIC

Today, The Grandma has been listening to some Mallorcan tonades, country songs sung by farmers and local workers, some of them recorded by Alan Lomax, the American ethnomusicologist who was born on a day like today in 1915.

Alan Lomax (January 31,1915-July 19, 2002) was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century.

He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker.

Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.

He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax, and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.

After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain, as well as the United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling an enormous collection of American and international culture.

In March 2004, the material captured and produced without Library of Congress funding was acquired by the Library, which brings the entire seventy years of Alan Lomax's work together under one roof at the Library of Congress, where it has found a permanent home.

More information: Cultural Equity

With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore, even as academic folklorists turned inward. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, the Global Jukebox).

In the 1970s and 1980s, Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor in the American South.

Lomax's greatest legacy is in preserving and publishing recordings of musicians in many folk and blues traditions around the US and Europe. 

Among the artists Lomax is credited with discovering and bringing to a wider audience include blues guitarist Robert Johnson, protest singer Woody Guthrie, folk artist Pete Seeger, country musician Burl Ives, Scottish Gaelic singer Flora MacNeil, and country blues singer Lead Belly, among many others.

Lomax was born in Austin, Texas, in 1915, the third of four children born to Bess Brown and pioneering folklorist and author John A. Lomax. 

Two of his siblings also developed significant careers studying folklore: Bess Lomax Hawes and John Lomax Jr.

Lomax, now 17, therefore took a break from studying to join his father's folk song collecting field trips for the Library of Congress, co-authoring American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) and Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936).

From 1937 to 1942, Lomax was Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress to which he and his father and numerous collaborators contributed more than ten thousand field recordings.

From 1942 to 1979 Lomax was repeatedly investigated and interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), although nothing incriminating was ever discovered and the investigation was eventually abandoned.

In December 1949 a newspaper printed a story, Red Convictions Scare 'Travelers', that mentioned a dinner given by the Civil Rights Association to honor five lawyers who had defended people accused of being Communists.

Lomax spent the 1950s based in London, from where he edited the 18-volume Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, an anthology issued on newly invented LP records.

More information: The Library of Congress

Upon his return to New York in 1959, Lomax produced a concert, Folksong '59, in Carnegie Hall, featuring Arkansas singer Jimmy Driftwood; the Selah Jubilee Singers and Drexel Singers (gospel groups); Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim (blues); Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys (bluegrass); Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger (urban folk revival); and The Cadillacs (a rock and roll group).

Lomax was a consultant to Carl Sagan for the Voyager Golden Record sent into space on the 1977 Voyager Spacecraft to represent the music of the earth.

Music he helped choose included the blues, jazz, and rock 'n' roll of Blind Willie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, and Chuck Berry; Andean panpipes and Navajo chants; Azerbaijani mugham performed by two balaban players, a Sicilian sulfur miner's lament; polyphonic vocal music from the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, and the Georgians of the Caucasus; and a shepherdess song from Bulgaria by Valya Balkanska; in addition to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and more.

Alan Lomax died in Safety Harbor, Florida on July 19, 2002, at the age of 87.

More information: Open Culture

And the thing that I always tried to do with important singers
when I met them was to sit down and record everything they knew,
give them a first real run-through of their art.

Alan Lomax

'ELK CLONER', ONE OF THE FIRST COMPUTER VIRUSES

Today, The Grandma has been reading about computer viruses. She has remembered Elk Cloner, one of the first known microcomputer viruses written by Richard Skrenta on a day like today in 1982.

Elk Cloner is one of the first known microcomputer viruses that spread in the wild, i.e., outside the computer system or laboratory in which it was written. It attached itself to the Apple II operating system and spread by floppy disk. It was written around 1982 by programmer and entrepreneur Rich Skrenta as a 15-year-old high school student, originally as a joke, and put onto a game disk.

Elk Cloner spread by infecting the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system using a technique now known as a boot sector virus. It was attached to a game which was then set to play.

The 50th time the game was started, the virus was released, but instead of playing the game, it would change to a blank screen that displayed a poem about the virus. If a computer booted from an infected floppy disk, a copy of the virus was placed in the computer's memory. When an uninfected disk was inserted into the computer, the entire DOS (including Elk Cloner) would be copied to the disk, allowing it to spread from disk to disk. To prevent the DOS from being continually re-written each time the disk was accessed, Elk Cloner also wrote a signature byte to the disk's directory, indicating that it had already been infected.

More information: Digit

The poem that Elk Cloner would display was as follows:

ELK CLONER:
THE PROGRAM WITH A PERSONALITY
IT WILL GET ON ALL YOUR DISKS
IT WILL INFILTRATE YOUR CHIPS
YES IT'S CLONER!
IT WILL STICK TO YOU LIKE GLUE
IT WILL MODIFY RAM TOO
SEND IN THE CLONER!

Elk Cloner did not cause deliberate harm, but Apple DOS disks without a standard image had their reserved tracks overwritten.

Elk Cloner was created by Skrenta as a prank in 1982. Skrenta already had a reputation for pranks among his friends because, in sharing computer games and software, he would often alter the floppy disks to shut down or display taunting on-screen messages. Due to this reputation, many of his friends simply stopped accepting floppy disks from him.

Skrenta thought of methods to alter floppy disks without physically touching or harming them. During a winter break from Mt. Lebanon High School in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Skrenta discovered how to launch the messages automatically on his Apple II computer. He developed what is now known as a boot sector virus, and began circulating it in early 1982 among high school friends and a local computer club. Twenty-five years later, in 2007, Skrenta called it some dumb little practical joke.

According to contemporary reports, the virus was rather contagious, successfully infecting the floppies of most people Skrenta knew, and upsetting many of them.

Part of the success was that people were not at all wary of the potential problem, nor were virus scanners or cleaners available. The virus could be removed using Apple's MASTER CREATE utility or other utilities to re-write a fresh copy of DOS to the infected disk.

Furthermore, once Elk Cloner was removed, the previously-infected disk would not be re-infected since it already contained the Elk Cloner signature in its directory. It was also possible to inoculate uninfected disks against Elk Cloner by writing the signature to the disk; the virus would then think the disk was already infected and refrain from writing itself.

More information: Techtarget

I think computer viruses should count as life.
I think it says something about human nature
that the only form of life we have created
so far is purely destructive.
We've created life in our own image.

Stephen Hawking

TANXUGUEIRAS, THE GALICIAN FOLK WITHOUT BORDERS

Today, The Grandma has been listening to Tanxugueiras, one of her favourite Galician folk groups.

Tanxugueiras is a Galician folk trio formed in 2016 by Aida Tarrío and twin sisters Olaia and Sabela Maneiro.

The group aim to bring a modern sound to traditional Galician music by merging folk sounds with pop and world music influences. Their music focuses on themes such as the understanding between peoples, the defence of the Galician language and culture, and women's empowerment.

Tanxugueiras made a name for themselves in Galicia even before the release of their first album.

In early 2017, a video of the trio singing with A Banda das Crechas in Glasgow became popular on social media. Later in 2017, they collaborated with fellow Galician band A banda da Loba on the song Pepa.

In 2018, they released their first album, the self-titled Tanxugueiras. For this they won the 2018 MIN Award for the best album in Galician.

More information: Twitter-Tanxugueiras

In 2019, the band received the Martín Códax da Música Prize in the category of Traditional Galician and Folk Music. Later in the same year, their second album Contrapunto was released. It was produced by Tanxugueiras with the collaboration of Isaac Palacín. Along with pieces closer to traditional music, such as Perfidia and Miña Nai, other tracks such as Malquerenza and Desposorio have sounds reminiscent of pop or electronic music.

In 2020, Tanxugueiras received the award for Best Adaptation of a Traditional Piece at La Opinión de Música de Raíz Awards.

One of their singles released in 2021, Figa, was chosen in a vote among fans of the Eurovision Song Contest as the favourite song to participate in the 2022 edition. Subsequently, they entered Benidorm Fest with the song Terra, which is based on the traditional rhythm of Muiñeira.

The song was published to significant positive reception, garnering over half a million plays on platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music on the first day of release.

More information: Instagram-Tanxugueiras

Canta ti, cantarei eu, co xeito das nosas nais
Festexarémos a vida da xente que está a bailar
Da xente que está a bailar, da xente que está a bailar.

Tanxugueiras

CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE IN WASHINGTON

Today, The Grandma has been reading about one of the most interesting Institutions of the United States, the Carnegie Institution of Washington that was founded on a day like today in 1902.

The Carnegie Institution of Washington, the organization's legal name, known also for public purposes as the Carnegie Institution for Science (CIS), is an organization in the United States established to fund and perform scientific research. The institution is headquartered in Washington, D.C.

As of June 30, 2020, the Institution's endowment was valued at $926.9 million. In 2018 the expenses for scientific programs and administration were $96.6 million. As of July 2, 2018, Eric Isaacs is president of the institution.

More than 20 independent organizations were established through the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie and now feature his surname. They perform work involving topics as diverse as art, education, international affairs, world peace, and scientific research.

In 2007, the Carnegie Institution of Washington adopted the public name Carnegie Institution for Science to distinguish itself better from other organizations established by and named for Andrew Carnegie. The institution remains officially and legally the Carnegie Institution of Washington, but now has a public identity that describes its work.

More information: Carnegie Science

When the United States joined World War II, Vannevar Bush was president of the Carnegie Institution. Several months before, on June 12, 1940, Bush had been instrumental in persuading President Franklin Roosevelt to create the National Defense Research Committee, later superseded by the Office of Scientific Research and Development, to mobilize and coordinate the nation's scientific war effort. Bush housed the new agency in the Carnegie Institution's administrative headquarters at 16th and P Streets, NW, in Washington, DC, converting its rotunda and auditorium into office cubicles. From this location, Bush supervised, among many other projects, the Manhattan Project.  

Carnegie scientists cooperated with the development of the proximity fuze and mass production of penicillin.

Carnegie scientists continue to be involved with scientific discovery. Composed of six scientific departments on the East and West Coasts, the Carnegie Institution for Science is involved presently with six main topics: Astronomy at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (Washington, D.C.) and the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (Pasadena, CA and Las Campanas, Chile); Earth and planetary science also at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and the Geophysical Laboratory (Washington, D.C.); Global Ecology at the Department of Global Ecology (Stanford, CA); Genetics and developmental biology at the Department of Embryology (Baltimore, MD); Matter at extreme states also at the Geophysical Laboratory; and Plant science at the Department of Plant Biology (Stanford, CA).

 More information: Science

Science is not only a disciple of reason but,
also, one of romance and passion.

Stephen Hawking

THE INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

Today, The Grandma has commemorated the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is an international memorial day on 27 January that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities between 1933 and 1945 by Nazi Germany, an attempt to implement their final solution to the Jewish question. 27 January was chosen to commemorate the date that Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.

The day remembers the killing of six million Jews, two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population, and millions of others by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. 

It was designated by United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 on 1 November 2005. The resolution came after a special session was held earlier that year on 24 January to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the end of the Holocaust.

Many countries have instituted their own Holocaust Memorial Days. Many, such as the UK's Holocaust Memorial Day, also fall on 27 January, while others, such as Israel's Yom HaShoah, are observed at other times of the year.

Resolution 60/7 establishing 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day urges every member nation of the U.N. to honor the memory of Holocaust victims, six million Jews, one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities, and encourages the development of educational programs about Holocaust history to help prevent future acts of genocide.

It rejects any denial of the Holocaust as an event and condemns all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief. It also calls for actively preserving the Holocaust sites that served as Nazi death camps, concentration camps, forced labor camps and prisons, as well as for establishing a U.N. programme of outreach and mobilization of society for Holocaust remembrance and education.

More information: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Resolution 60/7 and the International Holocaust Day was an initiative of the State of Israel. Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Israel, Silvan Shalom, was the head of the delegation of Israel to the United Nations.

The essence of the text lies in its twofold approach: one that deals with the memory and remembrance of those who were massacred during the Holocaust and the other with educating future generations of its horrors.

In 2006, 2007 and 2008, Holocaust Remembrance Weeks were organized by The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme. This programme is part of the Outreach Division of the United Nations Department of Public Information and was established under General Assembly resolution 60/7.

Commemorations are held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and at Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem.

In Austria, commemorations of the Remembrance Day are held at the Heldenplatz in Vienna since 2012. The broad platform Jetzt Zeichen setzen! calls for participation of the civil society. Speakers include survivors of the Holocaust, antifascist activists and politicians hailing from parties throughout the political spectrum.

In Israel, the national Holocaust memorial day is known as Yom HaShoah, which is held on the 27th of Nisan. However, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day is also held in Israel, on which day government officials, diplomats and ambassadors visit Yad Vashem and there are ceremonies throughout the country. Every year, as part of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs presents the annual report on antisemitism before the Israeli government. The report reviews the main trends and incidents of the last year, in terms of antisemitism and combating antisemitism.

More information: UNESCO

 The Holocaust illustrates the consequences of prejudice,
racism and stereotyping on a society.
It forces us to examine the responsibilities of citizenship
and confront the powerful ramifications of indifference and inaction.

Tim Holden

ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, DENVER, COLORADO

Today, The Grandma has been watching photos of the Rocky Mountain National Park and remembering her last visit.

This wonderful place was established by an act of the U.S. Congress on a day like today in 1915.

Rocky Mountain National Park is an American national park located approximately 89 km northwest of Denver in north-central Colorado, within the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.

The park is situated between the towns of Estes Park to the east and Grand Lake to the west. The eastern and western slopes of the Continental Divide run directly through the center of the park with the headwaters of the Colorado River located in the park's northwestern region. The main features of the park include mountains, alpine lakes and a wide variety of wildlife within various climates and environments, from wooded forests to mountain tundra.

The Rocky Mountain National Park Act was signed by President Woodrow Wilson on January 26, 1915, establishing the park boundaries and protecting the area for future generations.

The Civilian Conservation Corps built the main automobile route, Trail Ridge Road, in the 1930s.

In 1976, UNESCO designated the park as one of the first World Biosphere Reserves.

In 2018, more than 4.5 million recreational visitors entered the park. The park is one of the most visited in the National Park System, ranking as the third most visited national park in 2015.

In 2019, the park saw record attendance yet again with 4,678,804 visitors, a 44% increase since 2012.

More information: National Park Service

The park has a total of five visitor centers, with park headquarters located at the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center -a National Historic Landmark designed by the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin West.

National Forest lands surround the park on all sides, including Roosevelt National Forest to the north and east, Routt National Forest to the north and west, and Arapaho National Forest to the west and south, with the Indian Peaks Wilderness area located directly south of the park.

The history of Rocky Mountain National Park began when Paleo-Indians traveled along what is now Trail Ridge Road to hunt and forage for food. Ute and Arapaho people subsequently hunted and camped in the area.

In 1820, the Long Expedition, led by Stephen H. Long for whom Longs Peak was named, approached the Rockies via the Platte River. Settlers began arriving in the mid-1800s, displacing the Native Americans who mostly left the area voluntarily by 1860, while others were removed to reservations by 1878.

Lulu City, Dutchtown, and Gaskill in the Never Summer Mountains were established in the 1870s when prospectors came in search of gold and silver. The boom ended by 1883 with miners deserting their claims. The railroad reached Lyons, Colorado in 1881 and the Big Thompson Canyon Road -a section of U.S. Route 34 from Loveland to Estes Park- was completed in 1904.

The 1920s saw a boom in building lodges, including the Bear Lake Trail School, and roads in the park, culminating with the construction of Trail Ridge Road to Fall River Pass between 1929 and 1932, then to Grand Lake by 1938.

Prominent individuals in the effort to create a national park included Enos Mills from the Estes Park area, James Grafton Rogers from Denver, and J. Horace McFarland of Pennsylvania. The national park was established on January 26, 1915.

The Rocky Mountain National Park encompasses 1,074.28 km2 of federal land, with an additional 1,024.09 km2 of U.S. Forest Service wilderness adjoining the park boundaries. The Continental Divide runs generally north-south through the center of the park, with rivers and streams on the western side of the divide flowing toward the Pacific Ocean while those on the eastern side flow toward the Atlantic.

A geographical anomaly is found along the slopes of the Never Summer Mountains where the Continental Divide forms a horseshoe-shaped bend for about 9.7 km, heading from south-to-north but then curving sharply southward and westward out of the park.

The sharp bend results in streams on the eastern slopes of the range joining the headwaters of the Colorado River that flow south and west, eventually reaching the Pacific. Meanwhile, streams on the western slopes join rivers that flow north and then east and south, eventually reaching the Atlantic.

The headwaters of the Colorado River are located in the park's northwestern region. The park contains approximately 724 km of rivers and streams, 563 km of trails, and 150 lakes.

Rocky Mountain National Park is one of the highest national parks in the nation, with elevations from 2,396 to 4,346 m, the highest point of which is Longs Peak. Trail Ridge Road is the highest paved through-road in the country, with a peak elevation of 3,713 m.

More information: National Park Foundation

Sixty mountain peaks over 3,658 m high provide scenic vistas. On the north side of the park, the Mummy Range contains a number of thirteener peaks, including Hagues Peak, Mummy Mountain, Fairchild Mountain, Ypsilon Mountain, and Mount Chiquita. Several small glaciers and permanent snowfields are found in the high mountain cirques.

There are five regions, or geographical zones, within the park.

Precambrian metamorphic rock formed the core of the North American continent during the Precambrian eon 4.5-1 billion years ago. During the Paleozoic era, western North America was submerged beneath a shallow sea, with a seabed composed of limestone and dolomite deposits many kilometers thick.

Pikes Peak granite formed during the late Precambrian eon, continuing well into the Paleozoic era, when mass quantities of molten rock flowed, amalgamated, and formed the continents about 1 billion-300 million years ago. Concurrently, in the period from 500 to 300 million years ago, the region began to sink while lime and mud sediments were deposited in the vacated space. Eroded granite produced sand particles that formed strata -layers of sediment- in the sinking basin.

About 300 million years ago, the land was uplifted creating the ancestral Rocky Mountains.  Fountain Formation was deposited during the Pennsylvanian period of the Paleozoic era, 290–296 million years ago.

Over the next 150 million years, the mountains uplifted, continued to erode, and covered themselves in their own sediment. Wind, gravity, rainwater, snow, and glacial ice eroded the granite mountains over geologic time scales. The Ancestral Rockies were eventually buried under subsequent strata.

More information: World Atlas

Is there climate change?
I live in the shadow of some of the greatest
climate change the world has ever seen.
It's called the Rocky Mountains.
When the glaciers went back.

Scott Tipton

AVA GARDNER, ONE OF THE ERA'S TOP STARS ACTRESSES

Today, The Grandma is at home watching TV. She has chosen some films of Ava Gardner, the American actress and singer who dies on a day like today in 1990.

Ava Lavinia Gardner (December 24, 1922-January 25, 1990) was an American actress and singer. 

She first signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1941 and appeared mainly in small roles until she drew critics' attention in 1946 with her performance in Robert Siodmak's film noir The Killers.

She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in John Ford's Mogambo (1953), and for best actress for both a Golden Globe Award and BAFTA Award for her performance in John Huston's The Night of the Iguana (1964). During the 1950s, Gardner established herself as a leading lady and one of the era's top stars with films like Show Boat, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (both 1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Bhowani Junction (1956) and On the Beach (1959).

She continued her film career for three more decades, appearing in the films 55 Days at Peking (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966), Mayerling (1968), Tam-Lin (1970), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Earthquake (1974) and The Cassandra Crossing (1976). She continued to act regularly until 1986, four years before her death in 1990, at the age of 67.

In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Gardner No. 25 on their greatest female screen legends of classic American cinema list.

More information: The Guardian

Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on December 24, 1922, in Grabtown, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children. She had two older brothers, Raymond and Melvin, and four older sisters, Beatrice, Elsie Mae, Inez and Myra. Her parents, Mary Elizabeth "Molly" (née Baker) and Jonas Bailey Gardner, were poor tobacco sharecroppers. She was of English and Scots-Irish ancestry.

Gardner was visiting her sister Beatrice in New York City in the summer of 1940, when Beatrice's husband Larry Tarr, a professional photographer, offered to take her portrait as a gift for her mother Molly. He was so pleased with the results that he displayed the finished product in the front window of his Tarr Photography Studio on Fifth Avenue.

Her first appearance in a feature film was as a walk-on in the Norma Shearer vehicle We Were Dancing (1942). Fifteen bit parts later she received her first screen billing in 3 Men in White (1944), a Dr. Kildare film in which she brings her mother to the hospital for treatment. After five years of bit parts, mostly at MGM and many of them uncredited, Gardner came to prominence in the Mark Hellinger production The Killers (1946), playing the femme fatale Kitty Collins.

Films from the next decade or so include The Hucksters (1947), Show Boat (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), Lone Star (1952), Mogambo (1953), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Bhowani Junction (1956), The Sun Also Rises (1957) and On the Beach (1959).

Off-camera, she could be witty and pithy, as in her assessment of director John Ford, who directed Mogambo, The meanest man on earth. Thoroughly evil. Adored him!.

In The Barefoot Contessa, she played the role of doomed beauty Maria Vargas, a fiercely independent woman who goes from Spanish dancer to international movie star with the help of a Hollywood director played by Humphrey Bogart, with tragic consequences. Gardner's decision to accept the role was influenced by her own lifelong habit of going barefoot.

Gardner played the role of Guinevere in Knights of the Round Table (1953), opposite actor Robert Taylor as Sir Lancelot. Indicative of her sophistication, she portrayed a duchess, a baroness and other women of noble lineage in her films of the 1950s.

Gardner played the role of Soledad in The Angel Wore Red (1960) with Dirk Bogarde as the male lead. She was billed between Charlton Heston and David Niven for 55 Days at Peking (1963), which was set in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.

The following year, she played her last major leading role in the critically acclaimed The Night of the Iguana (1964), based upon a Tennessee Williams play, and starring Richard Burton as an atheist clergyman and Deborah Kerr as a gentle artist traveling with her aged poet grandfather.

John Huston directed the movie in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, insisting on making the film in black and white -a decision he later regretted because of the vivid colors of the flora.

Gardner received billing below Burton, but above Kerr. She was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture- Drama and BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance.

More information: Saturday Evening Post

She next appeared again with Burt Lancaster, her co-star from The Killers, this time along with Kirk Douglas and Fredric March, in Seven Days in May (1964), a thriller about an attempted military takeover of the US government.

Gardner played a former love interest of Lancaster's who could have been instrumental in Douglas's preventing a coup against the President of the United States.

Two years later, in 1966, Gardner briefly sought the role of Mrs. Robinson in Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967). She reportedly called Nichols and said, I want to see you! I want to talk about this Graduate thing! Nichols never seriously considered her for the part, preferring to cast a younger woman (Anne Bancroft was 35, while Gardner was 44), but he did visit her hotel, where he later recounted, she sat at a little French desk with a telephone, she went through every movie star cliché. She said, 'All right, let's talk about your movie. First of all, I strip for nobody.'

Gardner moved to London in 1968, undergoing an elective hysterectomy to allay her worries of contracting the uterine cancer that had claimed the life of her mother. That year, she appeared in Mayerling, in which she played the supporting role of Austrian Empress Elisabeth of Austria, opposite James Mason as Emperor Franz Joseph I.

She appeared in disaster films throughout the 1970s, notably Earthquake (1974) with Heston, The Cassandra Crossing (1976) with Lancaster, and the Canadian movie City on Fire (1979). She appeared briefly as Lillie Langtry at the end of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), and in The Blue Bird (1976). Her last movie was Regina Roma (1982).

In the 1980s, she acted primarily on television, including the miniseries remake of The Long, Hot Summer and in a story arc on Knots Landing (both 1985).

More information: Vanity Fair

 I have only one rule in acting
-trust the director and give him heart and soul.

Ava Gardner

1984, THE MACINTOSH PC ON SALE IN THE UNITED STATES

Today, The Grandma has been working with her old Macintosh. She has remembered when she bought it, when Apple Computer placed the Macintosh personal computer on sale in the United States, on a day like today in 1984.

The Macintosh (mainly Mac since 1998) is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Inc. (originally as Apple Computer, Inc.) since January 1984.

The original Macintosh is the first successful mass-market all-in-one desktop personal computer to have featured a graphical user interface, built-in screen, and mouse.

Apple sold the Macintosh alongside its popular Apple II, Apple IIGS, Apple III, and Apple Lisa families of computers until the other models were discontinued in the 1990s.

Early Macintosh models were relatively expensive, hindering competitiveness in a market dominated by the much cheaper Commodore 64 for consumers, as well as the IBM Personal Computer and its accompanying clone market for businesses, although they were less expensive than the Xerox Alto and other computers with graphical user interfaces that predated the Mac, except Atari ST.

Macintosh systems were successful in education and desktop publishing, making Apple the second-largest PC manufacturer for the next decade.

In the early 1990s, Apple introduced the Macintosh LC II and Color Classic which were price-competitive with Wintel machines at the time.

However, the introduction of Windows 3.1 and Intel's Pentium processor, which beat the Motorola 68040 used in then-current Macintoshes in most benchmarks, gradually took market share from Apple, and by the end of 1994 Apple was relegated to third place as Compaq became the top PC manufacturer.

More information: Mac-History

Even after the transition to the superior PowerPC-based Power Macintosh line in the mid-1990s, the falling prices of commodity PC components, poor inventory management with the Macintosh Performa, and the release of Windows 95 contributed to continued decline of the Macintosh user base.

Upon his return to the company, Steve Jobs led Apple to consolidate the complex line of nearly twenty Macintosh models in mid-1997 (including models made for specific regions) down to four in mid-1999: the Power Macintosh G3, iMac G3, 14.1" PowerBook G3, and 12" iBook.

All four products were critically and commercially successful due to their high performance, competitive prices, and aesthetic designs, and helped return Apple to profitability.

Around this time, Apple phased out the Macintosh name in favor of Mac, a nickname that had been in common use since the development of the first model. After their transition to Intel processors in 2006, the complete lineup was Intel-based. This changed in 2020 when the M1 chip was introduced to the MacBook Air, entry level MacBook Pro and Mac Mini. 

Its current lineup includes three desktops, the all-in-one iMac and the desktop Mac Mini and Mac Pro, and two notebooks (the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro). Its Xserve server was discontinued in 2011 in favor of the Mac Mini and Mac Pro.

Apple has developed a series of Macintosh operating systems. The first versions initially had no name but came to be known as the Macintosh System Software in 1988, Mac OS in 1997 with the release of Mac OS 7.6, and retrospectively called Classic Mac OS.

Apple produced a Unix-based operating system for the Macintosh called A/UX from 1988 to 1995, which closely resembled contemporary versions of the Macintosh system software. Apple does not license macOS for use on non-Apple computers, however, System 7 was licensed to various companies through Apple's Macintosh clone program from 1995 to 1997. Only one company, UMAX Technologies, was legally licensed to ship clones running Mac OS 8.

In 2001, Apple released Mac OS X, a modern Unix-based operating system which was later rebranded to simply OS X in 2012, and then macOS in 2016. Its final version was macOS Catalina, as Apple went on to release macOS Big Sur in 2020. The current version is macOS Monterey, first released on June 7, 2021.

Intel-based Macs can run native third party operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows with the aid of Boot Camp or third-party software. The same feat has been accomplished on ARM-based Apple silicon, but it requires an operating system built for it. Volunteer communities have customized Intel-based macOS to run illicitly on non-Apple computers.

The Macintosh family of computers has used a variety of different CPU architectures since its introduction. Originally they used the Motorola 68000 series of microprocessors.

More information: Computer History

In the mid-1990s they transitioned to PowerPC processors, and again in the mid-2000s they began to use 32- and 64-bit Intel x86 processors. Apple began transitioning CPU architectures to its own ARM based Apple silicon for use in the Macintosh beginning in 2020.

The Macintosh project began in 1979 when Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. He wanted to name the computer after his favorite type of apple, the McIntos /ˈmækɪnˌtɒʃ/ MAK-in-tosh), but the spelling was changed to Macintosh for legal reasons as the original was the same spelling as that used by McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., an audio equipment manufacturer.

Steve Jobs requested that McIntosh Laboratory give Apple a release for the newly spelled name, thus allowing Apple to use it. The request was denied, forcing Apple to eventually buy the rights to use this name.

A 1984 Byte magazine article suggested Apple changed the spelling only after early users misspelled McIntosh. However, Jef Raskin had adopted the Macintosh spelling by 1981, when the Macintosh computer was still a single prototype machine in the lab.

More information: History Computer

Part of what made the Macintosh great was
that the people working on it were musicians,
poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians.
They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.
But if it hadn't been computer science,
these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

Steve Jobs

THE INTERNATIONAL OPIUM CONVENTION IS SIGNED

Today, The Grandma has been reading about The International Opium Convention, the first international drug control treaty that was signed on a day like today in 1912.

The International Opium Convention, signed at The Hague on January 23, 1912 during the First International Opium Conference, was the first international drug control treaty.

The United States was unsuccessful in its attempts to have cannabis included in the 1912 Convention.

It was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on January 23, 1922. The United States convened a 13-nation conference of the International Opium Commission in 1909 in Shanghai, China, in response to increasing criticism of the opium trade. The treaty was signed by Germany, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam.

The Convention provided, The contracting Powers shall use their best endeavours to control, or to cause to be controlled, all persons manufacturing, importing, selling, distributing, and exporting morphine, cocaine, and their respective salts, as well as the buildings in which these persons carry such an industry or trade.

The Convention was implemented in 1915 by the United States, Netherlands, China, Honduras, and Norway. It went into force globally in 1919, when it was incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles.

The primary objective of the convention was to introduce restrictions on exports as opposed to imposing prohibition or criminalising the use and cultivation of opium, coca, and cannabis.

That explains the withdrawal of the United States and China, which were gravitating towards prohibitionist approaches, as well as the beginning of negotiations leading to the 1925 International Opium Convention in Geneva.

A revised International Opium Convention International Convention relating to Dangerous Drugs was signed at Geneva on February 19, 1925, which went into effect on September 25, 1938, and was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on the same day. It introduced a statistical control system to be supervised by a Permanent Central Opium Board, a body of the League of Nations.

India and other countries objected to this language, citing social and religious customs and the prevalence of wild-growing cannabis plants that would make it difficult to enforce. Accordingly, this provision never made it into the final treaty.

A compromise was made that banned exportation of Indian hemp to countries that have prohibited its use, and requiring importing countries to issue certificates approving the importation and stating that the shipment was required exclusively for medical or scientific purposes. It also required Parties to exercise an effective control of such a nature as to prevent the illicit international traffic in Indian hemp and especially in the resin.

These restrictions still left considerable leeway for countries to allow production, internal trade, and use of cannabis for recreational purposes.

The Convention was superseded by the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

More information: United Nations

 The British seizure of Hongkong was an aspect
of one of the most ugly crimes of the British Empire:
the takeover and destruction of India,
and the use of India to flood China with opium.

Robert Trout

MINNIE MOUSE, A BIG STAR IN HER 90TH ANNIVERSARY

Today, The Grandma has been watching television. She loves cartoons and she has chosen Minnie Mouse's ones. Minnie Mouse is a cartoon character that obtained a star in Hollywood Walk of Fame on a day like today in 2018, to celebrate her 90th anniversary.

Minnie Mouse is a cartoon character created by The Walt Disney Company.

As the longtime sweetheart of Mickey Mouse, she is an anthropomorphic mouse with white gloves, a bow, polka-dotted dress, white bloomers, and low-heeled shoes occasionally with ribbons on them.

The Mickey Mouse comic strip story The Gleam (published January 19-May 2, 1942) by Merrill De Maris and Floyd Gottfredson first gave her full name as Minerva Mouse, although this is seldom used.

Minnie is classy, calm, sassy, well-mannered, cheerful, and feminine. She is filled with love and affection, polite to all her friends, and knows her manners.

The comic strip story Mr. Slicker and the Egg Robbers (published September 22-December 26, 1930) introduced her father Marcus Mouse and her unnamed mother, both farmers. The same story featured photographs of Minnie's uncle Milton Mouse with his family and her grandparents Marvel Mouse and Matilda Mouse.

Her best-known relatives, however, remain her uncle Mortimer Mouse (Mortimer was almost the name of Mickey) and her twin nieces, Millie and Melody Mouse, though most often a single niece, Melody, appears. In many appearances, Minnie is presented as the girlfriend of Mickey Mouse, and is best friends with Daisy Duck, and a friend to Clarabelle Cow.

In honor of her 90th anniversary, Minnie Mouse got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

On January 22, 2018, she joined the ranks of other animated celebrities by receiving her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was the sixth Disney character to receive this honor. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Winnie the Pooh, Tinker Bell, and Snow White have already received this distinction.

Minnie was initially created to be the love interest of Mickey Mouse; concept art for Mickey showed a female mouse alongside him.

Minnie was designed in the fashion of a flapper girl. Her main outfit consisted of a short flapper girl dress that often revealed her distinctive patched knickers. In the 1929 cartoon The Karnival Kid, it was also revealed that she wears black stockings which were also fashionable among flapper girls.

Her shoes are probably her most distinctive article of clothing. For comedic effect, she wears oversized high heeled pumps that are too big for her feet. Her heels often slip out of her shoes, and she even loses her shoes completely in The Gallopin' Gaucho.

More information: Walk of Fame

When she walked or danced, the clip clop of her large pumps was usually heard clearly and often went with the rhythm of the music that was played in the background. Along with Mickey, she was redesigned in 1940. Her hat was replaced with a large bow, and bows were added to her shoes as well. Her eyes were also given more detail. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, her look and personality became more conservative.

Minnie almost always wears red or pink, but in her early appearances, she could be seen wearing a combination of blue, black or green (when not depicted in black and white).

Minnie's early personality is cute, playful, musical and flirtatious. She often portrays an entertainer like a dancer or a musician whose affection Mickey is trying to win. Part of the comedy of these early shorts is the varying degree of success Mickey has in wooing Minnie.

Unlike later cartoons after the redesign, Minnie often becomes a damsel in distress whom Mickey tries to rescue. She is also subject to a lot of slapstick and rubber hose animation gags. Over the course of the 1930s, Minnie's and Mickey's relationship solidified and they eventually became a steady couple.

Minnie was first seen in a test screening of the cartoon short Plane Crazy. Minnie is invited to join Mickey in the first flight of his aircraft. She accepts the invitation but not his request for a kiss in mid-flight. Mickey eventually forces Minnie into a kiss but this only results in her parachuting out of the plane. This first film depicted Minnie as somewhat resistant to the demanding affection of her potential boyfriend and capable of escaping his grasp.

Their debut, however, featured the couple already familiar to each other. The next film featuring them was The Gallopin' Gaucho. The film was the second of their series to be produced, but the third to be released, and was released on December 30, 1928.

We find Minnie employed at the Cantina Argentina, a bar and restaurant established in the Pampas of Argentina.

She performs the Tango for Mickey the gaucho and Black Pete the outlaw. Both flirt with her but the latter intends to abduct her while the former obliges in saving the Damsel in Distress from the villain. All three characters acted as strangers first being introduced to each other. 

But it was their third cartoon that established the definitive early look and personality of both Mickey and Minnie, as well as Pete. Steamboat Willie, was the third short of the series to be produced but released first on November 18, 1928. Pete was featured as the Captain of the steamboat, Mickey as a crew of one and Minnie as their single passenger.

The two anthropomorphic mice first star in a sound film and spend most of its duration playing music to the tune of Turkey in the Straw.

Her next appearance was arguably more significant. Mickey's Follies (June 26, 1929), featured the first performance of the song Minnie's Yoo-Hoo.

Her final appearance for the year was in Wild Waves, carried by a wave into the sea.

The Shindig (July 11, 1930) featured Minnie joining Mickey, Horace, and Clarabelle in a barn dance.

In The Fire Fighters (June 20, 1930), Minnie is trapped in a hotel during a fire.

In The Picnic (1930), Minnie introduces her boyfriend to her new pet dog, Rover. This is actually Pluto making his first appearance as an individual character. Two unnamed bloodhound guard dogs strikingly similar to him had previously appeared in The Chain Gang (August 18, 1930) which featured Mickey incarcerated in prison without Minnie at his side.

The final appearance of Minnie during the year was Pioneer Days (November 20, 1930).

During the second half of the thirties, Minnie did not appear as often in Mickey cartoons. This was mainly due to the growth in popularity of Mickey's new sidekicks, Goofy, Donald Duck, and Pluto, whose appearances in Mickey cartoons had more or less replaced Minnie's role.

She starred in a 1988 musical television special on NBC called Totally Minnie and it was the first film to feature Minnie in a lead role. She also appeared in a line of merchandise called Minnie 'n Me in the 1990s. On September 18, 1990, the CD Minnie 'n Me: Songs Just For Girls was released.

 More information: Walt Disney

Minnie's return to animation came in Mickey's Christmas Carol (October 20, 1983). She was cast as Mrs. Cratchit. As with most Disney characters, she was given a small cameo in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) but does not have any lines in the latter movie, despite her voice actress being listed in the end credits.

Minnie Mouse makes an appearance in every episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

Minnie runs a neighborhood in Disney's Toontown Online called Minnie's Melodyland. This is a powerful area with access to Toontown Central, The Brrrgh, and Donald's Dreamland.

Minnie is available to sign autographs and take pictures throughout the day in various locations at the different Disney Resort Theme Parks around the world. She also appears in all of the daily parades that take place at the Disney resorts.

In the 2013 Mickey Mouse television series Minnie was restored to her classic 1930s look with the flowered bowler hat and flapper girl outfit. Minnie also gained more character quirks and, like the older cartoons, was subject to more slapstick and rubber hose cartoon gags.

On June 22, 2017, it was announced that Minnie, alongside Weird Al Yankovic, Zoe Saldana, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, would be receiving her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2018.

In December 2019, both Minnie and Mickey served as special co-hosts of Wheel of Fortune for two weeks during Disney's Secret Santa Giveaway while Vanna White served as the main host during Pat Sajak's absence.

More information: Mickey Blog

If wearing mouse ears is wrong,

I don't want to be right.

Minnie Mouse

PEGGY LEE, THE AMERICAN SOPHISTICATION IN MUSIC

Today, The Grandma has been listening to some music. She has chosen Peggy Lee's songs.  Lee was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer, and actress who died on a da ylike today in 2002.

Norma Deloris Egstrom (May 26, 1920-January 21, 2002), known professionally as Peggy Lee, was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer, and actress, over a career spanning seven decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local radio to singing with Benny Goodman's big band, Lee created a sophisticated persona, writing music for films, acting, and recording conceptual record albums combining poetry and music.

Lee recorded over 1,100 masters and composed over 270 songs.

Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, United States, on May 26, 1920, the seventh of the eight children of Selma Emele (née Anderson) Egstrom and Marvin Olaf Egstrom, a station agent for the Midland Continental Railroad. Her family were Lutherans. Her father was Swedish-American and her mother was Norwegian-American. After her mother died when Lee was four, her father married Minnie Schaumberg Wiese.

Lee and her family lived in several towns along the Midland Continental Railroad (Jamestown, Nortonville and Wimbledon). She graduated from Wimbledon High School in 1937. The Wimbledon depot building, where she and her family lived and worked, became the Midland Continental Depot Transportation Museum, featuring The Peggy Lee Exhibit, in 2012. The upper floor of the museum, where the Egstrom family once lived, features exhibits that trace Lee's career and her regional and state connection.

In Wimbledon, Lee was the female singer for a six-piece college dance band with leader Lyle "Doc" Haines. She traveled to various locations with Haines' quintet on Fridays after school and on weekends.

Lee first sang professionally over KOVC radio in Valley City, North Dakota in 1936. She later had her own 15-minute Saturday radio show sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her salary in food. Both during and after her high-school years, Lee sang for small sums on local radio stations.

In October 1937, radio personality Ken Kennedy, of WDAY in Fargo (the most widely heard station in North Dakota), auditioned Egstrom and put her on the air that day, but not before he changed her name to Peggy Lee.

Lee left home and traveled to Hollywood, California at the age of 17 in March 1938. Her first job was seasonal work on Balboa Island, Newport Beach as a short order cook and waitress at Harry's Cafe. When the job ended after Easter, she was hired to work as a carnival barker at the Balboa Fun Zone. She wrote about this experience in the song, The Nickel Ride, which she composed with Dave Grusin for the 1974 film of the same name.

More information: Peggy Lee

Later in 1938, Lee returned to Hollywood to audition for the MC at The Jade. Her employment was cut short when she fainted onstage due to overwork and an inadequate diet. After she was taken to the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center she was told she needed a tonsillectomy. Lee returned to North Dakota for the operation.

The following year, remaining in North Dakota, she was hired to perform regularly at The Powers Hotel in Fargo, and toured with both the Sev Olson and the Will Osborne Orchestras.

When Lee returned to California in 1940, she took a job singing at The Doll House in Palm Springs. Here, she developed her trademark sultry purr, having decided to compete with the noisy crowd with subtlety rather than volume.

While performing at The Doll House, Lee met Frank Bering, the owner of the Ambassador East and West in Chicago. He offered her a gig at the Buttery Room, a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel West.

She joined his band in August 1941 and made her first recording, singing Elmer's Tune. Lee stayed with the Benny Goodman Orchestra for two years.

In 1942, Lee had her first number-one hit, Somebody Else Is Taking My Place, followed in 1943 by Why Don't You Do Right?, which sold more than one million copies and made her famous. She sang with Goodman's orchestra in two 1943 films, Stage Door Canteen and The Powers Girl.

She drifted back to songwriting and occasional recording sessions for Capitol Records in 1944, for whom she recorded a long string of hits, many of them with lyrics and music by Lee and Barbour, including I Don't Know Enough About You and It's a Good Day. Her recording of Golden Earrings, the title song of a 1947 movie, was a hit throughout 1947–1948.

Mañana, written by Lee and Barbour, was her eleventh solo hit recording, and remained on the charts for twenty-one weeks, nine of which were in the number one position. The song sold over a million copies, and earned the Top Disc Jockey Record of the Year award from Billboard magazine.

From 1946 to 1949, Lee also recorded for Capitol's library of electrical transcriptions for radio stations. An advertisement for Capitol Transcriptions in a trade magazine noted that the transcriptions included special voice introductions by Peggy.

In 1948, Lee joined vocalists Perry Como and Jo Stafford as a host of the NBC Radio musical program The Chesterfield Supper Club. She was a regular on The Jimmy Durante Show and appeared frequently on Bing Crosby's radio shows during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Her relationship with Capitol spanned almost three decades aside from a brief detour (1952–1956) at Decca. For that label, she recorded Black Coffee and had hit singles such as Lover and Mister Wonderful.

In 1958, she recorded her own version of Fever by Little Willie John, written by Eddie Cooley and John Davenport.

Lee created a new arrangement for the song, and added lyrics (Romeo loved Juliet, Captain Smith and Pocahontas), which she neglected to copyright. Her new version of Fever was a hit, and was nominated in three categories at the First Annual Grammy Awards in 1959, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

While Lee was in London for a 1970 engagement at Royal Albert Hall, she invited Paul and Linda McCartney to dinner at The Dorchester. At the dinner, the couple gifted Lee with a song they had written entitled, Let's Love.

In July 1974, with Paul McCartney producing, Lee recorded the song at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, and it became the title track for her 40th album, her first and only on Atlantic Records.

More information: Jazz History Online

Lee starred opposite Danny Thomas in The Jazz Singer (1952), a remake of the Al Jolson film, The Jazz Singer (1927). She played an alcoholic blues singer in Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Lee provided speaking and singing voices for several characters in the Disney movie Lady and the Tramp (1955), playing the human Darling, the dog Peg, and the two Siamese cats, Si and Am. She also co-wrote, with Sonny Burke all of the original songs for the film, including He's A Tramp, Bella Notte, La La Lu, The Siamese Cat Song, and Peace on Earth.

In 1987, when Lady and the Tramp was released on VHS, Lee sought performance and song royalties on the video sales. When Disney refused to pay, she filed a lawsuit in 1988. After a prolonged legal battle, in 1992, Lee was awarded $2.3 million for breach of contract, plus $500,000 for unjust enrichment, $600,000 for illegal use of Lee's voice and $400,000 for the use of her name.

Peggy Lee also wrote the lyrics for Johnny Guitar, with music composer Victor Young, the title track of the 1954 film, Johnny Guitar, which she sings partially at the end of the movie.

During her career, Lee appeared in hundreds of variety shows, and several TV movies and specials.

Lee continued to perform into the 1990s, sometimes using a wheelchair. After years of poor health, she died of complications from diabetes and a heart attack on January 21, 2002, at the age of 81. She was cremated and her ashes were buried with a bench-style monument in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

More information: UDiscover Music 

Retire? Not on your life.
I have no plans to stop singing.
What are you going to do when you love music?
It's a terrible disease. You can't stop.
Of course, I'd like to get off the road.

Peggy Lee