SHANE MACGOWAN, THE PUNK IRISH POET & SINGER

Today, The Grandma has been listening to some music written, composed and sung by Shane MacGowan, the Irish musician and member of The Pogues, who has passed away today.

Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan (25 December 1957-30 November 2023) was an English-born Irish musician, best known as the co-founder, lead vocalist and songwriter of Celtic punk band the Pogues. 

MacGowan's songs were influenced by Irish history, Irish nationalism, the Irish diaspora, and London life.

Born in Kent, England, to Irish parents, MacGowan spent his early childhood in Tipperary before returning to England aged six and a half. He won a scholarship to Westminster School (a public school) but, at 16, was expelled for possession of drugs. Three years later (1977), he joined the punk band the Nipple Erectors.

In 1982, he co-founded the Pogues, which fused punk with influences from traditional Irish music; his songwriting and vocals appear on the band's first five studio albums, released between 1984 and 1990, of which the critically acclaimed If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988) was the most commercially successful. He co-wrote Fairytale of New York (1987) and recorded it as a duet with Kirsty MacColl; the song has become a perennial Christmas favourite.

During a 1991 tour, MacGowan was dismissed from the Pogues for behaviour relating to his alcohol dependency. He subsequently formed a new band, Shane MacGowan and The Popes, with which he recorded two studio albums.

In 2001, MacGowan rejoined the Pogues for reunion shows, remaining with the group until it dissolved in 2014. He also produced solo material and collaborated with artists such as Joe Strummer, Nick Cave, Steve Earle, Sinéad O'Connor, and Ronnie Drew.

He received a 2018 Ivor Novello Inspiration Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award.

More information: Shane MacGowan

MacGowan was born on 25 December 1957 in Pembury, Kent, England, the son of Irish immigrants.

MacGowan drew upon his Irish heritage when founding the Pogues and changed his early punk style for a more traditional sound with tutoring from his extended family. Many of his songs were influenced by Irish nationalism, Irish history, the experiences of the Irish diaspora (particularly in England and the United States), and London life in general. These influences were documented in the biography Rake at the Gates of Hell: Shane MacGowan in Context. He often cited the 19th-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan and playwright Brendan Behan as influences.

The Pogues' most critically acclaimed album was If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988), which also marked the high point of the band's commercial success. Between 1985 and 1987, MacGowan co-wrote Fairytale of New York, which he performed with Kirsty MacColl, and remains a perennial Christmas favourite. 

In 2004, 2005 and 2006, it was voted favourite Christmas song in a poll by music video channel VH1. Other notable songs he performed with The Pogues include Dirty Old Town, Sally MacLennane and The Irish Rover (featuring the Dubliners). In the following years MacGowan and the Pogues released several albums.

In 1988, he co-wrote Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six, a song by the Pogues which proved highly controversial and was banned on British TV and radio.

After MacGowan had been dismissed from the Pogues, he formed a new band, Shane MacGowan and The Popes. The new band recorded two studio albums, a live album, three tracks on the Popes Outlaw Heaven (2010) and a live DVD; the band also toured internationally.

In 1997, MacGowan appeared on Lou Reed's Perfect Day, covered by numerous artists in aid of Children in Need. It was the UK's number one single for three weeks, in two separate spells. Selling over a million copies, the record contributed £2,125,000 to the charity's highest fundraising total in six years.

From December 2003 up to May 2005, Shane MacGowan and the Popes toured extensively in the UK, Ireland and Europe.

The Pogues and MacGowan reformed for a sell-out tour in 2001 and each year from 2004 to 2009 for further tours, including headline slots at Guilfest in England and the Azkena Rock Festival in the Basque Country.

In May 2005, MacGowan rejoined the Pogues permanently. That same year, the Pogues re-released Fairytale of New York to raise funds for the Justice For Kirsty Campaign and Crisis at Christmas. The single was the best-selling Christmas-themed single of 2005, reaching number 3 in the UK Charts that year.

In 2010, MacGowan played impromptu shows in Dublin with a new five-piece backing band, the Shane Gang, including In Tua Nua rhythm section Paul Byrne (drums) and Jack Dublin (bass), with manager Joey Cashman on whistle.

In November 2010, this lineup went to Lanzarote to record a new album. MacGowan and the Shane Gang performed at the Red Hand Rocks music festival in the Patrician Hall, Carrickmore County Tyrone in June 2011.

It was reported in July 2023 that MacGowan was hospitalised in an intensive care unit. He made his last public statement on 16 November 2023, complimenting Travis Kelce's cover of Fairytale of New York.

On 30 November 2023, after receiving last rites, MacGowan died at his home in Dublin with his wife by his side; he was 65.

More information: Instagram-Shane MacGowan

When I'm writing a song,
it gives me more actual pleasure
to hear someone else sing it
than do it meself.

 

Shane MacGowan

PONG, THE 1ST COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFUL VIDEO GAME

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Pong, the video game that was released on a day like today in 1972.

Pong is a table tennis–themed twitch arcade sports video game, featuring simple two-dimensional graphics, manufactured by Atari and originally released on November 29, 1972.

It was one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Alcorn as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, but Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney were surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work and decided to manufacture the game. Bushnell based the game's concept on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. In response, Magnavox later sued Atari for patent infringement.

Pong was the first commercially successful video game, and it helped to establish the video game industry along with the Magnavox Odyssey. Soon after its release, several companies began producing games that closely mimicked its gameplay.

Eventually, Atari's competitors released new types of video games that deviated from Pong's original format to varying degrees, and this, in turn, led Atari to encourage its staff to move beyond Pong and produce more innovative games themselves.

Atari released several sequels to Pong that built upon the original's gameplay by adding new features.

During the 1975 Christmas season, Atari released a home version of Pong exclusively through Sears retail stores. The home version was also a commercial success and led to numerous clones. The game was remade on numerous home and portable platforms following its release.

Pong is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., due to its cultural impact.

More information: Pong Game

Pong is a two-dimensional sports game that simulates table tennis. The player controls an in-game paddle by moving it vertically across the left or right side of the screen. They can compete against another player controlling a second paddle on the opposing side. Players use the paddles to hit a ball back and forth. The goal is for each player to reach eleven points before the opponent; points are earned when one fails to return the ball to the other.

Pong was the first game developed by Atari. After producing Computer Space, Bushnell decided to form a company to produce more games by licensing ideas to other companies. The first contract was with Bally Manufacturing Corporation for a driving game. Soon after the founding, Bushnell hired Allan Alcorn because of his experience with electrical engineering and computer science; Bushnell and Dabney also had previously worked with him at Ampex. Prior to working at Atari, Alcorn had no experience with video games.

Bushnell had originally planned to develop a driving video game, influenced by Chicago Coin's Speedway (1969) which at the time was the biggest-selling electro-mechanical game at his amusement arcade. However, Bushnell had concerns that it might be too complicated for Alcorn's first game.

The Pong arcade games manufactured by Atari were a great success. The prototype was well received by Andy Capp's Tavern patrons; people came to the bar solely to play the game. Following its release, Pong consistently earned four times more revenue than other coin-operated machines.

Bushnell felt the best way to compete against imitators was to create better products, leading Atari to produce sequels in the years following the original's release: Pong Doubles, Super Pong, Ultra Pong, Quadrapong, and Pin-Pong.

More information: Pong Game

I happen to believe that video games
will be the largest sport and entertainment in the world.
The reason for that is a video game can be every sport.
You can be anybody.
 

Jensen Huang

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS, STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and ethnologist, who was born on a day like today in 1908.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (28 November 1908-30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology.

He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honours from universities and institutions throughout the world.

Lévi-Strauss argued that the savage mind had the same structures as the civilized mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques (1955) that established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. 

Structuralism has been defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity. He won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Gustave Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 to French-Jewish (turned agnostic) parents who were living in Brussels at the time, where his father was working as a portrait painter.

From 1918 to 1925 he studied at Lycée Janson de Sailly high school, receiving a baccalaureate in June 1925 (age of 16). In his last year (1924), he was introduced to philosophy, including the works of Marx and Kant, and began shifting to the political left (however, unlike many other socialists, he never became communist).

From 1925, he spent the next two years at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet preparing for the entrance exam to the highly selective École normale supérieure. However, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he decided not to take the exam.

In 1926, he went to Sorbonne in Paris, studying law and philosophy, as well as engaging in socialist politics and activism.

In 1929, he opted for philosophy over law (which he found boring), and from 1930 to 1931, put politics aside to focus on preparing for the agrégation in philosophy, in order to qualify as a professor.

In 1931, he passed the agrégation, coming in 3rd place, and youngest in his class at age 22. By this time, the Great Depression had hit France, and Lévi-Strauss found himself needing to provide not only for himself, but his parents as well.

In 1935, after a few years of secondary-school teaching, he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo while his then wife, Dina, served as a visiting professor of ethnology.

Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort and was assigned as a liaison agent to the Maginot Line. After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a lycée in Montpellier, but then was dismissed under the Vichy racial laws. Lévi-Strauss's family, originally from Alsace, was of Jewish ancestry. By the same laws, he was denaturalized, of his French citizenship and forced to escape persecution.

Around that time, he and his first wife separated. She stayed behind and worked in the French resistance, while he managed to escape Vichy France by boat to Martinique, from where he was finally able to continue traveling.

In 1941, he was offered a position at the New School for Social Research in New York City and granted admission to the United States. A series of voyages brought him, via South America, to Puerto Rico, where he was investigated by the FBI after German letters in his luggage aroused the suspicions of customs agents. Lévi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City. Along with Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon, and Roman Jakobson, he was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études, a sort of university-in-exile for French academics.

He died on 30 October 2009, a few weeks before his 101st birthday. The death was announced four days later.

More information: ThoughtCo

The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published in 1949 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by Simone de Beauvoir, who saw it as an important statement of the position of women in non-Western cultures.

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success.

While Lévi-Strauss was well known in academic circles, in 1955 he became one of France's best-known intellectuals by publishing Tristes Tropiques in Paris that year by Plon.

Lévi-Strauss was named to a chair in social anthropology at the Collège de France in 1959. At roughly the same time he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of his essays that provided both examples and programmatic statements about structuralism.

Lévi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology. At the time, the family was traditionally considered the fundamental object of analysis but was seen primarily as a self-contained unit consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children. Nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all were treated as secondary.

Lévi-Strauss argued that akin to Saussure's notion of linguistic value, families acquire determinate identities only through relations with one another. Thus, he inverted the classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary family members first and insisting on analyzing the relations between units instead of the units themselves.

Lévi-Strauss's theory is set forth in Structural Anthropology (1958). Briefly, he considers culture a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others have used more narrowly in the discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, and movies. His reasoning makes best sense when contrasted against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. He wrote about this relationship for decades.

More information: The Guardian

Language is a form of human reason,
which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

ANDERS CELSIUS, THE SWEDISH TEMPERATURE SCALE

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Anders Celsius, the Swedish astronomer, physicist and mathematician who was born on a day like today in 1701.

Anders Celsius (27 November 1701-25 April 1744) was a Swedish astronomer, physicist and mathematician. He was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744, but traveled from 1732 to 1735 visiting notable observatories in Germany, Italy and France.

He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741, and in 1742 proposed (an inverted form of) the Centigrade temperature scale which was later renamed Celsius in his honour.

Anders Celsius was born in Uppsala, Sweden, on 27 November 1701. His family originated from Ovanåker in the province of Hälsingland. Their family estate was at Doma, also known as Höjen or Högen. The name Celsius is a latinization of the estate's name (Latin celsus mound).

As the son of an astronomy professor, Nils Celsius, nephew of botanist Olof Celsius and the grandson of the mathematician Magnus Celsius and the astronomer Anders Spole, Celsius chose a career in science. He was a talented mathematician from an early age. Anders Celsius studied at Uppsala University, where his father was a teacher, and in 1730 he, too, became a professor of astronomy there. Noted Swedish dramatic poet and actor Johan Celsius was also his uncle.

More information: SciHi

In 1730, Celsius published the Nova Methodus distantiam solis a terra determinandi (New Method for Determining the Distance from the Earth to the Sun). His research also involved the study of auroral phenomena, which he conducted with his assistant Olof Hiorter, and he was the first to suggest a connection between the aurora borealis and changes in the magnetic field of the Earth. He observed the variations of a compass needle and found that larger deflections correlated with stronger auroral activity.

At Nuremberg in 1733, he published a collection of 316 observations of the aurora borealis made by himself and others over the period 1716-1732.

Celsius traveled frequently in the early 1730s, including to Germany, Italy and France, when he visited most of the major European observatories. In Paris he advocated the measurement of an arc of the meridian in Lapland. 

In 1736, he participated in the expedition organized for that purpose by the French Academy of Sciences, led by the French mathematician Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698-1759) to measure a degree of latitude.

The aim of the expedition was to measure the length of a degree along a meridian, close to the pole, and compare the result with a similar expedition to Peru, today in Ecuador, near the equator. The expeditions confirmed Isaac Newton's belief that the shape of the Earth is an ellipsoid flattened at the poles.

In 1738, he published the De observationibus pro figura telluris determinanda (Observations on Determining the Shape of the Earth).

Celsius's participation in the Lapland expedition won him much respect in Sweden with the government and his peers, and played a key role in generating interest from the Swedish authorities in donating the resources required to construct a new modern observatory in Uppsala. He was successful in the request, and Celsius founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741. The observatory was equipped with instruments purchased during his long voyage abroad, comprising the most modern instrumental technology of the period.

He made observations of eclipses and various astronomical objects and published catalogues of carefully determined magnitudes for some 300 stars using his own photometric system (mean error=0.4 mag).

In 1742 he proposed the Celsius temperature scale in a paper to the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, the oldest Swedish scientific society, founded in 1710. 

His thermometer was calibrated with a value of 0 for the boiling point of water and 100 for the freezing point. 

In 1745, a year after Celsius's death, the scale was reversed by Carl Linnaeus to facilitate more practical measurement.

Celsius conducted many geographical measurements for the Swedish General map, and was one of earliest to note that much of Scandinavia is slowly rising above sea level, a continuous process which has been occurring since the melting of the ice from the latest ice age. However, he wrongly posed the notion that the water was evaporating.

In 1725. he became secretary of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, and served at this post until his death in 1744. He supported the formation of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm in 1739 by Linnaeus and five others, and was elected a member at the first meeting of this academy. It was in fact Celsius who proposed the new academy's name.

More information: ThoughtCo

A thermometer is somewhat more sensitive
when put into boiling water,
and would be easier to bring along
when travelling at sea or land,
especially on high mountains.

Anders Celsius

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE, LINGUISTICS & SEMIOTICS

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher, who was born on a day like today in 1857.

Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857-22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher.

His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders (together with Charles Sanders Peirce) of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.

One of his translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussure's contribution to linguistics and the study of the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology and anthropology.

Although they have undergone extension and critique over time, the dimensions of organization introduced by Saussure continue to inform contemporary approaches to the phenomenon of language. As Leonard Bloomfield stated after reviewing the Cours: he has given us the theoretical basis for a science of human speech.

Saussure was born in Geneva in 1857. His father, Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, was a mineralogist, entomologist, and taxonomist.

After a year of studying Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit and taking a variety of courses at the University of Geneva, he commenced graduate work at the University of Leipzig in 1876.

Ferdinand de Saussure is one of the world's most quoted linguists, which is remarkable as he himself hardly published anything during his lifetime. Even his few scientific articles are not unproblematic. Thus, for example, his publication on Lithuanian phonetics is mostly taken from studies by the Lithuanian researcher Friedrich Kurschat, with whom Saussure traveled through Lithuania in August 1880 for two weeks and whose (German) books Saussure had read.

Saussure, who had studied some basic grammar of Lithuanian in Leipzig for one semester but was unable to speak the language, was thus dependent on Kurschat.

Saussure taught at the École pratique des hautes études for eleven years during which he was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor). When offered a professorship in Geneva in 1892, he returned to Switzerland. Saussure lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European at the University of Geneva for the remainder of his life. It was not until 1907 that Saussure began teaching the Course of General Linguistics, which he would offer three times, ending in the summer of 1911.

He died in 1913 in Vufflens-le-Château, Vaud, Switzerland. His brothers were the linguist and Esperantist René de Saussure, and scholar of ancient Chinese astronomy, Léopold de Saussure. His son Raymond de Saussure was a psychoanalyst.

More information: Bucks County Community College

Saussure attempted, at various times in the 1880s and 1890s, to write a book on general linguistic matters. His lectures about important principles of language description in Geneva between 1907 and 1911 were collected and published by his pupils posthumously in the famous Cours de linguistique générale in 1916.

Saussure's theoretical reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language vocalic system and particularly his theory of laryngeals, otherwise unattested at the time, bore fruit and found confirmation after the decipherment of Hittite in the work of later generations of linguists such as Émile Benveniste and Walter Couvreur, who both drew direct inspiration from their reading of the 1878 Mémoire.

Saussure had a major impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century with his notions becoming incorporated in the central tenets of structural linguistics. His main contribution to structuralism was his theory of a two-tiered reality about language.

The first is the langue, the abstract and invisible layer, while the second, the parole, refers to the actual speech that we hear in real life. This framework was later adopted by Claude Levi-Strauss, who used the two-tiered model to determine the reality of myths. His idea was that all myths have an underlying pattern, which form the structure that makes them myths.

In Europe, the most important work after Saussure's death was done by the Prague school. Most notably, Nikolay Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson headed the efforts of the Prague School in setting the course of phonological theory in the decades from 1940. Jakobson's universalizing structural-functional theory of phonology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, was the first successful solution of a plane of linguistic analysis according to the Saussurean hypotheses. Elsewhere, Louis Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen School proposed new interpretations of linguistics from structuralist theoretical frameworks.

In America, where the term structuralism became highly ambiguous, Saussure's ideas informed the distributionalism of Leonard Bloomfield, but his influence remained limited.

Saussure approaches theory of language from two different perspectives. On the one hand, language is a system of signs. That is, a semiotic system; or a semiological system as he himself calls it. On the other hand, a language is also a social phenomenon: a product of the language community.

Saussure's Course in General Linguistics begins and ends with a criticism of 19th century linguistics where he is especially critical of Volkgeist thinking and the evolutionary linguistics of August Schleicher and his colleagues. Saussure's ideas replaced social Darwinism in Europe as it was banished from humanities at the end of World War II.

More information: English Literature Zone

Linguistics will have to recognise laws
operating universally in language,
and in a strictly rational manner,
separating general phenomena
from those restricted to one branch
of languages or another.

Ferdinand de Saussure

PERCY TYRONE SLEDGE, WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN

Today, The Grandma has been listening to some music. She has chosen Percy Sledge, the American R&B, soul and gospel singer, who was born on a day like today in 1940.

Percy Tyrone Sledge (November 25, 1940-April 14, 2015) was an American R&B, soul and gospel singer. He is best known for the song When a Man Loves a Woman, a No. 1 hit on both the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B singles charts in 1966. It was awarded a million-selling, Gold-certified disc from the RIAA.

After working as a hospital orderly in the early 1960s, Sledge achieved his strongest success in the late 1960s and early 1970s with a series of emotional soul songs. In later years, Sledge received the Rhythm and Blues Foundation's Career Achievement Award. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2005.

Sledge was born on November 25, 1940, in Leighton, Alabama. He worked in a series of agricultural jobs in the fields near Leighton, before taking a job as an orderly at Colbert County Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama. Through the mid-1960s, he toured the Southeast with the Esquires Combo on weekends, while working at the hospital during the week. A former patient and mutual friend of Sledge and record producer Quin Ivy introduced the two. An audition followed, and Sledge was signed to a recording contract.

Sledge's soulful voice was perfect for the series of soul ballads produced by Ivy and Marlin Greene, which rock critic Dave Marsh called emotional classics for romantics of all ages.

When a Man Loves a Woman was Sledge's first song recorded under the contract, and was released in March 1966. According to Sledge, the inspiration for the song came when his girlfriend left him for a modelling career after he was laid off from a construction job in late 1965, and, because bassist Calvin Lewis and organist Andrew Wright helped him with the song, he gave all the songwriting credits to them. 

It reached No. 1 in the US and went on to become an international hit. When a Man Loves a Woman was a hit twice in the UK, reaching No. 4 in 1966 and, on reissue, peaked at No. 2 in 1987. The song was also the first gold record released by Atlantic Records. The soul anthem became the cornerstone of Sledge's career, and was followed by Warm and Tender Love (covered by British singer Elkie Brooks in 1981), It Tears Me Up, Take Time to Know Her (his second biggest US hit, reaching No. 11; the song's lyric was written by Steve Davis), Love Me Tender, and Cover Me.

Sledge charted with I'll Be Your Everything and Sunshine during the 1970s, and became an international concert favorite throughout the world, especially in the Netherlands, Germany, and on the African continent; he averaged 100 concerts a year in apartheid-era South Africa.

Sledge's career enjoyed a renaissance in the 1980s when When a Man Loves a Woman re-entered the UK Singles Chart after being used in a Levi's commercial, peaking at No. 2 behind the reissued Ben E. King classic Stand by Me.

On March 23, 1987, Sledge performed When a Man Loves a Woman as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live hosted by Bill Murray. In the early 1990s, Michael Bolton brought When a Man Loves a Woman back into the limelight again on his hit album Time, Love, & Tenderness. On the week of November 17 to November 23, 1991, Bolton's version also hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, exactly 25½ years to the week after Percy's did in 1966.

In 1994, Saul Davis and Barry Goldberg produced Sledge's album Blue Night for Philippe Le Bras' Sky Ranch label and Virgin Records. It featured Bobby Womack, Steve Cropper, and Mick Taylor among others. Blue Night received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album, Vocal or Instrumental, and in 1996 it won the W.C. Handy Award for best soul or blues album.

In 2004, Davis and Goldberg also produced the Shining Through the Rain album, which preceded his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Songs on the CD were written by Mikael Rickfors, Steve Earle, the Bee Gees, Carla Olson, Denny Freeman, Allan Clarke and Jackie Lomax. The same year, Percy recorded a live album with his band Sunset Drive entitled Percy Sledge and Sunset Drive -Live in Virginia on WRM Records produced by Warren Rodgers.

In May 2007, Percy was inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall Of Fame in Baton Rouge, LA.

In December 2010, Rhino Handmade issued a four-CD retrospective, The Atlantic Recordings, which covers all of the issued Atlantic masters, as well as many of the tracks unissued in the United States, although some are simply the mono versions of songs originally issued in stereo; Disc 1 comprises Sledge's first two LPs, which were not recorded on stereo equipment.

In 2011 Sledge toured with Sir Cliff Richard during his Soulicious tour, performing I'm Your Puppet.

Sledge died at his home in Baton Rouge on April 14, 2015, at the age of 74. His interment was in Baton Rouge's Heavenly Gates Cemetery.

More information: Atlantic Records

As a kid, on the cotton fields,
I had this tune in my head.
I hummed it and sang it.
It was the same melody as
'When A Man Loves A Woman.'
I could never, ever forget it.

 

Percy Sledge

2009, THE AROMANIAN DIGITAL LIBRARY IS FOUNDED

Today, The Grandma has been reading about the Library of Aromanian Culture, the digital library and cultural initiative, that was founded on a day like today in 2009.

The Aromanians are an ethnic group native to the southern Balkans who speak Aromanian, an Eastern Romance language. They traditionally live in central and southern Albania, south-western Bulgaria, northern and central Greece and North Macedonia, and can currently be found in central and southern Albania, south-western Bulgaria, south-western and eastern North Macedonia, northern and central Greece, southern Serbia and south-eastern Romania (Northern Dobruja). 

An Aromanian diaspora living outside these places also exists. The Aromanians are known by several other names, such as Vlachs or Macedo-Romanians (sometimes used to also refer to the Megleno-Romanians).

The term Vlachs is used in Greece and in other countries to refer to the Aromanians, with this term having been more widespread in the past to refer to all Romance-speaking peoples of the Balkan Peninsula and Carpathian Mountains region (Southeast Europe).

Their vernacular, Aromanian, is an Eastern Romance language very similar to Romanian, which has many slightly varying dialects of its own. It descends from the Vulgar Latin spoken by the Paleo-Balkan peoples subsequent to their Romanization. 

The Aromanian language shares many common features with Albanian, Bulgarian and Greek; however, although it has many loanwords from Greek, Slavic, and Turkish, its lexicon remains majority Romance in origin.

Morw information: Proiect Avdhela

The Avdhela Project, also known as the Library of Aromanian Culture, is a digital library and cultural initiative developed by the Predania Association.

The Avdhela Project aims to collect, edit and open to the public academic works on the Aromanians based on a series of specific principles. It was launched on 24 November 2009 in Bucharest, Romania. Public events, the promotion of cultural works and the publication of audiovisual material are other activities carried out by the Avdhela Project in support of Aromanian culture.

The Avdhela Project was launched on 24 November 2009 at the Peasant Club of the Romanian Peasant Museum in Bucharest, Romania. The ceremony began at 18:00 EET and was attended by figures such as the Aromanian essayist and poet George Vrana, the anthropologist and director Ionuț Piturescu and the director Aleksander Zikov. The films Balkan's Digest by Piturescu and Calea Eschibaba by Zikov were screened there.

The Avdhela Project is an independent nonprofit initiative developed by the Predania Association, and it aims to identify, edit and offer artistic and scientific works on Aromanian culture and make them free of charge and easily accessible to any potentially interested researcher or individual through its digital library.

The project claims to be constructed on the principles of coherence, using the orthographic proposal for the Aromanian language of the Aromanian linguist Matilda Caragiu Marioțeanu for the preservation and edition of Aromanian works; and the principle of openness, meaning the development of cultural links between the Aromanians and the rest of the Balkan nations but also with the rest of world heritage.

These objectives are projected through activities such as public events, research projects, the publication of photographic and audiovisual material and the promotion of cultural projects for young Aromanians.

The Avdhela Project has a Facebook page of its own; in 2010, it was the second page dedicated to the Aromanians with the most members in Romania, having 1,200 members and being only behind Limba armânească (Aromanian language), with 1,579 members. The Facebook page includes discussions and posts on both Aromanian and Romanian in equal proportion, with announcements by the page being bilingual. It has a section with the description of the group and its principles, rules and values in six languages in the following order: Aromanian, Romanian, Greek, English, French and German.

In 2012, the Avdhela Project supported a financing campaign for Iho, a documentary about four Aromanian octogenarians from Cogealac, interpreters of Aromanian polyphonic music (that is, music with two or more performers), who go and perform several concerts with the Romanian musician Grigore Leșe after meeting him, with an album of their music later being published.

In 2013, the Predania Publishing House published a book on the traditional life of the Aromanians by Iotta Naum Iotta, an Aromanian scholar and professor who wrote the book in 1961 but died five years later. He did not manage to publish the book before his passing and it was kept in his family for fifty years until Iotta's granddaughter Mioara handed it over to Maria Pariza, an Aromanian scholar from Custantsa, Romania. From her, the book reached the Avdhela Project. Another initiative of the project is O pagină pe zi pentru cultura aromână, an online campaign encouraging volunteers to help collect works relevant to the Aromanians.

The Avdhela Project is also noted for various public events. On 15 January 2012, on the Romanian National Culture Day, it organized a session of debates and readings on the relationship between the famous Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu and the Aromanian people. To honor the poet, the project published several books and studies related to him. The event was attended by Aromanian figures such as the journalist Aurica Piha, the historian and philologist Nicolae Șerban Tanașoca and Vrana.

On 23 March 2019, the Avdhela Project commemorated the memory of four Aromanians, including the priest Haralambie Balamaci, who were killed in 1914 in Korçë by ethnic Greek troops for supporting Aromanian identity in the region.

The Avdhela Project claimed that a total of 1,000 Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Romanian priests, professors and teachers and also simple students were murdered for similar reasons.

On 7 May of the same year, the Avdhela Project helped organize a conference at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology of the University of Bucharest on religious aspects of the Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians. This was done in collaboration with the Macedo-Romanian Cultural Society.

The Avdhela Project's library includes a large number of books digitized page by page from Aromanian authors such as Caragiu Marioțeanu, Tache Papahagi or Ionel Zeana, as well as from Vrana himself. Also included are poems by Aromanian poets such as Nushi Tulliu; the Avdhela Project has also written an analysis on Tulliu's importance for Aromanian literature. Another original work of the project is Exiyisiri la Tatălu a nostru, one of the few works covering the Christian identity and spirituality of the Aromanians.

More information: Dinitrandu

Our language is the reflection of ourselves.
A language is an exact reflection
of the character and growth of its speakers.

Cesar Chavez

EDWIN POWELL HUBBLE, ASTRONOMY & COSMOLOGY

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of Joseph de Ca'th Lon, one of her closest friends.

 

Joseph loves Astronomy and Science, and they have been talking about Edwin Powell Hubble, the American astronomer, who discovered that the Andromeda nebula is actually another island galaxy far outside our own Milky Way, on a day like today in 1924.

Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889-September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology.

Hubble proved that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as nebulae were actually galaxies beyond the Milky Way. He used the strong direct relationship between a classical Cepheid variable's luminosity and pulsation period, discovered in 1908 by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances.

Hubble provided evidence that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increases with its distance from Earth, a property now known as Hubble's law, although it had been proposed two years earlier by Georges Lemaître.

The Hubble law implies that the universe is expanding. A decade before, the American astronomer Vesto Slipher had provided the first evidence that the light from many of these nebulae was strongly red-shifted, indicative of high recession velocities.

Hubble's name is most widely recognized for the Hubble Space Telescope, which was named in his honour, with a model prominently displayed in his hometown of Marshfield, Missouri.

More information: NASA

Edwin Hubble was born to Virginia Lee Hubble (née James) (1864-1934) and John Powell Hubble, an insurance executive, in Marshfield, Missouri, and moved to Wheaton, Illinois, in 1900.

Hubble's studies at the University of Chicago were concentrated on mathematics, astronomy and philosophy, which resulted in a bachelor of science degree by 1910.

After the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, Hubble rushed to complete his Ph.D. dissertation so he could join the military. Hubble volunteered for the United States Army and was assigned to the newly created 86th Division, where he served in 2nd Battalion, 343 Infantry Regiment. He rose to the rank of Major, and was found fit for overseas duty on July 9, 1918, but the 86th Division never saw combat. After the end of World War I, Hubble spent a year at Cambridge University, where he renewed his studies of astronomy.

In 1919, Hubble was offered a staff position at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California, by George Ellery Hale, the founder and director of the observatory. Hubble remained on staff at Mount Wilson until his death in 1953. 

Shortly before his death, Hubble became the first astronomer to use the newly completed giant 5.1 m reflector Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California.

Hubble also worked as a civilian for U.S. Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland during World War II as the Chief of the External Ballistics Branch of the Ballistics Research Laboratory during which he directed a large volume of research in exterior ballistics which increased the effective firepower of bombs and projectiles.

Hubble had a heart attack in July 1949 while on vacation in Colorado. He was cared for by his wife and continued on a modified diet and work schedule. He died of in September 28, 1953, in San Marino, California. No funeral was held for him, and his wife never revealed his burial site.

Hubble's papers comprising the bulk of his correspondence, photographs, notebooks, observing logbooks, and other materials, are held by the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. They were donated by his wife Grace Burke Hubble upon her death in 1980.

At the time, the Nobel Prize in Physics did not recognize work done in astronomy. Hubble spent much of the later part of his career attempting to have astronomy considered an area of physics, instead of being its own science. He did this largely so that astronomers -including himself- could be recognized by the Nobel Prize Committee for their valuable contributions to astrophysics. This campaign was unsuccessful in Hubble's lifetime, but shortly after his death, the Nobel Prize Committee decided that astronomical work would be eligible for the physics prize. However, the prize is not one that can be awarded posthumously.

More information: Earth Sky

 The great spirals... 

apparently lie outside our stellar system.

Edwin Powell Hubble

TERRENCE V. GILLIAM & THE MONTY PYTHON TROUPE

Today, The Grandma has been watching some movies directed by Terry Gilliam, the British filmmaker, comedian, animator and actor, who was born on a day like today in 1940.

Terrence Vance Gilliam (22 November 1940) is a British filmmaker, comedian, animator and actor. 

He gained stardom as a member of the Monty Python comedy troupe alongside John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Graham Chapman.

Together they collaborated on the sketch series Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974) and the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975, which Gilliam directed as well), Life of Brian (1979) and The Meaning of Life (1983).

In 1988, they received the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema.

Gilliam transitioned to directing serious films with themes exploring imagination and oppositions to bureaucracy and authoritarianism. 

His films are sometimes set in dystopian worlds and involve black comedy and tragicomedic elements. He has directed 13 feature films, including Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), 12 Monkeys (1995), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), The Brothers Grimm (2005), Tideland (2005), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), The Zero Theorem (2013), and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), as well as the aforementioned Python Holy Grail movie. In addition, he was a writer and/or co-director for several of the other Monty Python films.

Gilliam was born in Minnesota, but spent his high school and college years in Los Angeles. He started his career as an animator and strip cartoonist. He joined Monty Python as the animator of their works, but eventually became a full member and was given acting roles. The only Monty Python member not born in Britain, Gilliam became a naturalised British citizen in 1968 and formally renounced his American citizenship in 2006.

More information: Terry Gilliam Web

Terry Gilliam was born on 22 November 1940 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Beatrice (née Vance) and James Hall Gilliam.

Gilliam graduated from Occidental College in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science.

Gilliam began his career as an animator and strip cartoonist. One of his early photographic strips for the US magazine Help! featured future Python cast member John Cleese.

Gilliam was a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus from its outset, credited at first as an animator (his name was listed separately after the other five in the closing credits) and later as a full member.

In 1975, Gilliam began his career as a director by co-directing Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Terry Jones.Gilliam says he used to think of his films in terms of trilogies, starting with Time Bandits. The Trilogy of Imagination, written by Gilliam, about the ages of man, consisted of Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988).

Gilliam made his opera debut at London's English National Opera (ENO) in May 2011, directing The Damnation of Faust, by Hector Berlioz.

Gilliam has been involved with a number of charitable and humanitarian causes.

In 2009, he became a board member of Videre Est Credere (Latin for to see is to believe), a UK human rights charity. Videre describes itself as giving local activists the equipment, training and support needed to safely capture compelling video evidence of human rights violations. This captured footage is verified, analysed and then distributed to those who can create change. He participates alongside movie producer Uri Fruchtmann, music producer Brian Eno and executive director of Greenpeace UK John Sauven.

More information: Instagram-Terry Gilliam

 You get trapped by stories.
Though I've got this reputation for being out of control,
it's not true, it just happens to be
a more interesting story than the truth.

 

Terry Gilliam

SIGBJØRN OBSTFELDER, NORWEGIAN POET AND AUTHOR

Today, The Grandma has been reading poetry. She has chosen one of her favourite poets, the Norwegian Sigbjørn Obstfelder.

Sigbjørn Obstfelder (21 November 1866-29 July 1900) was a 19th-century Norwegian writer and poet.

Obstfelder was born in Stavanger, Norway on November 21, 1866. 

He was the eighth child in a family of sixteen children, being one of only six siblings to survive to adulthood. His father, Herman Friedrik Obstfelder (1828-1906), was a baker by trade and provided little financial or emotional support. His mother, Serine Obstfelder (née Egelandsdal) (1836-1880) died when he was fourteen. The difficulties he experienced, a threatening male figure, the loss of the mother and the sense of ever-present death, were strong influences on his writing.

He began to study at the University of Christiania in 1886. Two years later he started studying engineering at Christiania Technical School (now Oslo ingeniørhøgskole). 

In 1890, he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he took a job as a draftsman at a bridge construction company. After only a year, he returned to Norway, where he had a nervous breakdown and was briefly hospitalized in Christiania.

His first published work was a contribution to the feminist journal Nylænde (New Frontiers) on the topic of the chastity of men before marriage. The piece features early shades of a recurring theme in his work, the fear of the erotic woman.

Obstfelder's entry into the Norwegian literary scene comes with his meeting Jens Thiis in 1892 in Paris. They travelled together in Belgium, where Obstfelder wrote some of his best works and thereafter supported himself on his writing.

Primarily known as a writer of poetry, Obstfelder's debut collection of poems from 1893, Digte (Poems), is usually credited as one of the earliest examples of modernism in Norwegian literature. Despite producing a relatively small amount of works during his short lifespan, he is considered one of the most important figures in Norwegian literature of the late 19th century.

Strongly influenced by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, his writings have often been described as the literary equivalent of Edvard Munch's paintings; indeed, Munch made two lithographs of Obstfelder, who in turn wrote an essay in Munch's defense for Samtiden in 1896. Additionally, Munch was mysteriously in possession of some of Obstfelder's manuscripts. Obstfelder was a source of inspiration for Rainer Maria Rilke's work The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Although known more for his poems, Obstfelder also wrote and published prose works. His first published prose were two short stories, which came out in 1895. The following year he published his famous novel The Cross.

In 1897, he published a play, The Red Drops, which was listed in the National Theatre in 1902. Several of his works were published posthumously, including the unfinished A Priest's Diary (1900). His journals from his stay in the U.S. were also published. 

In 2000, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Obstfelder's death, a collection of his works was published.

Obstfelder is widely regarded as the first Norwegian modernist poet. His poems have left an indelible mark on Norwegian poetry. Choosing to depart from the traditional rimtvangen and the rigid structure of typical Norwegian verse, he created his own free verse, which was marked for its musicality.  

His poems are often tinged with anxiety, loneliness and alienation as well imparting a spiritual inclination. His poetry is considered by many to be the literary counterpart to expressionist art of Edvard Munch.

Obstfelder's memory is celebrated in numerous cities in Europe. In 1917, his bust, created by Gustav Vigeland, was unveiled in the Stavanger city park. Another bust has been placed in the Frederiksberg Ældre Kirkegård at Frederiksberg in Copenhagen. A bust of Obstfelder by Per Palle Storm is at NTNU Trondheim's Technology Library with the inscription: Remember that there are many values in life beyond technology.

More information: Nasjonalbiblioteket

En er en, og to er to
-vi hopper i vann, vi triller i sand.
Sikk, sakk, vi drypper fra tak,
tikk, takk, det regner i dag.

 

One is one, and two is two
-we jump in water, we roll in sand.
Tick, tock, we're dripping from the roof,
tock, tock, it's raining today.

 

Sigbjørn Obstfelder

VICTOR D'HONDT, THE PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Victor D'Hondt, the Belgian lawyer and jurist, well-known by his method for allocating seats to candidates in party-list proportional representation elections.

Victor Joseph Auguste D'Hondt (20 November 1841-30 May 1901) was a Belgian lawyer and jurist of civil law at Ghent University.

He devised a procedure, the D'Hondt method, which he first described in 1878, for allocating seats to candidates in party-list proportional representation elections.

The method has been adopted by a number of countries, including Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Fiji, Finland, Israel, Japan, North Macedonia, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Slovenia, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Iceland, Uruguay and Wales. A modified D'Hondt system is used for elections to the London Assembly and the Scottish Parliament.

Victor D'Hondt was an influential proponent of proportional representation in Belgium. He published several articles on proportional representation and was founding member of the Association Réformiste Belge pour l'Adoption de la Representation Proportionnelle in 1881. From 1885 he served as professor of civil and fiscal law at the University of Ghent. In 1896 he was awarded the title Officer in the Belgian Order of Leopold.

Party-list proportional representation (list-PR) is a subset of proportional representation electoral systems in which multiple candidates are elected through their position on an electoral list. They can also be used as part of mixed-member electoral systems.

In these systems, parties make lists of candidates to be elected, and seats are distributed by elections authorities to each party in proportion to the number of votes the party receives. Voters may vote for the party, as in Spain, Turkey, and Israel; or for candidates whose vote total will pool to the parties, as in Finland, Brazil and the Netherlands; or a choice between the last two ways stated: panachage.

In most party list systems, a voter may only vote for one party (single choice ballot) with their list vote, although ranked ballots may also be used (spare vote). Open list systems may allow more than one preference votes within a party list (votes for candidates are called preference votes -not to be confused with the other meaning of preferential voting as in ranked-choice voting). Some systems allow for voters to vote for candidates on multiple lists, this is called panachage.

More information: Northern Ireland Assembly

In my view what you can't argue for is a system
that is neither decisive nor proportional
and can be indecisive and disproportionate
at the same time.

William Hague

TÉLÉ MONTE CARLO, THE OLDEST EUROPEAN PRIVATE TV

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Télé Monte Carlo, the Franco-Monégasque general entertainment television channel, that was inaugurated on a day like today in 1954.

TMC is a Franco-Monégasque general entertainment television channel, owned by the French media holding company Groupe TF1.

The oldest private channel in Europe, TMC dates back to 1954, inaugurated by Rainier III, Prince of Monaco. Like several other European television channels, its first major broadcast was one relating to the country's reigning dynasty, in this case the marriage of Prince Rainier III and Grace Kelly.

From Monaco and from 1954, TMC broadcasts its television's program in the south of France from Menton to the east of Marseille.

In 1984, as a result of an agreement between Prince Rainier III and the French President François Mitterrand, TMC was able to be broadcast as far west as Montpellier, France, tripling its coverage (three million potential viewers).

In 1987, the channel was carried for a few hours on M6, a French television service -which made it available to much more of France- and the channel was eventually carried by CanalSat and became available in all of France and the Indian Ocean area. The channel also won a spot on the French language digital terrestrial television scheme, demonstrating its wide appeal.

The channel was owned jointly by the TF1 Group (40%), the AB Groupe (40%) and the Government of Monaco (20%).

In 2016, TF1 bought the Government of Monaco's shares, and now owns 100% of the channel.

Until 1995, TMC was a member of the European Broadcasting Union as a part of Radio Monte-Carlo (RMC). Currently the Monégasque membership is held by Groupement de Radiodiffuseurs Monégasques (GRMC), a joint organisation by Monte-Carlo Radiodiffusion (RMC) and Radio Monte Carlo (RMC).

Since October 2022, TMC, as well as the free DTT channels of the TF1 group, have been accessible free to air, via the Astra 1 satellite. This broadcast follows a temporary interruption in encrypted broadcasting to Canal+ and TNTSAT subscribers., following a commercial dispute. However, despite the resumption of encrypted broadcasts within the Canal+ and TNTSAT bouquets, this free-to-air broadcasting continues.

TMC is therefore received free of charge in almost all of Continental Europe and North African Countries.

More information: TV Festival

All television is educational television.
The question is: what is it teaching?

Nicholas Johnson