Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label birthdays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label birthdays. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 06, 2022

Today's Birthday

    Steven Wright - Dec 6, 1955

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

When I was a kid, we had a quick-sand box in the backyard. I was an only child ... eventually.

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.

The other day I was going through some old papers, and I found a diary I kept when I was first born. It said:
Day 1 - Still recovering from the move.
Day 2 - Everyone talks to me like I'm an idiot.

I have an inferiority complex, but it’s not a very good one.

Monday, October 03, 2022

Today's Birthday



Stephen Ray Vaughan was an American musician, best known as the guitarist and frontman of the blues rock trio Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. Although his mainstream career only spanned seven years, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians in the history of blues music, and one of the greatest guitarists of all time.

Born and raised in Dallas, Vaughan began playing guitar at age seven, initially inspired by his elder brother, Jimmie Vaughan. In 1972, he dropped out of high school and moved to Austin, where he began to gain a following after playing gigs on the local club circuit. Vaughan joined forces with Tommy Shannon on bass and Chris Layton on drums as Double Trouble in 1978 and established it as part of the Austin music scene; it soon became one of the most popular acts in Texas. He performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1982, where David Bowie saw him play. Bowie contacted him for a studio gig which resulted in Vaughan playing blues guitar on the album Let's Dance (1983), before being discovered by John Hammond who interested major label Epic Records in signing Vaughan and his band to a record deal. Within months, they achieved mainstream success for the critically acclaimed debut album Texas Flood. With a series of successful network television appearances and extensive concert tours, Vaughan became the leading figure in the blues revival of the 1980s. Playing his guitar behind his back or plucking the strings with his teeth as Jimi Hendrix did, he earned fame in Europe, which later resulted in breakthroughs for guitar players like Robert Cray, Jeff Healey, Robben Ford, and Walter Trout, amongst others.

During the majority of his life, Vaughan struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. He also struggled with the personal and professional pressures of fame and his marriage to Lenora "Lenny" Bailey. He successfully completed rehabilitation and began touring again with Double Trouble in November 1986. His fourth and final studio album In Step reached number 33 in the United States in 1989; it was one of Vaughan's most critically and commercially successful releases and included his only number-one hit, "Crossfire". He became one of the world's most highly demanded blues performers, and he headlined Madison Square Garden in 1989 and the Beale Street Music Festival in 1990.

On August 27, 1990, Vaughan and four others were killed in a helicopter crash in East Troy, Wisconsin, after performing with Double Trouble at Alpine Valley Music Theatre. An investigation concluded that the cause of the accident was pilot error and Vaughan's family later filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Omniflight Helicopters which was settled out of court. Vaughan's music continued to achieve commercial success with several posthumous releases and has sold over 15 million albums in the United States alone. In 2003, David Fricke of Rolling Stone ranked him the seventh greatest guitarist of all time. Vaughan was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, along with Double Trouble bandmates Chris Layton, Tommy Shannon, and Reese Wynans.

I'm Cryin'

Friday, August 13, 2021

Little Sure-Shot


"When a man makes a difficult shot, they call it marksmanship.
When a woman makes the same shot, they call it a trick."

Annie Oakley (born Phoebe Ann Mosey; August 13, 1860 – November 3, 1926)

Because of poverty following her father's death, Annie did not regularly attend school as a child, although she did attend later in childhood and in adulthood. On March 15, 1870, at age nine, she was admitted to the Darke County Infirmary along with her sister Sarah Ellen. According to her autobiography, she was put in the care of the infirmary's superintendent, Samuel Crawford Edington, and his wife Nancy, who taught her to sew and decorate.

Beginning in the spring of 1870, she was "bound out" to a local family to help care for their infant son, on the false promise of fifty cents per week (equivalent to $10 in 2020) and an education. The couple had originally wanted someone who could pump water, cook, and who was bigger. She spent about two years in near slavery to them, enduring mental and physical abuse. One time, the wife put Annie out in the freezing cold without shoes, as a punishment because she had fallen asleep over some darning. Annie referred to them as "the wolves". Even in her autobiography, she never revealed the couple's real names.

- snip -

Annie began trapping before the age of seven, and shooting and hunting by age eight, to support her siblings and her widowed mother. She sold the hunted game to locals in Greenville, such as shopkeepers Charles and G. Anthony Katzenberger, who shipped it to hotels in Cincinnati and other cities. She also sold the game to restaurants and hotels in northern Ohio. Her skill paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm when Annie was 15.

- more -

Thursday, December 24, 2020

Today's Tweet



Speaking of birthdays



 

250 Years Ago

Beethoven was born in 1770. He's recorded baptized on December 17th, but no one is sure as to the actual date of his birth.

So, I'm a little late, but happy birthday, Ludwig.



Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Today's Birthday


Eunice Newton Foote (July 17, 1810 – September 30, 1888)

American scientist, inventor, and women's rights campaigner from Seneca Falls, New York. She was the first to suggest that changing the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would change its temperature, in her paper 'Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun's rays' at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in 1856. Because women were not yet allowed to present papers to the Association at that time, Professor Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution spoke on her behalf. In the process, although her experiments did not clearly differentiate between the effect of incident solar radiation and that of long-wave infrared, she detected the root cause of what we now call the greenhouse effect.

Friday, February 01, 2019

Happy Birthday

Seems like a great way to start Black History Month.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
and yet must be —

the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine — the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME —
who made America,
whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
whose hand at the foundry, 
whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.


Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career.

He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue".





Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Happy Birthday

Django Reinhardt

Jean Reinhardt (23 January 1910 – 16 May 1953) stage name Django Reinhardt, was a Belgian-born Romani-French jazz guitarist and composer, regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. He was the first jazz talent to emerge from Europe and remains the most significant.

Friday, September 28, 2018

Oops - Just Missed


A hero

On 26 September 1983, just three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm,[1] and his decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol,[2] is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in large-scale nuclear war. Investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned.

Now imagine this while Cult45's in charge.

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Today's Birthday



Dinah Washington:


Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Today's Birthday

Lefty Cooper


Andrew Lewis Cooper (April 24, 1898 – June 3, 1941), nicknamed "Lefty", was an American left-handed pitcher in baseball's Negro Leagues. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. An alumnus of Paul Quinn College in Waco, Cooper played nine seasons for the Detroit Stars and ten seasons for the Kansas City Monarchs. The Texan was 6 feet 2 inches (188 cm) tall and weighed 220 pounds (100 kg; 16 st).

In defiance of a threatened five-year Negro league ban for contract jumping, Cooper joined a 1927 barnstorming team that toured Hawaii and Japan. He spent most of his later career with the Monarchs. Cooper is the Negro league record holder for career saves.
In a 1937 playoff game, he pitched 17 innings. Cooper served as manager or player-manager for the Monarchs from 1937 to 1940, leading the team to the pennant three times during those four seasons.

Saturday, December 09, 2017

Today's Today


December 9th is Grace Hopper's birthday. She would've been 109 today.

I never knew her, but along with probably millions of people just like me, I owe Admiral Hopper an awful lot.

Because of her work developing Compilers, computers became very human-friendly, which greatly helped to open the floodgates for computer technology to evolve with unbelievable speed.

If I have to work in machine language, I couldn't program my way off of a flatbed truck. Grace Hopper made it possible for me to master a certain level of Application Programming that led me to some pretty great things in a very satisfying career.

One of my favorite things is the story of her presence at the birth of the term "bug" as it applies to computers. 

Wikipedia:

While she was working on a Mark II Computer at a US Navy research lab in Dahlgren, Virginia in 1947, her associates discovered a moth that was stuck in a relay; the moth impeded the operation of the relay. While neither Hopper nor her crew mentioned the phrase "debugging" in their logs, the case was held as an instance of literal "debugging." For many years, the term bug had been in use in engineering.[35][36] The remains of the moth can be found in the group's log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.[37]
Like I said - I owe that lady a lot.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Tommy Jeff's Birthday

Thomas Jefferson April 13, 1743

From the Monticello website:


Thomas Jefferson was always reluctant to reveal his religious beliefs to the public, but at times he would speak to and reflect upon the public dimension of religion. He was raised as an Anglican, but was influenced by English deists such as Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury. Thus in the spirit of the Enlightenment, he made the following recommendation to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787: "Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."1 In Query XVII of Notes on the State of Virginia, he clearly outlines the views which led him to play a leading role in the campaign to separate church and state and which culminated in the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom: "The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. ... Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.2 Jefferson's religious views became a major public issue during the bitter party conflict between Federalists and Republicans in the late 1790s when Jefferson was often accused of being an atheist.

 

Saturday, February 04, 2017

Birthday

Happy birthday, Rosa Parks.
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order to give up her seat in the colored section to a white passenger, after the white section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation. Others had taken similar steps, including Bayard Rustin in 1942,[2] Irene Morgan in 1946, Sarah Louise Keys in 1952, and the members of the ultimately successful Browder v. Gayle 1956 lawsuit (Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith) who were arrested in Montgomery for not giving up their bus seats months before Parks. NAACP organizers believed that Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, although eventually her case became bogged down in the state courts while the Browder v. Gayle case succeeded.[3][4]
Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in town who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement.
At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights and racial equality. She acted as a private citizen "tired of giving in". Although widely honored in later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local department store, and received death threats for years afterwards. Her situation also opened doors.
BTW - this is how you win:



This is not:

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Ali's Birthday



"I handcuffed lightnin' and throwed thunder in jail"

Happy birthday to the greatest.



I grew up without benefit of color.  I don't remember even meeting anybody with dark brown skin for the first 12 or 15 years of my life.  But in 7th grade, I had a teacher/coach who showed us films of (then) Cassius Clay.  He taught us that a man's ability is where everything starts because that will show you what's in his heart.  If you get hung up on how he doesn't look like you or act like you or think like you - while you're busy with all the shit that doesn't matter, he'll be busy knockin' you on your dumb ass.  On a playing field. In a classroom. At a job.  Everybody's competing.  Everybody can learn to do what it takes to win. 

If you don't respect all of that because you refuse to see anybody else as your equal, you'll have a hard time being willing to do the work necessary to give yourself a shot.  Then the only way you win is if the game is rigged in your favor.  And that ain't winnin'.