Now that ain’t right
Posted: October 24, 2013 Filed under: politics Leave a comment
NSA monitored calls of 35 world leaders after US official handed over contacts
Janet Yellen: Philatelist
Posted: October 10, 2013 Filed under: politics Leave a comment
This will be insurance to most Helytimes readers, but: Janet Yellen apparently has a stamp collection, inherited from her mother, worth $15,000-$50,000.
Previous Helytimes coverage of the philatelic arts can be found here.
(photo from John Cassidy’s New Yorker blog, credited to Charles Dharapak/AP.)
Six Crises
Posted: July 15, 2013 Filed under: America, Kennedy-Nixon, politics Leave a comment
Nixon is talking about his campaign against John F. Kennedy in 1960, and why it is that he did so much better in the second TV debate than in the first:
What, then, were the major reasons for the difference in impact between the two debates?
First, there was a simple but important physical factor – the milkshake prescription had done its work.
Encounters With The Great Dogs Of History
Posted: June 24, 2013 Filed under: America, animals, heroes, history, politics Leave a comment
This is FDR’s dog Fala. He was famous in his day.
FDR was accused of sending a destroyer back to fetch him after accidentally leaving him on an Aleutian island (why did the President bring his dog to Alaska in the middle of wartime? I don’t know).
Here is FDR’s zinger of a response, playing on the fact everyone knew back then that Scots are “tight with a penny” as Norm Macdonald put it:
These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family don’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I’d left him behind on an Aleutian island and had sent a destroyer back to find him — at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars — his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself … But I think I have a right to resent, to object, to libelous statements about my dog!
Anyway.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking to a woman who once had lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde Park. She said Fala sat on her feet the whole lunch.
Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister of the UK from 1957-1963
Posted: April 30, 2013 Filed under: politics Leave a comment
Macmillan served with distinction as a captain in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War, and was wounded on three occasions. During the Battle of the Somme, he spent an entire day wounded and lying in a slit trench with a bullet in his pelvis, reading the classical playwright Aeschylus in the original Greek.
RFK
Posted: March 13, 2013 Filed under: America, history, politics Leave a comment
“[Robert] Kennedy did not just play furiously. He was furious,” spoiling, off the field as well as on, for a fight – often for senseless fights. One took place in a Cambridge bar where Bobby, celebrating his birthday with a group of friends, including the football captain, Ken O’Donnell, was picking up everyone’s bar tab. Another Harvard student, John Magnuson, happened to be already celebrating his birthday there, and his friends began singing “Happy Birthday” to him. Infuriated over what he apparently regarded as an intrusion into his celebration, Bob walked up behind Magnuson and hit him over the head with a beer bottle, sending him to the hospital for stitches.
– from Robert Caro, The Years Of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power
Obama
Posted: February 18, 2013 Filed under: America, Boston, Chicago, heroes, New England, politics, the California Condition, writing Leave a comment
James Fallows calls my attention to this article, from Chicago Magazine in 2007, about then-Senatorial candidate Obama’s Democratic convention speech.
The best bits, for the busy executive:
Obama composed the first draft in longhand on a yellow legal pad, mostly in Springfield, where the state senate was in overtime over a budget impasse. Wary of missing important votes, Obama stayed close to the Capitol, which wasn’t exactly conducive to writing. “There were times that he would go into the men’s room at the Capitol because he wanted some quiet,” says Axelrod. Once, state senator Jeff Schoenberg walked into the men’s lounge and found Obama sitting on a stool along the marble countertop near the sinks, reworking the speech. “It was a classic Lifemagazine moment,” says Schoenberg, who snapped a picture of Obama with his cell-phone camera.
(Photo not included, regrettably.) Kerry’s folks made Obama take out a line:
After the rehearsal ended, Obama was furious. “That fucker is trying to steal a line from my speech,” he griped to Axelrod in the car on the way back to their hotel, according to another campaign aide who was there but asked to remain anonymous. Axelrod says he does not recollect exactly what Obama said to him. “He was unhappy about it, yeah,” he says, but adds that Obama soon cooled down. “Ultimately, his feeling was: They had given him this great opportunity; who was he to quibble over one line?”
And:
On Tuesday, the day of his speech, Obama was up before 6 a.m. He gobbled down a vegetable omelet en route to the FleetCenter for back-to-back-to-back live interviews with the network morning shows. Next, he rushed off to speak at the Illinois delegation breakfast and then to a rally sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters. Afterwards, he returned to the arena for another hour of TV interviews. There was barely time for lunch, a turkey sandwich that he ate in the SUV while being interviewed by a group of reporters.
Always, always tell me what everyone ate.
(both photos from Chicago Magazine, uncredited. Michelle’s skeptical face in that first photo!)
Denmark
Posted: January 7, 2013 Filed under: politics Leave a comment
This N+1 article about a Danish TV show:
Borgen is more than a sensation; it is a kind of parallel government. Borgen stories are reported in Copenhagen’s free newspapers as if they were actually happening; an educational program that introduces the main fields of Danish politics—welfare spending, environmental policy, the status of Greenland—does so under the rubric “Borgen in reality.”
And:
In a recent interview with Le Monde, the actor [excellently named Babette Knudsen] said she learned about how politicians atrophy by watching Tony Blair.
Says N+1:
But in Britain, where Borgen airs in the original Danish, the program was the undisputed hit of 2012
(undisputed??)
I thought this idea was interesting and troubling:
As the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has argued, the shift we are seeing in Europe is one from “government” to “governance”—or, if you prefer, from democracy to administration, from a system in which political leaders enact the will of the people to one in which they act merely as “debt-collecting agencies on behalf of a global oligarchy of investors.”
Photo of Denmark’s actual prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, from wikipedia:
She married Stephen Kinnock in 1996, so becoming the daughter-in-law of Neil Kinnock, Baron Kinnock, former leader of the British Labour Party and European Commissioner, and Glenys Kinnock, Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead, former British Minister for Europe.
Neil Kinnock, remember, was the British politician from whom Biden plagarized whole chunks of life story during the 1988 presidential primaries.
Spider-Like
Posted: December 30, 2012 Filed under: adventures, politics Leave a comment
Inevitably, a ruler lived spider-like at the centre of a huge web of activities, surrounded by an army of clerks, cleaners, attendants, cooks, porters, messengers, carters, valets, maintenance workers, engineers, and so forth.
(so said the historian Ian Mabbett, writing about “Kingship in Angkor” for The Journal of the Siam Society, reported to me by the great Michael Coe in his book Angkor And The Khmer Civilization.)
a little too casual for me
Posted: December 6, 2012 Filed under: politics Leave a comment
On the city’s police website, spokesman Jonah Spangenthal-Lee said: “The department’s going to give you a generous grace period to help you adjust to this brave, new, and maybe kinda stoned world we live in.”
He added: “The police department believes that, under state law, you may responsibly get baked, order some pizzas and enjoy a Lord of the Rings marathon in the privacy of your own home, if you want to.”
The department also posted a picture of actor Jeff Bridges as the cannabis-smoking character “The Dude” from the comedy film “The Big Lebowski”.
Encouraging indoor cannabis smoking, it carried the caption: “The Dude abides, and says, ‘take it inside!”
from here. the UK’s Telegraph, where you can also learn about:
- ‘Kiss the Girls’ actress Ashley Judd mulls Senate bid
- Scottish ‘madam’ Anna Gristina to name clients on Dr Phil TV showNasa unveils ‘black marble’ images of the world
(photo from wikipedia)
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