Beware. Today is the ides of March, a day once enthusiastically celebrated among the common people with picnics, drinking, and revelry. In the ancient Roman calendar, each of the 12 months had an ides (from the Latin to divide). In March, May, July and October, the ides fell on the 15th day. In all other months, the ides fell on the 13th. There is a reason for this, but the logic declined and fell with Rome, and the ides lost their original intent and purpose and eventually came to mean the day that a bunch of guys are going to stick knives into you.
This was thanks to Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, and Caesar’s pals Brutus et al. In Act I, Scene 2, of Shakespeare’s history, the old soothsayer utters these words, dripping with foreboding: “Beware the Ides of March.” Pretty straightforward, but does Caesar pay attention? Of course not. And on March 15, 44 BC, aided by his friends, he buys the forum, so to speak, exiting stage left halfway through the play even though it bears his name.
Despite an occasional pretentious allusion to the Ides of March and the popular song, today’s calendar is pretty much ideless (as ideless as a painted ship upon a painted ocean, to slip in a quick pretentious allusion).
“The Salvation Army will attract the Kingdom of the Devil in Harry Hill’s Variety Theater on Sunday, March 14, 1880 at 6:30 pm sharp” Thus read the announcement of the first public meeting of the Army in the United States. It was a meeting of the strangest of bedfellows — the Army and the infamous Harry Hill who ran New York’s most well-know concert saloon, a place they said was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”
A small platoon of the Salvation Army under the command of George Scott Railton had arrived in New York City just two days earlier. The enterprising Harry Hill, having read about their arrival from England, contacted Railton with an offer to pay the group to take the stage on Sunday evening. Although Railton was warned that respectable people would refuse to attend a meeting in such a vile place, Railton was intrigued by the idea that such a notorious sinner would welcome him before any of the local churches did.
On Sunday evening, Railton and seven Salvation Army lasses took the stage. Railton knelt and the seven lasses formed a semicircle around him assuming “various and curious positions.” They sang hymns and invited the audience to repent and be saved. The audience applauded politely, but other than one habitual drunkard, Ashbarrel Jimmie, no one accepted the invitation to repent.
Undeterred, the Salvation Army soldiered on and, red kettle by red kettle, became a fixture in the United States.
Saving Nanki-Poo
Gilbert and Sullivan’s most famous work The Mikado premiered in London in 1885. It almost didn’t happen. A year earlier, Arthur Sullivan, whining about his precarious health and a desire to devote himself to more serious music, told W.S. Gilbert that he couldn’t bring himself to do another piece of the kind the two had previously written. Gilbert was surprised to hear of Sullivan’s qualms, having started work on a new opera in which people fell in love against their wills after taking a magic lozenge. Gilbert wrote Sullivan asking him to reconsider, but the composer replied that he was through with such operas. Gilbert, after much whining of his own, persuaded Sullivan by promising a plot in which no supernatural element occurs “. . . a consistent plot, free from anachronisms, constructed in perfect good faith and to the best of my ability.”
The Mikado was born. With a setting in Japan, an exotic locale far away from Britain, Gilbert was able to poke fun at British politics and institutions by disguising them as Japanese and, with Sullivan’s music, create one of the greatest comic operas, featuring such characters as Nanki-Poo, the wandering minstrel; Yum-Yum, Nanki-Poo’s love; Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner; and Pooh-Bah, the Lord High Everything Else. This is the origin of the word poo-bah — a pretty important person, a high muckety-muck, nabob, honcho, Donald Trump.
In 1906, Eleanor Roosevelt, then a young mother living in New York City, bought a cage made of chicken wire and hung it outside the window of her townhouse. The cage was for her daughter Anna to nap in and enjoy the fresh outside air. Her neighbors threatened to call in the authorities. Young Eleanor wasn’t really a wicked mother; she was just a few years ahead of her time. Fast forward to the 1930s; baby cages are a booming business, particularly in London.
In between, Emma Read of Spokane, Washington, had the foresight to apply for a patent for “an article of manufacture for babies and young children, to be suspended upon the exterior of a building adjacent to an open window, wherein the baby or young child may be placed.” She envisioned a cage with removable curtains and an overlapping slanted roof to protect the suspended tyke from rain and snow — And from rattles and other toys maliciously thrown by the rotten little kid in the cage on the floor above. Her patent was granted on March 13, 1923.
Interest peaked and petered out in the 1950s, and the baby cage disappeared into history despite the fascinating concept of children being caged.
Gonna Find Me a Planet
An advanced civilization inhabited Mars, but the times were desperate. The planet was becoming arid, and the Martians had constructed a series of canals and oases in an attempt to tap the polar ice caps. This was the theory espoused by Percival Lowell based on studies from his observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, during the early 20th century. Lowell was born on March 13, 1855, and after many years traveling in and studying the Far East, he turned his attention to the far reaches of space. He was all over Mars, writing three books on the red planet that captured the public imagination and helped give rise to the notion of men from Mars.
The existence of canals was later disproved by more powerful telescopes and space flights, but Lowell would make a more important contribution to planetary studies during the last years of his life. Turning from Mars to Neptune and Uranus, Lowell became convinced that their positions were affected by a hypothetical Planet X. Lowell began searching for the mystery planet in 1906. Dying in 1916, Lowell himself did not witness the discovery, but the Lowell Observatory announced on what would have been his 75th birthday — March 13, 1930 — that they had discovered the planet Pluto.
Sadly, after nearly a century as our ninth planet, Pluto was cruelly downgraded to the status of dwarf planet in 2006. And the name Pluto will become more associated with the Disney hound dog of that name.
Of Which You Ain’t Nothing But a
Mike Stoller (right), born March 13, 1933, working with his partner Jerry Leiber, helped shape rock and roll with an amazing list of hit songs beginning with Hound Dog in 1952. Elvis Presley , the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, John Lennon, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and Frank Sinatra top the list of the many artists who have recorded their songs. More than three dozen of their hits were featured in the Broadway production Smokey Joe’s Cafe including the title tune, Young Blood, Dance With Me, Searchin’, Kansas City, Poison Ivy, On Broadway, Yakety Yak, Charlie Brown, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, Spanish Harlem and Stand by Me.
In an interview, Stoller was asked to compare Elvis Presley’s 1956 version of Hound Dog with the original recorded by Big Mama Thornton. “It sounded kind of stiff and a bit too fast, a little nervous,” he answered. “It didn’t have that insinuating groove like on Big Mama’s record.”
Eventually, he grew to like the Presley version. “After it sold seven million copies it began to sound better.”
Prophet, evangelist, guardian of the gates of heaven and hell, and notorious pain in the butt Lodowicke Muggleton was born in 1609. Uneducated, he worked as a tailor until his forties when he began to have revelations, announcing to the world that he and his cousin were the last two witnesses of God that would ever be appointed on earth and the exclusive deciders of who got into heaven and who didn’t. When his cousin died, Muggleton took this great burden upon himself.
Blessing those who listened to him and cursing those who didn’t, he eventually attracted a few followers who became known as Muggletonians. His cursing and raving made him enough of a public nuisance that he was twice jailed, fined and sentenced to stand in the pillory for several days. He had a particular dislike of Quakers which he spelled out in his book with the catchy title The Neck of the Quakers Broken or Cut in Sunder by the Two-Edged Sword of the Spirit Which Is Put Into My Mouth (1663).
Among some of the more interesting Muggletonian beliefs: Heaven is six miles above Earth; God is between five and six feet tall and has absolutely no interest in the affairs of mankind. Man’s greatest enemy is not the Devil, who doesn’t exist, but Reason, which, for humans, is unclean and filthy. They had no organized worship; they would sometimes meet in taverns to talk and sing rancorous Muggletonian songs.
Muggleton died at the age of 88, and his religion more or less continued for centuries after him. One Philip Noakes who bequeathed to the British Library an archive of Muggletonian documents in 1979 is thought to have been the last surviving Muggletonian, although this entry is bound to bring a few more out of hiding.
Perhaps He Was a Muggletonian
In 1837, British poet laureate Robert Southey wrote a letter to 20-year-old Charlotte Brontë. The letter was in reply to her letter of a few months earlier asking him for his opinion on whether a poem she enclosed was any good and whether she should continue to write. Her letter and the poem are lost, but Southey’s infamous reply was not. One noted passage: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and, when you are, you will be less eager for celebrity.”
Brontë’s thank you letter resonates with veiled sarcasm: “Once more allow me to thank you with sincere gratitude. I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print; if the wish should rise, I’ll look at Southey’s letter and suppress it.” Ten years later, she wrote Jane Eyre. Raise your hand if you remember Robert Southey.
In 1958, the U.S. Air Force bombed South Carolina. Surprisingly, the bombing of Mars Bluff, a rural area near Florence, was not intentional. The bomb was a nuclear weapon carried by a B-47 Stratojet en route from Savannah, Georgia, to the United Kingdom. (The Air Force was not planning to bomb the Brits; the plane was on its way to military exercises and was required to carry nuclear weapons in the event of a sudden Dr. Strangelovian incident with the Soviet Union.) A fault light in the cockpit indicated that the bomb harness locking pin for the transatlantic flight did not engage, and the navigator was summoned to the bomb bay to investigate. As he reached around the bomb to pull himself up, he mistakenly grabbed the emergency release pin. The bomb dropped to the floor of the B-47, its weight forcing the bomb bay doors open and sending the bomb 15,000 feet down to unsuspecting Mars Bluff. Oops.
Because the removable core of fissionable uranium and plutonium was stored separately on board the plane, the bomb was not actually atomic, but it did contain 7,600 pounds of explosives. And it created a pretty good mushroom cloud over Mars Bluff, leaving a 75-foot wide and 35-foot deep crater where Walter Gregg’s home and vegetable garden had been. The only real casualties were several chickens who bought the farm so to speak.
The crater is still preserved but grown over, pretty much just a big hole. Steven Smith, who chaired a 50th anniversary event a few years ago, couldn’t understand why it never became a real tourist attraction. “It sure could be,” he said. “This is a national treasure!”
Take This Verb and Parse It
Diagramming sentences – what fond memories that brings back. Shuffling nouns and verbs and predicate adjectives around until they find their proper position on the diagram. Those were the days, my friend. However, it’s with some sorrow that I contemplate our dear parts of speech. One of their number has fallen upon some hard times.
“Snow White bit into the apple,” said the brothers grimly.
Pity the poor adverb. Modern writing mavens pretty much eschew the adverb today – plucking it from the garden of good writing (or the garden of bad metaphors, if you prefer) as though it were an insignificant weed. Okay, maybe it’s sometimes overused, but in moderation, like alcohol, caffeine and fat, it serves a noble purpose.
It wasn’t always considered a sin to associate with an adverb. Some important folks have — as I will demonstrate. Going way back to cite an example from a good book (or as many prefer The Good Book) “Verily, I say unto you . . .” Okay, all together now, what part of speech is that word verily? You got it. And it’s used more than once by you know who. Okay, who wants to go first? Just step right up and say “Lose that adverb.” I’d say that’s inviting a smiting.
Thomas Mann: Hold fast to time! Use it! Be conscious of each day, each hour! They slip away unnoticed all too easily and swiftly.
E. B. White: Be obscure clearly.
Mark Twain: The intellect is stunned by the shock but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words.
Or you may remember that catchy tune by Francis Scott Key with words that go something like this: Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming? Call the adverb police.
And finally, moving into the future, I quote just three words from one Captain Kirk: “to boldly go.” Now there’s a strong, sassy adverb coming to the rescue of a puny little verb and splitting an infinitive just for good measure.
Who would have thought back on March 10, 1876, that in a hundred or so years practically every other human on the face of the earth would have a phone pressed against the side of his or her head at any given moment. Certainly not Alexander Graham Bell, as he was in the process of making the very first phone call. It wasn’t much of a call, certainly not long distance. Bell called his assistant Thomas A. Watson who was in the next room. The phones they used weren’t much to behold; they looked more like tin cans connected by a long string than today’s sleek models. But nevertheless they made history.
The moment of truth in Bell’s own words: “I then shouted . . . the following sentence: Mr. Watson come here — I want to see you. To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said.”
Enter the quibblers. Why didn’t Watson answer Bell using that brand new telephone, they ask. And if Bell shouted his words and Watson were in the very next room, he’d very likely hear them without the phone, they suggest.
Watson’s diary says Bell’s words were actually “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you. ” a minor difference but just chock full of innuendo, they say, eyebrows raised. And some even suggest that the incident is all fabrication, that Bell actually stole the idea for the telephone from another inventor, Elisha Gray.
History does not record Bell’s disappointment when he tried to duplicate the experiment and was put on hold.
The Milkman Cometh
New Mexico State University’s first ever graduation was to have taken place on this date in 1893 but was abruptly canceled when Sam Steel, the lone graduating senior, was shot and killed while delivering milk the day before graduation.
Said the local paper: “The hearts of the whole community were stricken with sadness when it was learned that Samuel Steel, the most brilliant student of our College, had been foully and wil(l)fully murdered on Thursday evening, March 9th. We do not consider it in place to refer to the details of this ghastly deed, which are known to most of our readers; we only feel assured that it was perpetrated in sheer cold-bloodedness, and, knowing the victim as well as we have done, without the slightest provocation.”
Knowing what we do today about the reputation of milkmen, one might speculate that there could have been a slight provocation.
Louis Phillippe, King of the French (as opposed to King of France) from 1830 to 1848, created an elite military force on March 9, 1831, to bolster the regular French army. The French Foreign Legion or Légion étrangère was unique in that it was open to foreigners wising to join the French armed forces which normally allowed only French citizens to serve. Legionnaires could apply for French citizenship after three years’ service or immediately after being wounded in battle — “Français par le sang versé” (“French by spilled blood”). Known for its exceptional military skills and its strong esprit de corps, it became gained a reputation as a top mercenary corps.
The Legion also became legendary in pop culture. It has played a part in hundreds of books and movies, probably the most famous of which is the 1924 novel Beau Geste, about three brothers joining the Legion. It was made into a movie five times, and parodied even more. Buster Crabbe joined the Legion as Captain Gallant. Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges all did time. As did Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Pepé Le Pew, Heckle and Jeckle, and Snoopy. Edith Piaf and Frank Sinatra have both sung about the Legion.
In 1977, Marty Feldman wrote and starred in The Last Remake of Beau Geste. It probably won’t be.
The Japanese Foreign Legion?
Lt. Hiroo Onoda, a soldier in the Japanese army, was sent to the remote Philippine island of Lubang in 1944 to conduct guerrilla warfare. Onoda was supposed to blow up the pier at the harbor and destroy the Lubang airfield. Unfortunately, his commanders, who were worried about other matters, decided not to help Onoda on his mission and soon the island was overrun by the Allies. Time passed, the war ended, but nobody officially told Onoda; so for 29 years, Onoda remained a dedicated soldier, living in the jungle, eating coconuts and bananas and deftly evading searching parties. Hiding out in the dense jungles, Onoda ignored the leaflets, newspapers, photographs and letters from relatives dropped by planes during the years; he was convinced they were all part of an Allied plot.
In 1974, a college dropout named Norio Suzuki traveled to the Philippines, telling his friends he was out to find a panda, the Abominable Snowman and Lt. Onoda. Where others had failed, Suzuki succeeded. He found Lt. Onoda and tried to convince him that the war was over. However, Onoda refused to leave the island until his commander ordered him to do so. Suzuki traveled back to Japan and found Onoda’s former commander, who had become a bookseller. On March 9, 1974, Suzuki and the commander/bookseller met Onoda and delivered orders that all combat activity was to be ceased, and Onoda laid down his arms.
Millard Fillmore ominously assumed the presidency as number 13 when President Zachary Taylor, “Old Rough and Ready,” pushed up presidential daisies in 1850. As the Last of the Red Hot Whigs to hold the office of president, Fillmore had a rather lackluster four years in office before receiving the boot from his own party. He is consistently a cellar dweller in historical POTUS rankings.
Fillmore’s most lasting legacy, trumpeted in a 1917 article, was the installation of a bathtub, a mahogany model, in the White House, giving the device an imprimatur that paved its way for wider distribution in the United States. This bit of sudsy statesmanship is frequently cited in reference to the Fillmore presidency. The whole story was of course a hoax, fabricated by one of the nation’s less reliable historians, H. L. Mencken. Even though the article was blatantly false and “a tissue of somewhat heavy absurdities,” it was widely quoted as fact for years. “My motive,” Mencken later explained, “was simply to have some harmless fun in war days. It never occurred to me that it would be taken seriously. Soon I began to encounter my preposterous “facts” in the writings of other men…. The chiropractors and other such quacks collared them for use as evidence of the stupidity of medical men. They were cited by medical men as proof of the progress of public hygiene. They got into learned journals and the transactions of learned societies. They were alluded to on the floor of Congress. The editorial writers of the land, borrowing them in toto and without mentioning my begetting of them, began to labor them in their dull, indignant way. They crossed the dreadful wastes of the North Atlantic, and were discussed horribly by English uplifters and German professors. Finally, they got into the standard works of reference, and began to be taught to the young.”
Old Rub-a-Dub-Dub joined Old Rough and Ready on March 8, 1874.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken
A certain Miss Molly Mogg of the Rose Tavern in Wokingham, England, turned up her dainty toes on March 7, 1766, at the age of 66. Some 40 years earlier she had been the subject of an amusing ballad written by “two or three men of wit.” The ballad, perhaps to the surprise of its authors, became quite popular. Literary historians have determined that the “men of wit” were Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Gay and that the three were probably quite drunk when they penned the tribute to the pretty Molly.
It begins:
The schoolboy delights in a play-day,
The schoolmaster’s delight is to flog;
The milkmaid’s delight is in May-day,
But mine is in sweet Molly Mogg.
and continues on for eleven verses each ending with “sweet Molly Mogg. This, of course required the three rhymesters to come up with 11 words to rhyme with Mogg. Which they did. In addition to the aforementioned flog, there’s bog, cog, frog, clog, jog, fog, dog, log, eclogue and agog — bypassing hog and Prague.
Cogito Airgonaut
Jean-Pierre Blanchard, the noted 18th century “Airgonaut,” made his first successful balloon flight in Paris back in 1784, in a hydrogen gas balloon launched from the Champ de Mars. Blanchard’s flight nearly ended in disaster, when one spectator slashed at the balloon’s mooring ropes and oars with his sword after being refused a place on board. Observer Horace Walpole wrote of the flight that the Airgonauts were just like birds; they flew through the air, perched in the top of a tree, and some passengers climbed out of their nest to look around.
Nevertheless, these early balloon flights set off a public “balloonomania”, with clothing, hairstyles and various objects decorated with images of balloons or styled to resemble a balloon. In 1793, Blanchard scored another first — the first balloon flight in North America, ascending in Philadelphia and landing in New Jersey. Witnesses to the flight included President George Washington, and future presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Some say Washington threw a silver dollar at the balloon.
Now famous, our Airgonaut married Marie Madeleine-Sophie Armant in 1804. But his run of fame, fortune and good luck came to a sudden end four years later, when Blanchard had a heart attack while ballooning above the Hague. He fell from his balloon and died of his injuries on March 7, 1809. His widow Sophie inherited everything including the ballooning bug which would be her undoing as well: she continued to support herself with ballooning demonstrations until it also killed her. In 1819, she became the first woman to be killed in an aviation accident when, during an exhibition in the Tivoli Gardens in Paris, she launched fireworks that ignited the gas in her balloon. Her balloon crashed on the roof of a house, and she fell to her death. Don’t try ballooning at home.
If asked to name an important sculptor, the name John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, would not come tripping off most people’s lips, although his most important work certainly would. Borglum died on March 6, 1941, leaving the monument he had worked on since 1927 uncompleted.
Borglum sculpted big: a portrait of Abraham Lincoln carved from a six-ton block of marble, a 76 by 158 foot bas-relief of Confederate heroes, and what would have been his biggest ever, the 60-foot heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
From the very moment the monument was completed, folks have wanted to edit it by sticking another head up there. And they become quite passionate about whose head it should be.
In 1937, while work was still in progress, a bill was introduced in Congress to add women’s right activist Susan B. Anthony. It failed to advance. A 2010 poll suggested JFK. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all had their hats tossed into the ring. Obama responded “I don’t think my ears would make it. There’s only so much rock up there.”
Donald Trump’s head would not satisfy the MAGA tribe. They want it to be renamed Mount Trumpmore.
The support for a fifth head gets no government support: “The National Park Service takes the position that death stayed the hand of the artist and the work is complete in its present form. Thus, to maintain both the integrity of the structure and the artist’s concept, there is no procedure for adding another likeness, the sculpture is complete.”
The Nose Knows
Mount Rushmore is home to 2 million visitors and has been extensively depicted throughout popular culture, probably most famously in the climactic chase scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest with Cary Grant swatting at secret agents from Lincoln ‘s forehead. Hitchcock later admitted: “I wanted Cary Grant to hide in Lincoln’s nostril and then have a fit of sneezing . . . the Department of Interior was rather upset at this thought. I argued until one of their number asked me how I would like it if they had Lincoln play the scene in Cary Grant’s nose. I saw their point at once.”
The Nose Knows II
Cyrano de Bergerac, born in 1619, is of course best known in modern times for his nose. According to legend, it was quite large. Depending on which account you accept, Cyrano was either a French aristocrat, author and military hero with a big nose or the descendant of a Sardinian fishmonger who suffered from syphilis with a big nose. He was an early writer of science fiction, and in his most famous work, The Other World, Cyrano travels to the moon using rockets powered by firecrackers where he meets the inhabitants who have four legs, musical voices, and firearms that shoot game and cook it — the TV rights are still available, if you’re interested. A lesser known work, Noses from Mars, is self-explanatory.
Then we come to the story of Cyrano himself and how he courted the fair Roxanne on behalf of his friend Christian. Although these people are real, the story is alas! pure fiction, which is probably just as well, for Roxanne was Cyrano’s cousin and had they ever consummated their relationship, their children would have been half-wits with big noses.
Wretched Richard's Almanac 