why dave bergman is neat

Man pulls TV from house fire to watch soccer Thu Jun 29, 7:31 AM ET

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Beijing soccer fan refused to let the small matter of his house burning down disturb his enjoyment of Tuesday's World Cup match between France and Spain.

A fire broke out in a hutong in the center of the Chinese capital at 3am local time Wednesday -- kickoff time in Hanover -- and gutted the traditional courtyard dwelling, the Beijing Daily Messenger reported.

"When the neighbors shouted 'fire!', I took my little baby and ran out in my nightclothes," the man's wife told the paper.

"My husband paid no attention to the danger, just grabbed the television and put it under his arm.

"After getting out of the house, he then set about finding an electric socket to plug in and continue watching his game."

The anti-social timing of the matches broadcast from Germany, which is six hours behind China, has forced some Chinese fans to go to great lengths to follow the action.

One man quit his job in Beijing to return to his hometown Chongqing so he could watch the whole tournament uninterrupted.

State news agency Xinhua reported that the 23-year-old's boss at the IT company had offered him a pay rise, but he turned it down flat, saying the World Cup was more important than his job.

The Guangzhou Daily reported that local police were forced to release a thief arrested for stealing a mobile phone when the victim refused to press charges because he did not want to miss the start of a match.

Although there are also many female World Cup fans in China, one man in the southeastern city had to sign a contract with his wife agreeing to do all the housework during the month of the finals so he could watch the matches at night.

Another from Putian, Fujian province, took a less diplomatic approach, Xinhua reported.

When his cheers during the Argentina-Ivory Coast match woke his wife and she switched off the television, he locked her in their bedroom and settled back down to watch the game ignoring her loud protests.

It's good to laugh at yourself sometimes. Actually, it's good to laugh at yourself a lot. Humility and all that. And this video made me, as an evangelical Christian, laugh myself almost onto the floor: 'Baby Got Book', a parody of Sir Mix-a-Lot's 'Baby Got Back'. You know what the song was about before; well, now it's about the Bible.

In spite of her having collaborated with Bright Eyes, I still respect Emmylou Harris and recently came across another duet of hers that I quite enjoy--it's called 'This is Us', with Mark Knopfler, off the All the Roadrunning album. Knopfler is becoming one of my favorite guitar players. His style is so subtle, and I don't know how he gets that great electric tone, but it is killer. Emmylou's voice is, as usual, stunningly beautiful. We can add this to the following list:

'If I Needed You', with Townes Van Zandt
'Oh My Sweet Carolina', with Ryan Adams
'Gulf Coast Highway', with Willie Nelson
The Neil Young collaborations on her album Wrecking Ball
Her contributions to Bob Dylan's album Desire
A live performance where I heard her sing 'One More Cup of Coffee' with Buddy Miller (remember that, Mark?)

By the way, I finally saw Walk the Line last night. It was pretty good.

June 29

1613 The Globe Theater burns down

The Globe Theater, where most of Shakespeare's plays debuted, burned down on this day in 1613.

The Globe was built by Shakespeare's acting company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, in 1599 from the timbers of London's very first permanent theater, Burbage's Theater, built in 1576. Before James Burbage built his theater, plays and dramatic performances were ad hoc affairs, performed on street corners and in the yards of inns. However, the Common Council of London, in 1574, started licensing theatrical pieces performed in inn yards within the city limits. To escape the restriction, actor James Burbage built his own theater on land he leased outside the city limits. When Burbage's lease ran out, the Lord Chamberlain's men moved the timbers to a new location and created the Globe. Like other theaters of its time, the Globe was a round wooden structure with a stage at one end, and covered balconies for the gentry. The galleries could seat about 1,000 people, with room for another 2,000 "groundlings," who could stand on the ground around the stage.

The Lord Chamberlain's men built Blackfriars theater in 1608, a smaller theater that seated about 700 people, to use in winter when the open-air Globe wasn't practical.

I've actually been enjoying watching the World Cup, but I thought that this article was mildly entertaining, in which the authors, in addition to citing the game as the perfect postmodern sport (a game about nothing in which nothing happens), claim that it is the most unhuman game for human beings to play, since it forces homo sapiens to batter a ball around with unprotected head and denies to homo habilis the right to use the hands--i.e. it flies in the face of two things (big brains and opposable thumbs) that, in the authors' view, make us distinctively human. Here's a little taste:

In truth, soccer could be played without using a ball at all, and few would notice the difference. The game consists of 22 men running up and down a grassy field for 90 minutes with little happening as fans scream wildly. When the ball actually approaches one of the goals, the fans reach fever pitch and the cheering becomes a deafening roar.

Of course, these infrequent occurrences in which the soccer ball approaches the end zone--where goaltenders wile away their time perusing magazines, trimming their fingernails or inspecting blades of grass--rarely result in a shot on goal. Most often the ball ends up high over the goal, missing everything by 20 or 30 feet. These "near misses" typically send the fans into paroxysms; TV announcers scream themselves hoarse. Then the players mill about the field for another 20 or 30 minutes or so and the goaltenders return to their musings before the ball returns, like Halley's comet in its far-flung orbit, for another pass in the general vicinity of the goal.

(LvRef21.)

A friend send me a compilation of 'Weird Al' Yankovic's songs about food a couple of months ago. It is called, appropriately, 'The Food Album'. I haven't listened to Weird Al in a long time, but let me tell you something: it is still hilarious. The album includes such classics as 'Eat It', 'My Bologna', 'The Rye or the Kaiser, and 'Lasagna'. I still laugh out loud at some of the stuff.

Any readers interested in art, faith, life, and the intersection of the three might want to check out a recent Weekly Standard review (well, I guess they call it a ‘preview’) of Arthur Kirsch’s book Auden and Christianity by Wilfred M. McClay, professor of humanities and history at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. Auden moved from left-wing sympathies back to Anglicanism, though in influences (two of the most important being Reinhold Niebuhr and Soren Kierkegaard) and many sympathies he seems to have been a modernist liberal Protestant (by the way, I don’t claim expertise on Auden’s theological pedigree; these are just some off-hand remarks and a summary of some parts of the article), and he held many unorthodox views. Of course, however, he was most influential as a poet and critic, not as a theologian, and that is probably the way he would’ve wanted it (though Kirsch also notes that he would have wished to be remembered ‘as a man who sought to live a Christian life’). Still, the book seems to contain an interesting analysis of this part of his life. As a teaser, here are the first two paragraphs of the (p)review:

IT'S A SAFE BET THAT W.H. AUDEN would have been suspicious of the idea behind this book. True, he was forthcoming about his attraction to the Christian faith, an attraction that remained strong even during his years of professed atheism, and became explicit after his formal return to the church in 1940. He was equally forthcoming in lamenting what he called the "prudery" of "cultured people" who treat religious belief as the last remaining shameful thing, and find theological terms "far more shocking than any of the four-letter words." Furthermore, there can be no doubt that Auden was, and deserves to be known as, a Christian writer, rather than a writer who merely happened to be Christian. Many of his most distinguished works of poetry and criticism, especially in his American years, are not only indebted to, but positively enveloped in, the riches of Christian narrative, language, imagery, allusion, and moral insight.

The notion that religious faith and serious thought are mutually exclusive categories always struck Auden as risible and unintelligible. But he would have bristled at an effort to separate out his religious beliefs and restate them as systematic propositions, or examine them independently or thematically, rather than see them as players in his rich and various inner symbolic drama. Such an undertaking would probably have struck him as unspeakably vulgar and, moreover, an invasion of his privacy, putting his devotional life on display and forcing him unwillingly to be judged by the public standard of a "religious" man, a role for which he felt singularly ill-equipped.

Auden was primarily a poet. Let’s move on now to someone who was primarily a critic: F.R. Leavis. The Weekly Standard also has a review of F.R. Leavis: Essays and Documents, edited by Ian MacKillop and Richard Storer. The (p)review is by Brooke Storer. Leavis was a great contributor to the professionalization of the study of English literature, a polarizing figure who was ‘not only dogmatic but belligerent and paranoid’. He wished to educate his students in how to study and analyze literature; on a less sympathetic reading, he wished rather to indoctrinate them:

Leavis's effect on educational standards was so pervasive that his inimical colleague, the literary historian E.M.W. Tillyard, complained that his students were trained rather than educated; they came up to Cambridge, he said, already armed with "a repertory of labels and phrases to be attached, by cunning, to the proper exhibits," and fully informed as to "the proper authors to admire or despise." Patrick Harrison, a former student of Leavis's, has spoken not only of "OK texts" for Leavis's students to read and approve, but "OK words"--"poise," "immediacy," "sharply realized"--for them to bandy about in examination papers.

Toward the end of the (p)review, we read the following:

To reexamine Leavis's career is to return to the question he thought he had definitively answered: that is, whether it is really desirable to "professionalize" literary criticism at all. Perhaps Leavis's Victorian and neo-Victorian predecessors (George Saintsbury, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Lord David Cecil) had it right, and the study of literature must remain the province of the erudite amateur. Literature simply cannot be judged or examined by scientific standards; if it could, it would not be literature at all but science or philosophy.

I admit that one would be hard-pressed to successfully apply scientific standards to literature. I’m still, however, the follow-up to that leaves me a bit unsettled: ‘...if it could, it would not be literature at all but science or philosophy.’ Are boundaries between types of writing really this hard and fast? If they are, then what do we do with, say, the ancient Greeks, who wrote science as literature, philosophy as literature (and, of course, literature as philosophy)?

Anyway, the book sounds like a good read, even including class-notes taken by his students. If you’re interested in literary criticism and its history, it might be worth perusing.

(Links via ALDaily.)

Wed Jun 21, 8:23 AM ET

KAMPALA (Reuters) - Ugandan police have banned people from playing pool during the daytime because it encourages crime, local media said Wednesday.

The game is very popular in the east African nation, where pool tables sit under canopies outside thousands of small bars.

But Kampala police chief Grace Turyagumanawe said youths often played while drinking illegal spirits and smoking drugs.

"They also use this as a meeting place to make plans of robbing people of their property at night," he told the Daily Monitor newspaper. "We are not banning the sport, but we are stopping people from playing it during the day."

Bar owners like pool tables because they earn income but use no electricity. Uganda has suffered power cuts for months.

June 21

1956 Arthur Miller refuses to name communists

Playwright Arthur Miller defies the House Committee on Un-American Activities and refuses to name suspected communists.

Miller's defiance of McCarthyism won him a conviction for contempt of court, which was later reversed by the Supreme Court. His passport had already been denied when he tried to go to Brussels to attend the premiere of his play The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials.

Miller was born in 1915 to a well-off German-Jewish family with a prosperous clothing store. However, the store went bankrupt after the stock market crash in 1929, and the family moved to Brooklyn. Miller finished high school at 16 and decided to become a writer after reading Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

Miller worked for two years in an automobile-parts warehouse before he attended the University of Michigan, where he studied journalism and playwriting. His student plays, largely studies of Jewish families, won awards. His first literary success was a novel called Focus (1945), about anti-Semitism. His first hit Broadway play, All My Sons, was produced in 1947. In 1949, Death of a Salesman was produced and won a Pulitzer Prize.

In 1956, Miller divorced his first wife and married glamorous movie star Marilyn Monroe. The couple remained married until 1961, the same year she starred in the movie he wrote for her, The Misfits. In 1962, he married his third wife, photographer Ingeborg Morath, and continued to write hit plays.

Miller died on February 10, 2005 at age 89 of congestive heart failure.

(Via Arts&Letters Daily.)

The first is by Roger Scruton on Francis Fukuyama and the 'end of history'. The article is too brief for Scruton to develop his ideas at any length, but I heard him talk about a similar thesis at Villanova sometime last year. Here are the three concluding paragraphs:

Fukuyama is wrong to believe that Hegel was the first historicist philosopher. He was preceded by Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) and Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Ibn Khaldun made the useful point that historical processes are not governed by culture and knowledge only, but also by the will to reproduce. This will, he believed, dwindles as people become habituated to luxury, and dynasties therefore rise and fall according to a quasi-biological logic.

That, clearly, is far too simple an hypothesis. But it adds something that is missing from most historicist theses, and especially from those German theories that appeal to Kojève and Fukuyama, namely the permanent legacy of human biology. Much that we attribute to history we ought rather to attribute to biology – including aggression, territorial expansion and maybe even scapegoating, racism and the all-pervading emotion that Nietzsche called ressentiment.

Christ taught us to overcome those things, and paid the price for doing so. Maybe it is the long-term effect of his sacrifice that so much of European history looks like a process of steady emancipation from the grim realities of species life. But that only tends to confirm the thesis that Fukuyama attributes to Huntington: that the march of history towards liberal democracy is a local achievement of Christian culture.

Second is a scathing review by Peter Beaumont of Noam Chomksy's Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. While claiming that Chomsky does land some 'crunching punches', Beaumont's major beef is that the book is long on rhetoric, short on ideas, and irresponsible with information. As a bonus, you can find out by reading the article that Beaumont believes in recoverable authorial intent. One claim that was confusing to me: Beaumont claims that under the Bush administrations 'American officials' have been responsible for 'kidnapping' while 'storm[ing] their way around the globe'. Is that true? I haven't heard or read anything about official American kidnappings.

Today's nugget is about Nathanael West and the publication of A Cool Million. I haven't read that one, but I have read The Day of the Locust, which I remember being very good. One thing I'd forgotten about it, though, was that it had a character named Homer Simpson.

June 19

1934 Nathanael West's A Cool Million is published

On this day, Nathanael West's novel A Cool Million, a satire of rags-to-riches morality tales, is published.

West, the son of Jewish immigrants, was born in New York in 1903. He attended Brown University, then went to Paris to write for about a year and a half, during which time he wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, about disgruntled characters inside the Trojan Horse. Only 500 copies of the book were printed when it was published in 1931.

West returned to New York, where he took a job managing a hotel. He frequently gave free or cheap rooms to struggling fellow writers, including Dashiell Hammet and Erskine Caldwell. In 1933, he published his novella, Miss Lonelyhearts, about a male reporter who becomes increasingly troubled by the pitiful letters he answers in his advice column.

In the 1930s, West moved to Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1939 he published The Day of the Locust, considered one of the best novels written about early Hollywood. West and his wife, Eileen McKenney, were killed in an automobile accident in California in 1940. Although West was not widely read during his lifetime, his popularity grew after World War II and after the publication of The Complete Works of Nathanael West in 1957.

For trivia buffs, it's interesting to note that West died on the same weekend as F. Scott Fitzgerald:

By a bizarre coincidence, Fitzgerald and West died on the same weekend in December 1940. West was killed in an automobile accident on December 22, near El Centro, California, with his wife Eileen McKenney. He was recently married, with better-paid script work coming in, and returning from a trip to Mexico. Distraught over hearing of his friend's Fitzgerald's death, he crashed his car after ignoring a stop sign. Eileen McKenney become the subject of a book, My Sister Eileen (1938), written by Ruth McKenney, her sister.

And since The Day of the Locust is about Hollywood, today's tidbit about entertainment history is relevant as well:

June 19

1905 First nickelodeon opens

On this day in 1905, Pittsburgh showman Harry Davis opens the world's first nickelodeon, showing a silent film called The Great Train Robbery. The storefront theater boasted 96 seats and charged only 5 cents. Nickelodeons soon spread across the country, typically featuring live vaudeville acts as well as short films. By 1907, some two million Americans had visited a nickelodeon, and the storefront theaters remained the main outlet for films until they were replaced around 1910 by large modern theaters.

Inventors in Europe and the United States, including Thomas Edison, had been developing movie cameras since the late 1880s. Early films could only be viewed as peep shows, but by the late 1890s movies could be projected on a screen. Audiences were beginning to attend public demonstrations, and several movie "factories" (as the earliest production studios were called) were formed. In 1896, the Edison Company inaugurated the era of commercial movies, showing a collection of moving images as a minor act in a vaudeville show that also included live performers, among whom were a Russian clown, an "eccentric dancer," and a "gymnastic comedian." The film, shown at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City, featured images of dancers, ocean waves, and gondolas.

Short films, usually less than a minute long, became a regular part of vaudeville shows at the turn of the century as "chasers" to clear out the audience after a show. A vaudeville performers' strike in 1901, however, left theaters scrambling for acts, and movies became the main event. In the earliest years, vaudeville theater owners had to purchase films from factories via mail order, rather than renting them, which made it expensive to change shows frequently. Starting in 1902, Henry Miles of San Francisco began renting films to theaters, forming the basis of today's distribution system. The first theater devoted solely to films, "The Electric Theater" in Los Angeles, opened in 1902. Housed in a tent, the theater's first screening included a short called "New York in a Blizzard." Admission cost about 10 cents for a one-hour show. Nickelodeons developed soon after, offering both movies and live acts.

So a live rodent has been discovered that was thought to have been extinct for 11 million years--'a docile, squirrel-sized animal with dark dense fur and a long tail but not as bushy as a squirrel's' that 'waddles like a duck with its hind feet splayed out at an angle — ideal for climbing rocks'.

But apparently this wasn't the first specimen of the rodent that has been discovered; it was just thought to be a new species:

'The long-whiskered rodent was branded as a new species last year when biologists first examined dead specimens they found being sold at meat markets.

I'm not sure, but I'm guessing it's not something you're going to find on special at Kroger or Superfresh.

The best albums of 2006 so far.*

*N.B., these are the best albums that I've heard so far in 2006 (released at any time before, well, now), not what I think are the best albums released in 2006.

1. Explosions in the Sky, The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place. You might recognize some of the songs of this Midland, TX, outfit from the movie Friday Night Lights. The album, entirely instrumental, is breathtakingly beautiful, and I don't say that hastily or with typical indie-rock hyperbole. Evocative.

2. The Weakerthans, Reconstruction Site. This is by far the most intelligent pop album I've heard in a long time. Of course, as I was writing this, I realized I don't actually have the whole thing at the moment. To be remedied soon.

3. Songs: Ohia, The Magnolia Electric Co. Good midwestern rock/twang type stuff.

4. Richard Buckner, Richard Buckner. Do I really need to give an explanation?

5. Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane, Over the Sea. All I can say is I don't know why I didn't pick this up sooner after Beauchamp's recommendation about 6 or 7 years ago.

I'll just post the lead paragraph and let his fingers do the walking.

June 15

1846 Francis Parkman arrives at Fort Laramie

Francis Parkman, one of the first serious historians to study the American West, arrives at Fort Laramie and prepares for a summer of research with the Sioux.

MAGNA CARTA SEALED:
June 15, 1215

Following a revolt by the English nobility against his rule, King John puts his royal seal on the Magna Carta, or "Great Charter." The document, essentially a peace treaty between John and his barons, guaranteed that the king would respect feudal rights and privileges, uphold the freedom of the church, and maintain the nation's laws. Although more a reactionary than a progressive document in its day, the Magna Carta was seen as a cornerstone in the development of democratic England by later generations.

John was enthroned as king of England following the death of his brother, King Richard the Lion-Hearted, in 1199. King John's reign was characterized by failure. He lost the duchy of Normandy to the French king and taxed the English nobility heavily to pay for his foreign misadventures. He quarreled with Pope Innocent III and sold church offices to build up the depleted royal coffers. Following the defeat of a campaign to regain Normandy in 1214, Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury, called on the disgruntled barons to demand a charter of liberties from the king.

In 1215, the barons rose up in rebellion against the king's abuse of feudal law and custom. John, faced with a superior force, had no choice but to give in to their demands. Earlier kings of England had granted concessions to their feudal barons, but these charters were vaguely worded and issued voluntarily. The document drawn up for John in June 1215, however, forced the king to make specific guarantees of the rights and privileges of his barons and the freedom of the church. On June 15, 1215, John met the barons at Runnymede on the Thames and set his seal to the Articles of the Barons, which after minor revision was formally issued as the Magna Carta.

The charter consisted of a preamble and 63 clauses and dealt mainly with feudal concerns that had little impact outside 13th century England. However, the document was remarkable in that it implied there were laws the king was bound to observe, thus precluding any future claim to absolutism by the English monarch. Of greatest interest to later generations was clause 39, which stated that "no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed] or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised...except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." This clause has been celebrated as an early guarantee of trial by jury and of habeas corpus and inspired England's Petition of Right (1628) and the Habeas Corpus Act (1679).

In immediate terms, the Magna Carta was a failure--civil war broke out the same year, and John ignored his obligations under the charter. Upon his death in 1216, however, the Magna Carta was reissued with some changes by his son, King Henry III, and then reissued again in 1217. That year, the rebellious barons were defeated by the king's forces. In 1225, Henry III voluntarily reissued the Magna Carta a third time, and it formally entered English statute law.

The Magna Carta has been subject to a great deal of historical exaggeration; it did not establish Parliament, as some have claimed, nor more than vaguely allude to the liberal democratic ideals of later centuries. However, as a symbol of the sovereignty of the rule of law, it was of fundamental importance to the constitutional development of England. Four original copies of the Magna Carta of 1215 exist today: one in Lincoln Cathedral, one in Salisbury Cathedral, and two in the British Museum.

June 15

1300 Dante is named prior of Florence

On this day, poet Dante Alighieri becomes one of six priors of Florence, active in governing the city. Dante's political activities, which include the banishment of several rivals, lead to his own exile from Florence, his native city, after 1302. He will write his great work, The Divine Comedy, as a virtual wanderer, seeking protection for his family in town after town.

Dante was born to a family with noble ancestry whose fortunes had fallen. His father was a moneylender. Dante began writing poetry in his teens and received encouragement from established poets, to whom he sent sonnets as a young man.

At age nine, Dante first caught a glimpse of Beatrice Portinari, also nine, who would symbolize for him perfect female beauty and spiritual goodness in the coming decades. Despite his fervent devotion to Portinari, who did not seem to return his feelings, Dante became engaged to Gemma Donati in 1277, but the two did not marry until eight years later. The couple had six sons and a daughter.

About 1293, Dante published a book of prose and poetry called The New Life, followed a few years later by another collection, The Banquet. It wasn't until his banishment that he began work on his Divine Comedy. In the poem's first book, Dante takes a tour through Hell with the poet Virgil as his guide. Virgil also guides the poet through Purgatory in the second book. The poet's guide in Paradise, however, is named Beatrice. The work was written and published in sections between 1308 and 1321. Although Dante called the work simply Comedy, the work became enormously popular, and a deluxe version published in 1555 in Venice bore the title The Divine Comedy. Dante died of malaria in Ravenna in 1321.

June 14

1811 Harriet Beecher Stowe is born

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, is born on this day in Litchfield, Connecticut, the seventh child of Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher.

Stowe studied at private schools in Connecticut and worked as a teacher in Hartford for five years until her father moved to Cincinnati in 1832. She accompanied him and continued to teach while writing stories and essays. In 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, with whom she had seven children. She published her first book, Mayflower, in 1843.

While living in Cincinnati, Stowe encountered fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad. Later, she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in reaction to recently tightened fugitive laws. The book sold some 300,000 copies and did much to galvanize public opinion in the North against slavery. Stowe traveled to England in 1853, where she was welcomed as a literary hero. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, she became one of the original contributors to The Atlantic, which launched in November 1857. In 1863, when Lincoln announced the end of slavery, she danced in the streets. Stowe continued to write throughout her life and died in 1896.

This is a good one, given my recent rediscovery of the joy of detective novels.

June 13

1893 Dorothy Sayers is born

Mystery writer Dorothy Sayers, creator of detective Lord Peter Wimsey, is born on this day in Oxford, England.

Sayers, whose father was an Oxford teacher and minister, became one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford. Although the family moved to the country when Sayers was four, she received an excellent education in Latin, French, history, and mathematics from her father and won a scholarship to Oxford. She received highest honors on her final exams in 1915. Although women at the time were not granted degrees, the rules changed retroactively in 1920.

After Oxford, Sayers worked as a poetry editor in Oxford and a teacher in France. She returned to London to work as a freelance editor and an advertising copywriter for England's largest ad agency. She later turned her experiences at the agency into comic fodder in Murder Must Advertise (1933).

She began writing detective fiction in the early 1920s, and her first novel, Whose Body?, was published in 1923. It introduced the world to the educated and fanciful Lord Peter Wimsey, who over the course of some dozen novels and many short stories emerged as a complex, intriguing character, comic and lighthearted at times, but plagued with nightmares and nervous disorders from his service in World War I.

In Strong Poison (1930), Wimsey solves a mysterious poisoning and wins freedom for the wrongly accused mystery novelist Harriet Vane, with whom he falls in love and pursues through several books. In Gaudy Night (1935), set at an Oxford reunion, Vane finally accepts Wimsey. The two, plus Wimsey's butler Bunter, depart on a comical honeymoon, plagued by dead bodies, in Busman's Honeymoon (1937).

Sayers herself had an unhappy romance in the early 1920s and had a child in 1924. Two years later, she married Scottish journalist Oswald Atherton Fleming, who became an invalid not long afterward. She spent much of the next 25 years caring for him, until his death in 1950.

With G.K. Chesteron, Sayers founded the Detection Club, a group of mystery writers. She edited an important anthology called Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horrors from 1928 to 1934. After the late 1930s, she grew tired of detective fiction, and having won enough financial independence to write what she liked, she returned to her academic roots and wrote scholarly treatises on aesthetics and theology, as well as translations of Dante and others. She died in 1957.

I'd just like to congratulate the Detroit Tigers for being the first team in baseball to 40 wins this season. Now, before anyone gets too excited, let's remember what's been happening this year to Detroit sports teams with the best regular season records (see early playoff exits of Red Wings and Pistons). Still, it's nice to enjoy a first-place standing this far into the season given that they haven't been having a year like this since my age was in single digits. Looks like bringing Leyland in was a great move.

Also, the World Cup is apparently going on right now. If I followed soccer, that would probably seem really sweet to me. But at least there are millions of Germans who think it's really sweet.

June 12

1942 Anne Frank receives a diary

On this day, Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, receives a diary for her 13th birthday. A month later, she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis in rooms behind her father's office. For two years, the Franks and four other families hid, fed and cared for by Gentile friends. The families were discovered by the Gestapo, which had been tipped off, in 1944. The Franks were taken to Auschwitz, where Anne's mother died. Friends in Amsterdam searched the rooms and found Anne's diary hidden away.

Anne and her sister were transferred to another camp, Bergen-Belsen, where Anne died of typhus a month before the war ended.

Anne's father survived Auschwitz and published Anne's diary in 1947 as The Diary of a Young Girl. The book has been translated into some 30 languages.

June 10

1881 Tolstoy disguises himself as a peasant and leaves on a pilgrimage

On this day in 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy sets off on a pilgrimage to a monastery disguised as a peasant.

Tolstoy had already produced his two greatest masterpieces War and Peace (1865-1869) and Anna Karenina (1875-1877). The Russian nobleman was engaged in a spiritual struggle and felt torn between his responsibility as a wealthy landlord to improve the lot of the people, and his desire to give up his property and wander the land as an ascetic. He had started giving away his possessions and declared that the public owned his works, but his wife, Sofya, worried about the financial stability of the couple's 13 children, gained control of the copyrights for all his work published before 1880.

Tolstoy was born in 1828. His parents died when he was a child, and he was raised by relatives. He went to Kazan University at age 16 but was disappointed in the quality of education there and returned to his estate in 1847 without a degree. He lived a wild and dissolute life in Moscow and St. Petersburg until 1851, when he joined the army. He fought in the Crimean war, and his experiences in the defense of Sevastopol became a successful literary memoir, Sevastopol Sketches, in 1855. While in the army, he wrote several other autobiographical works.

In 1857, Tolstoy visited Europe and became interested in education. He started a school for peasant children on his estate and studied progressive educational techniques. In 1862, he married, and the following year he published a successful novel, The Cossacks.

Later in his life, Tolstoy embraced Christian anarchism and was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1910, he fled his home secretly with his youngest daughter but caught pneumonia and died at a remote railway station a few day s later.

June 8

1999 Hannibal by Thomas Harris hits bookstores

Some 1.3 million copies of Hannibal, the final book in the Hannibal Lecter series by Thomas Harris, arrive at bookstores around the country. Hannibal quickly tops the bestseller charts, despite-or perhaps because of--an intensely gruesome plot.

Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant psychiatrist/serial killer with a taste for human flesh, first appeared in Harris' 1981 book, Red Dragon, as a minor character. He played a larger role in The Silence of the Lambs (1988), which sold some 10 million copies and was made into an Academy Award-winning movie in 1991, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster. Hannibal was made into a film starring Hopkins and Julianne Moore in 2001.

Harris was born in 1940 in Richmond, Mississippi, the son of a biology teacher and an electrical engineer. In 1968, he took a job in New York with the Associated Press. While working for the news agency, Harris and two friends had an idea for a novel about hijackers seizing the Goodyear blimp during the Super Bowl. Harris turned the idea into the bestselling Black Sunday (1975). He has turned out bestsellers ever since. Like his antihero Hannibal Lecter, Harris is a gourmet chef with a taste for fine wines. He divides his time between Sag Harbor, Miami, and Paris.

Give some recent discussions about Midwestern literature, today's 'This Day in History' in the 'Literary' category is especially pertinent:

June 7

1954 Louise Erdrich is born

Award-winning novelist Louise Erdrich is born this day in Little Falls, Minnesota.

Erdrich's Native American heritage became a dominant theme in her novels, which explored the lives of American Indian families. Her grandfather was tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, and Erdrich was raised in the nearby town of Wahpeton, where her parents taught at a boarding school for Native American children run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Erdrich took a B.A. at Dartmouth College, where she met her future husband, Michael Dorris, who was also part Native American, descended from Modoc Indians from Kentucky. She earned her master's degree at Johns Hopkins. At various times, she worked as a field hand, a highway construction worker, a waitress, a lifeguard, and the editor of a paper for Native Americans in Boston. She and Dorris married and adopted three children. They later had three of their own as well, and struggled to support their growing family until Erdrich won the prestigious Nelson Algren fiction prize in 1982, with an award of $5,000. The award-winning story grew into her first novel, Love Medicine (1984), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich's subsequent books, including The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), and Tales of Burning Love (1996), were critical and popular successes. Meanwhile, Dorris' writing was also winning awards and gaining recognition.

The pair, who dedicated all their books to each other, seemed the perfect literary couple until Dorris committed suicide in 1997. Dorris was about to be indicted for sexually and physically abusing their children. Erdrich had secretly been separated from Dorris for more than a year at the time of his death.

Her 1998 novel, The Antelope Wife, features a deteriorating marriage and a husband who slides into drunkenness and self-pity before shooting himself. In the book's dedication, she was careful to make it clear that the subject matter was not based on Dorris' life. It read, "This book was written before the death of my husband."

June 6

1949 George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four is published

On this day, George Orwell's novel of a dystopian future, Nineteen Eighty-four, is published. The novel's all-seeing leader, known as "Big Brother," becomes a universal symbol for intrusive government and oppressive bureaucracy.

George Orwell was the nom de plume of Eric Blair, who was born in India. The son of a British civil servant, Orwell attended school in London and won a scholarship to the elite prep school Eton, where most students came from wealthy upper-class backgrounds, unlike Orwell. Rather than going to college like most of his classmates, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police and went to work in Burma in 1922. During his five years there, he developed a severe sense of class guilt; finally in 1927, he chose not to return to Burma while on holiday in England.

Orwell, choosing to immerse himself in the experiences of the urban poor, went to Paris, where he worked menial jobs, and later spent time in England as a tramp. He wrote Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933, based on his observation of the poorer classes, and in 1937 his Road to Wigan Pier documented the life of the unemployed in northern England. Meanwhile, he had published his first novel, Burmese Days, in 1934.

Orwell became increasingly left wing in his views, although he never committed himself to any specific political party. He went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to fight with the Republicans, but later fled as communism gained an upper hand in the struggle on the left. His barnyard fable, Animal Farm (1945), shows how the noble ideals of egalitarian economies can easily be distorted. The book brought him his first taste of critical and financial success. Orwell's last novel, Nineteen Eighty-four, brought him lasting fame with its grim vision of a future where all citizens are watched constantly and language is twisted to aid in oppression. Orwell died of tuberculosis in 1950.

They used to have races during the hottest part of the summer that my brother ran in when he was in high school (participants were given a t-shirt that said 'I ran through hell'). The race was just a race with a shirt that capitalized on the town's weird name, but this goes a little bit beyond that and seems to be--well, playing with fire.

Hell, Mich., heats up for 6-6-6 party Sun Jun 4, 7:04 AM ET

HELL, Mich. - They're planning a hot time in Hell on Tuesday. The day bears the date of 6-6-06, or abbreviated as 666 — a number that carries hellish significance. And there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that the day will go unnoticed in the unincorporated hamlet 60 miles west of Detroit.

Nobody is more fired up than John Colone, the town's self-styled mayor and owner of a souvenir shop.

"I've got `666' T-shirts and mugs. I'm only ordering 666 (of the items) so once they're gone, that's it," said Colone, also known as Odum Plenty. "Everyone who comes will get a letter of authenticity saying you've celebrated June 6, 2006, in Hell."

Most of Colone's wares will sell for $6.66, including deeds to one square inch of Hell.

Live entertainment and a costume contest are planned. The Gates of Hell should be installed at a children's play area in time for the festivities.

"They're 8 feet tall and 5 foot wide and each gate looks like flames, and when they're closed, it's a devil's head," Colone told The Detroit News for a Saturday story.

Mike "Smitty" Hickey, owner of the Dam Site Inn, wasn't sure what kind of clientele would show up Tuesday.

"We're all about having fun here. I don't think we're going to get the cult crowd, the devil worshippers or anything like that," said Hickey, whose bar's signature concoction is the Bloody Devil, a variant of the Bloody Mary.

Colone, meanwhile, has been in touch with radio stations as far away as San Diego and Seattle that are raffling off trips to Hell in honor of 6-6-6.

The 666 revelry is just the latest chapter in the town's storied history of publicity stunts, said Jason LeTeff, one of its 72 year-round residents — or, as the mayor calls them, Hellions or Hell-billies. But LeTeff wasn't particularly enthused.

"Now, here I am living in Hell, taking my kids to church and trying to teach them the right things and the town where we live is having a 6-6-6 party," he said.

According to the town's semiofficial Web site, there are two leading theories about how Hell got its name.

The first holds that a pair of German travelers stepped out of a stagecoach one sunny afternoon in the 1830s, and one said to the other, "So schoene hell" — roughly translated as, "So bright and beautiful." Their comments were overheard by some locals and the name stuck.

The second holds that George Reeves was asked after Michigan gained statehood what he thought the town he helped settle should be called, and reportedly replied, "I don't care, you can name it Hell if you want to." The name became official on Oct. 13, 1841.

A couple funny pictures of town signs can be seen here.

...this is also the anniversary of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

June 5

1968 Bobby Kennedy is assassinated

Senator Robert Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. Immediately after he announced to his cheering supporters that the country was ready to end its fractious divisions, Kennedy was shot several times by the 22-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan. He died a day later.

The summer of 1968 was a tempestuous time in American history. Both the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement were peaking. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in the spring, igniting riots across the country. In the face of this unrest, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided not to seek a second term in the upcoming presidential election. Robert Kennedy, John's younger brother and former U.S. Attorney General, stepped into this breach and experienced a groundswell of support.

Kennedy was perceived by many to be the only person in American politics capable of uniting the people. He was beloved by the minority community for his integrity and devotion to the civil rights cause. After winning California's primary, Kennedy was in the position to receive the Democratic nomination and face off against Richard Nixon in the general election.

As star athletes Rafer Johnson and Roosevelt Grier accompanied Kennedy out a rear exit of the Ambassador Hotel, Sirhan Sirhan stepped forward with a rolled up campaign poster, hiding his .22 revolver. He was only a foot away when he fired several shots at Kennedy. Grier and Johnson wrestled Sirhan to the ground, but not before five bystanders were wounded. Grier was distraught afterward and blamed himself for allowing Kennedy to be shot.

Sirhan confessed to the crime at his trial and received a death sentence on April 24, 1969. However, since the Supreme Court invalidated all death penalty sentences in 1972, Sirhan has spent the rest of his life in prison. He has never provided a clear explanation for why he targeted Bobby Kennedy.

Hubert Humphrey ended up running for the Democrats in 1968, but lost by a small margin to Nixon.

June 5

1949 Ken Follett is born

Bestselling thriller writer Ken Follett is born on this day in Wales to a devout Christian family that does not allow young Ken to watch TV, see movies, or listen to the radio.

As a result of his strict media diet during childhood, Follett became a voracious reader. After college, he became a reporter for the newspaper in Cardiff, Wales, his hometown, and later reported for a paper in London. Deciding he wasn't a very good reporter, he tried his hand at novels after a friend received a 200-pound advance (less than $400) for a thriller. Coincidentally, Follett needed about 200 pounds to fix his broken car, so he wrote a thriller, which was picked up by Everest Publishers.

Although his advance was large enough to fix his car, the book flopped, and Follett went to work for Everest. He wrote 10 novels during the next four years, finally breaking through with The Eye of the Needle. He wrote many more bestselling spy thrillers, then branched out with historical fiction such as Pillars of the Earth, about cathedral builders in medieval Europe, and On Wings of Eagles, a nonfiction account of Ross Perot's mission to rescue employees trapped in Iran.

Just plain Bill is banned in Hollywood name game
By Arthur Spiegelman
Fri Jun 2, 10:11 AM ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - If you have ever wondered what's in a name, consider: Brooklyn, Moxie Crimefighter, Bluebell Madonna, Suri, Phinneaus, Apple and, debuting just last week, Shiloh.

All these are names that celebrities have bestowed upon their newborns in their quest for the unusual, outlandish or off-the-wall. Consider plain Bill boring and banned.

The experts say it is only a matter of time before the latest trendy new names spread to the general public. For example, ordinary people in the Bronx could start naming their children Brooklyn -- a name British soccer star David Beckham and his ex-Spice Girl wife Victoria chose for their son.

Although some name experts think the public might embrace Brooklyn as a first name, they might not jump at the name another former Spice Girl, Geri Halliwell, gave her daughter -- Bluebell Madonna.

Shortly before the birth, Halliwell told a British magazine she saw bluebells everywhere and took that as a sign. As for the name Madonna, she explained it this way: "No one else has the name except the Virgin and the singer, who I adore."

It might take a few years to see if the name Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt gave their new daughter -- Shiloh -- when she was born Saturday catches on with the general public.

A GIRL CALLED MESSIAH

Paul JJ Payack, the head of Global Language Monitor, which monitors word and name usage, says Shiloh is unusual in several ways: it is the site of one of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War, a male name and means Messiah.

"This is, indeed, a very unusual trend, where the baby's name is seen as just another Hollywood adornment," Payack said.

"Having children has become a fad, and as will any fad emanating from Hollywood, self-augmentation, adornment and going to the extreme are going to be present," he said.

Pam Satran, co-author of the bestselling baby naming book "Beyond Jason & Jennifer," says that for years bland names were the order of the day, but not any more. In fact, the next edition of her book will be titled, "Beyond Jason & Jennifer, Madison & Montana" to recognize the first name revolution.

"Twenty years ago celebrity baby names were pretty simple. It was Kate, Kate, Max, Max. Now celebrities are trying to outdo celebrities," she said.

In the 1950s, if a celebrity had an unusual name he or she would change it something simple and socially acceptable like Ken or Debbie.

As the decades passed, new fads included using boys' names for girls, like Drew, Cameron and Stockard. Then came the place names: Madison, Brooklyn, Paris and now, Shiloh.

"These days if you have an ordinary name in Hollywood you change it to a weird one. The more distinctive your name is the better. There's a whole issue of image and branding out there," Satran said.

She added, "Celebrities are very much aware of the power of their image."

And with that in mind, here are some example of what celebrities have recently called their children: Julia Roberts, Hazel and Phinneaus; Gwyneth Paltrow, Moses and Apple; Jason Lee, Pilot Inspektor; Joely Fisher, True Harlow; and Nicolas Cage: Kal-el.

According to the Social Security Administration the 10 most popular male names of the 2000s so far are Jacob, Michael, Joshua, Matthew, Andrew, Christopher, Joseph, Daniel, Nicholas and Ethan.

For girls they are Emily, Madison, Hannah, Emma, Ashley, Abigail, Alexis, Olivia, Samantha and Sarah.

Or to sum up in a single word: BORING.

'And finally, before the 11 o'clock news, with Dwyane Wade battling the flu and barely a factor, with a kid called White Chocolate outplaying all of them, with not a bang but a whimper -- and barely a whimper at that -- the Pistons lost their last game of the season.'

Well, I don't think this is accurate in any way, shape, or form, but I'll post my results as a shout-out to Mark.

You're Nevada!

People are constantly mispronouncing your name, and this has provided you
with a lot of frustration over the years. You prefer silver to gold, sagebrush to trees,
and cards to sporting events. There is almost nothing you aren't willing to lay down a
wager on, and others seek you out for advice on their own wagers. You don't take marriage
terribly seriously, though you are one of its biggest proponents. Far too often these
days, others are mistaking you for an industrial-strength garbage bag.


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