Snoopy

Snoopy made his premiere in The Peanuts comic strip two days into the strip's history. So October 4th, 1950 is Snoopy's birthday. Charles Schultz modeled him after his childhood beagles Snooky and Spike. He originally was supposed to be named Sniffy but changed it to Snoopy after discovering that Sniffy was taken. In the early days of the strip, Snoopy walked on all fours and was silent. After two years, the thought bubble was introduced to show what he was thinking. Other characters in the strip seemed to be able to read his mind because they responded to his thoughts as if he was talking. He was mostly silent in the TV specials. It was ten years after he was introduced that Snoopy started walking upright. Since then Snoopy became the real star of the strip and shows. Schultz claims that Snoopy became the character that the loser Charlie secretly wanted to be. Schultz suffered from manic depression and he modeled the character Charlie Brown after himself. When he was young, he claims, every time he started to show pride in some of his accomplishments, his father would tell him not to get a big head. So when he created Charlie, he purposely made him with a disproportionally large head.

Gladwell's Hours

Last year's New Year's resolution, for me, was that I would blog, at least one more entry, more than last year. As of right now, I need to blog 10 more times in 25 days to meet my goal. I really do learn something everyday. I work at home and listen to several podcasts a day which is mostly talk but some are music.

Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers: The Story of Success, sounds like a great read. I haven't read it yet, perhaps I'll read it next (after I finish this Orson Scott Card novel). I have heard Gladwell speak on several podcasts and I think he was on the Daily Show recently. His latest subject is why some people have extraordinary success and some don't. He doesn't believe in the gifted but believes that people become successful through practice and lots of hard work. It is kinda like that old joke .... "Young man! Young man! How do I get to Fenway Park?!" The young man responds "PRACTICE!"

He calls his principle the 10,000 Hours to Success. His best example is Bill Gates. Gates apparently spent 10,000 hours on a computer before he turned 18. I did the math, this over 416 days if he was awake on the computer all that time. This might explain Bill Gates' personality. This is not to say that everyone who spends 10,000 hours on the computer before he/she is 18 is going to grow up to be a billionaire. But given some luck and intelligence with the 10,000 hours, you have an outlier. My old track coach, Ira Brown, used to say that luck is when preparation met opportunity. So 10,000 hours doing anything like playing video games or watching Bill O'Riley isn't necessarily going to get you anything ... other than a potbelly and/or a bad attitude. It is important that you spend your 10,000 hours doing that is worth doing, hopefully learning or building a skill.

The coolest stat I have heard him state is that something like 90% of the elite hockey and soccer players in the US and Canada are born in the months of January, February and March. This could be mere chance or this could be explained by the fact that most youth hockey programs on the continent have a cutoff of a January birthday to get into them. This would mean that those who get into these programs at a younger age are more likely to succeed. They just have more time under their belt than the others ... there are those hours again. This doesn't mean that every kid that is born in January is going to success or if you are born in December you are not. It is just a high level look at trends. How do you get the Molson Center? Practice!

The Snail Darter and the God Committee

The snail darter is a small fish, about the size of a paper clip, that lives primarily in East Tennessee. It feeds on snails and providers food for larger fish like trout. In 1975 it was declared as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. This is significant because when this happened, it halted the creation of the Telico Dam (which helps bring electricity to the valley). The construction of this dam by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) would alter the habitat of the river to the point of killing all of the snail darter. You would think this would have brought a stop to construction of the dam, considering destroying this fish would have an equally destructive affect on recreational fishing and the local economy: enter the God Committee.

Senator Howard Baker (R-TN) sponsored of an amendment to the Endangered Species Act that would allow some projects exempt. The Tellico Dam was the first of such projects. This "God Committee," made up of several cabinet members and at least one person from the state in question. This amendment was signed into with bi-partisan support in Congress and signed by President Jimmy Carter.

As a side note, Baker was replaced by Al Gore in the US Senate in 1985. He was also asked by President Nixon to be on the US Supreme Court. Because he took too long to answer, Nixon picked Rehnquist instead. In 1976, he almost was picked to be Ford's running mate instead of Bob Dole. He ran for president in 1980 but dropped out after poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire. He was President Reagan's Chief of Staff from 1987 to 1988.

The Stones at Altamont

I just finished watching the film Gimme Shelter. What a great film! I have always had an appreciation for the Rolling Stones, but I wouldn't call myself a big fan. Among other things, the film documents the concert at Altamont Speedway in the San Francisco area in 1969. I have never known much about the concert other than that someone was stabbed to death by the Hell's Angels at the concert.

The Stones have always had the image of being bad boys. It is just that ... an image. It is something they grabbed onto after their friend, The Beatles, got such an image of being squeaky clean. Mick Jagger, not only the lead of the band but the business man, thought having the Hell's Angels as body guards at the concert would be a nice stunt to bolster this bad boy image. I guess he didn't think of how much the Angels were the real thing ... bad boys ... or to put it more bluntly just a bunch of violent thugs. After the violence started, the Stones had no idea how badly people were injured and continued to play after several interuptions with the intention of calming the crowd. One of the Angels claims he had a gun on Keith Richards threatening him if he stopped playing.

The Altamont Free Concert featured the Stones as the headliners since they organized the event. It also featured Bay Area rockers, Jefferson Airplane and the Flying Burrito Brothers. The Grateful Dead were supposed to play but refused to go .. hearing that Marty Balin of the Airplane was assaulted by the Angels and knocked unconscious while he was playing. 300,000 people attended the concert. The stabbing death of Meredith Hunter was already known to me before I saw the film but what I didn't know that is that there were 3 other accidental deaths during the concert, two by car accident and one by drowning in an irrigation ditch. The stabbing and the assault on Balin are documented in the film, just a little hard to see in the commotion.

I find the coolest thing about the film is watching Jagger and Charlie Watts watching the news reports about the stabbing coming in. You can see in their faces, the regret and some shame. Charlie even had a tear. They just wanted to put on a great rock show. They didn't know what they were dealing with when it came to the Angels.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the city of Danzig

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact is the short name of the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in August 1939. The longer, more official name is Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was named after the two high ranking representatives from those nations, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The term non-aggression on its own sounds nice until you understand that it just meant that they weren't going to be aggressive to each other while they invaded the nations around them. Barely a week later on September 1st, Germany invaded Poland on their eastern border while the Soviets waited until September 17th to invade them from the other side. They both went on to invade the nations of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania splitting the land and resources into their respective spheres of influence. Only Finland was able to hold them off.

Under the Versailles Treaty after World War I, Poland was guaranteed access to the sea (the Baltic). So the city of Danzig was declared a free city under the auspice of the League of Nations. So this split Germany up with a small portion of the nation disconnected from the mainland (where Konigsberg is now). Not a good situation. The city had its own currency, stamps and national anthem. Germany wanted to build a highway connecting Konigsberg to the rest of Germany. When this did not happen, Germany demanded Danzig back. Poland, having recently signed the Anglo-Polish military alliance, pushed back believing that having England (and France) behind them, Germany wouldn't do anything about it. Hence, ... as it is said ... the rest is history.

Ann Lee and the Shakers

Mother Ann Lee was the founder of the Shakers. Shakers' official name is The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing but are usually called the Shakers. This is due to shaking and trembling they did during their ritual dance. The shaking was thought to rid the body of sin.

Ann Lee was born in Manchester, England in 1747 and was married off, by her parents, at a very early age. He had eight children, four that died during childbirth and four that died before they were six. She developed religious beliefs against sexual activity and marriage and became famous for her preaching of her beliefs. She emigrated to the US in 1774 fleeing persecution and settled in Watervliet which is somewhere near Albany, NY.

Shakers lived in communes where men and woman lived side by side as equals. They believed that the spirit of god lived through your work. Their craftsmanship is famous for perfectionism and beauty without being ostentatious. Their inventiveness brought us the clothespin, the circular saw and the flat broom. Their membership dwindled into the 20th century. Since they didn't reproduce, they could only grow or survive by recruitment or adoption. States no longer allow the adoption of children by communes. The last Shaker community closed in 1992. There were close to 20 of them in the US at their peak, mostly in the New York and New England. The last few remaining Shakers live in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

The USS Indianapolis and the Bomb

The USS Indianapolis was a cruiser in the US Naval fleet during World War II. It played a pivotal role in ending the war in the Pacific.

After the war in Europe had come to a close, the US war against Japan continued. A speedy end to the war was needed, but all estimates said it would be long and costly in lives. Millions on each side. The Manhattan Project was a secret that would end the war quickly and save lives in the long run. It was such a secret project that when Vice President Harry S. Truman became president after FDR's death, even he didn't know about it. Upon hearing of its existence, he immediately approved of the bombs use to end the war.

On July 16th 1945, the USS Indianapolis left San Fransisco with a secret cargo. Most members of the crew didn't know what it was. Rumors said that it was MacArthur's special scented toilet paper. They were actually delivering the atomic bomb, "Little Boy", to the Phillipinian island of Tinian. It was the island of Tinian that the Enola Gay, a B-29, left with "Little Boy" to drop on Hiroshima. This would change the world forever.

After delivering their cargo on July 28th, the USS Indianapolis headed toward Okinawa and never arrived. They was sunk by a Japanese submarine. Of the 1196 crew members, approximately 300 died in the initial attack. Distress signals were sent. Declassified records show that three SOS messages were received separately, but none were acted upon because one commander was drunk, another had ordered his men not to disturb him and a third thought it was a Japanese prank. Over 800 men were left afloat in shark infested waters either in life rafts or jackets. It wasn't until 4 days later when the ship didn't show up in Leyte that search parties were sent for them. 321 men were pulled out of the water, 317 ultimately survived. Most causes of death were exposure, starvation, severe desquamation, and shark attack.

In March of 1945, my father quit high school and joined the US Navy. The horrors of the atomic bomb is a difficult subject for me to wrap my head around for it is quite possible that if not for the dropping of "Little Boy" and the bomb that followed in Nagosaki, I may not exist.