Immediately after Japan’s “sneak” (ha!) attack against Pearl Harbor, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt damned December 7th, 1941 as “a day that will live in infamy”. I submit that his eloquent terminology also applies, for all time, to that entire abominable era in American history when the country’s administration totally forgot F.D.R.’s earlier assurance that “We [...]
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Posted in Events, Life and culture, Music, People on Aug 27th, 2007 Comments Off
See and hear them mambo the living bejesus out of Lenny’s West Side Story example during their recent London Proms concert! Technorati Tags: Gustavo Dudamel, Leonard Bernstein, London Proms
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[From Mathias Herzog, the Berlin bureaucrat responsible for surnames beginning with "M":] Sehr geehrter Herr Moor, Ich habe meine Vorlage an die Senatsverwaltung für Inneres und Sport nunmehr zurückerhalten. Man hat meine Entscheidung zustimmend zur Kenntnis genommen und teilt meine juristische Auffassung. Ich freue mich daher aufrichtig Ihnen mitteilen zu können, dass Ihrer zügigen Einbürgerung [...]
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[Of late such dreary priorities as livelihood-earning have forced me to neglect this rumpus-room, but I'll use the following, just sent to the editor of www.musicalamerica.com, to get things here going again - until I can finally get around to writing about my two (brief and superficial but still highly memorable) personal encounters with Marlene [...]
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Posted in Events, People, Politics on Jul 23rd, 2007 5 Comments »
Two dear old unmarried sisters, who live two floors above me and have spent most of their lives in this Wilmersdorf section of Berlin, much of it in this house, recently called my attention to nearby locations associated with the pre-emigration years of Marlene Dietrich, so this afternoon I finally got around to making a [...]
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Posted in Events, Letter from Berlin on Jul 6th, 2007 Comments Off
Unless you’ve spent the past several months under water, you’ll almost certainly long since know about Berlin’s latest superstar and present unrivalled all-out celebrity darling: a snow-white polar bear-cub named Knut, rejected at birth by his circus-traumatized mother Tosca and raised by a model bipedal foster-mother named Thomas Dörflein, a member of the staff of [...]
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Posted in Events, Memory Lane, People, Politics on Jul 4th, 2007 Comments Off
Egbert Roscoe Murrow, later known as plain Ed Murrow, born April 25, 1908 near Polecat Creek, near Greensboro, in Guilford County, North Carolina, half a century ago set the standard for responsible American television journalism. His finest hour came on March 9, 1954, when a half-hour documentary quoting the documented utterances of Wisconsin’s hysterically red-baiting Senator [...]
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The facts, folks – just the facts, as summarized by The New York Times: I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted March 6, 2007, of lying to F.B.I. agents and grand jurors investigating the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative amid a burning dispute over the [...]
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Posted in Events, People, Politics on Jul 3rd, 2007 Comments Off
[Since our former Attorney General appeals directly for my help in propagating his message - and since I can perceive no violation of copyright or anything else along those lines - I herewith reproduce in toto an appeal from Ramsey Clark just received:] Dear Paul, I am writing to you with the hope that you [...]
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Let me refer you to this official statement dated September 18th, 2001 – in German, but I assume you can read that – issued by the city-state Hamburg the day after the press conference there that ignited that brouhaha. The night before, only hours after that outrageous utterance, Dr. Christina Weiss, Hamburg’s Senator for Kultur, [...]
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