No business like show business

The first Academy Awards were presented on 16^th May 1929, at a private brunch at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel with an audience of about 270 people. The post Academy Awards party was held at the Mayfair Hotel. The cost of guest tickets for that night's ceremony was $5. Fifteen statuettes were awarded, honouring artists, directors and other personalities of the filmmaking industry of the time for their works during the 1927–1928 period.

Winners were announced three months before the ceremony. The recipients included Emil Jannings, the first person to receive an Academy Award, for Best Actor for the films The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command; Janet Gaynor for Best Actress, for Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans; Frank Borzage for Best Director, Drama for Seventh Heaven and Lewis Milestone for Best Director, Comedy for Two Arabian Knights; and the film Wings, the most expensive film of its time, became the Best Picture recipient. Charlie Chaplin and Warner Brothers each received an Honorary Award. Originally, Chaplin was a Best Actor, Best Writer and Best Director, Comedy nominee for the film The Circus, but was removed from the list, and was honoured with the award; while the company received the award for pioneering talking pictures. Awards also would favour big films' producers—Fox Films Corporation, MGM, Paramount Pictures, Radio-Keith-Orpheum and Warner Brothers Production. Three categories (for Best Engineering Effects, Best Title Writing and Best Unique and Artistic Quality of Production) disappeared after the ceremony budiness

BULL, BULLETS, CRAZY, ASYLUM

The 15^th May brings us back to Pope Leo XIII (see previous blog Encyclical Performance 20/04/2012). The Rerum Novarum (Latin for On the New Things) is an encyclical issued by him on 15^th May  1891. It was an open letter, passed to all Catholic bishops, that addressed the condition of the working classes. The encyclical is entitled: "Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour".

It had discussed the relationships and mutual duties between labour and obtaining capital, as well as government and its citizens. Of primary concern was the need for some amelioration for "The misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class." It (apparently) supported the rights of labour to form unions, rejected communism and unrestricted capitalism, whilst affirming the right to private property.

"Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice."

Some of the duties of workers are:

▪   "fully and faithfully" to perform their agreed-upon tasks

▪   individually, to refrain from vandalism or personal attacks

▪   collectively, to refrain from rioting and violence

Some of the duties of employers are:

▪   to pay fair wages

▪   to provide time off for religious practice and family life

▪   to provide work suited to each person's strength, gender, and age

▪   to respect the dignity of workers and not regard them as slaves

The sentiments that labour is ‘unjustly pressed’ and that workers have the right to form unions, is perhaps laudable, but the language, by its condescending nature and tone, belies the meaning. Who is this “frugal and well-behaved wage-earner”?

The reality for Leo XIII was that:

 “Private ownership, as we have seen, is the natural right of man, and to exercise that right, especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary.”

He goes on to quote Aquinas: "It is lawful," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "for a man to hold private property; and it is also necessary for the carrying on of human existence."

He claims:

Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings, whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind, has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and, at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God's providence, for the benefit of others.

Fat chance of that, in my view.

Bull is bull, as our friend Bowater so rightly says, but are we being too severe and critical?

In contrast to all this the writer and London Lawyer James Puckle (who wrote the following texts, The Interest of England considered in an essay upon wool, our woolen manufactures, and the improvement of trade : with some remarks upon the conceptions of Sir Josiah Child. (1694); England's interest, or, A brief discourse of the royal fishery in a letter to a friend (1696); A new dialogue between a burgermaster and an English gentleman (1697); England's way wealth and honour in a dialogue between and English-man and a Dutch-man. (1699);  and, The club; or, A grey cap for a green head - A dialogue between a father and son. (1713)) took out a patent on the 15^th May 1718 for what was the first machine gun.

In 1718, Puckle demonstrated his new invention, the Defence Gun—a tripod-mounted, single-barrelled flintlock weapon fitted with a multi-shot revolving cylinder, designed for shipboard use to prevent boarding. The barrel was 3 feet (0.91 m) long with a bore of 1.25 inches (32 mm) and a pre-loaded "cylinder" which held 11 charges and could fire 63 shots in seven minutes—this at a time when the standard soldier's musket could at best be loaded and fired three times per minute

Another contrast, on the 15^th May 1928, Mickey Mouse premiered in his first cartoon Plane Crazy.

Also on the 15^th May 1951, the Polish cultural attaché in Paris, Czesław Miłosz, asked for and received political asylum from the French Government. Czesław Miłosz was a Polish poet, prose writer and translator of Lithuanian origin. His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of 20 "naive" poems. He defected to the West in 1951, and his nonfiction book The Captive Mind (1953) is a classic of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Miłosz later became an American citizen and was awarded the 1978 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was stated that Miłosz was a writer "who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".

PONDERING

I have been pondering the publication dates of various novels of note which take place in a single day. They are few. One, which first appeared on the 14^th May 1925, is Mrs Dalloway  by Virginia Woolf. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.

Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. During the course of the day Mrs Dalloway, at a party she has organised, she hears of the suicide of one of the characters, an emotional casualty of the Great War. She gradually comes to admire the act of this stranger. She considers it an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness. Mrs Dalloway is described as being 51 years old. Mrs Woolf committed suicide at age 59 in 1941 during the second year of World War II.

The tragedies of war prompted another personal memory. When I was a pupil at the Lycée Henry IV, annex de Montgeron, I was given a book to read by my home room teacher Mademoiselle Corteggiani  entitled Le Grand Meaulnes.  This was in 1955. I was just thirteen years old. Here is a class photograph taken some time at the end of the school year in 1956. It must have been taken in later spring of ’56 as my family returned to the United States in July of that year. The man sitting next to Mlle Corteggiani is M. Leclerc, our science and maths teacher. 

But I digress. 

Le Grand Meaulnes is a novel by Alain-Fournier. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his relationship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as Meaulnes searches for his lost love. Impulsive, reckless and heroic, Meaulnes embodies the romantic ideal, the search for the unobtainable, and the mysterious world between childhood and adulthood. It is considered one of the great works of French Literature. I was immensely impressed by the story, or rather immersed in its world. There were a lot of things I did not fully understand, but there is no denying the lingering memory still present in my brain.

Fournier

Alain-Fournier was the pseudonym of Henri Alban-Fournier born 3^rd October 1886. He was the author of a single novel, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) In 1914, Alain-Fournier started work on a second novel, Colombe Blanchet, but this remained unfinished when he joined the army as a Lieutenant in August. He died fighting near Vaux-lès-Palameix (Meuse) one month later, on the 22nd of September 1914. His body remained unidentified until 1991, at which time he was interred in the cemetery of Saint-Remy-la-Calonne. Much of the story of Le Grand Meaulnes draws on Fournier’s own short life. What makes the memory stronger is that I was born exactly 38 years after his death on the Meuse. Again I ponder, what has that got to do with anything? The brain is a strange instrument. Little things like time and date seem to carve themselves into our cells and somehow link our lives with other events occurring at the same date and time. That little boy, 2^nd row from the top and second from the left, was going through that mysterious world between childhood and adulthood at the time. It’s still a mystery.

FATIMA, MINERS, STADIUMS, QIGONG AND OPERATION ABOLITION

A very mixed bag for the 13^th  May

On 13^th May 1917 three children report the first apparition of Our Lady of Fátima is in Fátima, Portugal. Our Lady of Fátima is a famous title given to the Blessed Virgin Mary as she appeared in apparitions reported by three shepherd children at Fátima in Portugal. These occurred on the 13th day of six consecutive months in 1917, starting on 13^th May. The three children were Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto.

The 1926 general strike in the United Kingdom was a general strike that lasted nine days, from 4^th  May 1926 to 13th May 1926. It was called by the general council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in an unsuccessful attempt to force the British government to act to prevent wage reduction and worsening conditions for coal miners.

On 12^th May 1926, the TUC General Council visited 10 Downing Street to announce their decision to call off the strike, provided that the proposals worked out by the Samuel Commission were adhered to and that the Government offered a guarantee that there would be no victimization of strikers. The Government stated that it had "no power to compel employers to take back every man who had been on strike." Thus the TUC agreed to end the dispute without such an agreement.

On the 13^th May 1951 the 400th anniversary of the founding of the National University of San Marcos is commemorated by the opening of the first large-capacity stadium in Peru. The Estadio Universidad Nacional Mayor San Marcos is a multi-purpose stadium located in Lima, Peru, belonging to the National University of San Marcos. It was inaugurated on 13^th May, 1951, with a seating capacity of 70,000 and covers an area of 48,782 m².

On the 13^th May 1960 hundreds of University of California, Berkeley students congregate for the first day of protest against a visit by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Thirty-one students are arrested, and the Free Speech Movement is born.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) or House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) (1947–1975) was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security". When the House abolished the committee in 1975, its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee. In May 1960, the committee held hearings in San Francisco City Hall that led to the infamous "riot" on 13^th May when city police officers fire-hosed protesting students from UC Berkeley, Stanford, and other local colleges and dragged them down the marble steps beneath the rotunda, leaving some seriously injured. Soviet affairs expert William Mandel, who had been subpoenaed to testify, angrily denounced the committee and the police in a blistering statement which was aired repeatedly for years thereafter on Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley. The following video from You tube is well worth watching.

On 13^th May 1992 Li Hongzhi gives the first public lecture on Falun Gong in Changchun, People’s Republic of China.

On this day, Li Hongzhi gave his first public seminar on Falun Gong (alternately called Falun Dafa) in the northeastern city of Changchun. In his hagiographic spiritual biography Li Hongzhi is said to have been taught ways of "cultivation practice" by several masters of the Buddhist and Daoist traditions, including Quan Jue, the 10th Heir to the Great Law of the Buddha School, a Taoist master from age eight to twelve, and a master of the Great Way School with the Taoist alias of True Taoist from the Changbai Mountains. Falun Dafa is said to be the result of his reorganizing and writing down the teachings that were passed to him.

Falun Gong or Falun Dafa (literally means "Law Wheel Practice") is a spiritual discipline first introduced in China in 1992 through public lectures by its founder, Li Hongzhi. It combines the practice of meditation and slow-moving qigong exercises with a moral philosophy. Falun Gong emphasises morality and the cultivation of virtue in its central tenets of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance (Chinese: 真、善、忍), and identifies as a qigong practice of the Buddhist school, though its teachings also incorporate elements drawn from Taoist traditions. Through moral rectitude and the practice of meditation, practitioners of Falun Gong aspire to better health and, ultimately, spiritual enlightenment.

EDUCATION COMPUTING AND THE BASIC LAW

The National University of San Marcos (Spanish: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, UNMSM) is the most important and respected higher-education institution in Peru. Its main campus, the University City, is located in Lima. It was chartered on 12th May 1551 by a royal decree signed by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, which makes it the oldest officially established university in the Americas and, as such, one of the oldest universities in the world. Academically, the University of San Marcos ranks first in Peru

Zuse

On 12 May 1941 the Z3 was presented to an audience of scientists including the professors Alfred Teichmann and Curt Schmieden of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt ("German Laboratory for Aviation"), in Berlin. The Z3 was an electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse. It was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computing machine. It was Turing-complete, and by modern standards the Z3 was one of the first machines that could be considered a complete computing machine, although it lacked the conditional branch operation. The Z3 was built with 2,000 relays, implementing a 22 bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz. Program code and data were stored on punched film.

The Z3 was completed in Berlin in 1941. The German Aircraft Research Institute used it to perform statistical analyses of wing flutter.

Z3 replica

On the 12^th May 1949 the western occupying powers approve the Basic Law for the new German state: the Federal Republic of Germany..

The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland) is the constitution of Germany. It was formally approved on 8^th May 1949, and, with the signature of the Allies of World War II on 12^th May, came into effect on 23^rd May, as the constitution of those states of West Germany that were initially included within the Federal Republic. Within a few years, the Federal Republic included all of West Germany, i.e. those parts of Germany under American, British, or French occupation.

The first five articles set out what most constitutions hope to achieve. In the light of the history of the German people in the 10 years preceding the writing and approval of theses articles, it was fitting that it should begin with the idea that "Human dignity is inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority"