Among the books in my library are volumes dating back to the Protestant Reformation. I think it’s cool, but on the other hand old books aren’t valuable any more so they’ll probably end up in the landfill. Or recycled, if anyone’s really doing that now.

In the late Soviet era there was a common sarcastic meme “видел человека, который видел Ленина!” (I saw a person who had seen Lenin!). Probably because old people who had seen Lenin alive were dragged in front of classrooms to impress the school children. And of course their stories generally boiled down to standing in a large crowd as a child seeing Lenin off in the distance.

Who gives a rat’s behind about the handshakes of old, dead, whote men?

I shook Pat Buchanan’s hand. And I might add that he is a very pleasant gentleman.

Steve, we’ve both shaken the hand of Alex Trebec. Think of the connections there!

…as a kid, his grandmother used to talk of the day…

…as a boy, Prime Minister William Gladstone…

Steve just repeated Krulwich’s schoolboy error, which suggests a chain of its own.

I got modifiers that dangle, dingle, dangle
As I go blogging merrily along…

As a child in England, Bob Hope (1903-2003) spoke of a neighbor lady who was over 100 years old, and likely born before Darwin and Lincoln. In turn, these men were born on the same day.

(See, I can do it, too!)

With handshakes suddenly out of fashion…

Some things never go out of fashion, even during epidemics:

Though generally, you have to get out of your fashion to engage:

I’m three handshakes away removed from Adolph Hitler and two from Charles de Gaulle.

No one’s mentioned President John Tyler, the 10th POTUS. Born 1790. Died 1862. Became President in 1841.

Two of his grandsons are still alive. This story is from 2018, but they are alive and kicking at the present time.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-two-of-president-john-tylers-grandsons-are-still-alive/

What on earth are you talking about? I think that it sounds better in your head than it turns out on the screen

You are correct about one fact, although you expressed even that semi-incoherently: Darwin and Lincoln-two of the most influential people of the 19th century, were indeed born on the exact same day-Feb. 12th, 1809.

Other pairs of people born on the exact same month, day, and year:

Andy Griffith and Marilyn Monroe
George W. Bush and Sly Stallone.
Michael Jordan and Larry the Cable Guy
Al Sharpton and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

I asked a question of both Michael Jordan and Jack Nicklaus. I asked Nicklaus what major had he let get away. He said it was a good question. I don’t remember the answer.

I’ll do you one better … I shook the hand of his boss, Mr. Nixon, who through his father gets me to Mr. McKinley, and directly to Henry the K and Chairman Mao, Dwight D. Eisenhower, etc, but I didn’t look beyond that. Makes one appreciate Steve’s thoughts on COVID spread among the elite.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjnxZmbxIjpAhXVgnIEHWz_BXcQyCkwAHoECA0QBA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D1RPoymt3Jx4&usg=AOvVaw3r1dBfY4fff67PCbMzPmev

Not handshakes, but this sort of blew my mind.

Isn’t there someone who is still collecting a civil war pension?

Orson Welles probably took part in quite a few historical chains.

This will amuse you- not a handshake, but still….

Mark Steyn wrote that we are now farther in time from the end of WWW2 than the beginning if WW2 was from the end of the Civil War…makes one think.

Apostolic succession is pretty cool too.

As did Larry King, Bob Hope, and Walter Cronkite.

Lucretius, looking for examples of imperceptible wearing-away, says, “The bronze statues by the city gates show their right hands worn thin by the touch of travelers who have greeted them in passing.” This has always suggested to me that shaking hands is almost an instinct for us.

Hell, Jeffrey Epstein probably had quite the colorful collection of people he shook hands with.

> Tony Hiss, a writer for the New Yorker, says his traitor dad called it

So you’re accepting the tenditious claims that the USSR was furiously spying on its allies during WW2, and that Alger “ALES” Hiss was loyal to the Politburo rather than to his own country.

I’m sure the camp library will be stocked with back issues of the right magazines, giving you plenty of time to reflect on your errors.

President John Tyler, born 1790, has two living grandsons.

Never thought of this game.

At a party to celebrate winning the Stanley Cup I got my pic taken with the Stanley Cup, and also shook hands with Slava Fetisov, who is now back in Russia and was high up in Russian Sports, and was a bud of Putin.

So I’m two handshakes removed from Putin. And three removed from Trump, Obama, Bush etc. And probably three handshakes removed from some formerly powerful in favor Russians, who then became out of favor, and were purged to different degrees.

I would’ve liked to have shaken hands with Margaret Thatcher.

President Tyler has two living grandsons. I bet they can serve as a connection to most presidents and important political figures:

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/how-two-of-president-john-tylers-grandsons-are-still-alive/

Best O.W. Holmes story concerning Lincoln was when Gen. Shelby was outside Washington, D.C. Lincoln had to go personally witness the Confederate Army at the gates, and as he was standing on the ramparts looking a cannon ball flew overhead, and, Holmes grabbed him and said, “Get down you damned fool! You’ll get shot.”

Last time I checked, about six months ago, John Tyler had two living grandsons.

UPDATE: apparently still true.

I shook hands with Strom Thurmond who probably shook hands with George Washington. ;^)

I have shaken hands with George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown, Rick Perry, Greg Abbott, Susanna Martinez, Meg Whitman, and various Senators and Congressmen. Big deal. In retrospect I hope they all washed their hands.

Going forward, we should substitute something we learned from the Native Americans. Instead of shaking hands, just raise your arm at 90 degrees like you are taking a pledge, and say, “How!”

Grover Cleveland who was born in 1837 had a granddaughter who is still alive. John Tyler who was president in president in 1845 and served in the Confedrate states of America still has two grandchildren living.

One of the odd bits of trivia about former presidents is that several of them were widowers who secnd wives were around the same age as their daughters.

Of living people, maybe Olivia De Havilland shook Holmes’ hand. They were actually apparently distant cousins.

My 88 year old friend claims to have seen the last Southern slaves that were alive in a Baltimore retirement home in the 1950’s. He shook the hand of LBJ in the 1960’s during a parade stop and most incredible of all is that he swears that he was the only white guy standing close to Martin Luther King during his famous “I have a dream” speech in 1963.

President John Tyler (1790–1862) seems to still have two living grandsons through his son Lyon Gardiner Tyler (1853–1935): Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. (1924– ) and Harrison Ruffin Tyler (1928– ). At least they were both alive in mid-2019 per various websites, though at some point something has to give.

Each of the above Tyler descendants was under 12 when his father died but was old enough to have known him.

It’s not handshakes, and it’s not George Washington, but my 81-year-old Concord, MA-born father-in-law says his great-uncle Edward recalled that as a child he’d sat in the lap of someone who’d sat in the lap of a Revolutionary soldier.

My great grandmother walked across the Brooklyn bridge on the day it opened. That was in 1883, so it was only ~140 years ago.

I’ve thought of this kind of continuity with respect to sports. For example, few would think that if thru time travel Babe Ruth could face today’s pitchers that he would fare very well. Yet Ted Williams faced pitchers who faced Babe Ruth, and Williams shared mound foes with Rod Carew, who shared them with George Brett, and so on. So in theory you could compare players thru time via these connections.

My second grade teacher, Mrs. Mullin, had known an old woman who, as a little girl, met President Lincoln and sat on his lap.
Mrs. Mullin also told me that my penmanship was terrible, and that I would never amount to anything.
She was certainly right in the first remark…the second? Remains to be seen…I’ve still got some time left.

No handshakes involved, but I remember meeting my great-grandmother, just once, when I was very young and she was very old. She was born shortly before the Civil War. I like to tell this to young people, partly to blow their minds, and partly to illustrate that what they tend to think of as the strange and distant past really isn’t all that distant.

Bertrand Russell was famously long-lived and famously connected and I’m sure would serve as a great nexus for this slightly more high-brow version of “Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. Russell was still active as a public intellectual up through Vietnam, yet was so old he could have protested WWI- with special moral authority as the father of a soldier killed at the Somme! He was so old he could have, as a child prodigy, helped Sherlock Holmes on a case. He was so old yet infamously so sex-crazed (a biography of T.S. Eliot’s crazy wife claimed he was not below tapping even THAT) it was not logically impossible for him to have been Jack the Ripper. He could have even BEEN Jack the Ripper while helping Holmes out on a case involving Moriarty, with Holmes overlooking his â€�common’ crimes for the sake of stopping Moriarty’s world-spanning evil. Seven degrees of Bertrand Russell’s d!ck…

The tenth President, John Tyler, was born in 1790 – in the first year of George Washington’s presidency. He was a schoolboy when he, presumably, got news of Washington’s death. As of a year or so ago, John Tyler’s grandsons were still alive.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-two-of-president-john-tylers-grandsons-are-still-alive/

That is, there are two people around who’ve shaken the hand of a man (their dad-Tyler’s son) who may have heard, first-hand, an account from John Tyler of hearing the news of Washington’s death.

My grandfather was born in 1867 but died before I was born. But my grandmother lived until I was in graduate school, and she’d recount memories of her childhood in the 1880s and early 1890s to us kids.

I had the same sensation when watching an interview with Bertrand Russel:

Go to 2:00. Russel recounts being raised by his grandfather, John Russell, who “was in parliament when Napoleon was on the throne.”

So you are watching and listening to a man who knew a man who knew Napoleon.

After Sunday school we used to visit my great-grandmother, born in the 1860s. She had presumably met Thomas Carlyle, a family friend and maybe even distant kin.

He had been born in 1795 so could presumably have remembered the news not just of Waterloo but of Trafalgar.

Anyway, I own old Tom’s smoking cap. And it might have been in use during conversations with Lord knows how many luminaries.

Anyone who shook hands at this filming:

John L. Sullivan was a highly-coveted handshake in his day; men who had shaken with him were wont to tell others on greeting them that “You just shook the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan”, a well-worn catchphrase. Sullivan died in 1918, so there are probably no first-degree handshakes left (though it’s not totally impossible), but I’ll wager there are still a quite a few second-degrees out there.

OT: Former magical hotgirl turned feminist harridan Rose McGowan now demands that Sleepy Joe Biden withdraw from the Presidential race because of alleged Tara Reade sexual assault.

https://abc14news.com/2020/04/26/rose-mcgowan-calls-on-joe-biden-to-drop-out-as-tara-reade-allegation-roils-campaign/

Charmed, I’m sure.

Good comment.

Ted Williams faced pitchers who faced Babe Ruth, and Williams shared mound foes with Rod Carew

The Splinter’s excellence truly spanned eras. He hit .327 his rookie year (1939) and .388 his age-38 season (1957). Aaron and Mays were also very good for a long time, making All-Star appearances into the 1970s.

Steve had a post years ago about how Ted Williams was one of the greatest hitters, fighter pilots and fishermen of all-time.

I’m about a decade younger than Sailer. My dad, whom I just talked with by phone, is a U.S. Army veteran who survived WWII battles with only shrapnel and bullet wounds (he never talked about it when I was growing up). After the war he came back and became a teacher at Palo Alto High School. He also coached basketball there (and had Blaine and Jon Huntsman as players).

When my dad was in grad school at UCLA he lived in an apartment on Sunset Blvd. in Brentwood. At the local Catholic church Maureen O’Hara, a regular communicant, once sat right next to my dad (her leg touching his and which he made a point of not moving). O’Hara was in charge of collections at Mass and counted the money. At a small supermarket on Sunset Blvd. my dad bumped into another shopper, General Omar Bradley. My dad shook his hand and told what him what Army unit he (my dad) had been in. Bradley was friendly and replied, “Well that’s real nice son.”

Anyway, when my dad was a young kid (~5 or 6) he met and shook hands with an elderly man who was a veteran of the Civil War. I often thought it would have been possible for that Civil War veteran to have shaken the hand of an elderly veteran of the Revolutionary War.

Though Jack the Ripper, aka Aaron Kosminski, was a Jew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Kosminski

I just missed a connection to Abraham Lincoln through my grandfather.
Well OK, actually I didn’t just miss. My grandfather did hold me on his lap, but, Lincoln had been dead six weeks when my grandfather was born in a tiny Italian village so I’m pretty sure Lincoln never met anyone in my family.
But that was the best I could come up with.

Pinker promoting the book of his sister Susan titled : The village effect How face to face contact matters (and can make you happy) where she explains that shaking hands and face reading in real proximate and warm meetings is paramount for any sound human activity decisions.

It’s difficult to be as unlucky as her in the timing while still being promoted by Forbes as a top 40 books in quarantine time.

Not exactly to the point, but (God I love Wikipedia!) the Venetian Doge who infamously instigated the sack of Constantinople during the 4th Crusade lived into his nineties, yet came from such a long-lived family he was still legally a minor into his late sixties thanks to the longevity of his nonagenarian dad. The sack of Constantinople resulted in many treasures of the ancient world finding their new home in Venice, including the famous statue of the Four Tetrarchs (there to this day), almost 1000 years old AT THE TIME of the 4th Crusade.

OT:

An article wondering if genetic diversity accounts for the significant variance in severity and the progress of Covid-19 between patients.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/27/covid-19-quickly-kills-some-while-others-dont-show-symptoms-can-genetics-explain-this/#comments-wrapper

I met Johnny Cooke (R.I.P) at Harvard son of Alastair Cooke. To the best of my memory I never shook hands with him.

Peter Rawson Taft III, grandson of William Howard Taft, could plausibly be a living person who shook hands with Holmes but I can’t find readily available information on when exactly he was born or if he’s still alive.

Not the same thing but it’s neat that James Naismith still has one third-generation disciple still coaching in Roy Williams.

Can we trace a chain of high-fives that reaches back to the Glenn Burke-Dusty Baker original in 1977? Or has the fist-bump broken the flow?

I have wondered how people feel who don’t, or can’t due to uneventful ancestry or personal history, make connections to the wider world in the sense you’re talking about. My grandfather was born in a cabin on a mountain farm in 1858, several weeks before Darwinism made its debut. His father was on the field with N. B. Forrest at the battle of Ebenezer Church seven years later, as an unwilling member of the Confederacy’s Volkssturm. I roomed for a few days with Bill Hamilton at a rooming house in Brazil. Hamilton knew John Maynard Smith, who knew Haldane, who must have known multiple people who knew Darwin. Such connections are an antidote to personal anomie.

There was a book titled Hitlers Private Library 15 years ago that noted his study had simply been packed up and warehoused in huge saltmine near the wars end. ( now in the library of congress, separate collection ) He was an intense reader and artistic type and of course received dozens of volumes as gifts often inscribed.

Author actually read through the many individual titles finding annotations in the margins etc and on one page claims he finds a black hair resembling a curled forelock.

How far back do Bush and Kennedy family handshakes go? I’ve had friendship connections to both since college. As the saying goes “that and a couple of bucks will buy me a cup of coffee.” (It used to be “fifty cents” or “a quarter,” but you have to adjust it now for inflation and fancy coffee drinks.)

In fact, in a weird way, I just realized I have another Bush connection: My father and I knew John Hinckley’s neighbors, who, strangely, knew at least one of the Bushes. Does this mean I can get my name in a conspiracy book about assassinations? Obviously I must have CIA connections…

Oh hey, and I’ve shaken Harvey Weinstein’s hand! I can only imagine where that’s been.

In the UK, compulsory education starts at age 5 – in practice, this often means 4 years old plus 8 or 9 months.
My strongest memory from early childhood is my first day at school, everything about it, the build up, being taken there by my mother, remembering the man across the street perched on a ladder painting his house, my first teacher, the strange kids, the strange room, building etc etc. Another strong impression was that it was the biggest let down of my life, perhaps it’s bred a cynicism in me – it just was *NOT* what it was cracked up to be.
I’m sure for many many kids, particularly of a sensitive predisposition, it is/was an absolutely traumatic experience. Akin to the shock of birth, or to those who believe in reincarnation, the shock of death.

A Maryland man named Samuel Seymour, who as a child witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, lived long enough to appear on the TV show “I’ve Got a Secret” in 1956 at the age of 96:

An historical chain of handshakes is merely a symbol of continuity. But it makes me wonder how the progress of time and death slowly changes and eventually erases our collective experience. How many people — and in what age cohort — need to be alive for their experiences to be a part of our national psyche?

World War II and the Depression used to be central national experiences. But anyone who was 20 in 1945 is now 95 years old. The living memory of these events is all but gone. Think of this: The end of WWII is as far in the past from 2020 as the Civil War was from 1940!

Eventually, the living memories of the 60’s counter-culture, the Cold-War, and everything else will fade out of existence. To be replaced . . . by what?

There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.
Ecclesiastes 1:11.

Interesting to think of. As a young soldier I once shook hands with General Rick Hillier, Chief of the Defense Staff 2005-2008 , and David Johnston (who?), Governor General of Canada 2010-2017.

I would assume both men pressed palms with all sorts of big names throughout their respective tenures. Perhaps even the Queen (does she shake hands?)

Hope all you virusterics enjoy the new normal you’re helping to usher in:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90494160/concerts-will-never-be-the-same-after-covid-19-heres-what-you-could-wear-to-bring-them-back

The AP History version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Only four of the twelve men who stood on the Moon remain with us.

They are all in their eighties, except for Buzz Aldrin, who is ninety. When they go, there will be no living human beings who have truly traveled through space and visited another world. We have not progressed as a species; we have regressed, devolved. It is as if the first amphibians died out and none ever crawled up on the land again.

We suck. And we don’t even shake hands anymore. Might as well go back to flippers and fins.

tenditious

Nice neologism, especially if intended: tenditious = tendentious + seditious = ‘tendentious assumptions about sedition’.

In the literary field a good starting point would be the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, still around and still writing at 101.

I used to really like the Indiana Jones stories. The writers probably based the character at least in part* on Hiram Bingham, discoverer of Macchu Picchu turned governor and senator. When I was a child my family briefly rented a house in Connecticut from a very, very old man, who owned a great deal of real estate in the area, and for some reason I can recall that he graduated from Yale University shortly before 1900. As it wasn’t too large a university at the time,** it wouldn’t surprise me if he knew Bingham.

* = and in part on the African explorer and hunter Frederic Selous, who is a possible answer to the trivia question “Who was the most famous Channel Islander?”
** = in enrollment terms it’s still of only modest size. Yale is the answer to the trivia question “What’s the second-largest university in New Haven?” (Southern Connecticut State University is #1)

Back in 1993 when their memoir was published I spent a couple of hours visiting with and interviewing Sarah and Elizabeth Delany, famously long-lived and upstanding black ladies who at the time were living in Mt. Vernon, NY, and who were both well into their 90s.

A couple of things I remember learning from them: 1) Their dad started out life as a slave, and 2) when Sarah and Elizabeth talked about “the war,” what they were referring to was the Civil War. They were born after it themselves but it was as important and as living a landmark to them as WWII (which my dad fought in) was to Boomer me, growing up in the �50s and �60s.

In other words: I once got to spend a couple of hours with ladies who had a direct personal connection to the Civil War. My head still spins when I think about it.

The memoir is a sweet read, btw.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Having_Our_Say:_The_Delany_Sisters%27_First_100_Years

Agreed. Buzz, perhaps you’ve noticed that clothing with the NASA logo has become somewhat trendy among diverse youth?

I find it especially galling, since diversity is the reason we don’t have a moon base. It’s like reverse cargo-culting.

What about American links? What’s the shortest set of intermediaries to Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)?

It’s not a handshake, but this link to Lincoln is fascinating:

My mother shook the hand of Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) back in the ’80s, which provides me with a link to a host of mid-century SF luminaries (Asimov, Heinlein, John W Campbell, etc). She also once met John Huston, which provides a link to God knows how many actors and directors….

Robert (I, Claudius) Graves met Swinburne:

“Swinburne, by the way, when a very young man, had gone to Walter Savage Landor, then a very old man, and been given the poet’s blessing he asked for; and Landor when a child had been patted on the head by Dr Samuel Johnson; and Johnson when a child had been taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne for scrofula, the King’s evil; and Queen Anne when a child…”

It seems very probable that Covid will be the 21 Century event comparable to what Civil War and WW2 were for 19th and 20th.

Among others my dad has shaken hands with Prince Phillip (was interviewing him for BBC). So I reckon that one handshake puts me within two degrees of separation of many 20th century figures.

About 150 years merits investigation.

If you know anyone, who knew anyone, who had first hand knowledge of the events

This is when Chinese dynasties, for example, begin their 2nd phase of existence. Western Han and Eastern Han, Tang pre and post rebellion, etc

Only four of the twelve men who stood on the Moon remain with us.
They are all in their eighties, except for Buzz Aldrin, who is ninety.

I was about to say that’s surprising, but it isn’t. The last moon mission was 48 years ago, and because of all the experience required the astronauts weren’t young men.
Come to think of it, the last moon mission is more remote to us today than the Wright Brothers flight was to the beginning of the Korean War.

Space flight trivia: Yuri Gargarin was the first man in space because of his size. As the first version of the Soyuz capsule was very small, the vertically challenged Gargarin was one of only two members of the cosmonaut training corps who could fit into it. The similarly stubby Gherman Titov had entered the corps prior to Gargain and normally would have gone first, but the Soviet authorities decided it would be better for the first man in space to have a more conventionally Russian name.

My father (1931-2018) heard Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) give a speech, though he didn’t remember what he heard. I have heard Speaker Tom Foley(1929-2013) in 1984 on a college campus though I don’t remember what he spoke.

My father worked down the hall from Wally Schirra for a couple of years, so I have handshake connections to a lot of spacemen.

Also, since Wally shook hands with Werner von Braun, and Werner shook hands with Hitler, I have a handshake connection with Adolf Hitler.

There’s a closer anecdote: China once had people who had shaken the hand of a guy who shook the hand of a guy who shook the hand of a guy who shook the hand of Mao.

In the 1970s, my father employed a cleaning man who, in his younger days, had been the chauffeur of one of FDR’s physicians. When Roosevelt had his stroke at Warm Springs, a police escort was arranged so that he could speed the doctor from Atlanta to the Little White House. He, the cleaning man, knew Roosevelt from previous visits to the Big White House, and at Roosevelt’s request often prepared fried chicken for him (I’m not kidding; this is what he told my father). He was one of the first few people in the world to learn of Roosevelt’s death.

I know a guy whose father met Kemal Ataturk, and I believe, had his photograph taken with him. I met the father briefly, who at that time was a very old man.

Alan Ginsburg liked to boast that he’d had sex with someone, who had sex with someone . . . . all the way back to someone who had sex with Walt Whitman.

I chatted once with an amiable Michael Bloomberg for 10 or 15 minutes. He told me and my wife about his house in London, which “I never use,” but wasn’t kind enough to offer us the key.

I guess this is more “Six Degrees of Separation” than “Handshakes across History,” but there it is.

Welcome back. Thanks for something interesting.

So with all the handshaking going on, one can easily see how COVID-19 could be passed on from generation to generation, stretching down the corridors of time.

Know somebody who knows Arnold Schwarzeneggor and he knows John Conner.

I know a big wig in Chinese industry so I suppose he knows Xi.

I know someone who knows someone who probably knows Putin.

I worked with a man who told Patton he was an S.O.B.

I met Robert Chenowith who may have met Ho Chi Minh, but surely knew people who did.

Mother, siblings and I met Johhny Carson in 1961 on the set of Who Do You Trust? and I suppose he knows everybody. So there.

But the biggie is that I interviewed Kinky Friedman who knows Bob Dylan who knows like everybody else.

That should be Philip with one ‘l’!

Adelina Patti sang “Home Sweet Home” to Abraham Lincoln at the White House – she was 19, I looked that part up – and lived long enough to make recordings.

I once shook hands with Alec Baldwin and yeah he’s short and pudgy.

“We suck. And we don’t even shake hands anymore.”

We do suck, but ridding ourselves of the rather disgusting hand-shaking custom is a step in the right direction. I’m a social-distancer from way back; I’m hoping this trend will still be in place when the Fu Manchu virus is no longer threatening its threats.

Off-topic,

Noah Smith on our POC-majority future:

27/For this nation to survive and thrive, the children and grandchildren of the recent immigrant waves — mostly Latin American and Asian, but also some Middle Eastern and African — must be made to feel like core Americans. Unshakable members of the American polity.

27/For this nation to survive and thrive, the children and grandchildren of the recent immigrant waves — mostly Latin American and Asian, but also some Middle Eastern and African — must be made to feel like core Americans. Unshakable members of the American polity.

— #TestAndTrace EVERYWHERE NOW đź�‡ (@Noahpinion) April 27, 2020

I really don’t know how people like this

can be expected to feel any kind of connection to Jamestown and Plymouth……

“Jack the Ripper”

The Yorkshire Ripper was two people. One of them was Jimmy Savile. Back in the USA, the Zodiac Killer was actually a cult of killers active in California in the late 60s/early 70s. Konspiracy Korner is now closed.

Of living people, maybe Olivia De Havilland shook Holmes’ hand. They were actually apparently distant cousins.

Maybe by virtue of being distant cousins, but otherwise unlikely as De Havilland was just beginning her career when Holmes died.

Of course Noah does have some ideas as to how the whole thing might be made to work:

28/That will require some creative rewriting of the national story. It may require cooperation against common threats (as in the 1860s and the 1930s-40s). It will certainly require some strong leadership. And it will be a very long, contentious process, as it always was before.

28/That will require some creative rewriting of the national story. It may require cooperation against common threats (as in the 1860s and the 1930s-40s). It will certainly require some strong leadership. And it will be a very long, contentious process, as it always was before.

— #TestAndTrace EVERYWHERE NOW đź�‡ (@Noahpinion) April 27, 2020

“[R]writing the national story”: See, The Founders were actually POC…

“It may require cooperation against common threats (as in the 1860s and the 1930s-40s). “:

Anybody know where we can find some Nazi Confederates to wage war against?

My 88 year old friend claims to have seen the last Southern slaves that were alive in a Baltimore retirement home in the 1950’s. He shook the hand of LBJ in the 1960’s during a parade stop and most incredible of all is that he swears that he was the only white guy standing close to Martin Luther King during his famous “I have a dream” speech in 1963.

George Raveling, a former college basketball player later to go on to a long coaching career, was working as a security guard during the speech. He later asked King if he could have a copy of the speech and King handed him the original.
Now in his early 80’s, Raveling still owns the original speech and keeps it in a bank vault. It is worth many millions of dollars but he won’t sell.

Peter Rawson Taft III, grandson of William Howard Taft, could plausibly be a living person who shook hands with Holmes but I can’t find readily available information on when exactly he was born or if he’s still alive.

His next-oldest sibling, now dead, was born in 1930, so he probably was born in the early 1930’s and could quite possibly be alive. He would have been very young when Holmes died.
In any event, William Howard Taft has another living grandchild, Caroline Manning. She was born in 1925 and as such is a more likely candidate to have met Holmes.
Trivia: Peter Rawson Taft’s mother came from my hometown. I highly doubt there’s any possible connection with me, but you never know.

Possibly the 1977 British Open? Maybe the 1981 Masters when Nicklaus led after the second round, was one shot behind Tom Watson going into the final round and shot a 72 on Sunday to lose by two shots.

Mark Steyn wrote that we are now farther in time from the end of WWW2 than the beginning if WW2 was from the end of the Civil War…makes one think.

The last 200 years has really skewed our collective perspective. Prior to that, change occurred more slowly, or it had since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Take any 50 year period going back 200 years and consider the fast paced change of just technology (and the disruptions in culture, social structures, politics, economics, etc that accompanied them.)

2020 – 1970: In 1970, we had just been to the moon,using largely analog technology. Computers with the power of computation in our cell phones, filled entire rooms.
1970-1920: In 1920, powered flight was still fairly new, as was the radio. But by 1970 we had built giant rockets to propel ourselves to the moon, and powered flight was (and still is) dominated by the jet engine. The automobile had spread to the middle class, thanks to Ford et al.
1920-1870: 5 years after the end of the Civil War; machine guns and repeating rifles were fairly new; metal ships were starting to replace wooden ships (giant battleships by WWI with rifled cannon and ranges of dozens of miles). Telegraphs and railroads.
1870-1820: 5 years after Waterloo; concept of mass conscription armies; beginnings of mass production and factory output; railroads still just a proof of concept, land transportation still largely horse-drawn wagons, or by boat down rivers/canals.

Yes, she’ been dead for years – paperwork hasn’t caughtf up yet.

I’ve shaken the hands of several big name politicians. The most prolific hand shaker with whom I’ve shaken hands was Bill Clinton. Most famously, he shook the hand of JFK. Not to mention quite a few other big names over the years.

I did not shake the hand that shook the hand of P.T. Barnum and Charlie Chan.

Does the Queen shake hands? Yes, she does, and she usually wears gloves.

Not entirely OT: https://xkcd.com/2277/

Maybe OT, but when I see old clips of Russell, they remind me of old clips of G. B. Shaw, whom B. Russell had been highly critical of, …and, well then…

Here is a possible Buzz Aldrin story. In the July 2019 issue of The Atlantic, the writer Arthur Brooks describes an encounter with a famous elderly man on a Los Angeles to Washington flight in the summer of 2015. Brooks, now at Harvard Business School, was head of the American Enterprise Institute in 2015 and no doubt knew many, many people. To summarize, Brooks overheard an elderly woman in the seat behind him comforting her husband as he lamented about how he was now old and irrelevant, never fulfilled his dreams, and so on.
After the plane landed, however, Brooks was shocked to see that his unhappy older man ” … was – and still is – world-famous. Then in his mid‑80s, he was beloved as a hero for his courage, patriotism, and accomplishments many decades ago.” Other passengers “greeted him with veneration” and the pilot, standing in the cockpit door, said “Sir, I have admired you since I was a little boy.”
If we accept the facts as Brooks states them, the man (1) was born within a few years either side of 1930 (mid-80’s in 2015), (2) has/had a wife who also was elderly, (3) was famous for bravery and patriotism (therefore probably not an actor or other celebrity) for things that had occurred many decades ago, and (4) was someone airline passengers could recognize. Given the context he’s most likely American. The “still is” remark about the fame probably means that the man is still alive, or was as of last July, but this isn’t definitive.

Other than the fact that he wasn’t married in 2015, having divorced Wife #3 a couple years earlier, Buzz Aldrin fits this profile perfectly. He was right in the middle of the stated age range, was famous for a courageous thing decades in the past, would have been reasonably recognizable, and definitely would have been an inspiration to a youthful would-be airline pilot. In addition, Brooks might have thought the woman with him was his wife.

I’ve read elsewhere about some possible candidates, but none of them quite fit.
Chuck Yeager: he had heroic accomplishments long in the past, and certainly could have inspired a boy who hoped to be a pilot someday. However, he was too old for the stated age range, having been born in 1923, and his wife is only in her 50’s (though the woman with him might have been his daughter with his late first wife). I’m also not sure if many airline passengers would have recognized him.
Bob Dole: fits perfectly, but is beyond the age range given that he turned 92 in the summer of 2015.
Jimmy Carter: a good choice, but too old for the stated age range and Brooks would have noted his security detail. It’s also hard to imagine a former President thinking that he hadn’t fulfilled his dreams.
George H.W. Bush, John McCain and John Glenn were dead by the time the article came out. If that’s not a disqualifier, there’s the age issue (Bush and Glenn too old, McCain too young), McCain’s accomplishments were recent, and Bush would have had a security detail and might not have been physically able to travel in 2015. I don’t believe Glenn would have been in any condition to travel either.

And of more importance, an interview with a deep and unabashed thinker. Thanks for the link.

Tell us about the first.

Bill Clinton has shaken hands with Harvey Weinstein, who has shaken hands with me, so you and I have a handshake connection. Howdy!

I don’t suppose the grandchild example you give is excessively rare. My aunt (mentioned often here, if only by me) turned 98 a week ago. Her paternal grandfather was born in 1838.

As for this handshaking thing: I never shook his hand but I kissed the episcopal ring more than once of the only truly great cleric of the second half of the 20th century, Marcel Lefebvre.

My father died a couple of years ago and it used to blow my mind when he reminisced about his childhood and knowing his grandfather who had served in the Civil War. There must be some African Americans in their 80s and 90s today who as children knew elderly relatives who had been born into and remembered slavery.

Grover Cleveland’s granddaughter is only in her 60’s. President Cleveland did not marry until he was in his sixties to a much younger woman and his youngest son did not marry until being in his sixties.

Jumping 190 years in two generations requires very late marries on the part of the men in the chain.

Can’t remember if I shook his hand, but I met Ed Sullivan at an outdoor performance of Aida in Rome; sadly, I lost his autograph on the way home. Goodness knows who that puts me within 1degree of separation. I also went on a date with a man who became Anton LaVey’s second-in-command in the Church of Satan, said hello to Isaac Asimov, and kissed Neil Diamond’s drummer. Oh, and I met Sir Roger Scruton and called him Mr. Scruton. Hey, he met the Queen, right? They were all amazingly nice, actually.

One of my favorite topics.

Just, as I see it, the crucial two decades were in the interwar period. Here you got the modern world, in sciences, arts, ideologies, technology, world-views, popular culture, morality.. even blueprint for A bomb. Until WW1, and after WW2, there is only evolution.

But, from 1918 to 1938 (or a few years later), you got revolution.

Hell, Jeffrey Epstein probably had quite the colorful collection of people he shook hands with.

I would consider that a minor accomplishment.

In the 1960s a broken-off heel belonging to one of the Four Tetrarchs was dug up in Istanbul, scene of the crime.

“I also went on a date with a man who became Anton LaVey’s second-in-command in the Church of Satan”
Best connection yet!

We should keep the Bible and the classical world at the center of our culture so we can share the same subjects through the ages, and by seeing how each age expresses and relates to the foundations of our civilization, we can know each age better than we could do any other way.

Somewhere I read, “People who don’t remember their distant ancestors will not be remembered by their distant descendants.” We’ve lost the thread.

That was probably St Martin of Tours, which is right on Sunset and smack in the middle of Brentwood. The Santa Monicans went to St Monicas (where the parish priest, Msgr Conneally, was the model of the old pastor in Going My Way – my father had many a story about him) and the Bel Air set (like the aunt I mentioned earlier) went to St Pauls. But in the 40s, when the whole family lived in Beverly Hills, everybody went to Good Shepherd, where, my mother told us, Loretta Young always came in late, clicking up to the front pew in her high heels.

And then Palo Alto! St Thomas Aquinas and then St Albert the Great, where we, Hamilton Avenue denizens, went once it was built. How about you?

The connection of eras is fascinating to ponder. Most of us born in the US in the 1950’s (as I was) could very plausibly have interacted (as very small children) with people who remembered the Civil War (as very small children.) They could’ve been great-grandparents or some other relative. And they themselves could’ve interacted with people who remembered the War of Independence. My kids are amazed whenever I mention that. It’s unlikely that handshakes would’ve been exchanged between such generational extremes, but a handshake is merely a ritual of social interaction, and it’s the interaction or connection that’s fascinating to ponder.

Of course, the Industrial Revolution greatly magnifies (and maybe distorts?) the significance of that connection, given how much and how rapidly it’s changed the way we live over the last two hundred years. Putting the shorter lifespans of a thousand years ago aside, an older person of the early 10th century having met someone who met someone who remembered the late 7th century as a small child may not have seemed quite as impressive back then, at least socially or culturally. If, however, you went two or three centuries earlier (in western Europe) two degrees of separation between you and a person who remembered the Roman empire might have been even more impressive than the 1950’s to 1770’s scenario.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opinion/income-inequality.html

Hi Steve: Would you please write a blog post about this article by David Brooks.

I chose to go to Compton and Watts for a specific reason, which offers a way forward. Harvard economist Raj Chetty recently led a study that showed that though these two neighborhoods are demographically similar and only 2.3 miles apart, 44 percent of the black men who grew up in Watts were incarcerated on April 1, 2010, compared with only 6.2 percent of the black men who grew up in families with similar incomes in Central Compton. Similarly, social mobility was much lower in Watts than in Compton.

Why are some neighborhoods, including some in Compton, able to give their kids better chances in life despite so many disadvantages? Chetty points to several factors: better schools, more fathers present in the neighborhoods and more cohesive community organizations.

I found all those things in my reporting in Compton — and something else. Watts is part of Los Angeles. Compton is its own city with its own mayor. I met a lot of great people in Watts, but Compton has more civic infrastructure — community groups and locally controlled government agencies. Compton has a lot of homegrown civic reformers, like Rafer Owens, who is a deputy Los Angeles County sheriff and pastor at a Baptist church. There’s also a mentality: We have faith in our ability to take care of ourselves; only people in the neighborhood really know what’s going on.

Some people who talk about inequality focus on the top 1 percent, and if you want to go after the hedge fund billionaires feel free. But as inequality is actually lived out, it’s the 20/80 gap that is most glaring and most unjust.

Shake the hand that shook the hand of P.T. Barnum and Charlie Chan.

I never met but spoke on the phone with Percival Spencer. He designed several aircraft and the Wham-O ornithopter toy: his father Christopher Spencer designed the Spencer repeating rifle, one of which I had actually shot before, which he found amazing.

I also met James Dougherty, first husband of Marilyn Monroe, on a couple of occasions.

I met a few of the oldest living early aviators when I was a young child, one showed me his first pilot’s license signed by one of the Wrights. His son was then a very senior airline captain and he showed me his also: he was one of the few check captains who had been granted the legendary “All Ratings Approved” type ratings, done to make the workload of FAA examiners manageable at the start of the jet era when a major carrier might have eight or nine separate needed type ratings. They quit doing that during or right after the Halaby era. Legally the holder could command any aircraft of the category and class, e.g, airplane multi engine land. In other words any airliner.

Several of those old guys were Early Birdmen and/or OX-5 Society, so basically they knew everyone who flew before WWI who survived into the late 40s or early 50s.

Who else? Well Dick Dale, who was in a Marilyn Monroe movie, a few astronauts, and a few of the really old engineers who worked on various interesting things. Burt Ward and Adam West, they were in costume. A few ball players- they hung out at this place in St. Louis my father got comped at so we’d go there. Thurman Munson right before he got killed and Ted Williams notably. They both flew.

Update on the rate of spread:

https://rt.live/

42 US states have an RO that’s now below 1. This means the virus is dying out all over the US. I am suspicous about the model, though. Only a couple of days ago, the model they were using gave an RO that was over 1 for most US states, but the model makers claim they’ve updated their model and they’re using more reported tests in the data. Yeah, but most US states have not improved their reporting rates overnight. All of a sudden, the model is including a lot more data. But because the model has been ‘back revised,’ the worse rates the old model had only yesterday and the day before have vanished utterly.

Where did this data come from? Did all of a sudden every department of health in every state cough up a lot more figures? I suspect liberal states were sitting on data to try to make the economy look bad and to force the government to bail out their lousy pension funds. But when McConnell and Trump told them to pound sand, they decided they didn’t want to wipe out their pension funds’ stock portfolio even more, and all of a sudden, more accurate data is coming out. The market is going up in response, too.

I once shook hands with Chuck D, and one can only imagine who and what he’s shaken hands with.

I understand but disagree. Even though I have real OCD, I like shaking hands. My neurosis manifests itself in checking things over and over, in an infinite loop like a bad piece of code.

If people realized how we and everything we touch, breathe and swallow is filled with little, creepy living things, they would 1) freak out, and 2) learn that there is no way to be apart from it. In fact, you need many of those living things. In your gut, for example, they help you digest your food. When you take antibiotics, the best thing you can do is eat yogurt with live cultures, because you need bacteria.

Being too clean is unhealthy, as unintuitive as it sounds. Shake hands!

All this handshaking connection stuff. It doesn’t really give you any glory, but did you reflect that you’ve probably got the skin bacteria of your six degrees of separation partners?

Yeah, if you’re six degrees of handshaking away from Hitler, you’ve likely got Hitler’s skin Germanic skin bacteria. They ought to culture the skin bacteria of those men with a lot of contacts. The results might be interesting.

We can assume the living Tyler brothers shook hands with their father, who shook hands with his, the President. (Well, former President.) Whose own father was once Thomas Jefferson’s roommate.

I had a couple of brief dealings with Walter Mondale, who debated Ronald Reagan (who met Mao), toured the already porous Mexican border with César Chávez,and was a protege of Hubert Humphrey and colleague of Eugene McCarthy, who himself signed a book for me.

Tiny Tim also gave me an autograph, and he appeared many times on Johnny Carson’s show. (My connection to Carl Sagan and Ashley Montagu!) Joni Mitchell, too, without my asking. She did not go to Woodstock, as she appeared on Dick Cavett that weekend. Plus she’s connected with much of rock and folk royalty.

Oh, and I’ve had a couple of chats with Joey Molland of Badfinger, who’d have met every one of the Beatles. And with the owner of the piroshki joint in St Paul, whose brother sold a guitar to George Harrison in the other half of the building. Of course, the Fab Four themselves met their share of important people.

I saw Reagan in the flesh when he stumped from the caboose of a train at Perrysburg, Ohio, and Jimmy Carter in Portland as he threw away Maine’s electors simply by appearing there. My grandfather’s little brother was named after their Congressman, who a decade later chaired the Titanic hearings in the Senate. Not quite coincidentally, he had the same surname as the captain– Smith.

Nothing special about all this– other regular Joes and Janes were present at all these meetings, and they can make the same claims.

Well , here’s my contribution :

Exactly, that is what the Russian joke developed into as well.

You are correct about one fact, although you expressed even that semi-incoherently

On purpose, to repeat the dangling modifier in Steve’s quote. Sorry if you missed the joke. At least you concede it was semi-coherent!

Other pairs of people born on the exact same month, day, and year:

My father’s first wife was born on the same day as his little sister. The former died a dozen or so years ago; Auntie is going on 97. Perhaps Khrushchev got his “We will bury you” from her.

said hello to Isaac Asimov

Asimov proudly claimed as his birthday the same day as my dad. However, he was almost certainly wrong. Asimov scholars are pretty sure he was born several weeks earlier. It was pretty chaotic over there at the time.

When Steve’s page first appeared on Wikipedia, his birthday was given as the same day as my son’s. But it was a week or so off, and later corrected. Oh, well… At least it wasn’t Obama’s birthday, as with one of the Brimelow girls. Which is also Coast Guard Day.

Surprised that nobody has mentioned Neil – “Hands! Touching Hands!” – Diamond…

Anyway I once gave directions to celebrity photographer and sometime member of the Royal Family, Lord Snowdon. He was running late for an engagement and having problems with the one-way streets. He was driving himself – a huge old RR.

Was O.W. Holmes Jr. the last person to leave his estate to Uncle Sam?

My family claim to fame is that I was bought a pint of beer by “Vera Duckworth” – a character in the soap “Coronation Street.” Happy day hahaha.

I’ve met Stephen Greenblatt several times, and he once knocked down an elderly TS Eliot, which links me to Ezra Pound, Groucho Marx, James Joyce, ……

I wonder what made Adelina Patti, at the height of her international fame, move to the Swansea Valley in South Wales – while very lovely, not exactly a haven for the rich and famous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig-y-Nos_Castle

If wiki is correct, Patti is name-checked in the works of Tolstoy, Wilde, Zola, Jules Verne, Conan Doyle and Edith Wharton. She must have been quite a singer, although she didn’t get a steam loco named after her as Jenny Lind did.

A few years ago as a grad student I shook the hand of a man who
shook Einstein’s hand in the early 1950s at the Institute for Advanced
Studies, Princeton, NJ. I don’t want to reveal who the man was although
he is no longer alive. I think the Age of Genius, associated with Modernity,
roughly 250 years in duration, ended when Picasso died in 1973. Modernity
(when even second-rate minds could make first-rate discoveries, as Dirac
put it) has ended because the low-hanging fruit had been picked. We’re
now going through Postmodernity, and the problems we’re trying
to solve are immeasurably more challenging, so challenging in fact
that the human mind seems no longer adequate to the task. David
Hilbert, a mathematician, opined in the early 1900s that physics was
becoming too difficult for physicists. I think this statement was
a little premature then but is right on the money now

While the American Civil War was of importance to countries other than the United States, the Napoleonic Wars decades before were of greater importance to many countries, and of importance to the United States, as well (War of 1812). The Napoleonic Wars’ total death toll was also greater (well over two million).

Buzz, that looks like Deke Slayton obfuscating the hands in your photo. Slayton, one of the 7 original Mercury trained astronauts, had a mild heart condition, so he didn’t make it into space until the first USSR docking mission; making him the eldest man in space.

Spoke with him a couple of times, long after his NASA career. Had no idea who he was other than pilot of Stinger, a Formula 1 racing airplane. He seemed down to earth, excited about his plane and racing. I only approached him as I had built and raced a few scale models of his Stinger. He was surprised the toys were just a little slower than his original racer.

Stinger, before Slayton’s purchase to race in Formula 1

Anybody know where we can find some Nazi Confederates to wage war against?

Hollywood. Evidently they’re all over the place there.

Mark Steyn wrote that we are now farther in time from the end of WWW2 than the beginning if WW2 was from the end of the Civil War…makes one think.

Makes one think how odd it is that the traditional meanings of farther and further are not only getting blurred, they seem to be replacing each other.

It’s similar to something like “Me and him are going back to the outfitter’s to make sure we have enough provisions for he and I.” The kind of thing you hear everyday now.

At least such atrocities are still underlined in red if you have Grammarly or whatever installed.

I was traveling from London to Los Angeles on October, 9, 1990 on a PAN AM flight. Seated next to me was Tracy Chapman, but I did not know that she was a famous singer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Chapman). All I remember is that she was a pleasant young woman. The surprise came only towards the end of the flight when I started muttering about the misery of LA traffic at 4 p.m. , She mentioned that, thankfully, she won’t have to drive as her driver will be coming. That is when I realized I am sitting next to a “Big Shot”. I wonder if she was secretly happy that I did not know/recognize her. It was only much later I came to know she is a famous singer (4 Grammys).

Another strangeness of that date was the announcement on the PA system towards the end of flight that we will be going to San Francisco because of “Government Shutdown”. It didn’t make any sense to me as I had never heard of such a thing and started worrying something bad may happen. Later, I found out that all customs offices were closed on the West Coast except for SFO, where we had to clear customs and fly again to LAX as a domestic flight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_United_States_federal_government_shutdown

As a child in Wisconsin in the 1940s or 1950s, my father shook Sen. Joe McCarthy’s hand. On his deathbed in 2001, Dad shook hands with one of my friends and boasted of the link with McCarthy.

Due to late reproduction in my family, my grandfather (1892-1972) would have been 90 when I was born (1982). He claimed that he knew Patton and pulled him to safety after he (Patton) was wounded in WWI. Grandpa was in the tank corps, so it is possible.

I shook Pat Buchanan’s hand a few months back when I was in D.C. I rather doubt Buchanan shook hands with Mao or Zhou Enlai, but he certainly shook hands with Nixon, so that puts me two out from everyone Nixon shook hands with.

Me-Pat Buchanan-Richard Nixon-Nikita Khruschchev-Josef Stalin-Vladimir Lenin

I’m guessing there’s a shorter pass from Buchanan to Stalin, too. George F. Kennan, maybe?

Slightly off topic, but I was saddened to learn of the death last week of Steve Dalkowski, said by many who faced him to be the hardest thrower they had ever seen. Ted Williams faced him once in a spring training game, and said he never wanted to face him again. Couldn’t even see the pitch.

Christopher Steele, the failed intelligence officer who fell for a 4chan hoax and was depended upon by Obama’s top investigative minds for the Russian hackers debacle, is being sued in the UK for defamation by Russian oligarchs, and has claimed that all his documents and data from the 2016 attempt to prevent the election of Donald Trump has been deleted (probably by Russian hackers). “They no longer exist,” Steele said, under oath, in a UK court. “They were wiped in early January 2017.” This was the time of the Buzzfeed “dossier” leak.
This follows Adam Schiff, long-time close friend of numerous wealthy sex offenders, blocking the release of senate testimony.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/christopher-steele-dossier-emails-documents-wiped
https://aclj.org/public-policy/radio-recap-schiff-blocks-russia-probe-transcripts-to-keep-americans-in-the-dark

Don Young is the most senior member of the House today. In his first term, that claim belonged to Wright Patman, who served since 1929. When Gilbert N. Haugen (1899) was senior.

Before him was Alfred C Harmer (1871/1877), Henry Dawes (1857), Joshua R Giddings (1838), John Quincy Adams, et al., (1831), Lewis Williams (1815), Thomas Newton, Jr (1801), Nathaniel Macon (1791)

Phew… Someone else can do this for the Senate. And the House of Lords.

I got Arnold Palmer’s autograph after he finished the 3rd round of the L.A. Open at El Rancho in 1963. Later that year, there was an article about “Arnie’s Army” in one of the two golf mags of the day. And there, in that article, was a photo from that day of Arnie walking down the 18th fairway with a pack of fans straggling behind. Are there I was in the pic! Walking alongside, and looking at him with smiling hero-worship. I bought the mag bought lost the dang thing.

I’ve met Stephen Greenblatt several times, and he once knocked down an elderly TS Eliot, which links me to Ezra Pound, Groucho Marx, James Joyce, ……

Ezra Pound was held in the same jail as Emmet Till’s daddy, so- based on annual NYT references- you, sir, are closest to the most important person in American History. Congratulations!

(For my part the most important world-historical personage whose hand I ever shook was Eduard Teller, father of the H-bomb)

Had to look it up but now I remember it was the 1977 PGA. Missed out on playoff with Littler and Wadkins. Lanny’s only major.

Interesting wiki read…. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_PGA_Championship

I asked the question bc I’m a golf historian (sort of) and never remember reading about him totally gagging. The 77 PGA isn’t a choke at all.

The Duel In the Sun you mentioned was just Watson playing phenomenally and Jack only playing great. Even then He made a bomb on 18 to make Watson sweat his 2 foot tap in…

Isaac must have been on his best behavior that day. According to some recent accounts, he was famously boorish around attractive women.

I saw him speak at the 1974 comic book convention in NYC…thought his “I’m the Greatest” act was just a shtick. Apparently it wasn’t.

Still one of the all-time greats, though.

Justice Lewis Brandeis’ grandchildren were born in the mid to late 1920’s. Three of them were living a few years ago.Likely to have crossed paths with Holmes?

The Napoleonic Wars’ total death toll was also greater (well over two million).

The Napoleonic Empire, 2d ed (1991, 2003) Geoffrey Ellis (citing Esdaile)
KIA, Died of Wounds + Camp Disease, France Proper: 1,400,000 during the period 1792-1815
Total war dead among all Eur. armies: 3 million during the Napoleonic/Revolutionary Era
Civilians: 1 million

“Me-Pat Buchanan-Richard Nixon-Nikita Khruschchev-Josef Stalin-Vladimir Lenin”

Maybe the following works better, but it’s more speculative:

Me-Pat Buchanan-Richard Nixon-Armand Hammer-Vladimir Lenin

“He [Bertrand Russell] was so old he could have, as a child prodigy, helped Sherlock Holmes on a case.”

Apparently I knew far less about child prodigies and fictional characters than I thought.

Back in the 1980s there was an elderly British columnist for the Telegraph or somesuch who recounted how as a lad in school in the 1920s, came home one day and told his ancient grandmother how they had learned that day about wicked Oliver Cromwell.

He was shocked when his grandmother suddenly reached out and smacked him with her blackthorn cane! “They’ll be no such talk in this house!,” she croaked. “My first husband’s first wife’s first husband was Mr. Cromwell’s secretary, and he always said he was a very nice man!”

The columnist figured out it was entirely plausible if the old woman was conflating Oliver with his son Richard “Tumbledown Dick” (d. 1712). Just as toothless old widowers in rural England sometimes married jailbait girls for inheritance purposes, so ancient widows sometimes had marriages of convenience with young lads for the same reasons…

“Me-Pat Buchanan-Richard Nixon-Armand Hammer-Vladimir Lenin”

Didn’t get to shake his hand but my Chicago Alderman Leon Despres KNEW Trotsky and so had a direct link to Vladimir Lenin.

Saw University of Chicago physicist Robert J. Moon and a relative who talked to him said he talked with Winston Churchill who knew just about everyone in the early twentieth century. Moon carried a revolver when going to teach Sunday school in Black neighborhoods in Chicago.

Thanks!

Remember hearing of a guy (can’t remember who) who would say in the 1950’s that he kissed the same girl as the Marquis de Lafayette. His kindergarten teacher, an old woman in the late 1800’s, would give a kiss to the boys as they came in to school. In the early 1830’s, as a young girl, she had presented flowers to Lafayette during one of his tours of the U.S.–and received a kiss from him.

Just as toothless old widowers in rural England sometimes married jailbait girls for inheritance purposes, so ancient widows sometimes had marriages of convenience with young lads for the same reasons…

Can you please explain this? They were not very wealthy, were they?

I was just about to post that video but checked through comments first . It came to mind right away .

These is slightly off the topic, but, as late as 2009, so far as I could tell, a grandson of President John Tyler (1841–45) was still alive. I imagine that a fair number of hands were shaken by the Tylers.

I did get to shake his hand, Joe. He was the lawyer for a co-op of which I was board president for a few years.

That’s awesome (I’m not being flippant; I say “awesome”). I’d never heard of Moon before, but now I’m going to stay up late and be tired tomorrow and perform poorly at work on account of digging into “quantized space.” Thank you.

When I was a grad student at Chicago in the late sixties several of the senior faculty had been there when Russell was there for a year or so around 1940. I shook my professors’ hands, but I’m not entirely sure that they would have shaken Russell’s.

Are you Mossad, lol?
Well, Hitler shook a lot of hands. So did de Gaulle. It goes like this: de Gaulle shook hands with PĂ©tain, before the defeat, and the latter went on to shake hands with Hitler, and many years later de Gaulle shook hands with Giscard d’Estaing.
My father met Giscard 20 years ago, who I believe is still alive today.

Hitler>PĂ©tain>de Gaulle>Giscard>my father

(Though chronogically, PĂ©tain shook hands first with de Gaulle and then with Hitler.)
Of course, de Gaulle shook hands with Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill too. But his forte was ass-kissing.

Of all those mentioned above, the only great man worthy of mention is PĂ©tain. Someday, history will do him justice.

I was born in 1950 , in ’55 my father was in the military stationed in London . The house we rented , in Potters Bar outside of London was used by the US Gov’t during the war to put up VIPS , while Potters bar was never bombed the house had a bomb shelter that was carpeted had a fire place and a telephone in it . I remember accompanying my father to catch the “boat train” in London and there was still rubble from the Blitz around the area . In 1987 I went back to the UK for a visit and had dinner with a neighbor friend of my parents from that time . I asked her about that memory of rubble , could that have been real ? She assured me it was and also added that the English were still on rationing at the time > 10 years after the war . At one point there was a display in London of various WW2 aircraft , I got to climb up into the cockpit and bombardier’s position of an HE-111 . So no one famous but brushing up against momentous events .
One more thing , those neighbors of ours were really wealthy . 1% wealthy and yet they followed the rationing like every body else . She brought the rationing up because she remembered my folks inviting them to dinner and my mother serving a baked ham and how envious she was that the Americans had access to such luxuries while they were still rationed in the UK . They were surrounded by farms at that time and yet didn’t take advantage of their wealth to cheat the system . So no one famous but someone with integrity which is probably a lot rarer .

I rarely get a chance to share this gemThe American Methuselah

Former longtime Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer was mixed up in that.
Downer [b.1952] was the son of Liberal Cabinet Minster Sir Alec Downer [b.1904] who was the son of Sir John Downer [1837-1915], Senator for South Australia and one of the drafters of Australia’s Constitution.
Anyway, many Australians want to know if the Yanks still do waterboarding, if not, could the FBI make an exception for Downer?

My grandfather was born in 1860, west Ireland. I’m sure he encountered every now and then a veteran of the Napoleonic wars.

One of them is still alive.

My Paternal Grandmother was born in 1899 and my youngest son in 2011. That means if he can live to be 89, my family will have in 4 generations, lived in 4 different centuries.

Somewhere in Northern Virginia, in a little suburban house, an octogenarian “grand-dad” is sleeping at this moment, and nobody in the house (not the grand-dad in his sad little room, not the grandkids who spend the evenings on their sad i-pads, not the older middle aged dad who is probably watching trash on HBO, and certainly not the “soccer mom” who is in her late 50s and is really more of a grand-mom in all aspects except for the fact that she had her first kid in her late 30s and last kid in her early 40s) —– anyway, somewhere in Northern Virginia, in an ordinary suburban house with a larch tree and an oak tree in the front yard, and a few expensive little red maples in the back yard, is the house where “granddad” is sleeping, and nobody knows this, but it might be true —- “the granddad” has the dubious distinction of being that one surviving old person who, if anyone cared enough to count these things up, could claim to have had sex with (usually unsatisfying sex, but that is besides the point) more of JFKs sloppy seconds than any other living granddad in America.

As for me, I spent a couple months in Paris in the 70s, and, when offered, I turned down a couple of no longer young prostitutes who had, in their day, personally entertained some well-known historical figures. Looking back, I would have liked to talk to them for a while longer than I did, just to hear how they spoke French – French is a beautiful language, and it is almost always a good idea to learn more about it – but I am so so glad that I did not dip my wick where those historical critters had, long before, dipped, or tried to dip, their wicks.

Thus ends my most recent contribution to vulgar English prose.

This guy fought in the Civil War at 16 and he lived to be 107. Here he is posing with a military jet.

My father , who would have been called an “anti-YouKnowWho” if his general feelings toward the versipellous race were heard, did nail Susan Sontag and one of the sisters of a famous Jewish publishing family known for their musical endeavors (but not the really famous one). I’ll name Sontag since she is dead, but not the other one.

That did not prevent him from putting the kibosh on a budding romance with a Jewess in high school. She later became locally famous as the weather person on the top tv station there for years. She later survived severe breast cancer and since she never married she might have been lesbian later on, I don’t know.

Again since she is dead, I will say I turned down the late Susannah McCorkle. Not out of nobility, I was just drunk enough to fear not being able to perform but not too drunk to not care. Six months later she jumped out her high rise window. Since she wasn’t exactly sober either it spared me a lot of guilt.

My grandparents on my mother’s side met, and I guess fell in love, in the 1890s, and my grandparents on my father’s side met and, I guess fell in love, in the 1880s. (I was born in 1960, and the average wedding date for a grandparent for a person born in 1960 could easily be as much as two generations of 30 years prior – that is, 1900 —- but (my grandparents and) my parents were unattractive people who mated later in life than they would have, had they been pleasant to look upon…. trust me, I know how that works). (to be accurate, the average numbers are this : someone born in 1960 most likely had parents who married in 1955 or so, at the age of 25, and whose parents, in turn, had most likely married 25 years before that, in 1930).

At the time (the 1880s and 1890s), Saint Therese de Lisieux and Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity were still alive, praying every day for people, and I am sure they prayed, while still young people living on this earth, in the ordinary way, for my grandparents, or would have, had anyone asked them.

It is amusing to reflect, when watching classic John Ford westerns, that my grandparents were the same age as the younger people in the actual west that is celebrated in those great westerns, and were much much older than the young actors who, in the 1950s, acted the roles of those now long gone people – such as my grandparents – who were young in the 1860s and 1870s.

and …. There are people a mere 20 years or so older than me whose grandparents were mature adults during even earlier decades than those in which my grandparents fell in love.

Another thing that has changed perception of historic distance is photography-film-video and sound recording. People and events across the past century so far, approximately, can be seen and heard in increasingly realistic ways.

This is unprecedented, and it will only continue and become even more prevalent and lifelike.

Thank you for your comments, BTW. I hope my reply to you on Audacious Epigone’s blog did not seem critical of you. If it did, it was badly written. I was in agreement with you and criticizing others in a general sense via my comment.

Not a tale of handshake links, but of eras linked: a friend’s grand- (or was it great-grand-) mother came west as a child in a covered wagon and in maturity flew to Paris on the Concorde.

My father is 93. His grandfather fought in the civil war.
My maternal grandmother (b 1892) grew up in a world with no radio, no airplanes, no cars. She still churned her own butter and made her own quilts when I was a child. They did not get electricity in the house until my mother was in high school.
The old Ozark farm life of my grandmother had more in common with the 18th century than the 20th.
No famous people there, just old ways. All gone now.

That is amazing.

Thinking about myself, I probably can get the most mileage out of my grandfather to his father to Teddy Roosevelt.

I believe that Hamilton Fish III (1888-1991) was fond of saying that he was the last person alive “who knew someone who knew the Marquis de Lafayette.”

Ezra Pound was held in the same jail as Emmet Till’s daddy,

Wow! A toofer! Not only introduces a new theme (same jail cell as/arrested along with) but mentions Emmet Till, which means this thread has jumped the shark.

I once went out of my way to introduce myself to an astronaut so I could shake his hand, because I felt like it physically connected me to someone who had been in outer space. I’ve got some strange nerdy tendencies.

One of the first DVDs I got , a gift from a friend , great movie . John Candy RIP .

George Macdonald Fraser illustrated it by finding an instance of a person born in a wagon during the California Gold Rush (1849) who lived to be able to watch a television show about it.

And there were Pony Express riders (1859-60) who lived to see their once-desolate route paved, with gasoline stations and convenience stores at their old waypoints.

The “Old West” happened so quickly. And then it was over.

You really need to find a link to one of the two soldiers that Patton slapped on Sicily. If you can count a slap as a handshake.

Patton said he was actually present at Waterloo and the destruction of Carthage. So you can get a lot of time-travel years out of that. Jus sayin

I can’t believe you wrote that almost 24 hours ago and nobody here has questioned your “official narrative.” Lol

I asked a question of Henry Kissinger (from out in the audience)

What was the question?

There is doubt that Lundy was actually as old as he claimed and therefore that he was a Confederate veteran.

https://www.crestviewbulletin.com/news/20160126/william-lundy-did-not-serve-in-civil-war-new-research-states

That face hardly evokes a feeling of confidence in anything he might claim.

Before you send them to the landfill, I’ll take them.

Well, if we want to get into that variety of connection, we could turn things on their head and brag about nailing someone young who had a famous ancestor. Solely for the sake of argument, I swear, say a granddaughter of the first woman to fly around the world.

Orson Welles claimed to have met Hitler as a boy, and Welles knew a bunch of famous people who would still be living, though getting up there in years.

I remember as a kid reading a book about an Apache who in his teens fought under the leadership of Geronimo. On the back cover was a photograph of the same man, now an old man, stepping off an airplane.

Can you imagine, some time in the distant future…

ELDERLY ROBOT (reminiscing): One time back when I was just a young Version 3.1, I shook the hand of an old Chinese professor, who as a boy had shaken the hand of one of those extinct white people, who had once shaken the hand of… Joe Biden.

Can you imagine any future person having a fond old memory of meeting the legendary Joe Biden?

“When I was just a little girl, I got fondled and got my hair sniffed by ol’ Lunchpail Joe!”

I’m not sure I’ve shaken the hand of anyone famous? I shook hands with a MoH awardee, who may have shook hands with some famous people.

Does that mean I’m connected somehow?

I’m pretty common…no matter whose hand I’ve touched.

Of course, de Gaulle shook hands with Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill too. But his forte was ass-kissing.

As the late Yiddish comedian S. Dzigan said of de Gaulle “Ehr pobirt, ober der lange noz shtert” ‘He tries to (kiss ass) but his long nose gets in the way’. Dzigan was the proud owner of a Durantesque proboscis himself, so he know whereof he spoke.

IIRC from this series, if you lived on a farm you weren’t ‘cheating’ the system if you got stuff off the land. Even the high and mighty politicians followed the rationing system.

UK begging for money post-WW2.

Well, if we want to get into that variety of connection, we could turn things on their head and brag about nailing someone young who had a famous ancestor. Solely for the sake of argument, I swear, say a granddaughter of the first woman to fly around the world.

I don’t know about grandchildren, but Valentina Tereshkova had a daughter a year or so after her spaceflight, who’d still be young enough to be nail-able.

didn’t get to shake his hand but my Chicago Alderman Leon Despres KNEW Trotsky and so had a direct link to Vladimir Lenin.

And to — eeww!– Frida Kahlo. Speaking of ‘staches…

She screwed Diego and Leon , who in turn screwed and were screwed (over) by Nelson Rockefeller and Joe Stalin.

Which brings to mind other daisy chains:

Woody Allen/Mia/Frank/Ava/Mickey

Ari/Jackie/Jack/Marilyn/Joltin’ Joe & Arthur Miller

Recently it occurred to me that we’re now further from the end of WW1 than the start of WW1 was from the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Responses to my covered wagon to Concorde tale prompt me to add: I was on a tour that included St. Mark’s in Venice (900 years old), but my awe was diminished by news of discovery at that time of the Chinese emperor’s tomb (thousands). I spoke with a Chinese couple also touring, and said, “To you, this (St. Mark’s) must seem very junior.” The lady replied without hesitation: “But you go very fast.”

I see a post about apostolic succession above. I am not sure what the deal is for protestant denominations that have bishops, but for Catholic bishops the center of the becoming a bishop ceremony is the ‘laying on hands’ from an existing bishop, going back, in an unbroken line, to Jesus laying his hands on Peter and the other apostles. It’s institutionalized.

I remember you mentioning Potters Bar before, I grew up only a few miles north of there.

There were still some bombsites in London in the 1990s. Not rubble strewn desolation – long since cleared but still not built upon. Often used for car parking. The giveaway was not the missing building but the almost medieval style wooden props used to support surrounding buildings. Temporary in the war but still there decades later. Probably still a few even now. I hope a few are preserved as a reminder.

Anything that puts you a step nearer to Corn Pop is worth boasting about.

I’ve been noticing these things ever since the day, about ten years ago, that I figured out that JFK had been dead for longer than he lived.

Elvis has now been dead for longer than he was alive. Next year, we’ll be able to say the same for John Lennon. How about Kurt Cobain? Life is short.

Mystifying to me how an annoying little leprechaun like Mickey Rooney could been a lover of the great beauty Ava Gardner.

Joe D chased actresses that reminded him of Marilyn after she died. It’s known he bagged Jayne Mansfield (who certainly knew and most probably had sex with LaVey) and Morgan Fairchild. His equipment has been the stuff of legend-Pete Rose even said he was huge, he rigged up a shower for him in Vietnam- but based on photos that came out after he died, he doesn’t look impressive flaccid to me.

Arthur Miller, never known for ardor or size, certainly bagged a few young admirers on the side as well.

Frank also certainly bagged Marilyn. Along with about three-quarters of the rest of female Hollywood from about 1946 to roughly 1970. Probably Liz Taylor.

And very possibly Jackie.

Except for a few people who practiced true marital fidelity or were virgins, pretty much everyone in show biz is within three or four degrees of everyone else sexually going back to the Silent Era. Maybe five now, given that that was a century ago.

But considering some men have fifty-plus year careers of playing the field…..you can be 75 and still be getting teen quim if you are famous enough. And a few old cougars can still line up guys who will service them later than you’d think, if they still have some female body shape, and don’t stink or have wattling. So a young man still might have a woman who had a man who had Marilyn.

How about Babe Ruth to Mike Trout via three pitchers?

John Benson pitched to Ruth and Mickey Mantle. Luis Tiant pitched to Mantle and Cal Ripkin, Jr. Bartolo Colon pitched to Ripkin and Trout.

Of course it is. the Church is the Institution of Institutions.

However, the written historical record can only prove these consecrations back into the middle of the 16th century. Before that, the records are too spotty for certainty, although I suppose a concerted effort might turn up a few going back a few centuries more.

No I recognized your comment as you intended it. Good point about photography and other means of documentation having an impact on how we view the past. I hadn’t thought of that.

Your comment makes me think, however, about how we mentally file different eras of photographic technology as either archival/historical in nature or as a means of visual communication as they were originally intended. The black and white snapshots from when I was a kid in the early 60’s were just considered fairly accurate and affordable photos back then. Then they went into a sort of out of vogue phase as technology improved and color was added. Now their graininess and flatness can add sort of a cultural character that can either give context to the subject in the photo, or maybe even distort our perceptions of it a bit. The photo hasn’t changed, but maybe our interpretation of it has.

That in turn makes me wonder how the digital photography and video of today will be viewed as old fashioned in the future (?) I’m pretty sure the jerky cell phone video and selfie pose will become very dated in the not too distant future. But you’re absolutely right – photography in any form will be much more illuminating than distracting when looking at history.

I’ve been noticing these things ever since the day, about ten years ago, that I figured out that JFK had been dead for longer than he lived.

Given that he was born all the way back in 1917 those still-alive-as-a-vegetable stories are pretty much obsolete.

Elvis has now been dead for longer than he was alive.

Having been born 85 years ago, the working-in-a-Michigan-supermarket stories are rapidly heading toward obsolescence too.

At least the Walt-Disney-in-liquid-nitrogen stories won’t become obsolete.

There was a space adventurer series on TV in the early 50’s- can’t remember the name, I saw the episode on computer, I think- where they travelled back in time to Berlin circa 1953. Obviously the episide was shot there on location, or location shots were interspersed.

The city was still filled with destroyed buildings and mounds of rubble.

On a trip to Greece in the late 80’s, I sailed to one of the lesser known islands. I asked my cabbie (who was himself very well-travelled) about purchasing one of the very many empty abandoned villas and why there were so many, just open to the weather and abandoned.

He said the Germans had killed so many people in the war, and so many fled and never returned, that they were all over the place. He said almost half the people were killed, and many properties were split among dozens of distant relatives. He told me that the population was still way below what it had been- it had never recovered.

A friend lives in Cyprus. There are still entire abandoned cities guarded by U.N. troops. Apartments with the remains of food on the dining table. Car dealerships with new 1974 abandoned cars inside. All slowly crumbling.

As kids, he and his friends would sneak into these cities, although the penalties could be severe. One city was a beach resort that Richard Burton and Liz Taylor vacationed in in the 70’s, so it must have been pretty nice.

It’s funny how we hear non-stop about Palestinians and Israel, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about how Greek Cypriots lost everything 46 years ago, and somehow got on with their lives. No terror attacks, etc. But then neither Greece nor Cyprus has oil, so no-one gives a crap.

We in the wealthy countries have very short memories.

Mossad? No, more likely the Sicherheitsdienst.

If I hurry (he’s 94 after all) and if this lockdown ends soon enough, I could meet Giscard with some ease.

I have a friend who lives in a splendid manor-house on the Loire. Once, when I and an older couple were staying with him, he put on a delectable lunch al fresco to which he also invited another older person, who was in fact the widow of Giscard’s wife’s brother. She (who has herself since died) spoke with real warmth of the former presidential couple and their unforced commitment to the values we all shared, those of the Catholic Church. My friend had already got to know them well, and since he has recently also bought a flat in Paris, where they now spend all of their time, it would be easy to arrange a meeting.

However, I am with you about his essential mediocrity, and agree with you even more that Petain was the man of true stature, not least during the Vichy period. His heroic indifference, even disdain, at his trial after the war are striking evidence of his conviction that history would justify his actions.

I believe Dean Acheson’s daughter Mary (born 1924) is still living. Acheson clerked for Brandeis, but was friendly enough with Holmes that it seems likely that he would have presented his children to him.

Another person we might mention is Dean Acheson’s friend and patron Averill Harriman (1891-1986.) Not only did Harriman shake every famous hand in America in his day, including that of Holmes, but there are many many people living today who shook his. For example, like several others on this thread, I’ve shaken Joe Biden’s hand. Biden shook Harriman’s hand, who shook Holmes’ hand, etc.

Just as toothless old widowers in rural England sometimes married jailbait girls for inheritance purposes

Can you please explain this? They were not very wealthy, were they?

Thomas Edison’s grandfather was over 70 when he married an 18-year-old and had two more children. That’s Tyler territory.

One wonders what his secret was. Thomas himself wasn’t wealthy yet.

j mct, I am a cradle Catholic in the now bankrupt Diocese of Buffalo. Too much laying on of hands brought that about.

prosa, I didn’t remember JFK’s birth year, my still going strong mother was born in 1917. And for what it is worth, she never mentions the Spanish Flu, as she would have been only one year old, but she had three older siblings, spaced 2 years apart, 1915,1913,1911, who all survived it.

That I can understand (“flesh is weak”), but what/where is the inheritance? Unless you mean the kids are the inheritance. Also, the formula will not work in reverse ( ancient widows sometimes had marriages of convenience with young lads), unless they had some amazingly robust (and insatiable) “flesh”. (Have Cougars been present from ancient times?)

Digital photography, digital photo editing, and digital sound editing have seriously challenged the evidentiary value of both photographs and sound recordings. There are still tells that can suggest that things are not quite right-that editing has been employed-but the onus is on the defendant, and the State has all the resources unless they are after a multimillionaire or better. The sordid case of attorney Edgar Steele stands out in this regard: almost certainly he was convicted on fraudulent audio material. Steele was somewhat mentally impaired at the trial, whether from recent invasive heart surgery or deliberate drugging, but a bovine jury convicted him anyway and he died in prison.

Much of this was possible using analog methods but digital makes it cheap, repeatable, and doable by much less well trained people with only a cheap commodity computer and a subscription license to common low cost software. Looking at old Soviet doctored photos, one can quickly spot the relative crudeness of most with very little training. As digital tech gets better, more and more expertise is needed to even be suspicious in the first place.

As long as you only have to fool jurors, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Without experience and training in both general photographic or recording procedures and some forensic experience as well as a healthy skepticism of the prosecution, the evidence will seem airtight even if it is a total fabrication.

I was born in 1982. My oldest great-uncle (a half-brother of my grandfather) was born in 1858. Again, no famous people involved, but I still find this expanse of time quite difficult to get my head around.

Sailer you bastard. The only reason to post this detritus left behind by a bilge pump is to run up your numbers. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Neither Israel nor Palestine has oil. That’s not it. My dad was held over two weeks past his time in service in 1964. Cyprus was the reason.

For example, Winston Churchill (1874-1965) liked to recount in the 1930s that as a boy, Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809-1898) had told him that he remembered the bonfires celebrating victory at the 1815 Battle of Waterloo.

As a boy of 13 I attended Churchill’s funeral on a bitterly cold January or maybe February day in London. Of course he was already dead at that point, otherwise I would have shook his hand and been only two steps removed from the Battle of Waterloo.

Bertrand Russell was born a couple of years earlier than Churchill, but survived him by a few years. I bet he too knew a few people who were survivors from an earlier age, and being so precocious, he probably interviewed them and took notes at the age of 3.

Tragically, Russell died of influenza.

Steve,
The uncle of a friend of mine bought a mountain in Tuscany in tbe early 60’s. A very polished and educated Englishman, who spoke several languages, and could read and write Egyptian Hieroglyphics (!).
Anyway, people like Sir James Goldsmith and Gianni Agnelli were his friends and neighbors, and he threw big dinner and cocktail parties for all and sundry.
One of tbe regulars was the head of the local Communist Party. At one party in the early 80’s, this gentleman was explaining Italian Communism to my friend, and how it differed from Soviet Communism. It went like this:
“In Soviet Communism, what’s yours and what’s mine is of no meaning. All belongs to the State and is for everyone. In Italian Communism, what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine also!!”
I’m not sure if he was 100% joking, as the story was told to me later by my friend. But I think it’s a pretty good explanation of EuroCommunism!!

Physical books and records are more important than ever, so preserve them as best you can. Most digital preservation schemes these days are a mess and cannot be trusted. Vellum and paper are better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age

Sorry if I was snotty. I still don’t understand your joke. I’m sure it’s good.

You obtuse posturing Holy Roller. It might not suit the most refined sensibilities, but it’s how the world really works. Reality can be distasteful.

Harriman was also a noted womanizer-between him and his infamous last wife, Winston Churchill’s former daughter in law, they probably scrogged a wide swath of famous people in the 20th Century.

Fun fact: the Harriman family fortune was made by Averill’s dad, Railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, who was born in 1848. Think of the hands that he shook.

Harriman was also a noted womanizer-between him and his infamous last wife, Winston Churchill’s former daughter in law, they probably scrogged a wide swath of famous people in the 20th Century.

Fun fact: the Harriman family fortune was made by Averill’s dad, Railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, who was born in 1848. Think of the hands that he shook.

Institutions like railroads, the telephone company, power utilities, etc also have a sort of institutional memory where the people going out pass on their knowledge as much as possible to the new hires. When I worked for Santa Fe there were still a couple of engineers who had run working steam. The railroad also has really detailed personnel records going back a long way, thanks to the railroad retirement act, the unions, FELA, etc.

It would be interesting to see how many careers you have to go back to get to various points of technological change. I was talking to some seventysomething retired railroad guys, who have been out ten or fifteen years, and they could all tell certain stories passed down from at least before WWII because they worked with guys who worked with guys, etc. On a few yards there are still a few buildings that go back to the 1940s or so and they were saying that a couple of the lockers are filled with the effects-clothing, boots, whatever- of men killed on the job that have gone unmolested for sixty years or so. There’s no lock on them, it’s just understood no one bothers them. They still have the old labels on them. There’s probably nothing valuable in there, just street clothes, and no one ever talked about why they weren’t cleaned out. It was just an unwritten, unspoken thing.

I’d never heard of that before. I wonder if there are similar things with power linemen, people like that.

Paul MCartney once met Bertand Russell.

Russelll was mostly raised by his grandfather Lord John Russell, the former PM, who as a boy had visited Napoleon Bonaparte in Elba.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=N3m2r0Ln0rU

Reality can be distasteful.

The sense that something is distasteful is evolutionarily programmed with regard to feces, rotting protein and astringent edibles, but with regard to sexual matters it is an individual response determined by culture and personal preference. You accommodate Holy Roller too much.

The fact that Hitler’s library is stored in Washington is a good challenge for anyone who doesn’t believe America is a vain and conceited empire.

The Roosevelts, Franklin and Eleanor, were social with Holmes and may have introduced him to their grandchildren two of whom are alive today, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Dall (b. 1927) and Sara Delano Roosevelt (b. 1932).

I was thinking about old E. H. Harriman, and about Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman. Lots of connectivity there, but if your goal is to get back to George Washington, the O. W. Holmes — J. Q. Adams link is still the most powerful piece in the puzzle.

Wrong answer:

We were looking for what is East Timor.

Ironically future generations may get a lot of their best data on our time from excavating landfills, since under some conditions old books and papers can survive in readable or recoverable states for at least centuries and maybe millennia. Libraries who dumpstered huge collections in the dead of night may have secretly undone themselves as most of the books may be readable with future efforts.

Ironically future generations may get a lot of their best data on our time from excavating landfills, since under some conditions old books and papers can survive in readable or recoverable states for at least centuries and maybe millennia.

I wonder how many other Jean Shepherd fans read iSteve.

Not to mention the interchangeability of less and fewer.

But your me and him and he and I drives me nuts when I hear them. I guess they don’t teach grammar in school any more. It’s probably racist, or something.