What I’m Blogging

It’s the birthday of Frank Sinatra, born in Hoboken, New Jersey (1915). His mother was a midwife and a saloon owner, and she encouraged him to have big dreams as a kid. He spent a lot of his childhood sitting on the Hoboken wharves, staring at New York City, imagining how he could make a name for himself. It was his uncle who introduced him to music, and bought him a ukulele. He liked to sit on the curb at night, under a lamppost, and strum. He also liked to sing along with the player piano in his parents’ saloon, and occasionally one of the men in the bar would pick him up and sit him on the piano. One day, a customer gave him a nickel for a song he sang, and he decided that he wanted to spend the rest of his life getting paid to sing.

…You want the voice, you take the name…

He got sidetracked for a little while when he got into the newspaper business, first working on a delivery truck and then as a copy boy. But one night he saw Bing Crosby sing in Jersey City, and that persuaded him to quit his day job and focus on music.

The first singing group he joined only let him in because he had his own car and could drive the group to gigs. The group won an amateur singing contest on a radio show with the largest call-in vote in the show’s history, and they got a regular job touring with another band. Sinatra eventually began working on his own, singing in bars and roadhouses. The trumpeter for Benny Goodman saw one of Sinatra’s performances, and offered to hire him as a vocalist for $75 a week. But he told Sinatra that he had to change his awful name. Sinatra said, “You want the voice, you take the name.” And so he got to keep it.

But Sinatra’s big breakthrough came when he joined Tommy Dorsey and his band in 1940. Their recordings of “I’ll Never Smile Again,” “This Love of Mine”, and “Night and Day” became the best-selling records ever sold at that point in history.

Sinatra later said he learned his distinctive vocal style from the way Tommy Dorsey played trombone, sliding from note to note and then holding long pauses. But after two years with Dorsey’s band, he decided to become a true solo singer. His first booking as a soloist was an eight-week run at New York’s Paramount Theatre, longer than any other solo engagement at the Paramount up to that time. His press agent was so nervous about his debut that he hired a dozen girls to stand at the front of the theater to swoon and scream, but it wasn’t necessary. Hundreds of other women showed up and did the same thing.

It’s the birthday of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, born in Kislovodsk, Russia (1918). He grew up a committed communist, and never questioned the party line. He even brought a copy of Das Kapital along on his honeymoon for pleasure reading.

…a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones…

He became a decorated war hero during World War II, promoted to first lieutenant and then captain. But after the end of the war, he was suddenly arrested by Russian authorities for supposedly criticizing Stalin in one of his personal letters. He was sentenced without a trial to eight years in a labor camp. He spent time at a few different camps, but eventually wound up at a hard-labor camp in Kazakhstan, where he worked as miner, bricklayer, and a foundry man.

His time in the Gulag changed his life, because he found that most of the men there had already rejected the Soviet government. In a strange way, it was only in the Gulag that Russians spoke freely about their political beliefs without fear of retribution. Solzhenitsyn later wrote, “You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.”

It was in the Gulag that Solzhenitsyn began to write seriously for the first time. To keep his work from being seized, he would compose on tiny paper scraps, commit his words to memory, and then destroy the paper. He was finally released from his labor camp on the day of Stalin’s death in 1953, and when Nikita Khrushchev relaxed censorship laws, Solzhenitsyn was able to publish his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).

He went on to write a seven-volume history of the Stalinist labor camps called The Gulag Archipelago. The first volume was published in Paris in 1973, and that book got him deported from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont, where he tried to live as quietly as possible, rarely speaking in public. He lived there for 13 years, and then, in 1993, he was finally allowed to return to his homeland. He’s been living in Moscow ever since.

Solzhenitsyn wrote, “For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”

It was on this day in 1917 that an accidental explosion destroyed a quarter of the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was the height of World War I, and Halifax was serving as an important port city for many of the ships carrying supplies for the battlefront in Europe. One of the ships coming into the port that day was a French warship called the Mont Blanc, carrying 200 tons of TNT, 2,300 tons of other explosives, as well as 10 tons of cotton and 35 tons of highly flammable chemicals stored in vats on the ship’s upper deck.

…almost 2,000 people were killed in the blast…

As the Mont Blanc sailed through the narrow channel into the Halifax Harbor, it collided with a Norwegian freighter. The collision started a fire on the Mont Blanc, and the captain gave the order to abandon ship. The crew piled into lifeboats and then paddled frantically away. Unfortunately, the fire drew a crowd of onlookers along the shore of the channel. The docks filled with spectators, trams slowed down, people stood at office windows and on factory roofs to see the blaze. Then, a few minutes after the fire had started, the Mont Blanc exploded.

It was the single most powerful man-made explosion at that point in human history, and there wouldn’t be another more powerful explosion until the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

The blast wave of water hit the shore, sweeping away buildings, bridges, roads, vehicles, and people. City streets split open into deep fissures. Houses, churches, schools, and factories collapsed. The entire city was showered with debris. Virtually every building in the city had its windows broken. About a quarter of the city, within a square mile of the blast, was completely destroyed.

Almost 2,000 people were killed in the blast and as many as 9,000 were seriously injured, many of them blinded by pieces of broken glass. Thousands of people were left homeless in the middle of a bitter winter. Volunteers poured in from the United States and Great Britain to help in the recovery efforts, and children who survived the blast were photographed for postcards to be sold to help rebuild the city.

Even though World War I was being fought across the Atlantic, Halifax was damaged far greater than any European city. It is the worst disaster of any kind in Canadian history.

First they want you. Then they don’t. Then they want you again. Then, you guessed it, they don’t want you. Contract negotiations, which have been going more off than on for the past month, have now come to an end.

There was a moment there where I actually signed a renewal contract, but as things work out, and not having an army of lawyers, etc ,etc, it appears that what I actually signed was in fact only the promise of a contract, should the company decide at their leisure that they in fact wanted one.

This is where I came into the whole “negotiation” thing a month ago. For my money, it looks as if I should have just stayed there.

Oh well. Looks like I get Christmas off this year after all

Bad But Soooo Good

Lord knows, I try to be good, but every so often there’s this unquenchable urge to just let loose and gorge. The result? A Banquet Burger with back bacon, fries on the side and a milk to make me think I’m being good. Sooo bad but mmmmmmmm soooo good.