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May 2003 Archive Hanuman in the News, via Ananova. A possible reincarnation of the monkey god Hanuman is drawing crowds in India. The eleven month old Muslim baby, named Balaji or Bajrangbali - different names for Hanuman, has a four inch tail. Great - the sun finally came out late in the afternoon. I put up the flag, sat on the porch with a beer, and watched the Circle Cats chasing one another. Sunlight - good. 25 May  Flooding on the bowling green, Janus Museum Forest Preserve The sun hasn't shined here for about a week - the racoons are walking around in wellies - the forest is in danger of being redesignated as a protected wetland - we've moved the collections from our underground storage vaults into the cafeteria - the town authorities are making an emergency distribution of Prozac to the inhabitants. Oh, it's all too depressing... 24 May - Hanumania  Hanuman (Rakesh Pandey) confers with Ram and Lakshmana. My copy of Mahabali Hanuman arrived, thus doubling my collection of Indian movies about the heroic monkey god. No subtitles, but having watched Bajrangbali a half dozen times, the story is now pretty familiar. Rakesh Pandy as Hanuman just can't equal the magnificent Dara Singh in the same role in Bajrangbali, and the production values are a bit lame, but - hey, it's a Hanuman movie, so how can it be bad? Now I have to track down the 1956 version of Bajrangbali. I also picked an excellent English version of the Ramayana, from whence the Hanuman tales are drawn. Also of interest - wargaming the Ramayana. 21 May Found in the October-December 1936 issue of Airship magazine:
According to the Washington "Herald," the Goodyear Airship Enterprise was used in a more or less informal opening of the straw hat season in the nation's capital. Following is the story of the incident as reported by the newspaper :-
"The Weather Bureau report did not record it, but it 'rained' in Washington yesterday. It rained straw hats in the business district to usher in Straw Hat Day for 1936. From the Goodyear Airship Enterprise, 100 envelopes containing orders for summer skimmers fluttered through the air and whoever picked them up was entitled to walk into the store named and get his straw free. Persons jammed the streets as the airship soared over the city, bearing representatives of the Washington 'Herald'. Various stores in the District co-operated with the 'Herald' in making this year's Straw Hat Day one to be remembered.
"Verner Smith piloted the Washington 'Herald' party over the city in the Enterprise. He guided the silver craft over the business section under a brilliant sun, and when it was over the biggest crowds, gave the signal to drop the hat checks. These were hat checks that didn't cost a nickel, however. There were orders for just about every kind of summer headwear you could imagine. There were plain sailors and leghorns and panamas and chantungs.
"And the way Washington men went for the Straw Hat Day festival was best evidenced by the rush on men's stores throughout the city. Before the doors were closed late in the evening thousands of straws had been sold." Straw Hat Day was May 15, so I'm a week late - just found the article today, though. But what a day it must have been - a fine sunny day in DC - a silvery blimp floating in a cloudless sky - and free straw hats! How I wish a blimp would bring me a free chantung... 20 May 
A good Friend of The Janus Museum, the illustrious Sealwyf, has launched a very useful field guide to the cats that hang out on the porch of the Washington Grove Pacer Farm (including Toby the Museum Cat) and get captured on the Pacer Farm Circle Cam. Here's a hint - the cam page doesn't automatically refresh, so hit your browser's reload button (or shift-reload to check out the most recent capture. Here's our favorite cat capture. 17 May 
Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan (2nd from left) at headquarters near the Antietam battlefield, October 3, 1862. Photograph by Alexander Gardner.
I just finished reading James M. McPherson's excellent Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam. McPherson casts Antietam (September 17, 1862) as the pivotal battle of the Civil War - the battle that cost the Confederates their best chance at European recognition and mediation, and enabled Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, changing the character of the war and the course of American history. None of this is new, of course, but McPherson is very good at summing up the drama of the shifting fortunes of the first year and a half of the war, as North and South alternately exulted and mourned. George McClellan will never come off as a great man in any history of the Civil War, and McPherson shows him with warts and all - the huge conceit, the "slows" that frustated Lincoln so; and most shocking, the satisfaction that he showed at the defeat of his rival, Gen. John Pope, at Second Manassas. But McClellan also put the whipped Army of the Potomac back together after that fight, marched them (slowly) to meet the invincible Lee, forced him back across the Potomac. It wasn't a great victory - McClellan made many mistakes and lost such opportunities, but it was good enough to save the Union. And as a native Marylander, I was pleased to read that the morale of the Union troops was raised to a new high by the enthusistic reception they were given by the supposedly "secesh" inhabitants of my state; their reception would've been different in Maryland's southern counties, but never mind...
Also of interest was the carping of European governments - especially France - at the conduct of the Union, which seemed utterly modern. With certain exceptions (1917-'18, 1941-'45), we've done nothing right by European lights for longer than I knew. Who knew?
11 May  Grover Wallingford, engineer of the Monocacy Express, Derwood and Buckeystown Railroad, c.1930 I've been putting together train songs from my collection of old-time music for a friend, and it's been an interesting experience, if a bit unnerving for one who commutes daily on the railroad - all those train wrecks, you see. In these songs, trains continually leap the track or their boilers explode, or both, despite all those valiant engineers, fire- and brakemen. The loss of life in these ballads is always extensive. One specialist in train wreck songs, Vern Dalhart (Marion Try Slaughter), later branched out into airship disaster songs. The two genres are similar - invariably, a gray-haired mother is introduced who stands weeping by the tracks or by her simple farm house, awaiting for a train/dirigible bearing her blue-eyed son to pass or fly over her on the tracks or in the sky, as the case may be. Always very affecting, but the mass of musical disasters becomes a bit wearing. The disasters songs are leavened with the blues. Blues train songs usually involve one's woman leaving on the morning train, or one leaving one's woman on the morning train, or occasionally on a fast freight. Someone gets cut from time to time, but nothing explodes or leaps the track, which is a bit of a relief. There are also train imitations on the harmonica, and praise-songs for some of the famous trains of the time. Once in a while, the narrator leaves his woman on a famous train and also imitates the whistle - a remarkable tour de force. I've tried to keep down the number of takes on Casey Jones, John Henry, Reuben's Train, Freight Train, and Freight Train Blues, and I find I don't have The Wabash Cannonball or even The Orange Blossom Special, but it's not a bad selection, I think - I even have a commuter's song, Billy Murray's On the 5:15. 6 May The Hindenburg exploded at the Lakehurst (NJ) Naval Air Station on this date in 1937. A dear friend of the Museum, Anne Chotzinoff Grossman (Cookie), wrote this account of her own brush with the Hindenburg: In September or October of 1936, I was six years old, at school in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in those days a small, exceedingly rural town. I was a shy little girl, always trailing along behind my 10-year old brother Blair. One day we were outside during the lunch recess, when a shadow crossed the schoolyard. We all looked up; something huge was floating by. Blair said excitedly, "Hey, that's the Hindenburg! Let's follow it!" I hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about or what a Hindenburg was, but whenever Blair said "follow," I followed; so I ran behind him and his friends, trying hard to keep up with the "big boys." We ran across fields and brooks and over stone walls, trying to keep the airship in sight. Blair finally admitted defeat - the Hindenburg was faster than we were - and we made our way back to the school, very late and very dirty, to face very angry teachers. I don't remember what Blair's punishment was, but I was made to stand at the blackboard and write: "I will not follow the Hindenburg" 100 times. And I did learn my lesson, at least in part: I continued to follow Blair wherever he led, but I never followed the Hindenburg again.From The Zeppelin Reader, edited by Robert Hedin. 2 May Our Far-Sighted Statesmen (from Slate): By the year 2002, we can have a federal government with a balanced budget or we can continue down the present path towards total fiscal catastrophe.Heh, as Instapundit might say. |
