Here is your open thread for March 5, 2020.
Happy 58th birthday to Craig and Charlie Reid. Here’s video of the first time I heard them perform. It’s that song, but there’s so much more to these guys than just that song:
The great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner was born on March 5, 1904. Wikipedia states that he “is considered to be one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century.”
Counterpoint: Rahner is nowhere near as theologically influential as Joel Osteen, who was born exactly 59 years later. Osteen, who turns 57 today, is not a theologian or even really a preacher as much as he is a showman and a salesman. But he’s a very successful showman and salesman. Osteen’s relentlessly upbeat self-help gospel has proven very popular and he’s sold millions of copies (and made millions of dollars) by writing books with titles like Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential and Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day.
Osteen scrupulously avoids mentioning “controversial” topics and wants to keep his preaching and his writing far removed from discussions of politics and money. This has the effect of making his preaching and his message thoroughly political — a form of intensive indoctrination in a particular political and economic agenda. I’ve spent a long time trying to suss out whether or not he realizes that and whether it’d be better or worse if he did. I’m still not sure, but the effect and the consequences are the same regardless, and those are not good.
The Dutch painter Jan van der Heyden was born on March 5, 1637. His beautiful paintings are still displayed in museums around the world, but the cool thing about van der Heyden was that he was also an engineer and inventor who developed new hoses and manual fire engines and wrote a firefighting manual for the new fire brigades he organized in Amsterdam.
Van der Heyden’s fire brigades and the street lighting system he designed were still in use in Amsterdam when Johann Jakob Wettstein (born 327 years ago today) took a job there as a professor of philosophy. His real role was biblical studies — Wettstein was a pioneer in what we’d now call biblical criticism. He realized that very old texts that had been translated over and over again tended to change during translation. And he discovered that pointing this out and attempting to trace those changes tended to make some people very upset. It still does.
Howard Pyle, the great American illustrator who shaped how we imagine a swash should be buckled, was born on March 5, 1853. It’s been almost 10 years since I got laid off from the newspaper in Delaware, but I still feel the reflexive need to point out that Pyle lived and worked in Wilmington and that many of his greatest works can be viewed at the Delaware Art Museum along with works by his pupils in the Brandywine School, including the Wyeths. OK, then.
Lili Jahn was born on March 5, 1900. She completed her medical studies and became a doctor by the time she was only 24, when she began practicing medicine in Cologne, Germany. On her 33rd birthday, a far-right party won a slim plurality (43%) in the Reichstag elections and began reshaping her country. Dr. Jahn was arrested for listing her medical credentials — something Jews like herself were forbidden to do — and was sent to a forced labor camp, then later to Auschwitz, where she was killed in 1944. We only know her story due to the letters to her children that other prisoners were able to smuggle out of the camp. The last of those letters, completed by another prisoner after her death, was dated March 6, 1944 — the day after what would have been her 44th birthday.
Professional working actor Dean Stockwell turns 84 years old today. Rubber-armed submariner Kent Tekulve turns 73. Ringbang apostle Eddy Grant turns 72. Magician Penn Jillette — the one who talks (too much) — turns 65.
I saw Penn & Teller a few years back at the Academy of Music here in Philly. I went with my brother, who’s also a terrific juggler. He can juggle five balls — something, as he says, that took years of practice and makes onlookers go “That was kind of neat, I guess.” Anyway, the whole show was terrific, but this was the bit that my brother the juggler found most impressive, because it’s not a trick:
Talk amongst yourselves.
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