Here is your open thread for March 19, 2020.
Today is Ruth Pointer’s 74th birthday, so I probably should’ve gone with “Automatic” here to showcase her contralto. But I like this one better:
On March 19, 1649, the British House of Commons passed an act that read, in part:
The Commons of England assembled in Parliament, finding by too long experience that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the people of England to be continued, have thought fit to ordain and enact, and be it ordained and enacted by this present Parliament, and by the authority of the same, that from henceforth the House of Lords in Parliament shall be and is hereby wholly abolished and taken away. …
Alas, that didn’t take. But it still might be worth trying with the Senate.
The maiden voyage of the Georgiana — designed to be the most-feared battleship in the navy of the Confederacy, a juggernaut for the cause of treason in defense of slavery — ended on March 19, 1863, when the American Navy crippled it and its captain scuttled and burned it to avoid capture. The wreck of the ship was discovered exactly 102 years later, on March 19, 1965.
Author Tobias George Smollett was born 299 years ago today. (I’d have called him a “novelist,” but that still wasn’t quite a thing yet when Smollett started writing.) His jokes are still funny.
American President Thomas McKean was born 286 years ago today. McKean was “president of the Congress” under the Articles of Confederation, when that was the only president in town. He previously served as president of Delaware — another post that no longer exists. McKean later became the chief justice of Pennsylvania and, later still, governor of Pennsylvania. (I think he was the only Pa. governor to be impeached.)
Explorer, missionary, and colonizer David Livingstone was born on March 19, 1813. He failed in his lifelong quest to locate the source of the Nile River and, presumably, to convince it to accept Jesus Christ as its personal Lord and Savior. Explorer/colonizer Richard Burton (born March 19, 1821) came closer to locating the source of the Nile, but also failed and instead had to settle for translating One Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra into English.
Quaker preacher Elias Hicks was born 272 years ago today. Hicks got into theological hot water due to his unorthodox views regarding the “inner light,” but considering that he was also one of the earliest white American preachers to repent of slavery and embrace abolitionism, maybe the real problem there lay with his allegedly more “orthodox” contemporaries.
William Jennings Bryan was born 160 years ago today. He was the Democratic nominee for president in three elections, losing all of them, but still got to see some of the progressive causes he championed picked up by Teddy Roosevelt and other presidents. It’s odd to realize that the prairie populist — the Bernie Sanders of his day — ended his long career in public life arguing against the teaching of evolution in the Scopes Trial. It makes more sense when you realize that Bryan’s main animus seemed to be with social Darwinism, which he was right to oppose even though it isn’t, as he thought, the same thing.
Edith Nourse Rogers, the first woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts, was born 139 years ago today. She won 18 straight elections, serving for 35 years. A report by the British Foreign Office described her as, “… a capable, hard-working and intelligent woman. A pleasant and kindly old battle-axe — but a battle-axe.”
Rogers was born the same day as Earl Warren, who as chief justice of the Supreme Court wrote the majority opinions in Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda v. Arizona, Loving v. Virginia, and dozens of other landmark cases that white evangelicals are desperately voting to appoint judges to overturn.
Moms Mabley was born on March 19, 1894. She was doing a lesbian stand-up routine in the 1920s, stayed in comedy long enough to do television, and even recorded a Top 40 pop hit when she was 75. Phew.
Pulp novelist Irving Wallace was born 104 years ago today. His 1972 thriller, The Word, was a smarter, more plausible, more interesting version of what Dan Brown was trying to do with the Da Vinci Code. He also produced the delightful People’s Almanac, which was the closest thing there was to racing down Google holes before there was an internet.
Philip Roth would have turned 87 today. Roth died in 2018, but he’s got a new show on HBO anyway. It looks interesting.
Ricky Wilson of the B-52’s would have been 67 today. Wilson died of complications from AIDS in 1985. Here’s his unique surf-a-billy guitar on “Rock Lobster.”
Catholic theologian Hans Küng turns 92 today. That umlaut is kind of metal. So is the fact that Küng is no longer officially allowed to teach Catholic theology due to his rejection of papal infallibility.
Glenn Close celebrates her 73rd birthday today. Movie mogul and convicted felon Harvey Weinstein will be spending his 68th birthday in prison.
Bruce Willis turns 65 today. Superbowl-champion coach Andy Reid turns 62. Clayton Kershaw turns 32.
Today is the feast day of St. Alkmund of Derby. He was a Northumbrian prince who lived in exile before returning with an army to claim the throne, at which point he was killed. How this is supposed to make him a saint is no longer known or explained, but his name ended up on some really old churches, so there you go.
Finally, March 19 is the day when the swallows return to Capistrano, so let me leave you with this from Terry Scott Taylor:
Talk amongst yourselves.
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