Culture

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The Woman Who Named Pluto

The English woman who in 1930 suggested the newly discovered planet  be named Pluto died on April 30.  [Regardless of what it is considered now, I still think of Pluto as a planet. ]   The eleven year old Venetia Phair suggested the name to her grandfather at the breakfast table.

 

Venetia Phair

“My grandfather, as usual, opened the paper, The Times, and in it he read that a new planet had been discovered,” she recalled in a short film, “Naming Pluto,” released earlier this year. “He wondered what it should be called. We all wondered.

“And then I said, ‘Why not call it Pluto?’ And the whole thing stemmed from that.”

Her grandfather told a friend who told the discoverer, Clyde W. Tombaugh.

When the name was publicly announced on May 1, 1930, Mrs. Phair said her grandfather rewarded her with a five-pound note. (The same purchasing power today would be about 230 pounds, or $350.)

According to the London Telegraph, Ms. Phair is the only woman to have named a planet.  The photograph of Ms. Phair at 11 is from the Telegraph obituary. 

She was fascinated with astronomy, and recalled playing a game at school using clay lumps to mark out the relative positions of the planets.

She was also a keen student of mythology, and knew about Pluto, the Roman name for the Greek god of the underworld, Hades.

“There were practically no names left from classical mythology,” she told the BBC. “Whether I thought about the dark and gloomy Hades, I’m not sure.”

She tartly rejected any suggestion that the planet was named for the Disney dog, instead of the other way around.

…

She studied mathematics at Cambridge University and taught economics and math until retiring in the 1980s.

Coming full circle in a way, my husband read me her obituary from the Boston Globe this morning at breakfast – the print edition, of course.

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Barack and Jacoby

The Social Security Administration has released their list of baby names for last year.  Not surprisingly, Barack  is becoming a popular name.

Jumping more than 10,000 spots — from number 12,535 in 2007 to 2,409 in 2008 — it’s by no means one of the top titles for tykes. But 2009 could see an even bigger spike, perhaps putting the name in the top 1,000 for next year.

Barack Obama

Kinda like when a bunch of baby boomers were named Dwight, after the President and General Eisenhower.  But it does change the perception of the name, Barack, when there are a lot more of them running around and lots of people know a child with the name.  I used to be unique with the name Maya until Maya Angelou gained a lot of recognition.  I had a very brief encounter with her in 1977 when we both remarked how interesting it was to meet another Maya.  Now Maya’s are all over the place.

And then there is the growing popularity of Jacoby.

Though Jacob was the top name for boys, its variation, Jacoby, jumped 200 spots to number 423, drawing inspiration, no doubt, from Red Sox rookie centerfielder Jacoby Ellsbury. Perhaps these kids will be stealing bases like number 46 when they start T-ball.
Jacoby Ellsbury

I should also note that for some reason Emma was the top girl’s name with Olivia holding steadyand Miley moving up.

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Trending toward Marriage Equality?

The Boston Globe ran this AP story this morning which I read in my print copy. (Long may the Globe prosper so I can read it at breakfast.)  According to the AP

In recent weeks, Vermont and Iowa legalized same-sex marriage, while New York, Maine, and New Hampshire have taken steps in that direction. Polls indicated that younger Americans are far are more tolerant on the issue than are older generations. For now at least, the public is much more focused on the troubled economy and two wars than on social issues.

In addition, over the past decade, public acceptance of gay marriage has changed dramatically.

A Quinnipiac University poll released last week indicated that a majority of respondents, by a 55-to-38 percent margin, oppose gay marriage. But it also found that people, by a 57-to-38 percent margin, support civil unions that would provide marriage-like rights for same-sex couples, indicating a shift toward more acceptance.

I think it is relatively easy step from “marriage-like rights” to actual marriage so this looks hopeful.  The article goes on

With congressional elections next year, Republicans, Democrats, and nonpartisan analysts say the changes benefit Democrats, whose bedrock liberals favor gay unions, and disadvantage Republicans, whose conservative base insists that marriage be solely between a man and a woman.

“This is not a sea change. This is a tide that is slowly rising in favor of gay marriage,” creating a favorable political situation for Democrats and ever-more difficulty for Republicans, said David McCuan, a political scientist at Sonoma State University in California.

Democrats have a broader base filled with more accepting younger voters, as well as flexibility on the issue. Hard-core liberals support gay marriage, while others, including President Obama, take a more moderate position of civil unions and defer to states on gay marriage.

Conversely, the GOP base is older, smaller, and more conservative. Republicans have no place to shift on the issue but to the left, because the party has been identified largely with its rock-solid opposition to gay marriage and civil unions. Also, the GOP has no titular head setting the tone on this or other issues.

And tell me please, how is this couple in Iowa different from any other couple anywhere?

Veronica Spann (left) and Kentaindra Scarver were emotional as their marriage waiver was approved in Iowa on April 27.

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Wash your hands

The CDC says the best way to prevent swine flu is to wash your hands.  Here is a great story from NPR on washing effectively.

Grandma was right: If you want to prevent the spread of viruses, wash your hands.

But how long do we need to scrub? Preschoolers know the answer, and they sing a silly song or two to help them while away the 20 seconds that experts recommend.

Turns out that the “ABC” song is about right.  So pre-schoolers can practice hand washing and the alphabet at the same time.  But, as one of my co-workers said today, he’d get hauled away singing the alphabet song in the men’s room.  Allison Aubrey at NPR has a solution.

NPR’s reporters were quick to offer their suggestions: The chorus of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” is about the right length. Maybe the guitar riff from “Layla” by Eric Clapton, or how about that famous bridge in Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” about how “we will not let you go”?

For those more inclined to the theater, the first six lines of Lady MacBeth’s “Out, Damned Spot, Out” soliloquy clocks in at 22 seconds.

Also mentioned was “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” which is my choice only because I know all the words.  What ever you pick be sure to actually scrub and get the nails, the backs of your hands and between your fingers while you sing.

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Reading Out of Time

I often read mysteries set in historical times.  Dorothy Sayers for example set her Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane stories during the time between the World Wars and into the Second.  But my recent reading has started me thinking about the differences in investigations before and now.

The economic crisis caused me to re-read some of the Annette Meyer “Smith and Wetzon” books.  They are set in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  No cell phones, just answering machines.  Early forensics help identify the bones of a dancer found in a trunk.  No 24 hour news cycles – just the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal delivered daily.  The books (Blood on the Street, These Bones Were Made for Dancing, and Murder: The Musical) seem more dated than Dorothy Sayers or what I am reading now, Anne Perry’s Buckingham Place Gardens which is set in Victorian England.

Why are stories set 20 years ago so old-school while Anne Perry and Dorothy Sayers are not?  Is is because therre is so much that is familar in Annette Meyer’s that the reader expects Law and Order, CSI or Bones?

Something to think about.  I will have to re-read some very early Robert Parker to see if I get the same feeling.

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Mark Fidrych and Nick Adenhart

Baseball has suddenly lost two pitchers.  One, Mark Fidrych, had a brief and shining career with one outstanding season.  The other, Nick Adenhart, had finally realized his dream and pitched one game in the majors.  I had followed  The Bird and hadn’t heard of Nick Adenhart until after his death, but they will always be linked in my mind.

There will be a lot written about The Bird in the days to come, but everyone will be competing against the wonderful piece Don Gonyea did tonight on NPR.  I listened while I cooked dinner and had to blink back the tears that were not from peeling onions.  I hope you click on the link and listen too, but here are some highlights.

Mark Fidrych passed away Monday. You may know him better by his full name — that includes his nickname: Mark “The Bird” Fidrych.

His playing career with the Detroit Tigers was brief: one great season, followed by a handful of years marked more by injury than by time on the mound. But baseball fans in the Motor City and elsewhere still talk about the amazing year Fidrych had back in 1976.

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The newest Detroit Tiger, a kid with a mop of curly blond hair that stuck out from his ball cap on all sides, took the mound.

He pitched brilliantly. He kept the ball low and threw a devastating sinkerball that defied hitters.

Mark Fidrych, 21, threw a no-hitter through six innings, finally giving up a hit, a single, in the seventh. The Tigers won 2-1. It was the first of 24 complete games he would pitch that year.

His nickname, a result of his strong resemblance to Big Bird from Sesame Street, became a household word around Michigan. “Did you see Bird pitch last night?” “Are we going to see The Bird pitch Saturday?” What time does Bird pitch?” All common questions that summer in the Motor City. And it wasn’t just baseball fans. As that old rock ‘n’ roll song by The Trashmen said,

“Everybody’s talking
About the Bird
The Bird, the Bird,
The Bird is the word.”

After Nick Adenhart was killed by the drunk driver, Doug Glanville wrote a piece for the New York Times titled “Loss Beyond the Score.”  I quote from the beginning and the end.

After hearing about the tragic death of the 22-year-old pitcher Nick Adenhart, my heart skipped a beat. Although I never met him, I still feel close to the baseball family and his loss was the loss of a brother.

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In the game of baseball, you live and fight together as a unit day after day. Gradually an unspoken truth emerges: we will look out for one another, even 15, 20 years down the road. It is an everlasting vigilance that protects our immediate and extended baseball family.

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Rita Dove, Beethoven, and Bridgetower

This is another story I would have missed except for reading the print edition of the New York Times.

Haydn almost certainly encountered him as a child in a Hungarian castle, where the boy’s father was a servant and Haydn was the director of music, and Thomas Jefferson saw him performing in Paris in 1789: a 9-year-old biracial violin prodigy with a cascade of dark curls. While the boy would go on to inspire Beethoven and help shape the development of classical music, he ended up relegated to a footnote in Beethoven’s life.

Rita Dove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former United States poet laureate, has now breathed life into the story of that virtuoso, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, in her new book, “Sonata Mulattica” (W. W. Norton). The narrative, a collection of poems subtitled “A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play,” intertwines fact and fiction to flesh out Bridgetower, the son of a Polish-German mother and an Afro-Caribbean father.

Beethoven wrote what we now know as the Kreutzer Sonata for Bridgetower.  Originally titled Sonata Mullatica, Beetoven changed the name

…apparently in a fit of pique after a quarrel over a woman, Beethoven removed Bridgetower’s name from a sonata the composer had dedicated to him, Bridgetower being the mulatto of “Sonata Mulattica.” The two men had performed it publicly for the first time in Vienna in 1803, with Beethoven on piano and Bridgetower on violin.

By the time it was published, in 1805, it had morphed into the “Kreutzer” Sonata, dedicated to the French violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer, who disliked it, however, saying it was unplayable, and never performed it.

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Bridgetower’s story is a corrective to the notion that certain cultural forms are somehow the province of particular groups, said Mike Phillips, a historian, novelist and former museum curator who contributed a series of essays to part of the British Library’s Web site (at www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/blackeuro) that profiles five 19th-century figures of mixed European and African heritage, including Bridgetower, Alexandre Dumas and Pushkin. He also wrote the libretto for “Bridgetower: A Fable of London in 1807,” an opera in jazz and classical musica performed by the English Touring Opera, which had its premiere in 2007 in London.

“Bridgetower flourished in a time when the world outside Africa was like a huge concentration camp for black people,” Dr. Phillips said in an e-mail message. He noted that while Bridgetower got a music degree at Cambridge and managed to earn a living as a musician, for much of his life the trans-Atlantic slave trade was at full throttle.

 I find it fascinating that Bridgetower, a mulatto, and Beethoven also presumed to be mulatto performed together.  Add to the mix Thomas Jefferson who was in Paris with Sally Hemmings and it becomes even more interesting.  It seems that we have long been able to hold contradictory ideas about race.  The “all [insert race or ethnicity] are scum except you and you aren’t because you are [my friend, superior, different, etc.] syndrome at work.  Is that, I wonder, how many feel about our President?  That he is an exception.

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Iowa Joins the Marriage Equality States

With today’s unanimous decision, the Iowa Supreme Court made Iowa the third state to approve of same sex marriage joining Massachusetts and Connecticut.  According to the story in the Washington Post

The decision will be considered final in 21 days unless a rehearing is formally requested. The county that challenged the lower court’s ruling indicated today that it would not file such a request, meaning that same-sex couples likely will be able to obtain marriage licenses in Iowa in three weeks, attorneys for the plaintiffs said.

So what do the defense of marriage folks do now?  Richard Kim has a long post on The Nation.com in which he outlines the options and discusses some of the larger political implications. 

So now that the Iowa Supreme Court has essentially legalized gay marriage, what’s next? Some right-wingers (like Iowa Congressman Steve King and William Duncan of the Marriage Law Foundation) are already promising to put a defense of marriage amendment in front of Iowa voters. But they have a long road ahead of them. Iowa law says that a constitutional ammendment must pass TWO consecutive sessions of the state legislature before it appears on a ballot. So the earliest one could see a DOMA on the ballot is 2011, but with Democrats in control of both houses and with both the House speaker and the Senate majority leader on record supporting the decision–there’s virtually no chance that such an amendment would even come up for a vote this session.

That leaves the right-wing with a daunting task: defeat enough Democrats to take control of both houses (Dems currently enjoy a 56-44 and 32-18 advantage), replace them with Christian right Republicans who are willing to champion a marriage amendement and peel off enough remaining Democrats (to offset any moderate GOP defectors) to squeeze through four rounds of yes votes. Only then will they even have the chance to put the issue in front of voters–sometime in 2013 or 2014 if all the stars align. Then, they still have to win that campaign in a political climate in which increasing numbers of voters support gay rights. Oh yeah, and the vote will take place after Iowans have witnessed 5-6 years of ho-hum same-sex nuptials of which the most radical, earth-shaking element is that one of the grooms is a 50-year old church organist named Otter Dreaming (one of the named appellees in the Iowa decision). As Ari Berman points out, Iowa isn’t exactly the hotbed of culture war antagonism–despite being square one for GOP presidential wrangling–so my strong hunch is that Mr. Dreaming’s marriage will endure at least any legal and political challenges.

It doesn’t seem very likely that Iowa will amend it’s Constitution.  Here in Massachusetts it didn’t take long for gay marriage to just become marriage.  Just read Andrew Sullivans story about his Massachusetts wedding.

Born in a different era, I reached that conclusion through more pain and fear and self-loathing than my 20-something fellow homosexuals do today. But it was always clear to me nonetheless. It just never fully came home to me until I too got married.

It happened first when we told our families and friends of our intentions. Suddenly, they had a vocabulary to describe and understand our relationship. I was no longer my partner’s “friend” or “boyfriend”; I was his fiancé. Suddenly, everyone involved themselves in our love. They asked how I had proposed; they inquired when the wedding would be; my straight friends made jokes about marriage that simply included me as one of them. At that first post-engagement Christmas with my in-laws, I felt something shift. They had always been welcoming and supportive. But now I was family. I felt an end—a sudden, fateful end—to an emotional displacement I had experienced since childhood.

The wedding occurred last August in Massachusetts in front of a small group of family and close friends. And in that group, I suddenly realized, it was the heterosexuals who knew what to do, who guided the gay couple and our friends into the rituals and rites of family. Ours was not, we realized, a different institution, after all, and we were not different kinds of people. In the doing of it, it was the same as my sister’s wedding and we were the same as my sister and brother-in-law. The strange, bewildering emotions of the moment, the cake and reception, the distracted children and weeping mothers, the morning’s butterflies and the night’s drunkenness: this was not a gay marriage; it was a marriage.

And our families instantly and for the first time since our early childhood became not just institutions in which we were included, but institutions that we too owned and perpetuated. My sister spoke of her marriage as if it were interchangeable with my own, and my niece and nephew had no qualms in referring to my husband as their new uncle. The embossed invitations and the floral bouquets and the fear of fluffing our vows: in these tiny, bonding gestures of integration, we all came to see an alienating distinction become a unifying difference.

It was a moment that shifted a sense of our own identity within our psyches and even our souls. Once this happens, the law eventually follows. In California this spring, it did.

So I think Richard Kim is right.  Iowans are soon going to find gay marriages just as ordinary as straight ones.  So what is left for the opposition?  Here’s Richard Kim again

So, here’s my guess as to what the right can and will do. They’ll move to amend Iowa’s marriage law so that it requires in-state residency. Currently, Iowa (like California and unlike Massachusetts) does not have any such restriction (prompting claims that Iowa will become the Mecca of gay marriage). Of course, because of the court’s equal protection ruling, any such change will have to apply to both gay and straight couples, but the collateral benefit for the right would be in limiting the number of gay couples who can marry in Iowa and then sue in other states. But after thousands of out-of-state couples got married in CA and will likely stay married no matter how the CA Supreme Court rules on Prop 8’s broader legality–there’s not much use in raising this hurdle.

So, Iowa, Massachusetts welcomes you to the club.  I don’t think it will be too long before there are more than three members.

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Touching the Queen

Did Michelle Obama make a major diplomatic mistake when she touched the Queen?  (This is much more interesting to think about than the economic agreements that came out of the G-20.)  Everyone is writing about it and talking about it.

 We start with Mika Brzezinski saying ” you don’t touch the Queen” and then today’s stories including this also from MSNBC

Mrs. Obama clearly made an impression with the 82-year-old monarch — so much that the smiling queen strayed slightly from protocol and briefly wrapped her arm around the first lady in a rare public show of affection.

It was the first time Mrs. Obama — who is nearly a foot taller — had met the queen. The first lady also wrapped her arm around the monarch’s shoulder and back.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman who asked not to be identified because of palace policy said he could not remember the last time the queen had displayed such public affection with a first lady or dignitary.

“It was a mutual and spontaneous display of affection,” he said. “We don’t issue instructions on not touching the queen.”

It was the first time Mrs. Obama — who is nearly a foot taller — had met the queen. The first lady also wrapped her arm around the monarch’s shoulder and back.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman who asked not to be identified because of palace policy said he could not remember the last time the queen had displayed such public affection with a first lady or dignitary.

“It was a mutual and spontaneous display of affection,” he said. “We don’t issue instructions on not touching the queen.”

Then the Guardian weighed in with the headline Michelle Obama’s G20 faux pas brings out Queen’s touchy-feely side.  The story continued

Whoever briefed Michelle Obama on the things one does and doesn’t do with one’s hands when one meets the Queen must be wondering what went wrong.

 

Within minutes of their first encounter at Buckingham Palace yesterday, America’s first lady broke royal protocol by doing the unthinkable: she gave the Queen a hug. The monarch, for her part, responded with equally flagrant disregard for convention by returning the gesture.

 

Proceedings had begun innocuously enough following the Obamas’ arrival at the palace – polite handshakes, a curtsey and chit chat with the Duke of Edinburgh, who asked the president how he’d managed to stay awake all day.

Then, at the “getting to know you drink”, there was an exchange of dialogue between Michelle Obama and the Queen (they seemed to compliment each other on their shoes). At this stage, with everything going so swimmingly, the first lady put her arm around the Queen. The monarch appeared awkward at first, but after this initial surprise and hesitation, she seemed to respond positively by putting her arm round Obama’s waist.

 

So it was not quite a major diplomatic incident. And does it reflect a softening of the royal protocol that forbids physical contact with the Queen beyond handshakes? The Queen is widely regarded as formal but close observers point out that a number of traditional rules for dealing with the monarch have been relaxed in recent times. Bowing, for example, is no longer required.

And the picture is priceless

Michelle Obama with her arm around the Queen during a reception at Buckingham Palace

The Queen who is tiny – around my size – and the tall Michelle.  I think Michelle was being herself and the Queen clearly appreciated her.