Hello one and all and welcome to the 3rd Wednesday of the Month Good News Round Up. The directors of the Good News Roundup have once again steeled themselves to unlock the door and let me roam free across the pixels of the InterTubes, bringing you a kick start of Good News for your Day. Thank you for tuning in and reading along.
For those rather new to this Corner of the Internet, we specialize in hopeful, healing, comforting news, stories, pictures. Think pieces, links, snickers, one-liners, comments, snark-y cracks…..all these and more feature prominently and regularly at the Good News Round Up. Even better, you….yes, YOU!.....can pitch in, link stuff, drop in corrections, add in expansions, even build your own Digressions and…..no worries.
The folks/ Gnusies (contraction of Good News….to Gnu….to Gnusie (one who frequents Good News sites)…. who come regularly to the Gnuville (the watering hole)….the Gnuville Breakfast Brunch & Today’s Antique Lawn Mowing Contest (like THIS steam-powered number, just to your right) will welcome you with a favorite beverage (popular choices here are mimosas, tea, cocoa/mocha and coffee……but bring your own libations as well) and steam table breakfast/lunch stuff, all for the heaping upon plates for sustenance, comfort, understanding and even cause for hope. Its what we do here.
So to cleanse the palate for your Wednesday yen for Good News:
- How about a rescue cat….doing well and doing good….In a Library! THIS SWEET STORY from Ohio is definitely a heart-string puller (and kids are involved too!)
- For another animal story, I, like most of you, need to learn the word/name of “quoll”. (Sounds like a winner for a Scrabble tournament!) Australian marsupial that hunts…...OK then! It seems they have been a threatened species, BUT NOW, after a 100 year absence, they are being re-introduced into the wild in a National Park. Quoll, eh? Dazzle your friends with THAT.
BTW I have a habit of including a History Corner to note ancient and modern-ish Good News (of August 16ths of smaller numbered Times)…..and a dash of Things of the Day that are Goofy-ish, so you’ll see those noted in the sections below.
Good News In, Of and For Society
- Marx, Lenin, Mao and all the rest of that pestilent horde endlessly promised and promoted the correctness of Marx, the evils of capitalism, the decadence of democracy, and OF COURSE the need for the “vanguard of the proletariat” (read: gang of thugs, monsters and bully boys) to beat the opposition to a pulp, all led by a “Glorious Leader.” Meanwhile, from the alleged “right” of the spectrum there was an evil twin: Mussolini, Franco, Dolfuss, Salazar and Adolf, all preaching an inchoate “national socialism” (cover name) AKA fascism. Their bully boys “pure representatives of the master race” also got to beat up the opposition, while AGAIN led by a “Glorious Leader.”
IOW, both ends of the Horseshoe spectrum of politics feature a strongman/leader dictator. At times this is excused as “necessary for economic progress” toward a brighter future. Well THIS ARTICLE from the Atlantic is a thoughtful dismantling of the entire authoritarian enterprise, especially the “Fearless Leader” aspect. This debunking has been done before (I grew up on Maypo while Dad and Mom deconstructed Stalin, Hitler, Krushchev and Mao before 2nd helpings) but its still a good read. I think it was Samuel Johnston who once noted “People do not need to be so much instructed as they need to be REMINDED.”
- OTOH there are others out there working diligently to activate and organize the many against the noisy fewer. There have been hopeful signs that Generation Z (beginning birth years right around 2001) is surprisingly engaged and swinging elections (and 4 million of them reach voting age each year!). THIS ORGANIZATION is worth scanning over and pointing your younger people toward.
Of course, there have been moments in history in a society worth recalling. Here on August 16, there are a few major, societal changing events worth remembering:
1777 Bennington, (now Vermont) Hearing a rumor of horse farms to his southeast, British General Burgoyne, marching along the forested east bank of Lake Champlain, sends off Hessian Colonel Baum and his 800 German mercenaries to check out the report. Baum’s men are all cavalry and have marched down from Montreal in their cavalry boots and take along halters and reins. American resistance to this point his been minimal. Bands of militia have made hit-and-run attacks against Burgoyne, who is coming south from Canada and hoping London has ordered Howe to come north from British-occupied New York City to draw Washington into a final battle of annihilation.
Now Colonel John Stark of New Hampshire fought hard and well at Bunker Hill but went home disgruntled that the Continental Army did not think him a general. The state of New Hampshire took his side and the legislature made him a general last winter (and later mailed Congress what they had done.) Now gruntled, Stark had that charisma some have to call out farmers, cobblers and tailors and make them believe they could take on professional mercenaries. He expected close obedience to orders, and an all-out effort from his 1200 men camped at Bennington. (Most of the portraits of Stark show him with this grim visage and piercing eyes…..a gulp-inducing stare for sure! The night before he went from campfire to campfire telling his men that tomorrow if they stood their ground and followed orders, they would win, “or Molly Stark will be a widow by sundown.”) The Germans heard firing and skirmishing after breakfast, formed into ranks in a handy meadow, ……. and this August 16th were smashed by militiamen firing from under cover at anyone fool enough to stand in an open meadow. Burgoyne gets no horses and loses 15% of his army in one morning to stout-hearted John Stark and 1200 men…… nearly all of whom then walked home (sometimes for a week) after the fight. And perhaps Burgoyne first realized this campaign would not be so easy…….
1904 New York City Perhaps not as exciting as the loop-the-loop roller coaster at Coney Island but with way more tracks and a LOT of concrete, stones, glass New York-style “thinking big”, this day ground is broken for the construction of Grand Central Station. Opened in 1913.
1913 Sendai, Japan Tōhoku Imperial University of Japan, (today Tohoku University) founded in 1907 strikes a blow for equality. On this day, only 6 years old, Tohoku U. becomes the first university in Japan to admit female students (a pretty big deal in a pretty traditional society!)
Good News in Science and Tech
- These days the world-challenging problem for our entire species is global warming. Mind you, thanks to the great minds of the past, prior generations were able to mechanize everything, including coal mining, coal transporting, and industrial-level coal burning. Other great minds connected much of this artificial heating to boiling water---in a myriad of ways, leading to the Industrial Revolution as powered by STEAM. The Great Minds kept discovering, thinking and inventing, and in about the last 125 years (ONLY!) steam gave way to oil and its distillates, and then to electricity. But the exhaust from all of these as well as from all that used them is what has gotten us into a bind.
Now wind-turbines, tidal impulse-generators, geo-thermal couplings, and particularly, photo-voltaic silicon wafers, and a major upsurge in battery storage to tame those surges, is promising to get us off fossil fuels and to a better place (if it is in time…..)
THIS DIARY from last week here at DailyKos is a fingers-crossed dose of hope that, yes, we are getting there, and maybe…..just maybe…..quick enough.
- Then too comes THIS STORY of yet another wasteless power source from the frontiers of scientific and engineering research: fusion. This has been the Holy Grail for some decades, and the story may just be checking off a crucial box for scientific advancement: repeat-ability. You may have come up with a new discovery or invented a fantastic gadget. But Good Science tries to be careful: it might have been a fluke. It could be someone is trying to pull a fast one. SOooooo…..let’s see your work, your spec sheet, your diagrams, and lets see if some OTHER brain-y people can do it too.(Makes the Creation of everything a problem, since as far as we can measure, it has only happened once….)
The story seems to MAYBE be the answer to this, and if so, well, we may need that kind of power source to power all the plans our grandchildren will need to engineer Global Cooling…..to get us back to a far more sustainable and homeostatic (buffs nails….) situation. (Will those grand kids of ours need to re-direct ocean currents? Grow glaciers? Air-condition tropical regions economically?
August 16ths have pondered such issues over the prior years as well, as seen here:
1858 London and points west. Queen Victoria composes a royal note, then watches with interest as a certain clerk works a key on a block of wood connected to wires. Her message goes to Ireland, then is clicked again onto a newly-laid, trans-Atlantic cable to Canada. There, a series of telegraph men relay the message to the White House. President James Buchanan sends the first Presidential international message in return, stating in part, that this communication “is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle.” After a few weeks the cable failed but it was raised and repaired and other, improved ones added almost immediately. Well done, President Buchanan (how rare is THAT accolade!?)
1960 New Mexico. Have you ever had one of those “falling” nightmares, maybe so realistic that it wakes you? Snap a leash on that memory, take a deep breath and read ahead. Joseph Kittinger was a military test pilot in the days when jets were new, and rockets and space flight were on everybody’s mind. How much speed, and what G-forces, can the human body take? On this day Kittinger climbs into a pressurized, sealed gondola dangling from a 360-foot-long helium balloon. The balloon takes him up to 102,800 feet (19.3 miles), the highest altitude ever reached by man in nonpowered flight. He lets it come down to 84,700 feet (still 16 miles up) and BAILS OUT (in a pressurized body suit sort of what an astronaut might wear someday.) His record free fall lasted 4 minutes, 36 seconds and he became the first person to exceed the speed of sound without an aircraft or space vehicle. Parachutes opened as planned. The guy really liked balloons: in 1984 Kittinger became the first person to fly a solo helium balloon across the Atlantic Ocean. (Passed away just last year (2022) at age 94…..)
Here is Kittinger HIMSELF in a short clip talking about his test pilot days, including THE FALL:
Good News in Arts and Music
Well, mostly music. After that screaming falling record with Kittinger, how about something soothing? Perhaps something from……...
1795 Zittau, Germany Birth of Heinrich Marschner. Son of a lawyer, dad wanted him to follow in the family trade. Heinrich did for a time, but when he was 20 he had a meeting and long chat with Ludwig von Beethoven, which changed his life. Marschner gave up the law, went into music, and began supporting himself as a private music teacher for hire in Bratislava, Bohemia. Expanded his composing as theater manager and then music director at a succession of German theaters. Highly praised by Mendelssohn and Schumann for his piano pieces, Marchner also wrote several operas, but these (like for many other composers of the day) were overshadowed by Wagner’s giant reputation. An exponent of incorporating national folk tunes into larger works.
A little too old? Too ethereal? Well let it be noted THIS DAY:
1962 A recording studio in England The time has come to make a change for that group of mop tops from Liverpool. Pete Best packs up his sticks for the last time, shakes hands all around, and everyone wishes each other “Good Luck.” Then the new kid in the band comes in: Ringo Starr sits down at the drum set for practice with the Beatles this day. He has to work hard: 2 days later he is with them for the first time playing in a concert. Yeah….Yeah…..Yeah…..
________________________________________________________
And if that’s not far out or groovy enough for you, let be noted that on this day in 1969…..at a farm outside of Woodstock, New York (a festival for which, oddly enough, attendance keeps rising each year as the Boomers get older; by now it must be over 12 million…….) it is the 2nd day of a Rock Concert. Who are the acts this day?
Santana
John Sebastian (apparently without the Lovin’ Spoonful, but I may need to be corrected)
Mountain
The Grateful Dead.
Not enough? ALSO taking a turn making music this day:
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Janis “Freakin’” Joplin
Sly and his Family Stone(d)
The Who
…..and Jefferson Airplane
Good News that’s Just for Fun and Giggles
Other Good News Hostesses, MCs, and other assorted Rounder Uppers of the Good News frequently feature a set of “lighter side” collection of funny moments and cartoons. I appreciate these with chuckles and laughter, but I’m a bit short of my own contributions.
Nonetheless, I will post this cartoon. As a writer, player with words, and eventually-in-print-again author (even if this time its going to start off as pixels in an e-book instead of words on a paper page), this little panel strikes pretty close to home:
And then, if you’re going to write, you use words. Word CHOICE is very important. Also, knowing the full definition of words and their uses, both formal and casual, can make quite the difference in clarity of writing.
A preacher wanted to raise money for the local church and, upon hearing that there was a fortune to be found in horse racing, he decided to purchase a horse and enter himself. Unfortunately, the going price for a race horse at the local auction house was too high so he ended up buying a donkey instead. Having bought it, he decided he might as well try his luck and see if might finish “in the money” (win/place/ or show) so he would get an owner’s payoff. He entered it in the horse race and, to his great surprise, it came in third place. The sports section in the local newspaper headlined the story,
"Preacher's Ass Shows."
The preacher was so pleased the next week he decided to enter the donkey in another race, and to everyone’s amazement, the donkey won. Next day’s sports headline read,
"Preacher's Ass Out Front."
The bishop saw both stories and was unhappy the Church was getting this kind of publicity. He called the preacher and after a firm conversation ordered him to get rid of the donkey. The community section of the newspaper headlined the leaked story the following day as,
"Bishop Scratches Preacher's Ass."
After some careful reflection on his conversation with the bishop, the preacher arranged to give the donkey to a nun in a nearby convent. The local paper breathlessly noted the event with the headline,
"Nun Has Best Ass in Town"
The bishop was speechless. When he recovered, he went to the convent and sternly told the nun to humanely give up the donkey.The good sister found a local farmer who paid her $10 to take it to his farm. The newspaper’s business section’s banner headline of the transaction read,
"Nun Peddles Ass for $10."
The bishop fainted. When he regained consciousness, in a shaken conversation he told the nun to buy the donkey back from the farmer and to then release it into the nearby fields. The newspaper’s next morning edition had a headline,
"Nun announces Ass is Wild and Free."
They buried the bishop the next day.
Well I hope this is enough to get you started, inspired, refreshed, or even curious to click on links and see what else is out there (the Internet at its most useful.) Feel free to post, react, comment, rec, or otherwise pitch in to help make someone else’s day more comforting, more relieved, and/or more hopeful.
(Personal CAT note UpDate: As many of you recall, Rascal the Cat and I have relocated to the Minnesota abode of SageHagRN and Toby the Cat. That was back at the end of June. Here in the middle of August: both cats behave themselves in the kitchen during mealtimes. Each of them often eyes the other one eating to make sure they are not looking to poach, OR getting something else/different/better in THEIR bowl.
Rascal the 18 year old, relocating from his only ever home, has found a special spot in the sunroom for his special spot. He did NOT like the door separating him overnight from the rest of the house, and vocally let me know his annoyance about every 2 hours at night (my bedroom on the same side of the door as him) for the first week. Early on he was trying to be the Alpha cat but the last couple weeks his “paw-ti-cuffs” have been mostly defensive, of the “leave me alone, kid” air, rather than the Alpha Cat dominant sort. He also lost his upper left fang the first day or so here, (his last checkup the vet said he was in pretty good shape for 18 but some of his teeth were looking bad) which may have added to his sour mood. OTOH it lets his upper lip assume a certain Elvis-ian curl.
Meanwhile Toby (the Tyler) Cat, age 5, has been fascinated by the first ever companion cat under
the same roof he has ever had. He was intensely curious during the “door blockade” opening weeks, constantly on the watch, pouncing on a strange paw sliding along under the door. He also endlessly was poking his own paws underneath the other way for some sort of Paw Tag. Lately he has been somewhat more pushy (the night blockade lasted 3 weeks) but we are letting them sort things out on their own. There have been some yowls (all from Rascal; Toby never learned to “meow”) and some chasing incidents, although at least some of these have looked more playful than dominance ploys. All in all, after about 7 weeks, not bad. A cold peace with some snapping skirmishes but…….a certain acceptance is (maybe) establishing itself.)
May all your News be Good, comforting and inspiring.
Shalom.