Sunday, March 17, 2024

"Your Hit Parade," NBC-TV, St. Patrick's Day, 1951

Here is a screen shot of a video--a video made from a kinescope--from the March 17, 1951 St. Patrick's Day telecast of Your Hit Parade, on NBC (seventy-three years ago today).

The image is of a production number, that night, of the Irish-themed popular song "MacNamara's Band."  

The performers, for the number, were the Hit Paraders (the program's vocal/choral group), and the Hit Parade dancers.

In the foreground of the picture is the dance team of Fosse & Niles, who appeared often on Your Hit Parade during the program's 1950-1951 season. 

In addition to being a dance team, Bob Fosse and Mary Ann Niles were married to one another (though they would divorce in 1951, the year of this broadcast). 

The image from the video is unfortunately blurred.  In the background, behind Ms. Niles, are three of the Hit Parade dancers: Lenny Claret (in a light sport coat, seen clapping), Virginia Conwell (obscured by Ms. Niles), and Dusty McCaffrey.  Members of the Hit Paraders, singing "MacNamara's Band," included Artie Malvin and Gene Lowell (on the elevated stage behind the dancers), singer Hubie Hendrie (obscured, on the floor in front of the elevated stage), and singers Rae Whitney and Geri Beitzel (standing with others on tables at the left side of the TV screen, but out of camera range in the above image).

Fosse & Niles made appearances on a number of early television  programs, such as The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Fifty-Fourth Street Revue, and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.

Mr. Fosse, of course, would later become a much-celebrated choreographer and director, for both Broadway and film. 

(Your Hit Parade image, © Lost Gold Entertainment, Inc.)

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

COVID-19

On March 11, 2020, four years ago yesterday, the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic.

Two days later, the Trump administration declared the virus to be a national emergency.

On March 15th, shutdowns began in states across the country.

The first COVID death in the United States had been reported on February 29th.

Near the end of May, the number of deaths, in the country, passed 100,000.  This, despite President Trump's assurances that the virus would soon "go away." The virus, he had said on April 3rd--three weeks after his administration announced the national emergency--"is going to go away. It is going away." On June 18th, he said that the virus "is dying out. The numbers are starting to get very good." In July, he said:  "I’ll be right eventually. I will be right eventually. You know I said, ‘It’s going to disappear.’ I’ll say it again. It’s going to disappear, and I’ll be right."  In August, he said that "it’s gonna be gone soon."  He was wrong. By the end of 2020, there were more than 350,000 deaths.

The death count reached 1 million, in the U.S., in May of 2022.

As of March 2, 2024--this from a March 11th ABC News story, online--1.18 million Americans have died due to the virus. 

Various studies, though, have suggested that it is probable the number is in fact higher. 

One study, as reported last month by the British publication The Guardian, indicated that the actual number of COVID deaths, in America, "is likely at least 16% higher than the official tally."  

From the February 21st Guardian story:

“...we find over the first 30 months of the pandemic that serious gaps remained in surveillance,” said Andrew Stokes, associate professor of global health and sociology at Boston University and one of the study’s authors.

“Even though we got a lot better at testing for Covid, we were still missing a lot of official Covid deaths” in the US, said Jennifer Dowd, professor of demography and population health at University of Oxford, who was not involved in this research.

Yet the official numbers, when one looks back, remain staggering.

In one week, during January of 2021, there were nearly 26,000 deaths in the U.S.--the highest weekly figure since the start of the pandemic.

During one week, a year later--from January 30 to February 5, 2022, during the Omicron wave--there were more than 18,000 deaths.

And more recently: in the week ending this past December 9th, there were, in the U.S., more than 1600 deaths due to the virus--as opposed to 163 deaths, the same week, from the flu.  

The March 11, 2024 ABC story, referred to above, notes that during the week of March 2nd, there were 576 deaths. COVID deaths have, obviously, been reduced dramatically--yet 576 deaths in a single week is a figure which should not be ignored.  I am guessing, though, that any number of Americans--perhaps in part from simple weariness, or perhaps, for some, from a certain sense of defiance--consider the virus to be a thing of the past.  One also notes that there are, indeed, many in the country who, during the course of the pandemic, made strenuous efforts to minimize--or simply deny--the virus's deadly severity.

Nevertheless: the issue of memory, as regards COVID, is of great significance.  A February story in The Boston Globe reported that the Library of Congress had begun an oral history project, "part of a congressional mandate to preserve the experiences ordinary Americans had during the pandemic..."

A year ago, in mid-March of 2023, as part of the weekly "Brooks and Capehart" segment on the PBS NewsHour, featuring journalists David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, Mr. Brooks said the following, about the pandemic:

"I don't think we've memorialized the million Americans who died, enough. President Biden, the day before the inauguration, remember he had that ceremony? And it seems like we should do that. We still need to do that more.  And so there are a million households who lost somebody.  And I think we still haven't quite faced the emotional leftovers of that."

I think of the dedication page of a novel I read in 2022--writer Don Winslow's City on Fire, a work of crime fiction, published by William Morrow, which takes place for the most part in Providence, Rhode Island (a city, I'll mention, where I lived for a number of years, in the 1970s and 1980s).  Mr. Winslow dedicated the book to those who had died from the virus:


 





Sunday, March 3, 2024

Editorial Cartoon by Nick Anderson, about the House Speaker, and Ukraine

A cartoon from February 28th by Nick Anderson, whose work is syndicated by the Tribune Content Agency. Mr. Anderson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 2005. (Please click on the cartoon to see it enlarged.)


(Cartoon © 2/28/24, by Nick Anderson and Counterpoint Media)

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Aleksei Navalny, and Ukraine

Today is the second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.  It has also been eight days since the death of Russian opposition figure Aleksei Navalny.

Today, too, Mr. Navalny's spokeswoman announced, in an online statement, that Mr. Navalny's body had--finally--been released to the custody of his mother.

Yesterday, President Biden announced some 500 sanctions against Russia, as a result of Mr. Navalny's death, and Russia's continuing war against Ukraine.  Those sanctioned, The Washington Post noted,  included Russian individuals, companies, "and firms in other countries that supply Russia's military and industrial production, according to a Treasury Department spokeswoman."  

Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said there will also be sanctions concerning Russia's human rights abuses, within the country, and without. One hopes the sanctions will have an effect.

And yet:  in the United States, the Republican-led House continues to delay--recklessly--sending crucial aid to Ukraine.

Gamesmanship is not leadership. Fealty to Donald Trump--who is besotted with Putin--is not leadership. The stakes, concerning Ukraine, are incalculably high, worldwide, and many in the House GOP don't seem to care.

The world--teetering on its axis, while House Republicans are dormant.  

Putin is strengthened by this; America's moral leadership is deeply diminished.

And, to speak of Mr. Navalny:  he was an immensely brave man. 

The day before his February 16th death, he made a court appearance, video from which has aired on television, and can be seen online.

In the courtroom--or, in the enclosure within the courtroom--he was smiling, laughing, making jokes to the judge.

The judge had imposed "a stream of fines" against Mr. Navalny, an online Russia-oriented independent news site noted (a site blocked in Russia; the publication is now based outside of the country). Mr. Navalny said the following, at the court hearing (I am using the translation not from the above publication, but from the CBS News video, below):

"Your honor, I am waiting.  I will send you my personal account number, so that you can use your huge federal judge's salary to fuel my personal account."  He added: "Because I am running out of money, and thanks to your decisions, it will run out even faster. So send it over." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUwOYeei5MU

Mr. Navalny's cheerful-appearing demeanor, the day before he died, was, on its own, evidence of his tremendous fortitude, and his heroism.

He had not, his manner proclaimed, been defeated--either from the terrible (and freezing) conditions of the Russian Arctic penal colony to which he had been sent in December, or from the punishing circumstances at the prison where he had been previously held since 2021.  During his imprisonment, he spent hundreds of days in solitary confinement.

Mr. Navalny's death--whether due to the harsh conditions of his incarceration (conditions imposed, certainly, by Vladimir Putin), or because of a Putin-ordered assassination--is a tragedy of great magnitude: for the citizens of Russia, for his many supporters, and, of course, for Mr. Navalny's courageous family. It is also a considerable tragedy for those seeking freedom across the world.

On February 16th, the day his death was reported, Anne Applebaum wrote the following in The Atlantic, online:

The enormous contrast between Navalny’s civic courage and the corruption of Putin’s regime will remain. Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history.

Even behind bars Navalny was a real threat to Putin, because he was living proof that courage is possible, that truth exists, that Russia could be a different kind of country. For a dictator who survives thanks to lies and violence, that kind of challenge was intolerable. Now Putin will be forced to fight against Navalny’s memory, and that is a battle he will never win.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/navalny-death-russia-prison/677485/?gift=Tcay7nmVziC9n3Jf9QllmzHT97CTYmgyJxhyNuNZ0fM&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

On February 20th, Nadya Tolokonnikova--one of the founders of the Russian music/protest/performance art group Pussy Riot, and who was a friend of Mr. Navalny's--published an op-ed essay in The New York Times.  She wrote the following:

People say Mr. Putin feared Aleksei. But I think the reason he wanted to get rid of Aleksei was another emotion — a darker, more sinister one. It was envy. People loved Aleksei. With his jokes, irony, superhero-like fearlessness and love for life, he led with charisma. People followed Aleksei because he was the kind of person you wanted to be friends with. People follow Mr. Putin because they fear him, but people followed Aleksei because they loved him. Mr. Putin clearly envied this appeal. No amount of money in the world can buy love; no amount of missiles and tanks can conquer people’s hearts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/20/opinion/navalny-death-putin.html?unlocked_article_code=1.YE0.37GO.CriK-ATjG56m&smid=url-share

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Sentences

From Ann Beattie's fine book of short stories, Onlookers (published last July):   

Here are two sentences--from a story titled "Alice Ott"; the story is narrated by Alice Ott's niece.

My boyfriend back in Michigan had found me withholding. That was because sometimes I didn't talk just about him.

https://www.amazon.com/Onlookers-Stories-Ann-Beattie/dp/1668013657/