Alfred Hitchcock ~ August 18,1899 ~ April 29,1980

Photo:Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection

Unimaginable Tragedy in Poland ~ April 10, 2010

A young woman lights a candle among hundreds of others left by mourners outside the Presidential Palace in memory of late Polish President Lech Kaczynski on Monday in Warsaw, Poland.

Image:Sean Gallup/Getty

Unimaginable tragedy in Poland as President, First Lady, Top Military Commanders, Advisors die in Plane Crash

by Infidelesto on April 10, 2010


Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and some of the country's most prominent military and civilian leaders died Saturday April 10, 2010 along with dozens of others when the presidential plane crashed as it came in for a landing in thick fog in near Smolensk in western Russia.

NYT:
The crash came as a staggering blow to Poland, wiping out a large swath of the country’s leadership, including the commanders of all four branches of the military, the head of the central bank, the president and many of his top advisors. In the numb hours after the crash, leaders in Warsaw evoked the horror of the massacre at Katyn, which stood for decades as a symbol of Russian domination.

“It is a damned place,” former president Aleksander Kwasniewski told TVN24. “It sends shivers down my spine. First the flower of the Second Polish Republic is murdered in the forests around Smolensk, now the intellectual elite of the Third Polish Republic die in this tragic plane crash when approaching Smolensk airport.”

The Economist calls this a decapitation of Polish society: the plane crash also seems like a decapitation of Polish society. Among the 96 people who died were the chief of the Polish general staff, the head of the central bank, the director of the Institute of National Remembrance (which investigates and documents crimes such as Katyn) and many other of the country’s top public figures. Many politicians from the opposition Law and Justice Party, which is led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the late president’s twin brother, were among the delegation.

The country’s military chiefs were on board because they were going to attend ceremonies in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk, marking the 70th anniversary of the Soviet slaughter of 22,000 Polish officers there and elsewhere in Russia and Ukraine during World War II.

Poland plunged into political turmoil after crash:

The tragedy has forced an early presidential election which under the Polish constitution must be held before the end of June.

“This kind of dramatic tragedy is unheard of in the modern world,” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in Warsaw after an emergency cabinet meeting before he headed to the crash site in Smolensk in western Russia.

At the same time Bronislaw Komorowski, Poland’s parliamentary speaker who became acting head of state after Kaczynski’s death, declared a week of mourning for the 97 people killed in the crash.

Poland Had Nicknamed Government Planes ‘Flying Coffins’ – WSJ
Polish Premier Donald Tusk on board arrived to the Czech capital to meet U.S. President Barack Obama and eleven leaders of Middle and East European countries. Only 39 hours later, the same aircraft crashed near Smolensk, western Russia, on Saturday.

The airplane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski Saturday is deeply shocking — but, sadly, not a complete surprise. Poland has for years been calling the Soviet-era military aircraft used by Polish officials “flying coffins."

Poland’s former Prime Minister Leszek Miller once had to leave the government airplane at an airport in Germany after an engine caught on fire. He was later nearly killed in a helicopter crash — and still politicians were too afraid of the public reaction to buy new aircraft.

The possibility of a government aircraft crashing and killing an important official was so strongly discussed that it became absorbed into popular culture. Commercial television broadcaster Polsat produced a series called Ekipa in 2007 in which a fictitious president crashes in a helicopter and dies shortly afterward.

Poles continue to mourn President Lech Kaczynski, whose body was returned to home soil Sunday amid questions about the airplane crash that killed him and about the pilot who flew the jet.

The first lady and scores of others from the country's military and political elite also died in the crash in western Russia.

Russian investigators say a preliminary analysis of the flight data recorders indicates that there were no mechanical problems on board. So far, they are pointing to pilot error.

On Monday, Poland's acting president, Bronislaw Komorowski, ordered a review of rules governing travel for all senior military personnel. Saturday's crash killed 96 people, including senior leaders of all of Poland's branches of armed forces.

The presidential plane was repaired and overhauled in December. But Wawrzyniec Konarski, a professor of political science at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences, says it's absurd that the president and other top officials were flying in a two-decade-old Tupolev despite several warnings from senior officials and pilots that the aging official Polish fleet desperately needed to be replaced.

"The sources of transport, especially the planes, were perceived as obsolete and bad, should be absolutely replaced by new and modernized machines. This kind of debate, even a technical one, really has to be accelerated," Konarski says.

There was heavy fog before the crash, and the Russians say they advised the Polish pilot several times to divert the Tupolev 154 to another airport. Russian media reports suggest that the pilot made several attempts to land before the crash.

But Col. Tomasz Pietrzak of the Polish air force disputes that. He says sources on the ground at the airport in Smolensk in western Russia near where the plane went down tell him the pilot made one approach and, moreover, the advice to divert was just that — advice. In the end, Pietrzak says, it is up to the pilot to decide what to do.

"It's not mandatory, it's only suggestion. If the weather was really bad in the airport, the decision is only one: The controller must say, 'OK, the airport is closed,' " he says.

The airport was not closed, says Pietrzak, who trained and commanded the two pilots who flew to Russia on Saturday — the one who was flying the plane carrying journalists and which landed safely; and the pilot killed in the crash of the president's plane.

Pietrzak says he has spoken with the pilot who landed safely, and he confirmed that the other aircraft made just one approach to the airport and that the airport in Smolensk is a primitive Russian military post whose control tower lacks modern aviation guidance equipment.

For several years, Pietrzak commanded the Polish air force regiment that was in charge of flying the president and other senior officials. But he resigned two years ago in large part to protest the poor shape of the fleet.

"The technology of these aircraft is too old," he says, adding that he got tired of waiting for aircraft improvements that never came.

A breaking point came in 2003, the colonel says, when a helicopter carrying the prime minister crashed. All of the passengers survived, but Pietrzak says that crash should have been a wake-up call.

"It was a sign from [God] seven years ago that we have to do something, we have to change something. But all of them ignore the situation. Everybody put under the carpet these problems," Pietrzak says.

Some are asking whether the pilot was under pressure from President Kaczynski or others on the plane to land and make the commemoration ceremony on time. In at least one previous instance, the president had reportedly pressured his pilot to land despite warnings.

Polish media report that in 2008, pilots flying Kaczynski to Tbilisi refused the president's order to land in Georgia because of the country's military conflict with Russia. Instead, the plane diverted to Azerbaijan.

Pietrzak says this is speculation, and the flight data recorders would most likely be able to shed light on the question.

He notes that there were four microphones in the cockpit of the president's Tupolev, which he says would probably have picked up any chatter relating to pressure to land.

But, he says, an upgrade for the presidential fleet is still much needed, no matter what the recovered flight data recorders show to be the cause of Saturday's crash.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Poles lined the route from Warsaw's airport to the presidential palace Sunday. Many stood somberly in silence. Some tossed flowers at the entourage carrying the president's casket as it slowly made its way to the palace for eventual public viewing.

Magdelena Udalkowska came out to view the procession with her son.

"I wanted to be here to honor Lech Kaczynski," she said. "He was a great Polish patriot, and it was important to come out and pay our respects."

The president and the other dignitaries were traveling to Katyn, Russia, for a ceremony marking the anniversary of the 1940 massacre there of thousands of Polish officers, police and intellectuals by Joseph Stalin's secret police, known as the NKVD. Historians believe Stalin wanted to cripple a postwar Poland by eliminating much of the country's officer corps and key members of the intelligentsia.

Some Poles are now calling the plane crash the "second Katyn." Udalkowska said the fact that the crash occurred in a place already soaked in Polish blood only worsens the confusion and shock.

"The fact that this catastrophe occurred in this place again — and on the 70th anniversary — makes me think it was some kind of act of God. I don't know. It makes it all even more sad," she said.

Text:NPR.org

Ode to A Nightingale ~ John Keats ~ 1795~1821

MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South!
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

12/12/12/12/12

BETTE, RENZO'S MOM, Arrived Two Years Ago

Two years ago this morning, my nephew Sheridan from Jersey City, New Jersey, flew out to San Francisco for less than a full day to bring my puppy Renzo's new companion -- his mother Bette.

Sheridan picked her up from the breeder, Mary Louise Gregg, in Newville, Pennsylvania two weeks before and kept her at his 1880's brick and brownstone townhouse in Jersey City until he could arrange a flight. I had hoped Sheridan's wife Sylvie could come along and that they would be able to visit for a few days; but they had plans to go to France to visit her family in Nantes for Christmas, so Sheridan ended up coming alone.

Even so, we had a great time and I took him to dinner at the St. Francis Yacht Club (where I'll sing a concert Saturday night with the SOTS --Sons of the Sea.)

The picture shows Bette and Renzo on their first walk together after being re-introduced and before entering the house. I liked the leaves on the sidewalk and took a number of shots with my iPhone. This one turned out pretty well. Bette and Renzo are getting along famously. I think they did recognize each other in some fashion. But Renzo's a teenager and was thrilled to have a girl in the house. He's calmed down a bit, but at first he seemed to have an Oedipus Complex!

THE GAME ~ November 23, 1968

Frank O’Brien/Kino International

Sport was not listed as one of the various subjects of this blog. But occasionally, even I will delve into the topic, particularly when it has an historical or personal connection. When I started my freshman year at Yale College in the autumn of 1967, Yale hadn’t had a claim to football glory for at least several decades. We asserted that we were above it all, and didn’t care. Of course, that attitude lasted just until we had a winning team.

I recall one torchlight parade up Hillhouse Avenue to President Kingman Brewster’s handsome brick Georgian-style mansion (a re-facing of an earlier staid Victorian). It was just before the Princeton game in 1967 (or was it ’68?). Our team had had a great season. President Brewster stepped out of his front door, held up a large naval orange, squeezed it, spiked it, and stomped on it, and then proclaimed: “Fuck Princeton!!” The crowd went delirious. I was rather shocked. (Prude that I was, it took another two and a half years for me to utter that crude Anglo-Saxon expletive even to myself— and that was at the prompting of a psychiatric nurse.) But this is an example of how even Yalies of my era picked up football fever. That’s one reason why the Yale-Harvard Game in 1968 was so traumatic. I didn’t go to The Game in Cambridge, but many of my friends did, and I clearly remember the anticipation before and the somber brooding afterwards.

A documentary about The Game opened in New York three years ago. I can’t improve upon the review in the New York Times, so I quote it below.

Back in 1968, When a Tie Was No Tie

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: November 19, 2008

For most of the world, I suspect, the year 1968 signifies upheaval, revolution, power to the people, Vietnam and My Lai, Paris in flames, Martin and Bobby, Nixon versus Humphrey. Another great rivalry played out that year in the form of a college football game. And while it seems absurd to include such a picayune event in the annals, the filmmaker Kevin Rafferty makes the case for remembrance and for the art of the story in his preposterously entertaining documentary “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29,” preposterous at least for those of us who routinely shun that pagan sacrament.

True gridiron believers doubtless know every unlikely, heart-skipping minute of this showdown. (The schools, like some others, honor their football rivalry with vainglorious capitalization, calling each matchup The Game.) On Nov. 23, 1968, the undefeated Yale team and its two glittering stars — the quarterback Brian Dowling and the running back Calvin Hill — went helmet to helmet against its longtime rival, Harvard, also undefeated. Mr. Dowling, a legendary figure whom grown men still call god (and the inspiration for Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury character B. D.), had not lost a game he started since the sixth grade, a record that well into the fourth quarter, with Yale leading by 16 points, seemed safe.

Everything changed in the final 42 seconds as all the forces of the universe, or so it seemed, shifted and one player after another either rose to the occasion or stumbled with agonizing frailty. Gods became men as the ball was lost and found and one improbable pass after another was completed. In front of the increasingly raucous packed stadium, each play became an epic battle in miniature with every second stretching into an eternity. As in film, time in football doesn’t tick, it races and oozes, a fact that Mr. Rafferty, working as his own editor and using the simplest visual material — talking-head interviews and game footage — exploits for a narrative that pulses with the artful, exciting beats of a thriller.

What’s most surprising about this consistently surprising movie is how forcefully those beats resonate, even though you know how the story ends from the start. (Take another look at the coyly, cleverly enigmatic title, borrowed from the famous headline in The Harvard Crimson.) One reason for the excitement is the game, of course, which remains a nail-biter despite the visual quality of the footage, which is so unadorned and so humble — and almost entirely in long shot — it looks like a dispatch from a foreign land. And in some ways it was: Football fans still wore raccoon coats to games and the women in the stands cheering for Yale could not attend the college. The same month, Yale announced it was (finally) opening that door.

This history helps explain why there are no women here, at least in close-up. “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29” is very much about men, triumphant, regretful, defiant, sentimental, touchingly vulnerable men who are made all the more poignant with each image of them as young players. For some, the game was and remains the greatest moment of their lives — even better than sex, one volunteers, prompting Mr. Rafferty to ask off-camera if the man had then been a virgin (no). Mr. Rafferty, himself a Harvard man, films his subjects (Tommy Lee Jones, a Harvard lineman, included) with a lack of fuss in plain kitchens and cluttered offices. He lets them roam around their memories and, for a time, gives them back sweet youth.

As reviewer Manohla Dargis alluded to, Garry Trudeau’s comic strip Doonesbury started in the Yale Daily News and featured B.D., Brian Dowling, our star quarterback. Running back Calvin Hill actually had a decent football career after Yale, while Brian Dowling’s legacy remains in the annals of New Haven and on the comic page.

THANKSGIVING DAY

Phot0:theunquietlibrary.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/thanksgiving

The fourth Thursday in November is the official national celebration of Thanksgiving in the United States. It hasn’t always been official, nor on the fourth Thursday.

In elementary school we learned that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1621. But seven years ago, when Dennis and I went to Virginia to visit Williamsburg, Monticello, and the hunt race at Madison’s Montpelier, we also visited some Charles River plantations, including Berkeley Plantation, which claims that honor. At this site in December 1619, a group of British settlers led by captain John Woodlief knelt in humble prayer and pledged “Thanksgiving” to God for their healthy arrival after a long voyage across the Atlantic.

Throughout the first century of the republic there were a number of Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations, but not necessarily on a regular basis. The first was issued by George Washington on October 3, 1789.

Then in the midst of the horrors of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln on October 3, 1863 proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving to be observed on the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and praise.” It was almost as if things were so bad, that it was necessary to look beyond the bloodshed to discern some greater purpose.

At the beginning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, Thanksgiving was not a fixed holiday and it was up to the President to issue a Thanksgiving Proclamation to announce what date the holiday would fall on. Most states followed Lincoln’s precedent and observed the last Thursday of November. But in 1939 there were two days celebrated a week apart. As a reaction to the Great Depression, Roosevelt decided to declare the third Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving. That was to give retailers an extra week of shopping before Christmas. (Of course today the Christmas shopping season starts almost before Halloween!) Most states, however, in 1939 continued to observe that last Thursday; so there were two Thanksgivings that year. (And World War II in Europe was already near the end of its third month.)

Franklin Roosevelt observed Thanksgiving on the second to last Thursday of November for two more years, but the amount of public outrage prompted Congress to pass a law on December 26, 1941, ensuring that all Americans would celebrate a unified Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November every year, and that’s the way it’s been ever since. I don’t know how my grandfather Bob Rich voted, but he probably was in favor of it. Note that the vote was after Pearl Harbor, so the psychology may have been a little like Lincoln’s during the Civil War.

####

A few other countries have National Days of Thanksgiving. After observing several different dates, the Canadian Parliament on January 31, 1957 proclaimed “A day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed… to be observed on the 2nd Monday in October.”

Great Britain likewise has a “Harvest Festival” Day of Thanksgiving held every year in the month of September, on a Sunday nearing the harvest moon. I attended such a Harvest Festival Thanksgiving service at Lincoln Cathedral in 1988. The preacher that day was Neville Chamberlain’s grandson, or great-nephew, I don't remember which.

(The week before I had seen a BBC revisionist documentary on Neville Chamberlain, which put a somewhat different perspective on his blame for, and contribution to the outcome of WWII. After being burned by Hitler’s occupation of all Czechoslovakia in violation of the Munich accord, Chamberlain ordered the building of the Spitfires, which eventually won the Battle of Britain. Had war started in 1938, the Germans would have had clear air superiority. Reality is frequently more nuanced than popular perceptions. Counter-factual history, though fascinating, guarantees absolutely nothing.)

[For the record, I prefer the British pronunciation of the word 'THANKS-giving'. To me it seems closer to the meaning.]

Anyway, have a Happy and thank-full Thanksgiving!

elements of text courtesy wikipedia.com