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I think the BBC may be having some fun in an article about a study at King’s College London into the existence or non-existence of the famed G-spot: “The elusive erogenous zone said to exist in some women may be a myth, say researchers who have hunted for it.” But “Some are firm believers.” Among these is sexologist Beverley Whipple, who popularized the idea of the G-spot but evidently couldn’t get it named the Whipple Spot (and you people refused to name female ejaculation after her). The study involved twins because, in the words of one of the researchers, “Mmmm, twins.”
Hat-tip to xkcd (click if cartoon gets, um, cut off):
A NY magistrate told one of the striking shirtwaist makers that he is on strike against God (who decreed that man live by the sweat of his brow), and Elizabeth Dutcher of the Women’s Trade Union League thought to cable George Bernard Shaw for his opinion of this. He replied, “Delightful, mediaeval America always in the intimate personal confidence of the Almighty.”
Boy-genius William James Sidis, 11 (the NYT wrongly says 10), gave a lecture to the Harvard (he is a student there) Mathematical Club, wearing short trousers (he did, not the Harvard Mathematical Club) (so far as I know), on the fourth dimension. He believes his theories will revolutionize the study of geometry.
The list of 14 countries all of whose citizens are to be thoroughly searched if they dare to buy an airplane ticket includes Cuba, whose citizens are not exactly renowned for joining Al Qaida. Is this bureaucratic inertia, where any measure designed to hassle foreigners must include Cubans, just because they can, or is it designed as a fig-leaf to show that we’re not just bothering Muslims (the other 13 nations being largely Muslim), in the same way as North Korea was included in the “Axis of Evil” to show that Bush’s crusade wasn’t actually a, you know, crusade.
From the Guardian’s World News page.
(That’s South African President Jacob Zuma, 67, who fell down dancing at the wedding at which he took a third wife, 38.)
Headline of the Day -100: “Negroes Quickly Doomed.” In Kansas City, Missouri, two black men were sentenced to death for assaulting a white woman. The trial, from jury selection to verdict, took two days. The jury was out for five minutes. The trial was held behind closed doors, to prevent a lynching.
NYT: “Society in Washington is to-day discussing somebody’s blunder at last night’s charity ball, which resulted in the bringing to the red ballroom of the Willard three negroes in evening dress.” Blunder indeed. What seems to have happened is that Paulens Sannon’s wife was listed in a newspaper as a patron of a fashionable charity, so she got the invite. She and her husband and their guest attended for an hour, were spoken to by absolutely no one, and left. Paulens Sannon was the ambassador from Haiti.
Professor William Morris Davis of Harvard, a geologist and the “father of American geography,” says that “We are now able to tell almost exactly the age of this earth.” 60 million years old.
A workman in my home just turned on (shudder) talk radio. Evidently Obama made a serious mistake by not cancelling his vacation, going to Washington Airport, and personally cavity-searching foreigners.
Oh, thank God. A drill is now drowning out the radio.
The director of the census will hire negroes as census-takers in districts where blacks are at least 2/5 of the population, but will hire both white and black ones in Southern districts “to preclude negroes from...” [shudder] “...enumerating whites.”
The clerk of the Havana Hotel Plaza was fined $10 for refusing to serve those two black congresscritters. After the court proceeding, the two lead a procession to the hotel and again ordered drinks. They got them. No word on whether they left a tip. The government newspaper writes that “the Americans must be taught by the strong arm of the law that they shall not be permitted to introduce into Cuba the anti-negro sentiments prevailing in the United States.”
Headline of the Day -100: “Monarchs Felicitate Taft.” For a second I thought it said something else.
Name of the Day -100: newly sworn-in Supreme Court Justice Horace H. Lurton. Another former Confederate soldier. And a Democrat appointed by a Republican president.
The police commissioner of Detroit bans Emma Goldman from giving a speech.
Newly inaugurated NYC mayor William Gaynor’s appointments have been notable for not having been dictated by Tammany but by qualifications or their order on the civil service list. Some of them didn’t really want the jobs they were handed.
18 year old Vernon Plessinger pleaded guilty to opening a railway switch and wrecking a train in Ohio, badly injuring the engineer and fireman. His plan was to loot enough money from dead or injured passengers to take him to the coast so he could join the Navy.
A meeting was held in Carnegie Hall to protest violations of the rights of striking shirtwaist makers by police and police magistrates who, the meeting’s resolutions declare, “have dealt with the strikers in a spirit of revolting partisanship, unfairness, and cruelty.” The police allow strikers to be assaulted, magistrates (two of whom are singled out by name) convict for “disorderly behavior” with little evidence or even against the evidence and then impose harsh sentences. A box was reserved for the magistrates, all of whom were invited. One actually came; his reaction to the proceedings is not recorded. On the platform were 350 of the “girls” who had been arrested and 20 who had been sent to the workhouse.
A NYT editorial agrees that strikers should not be thrown into the workhouse, although for the rather different reason that the abominably paid shirtwaist-makers might be corrupted by their exposure to prostitutes, “whose sinful occupation often provides what seems like wealth to the workers.”
There is also a pro-vivisection editorial, “Not Hideous When Understood,” which I will refrain from quoting.
The bar of the Plaza Hotel in Havana, described by the NYT as “distinctively an American house,” refused to serve drinks to two black members of the Cuban Congress. They came back with a large crowd of negroes and hilarity ensued. “It is thought that the riot was a concerted plan on the part of the negroes to give expression to the anti-American sentiment in Cuba.”
At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Mr. Q. T. Simpson “declared that it was only a matter of time when the negro of the darkest hue could be made as pink skinned as the caucasian.” Mr. Simpson is a Chicago stock breeder. He declares that through experimentation we “have unearthed a great deal on the nature of chromosomes, the unit of life which gives color. I think we are on the verge of gaining complete control over these chromosomes, and that means the control of color. By a set process of treatment with baths or injections this new tide in the affairs of the black man will be brought about and these color units in the cells of the creature will be attenuated or destroyed.” He is hard at work on the process that will bring this about and make it possible for everyone to get service at the Havana Plaza Hotel. At no point in the article is he quoted as giving a reason why it is desirable to eliminate dark skin; it is just assumed.
Senator Col. James Gordon, the possible Lincoln conspirator, has met President Taft. “He’s a mighty nice young fellow. I like him. I felt just like putting my hand on his shoulder and calling him ‘Bill.’” So Taft can breathe a sigh of relief.
Taft has successfully met the challenge of his first New Year’s Day reception at the White House. He stood in the Blue Room and shook hands, 5,575 of them, from 11:00 to 1:55. That’s 31.8 hands per minute.
Sing Sing abandoned its New Year’s custom of giving each convict a cigar with his noonday meal. Too many prisoners now, can’t afford it.
Headline of the Day -100: “All Militia to Aid Army. Lieut. Col. Weaver Certain that States Will Accept the Dick Law.”
In Philadelphia, 1 divorce suit was filed for every 11 marriage licenses issued in 1909.
Speaking of licenses, the New York Legislature is considering requiring driving licenses. And abolishing speed limits.
The WaPo news section reports today that since the Underpants Bomber, Michael Chertoff has been repeatedly telling the media and anyone who will listen that we need to buy lots of full-body scanners for airports, without mentioning his own financial interest – one of the Chertoff Group’s clients is Rapiscan Systems. (I assume the first syllable of Rapiscan is pronounced with a soft a as in rapid, not a hard a as in rape. If I were planning to sell scanners that pictured people naked, I’d have put some more thought into that name.)
And the WaPo op-ed page today has a piece by Michael Chertoff. Guess what he’s calling for.
Astronomer Percival Lowell tells the general session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the Martians are building new canals. Wonder what they’re saying at the Martian Association for the Advancement of Science.
Name of the Day: National Security Council Spokesman Mike Hammer (picture below). Every morning he stands in front of the mirror, flips open an imaginary badge, and says in his best Joe Friday voice, “Hammer, National Security.” (Alternatively, he may flash an imaginary badge and say, “It’s Hammer time!”, in which case he should be fired immediately.)
A second man has plead guilty to uploading the movie “The Love Guru” to the internet before its theatrical release. Another man was previously sentenced to six months in prison. Mike Meyers remains at large.
There’s been all this talk about how alarms should have gone off when the Underpants Bomber bought a one-way ticket with cash and had no luggage. And they probably should have, though paying in cash and buying one-way tickets are not uncommon in Africa. But what does it say about Al Qaida’s competence and resources? Could they not have sprung for a thrift store suitcase and clothing and a return ticket to make him less conspicuous and increase the chances of success?
If the NYT search function is correct, today was the first time they ever wrote about Marya Aman, a little Palestinian girl, now 8, who was riding in a car blown up by the an Israeli rocket in May 2006, collateral damage in the assassination on a busy highway of an Islamic Jihad leader on his way to the hospital to see his wife, who had just given birth. Marya is now a quadriplegic, permanently confined to an Israeli hospital (she is also on a respirator). I wrote about Marya in 2007 here, here, and here, but the NYT evidently waited until it could do a sentimental moral-equivalence story about Marya’s friendship with another 8-year-old, an Israeli boy in the same hospital, brain-injured by a Hamas rocket. The Times waits until the 16th paragraph to mention the details of the Israeli attack and that her mother, brother and grandmother were also killed in the blast, and until the 17th to note that Israel tried to deport her to certain death in Gaza. It says that her father still has “no official status.” In 2007 that meant he didn’t dare risk setting foot outside the hospital for fear of being summarily deported; I can’t tell from the NYT story exactly what it means now. Questions like that might have been answered if the NYT didn’t act as if it were the only news source in the world and maybe used Teh Google. At least Marya’s younger brother, also seriously injured by the rocket, is now in the same hospital.
In Britain, Earl Percy, an MP and heir of the Duke of Northumberland, has died in Paris, and the rumor is that it was in a duel, although the official cause of death is acute pleurisy.
A new speed record has been established for the monoplane: in France, Léon Delagrange flew 200 km in 152 minutes, or 48.9 miles per hour.
Mrs. Belmont has received a helpful letter suggesting that the way to win women’s suffrage is for all the women of the east to decamp to a part of the country where women already have full political and legal rights and tell their husbands to either pass a women’s franchise law or join them in Utah.
Little-known historical fact: the first woman ever elected a state senator was a Mormon plural wife in Utah, Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon in 1896. One of the candidates she defeated was her husband; she was a Democratic-Populist, he was a Republican.
And that’s our last blog post from 1909!
Reports say Obama is planning military strikes in Yemen in retaliation for the Underpants Bomber. Personally, I am definitely in favor of a tit for tat retaliation: let’s send Joe Lieberman to Yemen and have him set his leg on fire. I say an eye for an eye, a flaming doofus for a flaming doofus.
NYT headline: “MRS. GAYNOR ADMITS SHE’S A SUFFRAGIST.” That “admission” is from Augusta Gaynor, wife of the mayor-elect of NYC, at a suffrage luncheon. She notes that few of the men she talks to agree with her.
Alva Belmont told the luncheon of an incident in which she telephoned a Night Court judge asking if she should send her lawyer to defend arrested striking shirtwaist-makers. He told her, “You had better save your time and money; they are nothing but little Jew girls, and their place is the workhouse.” She will hold a meeting at Carnegie Hall to protest the violation of the rights of strikers.
The British Astronomical Association weighed evidence of canals on Mars, and expressed scepticism. Well, laughter.
Prof. Hugo Hergesell of Strasbourg is talking about his and Count Zeppelin’s plans to explore the North Pole by airship.
China executes a mentally ill British citizen, Akmal Shaikh, for drug smuggling. The method of execution: lethal injection.
Quote of the Day, Foreign: Manouchehr Mottaki, the foreign minister of Iran (which has taken to stealing the bodies of dead activists and arresting the relatives of live ones) objects to Britain praising democracy protesters: “Britain will get slapped in the mouth if it does not stop its nonsense.” (Update: The Times translates this as “receive a punch in the mouth”. We eagerly await a definitive translation – high diplomacy requires precision in its use of language.)
Quote of the Day, Domestic: Peter King (R-Under His Bed Until the Bad Men Go Away): “100% of the Islamic terrorists are Muslims”.
Quote of the Day, 1979 version: British official documents released under the 30 year rule show that Thatcher didn’t want her emissary to white-run Rhodesia meeting any of the nationalist opposition: “I have never done business with terrorists until they become prime ministers.” She’d have gotten along famously with Manouchehr “Slappy” Mottaki.
At Thatcher’s her first meeting with Soviet Premier Kosygin, she lectured him about the plight of Vietnamese boat people – and then did everything to prevent them being allowed into Britain, preferring white Rhodesian immigrants, white Polish immigrants, white Hungarian immigrants... She told her foreign and home secretaries that it was “quite wrong that immigrants should be given council housing whereas white citizens were not”. Note the telling, unnecessary use of the word “white.” Evidently she suggested to the Australian prime minister that they jointly buy an island from Indonesia or the Philippines to stick the boat people on. The idea was scotched by Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yu, who didn’t want the economic competition.
NYC Mayor McClellan’s committee on teacher pay recommends against equal pay for women teachers. They simply aren’t worth it in the free market: “the rate of pay which will attract women of high quality does not suffice to attract men of an equally high grade.”
Newly appointed senator for Mississippi James Gordon was a colonel in the Confederate army who was, for a while, believed to have been involved in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy (he was a close friend of Booth’s), and had a $10,000 reward on his head, dead or alive.
(Update: That’s no fun. The next day the NYT printed a War Dept denial that there was ever a reward offered on Gordon. Wikipedia says that while he was not, so far as we know, involved in the assassination plotting, he did discuss with Booth the possibility of kidnapping Lincoln. A United States senator, ladies and gentlemen! For two months anyway.)
Today -200: William Ewart Gladstone was born on this day in 1809.
Oh yeah, you can tell they are totally committed to peace talks.
Ha’aretz: “Netanyahu is willing to accept the U.S. proposal to allot 24 months to talks, but doesn’t want to announce that the goal is to reach a deal by the end of that period.”
