The mystery of life - birth, growth, death, is almost certainly behind the ancient efforts to precisely know the seasons. They knew when to plant, and when to harvest - they didn't need any help there, and only a professor who never spent a day on a farm could think that.
And so the "ancient observatories" like Stonehenge aren't observatories at all. They're Cathedrals.
Happy Solstice. Grill something with your dad to celebrate. Photo from the always amazing NASA Astronomy Picture Of The Day.
The D.C. government released emergency regulations yesterday that greatly expand the models of handguns that District residents can own, a shift designed to stave off another lawsuit over its compliance with the Second Amendment.
Emergency, get it? Pretty serious, I'd think, especially when you read into the story to find this:
Several council members who voted to implement the District's gun policies declined to comment yesterday, saying they had not reviewed the changes.
Wow. It was so much of an emergency, that the city council voted for it without even reading it.
So what was the emergency? Well, the story talks about (and even quotes - points for fairness there) Tracey Hanson, the DC resident who lawyered up with Alan Gura. But again, why the emergency nature? The usual suspects at the Brady Crowd are out talking about "Common Sense" gun controls, so where's the coverage of the non common sense controls that DC just ditched? All we get is a hint:
It's the second time in less than a year that city leaders have had to back away from some of the restrictions they put into place immediately after the Heller decision. Initially, the council permitted residents to register only revolvers, not semiautomatic pistols. But the ban on semiautomatics was lifted in September because of pressure from Congress and gun rights groups.
The only explanation that makes sense is that the reporter (Tim Craig) is so clueless about guns that he is simply incapable of writing a coherent story. Emergency legislation passed without the council even reading it - why did they think they were going to lose in court? What, in other words, constitutes non-common sense gun controls, per the Washington DC city council?
If you want to know, don't bother reading the Washington Post. They can't figure it out. I'm sure glad they have all those layers of editors and fact checkers, though.
When the researchers asked 66 people to watch 24 videos – 12 are real, and 12 deepfakes – people could only label them as real or fake correctly about 52 per cent of the time. “This model has shown promising results in generating lifelike videos, which produce facial expressions that reflect the speakers tone. The inability of users to distinguish the synthesized videos from the real ones in the Turing test verifies that the videos produced look natural,” the researchers concluded.
They are getting better. Whether they will get better enough to be able to fool experts - Joe Off The Street is notoriously bad at detecting stuff like this - remains to be seen.
The difference between America and Europe is that Americans think that 100 years is a long time, and Europeans think that 100 miles is a long way.
In the unlikely event that a European stumbles across this blog and joins my two regular readers, my advice to him is to visit the "flyover" country if he really wants to understand America. The spaces are huge, and (mostly) empty.
But the emptiness contains the ghosts of lost dreams.
There is a restlessness to the American soul that is best captured by standing in the main street of a Ghost Town. Where once people built lives, nature is triumphant. It's pretty astonishing just how fast a house will fall apart and disappear into the landscape without someone to keep it up.
I remember in 1972, visiting my great-grandfather's farm in Kansas. The old farmhouse where my father lived during the summers when he was a boy was nothing but boards. In thirty years, reduced to a pile. Thirty-five years later, even that will be gone.
Here used to be life, and love, and dreams. All gone.
There's nothing to compare with this in Europe, except for civilizations long dead and peoples vanished. But ours is not dead, and out people are not vanished, just moved on to greener climes and newer dreams.
The American (and Canadian) west is filled with Ghost Towns. The GhostTownGallery has a list of them, if you want to pick one to visit.
The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.
Not dead, but dieing. The silver's run out, the mine is boarded up, and the prospectors have moved on.
Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000. Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000. The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.
All that's left are those too old to pick up and move again, or those too sentimental.
Europeans build with stone, or brick. Americans build with wood. Expectations inform actions. Blut und Boden vs. Home is where the heart is. Here, the landscapes of the mind are what's durable.
The first mission involving the autonomous submarine vehicle Autosub Long Range (better known as “Boaty McBoatface”) has for the first time shed light on a key process linking increasing Antarctic winds to rising sea temperatures. Data collected from the expedition, published today in the scientific journal PNAS, will help climate scientists build more accurate predictions of the effects of climate change on rising sea levels.
The research, which took place in April 2017, studied the changing temperatures at the bottom of the Southern Ocean.
I think that Science does well with a sense of humor.
Via Chris Lynch (who you really should read every day), we get a glimpse into just how much that environmentalists "know" to be true is malarky:
We also need to consider the wider environmental impact of our bag choices. A 2018 study by the Danish Ministry of Environment and Food looked not just at plastic waste, but also at climate-change damage, ozone depletion, human toxicity and other indicators. It found you must reuse an organic cotton shopping bag 20,000 times before it will have less climate damage than a plastic bag.
Damn Danes. They're as bad as Ronald Reagan with his "trees pollute" view. If only they'd become more enlightened and Democratic Socialist and such, like environmentalists or Scandinavians.
Oh, wait ...
Why do liberals use reusable shopping bags? Because they want to help solve the problem. Everyone has told them that they're helping. But what they're doing is making the problem 20,000 times worse.
It's almost like the world is complex and chaotic and there are few simple solutions.
The linked article is filled with this sort of thing.
This is not to blame liberals for wanting to help solve the problem. It's pointing out that the biggest problem that we face is not what we don't know, but rather what we are certain is true even though it isn't. Especially when it's fed to us by people who get paid to feed it to us. [**cough** professional environmentalists **cough**]
The droids that work at UPS seem not to understand just how many felonies are involved with that. Holy cow. Or just how much traffic Gun Free Zone gets.
COLUMBIA [South Carolina] — He died with no family claiming him, but Petty Officer 3rd Class James Miske was surrounded by hundreds of people Friday at Fort Jackson National Cemetery where he would be buried.
...
Military personnel in full dress uniforms stood at attention. Another veteran saluted from his wheelchair as the silver, flag-draped casket passed by. When the guns fired the final salute, women gripped the shoulders of stoic children grasping flags.
...
More than 150 Patriot Guard motorcyclists, wearing vests emblazoned with insignia from Desert Storm, Iraq and other conflicts, and 100 vehicles, many with flags fluttering from their windows, participated in the miles-long funeral procession, joining the many more gathered at the cemetery.
Click the link to read the whole thing and watch the video, which is very moving. Petty Officer Miske was "unclaimed" - he had no family to take care of his funeral. But it turns out that he did have a family, one that saw him off with the respect due his service.
There are days that I weep for this Republic. Today is not one of those days. Fair winds and following seas, Petty Officer Miske. Ave atque vale.
They pledged a billion dollars in the aftermath of the fire that gutted the cathedral, but aren't paying. Guess who is?
PARIS (AP) — The billionaire French donors who publicly proclaimed they would give hundreds of millions to rebuild Notre Dame have not yet paid a penny toward the restoration of the French national monument, according to church and business officials.
Instead, it’s mainly American and French individuals, via Notre Dame charitable foundations, that are behind the first donations paying the bills and salaries for up to 150 workers employed by the cathedral since the April 15 fire that devastated its roof and caused its masterpiece spire to collapse. This month they are handing over the first private payment for the cathedral’s reconstruction of 3.6 million euros ($4 million).
“The big donors haven’t paid. Not a cent,” said Andre Finot, senior press official at Notre Dame. “They want to know what exactly their money is being spent on and if they agree to it before they hand it over, and not just to pay employees’ salaries.”
Almost $1 billion was promised by some of France’s richest and most powerful families and companies, some of whom sought to outbid each other, in the hours and days after the inferno. It prompted criticism that the donations were as much about the vanity of the donors wishing to be immortalized in the edifice’s fabled stones than the preservation of France’s church heritage.
None of that money has been seen, according to Finot, as the donors wait to see how the reconstruction plans progress and fight it out over contracts.
The reality on the ground at Notre Dame is that work has been continuing around the clock for weeks and the cathedral has had to rely partly on the charity foundations to fund the first phase of reconstruction.
So Americans are leading the way, while French billionaires show us once again that they only thing they know how to run are their mouths. No doubt they'll get right on it - probably after they pay off the World War I debt.
The article is damning, and I recommend that you click through and read the whole thing. The cleanup started immediately after the fire, and has been complicate (especially the lead contamination from the melted lead sheets on the roof). Actual rebuilding cannot begin until cleanup is complete, but the French bigwigs aren't paying a penny.
The Friends of Notre Dame de Paris was founded in 2017, and its president, Michel Picaud, estimates that 90% of the donations it has received have come from American donors.
I missed Sonny James' death three years ago - I had just started a new job and moved to Castle Borepatch and was distracted. That's a shame, because he was a huge star in the '60s and '70s. He had an unprecedented run of 16 #1 Billboard hits - he ended up with two dozen, but sixteen in a row is pretty impressive. Not bad for a ranch boy from Alabama.
He was musically inclined from a young age, as most successful musicians are. After a tour in Korea he started playing radio stations where he met Chet Atkins (of course he knew Chet; everybody knew Chet). Chet introduced him to Capitol Records and the rest is history. By 1957 he had a crossover hit, Young Love that hit #1 on both the Country and Pop charts. Unlike the rockabilly artists (Elvis, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis), James was known as "The Southern Gentleman" because of his, well, gentlemanly demeanor.
And it wasn't fake - he really was like that. He was married to his wife for 59 years, from 1957 right up until his death. At the CMA Awards when he was inducted he opened his acceptance speech by saying "I want to thank my Good Lord for the career He has given me." He was a gentleman to the end.
This song was the last of his 16 song streak of #1 hits.
Just about the time I pull myself together
When the hurt in me gets better than it's been
Just about the time I feel life's still worth living
It's funny, here comes honey, again.
Honey comes and honey stays just long enough to tear my mind up
Then she leaves me just the way I knew she would
And I have to start all over start to picking up the pieces
Times like this I almost wish she'd go for good.
Just about the time I'd find myself a new love
When this broken heart she left me starts to mend
Then that's just about the time that I'll be saying
It's funny here comes honey, again.
Just about the time I feel life's till worth living
It's funny here comes honey again.
An old post at The Gormogons discusses a poll from 2014 - before Donald Trump - that explains pretty much everything you need to know to understand why he won the 2016 election:
The Czar of Muscovy explains the poll:
Last week, despite the intense suppression of the main stream media, the generally pro-liberal Quinnipiac polling team released a poll that asked folks who the best and worst presidents have been in living memory (since World War II, which is fair enough). The results were unexpected, at least by the Czar
...
Yes, George W. Bush, the worstest, most awfully unpleasant president ever…no longer holds the title. That’s right! Barack H. Obama has now taken the mantle as the worst president ever. And not by a little… when the difference between Bush and Obama is more than the “don’t know” count, that’s big. And not, pace the Quinnipiac press release writers, “narrow.”
In 2014, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama were seen as failed Presidents. Both represented the establishment party position which is essentially the same with window dressing to make them look like two parties rather than one. Extrapolating to 2016, we can see how Jeb Bush didn't have a chance (too closely linked to his brother), why Hillary lost (too closely linked to Obama), and why Creepy Joe Biden's campaign is Dead Campaign Walking.
The deer and moose remains, RT said, can fetch a tidy sum on black markets for their alleged medicinal properties and to make furniture.
You need a licence to scavenge them – which Irgit and company did not have so the gang were likely hoping for a quick and painless trip.
They set up camp, cooked some grub, sang Ging Gang Goolie then split up.
The gods were not smiling upon Irgit, it seems, as he soon met a brown bear – one of the largest carnivores second only to its cousin, the polar bear.
Scared, Irgit screamed at the beast, hoping it would scarper. Instead it charged the lad, chomping down on his head and also injuring his hands and stomach.
At this point, chances of survival are drastically waning and yet our heroic antler thief prevailed.
The police report said that as the bear had its teeth locked round his skull, Irgit "managed to bite the bear's tongue off, after which the bear was frightened and ran away".
Woah. Sadly, Our Hero is being prosecuted for collecting antlers without a license.
Once the shortcut is installed and configured, you just have to say, for example, "Hey Siri, I'm getting pulled over." Then the program pauses music you may be playing, turns down the brightness on the iPhone, and turns on "do not disturb" mode.
It also sends a quick text to a predetermined contact to tell them you've been pulled over, and it starts recording using the iPhone's front-facing camera. Once you've stopped recording, it can text or email the video to a different predetermined contact and save it to Dropbox.
There is a ton of good information at that link, and I encourage everyone to click through to read it. I am not a lawyer, so you should bone up on what the recording laws are in your State (some require consent of both parties, although that may or may not apply to Police in a public space).
Oh, and one last thing: do not ever ever ever use your fingerprint (or Face ID) to unlock your phone. The Police cannot force you to give them your PIN, but they sure can swipe your finger or hold the phone up to see your face.
OldAFSarge has today's must read post in which he brings three brave men back from statistics and makes them - for a moment frozen in time - men again. The pictures taken of the moments leading up to these men's death highlight the million tragedies that was the second World War.
Some things are so big that our minds cannot really grasp them, and that conflict is one of them. Rather than stepping backwards so as to better see the entirety of the war, OLDAFSarge zooms in, magnifying the focus until we can see clearly what the mind absolutely can wrap itself around.
Last Saturday when Don and I drove to the air show, he mentioned a Youtube video of an old War Department film on assembling a P-47 in the field. He sent the link to me, and now to you.
The United States had a unique challenge in World War II - it was thousands of miles from the theaters of conflict (we should always have such problems, right?). It was a major logistical challenge to get the tools of war to the front. This is a creative solution for getting fighter planes from factory to airfield overseas: ship it in a big crate and then have a crew assemble it on the spot.
No power tools were involved. After watching this I must confess to having a whole new appreciation for the term "Greatest Generation". Oh, and Don (retired Air Force) points out that the pilots who took the birds on that first flight were pretty tough hombres.
On Saturday at the Mid Atlantic Air Museum I ran across Aaron Elson, who has spent a bunch of time interviewing World War II veterans. He has a blog and has made audio books of the interviews which he sells on his web site. He has a bunch of free downloads there including a 2 hour interview with a veteran from the 82nd Airborne about D-Day.
I know for a fact that a bunch of you will like this stuff. Thanks to Aaron for doing capturing these memories while the vets were still here. He had a bunch of CDs on display on his table, one for each vet he'd interviewed. He pointed to one and said "He's still with us". There were a lot of other CDs.
Yesterday Don and I made the trek to Redding, PA to the Mid Atlantic Air Museum's 29th anniversary WWII weekend. Between wheels on the highway at 0530 and the obligatory BBQ on return there wasn't any time to put up any posts.
My first thought was "how could I have never heard of this before". After all, I lived in Maryland 29 years ago and would have gone to this in a flash. If you're in the Mid Atlantic area then you should put this on your calendar for next year, because it was awesome.
I'll do a quick summary here and then hide the rest (including almost all the pics) under the jump. There are really four things that make this stand out from your typical regional air show:
There were not only a bunch of old warbirds, but there were a bunch of rare old warbirds. They had a B-29, a PBY Catalina, a Japanese Val dive bomber, a Japanese Kate torpedo bomber, and one of the only 2 or 3 flying Zero fighters in the world. All of the planes flew - there were no Hanger Queens here.
Land forces were well represented as well, with tanks, half tracks, and more Jeeps than you could count. I'd never seen a German StuG III before, and got to not only see it but talk to its owner about where he got it and how he restored it. I'd guess that there was perhaps $10M just in restored army equipment on display, not counting the planes (some of which, like the B-29 and the Zero are basically priceless). There were reenactments of an American assault on a French village held by the Germans, and a Flame Thrower demonstration.
The place was swarming with re-enactors, who loved to answer questions about what they were doing. It was sort of like a World War II themed Renaissance Faire, except at a Ren Faire pretty much everything is made up. Here the emphasis was detail-correct. I learned a bunch of stuff I'd never known before. There were a bunch of female re-enactors (pics below the jump)
A bunch of the visitors dressed in period clothes. We saw a bunch women dressed as Rosie the Riveter although I doubt that real factory workers went to work with cherry red lipstick.
I'll hide the rest of this post under the jump because of all the pictures, but here's one as a teaser:
Photo credit: Borepatch, 2019
The PzKpfw IV was one of only 4 or 5 tanks on offer. Click to embiggen.
There are a lot more pictures and descriptions after the jump.
When I started this blog eleven years ago this month, I mostly relied on Sitemeter to tell me that people were visiting. Sitemeter lost its mind years ago, but Google has been tracking page views here since 2010.
Google reports eight million page views in those 9 years. Thanks to everyone who stops by - this place wouldn't be the same without you.
Miguel has a good summary up, and his co-blogger has some thoughts on the implications/fallout from this. This is the key bit, although it's perhaps a bit of a long shot as to whether it will sink into the general public's American Idol dulled consciousness or not:
A better public understanding of “no duty to protect” leading to more support for armed teachers and concealed carry, i.e., “if they don’t have to protect us, we will have to protect ourselves.”
Telecom fraud is AFAIK the oldest form of computer fraud. I hadn't been blogging even a month when I posted about a fellow who called himself Cap'n Crunch because he used the whistle in the cereal box to steal free long distance service. It seems that the whistle put out a tone at exactly 2600 Hz which happened to be the tone that the phone switches used for signaling commands.
Well, it turns out that telecom fraud is down, because the people who would steal long distance time now use Skype. Of course, phone spam is way up because it's easy for the Bad Guys to fake their caller ID. The industry is working on fixing this but it will take years before it is deployed and nobody is entirely sure how effective it will be.
It was awful. This scene was famously more intense than that from The Longest Day, thirty-six years before.
The VA estimates that around 350 World War II vets pass on to the Final Muster each day. There are three surviving Medal of Honor recipients from that war:
Charles H. Coolidge who held Hill 623 in France. He had the distinction of being personally shot at by a tank main gun five times during those four days.
Frank Currey, a BAR rifleman. At the Battle of the Bulge he used the BAR as well as a bazooka and anti-tank grenades to disable four German tanks and rescue five of his fellow troops. He was also awarded three Purple Hearts during the war.
Herschel Williams, a Marine at Iwo Jima. When the tanks got stalled in front of a series of pill boxes, Williams went forward alone with his flame thrower. He fought off a Japanese bayonet attack with his flame thrower in hand to hand combat. Ooh rah.
I encourage you to click through and read about each of these men whose post war careers were every bit as interesting as their time on the front lines. Williams' TV appearance is particularly interesting.
A common theme that you hear from the vets who were at that Day Of Days was that they cannot stop remembering their buddies who didn't make it back. This was perhaps said most movingly by the late (Silver Star Distinguished Service Cross winner) Maj. Dick Winters, who parachuted into Normandy on that night:
Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.
- Billy Graham
UPDATE 6 JUNE 2019 11:35: Thanks to Aesop for pointing out that Maj. Winters was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, not the Silver Star. Several Silver (and Bronze) Stars were awarded in that Brecourt Manor to men under Winters' command, but he got the DSC.
When Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti launched his "Green New Deal LA" plan last month amid cheers from environmentalists, hundreds of jeans-wearing, tattooed union members outside the event chanted “Garcetti’s gotta go” and denounced the move as a betrayal. The Garcetti protest was followed by disputes in the state capital this month over a large buffer zone that would block new oil and gas wells, as well as a massive hydro project near Joshua Tree.
This article from reliably-lefty Politico looks like a warning to the Democratic party, that their labor union supporters are seeing red, not green:
Brian D’Arcy, business manager of the powerhouse International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Los Angeles, says that Garcetti’s move is just the latest on the environmental front that’s pushing his members toward the GOP — and into the arms of Trump, who effectively wooed blue-collar Rust Belt workers on his way to a 2016 presidential win.
“I’m getting hate mail and blowback from our workers, saying the Democratic Party is doing nothing for us,’’ D’Arcy says, sitting surrounded by his union members in a hall in Los Angeles as they prepared to protest on the streets. Asked if members might gravitate toward Trump, D’Arcy sighed and said, “It’s already happening.”
The article has a whole lot of unions and environmentalists are all singing Kum Bay Ya, but it rings a little hollow with unions taking to the streets to protest Democratic politicians:
Robbie Hunter, president of the state Building and Construction Trades Council — which represents more than 400,000 workers — says that dozens of his members plan a major “Blue Collar Revolution” demonstration Saturday morning at the California Democratic Party convention in San Francisco, which will be attended by 14 of the Democratic presidential contenders and 5,000 delegates and guests.
As I've said it's unlikely (although possible) that Trump can win 49 States in next year's election. However, winning 400,000 union and moderate Democrat votes in California takes him a long way down that path.
Right now I can imagine that there's a certain satisfaction in the Trump 2020 campaign, as the Democratic party is fracturing at the seams. But it's not over until it's over.
In last month’s blog post, Microsoft's Margosis wrote:
There’s no question that the state of password security is problematic and has been for a long time. When humans pick their own passwords, too often they are easy to guess or predict. When humans are assigned or forced to create passwords that are hard to remember, too often they’ll write them down where others can see them. When humans are forced to change their passwords, too often they’ll make a small and predictable alteration to their existing passwords and/or forget their new passwords. When passwords or their corresponding hashes are stolen, it can be difficult at best to detect or restrict their unauthorized use.
...
He added:
Periodic password expiration is a defense only against the probability that a password (or hash) will be stolen during its validity interval and will be used by an unauthorized entity. If a password is never stolen, there’s no need to expire it. And if you have evidence that a password has been stolen, you would presumably act immediately rather than wait for expiration to fix the problem.
Anything that gets users out of having to choose new passwords every 60 days is a big win for everyone's security - as long as password updates are required if you think that the password has been compromised. Long passwords (more than 11 characters) that are easy to remember are best, like the passphrase that I posted about in the first link above (only longer than that one, which was posted back in the days of 8 character passwords).
Now that we're seeing some of the Big Boys taking this approach, maybe we'll see more sane password rules coming around.
The Kiwi.Gov, with great fanfare, recently banned semi-automatic firearms. Some kook shot up a mosque, and so it was decided that all gun owners must pay. So how many of the now illegal firearms have been handed in to the Kiwi.Police?
The New Zealand Herald goes to great lengths to explain that this is only temporary, for real you guys. Oooooh kaaaaay.
Pay no attention to the under 5% compliance rate on AR bans in New York and Connecticut. It's totes different in New Zealand. I mean, people bought all those guns so that they could have the pleasure of turning them over to Officer Plod. Srlsy.
Can anyone please explain to me why half the world thinks that Americans are drooling idiots and that they're ever so much more clever than we are? It sure doesn't look like it from where I sit.
This is a short film about the French liner SS Normandie, sailing from Le Havre to New York back in 1939.
I'm struck by how well dressed even people of modest means were. Thirty years later saw long hair and love beads, and now the typical fashion that you encounter is stomach churning.
It was a different - and much more elegant - day.
Bootnote: When the Queen Of The World was a little girl, she sailed from England to America on the SS United States. But she's pretty elegant.
There's quite a good list at (of all places) Wikipedia. It seems reasonably complete and surprisingly free of the sort of politicized bias so often on display at La Wik. It's also very well organized, with separate sections for those who question the accuracy of the IPCC climate projections, those arguing that the current warming is a fundamentally natural process, those who think that the causes of the warming are unknown, and those who think that warming will have few negative consequences.
There is a list of deceased scientists as well - long time readers will remember Hal Lewis and his spectacular resignation letter to the president of the American Physical Society.
This is a quite interesting list, and potentially useful as well. The argument that most scientists support the "consensus view" is not only wrong, it's dumb. It's essentially saying "my scientist is red hot, your scientist ain't doodly-squat".
Even people who don't much listen to Classical Music know more of it than they think. We're surrounded by it, and absorb much of it unconsciously. And so with today's piece, written by Elgar for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1901.
You know this piece. Indeed, it is instantly recognizable to the entire population. Even we in the Colonies recognize it. I heard it last week at my niece's high school graduation.
What you may not know is that there are words to it. It became so popular in Great Britain that it is considered an unofficial national anthem there.
Elgar was born into modest circumstances in the very class conscious Victorian age. With few prospects for financial success, but with musical genius to spare, he married the daughter of a Major General. Her family was horrified at the match, and in fact disinherited her.
She didn't care. His works gradually attracted more and more attention, until he broke through into national (and international) fame in 1899 with his "Enigma Variations". Recognized as England's preeminent composer, he was approached to write for a Royal Command Performance at the Royal Opera House. This is what he wrote.
The words are from poet A.C. Benson's Coronation Ode. The music is typically referred to as Pomp And Circumstance.
Land of Hope and Glory (Words by A.C. Benson, music by Edward Elgar)
Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free, How may we extol thee, Who are born of thee? Truth and Right and Freedom, Each a holy gem, Stars of solemn brightness, weave thy diadem.
Tho' thy way be darkened, Still in splendour drest, As the star that trembles O'er the liquid West. Throned amid the billows, Throned inviolate, Though hast reigned victorious, Though has smiled at fate.
Land of Hope and Glory, Fortress of the Free, How may we extol thee, Praise thee, honour thee?
Hark, a mighty nation Maketh glad reply; Lo, our lips are thankful, Lo, our hearts are high! Hearts in hope uplifted, Loyal lips that sing; Strong in faith and freedom, We have crowned our King!
Elgar's wife had the satisfaction of seeing her family see her husband knighted by King Edward in 1904. Even more, George V appointed him to the Order of Merit, one of the most exclusive of the dynastic orders. Limited to no more than 24 members, the invitation to join is at the discretion of, and is considered the personal gift from the Monarch. That's plenty good enough for anyone, even the daughter of a Major General. You might say that he had finally graduated into High Society, despite his humble beginnings.
Elgar is interesting in that he was the first major composer to take an interest in the new fangled gramophone, and he recorded many of his works. You can buy them today on Amazon.com.
The last few years have seen a number of songs from the "I'm more country than you" school. Possibly in reaction to this is one so over the top that it makes me chuckle. Michael Hardy is an interesting fellow. While he is from the South, he got a college degree in songwriting from Middle Tennessee State University - I hadn't known that you could even do that but it's not surprising it's from Nashville).
It seems to have done him some good, though - he's written songs for a bunch of artists including Florida Georgia Line and Blake Shelton. His songwriting success led to a contract from one of the record labels, and here we are. This song was pitched to Shelton, but Hardy (rightly) thought that a funny song like this could jump start his career.
This song shows a sense of humor, and one that can turn its satire on some of Nashville's more obnoxious tropes. The comments on Youtube about this are also pretty funny, although a disturbing number have to point out that a lot of folks don't seem to know that this is satire.
Rednecker (Songwriters: Michael Hardy, Jordan Schmidt and Andy Albert)
So you think you've got some county line cred
'Cause you rode a dirt road or two
You got a Mossy Oak hat on top of your head
And a Southern pride tattoo
Yeah, you mighta drank a little grain alcohol or hauled a little
hay
But if you think your boots got more dirt than mine
I got one thing to say
My town's smaller than your town
And I got a bigger buck and bass on my wall
I got a little more kick in my drawl, y'all
I got little more spit in my chaw
My truck's louder than your truck
And my collar's a little more blue
You might think that you're redneck
But I'm rednecker than you,
yes I am
I got a car parked in my front yard
With a floorboard full of Slim Jims
I piss where I want to and I fish where I swim
I bet you ain't got it on a tailgate
Or killed a copperhead a time or two
Man, if you're thinking you're a better beer drinker
