For The First American Woman In Space

Don Cornelius Wasn't Necessarily A Very Good Person, But Soul Train Was The Best

and Soul Train was Don Cornelius.

So. Life continues to be complicated.

Etta James, R.I.P.

Even though you were kinda weirdly bitchy about America's Sweetheart ™, Beyoncé, singing your song to the Obamas at the inaugural ball, I still have nothing but good feeling about you, Etta. I listen to your albums that I have all of the time, really and truly I do. I am sorry you died. Dying is the worst and you were the best.

Stetson Kennedy, R.I.P.

Saw today that Stetson Kennedy died. He was just shy of 95 years old, so you know. He was something else, of course: he was straight AWESOME.

First off, he was awesome because he was a pioneering folklorist who traveled the south with Zora Neale Hurston for the WPA, even though Jim Crow laws forbade them from going in the same car, staying at the same place overnight, and even taking meals together. He and Zora chronicled the folk life of America that would have been lost forever had someone not taken the time to write it down, to record it, to acknowledge its existence.

Second, he was buddies with Woody Guthrie.

Third, he was kept out of World War II because of a bum back and so instead of fighting racist fucktards over in Europe, he decide to fight them closer to home.

He infiltrated the KKK in Georgia and would pass on their plans to the authorities whenever they were going to do something dastardly. But almost better still, he reported on their ridiculous ceremonies, handshakes, and beliefs to the papers and then became a consultant on the Superman radio program, where he got them exposed to the masses and held up for ridicule as Superman kicked the asses of fictionalized Klan members.

In his book, The Klan Unmasked, he details the tense and exciting project that he and at least one other infiltrator undertook and the ways in which their work dealt almost the killing blow to the legitimacy of the KKK in the American South after World War II.

Dude lived with death threats the rest of his life. But we know who won.

The ancient Greeks used to find their folk heroes in the stars, where the Gods had placed them to be remembered. America has to make some room in its mythic heavens. You can put Stetson right up there with John Henry and Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan in my book.

Jerry Leiber, R.I.P.

Together with Mike Stoller, Jerry Leiber wrote some of the most iconic songs of the Rock and Roll era. I might post some later, but there are just SO MANY.

Anyway, he was pretty old, I guess, so, you know. But DAMN did he write songs.

Amy Winehouese, R.I.P.

I guess if I had been asked to lay bets on which too young talent was going to die from living too hard, I'd have been pretty likely to choose her, but it's still lame she died.

I really like Frank and I really like Back To Black; they're great albums of neo-soul. I would have liked to have another one. Sigh.

Peter Falk, R.I.P.

Peter Falk always amused me. He was funny and inimitable (except for the fact that everyone does a two-bit impression of him as Columbo).

He died today, peacefully, after battling Alzheimer's, which is a horrible thing to battle. In the end, he didn't even remember who Columbo was.

He had a glass eye. That's pretty cool. Also, The Princess Bride wouldn't be what it is without him and what it is is THE BEST.

Clarence Clemons, R.I.P.

Clarence Clemons was a great saxophone player and he was the best part of The E Street Band.

 

Saxophone solos always make me nervous; it is such a slippery instrument. 

Clarence Clemons never made anybody nervous when he played. He made everybody happy.

It's lame that he died this way.

John Updike, R.I.P.

No book ever depressed me more than Rabbit, Run. I'm sorry he's dead. I don't know that T.C. Boyle and A.S. Byatt can edit every anthology of fiction, but now we'll have to find out.

Freddie Hubbard, R.I.P.

I only have one Freddie Hubbard album.


It's awesome.

I'm sorry he died.

Laika, The Cosmonaut

On November 3, 1957 the world tuned in to the distant beep-beep-beep of the Sputnik II orbiting satellite. It was the second object launched into outer space by the Soviet Union, but it was the first to carry a living passenger. On board was the dog, Laika.

She would also be the first living being to die in space.

Laika is remembered as the first to reach outer space, but she began her brief life in far humbler circumstances:
She was a mutt and a stray, living on the streets of Moscow and begging for food. When she was about three years old, she was found by a scientist in the Russian space program and brought to Star City, where she would begin her new life as first-cosmonaut-in-training.

They gave her the name ‘Laika’ there at Star City, (it means simply ‘Bark’ in Russian), but they usually called her ‘Little Bug’ or ‘Little Lemon’.

She was well fed for the first time in her life and had a warm bed to sleep in every night. These, one can only imagine, were the happiest days of her life.

She lived with two other dogs, Albina and Mushka, and they spent their days undergoing tests on their reflexes, their heart rates, their hearing, their breathing.
Albina and Mushka both survived brief sub-orbital trips up in Soviet rockets prior to Laika's fateful voyage, but the real mission was saved for Laika.

In the end, it was her most unheroic trait that earmarked her for destiny - she was the calmest, the best behaved, the quietest.

Sputnik II weighed more than 1,000 pounds and was filled with instruments and antennae and insulation and electrical wiring. In the very center of the craft, however, a small cavity, just large enough for a smallish dog to stand or lie down in (but not turn around), was reserved for Laika.

To prepare her for the cramped quarters, she was kept in progressively smaller cages - in the dark - for two weeks at a time.
To accustom her to the stress and shaking of the flight, her cage was routinely agitated hydraulically or placed in the massive centrifuge used to train the human cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, who would go up a year later.
To simulate the noise of liftoff, speakers were positioned outside her closed box that periodically played - at full, deafening volume - a recording of a rocket during launch.
She was fed a nutrient enriched jelly and given water, but the close quarters stopped her from urinating or defecating.
Her pulse was monitored at all times and ran high, but within the bounds of safety.
She was adjudged to have performed admirably, under the circumstances.

Three days before launch, Laika was gently bathed and groomed, fitted with a harness and electrodes to monitor her vital signs, and placed into the padded cavity of the Sputnik II capsule at the launch site. The capsule was sealed. Laika would never see the sky or the sun or another living thing ever again.
It was so cold that they had to attach a hose to the capsule to pipe in heated air. Laika was restless.

Launch! Half a ton of steel and fire hurtled into space at twenty thousand miles an hour. Laika, the stray-dog cosmonaut, the fastest thing alive.

The capsule slung around the Earth for five and a half months (2,570 orbits) before it burned up in a flash of chrome and vermillion upon re-entry. Re-entry was on April 14th, 1958 - the 46th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic and the 93rd of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln - an infamous day, April the 14th.

Of course, Laika was dead long before that day.

She was never meant to survive the trip. There was never any consideration of recovering Laika or the capsule itself. Hers was always going to be a one-way flight.

It has never been entirely clear how long Laika was able to stay alive inside her Sputnik (Russian for ‘Companion’), but it was not longer than ten days. After ten days there would be no more food or water and a poisoned dose of her nutritional jelly would have euthanized her.

She may have survived as many as four days before dying of stress and heat. Recently, a Russian scientist who worked at Star City alleged that Laika lived little more than a few hours following her fiery ascent up Jacob’s Ladder.
He said that he has always regretted what they did to Laika.

However long she stayed alive in her dark-little-fastest-flying-coffin, she has become one of the most famous dogs in history. Her face has graced the postage stamps of several countries; her image adorns a Russian monument to all those who died in the pursuit of space; she has been featured in novels and songs.

That song by Domenico Modugno, ‘Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu’, was likely written in 1958 (only months after Laika's voyage) as a kind of homage to Laika.

I originally had a whole thing about the lyrics here, but I think you’ll feel it more if I leave it at this: in the song, the narrator is exclaiming how happy he is to be flying away from everything and into infinite space. It’s a metaphor for a love affair, sure, but it’s filled with a kind of pathos as the singer moves further and further away from the Earth and everything he has ever known there, singing all the while.
Here's a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-DVi0ugelc&feature=player_embedded

Every So Often, Not at Great Speed

So up there in Seward, Alaska, at the Alaska Sea Life Center, they had this Octopus called Aurora.

Aurora was about five years old when she died. A Giant Pacific octopus, she was found outside the Sea Life Center when she was only about the size of a softball.

She was living inside an old tire that had filled with water from the rain. They took her to live in the aquarium and she did pretty well.

Octopuses are really smart - maybe as smart as dogs. They are excellent problem solvers and can learn to recognize symbols and play games. But they don’t live very long.

Aurora lived at the aquarium for three years before somebody had the idea to try to hook her up with the other resident Giant Pacific octopus, a male by the name of J-1.

J-1 was the largest known octopus in the world. He weighed 57 pounds. He, too, was a foundling - found on a beach when he was only the size of a quarter.

He was about five years old at the time he was introduced into Aurora’s tank. He was pretty near the end of his life. His skin was beginning to wear away and his suckers were cracking and becoming pitted. He had never met another octopus.

When they dropped J-1 into Aurora’s tank, Aurora freaked out a little bit. She retreated to the bottom and bunched herself into a ball. Eventually though, it was Aurora who approached J-1. She reached out a tentative tentacle and touched the old guy. Then she ran away, scrunched herself into a corner of the tank.

Little by little, J-1 pursued Aurora and won her over with, I dunno, charisma. Maybe he did the thing where he squeezes into a really little jar.

Anyway, at some point, the two of them suckered themselves onto the back wall of their glass enclosure with J-1 on the outside, completely covering Aurora. They stayed like that for more than eight hours, mating. At times during this somewhat alien lovemaking, J-1 flashed several different colors in rapid succession, from deep red to ghostly white, which is a thing octopuses can do. Nobody really knows what it means, though.

When they finally separated, J-1 had done what he could, but nobody was sure if the two were too old to conceive.

A month later, Aurora retreated to a rocky outcropping in a corner of the tank and laid tens of thousands of tiny, pearlescent eggs. She began the long process of caring for her unborn young by drawing water into her mantle and blowing it over them, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This was June. If all went well, in six to eight months she would hatch her eggs and then die of starvation and exhaustion.

Octopuses stop eating entirely while they tend their eggs. They really only die because they give up everything for their eggs.

But early on, there were problems. Her eggs weren’t developing. They failed to grow or change color as they should have. Probably Aurora was simply too old to be an octopus mother. Still, she sat next to her eggs and kept the water moving over them. Occasionally she would have to get rid of a curious starfish or two that snuck in at night, looking for a meal.

In September of 2004, J-1 died of old age and Aurora was still tending her (most likely sterile) eggs. She hadn’t eaten anything in months.

When December rolled around and still the eggs showed no sign of developing, Aurora’s keepers decided to drain the tank and remove the eggs that were slowly killing their well-intentioned mother.

Aurora had other ideas.

As the water level fell, the eggs were slowly exposed to the air and, in order to stay under water where she could breathe, Aurora was forced further and further away from them. She repositioned herself, half in and half out of the water, and began spraying long streams of water onto the now exposed rock face where her eggs were slowly drying and dying in order to keep them moist.

An intern charged with clearing the undeveloped eggs from the tank noticed that some of them had little red dots inside them - eyes.

They were woefully undeveloped after seven months, but Aurora’s eggs weren’t sterile after all. They hastily refilled her tank and she moved back next to them and resumed her vigil. She would have a long while left to go.

It should have taken - at most - eight months, but it took Aurora and her eggs more than twelve.

Finally, one day in April 2005, a tiny, almost spherical, baby octopus hatched from one of the eggs and began floating around in the tank. The keepers were sure that would be it, but in the coming days, in ones or twos or tens or twenties, "every so often, and not at great speed", thousands and thousands of babies were born.

They had to set up additional tanks just to hold them all.

As the eggs hatched, Aurora became noticeably more active for the first time in months, stretching herself across the glass and moving around her tank.

Aurora, who had weighed 37 pounds at the beginning of her long ordeal, was now a cephalopod waif. She hadn’t eaten on her own in more than a year. Her keepers had been hand feeding her fish and crabmeat in an effort to extend her life. They were successful, after a fashion. She lived until August of 2005, four months after the first of her babies were born, when she was euthanized out of concern for her comfort.

For octopuses, birthing is a numbers game. Out of thousands of babies, some two dozen of Aurora’s babies (a huge number for an octopus brood) have survived and grown up and are being cared for at the Sea Life Center today.

Here's a picture of Aurora, who was a hell of a mother octopus:

The End of Elephants

In the small town of St. Thomas, in Ontario, there is a massive (and life-sized) statue of an African elephant. This is because St. Thomas is where, on September 15, 1885, Jumbo the Elephant died after being hit by a steam locomotive.

Jumbo had an interesting life, for anyone, elephant or human. He was born free, sometime around 1861, in the Sudan. The French, who then controlled the Sudan, captured Jumbo as a young elephant and brought him by rail to Cairo, where he was sold and then taken by boat and then again by rail to Paris, where they exhibited him in the Jardin des Plantes near the railway station. He was probably chained.

In 1865 he was given to the London Zoo. More boats on the ocean and trains chugging across unfamiliar landscapes.

In London, he became a favorite among children for the remarkable docility he showed. Even though by this time he was far and away the largest elephant ever held in captivity (standing some four meters tall), and though he had never been trained to do it, he routinely allowed visitors to the zoo to ride on his back. In fact, he so impressed one particular visitor with his demeanor and ever-increasing size, that he ended up being sold again for the tidy sum of $10,000 - to P.T. Barnum. This transaction was made over the public protestations of Queen Victoria herself, who had taken rather a fancy to Jumbo, it seems.

Jumbo then became the star attraction in the Barnum and Bailey circus. He became so famous that his name (a corruption of the Swahili word for ‘hello’) became a household word. His name has survived in the English language to this day as a descriptor for anything gigantic.

He was an icon of the early industrial age, traveling all over the globe in an era when most humans never went far beyond their hometowns. He was, very nearly, the most famous anything in the world. People waited in line for hours just to see him and feel awe.

In 1885, while being led onto his car on the circus train along with the smallest elephant in the circus, Tom Thumb, Jumbo was struck by an unscheduled (and yes, speeding) locomotive coming from the other direction.

Later, P.T. Barnum would claim that Jumbo’s final living act was to grasp Tom Thumb with his trunk and throw him twenty yards away, out of the path of the hurtling train.

The beast of iron and wheels met the “mountain of bone and brawn” and was completely derailed - was, in fact, so damaged that it had to be scrapped - but Jumbo too was crushed, and his six and one half ton body was badly broken.

It took 160 men working together to drag his body into the ditch alongside the rails where he finally died.

Jumbo’s handler, Matthew Scott, stood guard over the fallen giant all night, waiting for the heavy machines to arrive which would be able to lift Jumbo’s immense corpse onto the train that would take him away.

When Scott finally collapsed from exhaustion, scores of eager souvenir-hunters rushed the body with knifes, hoping to hack off a piece of history. Scott had been fighting them off for more than ten hours and wept pitifully when they finally overwhelmed him.

Jumbo's bones now reside in the New York Museum of Natural History. His skin was stuffed and displayed at Tufts University (whose mascot Jumbo still is) until it was consumed by fire in 1975.

Jumbo is only the most famous in the surprisingly long roster of famous elephants killed in tragic circumstances far from their homes. To wit:

Abul-Abbas, the famed elephant of Charlemagne, who died of pneumonia after swimming the Rhine in the winter of 810.

Hanno the Blessed, elephant of Pope Leo X, who died after he was given a laxative by the Pope’s doctors in 1516.

Topsy, who was fed a lit cigarette by her trainer in 1903 at Coney Island’s Luna Park and then went on a rampage in which she killed three men. Topsy was electrocuted to death by Thomas Edison, who wanted to use the opportunity to further his war with Westingouse and Tesla and alternating current. Edison filmed it for his propaganda. You can watch the film he shot on YouTube, but is is graphic and it will stay with you.

Mary, the circus elephant who, in 1916, finally reacted to years of physical abuse by throwing her trainer against a drink stand and then deliberately crushing his skull with her foot. She was hung. On the first attempt she snapped the chain meant to hang her and fell to the ground, breaking her hip. They strung her up and tried again - this time successfully.

And perhaps not finally, but less depressingly, there is the still living Ruby, the famous painting elephant of the Phoenix Zoo, who once had a painting of hers sell for more than $10,000 - the price of one Jumbo.

An Obit for Old Adwaita

I read today that the oldest animal on earth died last week In Calcutta. He was a tortoise called Adwaita. In Bengali, his name meant ‘The Only’.

He was - they think - some 256 years old.

He was born in the Seychelles but was captured there by British sailors and brought to India, where he was presented - along with three of his brothers - to Robert Clive, the man who forged the British Raj in India for the East India Company. This would have been sometime in the 1750s or 60s.

For one hundred and some-odd years, Adwaita lived on the sprawling estate of the Adventurer, Robber Baron, Statesman, Opium Eater, and Suicide, Robert Clive.

Eventually, Adwaita outlived his three brothers, Clive, and the British Empire.

In 1876, he was moved to the Calcutta Zoo, where he lived the life of a bachelor until his death last Wednesday.

About a month ago, his massive shell cracked and he developed a wound that wouldn’t heal. His keepers came to feed him one morning and found him collapsed under his own weight. They will preserve his shell and use carbon dating techniques on it to ascertain his age with more certainty than was possible while he lived.

Having had, at one time, a pet tortoise of my own (Shellbert, by handle), maybe this all hit me harder than it otherwise might have.

Shellbert hibernated nearly all the time. He was usually buried somewhere in the garden - his preferred situs for his project of endless sleep. When he reappeared occasionally, we’d ply him with strawberries, which he ate with abandon. You could hold them in front of him and he would rush at them with a speed you would not expect from such a slow little creature.

Strawberries are a tortoise's favorite thing in the whole world, in my experience.

One day he simply disappeared. Either he had buried himself yet again in the flowerbed and we simply didn't see him on the days he happened to emerge or he had escaped our backyard for the wide world. I think about him sometimes.

I read once about the tortoises that were kept by the Ottoman sultans on the Topkapi Palace grounds on the Golden Horn. They wandered freely through fields of tulips with gigantic candles fixed to their backs and at night, the candles were lit so that - in those days before electric lights - one could look up at the gently sloping hill from the banks of the Bosphorus and watch the sad creatures’ nocturnal movements by the slow, pendulous motion of the flickering candles on their backs.

I like to think Adwaita’s days on the Clive Baronate Estate were like that: full of balmy nights under quiet stars, with a belly full of flowers.

I hope that his long years at the Calcutta Zoo weren’t anything like the only tropes I know for zoo animals. I hope they gave him strawberries sometimes.

I hope he didn’t have the kind of memory we do - one that endlessly ferments everything into treacly nostalgia, no matter what we pour into it; I hope he didn’t think much about the Seychelles or about other tortoises.

The Egyptians have this thing they say about the Pyramids:

“All men fear Time, but Time itself fears the Pyramids.”

The story of Adwaita the tortoise feels like that to me, mixed up with the sensation I get when I see homemade posters stuck on stop signs advertising lost dogs and cats.

I am strangely moved by the passing of this reptilian monument to time and I never even knew he existed until today. If I ever go to Calcutta, I will be sure to look for his great shell, horny and calloused, wherever it hangs - as it is sure to do - for a reverent public to view. Maybe I will feel like I feel when I visit the grave of someone I admire.