Chaotic Wisdom

 

          Good evening, 919 Gang.

 

          PRESTON TUREGANO writes:

Here is the entire cast of San Antonio's Fiesta Week 2023 Cornyation (CQ) -- the "Court of Chaotic Wisdom,” a spoof on politics and society with drag queens a-plenty, taking their final bow at Thursday night’s 7 p.m. performance.

          The event is inspired by, and makes fun of, the serious Fiesta week event, the Order of the Alamo’s Coronation of its queen. This year, the Order staged “The Court of the Magic of Morocco” at the Majestic Theatre . The Majestic’s back stage wall butts up to the back stage wall of the Empire Theatre, home of “Cornyation.”  Amazingly, despite that close proximity, there’s no sound wafting from one venue to another. On Coronation night, the 26 young rich ladies participating in that annual ritual (that began in 1909) share dressing rooms with Cornyation stars. So far, no hair pulling or face scratching has been reported. This year’s Cornyation (dating from the late 1950s) was staged six times (7 and 10 p.m. over three nights). Of course, a  proposed Texas law regulating drag queens was exposed for its stupidity and draconian irrationality.  Enjoy and viva Fiesta.

 

--------------------------------------------------------

 

          JOHN GIBBINS writes:

Damn, we were SO lucky to have lived the newsroom experience during our careers!

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

          REBER: Right. I will always remember election nights. Every desk is filled. Every person is on deadline. My favorite time.

 

------------------------------------------------------------

 

BERNIE HUNT writes:

In 1966, I think it was, Peter Cook – he of the then-celebrated comedy team of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, famously said that at some point “England will sink giggling into the sea”.

It ain’t happened yet, although the United Magic Kingdom is still working hard on it. Comedy is, and always has been, a national obsession on this side of the pond.

“Saturday Night At The Apollo” is a hugely popular BBC-TV show that draws huge audiences, comedy clubs abound across the kingdom, and British funnymen have tickled people’s fancies around the globe, including in America.

Can you say: Stan Laurel; Charlie Chaplin; Dudley Moore (to mention him again); Peter Sellers, Eddie Izzard, Ricky Gervais? Even in less hilarious times, such wits as Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens packed halls around the United States.

Some of those UK comedians tamed their routines for the Yanks, and many celebrated humourists from the UK failed to leave them laughing in America.

One such is the viciously funny (in Britain) Jimmy Carr, whose U.S. debut bombed at a New York City theatre. UK audiences usually wet themselves laughing at Carr’s pointed humour, but the New Yorkers sat in stony silence.

Jimmy’s jokes often/usually are guilty of many sins against modern propriety. That’s what makes them so funny, and so popular in Britain. But in America, they gave rise to tut-tutting, much shaking of heads, and complaints of transgression against all that’s right and proper.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were a hugely popular comedy team in 1960’s Britain. Earlier, they were part of the 1950’s Beyond the Fringe quartet. When Dudley Moore set off for Hollywood stardom, Cook – in my view and that of many others – the much funnier one, continued his brilliant satire of British mores on television and on the London stage.

He is said to have believed that Americans simply would not have grasped his peculiarly British, mordant humour.

I was led to reflect upon all this by the reaction to a joke I wrote in my ravings about Napoleon the other day.

When I said French armies had never won any victories when led by a Frenchman, it was a joke folks. It was nothing to get your knickers in a twist about, as we say in the Sceptic Isle. But, as Peter Cook wisely observed, some Americans just don’t get it.

I was assailed by a posse of evident American francophiles eager to defend the honour of the people across the, ahem, English Channel. They trotted out chapter and verse to stress that French armies have won battles when commanded by Frenchmen.

On one hand, I am happy to be able to spur enough outrage, comment and chat so Jack can have enough copy to fill his valuable daily compendium of the tidings of ex-UT workers.

On the other hand, I am saddened yet again to realize that Peter Cook was proved right in his sardonic view that Americans, sometimes, just don’t get it.

And on the third hand, may I point out that I, too, am a Francophile, though, like all Brits, I can’t help cocking a snook at les francais now and then.

The cross-Channel neighbours of Britain and France have had a love-hate relationship for centuries. My bible is the wonderful book “1,000 Years of Annoying The French” by the brilliant historian and humourist Stephen Clarke.

 

BOB WITTY writes

          I can’t put to rest the debate over Napoleon, but I can show you where he went to his rest.. I took the photo below in 2012. It is where he was kept prisoner on the island of St. Helena, deemed the most remote place in the world. He arrived there after 10 weeks at sea. There is no port. This didn’t keep his admirers in New Orleans from devising plots to rescue him. Cartoons depicted him flying with assorted kites and balloons. The mayor owned a house which was readied for him, and is a tourist attraction, the Napoleon House.

Jonathan, the tortoise in the photo, celebrated his 190th birthday last December “with fanfare and salad cake."

 

          REBER: You are my hero, Bob Witty. I always wanted to travel to such remote locations. I never did, but you have. I admire that.

          One question: Does Jonathan the tortoise walk on the right side of the road or the left?

 

------------------------------------------------------

 

          REBER: The birthdays continue. Happy Birthday, May 1, to Thomas Neumann.

 

Jack J. Reber

P.O. Box 2239

Ramona, CA 92065-0938

United States

A night to remember

 

          Good evening, 919 Gang.

 

          DON KOHLBAUER writes:

April, 30; 1992.

The day and night I’ll never forget.

I was sent up alone early the morning after the Rodney King riots started in Los Angeles. John Gibbins had been there overnight, after the riots started on April 29.

The U-T did not send a reporter with me. I was told many times during the day that I had to find another photographer or TV crew to join,  because you couldn’t watch your back. The media had become a target.

At 5 p.m., I was joined by Ron Powell.  Once, during the night, we were chased by someone with a brick as we tried to get back to the car.

This was around 2 a.m.m the following morning.

I was photographing this fireman when we were bombarded by rocks and bottles from the hill above. Because of fire fighters being attacked through the day, they would not respond without police protection.

The U-T's Ron Powell

  

          REBER: My memory is hazy on this, and it’s possible this is just another newsroom rumor, but I believe I heard that Angela Lau was in the area and that her U-T car broke down. The story was that she took refuge in a Korean laundry.

 

----------------------------------------------

 

          DAVID ELLIOTT writes:

Bernie Hunt is an amusingly dogged debater, so I will grab the other end of the bone and reply to his reply:

Whether or not the unproven Napoleon of 1792 (sent to his native Corsica to ensure that the National Guard stay loyal to the new French Republic) demanded that his men march on the right side of the road, did he ever impose an edict about this in his years of power?

It's a marginal issue. Standard marching order on campaign was for infantry to move in single file, on each side-margin of a road, leaving the center open for artillery, cavalry and messengers. Combat was seldom on roads, but on open ground, where Napoleon was famously flexible.

Not sure where Bernie got his notion that French-born generals seldom led French armies to victory. I guess we had better erase from the books Turenne (17th century), de Saxe (18th), Desaix, Hoche and French-born, Italian-ancestry Bonaparte (Revolution), Napoleon and nearly all his marshals (Empire), Foch, Petain and Joffre (WWI), Leclerc (WWII). I now lay down my sword and quill pen, and return to Elba.

 

BRIAN CLARK writes:

          I've never been in the military (French or otherwise), but I do have to wonder how then Captain Bonaparte could have ordered his troops to march on the opposite side of the road from the norm of the time. Sounds like a wee bit of an urban myth, non? What happened when they encountered soldiers under the command of another captain? Or perhaps, a colonel? Or the local mayor? Or a governor and so on up the food chain? To paraphrase that old journalistic saw, "If your mother tells you something, get a second source." So I must respectfully ask Bernie Hunt for a citation for his missive on Napoleon from Saturday's Rebergram.

          Also, not to pick nits, but since Napoleon was the French Emperor when he was leading French armies and conquering wide swaths of Europe, I think you'd have to call him a Frenchman, not an Italian. But Bernie certainly is right that he was born on Corsica while it was technically part of Italy in 1769. However, it became a province of France later that year. It was also occupied by the Brits from 1794-96, but that's another matter.

          For further research on the emperor, I will be sailing from Rome to Corsica to Sardinia next month. I'll also be visiting the island of Elba, where Napoleon was exiled for a time after abdicating in 1814, before returning to the throne in 1815. Later in 1815, he was defeated at the battle of Waterloo in today's Belgium by a coalition of British and Prussian armies. In any case, because I so snootily asked Bernie for his citation, here are mine:

https://www.britannica.com/place/Corsica, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/napoleon-exiled-to-elba and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo.

          The emperor (who stood 5'6", so he wasn't that short for his time), was shipped off to St. Helena in the South Atlantic later in 1815. It's a small island about half way between Angola and Brazil. He was there until 1821 for his second exile, when he died at age 52.  ronically, St. Helena is a British outpost. France owns Briar's Pavilion and Longwood House, where he lived during most of his time on the island, but the UK retains sovereignty over the properties.

          His remains were returned to Paris in 1840. I hope to visit that gravesite this summer, too. But I don't think I'll make it to St. Helens, which is about 1,200 miles from Angola and more than 4,000 miles from France, this summer. Perhaps, though, as part of another sailing trip.

          For one last note - and this is where the story gets really weird - a British surgeon allegedly severed Napoleon's penis as part of his autopsy and kept it.  (Oh my.)  My source for this snippet of history (so to speak), the respected BBC:

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160915-are-these-the-strangest-relics-in-history

 

JAMES GOLDSBOROUGH writes:

I’m not sure what gotcha point Bernie Hunt is trying to make with his silly comments that "French armies have never actually won any battles when commanded by a Frenchman," and that Charlemagne was a German and Napoleon an Italian, both false. Need I start with the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers), where Charles Martel defeated Muslim armies trying to advance from Spain, what one might call the decisive battle in the history of Europe. Charles Martel was a Frank, as was his son, Charlemagne, in days when the Franks ruled all of what is now France and parts of what is Germany and Italy, though none of those nations existed at the time. Charlemagne was born in Liege, now part of Walloon (French-speaking) Belgium. Napoleon was a Corsican, not Italian. Corsica has been part of France since 1769. Or is that not long enough?

Coming to later days, need I mention Yorktown, where the French Navy under Rochambeau was decisive in the defeat of the British and in the fate of the American Revolution? Lafayette was also useful to us in that war. Let's go to World War I, where d'Esperey at the first Marne and Foch at the second Marne won decisive battles.

And what of Petain at Verdun? I understand that World War I battles are hard to classify as wins or losses because most of them were pure slaughters. Suffice to say that Verdun, which lasted three years, was a costly victory for Petain, but it was a victory.

Petain was a defeatist in World War II, but de Gaulle, wounded at Verdun, split with Petain and became the moral leader of France in World War II.

I'd call that a win as well.

 

          KEN WILLIAMS writes:

"Charlemagne was not French. He was German.”

 

Not really. Historians still argue about Charlemagne's birth location. Some say he was born near Liege, in what is modern Belgium; others say he was born in Aachen in Austrasia, in what is modern North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. (This borders Belgium and the Netherlands.)

          That would make him of Germanic ethnicity. Historically, the German and French identities would come much later. He did speak the Germanic language of his era.

 

 (free clip art found online)

 

Charlemagne was King of the Franks (768-814) and King of the Lombards (774-814) before he founded the Carolingian Empire in 800 and became its emperor. He ruled until his death in 814 in Francia.

          The rise of the Carolingians spelled the end of the Western Roman Empire.

          Charlemagne had at least four wives and numerous concubines, producing so many children that he has been dubbed the "Father of Europe." Three of his legitimate sons lived to adulthood to carry on his considerable legacy.

          In genealogy, the "Holy Grail" is to find possible connections to Charlemagne, since just about everyone with European ancestry will have ties to Charlemagne. Even NPR took up the topic:

https://tinyurl.com/Charlemagne-descendants

          For those who are into genetic genealogy, the Frankish men were thought to be mostly R1b, the major YDNA haplogroup for modern Europe. Other common haplogroups include R1a and I1. For the record, I am R1a, and I test positive for the Z283 subclade.

          Read “Genetics of the Franks” at:

https://tinyurl.com/hbjbd5jj

          Fun fact: Charlemagne did not want his daughters to legally marry for strategic reasons, to prevent any political rivalries from their potential husbands and their families. 

 

The Wikipedia photo above is a detail of Charlemagne enthroned between top church officials, supposedly the Pope and the archbishop. The message was simple: Charlemagne was projecting that he was the viceroy of Christ.

 

Above is the Karlsschrein - Shrine of Charlemagne - in Aachen Cathedral, which Charlemagne commissioned around 796 to be built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsschrein

 

 

In 1978, the cathedral (above) was named one of the first 12 UNESCO World Heritage sites. In its Palatine Chapel, 31 German kings and 12 queens were crowned. 

 

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

          REBER: A pleasure to with a Happy Birthday on April 30 to Larry Ross and Marcus Stern.

 

Jack J. Reber

P.O. Box 2239

Ramona, CA 92065-0938

United States