Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:45 PM

Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner (which I'm watching live on streaming video from C-Span):

"I believe that the government that governs best, governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq!"

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:28 PM

When I heard that President Bush said "I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and claimed the anthem doesn't hold the same value if sung in other languages [*], I pulled out my copy of Mandy Patinkin's Mamaloshen. Unfortunately, he only sings "Got bentch Amerike" and didn't actually perform the national anthem in Yiddish.

However, other people had similar ideas.

Star spengld bener
fun Frensis Skat Ki

O zog! konstu zen in likht fun sof nakht,
Vos mir hobn bagrist in demer-shayn mit freyd?
Di shtrayfn, di shtern -- in flaker fun shlakht
Fun di shuts-vent mir hobn mit bang in blik bagleyt.

Un der blits fun raket, un der knal fun kanon
Durkh der nakht gerufn hobn zey: es lebt di fon.
O zog! di fon mit di shtern iz zi nokh tsehelt
Iber land fun fraye un iber heym fun held?

Afn breg, durkh neplen fun yam fartunklt,
Vu dem soynes makhne iz fartayet in shrek,
Vos iz es, in bloz fun laykhtn vintl fartunken,
Ot halb-farborgn, ot af a helft antplekt?
Es iz di fon mit di shtern, o, af lang zey tsehelt
Iber land fun fraye un der heym fun held.

O, azoy vet es tomed zayn, ven frayer mentsh mit gever in hant
Bashitsn vet zayn libe heym kegn farlend fun krig un zayn shnit!
Gebentsht mit zig un frid, zol dos land
Loybn di kraft, vos hot undz als folk farhit!

Undzer kamf iz a gerekhter -- undzer iz der nitsokhn,
Zol zayn undzer gebot: "In got iz undzer bitokhn!"
Un di fon mit di shtern, in zig vet zi zayn tsehelt
Iber land fun fraye un der heym fun held!

Translation by Ber Grin, found in In dinst fun folk; almanakh fun yidishn folks-ordn, New York: Book League of the Jewish People's Fraternal Order I.W.O., 1947, p. 112.

Thanks to Arthur Hlavaty and Joe Grossberg for discovering it and Leonard Prager for transcribing it.

A poster on NationalAnthems.us provides another translation, by Dr. Abraham Asen, both transliterated and written in Yiddish (image file)

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:21 PM

How annoying. I take the time to note in this blog books of interest, so I won't forget any, but when I'm at an actual brick and mortar bookstore, I don't have access to the site...

Wandered around Harvard Square today. Beautiful day, nice walk. Stopped at three bookstores -- one of them (The Raven, 52-B JFK) new to me. And since I'm not the most impulsive of people, I made a list of some of the books I saw in the stores, so I could check them out online and see if they're worth my time and money:

• The man who found time: James Hutton and the discovery of the Earth's antiquity by Jack Repcheck
• Under the Molehill: an Elizabethan spy story by John Bossy
  also by the same author: Giordano Bruno and the embassy affair
• Fly by night by Frances Hardinge (YA fiction)
• Bella at midnight: the thimble, the ring, and the slippers of glass by Diane Stanley (YA fiction)
• The crossword obsession: the history and lore of the world's most popular pastime by Coral Amende
• Sin City: London in pursuit of pleasure by Giles Emerson
  [Anybody know how this relates to City of sin by the same author? Identical content? Newer edition? Misprint?]
• To marry an English Lord by by Gail MacColl
• The secret house: the extraordinary science of an ordinary day by David Bodanis
• Blood and roses: one family's struggle and triumph during England's tumultuous civil war by Helen Castor
• Consuming Splendor: Society And Culture In Seventeenth Century England by Lind Levy Peck

Meanwhile, via Elizabeth Bear, Anne Barton in the New York Review of Books "sporks the old year's crop of Shakespeare biography."

Much to my relief, Barton seems to like James Shapiro's 1599, which I enjoyed earlier this year. Here's how she describes the book's contents:

With admirable restraint, Shapiro sets out to chronicle the public events of 1599 -- its major news items, as it were -- without speculating unduly about Shakespeare's own response to them. He is content (to adapt Hamlet's words to the players) to show "the body of the year, its form and pressure," and to situate Shakespeare with respect to such matters as the death of Edmund Spenser, the clandestine dismantling of the old Theatre in Shoreditch and its rebirth as the Bankside Globe, Essex's unhappy campaign in Ireland, the rumors of an "invisible Armada" which put both the authorities and the general public on high alert, and the publication of The Passionate Pilgrim and of John Hayward's risky History of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV. As Shapiro moves from late winter 1598 through the autumn of 1599, he deftly weaves in an account of Shakespeare's artistic development and achievement during these months, but without doing more than suggest how the two trajectories might have come to interact in Shakespeare's consciousness.

There is a great deal, however, in this book that genuinely illuminates the plays and the man who wrote them. Shapiro is particularly fine in his detailed account of how the timbers of the Shoreditch theater were salvaged and stored (not, as often claimed, ferried at once across the Thames) and just what kind of carpentry and weather conditions were required in reusing them for the Globe. He makes the campaign in Ireland vividly (and horrifyingly) present to the reader, as it must have been for Shakespeare and his contemporaries...

The review also pointed out another book for my to-read list: That Man Shakespeare: Icon of Modern Culture by David Ellis:

Nothing can rival Samuel Schoenbaum's magnificent and massive Shakespeare's Lives, that witty and exhaustive account of all the biographical attempts from the very beginning, published initially in 1970, and subsequently brought up to the 1980s in its revised edition. Schoenbaum died, however, in 1996. One can only speculate about what he would have made of all the outpourings of the last decade. Ellis, however, when he turns in his concluding chapter from assembling an anthology of passages (fictional and nonfictional) which have helped to construct Shakespeare's image over the centuries, and addresses instead "what kinds of methods have to be used by those who, with no new information available, feel constrained to produce new biographies," proves to be both shrewd and perceptive.

There are, he suggests, six basic strategies employed by most of the Shakespeare biographers of our time. These he enumerates as (1) "the argument from absence," meaning that where there is silence, as with proof of Shakespeare's Catholicism, there must have been a need for secrecy that effectively proves the case; (2) "minding your language" -- the use of what he calls "weasel words" such as "perhaps," "if," "probably," "could have," "may," to conceal the fact that we don't really know; (3) using the plays to reveal distinct features of Shakespeare's own life and thought; (4) using the sonnets in the same way; (5) shifting the burden onto historical circumstances that apparently elucidate the nature of his private existence; and (6) "the argument from proximity, or joining up the dots," meaning the deployment of what we know about Shakespeare's schoolmaster in Stratford, or his relatives and acquaintances, to make the little or nothing actually established about him go a long way.

Further searching reveals this book is part of an entire series which will explore iconic figures.

One last book to read, also via Bear, Monstrous adversary: the life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford by Alan H. Nelson.

8pm PS: I'm aware of the book How the Irish became white; does anybody know of something similar about the Jewish experience in America?

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:20 AM

First, C for Cookie, a spoof of the V for Vendetta trailer, featuring Sesame Street characters... Cute...
 via StrangeMuses

Second, an interesting e-mail this morning: I received an offer for free movie tickets to United 93, in exchange for adding a banner for the movie or for holding a ticket giveaway on my site (for which they'll provide).

I'm not going to take part, because I wasn't planning on seeing the movie (though the reviews sound quite intriguing: Ebert & NPR), but I'm flattered to be asked.

Out of curiousity, how would y'all feel if I took part in future such promotions? I don't place ads on my blog or have a tipjar, because I view you (my readers) as friends and don't want to take money from friends. I do have an Amazon affiliate account, and make a few pennies off books bought from my links. That seems fair, since (a) I write about books so much, that (b) if you're going to buy the books anyway, I'm not pushing you one way or the other. I don't know if I've even mentioned that before as a prod... I do accept press tickets for the reviews I write, and used my blog to receive a reviewer's proof of a forthcoming novel...

But this, if I participate, is more blatant advertising. I would be upfront about any renumeration I received, and doubt I would do this for anything I wouldn't be interested in without such incentives.

Your thoughts on the matter?

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:52 PM

Just realized that there are exactly two television shows I watch every week: House, Tuesday nights on FOX, and Doctor Who in about ten minutes on the SciFi channel (and thank you so much, downstairs tenant, for letting us watch the cable with you).

That is all.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:12 PM

From the often aptly named SplodeFromCute:

YouTube video of a wild fox discovering someone's backyard trampoline.

Whee!

[Entry link]         

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:10 PM

Yesterday morning, on the way to work, I spotted a tractor trailer carrying (at least) three rowing sculls. I asked Ian if he saw the sculls shells, and he paused for a moment before replying in the affirmative:

"Had to rewind the tape."

And while I understood perfectly what he meant, I was struck by the thoroughly modern metaphor, harkening back to last night's post.

Centuries ago, people relied upon memory castles for mnemonic imagery. [Links: 1, 2, Wikipedia]

Now we think in terms of rewinding and pausing...

Although it was cut from the movie, Joss Whedon's Serenity screenplay included a prayer for the dead which featured the following imagery: "Look in my eyes, Lord, and my sins will play out on them as on a screen. Read them all." I thought that was brilliant.

I find it fascinating how technology can influence not only our language but how we visualize more abstract concepts.

And, for anybody writing SFF or historical works, it's something to consider -- both in terms of current terms to avoid and for invented language. [As a teen, I thought Anne McCaffrey's use of "Shards!" as an expletive was a great example of something suited to the world yet not sounding ludicrous to modern ears.]

Tangent, for later reading: Teresa Nielsen Hayden has linked to "The Sociolinguistics of Modern and Global English."

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:50 PM

Maybe I should rename my site to "Reading Rambles" given all the bookblogging I've been doing this week. Then again, these things come in waves and this too shall pass eventually...

First, I've written in the past how psychiatric/psychological theories were developed during the age of steam, so steam metaphors made their way into the language: bottling things up, blowing off steam, under pressure...

Scurvy points up some common expressions that derive from the time when the humours were a popular theory:

The humours were believed to produce identifiable symptoms when out of balance. Therefore, to call someone "yellow" or "lily-livered" suggested that an excessive quantity of yellow bile was producing a feeble or cowardly disposition without anger

Any other such etymological artefacts of outmoded scientific theories?

Digression, as I'm reminded of this exchange from the Firefly episode "Safe":

ZOE
You sanguine about the kinda
reception we're apt to receive on an
Alliance ship, Captain?

MAL
Absolutely.
(then)
What's sanguine?

ZOE
Hopeful. Plus, item of interest, it
also means bloody.

MAL
Well, that pretty much covers the
options, don't it?

Second, a footnote in The Book nobody read:

Scholars speculate that frugal Copernicus took his degree at Ferrara, where he had not actually studied, because he knew no one there and hence was spared the expenses of a lavish graduation party.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:42 PM

It's Poetry Month, which many of the blogs I'm reading have been commemorating with daily poems.

In honor of the occasion, former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky has an essay on Slate focusing on insulting poems.

I had never read Ralegh's epitaph to Robert Dudley, but ouch!

Here lies the noble Warrior that never blunted sword;
Here lies the noble Courtier that never kept his word;
Here lies his Excellency that governed all the state;
Here lies the Lord of Leicester that all the world did hate.

For other fans of Elizabethan and Stuart England, Pinsky also holds up Ben Jonson as "[o]ne of the great insulters in English poetry" and concludes with John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (now best known for Johnny Depp's recent movie, The Libertine, though I've also blogged him regarding his authorship of pornographic works).

But the article also includes other names from other periods, including Emily Dickinson, Edward Lear, and even a familiar schoolyard chant dating back to World War II.

A fun article if you ever need to demonstrate that poetry doesn't need to be serious stuff.

PS: If you're at all curious about children's playground rhymes, I cannot recommend more highly Josepha Sherman's Greasy grimy gopher guts: the subversive folklore of childhood.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:31 PM

Finished Scurvy last night. A bit dry in parts, but the closing chapters focus how scurvy probably influenced the outcomes of the American Revolutionary War and Napoleonic War at Sea. Along with the speculation over Captain Cook's erratic behavior during his final mission, it presents an interesting set of "What If"s for anybody interested in exploring alternate histories.

FWIW, the author has a website for this and his other books. [I used the contact form to repeat my question regarding books on steamtech.]

Afterwards, since I let Ian read Throne of Jade before me, I began The Book nobody read: chasing the revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus by Owen Gingerich. [I picked up The Grand contraption: the world as myth, number, and chance, but it just didn't grab me.]

Fascinating book. Copernicus' De Revolutionibus was the book which set forth the heliocentric theory of the solar system in the 16th Century. In the 1950s, Arthur Koestler wrote a book in which he described it as "the book nobody read." This piqued Gingerich's curiousity, and he spent decades generating a world census of the surviving first and second edition copies, discovering a lot of period marginalia disproving Koestler's glib dismissal.

I'm only a few chapters into it, but this book is the story of Gingerich's process, along the way telling Copernicus' story and providing details about the books, academic and publishing practices in the period, and so on.

If you're curious, Appendix 2 gives a partial listing of known copies of Copernicus' book and where they can be found. [Four in the Boston area: BPL, Boston Athenaeum, and two at Harvard, where Gingerich is on the faculty]

Anyway, I wanted to share this passage:

[I]n the spring of 1543, it was ready at Petreius' press in Nuremberg. Its title page read like an optometrist's chart:

NICOLAUS CO
PERNICUS OF TORUN
ABOUT THE REVOLUTIONS OF
the Heavenly Spheres in Six Books

[...] As the publisher's blurb, planted squarely in the middle of the title page read, “You have in this recent work, studious reader, the motion of both the fixed stars and the planets restored from ancient as well as recent observations, and outfitted with wonderful new and admirable hypotheses. You also have most expeditious tables from which you can easily compute the positions of the planets for any time. Therefore buy, read, profit.”

I can't quite articulate why, but I find that sales pitch utterly charming...

Incidentally, the back flap refers to www.thebooknobodyread.com, presumably a site by the author or publisher with more information. Do not bother with the URL. I don't know when it was active, but the page is currently occupied by a porn site, which presumably hijacked the domain when it expired.

The Wayback Machine has archived versions of the genuine site, if anybody's truly interested.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:11 PM

First, from Sanj:

Announcing the "No, Really," Self-Indulgent Story Challenge

We've all got it -- that crossover story where House talks to Death, or the one where Tara is actually a Highlander immortal who goes on to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts. The tattered-past story where young Rose Tyler ran away from home for a week to try and make it as a pole dancer. The one where the crew of Serenity gets their Tarot cards read by a nice and accurate prophet. In which Sidney Bristow gets drafted as a triple agent for UNCLE by Megan Conner. In which Buffy and the Scoobies open a 24-hour diner.

[...]

Yeah, THAT story. The story with the cracked-out premise that you're both pleased and embarrassed that you came up with. The one only you can write, because only you are that crazy.

The challenge: Go ahead and write it. Make it as good as you can. Make it so people will say, "no, really, it totally works." Any fandom, any length. On June 21st I'll start up on a webpage with everyone else's stories... so for you who write to deadlines, that's JUNE TWENTY-FIRST or I'll sic Big Louie on you.

(The rest of y'all can finish them whenever, but keep in mind that your odds of getting read with all the other cool stories goes down exponentially with each day past the summer solstice. The thing about Big Louie, though, is a total lie.)

Sound like fun? Let me know if you want to play!

And the All-Star Mary Sue Challenge from hello_marysue:

Once upon a time in fandom people wrote fics with girls in them. They did it for fun, they did it because it was hot, and they did it because they wanted to do bad things to Adrian Paul. (Or David Boreanaz or Justin Timberlake or Callum Keith Rennie, or... you get the idea.) And this was alright, it was accepted. And then...
Mary Sue became a dirty word. People no longer wrote "original female characters", they wrote "Mary Sues". She weren't an interpretation of a female canon character, it was a Mary Sue. Somewhere, down the line, every female character written in a fic was getting smacked down as a Mary Sue, and I'm not sure we'll ever know why. [...]

It's time to take back our OFCs.

This challenge is for getting back to the roots of fanfic writing. Back when we wrote solely for our own entertainment and gratification. We're asking for you to write what you want with who you want, how you want. Write it for yourselves, about yourselves, for your friends, about your friends, however you want it. Bring the RPF (or RPS as your case may be), bring your FPF, bring the porn, bring the hot, bring the cheese (if need be). Just leave your embarrassment at the door. We're all friends here. (Which needless to say, means absolutely no mocking or flaming allowed in the comments.)

All fandoms are welcomed.

I probably won't participate in either, but they both seem like good fun and I thought some of you might enjoy.

[first seen via Dorrie]     

PS: Over on Making Light, the Nielsen Haydens are hosting some fascinating discussions on fanfic, first here, with 139 comments and today's thread at 185 comments and still ongoing.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:05 PM

Further cause for squee-age, besides Free Ice Cream Day at Ben & Jerry's.

Today's the release date for Throne of jade by Naomi Novik -- the sequel to last month's rave, His majesty's dragon (aka Temeraire, in the UK).

We've already got our copy.

I've given Ian permission to read it first, since I've still got another fifty-some pages left in Scurvy.

But I thought y'all deserved a reminder.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:05 AM

As many people have been pointing out, today (Tuesday) is Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry scoop shops.

The few times I've tried to go in recent years, the lines were too prohibitively long for me.

Baskin-Robbins usually has their own free cone day around this time as well. I don't see any announcements on their site, but they are doing a Buy One Sundae, Get One Free promotion on Sunday, May 7.

Speaking of ice cream, Mark Evanier shares his favorite Howard Hughes story.

Warning: offensive humor follows! Do not read further unless you enjoy black humor!

Meanwhile, the folks at Journalfen have found Ben and Jerry's wank. Some people are complaining that the new Black and Tan flavor ice cream is insulting and insensitive to the Irish.

Much amusement ensues, including subthreads where people come up with their own offensive ice cream flavors, including Cherry-nobyl, Grape Crisis Center, New Orleans Scooperdome, and Trail of Marshmallow Tears, the latter of which cracked me up with this response:

Hey! I'm offended! My great-great-grandfather walked the Trail of Tears, and... oooh, marshmallows!

Needless to say, this inspired Ian and I to invent with our own tasteless treats, such as Sherbet's March to the Sea, Blintzkrieg, the Warsaw Gelato, Eva Brownie, Sorbet of Pigs... As toppings or sides, there are also Iwo Jimmies, Luft-wafers and the Auch-wich. [Insert appropriate comment about the Battle of the Bulge.]

Anybody else care to contribute?

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:00 AM

The current issue of The New York Review of Books includes corrections:

On page 46 of Stephen Greenblatt's article "Who Killed Christopher Marlowe?" [NYR, April 6], the government spy Richard Baines is said to have reported to the Queen's Privy Council that Marlowe said that religion was first invented "only to keep me in awe," which ought to have read "only to keep men in awe."

Minor distinction, there...

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:56 AM

Quick quote from the prologue to Scurvy:

The defeat of scurvy was one of the great medical and socio-military advances of the era, a discovery on par with the accurate calculation of longitude at sea, the creation of the smallpox vaccination, or the development of steam power.

Okay, so I just finished Longitude last week, and read The Speckled monster: a historical tale of battling smallpox two years ago...

Can anybody recommend a good book on steam tech? :D

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:20 PM

Scurvy articulates something about 16th-18th century science that I first noticed in the Doctor Dee biography:

While modern science generally identifies the most recent studies as the most reliable, in the eighteenth century the opposite was true. The belief that humankind had been degenerating ever since being flung from the Garden of Eden meant that the older a scientific theory, the greater its credibility, because it had been produced by purer thinkers. [...] To understand the causes of and unearth potential cures for a sickness or disease, physicians and academics throughout Europe scoured the medical treatises of the ancient Greeks and Romans for ailments with similar symptoms.

It's a very different mindset. Despite recent pessimism and dystopian predictions, we were raised to have a general faith in progress. We are wiser than our predecessors, and future generations will have things even better... The whole attitude can be encapsulated in common slogans like "New and improved" or the popular notion of how evolution works.

Furthermore, at least as far back as Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, there's been a certain hubris that if we ever travelled back in time, we could show those ignorant superstitious types whatfor, immediately impress them with our knowledge and start educating and improving their lot in life.

But I get the feeling that if we moderns were to meet our predecessors, not only wouldn't they listen to us, but they might pity us for our narrowminded view of the universe. Even if you could convince them to ignore the wisdom of the ancients in favor of the scientific method, we close our eyes to so many aspects, how can we know what we're talking about?

As I wrote last week about Dee, if everything is interconnected, then astrology is part and parcel of intelligence gathering. Quoting Woolley, one "reason for irrepressible alchemical optimism was that success depended on the right spiritual as well as chemical conditions. [...] If the experiment failed, then it was easy to claim that it was the alchemist, rather than alchemical principles, that was at fault."*

Modern scientists pride themselves on the rigor and precision with which they record all relevant details, but nobody notes the position or phase of the moon any more. So if you were to explain modern theories to a scientist of Tudor, Stuart, or Georgian England, they might dismiss failures out-of-hand for not having been attempted under all conditions.

One more passage from Scurvy, regarding this mindset, and how it affected scientific discovery:

Seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century medicine was based not on scientific method or an experimental approach but on theoretical reconciliation. Fortunately for many patients, the humoral concept of medicine declined throughout the eighteenth century as physicians began studying the actual workings of internal organs and the circulatory system in greater detail. By the nineteenth century, medicine had returned to scientific ground, with an emphasis on observation and experiment rather than hypothesis and a desire for theoretical harmony.

In the 1600s and early 1700s, however, concurrent with a belief in the need to balance the four humours, there developed a belief that there was a universal cure to a universal disease. All diseases and their corresponding cures, went the argument, could and should be explained by a single theory. Diseases were not to be observed and treated independently but were supposed to fit within an overall theory that encompassed all human ailments -- a universal law or set of principles for medicine similar to those then being developed for physics (such as Newton's laws of motion). A medical practitioner who observed that scurvy appeared when people had lived for prolonged periods of time on diets deficient in fresh fruits and vegetables, and who proposed that the cure would, therefore, be to eat more of these substances, would have had little respect within the medical community. How, after all, did this observation fit within the holistic network of the distempers that afflicted humanity? As it happens, an eighteenth-century Dutch physician, Johan Friedrich Bachstrom, did propose that scurvy was exclusively a deficiency disease, and he was dismissed for this precise reason.

Fascinating insight, isn't it?

And it does make me wonder what solutions modern science might be overlooking because they don't fit into our current notions of how the world works...

^* Woolley also mentions improvements in mining as another interesting (and less insulting) possible reason for the credence given to alchemy during the period: "Metallurgy, which had proved very effective at extracting precious metals from the dark ores being lifted from the earth, was regarded as a form of alchemy, and the yields of the one seemed to confirm the fundamental soundness of the other."

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:35 AM

Wednesday, April 24, 2002 at 3:59 PM.

It seems so long ago. I was still working at Lotus (for about three more days). Osmond-riba.org hadn't even gone live yet -- at the time, all I had was a page on blogspot.

So much has changed, so much remains the same.

According to the Wikipedia birthday meme, the following events also happened on this date:

Events

• 1184 BC - Greeks enter Troy using the Trojan Horse (traditional).
• 1704 - The first regular newspaper in the United States, the Boston, Massachusetts New-Letter, is published.
• 1800 - The United States Library of Congress is established when President John Adams signs legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress".
• 1898 - Spanish-American War: Spain declares war on the United States.
• 1915 - The Armenian Genocide began when the Young Turks undertook the systematic annihilation of Armenian intellectuals and entrepreneurs within the city of Constantinople and later the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire .
• 1961 - The 17th century Swedish ship Vasa is salvaged.
• 1967 - Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1, when the parachute fails to open. He was the first human to die during a space mission.
• 1980 - Eight U.S. servicemen died in Operation Eagle Claw as they attempted to end the Iran hostage crisis.
• 1981 - The first IBM PC is introduced.
• 1984 - Apple Computer unveils its Apple IIc portable computer.
• 1990 - STS-31: The Hubble Space Telescope is launched by the Space Shuttle Discovery.
• 2005 - Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is inaugurated as the 265th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church taking the name Pope Benedict XVI.

Births 1533 - William I of Orange (d. 1584) 1815 - Anthony Trollope, English novelist (d. 1882) 1904 - Willem de Kooning, Dutch painter (d. 1997) 1934 - Shirley MacLaine, American actress and author 1940 - Sue Grafton, American author 1942 - Richard M. Daley, American politician 1942 - Barbra Streisand, American singer, actress, and director 1953 - Eric Bogosian, American actor and writer

Deaths 1731 - Daniel Defoe, English writer (b. 1660) 1942 - Lucy Maude Montgomery, Canadian author (b. 1874) 1947 - Willa Cather, American writer (b. 1873) 1974 - Bud Abbott, American actor and comedian (b. 1895) 1986 - Wallis Simpson, American wife of Edward, Duke of Windsor (b. 1896) 1997 - Pat Paulsen, American comedian and politician (b. 1927) 2004 - Estée Lauder, American cosmetics entrepreneur (b. 1906) 2005 - Ezer Weizman, President of Israel (b. 1924)

Also, the first 24-Hour Comics Day was held on this date in 2004, although subsequent anniversaries have migrated around the calendar.

PS: For what it's worth, my previous bloggiversary posts:

• Friday, April 25, 2003 at 7:15 PM (yeah, I missed it that year; then again, AFAIK the term "bloggiversary" hadn't even been invented then)
• Saturday, April 24, 2004 at 9:25 AM (made a whole bunch of design improvements to the blog and introduced the new URL, RibaRambles.org)
• Sunday, April 24, 2005 at 5:00 PM (a modest affair, given our recent housefire)