There's Romance in Books

George Peabody Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

The Painting Techniques of Jackson Pollock: One: Number 31, 1950

Very cool collection of book "art"

More at Flickr

Google hotpot

Google hotpot

I'm Reading a Book

Appropos of the recent heavy snowfall....

At one point this past year, 49 of 50 U.S. states had snow on the ground. And it keeps coming down, with 20" of snow thus far in Chicago, 37" in Philadelphia, and a ridiculous 56" in New York. While this winter has been unusually brutal, it has happened before. Below is a letter from 1948 from the Mayor of Boston to the then President of M.I.T. pleading for new ideas for snow removal - flamethrowers were even suggested (but dismissed in the reply).

Click the images to enlarge

Maria Schneider, Co-Star of ‘Last Tango in Paris,’ Dies at 58

Maria Schneider had a limited career and turbulent life. She never again achieved the global fame on film that she found with “Last Tango in Paris.” She appeared with Jack Nicholson in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger,” and while that film was well-regarded by some critics, it didn’t become a cultural landmark like “Last Tango is Paris.”

A Rejection Letter to Gertrude Stein

Click to enlargeThis may explain the letter a bit.....

We love libraries

Leave the libraries alone. You don’t know the value of what you’re looking after.

Britain's new austerity budget has brought massive library closures across the country, with some communities in danger of ending up with no public library at all. When one Local Chief Counselor accused authors of defending libraries because they like the royalties they earn from the books libraries buy. In response, best-selling author Philip Pullman has given a stirring speech about the value of libraries to their communities and to civilization. Excerpted here:

"The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that's all he understands. What he doesn't understand is enterprises that don't make a profit, because they're not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn't understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch - how much money did it make last year? Why aren't you charging higher fines? Why don't you charge for library cards? Why don't you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books - you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there - what's on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.

That's all the greedy ghost thinks libraries are for..."

Full text of the speech is here.

The United States of Shame

Click to enlarge
Found at Pleated Jeans

Libraries are screwed.....parts one and two

Eli Neiberger gave a brilliant 20-minute presentation at the LJ/SLJ eBook Summit outlining the uncomfortable position ebooks puts libraries and offering several solutions. Parts one and two follow:

A Balanced Life

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air. You name them – work, family, health, friends and spirit – and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls – family, health, friends and spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.

~ Brian Dyson, President of Coca Cola (1978-1994)

Introducing "The Book"

Ancient by Internet standards, but hilarious enough to merit a repost....

It's a book

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

The image above is the cloud generated from the content on this page of this blog.

In the Library scent

I have serendipitously discovered CB I Hate Perfume a small company that, ironically, makes perfumes. However, this is not your usual collection of lavender and rose scents. With names like "In the Library", "Under the Arbor", "At the Beach, 1966" and "Burning Leaves", their collection of scents is eclectic, nostalgic and completely unique. They will even construct a scent specifically for you and tailored to your tastes and lifestyle. Cool stuff....

In the Library is a warm blend of English Novel, Russian & Moroccan Leather Bindings, Worn Cloth and a hint of Wood Polish

The main note in this scent was copied from one of my favorite novels originally published in 1927. I happened to find a signed first edition in pristine condition many years ago in London. I was more than a little excited because there were only ever a hundred of these in the first place. It had a marvelous warm woody slightly sweet smell and I set about immediately to bottle it.

The CD is dying....

I guess we all know this already - it has been over a year since I purchased an actual "physical" CD and the only reason I bought that one was because the music (the soundtrack to the Beatles LOVE by Cirque du Soleil) was only available in that format at the time.

In 1982 Billy Joel's 52nd Street was the first album released on CD and offered to the public. I bought my first CD player that year - a Yamaha that cost me $1200.00. These days I shop online and through iTunes for immediate downloads and I seldom buy an entire album, but only those songs I want. So, CDs are not the only casualty of this digital age for music - albums, too, are fading fast. And, with no demand for CDs, CD player manufacturers will soon be laying off employees, as well. Can DVDs and DVD manufacturers be far behind? Netflix already streams almost anything I want to see - cheaply and when I want it.

Sony once operated three CD-producing facilities in the United States but will soon be down to one. Pitman, New Jersey, which has 9,365 residents and is about 17 miles southeast of Philadelphia, is home to one of Sony's two remaining U.S.-based CD-manufacturing plants--until March 31. After that, the company will shutter the facility and 300 workers will be out of jobs. A Sony spokeswoman recently cited an ailing U.S. economy and sagging interest in physical media as the reasons for the closure. Piracy is also partly responsible for the decline in legitimate CD sales, but I am convinced it is primarily the result of a fundamental shift in the way consumers acquire music - and video, and clothing, and almost any thing else you can imagine. The internet has changed everything and it is just getting started.

Did you read....

Maybe reading less but retaining more is a better idea....

Fran Lebowitz on Aphorisms

Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, is the author of the forthcoming “Progress,” which will be published within the century. In the January 16 edition of the New York Times she posted this collection of aphorisms. Typical of Fran and delightful.

Click to enlarge

JFK asks for a raise in his allowance

When John F. Kennedy was ten he approached his father for a 30¢ increase in his then 40¢ allowance. His father required the request to be put in writing and the resulting document is at the same time delightful and revealing.

Image courtesy of the JFK Library. A transcription follows the image.

Click to enlarge

Transcript

A Plea for a raise
By Jack Kennedy

Dedicated to my
Mr. J. P. Kennedy

Chapter I

My recent allowance is 40¢. This I used for areoplanes and other playthings of childhood but now I am a scout and I put away my childish things. Before I would spend 20¢ of my ¢.40 allowance and in five minutes I would have empty pockets and nothing to gain and 20¢ to lose. When I a a scout I have to buy canteens, haversacks, blankets, searchlidgs, poncho things that will last for years and I can always use it while I can't use a cholcalote marshmellow sunday with vanilla ice cream and so I put in my plea for a raise of thirty cents for me to buy scout things and pay my own way more around.

Finis

John Fitzgerald Francis Kennedy

Found at Letters of Note

The watercolors of Grzegorz Wróbel

Living Design is a wolderful visual blog that bills itself as being for "Creative and Curious Minds". Well, that's me. I love this site and have spent hours perusing its offerings. One of my favorites is the extensive collection of watercolors by Grzegorz Wróbel .

RIP, Reynolds Price

Reynolds Price has died. Among the books I have selected for my modest office library are two by him: Feasting the Heart and Three Gospels. Those books have done much for me in my apparent life-long search for enlightenment, if not salvation. Reynolds will be missed. Read him, if you haven't.

The NYT obituary

Rides a Bike

Rides a Bike offers movie stars and their self-propelled vehicles. Updated twice or thrice a week and great fun!

Because sometimes you need a drink bigger than your stomach...

Starbucks announced plans on Sunday to roll out their version of the Big Gulp: the new, massive, 31-ounce cup size called the "Trenta." (Trenta means "thirty" in Italian.) It will only be available for iced coffee and tea drinks, at $.50 more than a Venti. The rollout begins this week in 14 states, and will go nationwide by May 3.

I so want this phone...

What is being creative? from Kristian Larsen on Vimeo.

Thanks for the link, Chris!

If it were my home.

The lottery of birth is responsible for much of who we are. If you were not born in the country you were, what would your life be like? Would you be the same person?

IfItWereMyHome.com is a gateway to understanding life outside your home. Use its country comparison tools to compare living conditions in your own country to those of another. For those of us residing in the United States, prepare to be shocked.

The music of the spheres

A simple, but fun little site where you control the orbits of the planets as they pluck a harp's string making, quite literally, the music of the spheres.

The 2011 "Tournament of Books"

Each spring the folks at The Morning News take 16 of the most celebrated novels of the previous calendar year and seed them into a competitive bracket—the kind you see in the N.C.A.A. basketball championship. Seventeen judges are enlisted throughout several rounds of competition, with each arbiter considering two books and advancing one. In this way, a pool of 16 books becomes eight, eight becomes four, four becomes two, and two becomes one, The Rooster, Champion Book of the Year.

Each weekday in March, two books go head to head, with a judge explaining in detail how he or she has chosen one of them to advance to the next round. Unlike other book awards, the judges are asked to come clean about how they made their decision, their literary biases and reading preferences, their personal and professional conflicts and affiliations.

Morning News readers are also given a chance to participate. During competition, once the judges have winnowed the field to two books, the contest enters the Zombie Round. This is where the top two most popular books among you readers that were earlier eliminated in the competition rise from the dead and get another chance to trip up the semi-finalists on their march to victory.

Finally, one book wins The Rooster, the Champion Book of the Year, and its author is awarded/threatened with the presentation of a live rooster, the official Tournament of Books mascot, named after a favorite character in contemporary literature, David Sedaris’s brother.

This year's selections are:

• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender


• Nox, by Anne Carson


• Bad Marie, by Marcy Dermansky


• Room, by Emma Donoghue


• A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan


• Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen


• Lord of Misrule, by Jaimy Gordon


• Bloodroot, by Amy Greene


• Next, by James Hynes


• The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson


• Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray


• Model Home, by Eric Puchner


• So Much for That, by Lionel Shriver


• Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart


• Kapitoil, by Teddy Wayne


• Savages, by Don Winslow

The King James Bible represented graphically.

This image renders the 1,200 chapters and 31,000 verses of the King James Bible into visual form. The graph along the bottom represents the chapters with the lengths corresponding to the number of verses in each chapter. Each of the 63,779 colored arcs represents a cross-reference, in which a passage alludes to figures or ideas from an earlier one, while the distance between the two passages determines the color of the arc. This infographic was developed by a computer science doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a Lutheran pastor in Germany.

Found at Discover Magazine

How the King James Bible changed the English language

No other book, or indeed any piece of culture, seems to have influenced the English language as much as the King James Bible. Its turns of phrase have permeated the everyday language of English speakers, whether or not they've ever opened a copy.

Below are some familiar phrases from the Text and the BBC has a revealing and fascinating article that explains and debates its influence in depth.

Phrases still with us

• Turned the world upside down Acts 17:6


• God forbid Romans 3:4


• Take root 2 Kings 19:30


• The powers that be Romans 13:1


• Filthy lucre 1 Timothy 3:3


• No peace for the wicked Isaiah 57: 21


• A fly in the ointment Ecclesiastes 10:1


• Wheels within wheels Ezekiel 10:10


• The blind leading the blind Matthew 15:13


• Feet of clay Daniel 2:33
  

So you want to be an academic librarian.

The 50 best comic book covers of 2010

Kevin Melrose over at Robot6 Comic Book Resource has picked his favorites and they are all delightfully original. See them here.

Infographic: The evolution of the batmobile

Graphjam has an amazingly detailed infographic that chronicles the evolution of the Batmobile from 1941 until present. Worth a look for the "fun factor" alone. Thanks John!

Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions.

So many things we take for granted and consider sacrosanct are, in fact, simply wrong. For example, Napoleon was not particularly short. He was about 5' 7" and while not particularly "tall" was certainly not far from average.

Wikipedia has a very interesting collection of common misconceptions. A few are offered below and many more at the link.

• Searing meat does not "seal in" moisture, and in fact may actually cause meat to lose moisture.


• Microwave ovens do not cook food from the inside out. Microwave radiation penetrates food and causes direct heating only a short distance from the surface.


• Shaving does not cause terminal hair to grow back thicker or coarser or darker.


• Prolonged exposure to cold weather such as rain or winter conditions does not increase the likelihood of catching a cold.

Astounding "Star Trek - like" home controller

The top ten scifi books that have been banned

These titles are among the most popular and beloved science fiction works of the last century. They've told us how bad the future might be before we get there, how free you can be if you don't follow blind belief, and that children are perfectly capable of digesting some pretty heavy concepts, actually. But they've all been banned or threatened with banning.

Wonderful movie posters from Poland and Czechoslovakia

A wonderful collection of posters for Japanese horror movies produced by Czech and Polish artists. More at the link.



Found at Coudal Partners

Infographic: What does your state do best?

Click to enlarge

50 years of typography in album covers

In 1938, Alex Steinweiss of Columbia Records invented the concept of album covers and cover art, replacing the plain covers used before. Over time, cover art has become an important part of the music industry, both as cultural icons and as marketing tools. Since then, cover art has evolved with the advancement of technology. The format has changed as well. We no longer use 12” LPs. Today, cover art is designed mainly for CD covers and digital downloads. This article features some inspiring examples of typography in album covers from the 1960’s until today.



Found at Coudal Partners

Kindle and Libraries

"Librarian In Black" has a recent post discussing her newly bought Kindle and her opinion on the lack of ability to load Library loaned books on the device. It's worth reading the responses to her entry.

Humorous quotes made by peer reviewers

Extracted from Twisted Bacteria:

"This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author’s email ID so they can’t use the online system in future."

"The biggest problem with this manuscript, which has nearly sucked the will to live out of me, is the terrible writing style."

"The writing and data presentation are so bad that I had to leave work and go home early and then spend time to wonder what life is about."

"The finding is not novel and the solution induces despair."

"The writing style is flowery and has an air of Oscar Wilde about it."

More at the link....

Net Neutrality and the Upcoming FCC Meeting

If the Internet is useful to you now and you care about its future, it's time to pay attention (maybe past time) to the upcoming meeting of the FCC. At the meeting on 12/21 the FCC will (probably) vote on rules that will affect the future of the Internet. (There's an unlikely possibility that Chairman Genachowski may still pull the item from the agenda.) While no one aside from FCC members have actually seen the rules, rumors indicate there may be cause for concern.

If you're new to the issue, here's ALA's overview and here is Library Journal on the pending rules.

Here's a link to Commissioner Clyburn's statement about what needs to be in the proposed rules. And, here's a link to Commissioner Baker's statement about why the FCC doesn't belong in this discussion.

It's a complicated issue and Tim Wu's new book, The Master Switch; the Rise and Fall of Information Empires, does an excellent job of explaining what's at risk and why.

One last link, to a site that has suggestions to improve the proposed rule and links to make it easy to contact Chairman Genachowski and the other commissioners.

On tech sites there's a lot about the proposed rules. Take some time, do a search, read about it, make up your mind and let the FCC know how you feel.

Infographic: Should you friend your parents on Facebook?

Click to enlarge

UC Berkeley Course Podcasts

Every semester, UC Berkeley webcasts select courses and events for on-demand viewing via the Internet. webcast.berkeley course lectures are provided as a study resource for students and are not sanctioned as a substitute for going to the course lectures. However, their selection of available courses is extensive and you can enjoy lectures by reknowned Berkeley lecturers on subjects as diverse as "Intellectual History of the United States", "Macromolecular Synthesis and Cellular Function" and "Buddhist Psychology".

There is also a section that rebroadcasts special events held on campus.

Smugopedia: Pretend you know better

Smugopedia is a collection of slightly controversial opinions about a variety of subjects. We offer you the chance to buy a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction at the small cost of alienating your friends and loved ones.

For example:

Sushi: It's only worth bothering with sushi if you're going to go to the Tokyo Fish Market. Nothing else is really fresh enough to capture the perfect simplicity of toro or uni.

and

Boston University: Boston University has worked hard to collect documentation of 20th century authors; for my personal tastes, I prefer Yale's collection of documentation of 18th century authors, and Harvard's of 19th century ones.

Much more smugness at the above link.....

Found at Coudal Partners

Pocket notebooks

Having posted recently about Moleskine (which I use daily for journaling) and being totally addicted to Field Notes (I go through 3 or 4 a month), I was pleased to find a very interesting and confirming post over at The Art of Manliness on The Manly Tradition of the Pocket Notebook. Admittedly, Moleskines are a bit foppish these days - what with their faux-history and all. I mean, how could Hemingway and Matisse have used a product that wasn't even produced until the late 90s?!

The authors of the article, Brett & Kate McKay, spent many hours combing through the Google book archives looking for references to the use of pocket notebooks by ordinary men during the past century. They have collected and published anecdote after anecdote outlining the pocket notebook’s history and demonstrating that far from being the domain of the modern hipster, the pocket notebook has always been used by men (and, yes, women) from many different walks of life.

They offer examples with specific applications from doctors, architects, farmers, salesmen and more. As I said, it is reaffirming and also fascinating insight. If you aren't using the reinvented pocket notebook, you might want to set your smartphone aside for a bit and grab a pencil. I love the tagline from the Field Notes site, "I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now."

The Noun Project

The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language - icons, if you will. You may use the symbols free of charge in any way you wish. Here is a short video about the project:


Found at Coudal Partners

Physics "proves" there really is a Santa Claus

Click to enlarge
Found at the always pithy and usually on-point Surviving the World

Google's eBook store opens

Google's Internet book store which opened Monday draws upon a portion of the 15 million printed books that Google has scanned into its computers during the past six years. Additionally, almost 4,000 publishers, including CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster Inc., Random House Inc. and Pearson PLC's Penguin Group are allowing Google to carry many of their recently released books in its new store.

"(These deals) will ensure that most of the current best sellers are among the 3 million e-books initially available in Google's store", said Amanda Edmonds, Google’s director of strategic partnerships.

Millions more out-of-print titles will appear in Google's store if the company can gain federal court approval of a proposed class-action settlement with U.S. publishers and authors. The $125 million settlement has been under review for more than two years, and faces stiff opposition from competitors, consumer watchdogs, academic experts, literary agents and even some foreign governments concerned hat Google might gain too much influence over a publication's pricing and availability in the still-new market for electronic books.

Questia Library for iPhone/iPod Touch

For current subscribers to Questia's online collection, this .99 iPhone/iPod application provides 24/7 access to what Questia bills as "the world's largest online collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences, plus magazine and newspaper articles". Complimenting their online library, Questia "offers a range of search, note-taking, and writing tools designed to help students locate the most relevant information on their topics quickly, quote and cite correctly, and create properly formatted footnotes and bibliographies automatically".

Questia's effectiveness as a research source aside, I can't for the life of me understand why they feel the need to charge another 99 cents for an application that requires a paid subscription to their basic services at $99/year.

What 10 classic novels were almost titled

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald went through quite a few titles for his most well-known book before deciding on The Great Gatsby. If he hadn’t arrived at that title, high school kids would be pondering the themes of Trimalchio in West Egg; Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; On the Road to West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; Gold-Hatted Gatsby; and The High-Bouncing Lover.

2. George Orwell’s publisher didn’t feel the title to Orwell’s novel The Last Man in Europe was terribly commercial and recommended using the other title he had been kicking around—1984.

3. Before it was Atlas Shrugged, it was The Strike, which is how Ayn Rand referred to her magnum opus for quite some time. In 1956, a year before the book was released, she decided the title gave away too much plot detail. Her husband suggested Atlas Shrugged and it stuck.

4. The title of Bram Stoker’s famous Gothic novel sounded more like a spoof before he landed on Dracula—one of the names Stoker considered was The Dead Un-Dead.

5. Ernest Hemingway’s original title for The Sun Also Rises was used for foreign-language editions—Fiesta. He changed the American English version to The Sun Also Rises at the behest of his publisher.

6. It’s because of Frank Sinatra that we use the phrase “Catch-22” today. Well, sort of. Author Joseph Heller tried out Catch-11, but because the original Ocean’s Eleven movie was newly in theaters, it was scrapped to avoid confusion. He also wanted Catch-18, but, again, a recent publication made him switch titles to avoid confusion: Leon Uris’ Mila 18. The number 22 was finally chosen because it was 11 doubled.

7. To Kill a Mockingbird was simply Atticus before Harper Lee decided the title focused too narrowly on one character.

8. An apt precursor to the Pride and Prejudice title Jane Austen finally decided on: First Impressions.

9. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Secretly, apparently. Mistress Mary, taken from the classic nursery rhyme, was the working title for Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.

10. Originally called Ulysses in Dublin, James Joyce’s Dubliners featured characters that would later appear in his epic Ulysses a few years later.

Found at Mental Floss

The United States of Auto-complete

Click to enlarge
Image from Google

Found at Coudal Partners

Shrimp packing pistols! Who knew....

Posted for its value for reference librarians everywhere....

Infographic: World cellphone usage

Click to enlarge
Found at The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian

World map drawn as if the largest countries had the largest populations

Click to enlarge
Found at Reddit

Spacelog transcribes historical US space mission communications

Spacelog.org offers transcripts of two of the most dramatic US space missions - Apollo 13 which nearly ended in disaster and Mercury 6 that propelled John Glenn into history as the first American to orbit the Earth. The site promises more to follow and the transcripts are searchable and well-designed.

Learn to pronounce "Moleskine"

It isn't "Mole-skin" and it isn't "Mole-skine", the "correct" pronunciation is actually "Mol-a-skeen'-a". It's Italian....

The company does say there is no "correct" pronunciation and that any old way you pronounce it is just fine with them (which is exactly what I might say were I selling the things!)

This video is offered for example:



The Moleskine image was originally posted to Flickr by Sembazuru at http://www.flickr.com/photos/sembazuru/6974372/ and is used under a Creative Commons license.

55 years ago today - Rosa Parks took a bus ride that changed America

Fifty five years ago today on December 1, 1955 a white man boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The bus driver, James F. Blake, instructed some of the African-American bus riders to move toward the back of the bus to make room for the white passenger. Rosa Parks refused and for this she was arrested.

A year-long bus boycott followed - lead in part by Martin Luther King, Jr. It ended a year later when the federal court system declared the segregation of public buses to be unconstitutional.

What is not commonly known is that Ms. Parks was very well prepared for her confrontation. She had previously taken a class at a local NAACP chapter on the art of passive resistance, and, in her own words, "was tired of giving in." At the time of her action, she was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for workers' rights and racial equality.

All that aside, her action was taken as a private citizen and showed extraordinary bravery and commitment in a time that did not reward non-conformity.

Even more interesting are the anecdotes Dan Lewis points out in his blog (with thanks to Wikipedia):

Parks' autobiography (cover above) recounts that in 1943, over a decade prior to the event's whose anniversary we mark today, Ms. Parks (then 30 years old) boarded a Montgomery bus through the front door -- at the time something forbidden for an African-American. The bus driver insisted that Parks, who had already paid, exit the bus and re-enter through the rear door. As Parks recounted, when she did not move quickly enough, the driver grabbed her sleeve as if to push her off the bus. She (intentionally) dropped her purse and sat down in a whites-only seat to pick it up. According to Parks, the driver motioned as if he were going to hit her; she stated that she'd get off the bus, staving off attack. She exited but the bus departed before she re-entered. (Some accounts suggest that she did not try and re-enter; others state that the driver sped off before she had an opportunity to do so. In either case, it was not uncommon for buses to disembark before African-Americans were afforded the opportunity to re-enter via the rear door.) Parks had battled with the driver; the driver had won, at the expense of Parks' dignity.

That driver? James F. Blake.

Parks vowed to never again ride a bus he was driving and, apparently, many times waited for a subsequent bus upon noticing that Blake was driving the first to arrive. However, fifty-five years ago today, she boarded the bus without paying attention to who was behind the wheel. So when Blake ordered her to cede her seat to a white traveler, he also resurrected the memory of a transgression a dozen years prior -- and Parks, historically, stood her ground against a nemesis from her past.

Historically speaking, December 1 is a very interesting day. On today, through the past few decades, a lot of interesting things have happened: the first artificial heart transplant, the Vietnam draft lottery begins, the AIDS virus is officially recognized, and a lot, lot more -- including, of course, Rosa Parks' famous refusal to move toward the back of the bus.