News from the Mudd

Today's Toasted Marshmallow Day. Zzzzzzzz. Oh, sorry.
S'Mores® Day was August 10. National Chocolate Chip Day was August 4. The least the National Confectioners Association could have done was to put two of the ingredients first in the month, then get together with the people who declared July 5 National Graham Cracker Day and move it to August, then have the culmination of the three, S'Mores® Day, on the 31th. It would be, like, orderly.

Today we've got CD piles so nice, we've posted them twice. Here are more LU 2007-2008 Artist + Jazz Series performers, plus an added bonus of a little Schumann and Mozart. As composers. Not players.

We've got a heapin' pile o' CDs for you today. All of the artists appear on the LU 2007-2008 Jazz Series.

The manner by which music-related people met their demise has always been a source of fascination. It seems that musicians are not prone to death by old age. Our friend Nicholas Slonimsky gleefully chronicled their odd send-offs in Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians: Lully, gangrene after piercing his foot with a staff while conducting. Music writer Arthur Eaglefield Hull threw himself under a train. French violinist Jean Marie Leclair was found in his own house, with no sign of struggle, stabbed to death. Seems his estranged wife was a professional engraver who owned sharp tools.
Now the highly respected Beethoven Journal published by the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University in California has published an article theorizing that Beethoven received a fatal dose of lead from a lead-laced poultice administered by his well-meaning (or WAS he?) doctor.
Our favorite headline for this article: Who Knew Beethoven Was Into Heavy Metal? (Philadelphia Daily News.)

The Life magazine cover dated August 28, 1964 featured these loveable moptops. They were just beginning their second U.S. tour - they'd just been here in February and hit only New York, Miami and Washington, D.C. As the article stated, this 33-day tour was expected to gross "an astounding $2 million." Yes, times have changed.
Had you been alive at that time, and had you been fortunate enough to be living in or near one of the 23 cities they'd be visiting, and had you been lucky enough to procure tickets to one of the concerts, here are some of the tunes you may have heard.

Today marks the birthday of Martha Raye (1916) Man Ray (1916) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908.) If you can find the connection, you are indeed old or you watch The Simpsons.

On August 24, 1869, Cornelius Swarthout received a patent for "a device to bake waffles." In celebration, today is National Waffle Day. This is not to be confused with International Waffle Day. Or Waffle Iron Day, which is in June, and apparently celebrates the iron itself and not its patent. Mr. Breakfast has an informative page on this most fascinating subject. Just think of it: without the waffle maker, we would not have paninis, the George Foreman grill, chicken and waffles or waffle fries. Make some.

Today is the birthday of Louis XVI. He's 253.
Louis the 16th was the King of France in 1789. He was worse than Louis the 15th. He was worse than Louis the 14th. He was worse than Louis the 13th. He was the worst since Louis the 1st.
King Louis was living like a king, but the people were living rotten. So the people they started an uprising, which they called the French Revolution, and of course you remember their battle cry which will never be forgotten.

On August 23, 1907, the Eau Claire Leader published a warning about the San Jose scale. The chair of LU's biology department predicted the end of fruit trees in Outagamie country unless this "ravenous pest" was eradicated. As we currenly have apple trees in Appleton, we're assuming eradication was achieved.

Today's the 103rd anniversary of Count Basie's birth. Pianist, composer, band leader, one can't think of him without remembering the cameo with his band in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles. Basie's iconic arrangement of "April in Paris" was the perfect, albeit anachronistic backdrop to showcase Cleavon Little's "urban sophisticate," Sheriff Bart. It also nicely balanced Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You" heard earlier in the movie.
We've got a recording of "April in Paris." We've got Blazing Saddles. Heck, we've even got "I Get a Kick Out Of You." Knock yourselves out.

The stars on the U.S. flag got realigned on this day in 1959 when Hawaii was added as the 50th state. If there had never been a "Hawaii 5-0," no one would ever remember which came first: Alaska or Hawaii.
Gather 'round the imu pit and sing the Hawaii state song, Hawaii ponoi.

This is moderately interesting. Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen (père) and Eero Saarinen (fils) share the same birthday today: the father in 1873 and the son in 1910. Both were architects and, oddly, both were Finnish. Eero also designed furniture and is a favorite of crossword puzzle constructors. We've got books by and about father and son.

You might say Lawrence University sometimes has an identity problem. We're not St. Lawrence University or Sarah Lawrence College, we're not in Lawrence, Kansas, and we have nothing to do with Lawrence Welk, except some of our students are from Minnesota and at least one of our faculty plays the accordion.
But today we're so gosh darn proud: we appear in the New York Times crossword puzzle, 30 down.

The world lost Max Roach this week. Celebrate his life and talent with a listen to many of his CDs from the Mudd. Then see him in action on the video, Max Roach: In Concert & In Session. The Mudd even has the DVD, How to Draw a Bunny, a documentary about the artist Ray Johnson for which Max Roach wrote and performed the music.

If you are 40-ish or older, you probably remember where you were 30 years ago today when you heard the news. The King was dead. We prefer to remember the Jailhouse Rock, pre-Vegas Elvis: no dope, no donuts, no white jumpsuit.
Of course, no anniversary this significant passes without being observed in the gaudiest manner possible. Memphis is commemorating this milestone with Elvis Week. You can visit the official website or link from the Memphis site. And go back to Sun Studio (that's a photo of the studio where Elvis recorded.)
The Mudd has books about Elvis, but, surprisingly, no Elvis recordings. We shall remedy that soon.
As an aside, if you were really listening to NPR this morning, you would have noticed all of the incidental music snippets played were Elvis tunes.

Today in 1947 the Kon-Tiki, a balsa wood raft, landed in Polynesia after a 4300 mile voyage. Listen to a 1999 interview with Thor Heyerdahl on NPR, read about the Kon-Tiki in the Mudd, and make a virtual visit to the Kon-Tiki Museum.

It's the particularly alliterative "Particularly Preposterous Packaging Day." We found two frightening examples of packaging gone wild on the web site All Art Burns. Scroll down a bit on the page to "When the Environment is the Enemy."

Dang. We missed what would have been Louis Armstrong's 106th birthday on Aug. 4.
The Mudd has many recordings featuring Pops, the heaviest hitter, along with some other heavy hitters. We suggest listening the original 1928 recording of West End Blues, with Earl "Fatha" Hines on the piano, as part of Ken Burns' Jazz series and compare it to a 1955 recording in a cool play-long (if you dare) format. It's not the original, but the chops are still there.

The magnificent 1974 structure that is the Mudd isn't the first library at LU. The first library, along with just about every other department and function on campus, was once housed in Main Hall. We are very pleased that The Chronicle of Higher Education has featured a photo of our Main Hall on their "Campus Architecture" blog. Main Hall appears in a new book Old Main: Fame, Fate and Contributions to Campus Planning and Design by Richard P. Dober. Watch the Chronicle's audio slide show, too.

It was 70 years ago today that The New York Times reported in a terse, 4-line item that President Roosevelt had signed a bill to curb "marihuana" traffic. This bill, called the Marihuana Tax Act, required that "Every person who imports, manufactures, produces, compounds, sells, deals in, dispenses, prescribes, administers, or gives away marihuana" would be levied a tax. We're wondering how that worked out for them.
Apparently not too well, because a scant 16 years later, the children's television show "Romper Room" made its debut with a character named Mr. Do-Bee, in 1966 Frank Sinatra recorded "Strangers in the Night," and in 1970 The Doobie Brothers was formed, ironically in the same year the Marihuana Tax Act was repealed.
The Mudd has scholarly sources on this subject.

Today marks the 86th birthday of composer Richard Adler. In 1950 he began composing with Jerry Ross, and a few years later they cranked out The Pajama Game (1954) and Damn Yankees (1955.) The latter show contains the song "Hey There," the opening of which is said to be based on the first theme of Mozart's Piano Sonata in C major, K. 545. Judge for yourself.
Grove Music Online has an interesting bit of trivia about Mr. Adler: "He was also the producer and director for various celebrity productions in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, including Marilyn Monroe's celebrated appearance in Madison Square Garden singing Happy Birthday to President Kennedy." But we want to know who sewed her into The Dress.

Listen to or view some Richard Adler.

It's been a while, but we have another CD pile. Here you will find representatives from the upcoming Artists' Series and Jazz Series.

A well-respected national news publication today announced what is possibly the end of "Guitar Hero"-like games. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, with all the band programs out there, but this particular take on interactive multiplayer gaming should have been run past a few more focus groups.

It's National Clown Week, proclaimed by Richard M. Nixon in 1971. We won't even go there.
We think clowns are kind of scary, but not as scary as ventriloquists' dummies. We're talking the wooden kind with the hinged mouth. If you want to see something spooky, check out the International Ventriloquists' Association web site. Yeesh.
National Clown Week also reminds us of a remark made by Bart Simpson to his dad when Homer expressed an urge to attend college: "Barber or clown?"
Here are our two favorite clown-related items in the Mudd: the electronic book Careers for Class Clowns & Other Engaging Types and Herb Gardner's play A Thousand Clowns.