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Damian Aspinall’s Extraordinary Gorilla Encounter

The dream of Damian Aspinall of The Aspinall Foundation was to reintroduce lowland gorillas back to the wild in [[Gabon]], West Africa, in the remotest part of the rainforest where their ancestors once lived. Watch this amazing life-changing journey.

Making a Pledge

About five years ago I had a student who absolutely refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. He said it was something he felt he couldn’t be compelled to do. Legally, he was right. A student cannot be compelled to say the Pledge. However, he does have to stand because that’s considered a school function, like getting out of your desk when the bell rings. But concerning the Pledge, what he took for granted was that I was like the vast majority of teachers in this country who have never served a single day in the military. (Why the white middle class has abdicated its duty of military service is another subject.) The fact is I’m a veteran and proud of it, and I wasn’t going to let this snot-nose kid think our patriotic rituals are optional. But my attempts to get him to stand for the flag were futile. He simply refused. And that was that.

I got an Assistant Principle to intervene, but he was worse than useless. The kid seemed more adamant in his determination to defy me. He remained seated. I called his mom. She was furious and read her son the riot act when he got home. He remained seated. So I had a talk with him outside. I explained that one day he’d come to understand that school was just a game which some students have figured out how to play it to their advantage. I told him he was playing the role of a fool because the game was now turned to his disadvantage. One day, I said, he’d come to understand the words behind the Pledge. He thought I was crazy.

As it turns out, I recently received an email from him. He’s now in the military, stationed in Korea. He wrote the following:

Maybe to help you remember i was a blue-haired punk rocker who wouldn’t stand for the flag. Ha. Anyways , it’s funny . . . I’m in the United States Army serving as infantry stationed in South Korea. Life is full of irony, isn’t it? Anyways, you were a great teacher, you were. Thanks a lot. I wish I would have paid more attention in class. Ha, but that’s life. Thank you, Mr. Fasano.

Will Crutchfield – Opera Conductor

Ah-ha! Will Crutchfield argues his point during a debate in Ms. Hunley’s class period. The class was also used for research, note-filing, and practice before tournaments.

I found this photograph in the Warwick High School yearbook of 1975. A friend of mine way back then in Newport News, VA, was Will Crutchfield, who grew up to be a famous opera conductor — that is, after a stint with the New York Times as the youngest opera critic in that paper’s history. Will’s an amazing person who has to his credit the discovery of a lost and unknown Donizetti opera, Elisabeth, the manuscript of which he found in a basement of London’s Royal Opera House. Sometimes in life one meets someone who’s destined to break away from the herd; of all the people I’ve met, Will took the lead.

What follows is a video clip of Will rehearsing “Ecco ridente in cielo” from Rossini’s Barber of Seville at the Polish National Opera of Warsaw. The tenor is Blagoj Nacoski.

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Taxi Driver Art Film

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When Randy Klein was going to art school, he needed a job to support himself. His brother suggested driving a cab, and so that’s what Randy did. His experiences are the stuff of some fairly creative film making, as you can see.

Remembering John Updike

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I found this little piece on the BBC site. It includes an excerpt from a very hard-to-find documentary called “What Makes Rabbit Run?: A Profile of John Updike.”

John Updike has Died

John Updike, Massachusetts, mid 1960s

I can’t even begin to express my profound sadness upon hearing the news of John Updike’s passing. Back in the late 1970s when I was getting very interested in literature, Updike was the man I most wanted to be. From my point of view as a young man in his early twenties who had recently fallen in love with the world of letters, Updike’s life seemed quintessentially literate — the one I wanted for myself.

Updike said that he wrote most often about the world he was reared in, “the small-town middle class,” as he described it to Life magazine in 1966. “It is in the middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

Today most commentators have spoken and written about Updike’s “Rabbit” novels (especially Rabbit Run), which feature the protagonist Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom — the American everyman, the displaced American male. And although Rabbit Run had a huge impact on me in my early adulthood, for me the center of his world will always be the short story The Music School, which was the place where I, the reader, participated most in Updike’s imagination.

Listen to Helen Jane Long’s “Porcelain,” the mood of which seems perfect for Updike’s level of humanity.

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John Lennon’s Laptop Commercial

John Lennon

Almost three decades after his death, John Lennon still proves to be a popular household name as the former Beatle has suddenly appeared in a charity commercial. How amazing is that? Especially since he’s been dead for twenty-eight years..

In the commercial Lennon encourages people to donate to a campaign started by One Laptop per Child (OLPC), which distributes solar-powered XO laptops to the world’s poorest children. The commercial was approved by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, and premiered on Christmas Day.

Lennon’s voiceover: “Imagine every child no matter where in the world they were could access a universe of knowledge. They would have a chance to learn, to dream, to achieve anything they want. I tried to do it through my music, but now you can do it in a very different way. You can give a child a laptop and more than imagine, you can change the world.”

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The Break-Up

This American Life can be a little corny at times, but Ira Glass has a real talent for getting moving stories out of everyday people.

I discovered this absolutely compelling piece about Phil Collins (Against All Odds) and one of his biggest fans. Even if you are NOT a Phil Collins fan, check out this piece with him on the show.

It’s extraordinary radio. The episode starts with a simple premise — girl with a broken heart wants to talk to Phil about heartbreak, and then it evolves into something quite different. By the end, barriers come down, and its turns into one of the most personal and affecting interviews about loss I think I’ve ever heard.

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Olga Korbut: The Gymnast, Her Coach, Her Rival and the President

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Like everyone who watched the 1972 Munich Olympics, I was quite taken with Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut — the 4-foot-11, 85-pound sprite who performed a back flip off the uneven bars, danced on the four-inch-wide balance beam, and seduced a worldwide audience with her floor exercise routine “like a little kid playing in the sun,” in the words of ABC commentator Jim McKay. During the intervening years she has taken a tumble from the world’s stage, but her fans still love her.

NOTE: The above documentary film first aired on the BBC in August of 2001.

Hear the World’s First Recording

It turns out that Thomas Edison was not the first person to record sound. In 1860, about twenty years before Edison’s phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made a recording of the French folk song “Au Claire de la Lune.” The device he used to do this was known as a phonautograph, which utilized paper blackened with smoke in order to make a pictorial representation of sound. Martinville believed that one day humans would be able to figure out how to derive sound from his smoky scratchings.The best article on this topic can be found at the New York Times:

The April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.

The Phonautograph Recording from 1860 of “Au Clair de la Lune”

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An Audio Excerpt from a 1931 Recording of the Same Song

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