Our Daily Dead

Diary for a small planet.

Harry Browne was twice a presidential candidate for the Libertarian party. The first time was in the 1996 election and the second as part of the 2000 election; however, he never achieved an elected office.

This Wikipedia bit on Libertarians says that in general the movment advocates the right of individuals to be free to do whatever they wish with their persons or property as long as they allow others the same liberty, by not initiating physical force, the threat of it, or fraud against others. The criticisim section of that Wikipedia bit offers something of a counter: critics from the Left tend to focus on the economic consequences, claiming that perfectly free markets, or laissez-faire capitalism, undermines individual freedom for many people by creating social inequality, poverty, and lack of accountability for the most powerful. Chew on that for awhile.

And our slice of the news includes two archeologists: Machteld Mellink and
Andrew Sherratt. Mellink was an expert regarding the region known as Anatolia while Sherratt was an Old World prehistorian.

Here is a bit about Anatolia and a map of the place for your working reference.

If it happens that you are scratching your head about prehistory we read that this subject is the history of humankind in the period before recorded history as per Answers.com. Not fair really using the term history to define prehistory now is it?

And we found this in our Need To Know box: helpful hints for the fashion challenged from Posh Spice. Um, yea right.

Now don’t mind us we’ve a plane to catch for a wee bit o’ shopping in Japan…

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Diary, Harry Browne, news, Machteld Mellink, Andrew Sherratt, Anatolia, Posh Spice

from the Independent Online

Andrew Sherratt was an Old World prehistorian with an unusual breadth of knowledge, interests and vision. At a time when increasing specialisation has driven most prehistorians to focus on particular aspects of life in the distant past, he moved nimbly from settlement patterns and technology, through exchange and land use, to material symbols, language and cultures of consumption.

While expanding data sets and fascination with local process have encouraged concern with particular regions and periods of prehistory, Sherratt travelled fearlessly through space and time, drawing his hallmark diagrams with bold arrows.

He first achieved international recognition with his model of an Old World “Secondary Products Revolution”, published in Pattern of the Past, a 1981 volume honouring his mentor David Clarke. He argued that animals were first domesticated to secure a ready supply of carcass products. Only several millennia later were domestic animals exploited for their renewable “secondary” products of milk, wool and labour.

This revolution enabled early European farmers to colonise many agriculturally marginal areas of the Continent, sowed the seeds of later social inequality (the plough supporting a privileged minority) and created some of the necessary conditions for the development of pastoralism.

Technorati Tags: Andrew Sherratt, Old World prehistorian

from the NY Times
Machteld J. Mellink, an archaeologist and authority on ancient sites in Turkey, who became a forceful voice for ending the international trafficking of looted antiquities, died on Feb. 23 in an assisted-living home in Haverford, Pa. She was 88.

Dr. Mellink’s death was announced by Bryn Mawr College, where she taught in the department of classical and Near Eastern archaeology for five decades.

In scholarship that bridged Greek and eastern Mediterranean cultures, Dr. Mellink helped excavate sites in central and southeastern Turkey and reported on archaeological finds throughout the country, in the wider region known as Anatolia.

In the 1960’s, she was an early explorer of the Elmali plain, where she and others unearthed two tombs with vivid interior paintings of hunting and domestic scenes that have been dated to the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. The rich finds of the area quickly became targets of looters, prompting Dr. Mellink to plead for a halt to a “subversive assault upon the antiquities of Anatolia by ignorance and greed.”

In 1968, she wrote in The American Journal of Archaeology, “International legal action is needed because technical progress and the ‘archaeology explosion’ will destroy a major part of the ancient record in a frightening tempo.”

Technorati Tags: Machteld J. Mellink, archaeologist, Turkey

from the NY Times
FRANKLIN, Tenn., March 3 (AP) — Harry Browne, who twice ran for president as the Libertarian Party candidate, died on Wednesday at his home here. He was 72.

The cause was Lou Gehrig’s disease, said a family friend, Jim Babka.

Mr. Browne, an author and investment adviser, received 485,134 votes for president in 1996 and 384,431 in 2000. He never held elective office, Mr. Babka said.

Mr. Browne wrote 12 books, which sold more than two million copies in total, the party said in a news release. They included “Why Government Doesn’t Work,” “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World” and “Fail-Safe Investing.”

Technorati Tags: Harry Browne, president, Libertarian Party, Lou Gehrig’s disease

Today’s slice of daily life brings us a femme fatale and carillonneur today. A what and a what?

Someone playing the part of a femme fatale might be said to be a vicious schemer. Now there is a movie called Ffemme Fatale that is said to be a bit of a crazy ride. Of note (perhaps) is that Peter Coyote is in the movie as a U.S. Senator. Recall Steven, Peter and Drew had a wee hit with some sort of alien some years ago.

And then there is the Femme Fatale Fetish Center web site. ‘Nuff said likely. This No Place For A Woman site has some interesting reading on the femme fatale role and other female film noir roles too if you are interested.

And if you find yourself in Auckland wander over to the Femme Fatale please and get a report back to us. Consider it an assignment and remember your role.

We know (and certainly you do too) that a carillonneur is a person who plays the carillon. But what the heck is a carillon? The American Heritage site says a carillon is a “stationary set of chromatically tuned bells in a tower, usually played from a keyboard”. Thus James Angell in addition to his primary role also made the Stanford Bell Tower sing. We note that there is no mention in his obit about HOW he came into his role as carillonneur.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: daily life, femme fatale, carillonneur

from the LA Times
James Angell, 81, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University and the school’s carillonneur for 31 years, died Feb. 13 at his home in San Francisco of complications of Parkinson’s disease.

“Jim’s research focused on the application of integrated circuit technology to the fabrication of sensors for biomedical instrumentation and the generation and manipulation of musical sounds with digital systems,” said Bruce Woolery, chairman of Stanford’s engineering school.

Perhaps best known as the university’s official carillonneur, Angell played the carillon from 1960 to 1991.

Angell was born on Staten Island, N.Y., and earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at MIT. He worked for Philco on circuit applications before joining the Stanford faculty in 1960. He became a full professor in 1962.

Carillon News

Technorati Tags: James Angell, electrical engineering, Stanford, carillonneur, carillon

from the LA Times
Nadira, 73, who played a series of femme fatale roles in more than 60 Indian films from the 1950s to the 1970s, died Feb. 9 in New Delhi after a long illness.

Born Florence Ezekiel into a Jewish family in Baghdad in 1931, she immigrated as an infant to the port city of Bombay. At 12, she adopted the screen name Nadira and made her film debut in 1943. But her career didn’t take off for another nine years, after she played the princess Rajshree opposite Dilip Kumar in the box office hit “Aan” (Pride).

Her performance as Maya in the film “Shree 420″ in 1955 gave her a new avenue of expression, as a villain. From then on she was generally typecast as the vicious schemer.

In 1975, however, she was awarded the Filmfare Best Supporting Actress Award for her portrayal of a poor Anglo-Indian housewife trying to keep her family together in the face of crisis in the film “Julie.”

Her cinema career declined after the 1970s, and she became reclusive after experiencing financial difficulties

Technorati Tags: Nadira, femme fatale

From the Sydney Morning Herald
Anna Marly, who has died aged 88, was a Russian-born French singer and guitarist who inspired the wartime French Resistance with her broadcasts from the BBC - notably with the stirring Le Chant des Partisans ( Song of the Partisans), which became arguably France’s most famous tune after La Marseillaise.

She wrote the song in London during the Blitz, while serving as a volunteer tea lady for Resistance leaders. She wrote the words in Russian, having read a newspaper report about Russian partisans fighting the Nazis at Smolensk.

Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon, the two French writers to whom she played it, realised its potential as an anthem for the Resistance after La Marseillaise was banned by the Nazis, and they gave her tune the lyrics now known to French speakers worldwide: Ami, entends-tu le vol noir des corbeaux sur nos plaines? (My friend, do you hear the black flight of ravens over our plains?)

Anna Marly whistled the tune as a station signal at the start of the BBC’s Free French broadcasts, entitled Honneur et Patrie - her crisp, clear whistle cracking through Nazi jamming to lift the hearts of Resistance fighters and ordinary citizens alike. BBC announcers usually referred to it as The Guerilla Song.

In her memoirs Anna Marly recalled being approached by a former Resistance fighter after the war. “He told me he and four other men captured by the Germans had been ordered to dig their own graves. To keep their spirits up, they whistled my song.” While his friends were gunned down, the man had managed to flee.

Among her customers when she was working in the canteen of the Free French Forces’ London headquarters, off the Mall, was General Charles de Gaulle.

After the war he described her as “the troubadour of the Resistance” and thanked her for “using her talent as a weapon for France”. Forty years after the liberation of Paris, she was awarded the Legion of Honour by President Mitterrand.

French listeners tuning into the BBC also heard Anna Marly’s whistling introduce another song for which she had written the music; her haunting La Complainte du Partisan ( The Lament of the Partisan) was made famous by Leonard Cohen on his album Songs from a Room in 1969.

Anna Marly was born Anna Betoulinsky in St Petersburg on October 30, 1917, at the height of Lenin’s October Revolution. Her father was executed when she was a baby and her mother fled with her, first to Finland and eventually to Paris to join the many other Russian emigres.

As a teenager, Anna took music lessons from Serge Prokofiev, and began writing songs, first in Russian, later in French.

Told that her surname was too long and hard to pronounce, she picked out Marly by opening a telephone directory at random. Her singing debut was at a Paris nightclub.

After the Nazi invasion of France, she and her husband, a Dutch diplomat she had married in 1938, fled to Spain and Portugal, eventually arriving in London in February 1941.

He worked with the Dutch government-in-exile while she volunteered to serve tea and soup to French Resistance members at their London headquarters.

Her talent was soon recognised and she was asked to tour Britain to entertain troops in French, English, Russian and Polish. Having divorced her first husband, she married George Smiernow, a devout Russian Orthodox native of St Petersburg, in 1946. They returned to Paris, only to find that she was relatively unknown - Kessel and Druon had been widely credited with writing Le Chant des Partisans.

Only years later did Russians realise the song had originally been written in their language, and after the success of the Cohen version of her other partisan ballad, she finally gained the recognition she deserved.

She toured the world performing her songs and eventually settled at Jordanville, New York, becoming a US citizen in 1965.

After the death of her husband in 2000, Anna Marly moved to the small town of Lazy Mountain, near Anchorage, Alaska, saying she wanted to be closer to nature.

Since Alaska used to belong to Russia, she said, she also felt that she was returning home. She died there on February 15.

Technorati Tags: Anna Marly, singer, guitarist, French Resistance