December 31

You first met Boies Penrose on November 1, 1860, his birthday. I offered the quote, from a speech he had delivered in 1896: “I believe in the division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass laws under which you make money…and out of your profits, you further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money.” Mr. Penrose died on the 31st in 1921. I generally don’t like to repeat myself, but Penrose gave us another quote that I liked so much that I am going to use him again. The quote echoes my own feelings about politics in general and politicians in particular. To coin a phrase, he hit the nail on the head when he said, “Public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

December 30

Have you made your plans for New Year’s Eve yet? If not, consider the following. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was a 19th century English sculptor who became friends with paleontologist Sir Richard Owen (pictured). There is nothing terribly startling or interesting in that is there? It was bound to have happened because they were both British, ran in the same circles, met and hit it off. The men met when they both became involved with London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Combining their two talents, the pair built a life-size model of an Iguanodon, a fierce ornithopod dinosaur, for the Exhibition. On the 30th in 1853, the two hosted a dinner party for twenty inside the Iguanodon. While not quite New Year’s Eve, it’s close enough and it did seem like a particularly good way to ring in the New Year. While it wasn’t Capote’s black and white ball it still must have been very cool.

December 29

At times it seems as if people have lost the ability to age gracefully. Strategies to turn back the hands of time are daily published in the various media. Plastic surgery, liposuction, hormone therapies, medicines, creams, and salves beyond measure appear on the market constantly. Some people, principally women, starve themselves almost to the point of death to make themselves, at least in their minds, beautiful. A seemingly limitless number of diets are published to help people already under-weight lose even more weight. The South Beach Diet was bad enough though the Bergen-Belsen Diet seems to be more distressing than most. I believe that look is referred to as Concentration Camp Chic. Unfortunately, a few people do cross the line and actually starve themselves to death. An exception is a 17th century member of minor nobility, Countess Elizabeth Báthory. She believed that she had discovered an efficacious beauty regimen, though perhaps she took it a tad too far. On the 29th in 1610, Bathory was arrested on charges of murder. It seems that since 1585 she had been in the practice of acquainting herself with an unknown number of young women, torturing and then killing them so that she could bath in their blood. By her own estimation, the number of her victims was in excess of 650. As a result, the dear countess was placed under house arrest, a condition in which she would remain until her death on August 21, 1614.

December 28

John C. Calhoun (pictured), Vice President in John Quincy Adams’ administration, on the 28th in 1832, became the first Vice President of the United States to resign. Vice Presidents choosing to resign are not rare, Spiro Agnew springs to mind. Calhoun has the distinction, however, of being one of only two Vice Presidents to serve in the same position in the administrations of two Presidents. He also served in Andrew Jackson’s administration. The other person to share this distinction was George Clinton, Vice President in the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. It’s amazing that Clinton would leave politics and go on to form the bands Parliament and Funkadelic. It was by a very narrow margin that the Mothership Connection was voted down as the national anthem.

December 27

If you have ever lived in a building that had low water pressure, or lived in a home one other person and only one and a half bathrooms, you may have encountered the problem of someone flushing while you were in the shower, the result of which drenched you with very hot water. The first reaction is to lash out at the offending individual who flushed offering strong arguments justifying the flusher’s placement in a spot on the food chain beneath amoebas. I thought I had stumbled onto a wisecrack for use in just that circumstance when I read about the Flushing Remonstrance. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that what I had found was a bird of very a different feather. The Flushing Remonstrance is a document crafted in the 17th century. It was signed on the 27th in 1657. The document's intent was to be a protest against the religious persecution carried out by Peter Stuyvesant in the Dutch settlement in what is today the county of Queens in New York City. The document is considered by many to be one of the seminal documents drawn on when drafting the United States’ founding fathers were crafting our country’s Constitution. Therefore, the next time you are caught in the shower and someone flushes the toilet try to remember that screaming at them in Dutch is not really going to get your point across.

December 26

Norman Angell was born on the 26th in 1872. He was a British politician, who somehow managed to finagle his way to a Nobel Peace Prize. It seems almost to be an oxymoron to use the word peace in the same sentence as politician but the Nobel committee doesn’t often ask for my advice. Angell’s worldview is probably best illustrated by the following quote, though I can’t determine the context in which Angell used these words. "Political nationalism has become...the most important thing in the world, more important than civilization, humanity, decency, kindness, and pity; more important than life itself."

December 25

"Silent Night" is a traditional Christmas song. My earliest memory of it is from the television show Rin Tin Tin, when the cavalry sang it during an episode that ran, surprisingly, near Christmas. The first performance of Silent Night was on the 25th in 1818 when a choir sang it during Christmas services in the Church of St. Nikolaus in Oberndorf, Austria. The song quickly became a staple of the Christmas season. During World War I, a war that probably set the standard for brutality in the modern era, on Christmas Day in 1914, the song was sung simultaneously, in English and German, by the troops facing each other near Ypres, Belgium. When they finished singing, the soldiers from both sides exchanged gifts with their adversaries. After gathering, the Germans and the Allies also conducted a group reading of the 23rd psalm. Sadly, after burying their dead it was back to business as usual for both sides. Currently, in Dallas, Texas, the men's chorus of the Turtle Creek Chorale traditionally ends its annual Christmas season concerts by singing the first verse of the carol, and then signing the verse in complete silence.