QUARANTINE BLOG # 169

September 15, 2020

Let’s begin with a look at this day in history, and at the same time, play a few tunes from the Jukebox.

On September 15, 1962, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons earned their first #1 hit with “Sherry” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMcWldfg28s.  The group took a decade to develop, changing their name in 1961 from the Four Lovers after failing an audition at a New Jersey bowling alley called The Four Seasons.

Keyboard player Bob Gaudio wrote “Sherry,” the song that would launch the group’s career, in 15 minutes before a scheduled rehearsal.  Released as a single in August 1962 it topped of the pop charts just four weeks later.  In the next six months, the Four Seasons would earn two more #1 hits with “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Walk Like A Man,” making them the only American group ever to earn three consecutive #1 hits.  Here is a medley of their hits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pWBnodrR1M.  In 2005, “Jersey Boys” debuted on Broadway presenting in a documentary-style format the formation, success and eventual break-up of the group.

And as promised (or threatened) yesterday, a look at Tom Lehrer.  If you were in high school or college in the mid 1960s the chances were very good that you memorized Lehrer’s original, and off-beat, lyrics.  His albums in my collection include “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” “An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer,” and “That Was the Week that Was.”  I told you yesterday I had 2 of his albums.  Oops.

Thomas Andrew Lehrer is a retired American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist, and mathematician.  He is best known for the pithy and humorous songs that he recorded in the 1950s and 1960s.  His songs often parodied popular musical forms, though he usually created original melodies when doing so.  A notable exception is “The Elements” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcS3NOQnsQM in which he set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the “Major-General’s Song” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance.

Lehrer’s early musical work was noted for its black humor in songs such as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”  In the 1960s, he produced a number of songs that dealt with social and political issues of the day, when he wrote for the television show “That Was the Week That Was.”  In the early 1970s, Lehrer largely retired from public performances to devote his time to teaching mathematics and musical theater history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Here are two more songs:  “Pollution” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPrAuF2f_oI
and “New Math” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA.

If you haven’t had enough of, as one reviewer said, Tom Lehrer’s lyrics, piano, and so-called voice, here is the complete recording of a live concert from Copenhagen in September 1967: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHPmRJIoc2k.

👉  Speaking of New Math, Zoe from “Baby Blues” offers her own version.

👉   While we are paused looking at art work, here are two from our days of “new normal.”

👉  Today is World Afro Day, a global day of change that educates about, and celebrates, Afro hair, culture, and identity.  Founder Michelle de Leon has stated that the vision for the day is “to create a platform to celebrate and educate people about Afro hair ... raising Afro hair to world class status through positive awareness and academic excellence.”  Historically, there has been bias against Afro hair in society, which has increased exclusion and feelings of inferiority and caused lasting effects on health and economic opportunity, de Leon says.  Conversely, straight hair has been associated with success and beauty.

The official World Afro Day was first celebrated in 2017.  Some of us were ahead of our time.

👉  Russia’s Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to rocket into space on April 12, 1961 (America’s Alan Shepard would have been first if Werner von Braun had not insisted on one more test flight of the Mercury-Redstone space vehicle).  It would be two years before a woman would orbit the earth, and once again that space voyager was a Russian: Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova.  On June 16, 1963, she was launched in the spacecraft Vostok 6, which completed 48 orbits in 71 hours.

Tereshkova had no pilot training (in fact, early Russian cosmonauts did very little piloting of their space craft as compared to American astronauts).  She was an accomplished amateur parachutist.  It was on this basis that she was accepted for the cosmonaut program and won the seat in the Vostok capsule over 3 other female cosmonauts.  Parachuting was deemed an important skill for Russian space flyers because the capsules hard-landed on land, requiring the cosmonauts to eject early and parachute to earth.

It would be 20 years and 2 days –  June 18, 1983 – before an American woman would fly into space (and then she was the third woman to venture into outer space – the second was cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya, who flew on the Soyuz T-7 mission on August 19, 1982).  That astronaut was Sally Ride who was launched on the STS-7 mission of the space shuttle Challenger.  She joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 1978 as one of the first six female astronauts to join the U.S. space agency.

Ride’s major assignment for her six-day flight was to control the space shuttle’s robotic arm, deploying communications satellites for Canada and Indonesia.  Ride would make history again in 1984 when she launched on the Challenger’s STS-41G mission, beginning the first American woman to fly in space twice.

More on women in space tomorrow.

👉  Some other bits and pieces from space:

The highest mountain discovered is the Olympus Mons, which is located on Mars.   Olympus Mons’ peak is 16 miles km) high, making it nearly 3 times higher than Mount Everest.

There are 79 known moons orbiting Jupiter.  It also has the largest moon in our solar system, Ganymede which is 33,279 miles in diameter making it bigger than the planet Mercury.

Neptune’s moon, Triton, orbits the planet backwards.  This is known as a retrograde orbit and astronomers are unsure as to why Triton orbits Neptune this way.  But Triton is gradually getting closer to Neptune.  Scientists believe that when Triton eventually gets too close to Neptune, it will be torn apart by the planet’s gravity and could potentially create another ring around Neptune – giving it more rings than Saturn.

👉  Today’s closing is by Ed Young from “The Proven Truth.”

Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’  Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’  What shall I say to them?”  God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM;”  and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘ I AM has sent me to you.’”  (Exodus 3:13-14).

God’s being is eternally present tense.  Tribal and national gods – like those of Pharaoh’s Egypt would come and go.  But Moses went in the authority of the everlasting God.  That He is I-Am-That-I-Am means He is back there in your past, reforming its wreckage into a beautiful testimony.  He’s in your future, preparing places, people, and events by which He will work good into your life, and advance His Kingdom for you.  I-Am-That-I-Am is engaged with you in the here and now, but He  is sublimely above it.  Isis will corrode into the desert like the Sphinx, and the sun god will burn itself out, but I-Am-That-I-Am is forever.

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