Today in History: July 25

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

From July 25, 1946, to July 25, 1956, the two men built one of the hottest acts in show business: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis became a top nightclub attraction, and the two were television stars, radio stars, and they made 17 movies together in those 10 years.

They started out as show business acquaintances. Seventy years ago tonight, a singer booked to work with Jerry Lewis at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, New Jersey, bailed out, and Lewis suggested Martin as a replacement. Martin was a decade older than Lewis, smooth on stage, a professional who had not yet found his audience. The two tried a standard “comedy and music” formula with no meaningful interaction, and the audience was memorably unmoved. The club owner threatened to fire them.
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Memories of the Future

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In his Confessions, St. Augustine writes, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.” He decides that time is an idea, unique to humans, and also unique in that we can simultaneously grasp the past in memory, the present by attention, and the future by expectation. In our minds, but only there, we are not locked to one perception of one reality.

Earlier, I deleted everything that I had written up to that point by dragging my unbuttoned shirtsleeve across my laptop’s touchpad while reaching for my coffee. (No, I can not replicate the results in an experiment; yes, like an idiot, I have attempted to replicate these results in an experiment.) In a feat of memory, I retyped all that I had written to that point: simultaneously, I remembered what I had written, was super-present and typed it attentively in the moment, and I lived in expectation of a future in which I regularly saved my work, a lesson I first learned, oh, 20 years ago.

I was in three specific time-experiences at once, and each one sucked.
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Today in History: July 24

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Machu Picchu, the ancient Incan settlement high in the Peruvian mountains, was (re)discovered by American Hiram Bingham (who was later a U.S. Senator) on this date in 1911.

Only the locals knew that something had been there once upon a time, and they had continued to use the agricultural terraces the Incans had started to use in the 1400s, but the buildings had been forgotten and overtaken by the jungle.
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