Today in History: March 21

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Vivian Stanshall was born on this date in 1943. I published a tribute two years ago, “Vivian Stanshall: Not an Eccentric.”

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“A House Divided,” the final episode of the third season of the television drama, “Dallas,” aired 36 years years ago tonight on CBS. It ended with the shocking cliffhanger: J.R. Ewing is shot in the final seconds and left for dead. His assailant is not seen. In the long-unfolding plot of the series, the season, and the episode, the number of characters who might have wanted to see the grinningly evil J.R. Ewing shot numbered in double (perhaps triple) digits. For the next eight months, until the first episode of the next season, American media was obsessed with this question: “Who shot J.R.?” When that episode aired, on November 21, 1980, some 75% of all American televisions that were turned on that night were tuned to “Dallas” on CBS. The “shooting” (below the fold):
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Through a Window

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A heavy rain drowns each raindrop; a light rain, like the kind I saw in the woods out behind my house when I was a child, a light rain striking the leaves and branches of trees, further slowing their impact, that rain produces the strongest petrichor of all, the one that renders me into an seven-year-old noticing the world for the first time.
 
The lightest of rain after the driest of spells leads to the most argillaceous petrichor, which is the kind that humans smell as relief, the thought that things will start growing again.—”Petrichor,” Jan. 26, 2015

We called it “The Woods.” Well, I did. Sometimes, I referred to it as a “forest,” which it most certainly was not. Our backyard ended at a line of trees and dross beneath them; the lightly manicured, suburban lawn did not grow beyond that line, despite my teen-aged lawn mowing efforts to expand the lawn by clearing the dead leaves and branches away. That tight boundary made The Woods appear all the more elemental and foreign.
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Today in History: March 20

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Today is the vernal equinox, the first full day of SPRING! Above is Salvador Dalí’s “The First Days of Spring” (1929), which art historians consider to be one of his first forays into surrealism. It is small, for him, about two feet wide by 20 inches tall, so it may be larger on some peoples’ screens right now than it is in life. The painting is at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. (For some, the fact of a Salvador Dalí museum in St. Pete is surreal.)
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