Brownian Motion

The New York Times December 18, 2005 Sydney Leff, 104, Artist With an Eye for Music, Dies By MARGALIT FOX Sydney Leff, a commercial artist who was almost certainly the last surviving illustrator of sheet music from the golden age of Tin Pan Alley, died on Dec. 10 at his home in Ossining, N.Y. He was 104 and had lived for many years in West Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Leff's son-in-law Alfred Miller confirmed the death. In the 1920's and 30's, Mr. Leff designed and drew the covers for nearly 2,000 songs, from enduring standards like "Stormy Weather" and "Sweet Georgia Brown" to more ephemeral numbers like "Rock Me in a Cradle of Kalua" and "Baby Feet Go Pitter Patter Across My Floor." Associated in particular with Irving Berlin, Mr. Leff also illustrated the work of Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington and many others. In 2000, several of his covers, including his elegant illustration for "Underneath the Harlem Moon," by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, were featured in "New York: Songs of the City," an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. In the MP3 era, with consumers awash in sound, it is hard to remember that through the first half of the 20th century, new songs typically met the world as sheet music. Nearly every middle-class home had a parlor, and nearly every parlor had a piano. Before radios and record players became ubiquitous, families gathered round the piano to sing the latest numbers, available in any dime store. The music's illustrated cover was meant to sell the song. Mr. Leff's covers spanned the transition from the dripping tendrils of Art Nouveau to the clean lines and bold tonal contrasts of Deco. Not all of them are memorable; Mr. Leff, who earned about $25 a cover, sometimes drew three or four a day. A few, which depict black Americans in the stereotypical manner of the period, are badly dated. But much of Mr. Leff's work is striking even now. With their promise of romance, glamour and sophistication, Mr. Leff's best covers were small graphic dramas, neatly encapsulating the story inside. One of his most enticing images is for "Yes Sir! That's My Baby," by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson. On the cover, a fur-swathed young woman, wearing a plumed cloche and an alluringly short hemline, strides toward the viewer. Behind the woman lies a sleepy village, with white houses and a church spire. Was she fleeing her staid home for the lights of the city? Was she a scarlet woman, run out of town? Or had she arrived there to shake things up? Spend a quarter and find out, the cover seemed to say. Sydney Leff was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 18, 1901, and attended a vocational high school for the arts in Manhattan. A classmate and lifelong friend was Al Hirschfeld, the noted theater caricaturist. Though the two men had very different visual styles, both were concerned throughout their work with a controlled economy of line. Mr. Leff got into the song business in the early 1920's, after answering an ad for an illustrator placed by the songwriter Sam Coslow, who would later write "My Old Flame." Over the next two decades, Mr. Leff illustrated a range of standards, among them "Sophisticated Lady," with music by Ellington; "Ain't Misbehavin' " (Fats Waller and Harry Brooks); "Me and My Shadow" (Al Jolson and Dave Dreyer); "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue" (Ray Henderson); and Berlin's "Blue Skies." By the early 1940's, photographs had become the norm on sheet music covers, putting a generation of illustrators out of work. Mr. Leff went into advertising, working as an art director at several agencies. Mr. Leff's wife, Rita Zion Leff, an artist and illustrator, died in 1979. He is survived by two daughters, Joan Miller and Gail Raab, both artists living in Manhattan; four grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. The American sheet-music business, which began in Colonial times and was by the 19th century a thriving concern, is today mostly a thing of the past. But through the work of Mr. Leff and his colleagues, the era of spats and Champagne endures in miniature. "I knew when to hang out the moon and the stars," Mr. Leff told The New York Times in 2000. He also knew where to hang a hemline, studying the fashion plates to ensure that his ladies' attire was fetchingly up to date.

Squire Gersh Squirrel Nutkin Squeaky Fromme

If it has "sweet & low" in it, doesn't that make it a "new-fangled old-fashioned"?

Bricktop Josephine Baker Jim Bakker Alan Bakke Haku Maki Raccoon, Rocky

The "war" is not on Christmas, Oh-Willing-Tool-of-Right-Wing-Christian-Fundamentalism; the "war" is on those who for reasons of faith don't buy into the Christian fairytale.

Johnny Best Johnny B. Goode Harold Betters

Mary Hart Mary Hartman Louise Lasser Lassie Asta Lady Astor

Tootsie Rollo May Pop Hart

Happy B-day!!

The Doors Alexander Graham Bell Bill Ring Ring Lardner Demi Moore Belle Starr

Frances Scott Key Don Lock Robert Bolt

Happy Birthday, Jim. You add a lot to the board (16576 posts at last count).

Alfred Kinsey Disco Tex & the Sex-o-lettes Sir Monte Rock III Monte Monte Carlo Ponti Conte Candoli

HALL OF FAME!!! We are not worthy! Mel Torme The Velvelettes Phileas Fogg Phineas T. Bluster Dayton Allen Deputy Dawg

Wallace Jones Arthur Whetsol Freddy Jenkins

Fritz Lang Fritz Kreisler Aunt Fritzi

The New York Times December 13, 2005 Essay Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't. By CARL ZIMMER I drove into New Haven on a recent morning with a burning question on my mind. How did my daughter do against the chimpanzees? A month before, I had found a letter in the cubby of my daughter Charlotte at her preschool. It was from a graduate student at Yale asking for volunteers for a psychological study. The student, Derek Lyons, wanted to observe how 3- and 4-year-olds learn. I was curious, so I got in touch. Mr. Lyons explained how his study might shed light on human evolution. His study would build on a paper published in the July issue of the journal Animal Cognition by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps how to retrieve food from a box. The box was painted black and had a door on one side and a bolt running across the top. The food was hidden in a tube behind the door. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Before they opened the door, they pulled back the bolt and tapped the top of the box with a stick. Only after they had pushed the bolt back in place did they finally open the door and fish out the food. Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result, when the chimps were given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to retrieve the food. The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a strikingly different result. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door. The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping. The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it. The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons said. "It suggested something remarkable was going on." It was possible, however, that the results might come from a simple desire in the children just to play along. To see how deep this urge to overimitate went, Mr. Lyons came up with new experiments with the transparent box. He worked with a summer intern, Andrew Young, a senior at Carnegie Mellon, to build other puzzles using Tupperware, wire baskets and bits of wood. And Mr. Lyons planned out a much larger study, with 100 children. I was intrigued. I signed up Charlotte, and she participated in the study twice, first at the school and later at Mr. Lyons's lab. Charlotte didn't feel like talking about either experience beyond saying they were fun. As usual, she was more interested in talking about atoms and princesses. Mr. Lyons was more eager to talk. He invited me to go over Charlotte's performance at the Yale Cognition and Development Lab, led by Mr. Lyons's adviser, Frank C. Keil. Driving into New Haven for our meeting, I felt as if Charlotte had just taken some kind of interspecies SAT. It was silly, but I hoped that Charlotte would show the chimps that she could see cause and effect as well as they could. Score one for Homo sapiens. At first, she did. Mr. Lyons loaded a movie on his computer in which Charlotte eagerly listened to him talk about the transparent plastic box. He set it in front of her and asked her to retrieve the plastic turtle that he had just put inside. Rather than politely opening the front door, Charlotte grabbed the entire front side, ripped it open at its Velcro tabs and snatched the turtle. "I've got it!" she shouted. A chimp couldn't have done better, I thought. But at their second meeting, things changed. This time, Mr. Lyons had an undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes, show Charlotte how to open the box. Before she opened the front door, Ms. Barnes slid the bolt back across the top of the box and tapped on it needlessly. Charlotte imitated every irrelevant step. The box ripping had disappeared. I could almost hear the chimps hooting. Ms. Barnes showed Charlotte four other puzzles, and time after time she overimitated. When the movies were over, I wasn't sure what to say. "So how did she do?" I asked awkwardly. "She's pretty age-typical," Mr. Lyons said. Having watched 100 children, he agrees with Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten that children really do overimitate. He has found that it is very hard to get children not to. If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Charlotte's box ripping is proof of that. Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions. As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate. Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. "Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought," Mr. Lyons said. We don't appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well. "It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way," he added. "You have to create very artificial circumstances to see it." In a few years, I plan to explain this experience to Charlotte. I want her to know what I now know. That it's O.K. to lose to the chimps. In fact, it may be what makes us uniquely human.

Tram Bix Lang

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Harrison Ford Joe Dodge Abraham Lincoln Penny Marshall Buck and Bubbles Ginger Rogers

An interesting bit of history on maple sweetners: Consistent with the subsistence life style of many early settlers and colonists, maple syrup and maple sugar were the staple sweeteners. These products found their way into many prepared food products, along with use in preserving, drying and curing processes. Cane sugar was a rare and expensive commodity, generally not readily available. When it was available, it was treated as a luxury product. Maple products continued their dominance as important food sweeteners in the United States until the Civil War. Following the Civil War, improvements in transportation made cane sugar available in greater quantities and at lower prices than before. As a result, many nonfarm people switched to cane sugar. With a lessening of demand for maple sugar, farmers began to produce and market maple as syrup. Maple syrup was on the way toward becoming a specialty product. http://ohioline.osu.edu/b856/b856_6.html

I was never much good at algebra. Sorry.

Little Beaver Beaver Harris Harris Yulin William Harris Harrison Williams William Henry Harrison

Margo Channing Carol Channing Charlie Chan Chano Pozo Bebe Rebozo Red Ryder

Brooks Atkinson Eve Arden Bette Davis