Brownian Motion

Well, at least she answered the question.

Booty Wood Cootie Williams Doodie, Howdy

Lorena Bobbitt Cutty Cutshall Slash Jim Bowie Spearchucker Jones Lance Rentzel

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By August 27, 2007 Norman Cohn, Historian, Dies at 92 By DOUGLAS MARTIN Norman Cohn, a historian who influenced a generation of historians and social scientists with his insight that totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, chiefly Communism and Nazism, were propelled by mythologies associated with medieval apocalyptic movements, died on July 31 in Cambridge, England. He was 92. The cause was a degenerative heart condition, said his son, Nik Cohn. In highly detailed, laboriously researched studies that depended on his knowledge of many ancient languages, Mr. Cohn reached far back into history to illuminate subjects of compelling current interest from totalitarianism to anti-Semitism to repression of minorities. His gift for seeing old stories with new eyes shone in his book on the development and interpretation of the biblical story of Noah, “Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought.” His crisp writing drew praise. He was an unusual historian in that as a student he did not study history, but was trained as a linguist; he then put his knowledge of medieval Latin, Greek, Old French and High and Low German to work in his famously meticulous research. He also brought passion to his search for the roots of hatred: he had lost relatives in the Holocaust. The Times Literary Supplement included his seminal 1957 book, “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages,” in a 1995 list of the 100 nonfiction works with the greatest influence on how postwar Europeans perceive themselves. Other books on the list were by Camus, Sartre and Foucault. Beginning with the Crusades and concluding with 16th-century Anabaptists, Mr. Cohn showed in this book how the desire of the poor to improve their lot merged with prophecies of a final struggle between Christ and Antichrist, to be followed by the emergence of a new paradise. “In situations of mass disorientation and anxiety, traditional beliefs about a future golden age or messianic kingdom came to serve as vehicles for social aspirations and animosities,” he wrote. This vision, he suggested, passed among cultures and languages and from religious to secular discourse without losing its coherence or power to jolt the downtrodden to rise up. Messianic leaders like Stalin and Hitler appealed to the deep, biblically inspired belief that after intense struggle history would end, and an elect of believers would inherit paradise. “The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious,” he wrote. “For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still.” Mr. Cohn’s theory emerged from a decade of research into millennial movements like the Flagellants who massacred the Jews of Frankfurt in 1349, the 16th-century Anabaptist theocracy of Münster, Germany, and the Ranters of the English Civil War. Anthony Storr, a psychoanalyst who has written on historical figures, once called Mr. Cohn “the historian of important parts of history that other historians do not reach.” Norman Rufus Colin Cohn was born on Jan. 12, 1915, in London to a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother. He began studying linguistics at Gresham’s School in Holt, which he attended on a scholarship. He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, with first-class honors in medieval and modern languages. During World War II, Mr. Cohn was in the Intelligence Corps. Immediately after the war, in Vienna, he interrogated members of the SS and met refugees fleeing Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. He then lectured in French at the University of Glasgow from 1946 to 1951. There, he began the millennium book, which took him a decade to complete and has been translated into at least 11 languages. Mr. Cohn went on to teach at universities in Ireland, Britain, the United States and Canada. In 1966, he published “Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” He showed how ancient myths coalesced with modern ideologies to give prominence to a racist tract proved to be a hoax. In 1975, he published “Europe’s Inner Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt,” which argued there was no credible evidence behind the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries. He found precursors to the witch hysteria in the persecution of early Christians by the Romans and elsewhere. His “Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith” (1993) plowed deeper into the roots of belief in an apocalyptic end of time, finding that the Iranian prophet Zoroaster laid the groundwork for the phenomenon. Older conceptions of time, like the Egyptian and Mesopotamian, did not lead inexorably to a final end, he said. In 1996, Mr. Cohn published “Noah’s Flood,” which explored the flood story in the context of scientific progress. Mr. Cohn was married to Vera Broido, an author and daughter of Menshevik revolutionaries in Russia, from 1941 until her death in 2004. In addition to his son from that marriage, he is survived by his wife, Marina Voikhanskaya. Mr. Cohn summarized his work by explaining that it was all about the same phenomenon, “the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil.” He wrote, “It occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.”

Richard the Lion-Hearted Bert Lahr Rory Calhoun

Nap Lajoie Cap Anson Harry the Hat Walker

Sir Alf Ramsey Jimmy Greaves Nobby Stiles Knobby Totah Holly Hobbie Dobby

Conor Cruise O'Brien Tom Cruise Penelope Cruz

The New York Times August 20, 2007 Joybubbles, 58, Peter Pan of Phone Hackers, Dies By DOUGLAS MARTIN Joybubbles (the legal name of the former Joe Engressia since 1991), a blind genius with perfect pitch who accidentally found he could make free phone calls by whistling tones and went on to play a pivotal role in the 1970s subculture of “phone phreaks,” died on Aug. 8 in Minneapolis. He was 58, though he had chosen in 1988 to remain 5 forever, and had the toys and teddy bears to prove it. The cause of death has not been determined, said Steven Gibb, a friend and the executor of the Joybubbles estate. Joybubbles, who was blind at birth, was a famous part of what began as a scattered, socially awkward group of precocious teens and post-teens fascinated with exploring the phone system. It could then be seen as the world’s biggest, most complex, most interesting computer, and foiling the phone system passed for high-tech high jinks in the ’70s. “It was the only game in town if you wanted to play with a computer,” said Phil Lapsley, who is writing a book on the phone phreaks. Later, other blind whistlers appeared, but in 1957, Joybubbles may have been the first person to whistle his way into the heart of Ma Bell. Phreaks were precursors of today’s computer hackers, and, like some of them, Joybubbles ran afoul of the law. Not a few phreaks were computer pioneers, including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, founders of Apple. Joybubbles felt that being abused at a school for the blind and being pushed by his mother to live up to his 172 I.Q. had robbed him of childhood. So he amassed piles of toys, Jack and Jill magazines and imaginary friends, and he took a name he said made people smile. But he never lost his ardor for phones, and old phone phreaks and younger would-have-beens kept calling. Joybubbles loved the phone company, reported problems he had illegally discovered and even said he had planned his own arrest on fraud charges to get a phone job. And so he did, twice. Well before the mid-1970s, when digitalization ended the tone-based system, Joybubbles had stopped stealing calls. But he was already a legend: he had phoned around the world, talking into one phone and listening to himself on another. In an article in Esquire in 1971, the writer Ron Rosenbaum called Joybubbles the catalyst uniting disparate phreaks. Particularly after news accounts of his suspension from college in 1968 and conviction in 1971 for phone violations, he became a nerve center of the movement. “Every night he sits like a sightless spider in his little apartment receiving messages from every tendril of its web,” Mr. Rosenbaum wrote. Josef Carl Engressia Jr. was born May 25, 1949, and moved often because his father was a school-picture photographer. At 4 or 5, he learned to dial by using the hookswitch like a telegraph key. Four years later, he discovered that he could disconnect a call by whistling. He found this out when he imitated a sound in the background on a long-distance call and the line cut off. It turned out that his whistle precisely replicated a crucial phone company signal, a 2,600-cycles-per-second tone. Joybubbles’s parents had no phone for five years because of their son’s obsession. Later, his mother encouraged it by reading him technical books. His high school yearbook photo showed him in a phone booth. By the time he was a student at the University of South Florida, Joybubbles was dialing toll-free or nonworking numbers to reach a distant switching point. Unbeknownst to telephone operators, he could use sounds to dial another number, free. He could then jump anywhere in the phone system. He was disconnected from college after being caught making calls for friends at $1 a call. In 1971, he moved to Memphis, where he was convicted of phone fraud. In Millington, Tenn., he was hired to clean phones, a job he hated. In 1975, he moved to Denver to ferret out problems in Mountain Bell’s network. He tired of that and moved to Minneapolis on June 12, 1982, partly because that date’s numerical representation of 6-12 is the same as the city’s area code. He advertised for people yearning to discuss things telephonic and weaved a web of phone lines to accommodate them. He lived on Social Security disability payments and part-time jobs like letting university agriculture researchers use his superb sense of smell to investigate how to control the odor of hog excrement. Joybubbles is survived by his mother, Esther Engressia, and his sister, Toni Engressia, both of Homestead, Fla. His second life as a youngster included becoming a minister in his own Church of Eternal Childhood and collecting tapes of every “Mr. Rogers” episode. When asked why Mr. Rogers mattered, he said: “When you’re playing and you’re just you, powerful things happen.”

August 17, 2007, 5:30 pm The Compact Disc Turns 25 By Patrick J. Lyons Tags: history, music, techology CD Philips manufactured the first compact disc on this date in 1982, Slashdot and others note. If history is any guide, that makes the format late-middle-aged and nearing retirement, at least as a commercial music medium. To review: Wax cylinders: 1880’s to 1910’s Edison’s original audio recording medium was dominant for about 30 years, first in a soft version you could shave and re-record at home and later in a hard plastic permanent recording. Disc records: 1910’s to 1940’s More convenient than cylinders to make, sell and play, 78-rpm discs of wax or acetate with a single selection on a side were the dominant form for about 30 years. Long-playing discs: 1940’s to 1970’s Vinyl LP’s could play up to 30 minutes of music a side in high fidelity; they quickly replaced 78’s and gradually eclipsed 45-rpm singles, remaining dominant for about 30 years. Cassettes: 1960’s to 1990’s Magnetic recording comes into its own in a handy format that you can play in the car; heyday lasts about 30 years. Eight-tracks: 1965 to 1988 No rewinding, but no home recording either, and a horsy image; an evolutionary dead end that nonetheless remains in production for about 23 years. Compact discs: 1980’s to 2000’s? Durable, digital, cheap and easy to make, ship, store and sell, the CD overtakes cassettes, but after two decades sales begin to erode with the advent of online file sharing and the sale of music downloads for MP3 players. Sure looks like a pattern. Vinyl discs and prerecorded cassettes haven’t completely disappeared; a handful are still produced for people who like the format. (Vinyl fans are adamant that their analog format still delivers the highest fidelity and often pay huge sums for high-end playback equipment.) CDs will probably stick around awhile after their heyday, too, not least because they also serve as a stable, useful data medium and many home computers can burn them. But the music business is changing profoundly — the “record business” hardly seems like a synonym any more — and the CD may turn out to be the last of the big-time physical recording formats. From here on, it may all just be bits. * Link * E-mail Th

Merle Watson Merle Travis Travis McGee

Storm Jameson Sebastian Younger Katrina

Harriet Tubman Heinrich Boll Bob Dishy Neal & Bob Bob Crosby Neal Armstrong Neil the Ethical Werewolf Remus Lupin Tonks

My grandfather told me about it.

Jimmy Durante Louis Prima Nat King Cole

12 stories? Three times? Croc of shit.

The Oakland Raiders Paul Revere & the Raiders Bill Hader Hadrian Adrian Rollini Arthur Marx

Timothy Dwight Mr. Right The Brothers Wright

Marco Polo Danny Polo Dolo Coker

Hayes Alvis Rutherford B. Hayes Helen Hayes

Budd Johnson Billy Budd Billy Batson Bat Masterson Masters & Johnson Johnson & Johnson

Leonard Bernstein Lennie Tristano Lenny Bruce Donal Lunny Lonnie Johnson Lanie Kazan