Pop History Moment: A Royal Massacre In Nepal

On this day in 2001 Prince Dipendra, the Crown Prince of Nepal, killed most of his family before turning the gun on himself at a banquet being held in the Narayanhity Royal Palace in the Nepali capital of Kathmandu. Despite his attempted suicide, Prince Dipendra lingered on life support for three days, during which time he was the de facto King of Nepal. He was eventually succeeded by his uncle Gyanendra.

Slain by Prince Dipendra in the massacre were his father King Birendra, mother Queen Aishwarya, brother Prince Nirajan, sister Princess Shruti, former Prince Dhirendra (a younger brother who had renounced his title), the King's cousin Princess Jayanti, aunts Princess Shanti and Princess Sharada, and Princess Sharada's husband Kumar Khadga as well as an unspecified number of servants. Wounded were another aunt Princess Shova, Princess Shruti's husband Kumar Gorakh, Princess (now Queen) Komal, another of King Birendra's cousins Ketaki Chester, and Gyanendra's tearaway son and heir Prince Paras.

The whys and the wherefores of the massacre may never be accounted for; among the few survivors there are no tattle-tales and a book entitled Raktakunda (recently published in Nepal and purporting to be an eyewitness account) is said to be riddled with inconsistencies and has been labelled a 'fairytale'. The official line, though, is that Prince Dipendra had been forbidden to marry the woman he wanted, Devyani Rana; the conspiracies say that Gyanendra had engineered the massacre to restore himself to the throne*, that Dipendra hadn't even been the shooter, that the reason Gyanendra was spared is that he was conveniently in another part of the kingdom at the time, and on and on...

Only the results, as senseless as they are, seem to make any sense; anyway, what's done is done, and the reasons why scarcely matter any more. More than just a family died that day, though, but an entire royal house; the Shah Dynasty was abolished in May 2008, four days shy of the seventh anniversary of the massacre, having reigned since September 1768 and unable to regain the people's confidence following the tragedy that befell them.

The entire story is told in Amy Willesee and Mark Whittaker's excellent book Love and Death in Kathmandu: A Strange Tale of Royal Murder. Part history tome, part journalistic expose, part travelogue, the book follows the Australian marrieds as they travel through the famously secretive mountain kingdom in search of answers. Along the way they encounter Chinese Maoists bent on destroying the people's love of their King by hook or by crook, a history of a royal family drenched in blood from way back, and strangely eerie astrological predictions of the disaster to come in a land which takes it's astrology very seriously, as well as a cast of characters rendered unforgettable merely by the fact that they actually exist, including a young woman who was briefly the Hindu goddess Kumari, despite being a Buddhist herself.

*Gyanendra had served as King before, from November 1950 to January 1951, while his grandfather King Tribhuvan was briefly in exile, and was said to be unhappy at having to renounce his position after Tribhuvan's return.
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POPnews - June 1st

[Lou Gehrig was still five years away from considering himself the luckiest man in baseball when millions of cards just like these found their way into millions of grubby little hands; the cause he's stumping for here, the Knot Hole League, no longer seems to exist, while its mantle has been taken up by the Knothole Gang (which encourages attendance at minor league games by families with preteens) and of course by the Little League.]

193 CE - Roman Emperor Didius Julianus was assassinated just 64 days after succeeding Pertinax, making him the second to serve during the Year of the Five Emperors. He himself was succeeded by Septimius Severus, and I think you can guess how that went...

1215 - Beijing - then under the control of the Jurchen Emperor Xuanzong of Jin - was captured by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, ending the Battle of Beijing.

1283 - Duke Rudolph II of Austria waived his right to the duchies of Austria and Styria under the terms of the Treaty of Rheinfelden.

1495 - Friar John Cor recorded the first known batch of scotch whisky.

1533 - Anne Boleyn was crowned Queen of England in a lavish ceremony at Westminster Abbey.

1660 - Quaker Mary Dyer was hanged for defying a law banning those of her faith from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Because that's what Jesus would have done.

1779 - During the American Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold was court-martialed for malfeasance.  From an American perspective, however, the worst was yet to come; the event which made his name synonymous with treason - the so-called Betrayal at West Point - didn't occur until July 1780.

1792 - Kentucky became the 15th US state.

1796 - Tennessee became the 16th US state.

1831 - James Clark Ross discovered the North Magnetic Pole.

1868 - The Treaty of Bosque Redondo was signed at Fort Sumner, allowing the Navajo to return to their lands in Arizona and New Mexico.

1879 - France's Prince Imperial Napoleon Eugene was killed in battle during the Anglo-Zulu War, thwarting any hope the Bonaparte Dynasty might have had about regaining the throne once held by his father, Napoleon III. The only child of the king and his famous consort Eugénie, the young man still referred to as Napoleon IV in monarchist circles, was seemingly dogged by a death wish, having also come under fire during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Still, what's an heir in exile to do? Well, he could have married Queen Victoria's youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, or even the Spanish infanta María del Pilar, daughter of Queen Isabella II... Instead he enrolled in the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, following which he accepted a commission into the Royal Artillery, and went and got his fool self blasted to bits.

1922 - The Royal Ulster Constabulary was founded, headquartered in Belfast.

1925 - Owing to a change in lineup by New York Yankees manager Miller Huggins, Lou Gehrig took to the field as a pinch hitter for Paul 'Pee Wee' Wanninger, whereupon he proceeded to play the first in a streak of 2,130 consecutive games; at 14 years' duration, it would be the longest such feat of endurance in professional baseball history until it was broken by Cal Ripken Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles in September 1995.

1941 - Battle of Crete - codenamed Unternehmen Merkur, or Operation Mercury - ended as Crete capitulated to Nazi Germany 12 days after the invasion by the 7th Flieger Division began.

1943 - British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 777 was shot down over the Bay of Biscay by 8 German Junkers Ju 88s, killing all 17 passengers and crew aboard, including actor Leslie Howard; almost immediately the crash led to speculation that the aircraft was downed in an attempt to kill British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but in fact the Luftwaffe may have actually been gunning for Howard, who was not only an effective propaganda tool and Jewish, but may have been a British spy as well. Howard's early death, while cutting his career short, seems to have preserved the films he'd already made - including such beloved cinematic spectacles as Of Human Bondage (1934), The Petrified Forest (1936), and Gone with the Wind (1939) - in a kind of sentimental amber.

1974 - At the so-called Flixborough disaster an explosion at a chemical plant in the north of England killed 28 people.

1980 - Ted Turner's Cable News Network began broadcasting, thus beginning both the 24-hour news cycle and the stupidification of the media continued to this day by such outlets as Fox.

2001 - During the Dolphinarium massacre a Hamas suicide bomber named Hassan Khutari killed 21 people and injured more than 100 at a youth disco in Tel Aviv.
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Pop History Moment: The Execution of Adolf Eichmann

On this day in 1962 Adolf Eichmann was hanged at a prison in the Israeli city of Ramla for crimes against humanity he committed during the Second World War, specifically in regards to his role in establishing the concentration camps; his was the only civil execution ever carried out in the beleaguered country, which does not generally use the death penalty.  Eichmann's capture - in Buenos Aires in May 1960 - set off a political firestorm both around the world and in Argentina, where the far-right extremist group Tacuara Nationalist Movement took to the streets with an organized campaign of terrorism in reaction.  Following his execution Eichmann was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean beyond Israel's territorial limit, in order to ensure that the place of his burial would not become a shrine to neo-Nazis.

Journalist Hannah Arendt wrote dispatches to The New Yorker about Eichmann's trial and execution, which she later compiled into a book, entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem (and which she pointedly subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil).  Arendt's research revealed no particular anti-Semitism or zeal in Eichmann's personality*, other than a willingness to follow orders; needless to say, her theory regarding the banality of evil remains a controversial one...

*A point disputed by Eichmann scholar David Cesarani.
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"Turn The Beat Around" by Vicki Sue Robinson

The disco era seems to have had more than its fair share of one-hit wonders; ah, but what hits they were! It's difficult to explain to people who can't or won't appreciate disco - and I've already expended enough breath in the defense of gay folk music to have inflated a sizable blimp - so I will spare the delicate sensibilities of my readers (not to mention my own lungs) any further rhetoric on my part.

This particular tune is called Turn the Beat Around, and was made famous by Vicki Sue Robinson; for that special camp flavour, the video is slightly out of synch, just like most of the queens who used to sashay this around countless dance floors ten thousand midnights ago. Be thankful, then, that unlike them her dress is on straight, she isn't grinding her teeth, and her makeup isn't visible from space.

Today would have been Ms. Robinson's 56th birthday; alas, she was taken far too soon, dying of cancer in April 2000, just as her career was experiencing a resurgence when disco came back into fashion as part of the retro craze of the mid-1990s. Thanks to modern technology, though, some part of her will always be with us - just like it can be 1976 whenever we want, and in the best possible way as well: in safe, three minute doses.
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"O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman

O CAPTAIN! my Captain, our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
The arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen Cold and Dead.

NOTE: In addition to When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, Walt Whitman wrote O Captain! My Captain! as an elegy to slain President Abraham Lincoln.
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In Memoriam: Walt Whitman

His was the first really American poetry; prior to the self-publication of his masterwork Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman in 1855, most writers (as was the case with painters and performers of various kinds) still looked to Europe for their inspiration, conventions, and very often their audience as well...

Whitman helped to change all that, by giving his poetry a uniquely American voice; proof that he was really on to something was the criticism his work drew, although it would have been less obvious to cultural workers then than it is now that controversy in one generation usually means acclaim in the next. Certainly, Whitman had many wildly popular contemporaries who are now nearly forgotten (especially among poets) while his own fame - and, more importantly, the fame of his work - endures. Yet for every bluestocking who reviled his verse as obscene, there came to be a growing crowd who rejoiced in it, among the more famous of them Ralph Waldo Emerson. Condemnation, after all, is just a judgemental form of PR.

Born on this day in 1819, as a young man Whitman worked a variety of jobs, frequently on newspapers or in print shops of one kind or another. His affection for and affinity with Nature appears to have developed around this time, but it's impossible to know much about him for sure; as an older man, with his fame fully grown, Whitman cropped, re-arranged, and even outright invented his past to suit his future - even unto frequently contradicting himself - in what can only be considered a deliberate act of obfuscation.

What Whitman was hiding can only be deduced; judging by the tenor of his poetry, it's safe to say that sexual attraction to (and possibly even sexual experiences with) men are likely the principal targets of his personal revisionism. Yet even as he burned diaries and notebooks, he more or less left his poetry intact, despite frequent revisions* to the text as a whole, and for that we can be grateful.

*Between six and nine versions of Leaves of Grass were published, depending on which scholarly account is considered.
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"Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin

How better to celebrate the life of John Bonham (born on this day in 1948) than to show him doing what he did best - playing live before a stadium filled with screaming fans...

Black Dog was the first single from Led Zeppelin IV, one of the most successful albums of the rock era; released in 1971 with Misty Mountain Hop as its B-side, the title does not refer to depression (which is occasionally called the Black Dog) but to a Labrador retriever who took up residence in the studio at Headley Grange where the album was recorded. Despite this, the lyrics have nothing to do with a black dog at all, but are merely the product of Robert Plant at his most obtuse.
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Remembering... John Bonham

By the time John Bonham - born on this day in 1948 - received his first drum kit at the age of fifteen he'd already been at it, banging out beats on coffee tins and anything else he could find, for a decade. Without a single lesson, but with an intuitive feel for music, he became the template by which every other rock drummer who came after him would be measured...

Despite his reluctance to join Led Zeppelin, from the first time they played together Bonham (along with bandmates Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones) knew they'd captured magic. Over a dozen years and as many albums together - not to mention hundreds of thousands of miles on the road and untold number of shows - they were proven right.

Bonham's tragic death in September 1980 proved to be the death of the band, and for many years they refused all offers to reunite; the surviving members were finally convinced to headline a one-off charity concert in tribute to Ahmet Ertegün at London's O2 Arena in December 2007. On drums was Jason Bonham, son of the late John Bonham; critics and fans alike raved, amazed that the band's power to rock was still intact after so many years apart, and with its once-furiously beating heart having been so successfully transplanted.
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In Memoriam: Rainier III

In 1955 Rainier III was an obscure princeling, ruling over a tiny country known mainly to that class of person who owned an ocean-going yacht and could afford to throw tens of thousands of francs every night at a baccarat table; one Cannes Film Festival, one fateful meeting, and two royal weddings later he's the husband of one of the most beautiful and glamourous movie stars of all time, suddenly an international celebrity in his own right, and yet still as obscure as ever.

It may be because he was naturally reserved; after all, it's a wise monarch who keeps his own counsel. It is not the custom of rulers to give interviews, and so even though he was known to give a few, these were generally short on personal detail and long on extolling the virtues of Monaco as a place to do business. Or it may be that given the circumstances of his family's past he relied on reticence to keep it all under wraps.

Born on this day in 1923, the story of how he came to the throne is a long and convoluted one; the family tree of the House of Grimaldi has many rotten roots, and would not even exist today had it not been for several major grafts over the years. Nevertheless, in 1949 when his grandfather Louis II died, Rainier's legitimized mother Princess Charlotte ceded her succession rights to her son, who became Rainier III.

During the 56 years of his reign, His Serene Highness turned the fortunes of his principality around as surely as if they were on a roulette wheel; from a neglected possession 95% reliant on gambling at the outset, Monaco became a centre of international banking, a tax haven and über-resort whose coffers at the time of his death in April 2005 were only 3% enriched by the casino. Still, for all his business acumen, Rainier never could contain the Grimaldi abandon in his children... His son and heir (the current Albert II) can't seem to stop impregnating women out of wedlock, and his daughters Princess Caroline and Princess Stéphanie seemingly never met a playboy they didn't like, although the former's second marriage - to Stefano Casiraghi - may one day save the realm by providing it an heir.

For all the headaches his children must have provided, the worst day of his reign had to be that terrible day in September 1982 when Princess Grace suffered a stroke while driving, and plunged her Land Rover down a ravine, killing her; his grief was much in evidence at her funeral in Saint Nicholas Cathedral, and despite three decades' worth of tabloid rumours that theirs was more a business arrangement than a marriage, on that day this was a man whose ashen face and defeated posture belied a loss far greater than that of a colleague.

Rainier never remarried; he died in April 2005, aged 81, and was buried next to his beloved...
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"It's Like That (That's Just The Way It Is)" by Run-D.M.C.

It's a sad fact of our life here at the Pop Culture Institute that a full half of our traffic comes from approximately five posts; as much as a quarter of it, in fact - by far the largest percentage of any single post - comes as a result of my having rather innocently posted this video on January 21st of 2009, on what would have been the birthday of Jam-Master Jay.

Accordingly, today is Darryl McDaniels' birthday (he's the DMC in Run-D.M.C., dontcha know?) and so here it is again, utterly without apology; I can guarantee you, on Joseph 'Run' Simmons' birthday in November you will see it again, and on and on down through the years. Actually, the song itself has had such an interesting life, I may yet post it a fourth time, in March, on the anniversary of the date it was released.

It's Like That first appeared on Run-D.M.C.'s self-titled debut album in 1984; by the time the video was produced in 1997 the song had been remixed (by DJ Jason Nevins*) into the version you see here. And a decade later still I get between 5 and 15 hits every day because of it - hits from all over the world, not just the hip-hop capitals of New York and LA but Saudi Arabia and Thailand and Slovenia even. In a very real way, I see proof of this song uniting disparate peoples from around the globe every time I log onto Site Meter, making this song the embodiment of what the Pop Culture Institute is trying to achieve.

*I'm still looking into when his birthday is, so I can publish it a fifth time annually. Seriously, I may be a comment whore, but I'll take hits like Hendrix if that's all I get.
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POPnews - May 31st

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Pop History Moment: The Lincoln Memorial Was Dedicated

On this day in 1922 the Lincoln Memorial - which had been designed by Henry Bacon after the Temple of Zeus at Olympia - was dedicated in Washington, DC; the sculptor on the project was Daniel Chester French, and the interior murals were executed by Jules Guerin. The Lincoln Memorial's position offers it sweeping views of both the National Mall and the Potomac River, and it shares the opposite view of the Reflecting Pool from the Washington Monument. Within are engraved the words of the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's second inaugural address.

So much more than merely a monument to the 16th President of the United States, the Lincoln Memorial is also a powerful sigil; it's image appears - pointedly, in my opinion - on the reverse of America's only brown money (the penny*), and at times of crisis Americans** have gone to find solace there, especially during the Civil Rights Movement. Both Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King, Jr. at different times appeared with the soaring pillars and monumental statue of the Great Emancipator behind them to remind their country of the promise of freedom made by him, the same promise which cost Lincoln his life.

Ironically, the memorial to one of the greatest Presidents was dedicated during the Administration of one of the worst - Warren G. Harding - although thankfully he didn't attend the dedication ceremony, which was handled by former President and then-Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Howard Taft; in the crowd that day was the only surviving child of President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, Robert Todd Lincoln.

*Not to mention its 21st Century equivalent, the $5 bill.
**Particularly those of the penny-coloured persuasion.
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POPnews - May 30th

[A somewhat smaller version of Tsao Tsing-yuan's Goddess of Democracy lives on in the beautifully landscaped grounds of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, having been erected there by that institution's Alma Mater Society; it was built in honour of the one which temporarily resided in Beijing's Tiananmen Square during the nascent pro-democracy movement which tried to emerge in China in 1989 and which Chinese officials brutally quashed, then spent the next twenty years attempting to expunge from the historical record. Similar replicas exist in Hong Kong's Victoria Park, in Portsmouth Square in San Francisco's Chinatown, on the grounds of the campus of York University in Toronto, at the University of Calgary, at Freedom Park in Arlington, and at the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, DC.]
1416 - The Council of Constance, called by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund - a supporter of Antipope John XXIII - ordered Jerome of Prague burned at the stake following his trial for heresy. Because that's what Jesus would have done.

1431 - 19-year-old Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen.

1434 - At the end of the Hussite Wars, during the Battle of Lipany, Utraquist forces led by Diviš Bořek of Miletínek defeated and almost annihilated the Taborite forces of Prokop the Great. I have no idea what it means, but I just loved typing it...

1536 - England's King Henry VIII married Jane Seymour, who had previously been a lady-in-waiting to his first two wives, the cast-off Katherine of Aragon and the now-headless Anne Boleyn.

1574 - Henri III became King of France following the death of his brother Charles IX.

1635 - Following the Thirty Years' War the Peace of Prague was signed.

1806 - Andrew Jackson (the future 7th President of the United States) killed Charles Dickinson in a duel after he'd accused Jackson's wife Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson of bigamy - an accusation which may, in fact, have been technically accurate. Dickinson was the only man Jackson ever managed to kill, despite his having taken part in 13 duels; he was himself hit in the ribs, but made a speedy recovery and, despite being 39 years old at the time, in fact lived another 40 years.

1814 - At the end of the War of the Sixth Coalition the Treaty of Paris was signed, returning French borders to their 1792 extent, where they were prior to the Napoleonic Wars.

1854 - The Kansas-Nebraska Act became law, establishing (oddly enough) the US territories of Nebraska and Kansas in addition to repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

1876 - Abd-ul-Aziz, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, was deposed and succeeded by his nephew Murat V.

1883 - A rumor that the Brooklyn Bridge was about to collapse caused a stampede which led to the  trampling deaths of twelve people.

1911 - At the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the first Indianapolis 500 ended with Ray Harroun in his Marmon Wasp becoming the first winner of the 500-mile auto race.

1914 - The new and then-largest Cunard ocean liner RMS Aquitania - displacing 45,647 tons - sailed on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York City.

1922 - The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated by former President and then-current Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft.

1948 - A dike along the flooding Columbia River in Oregon broke, obliterating the town of Vanport within minutes; in all fifteen people died and tens of thousands were left homeless.

1953 - New Zealand's Auckland Harbour Bridge was officially opened by Prime Minister Sidney Holland, joining Saint Marys Bay to Northcote.

1971 - The Mariner program's Mariner 9 was launched to map 70% of the surface of Mars, and to study temporal changes in the atmosphere and surface of the planet.

1972 - The Angry Brigade went on trial over a series of 25 bombings throughout Britain.

1989 - The 33-foot high Goddess of Democracy statue was unveiled in Beijing's Tiananmen Square by student demonstrators during a well-publicized series of pro-democracy protests there.
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"Everything My Heart Desires" by Adam Rickitt

At first it was just a song I liked. Then, one day, curiosity got the better of me*, and I went looking for a picture of its singer - just to help me put a face to a name, you understand; goodness knows, I liked what I saw well enough - but then, that's no surprise, since British pop music has recently developed a disdain for uggos which is practically American. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before I saw that it was his birthday and went looking for the video of the song I liked sung by the guy I thought was cute so I could post it here. And that's when it started to get weird...

That's when I read the bio of Adam Rickitt - expecting the usual scant detail and dull sameness one gleans from the bumf of most pop tarts - and stumbled upon a story worthy of the greatest writer, or even me. The discovery of a middle class upbringing didn't surprise me, but the revelations that he went through a bout of bulimia did. Even the appearance on Coronation Street (in which he was the second actor to play Nick Tilsley) made sense, as the soap once famous for its old boots and crochety coots inexorably drifts into a showcase for any pretty face capable of sounding even vaguely Mancunian**.

So given the face and the visible abs and the eating disorder and the performance of pop music - plus the fact that as Nick Tilsley he was responsible for Corrie's first all-male liplock (with Todd Grimshaw, played by Bruno Langley) - that he had once upon a time courted the gay community to establish his fan base sort of made sense. His involvement with the Conservative Party, though, only fits because Rickitt himself seems to be a raging closet case; then again, he may just be a typical actor, which means he's definitely a raging closet case.

Rickitt's flirtation with politics***, though, seems to have been even shorter than his pop career, which spawned a six record deal with Polydor, one actual album (2000's ironically titled Good Times) and three singles - each with less impact than the previous one, this being the second of them - following which he was unceremoniously dropped by his label. A whirl through the shallow morass of reality television seems to have encouraged him to decamp to New Zealand, where he's currently appearing on television as Kieran Mitchell in the drama Shortland Street. Since his emigration he's been accused of shoplifting from an Auckland grocery store.

All of which leads me to think a) we haven't heard the last of Adam Rickitt, and b) what batshit crazy thing is he going to do next? Only time - and the Pop Culture Institute - will tell...

*Either that or I was high.
**Although, to be fair, Christopher Quinten - who played Brian Tilsley in the 1970s and 80s - was pretty hot. Not Michael Le Vell (Kevin Webster) hot; then again I never was that fond of blondes. But I digress...
**He was a prospective parliamentary candidate for the Tories in the Cheshire riding of Macclesfield near where he was raised; an outcry by the riding's longtime MP Sir Nicholas Winterton put a swift end to that.
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"You Can Sleep While I Drive" by Melissa Etheridge

From her second album, Brave and Crazy - released all the way back in 1989 - comes You Can Sleep While I Drive, which remains one of my all-time favourite love songs (even despite the automobile imagery). It's a sign of Melissa Etheridge's virtuosity that the song - even though obviously female-centered - speaks that universal urge, the urge to be needed and loved, so eloquently.
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Happy Birthday Melissa Etheridge

Melissa Etheridge is right to give thanks; thanks to medical science, good fortune, and a legion of well-wishers, the cancer she was diagnosed with in October 2004 is gone. Two years later her partner Tammy Lynn Michaels gave birth to Etheridge's third and fourth children, a boy and a girl; Etheridge, of course, already had two children with her longtime partner Julie Cypher.  Etheridge and Cypher separated in September 2000 while Etheridge and Michaels parted ways in April 2010.

Etheridge's eleven studio albums run a fairly narrow gamut - bluesy rockers, heartfelt ballads - but do so in a way that is so uniquely her own, so sincere (without the overarching earnestness of, say, the Indigo Girls) that each new one feels like an old friend even before it's out of the plastic. With a smoky voice that is all her own, Melissa Etheridge gets her fans the old-fashioned way: she earns them.
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In Memoriam: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

More words have been written about John F. Kennedy - born on this day in 1917 - than any of us could read in a lifetime; the thirty-fifth President of the United States has been praised, vilified, and everything in between. There have been those who criticized his private peccadilloes to deflect attention from their own personal malfeasance, and those who like to claim that because he liked to chase skirt he was something less than he was: a dreamer.

From the Peace Corps to the Space Program, Kennedy had big dreams, forceful dreams, the kind that got into people's heads and helped them to dream as well. History has been gradually rewriting the role he played in the escalation of the Vietnam War and his role in the Bay of Pigs Invasion; but even history has a hard time getting past whether or not (or even how often) he had sex with Marilyn Monroe. History, after all, is just the stories we tell each other about our shared past - and that is a pretty good story.

Either way, the life that officially ended with Lee Harvey Oswald's bullet gave birth to the legend of JFK, a larger than life figure who, because of his early death, now gets to be all things to all people. To the Right he's a demon, specifically because he was handsome and populist and gave people hope (which is in direct contravention of Republican ideology), to the Left he's nothing short of a secular saint to be evoked rhetorically at will, and to us here in the Centre he may just be the last person to embody what made the United States of America great - not America, not States, but United...
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"Centipede" by Rebbie Jackson

Few people seem to remember Rebbie Jackson, and even fewer her 1984 hit Centipede - but I sure do! In fact, it's on my iPod as we speak. The song was produced by her younger brother Michael Jackson, and features a wild video, in which the eldest Jackson sibling works her red dress for all it's worth.

It's her birthday today, and I'd wish her one, except she's a Jehovah's Witness, and as such doesn't celebrate birthdays; still, I couldn't resist the urge to post this video today.
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Pop History Moment: The Conquest Of Everest

On this day in 1953 New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first known people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, also known as Chomolungma; the mountain is frequently cited as the highest in the world, and indeed its summit is the highest land elevation above sea level. It was named for George Everest, at one time the surveyor-general of India*.

Hillary and Norgay attained the summit at 11:30 AM local time and, most importantly, they later made a safe descent. There has been debate in the mountaineering community whether George Mallory and Andrew Irvine had in fact beaten them to the summit 29 years earlier; if they did they certainly never lived to tell about it.

News of the conquest of Mount Everest reached London on the morning of Elizabeth II's coronation, whipping the already ecstatic crowds into an even greater frenzy.

*As his name was pronounced Eee-verest, that is more correctly how the mountain's adopted name should be pronounced; it just isn't.
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POPnews - May 29th

[For nearly 200 years after the fact the triumphant return of Charles II to London, on this day in 1660 - no less than his escape from Parliamentary forces on the same day in 1651 following the Battle of Worcester - was commemorated as Oak Apple Day in Britain; as depicted in this 1862 canvas by Reuben Bussey, the event was intended to be celebrated by raising a glass in toast to the King. Although the holiday was formally abolished in 1859 it is still observed by the famous red-coated Chelsea pensioners in the central court of the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Then again, it doesn't take an event half as exciting as the restoration of a monarchy to get the British to engage in a little chin-chin, does it?]
363 CE - Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate defeated the Sassanids under the walls of their capital during the Battle of Ctesiphon, although Persian Emperor Shapur II did manage to prevent Roman forces from taking the city; their hollow victory on this day would become even hollower when the Emperor was killed on June 26th at the Battle of Samarra.

1167 - At the Battle of Monte Porzio near the city of Tusculum a Roman army supporting Pope Alexander III was defeated by Christian of Buch and Rainald of Dassel whose force represented Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

1176 - At the Battle of Legnano the Lombard League defeated Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I - the same dude whose army won the battle mentioned immediately above this one.

1660 - Charles II was restored to the throne of Great Britain, on his 30th birthday; the King (who managed to be crowned King of Scots in January 1651 before fleeing to the Continent) had spent the previous 11 years in exile during the Interregnum, while the English suffered under the Puritan dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell.

1677 - Following the bloodshed of Bacon's Rebellion, a treaty between the Virginia colonists of Middle Plantation and the local tribes - including the Weyanoke, the Pamunkey, the Nottoway, and the Nansemond - sought to establish a lasting peace. Try and guess how (or indeed, if) they did...

1780 - At the Battle of Waxhaws during the American Revolution Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton massacred 113 of Colonel Abraham Buford's continentals in Lancaster, South Carolina, allegedly after they had surrendered.

1790 - Rhode Island became the last of the Thirteen Colonies to ratify the US Constitution and was admitted to the Union as the 13th US state.

1848 - Wisconsin became the 30th US state.

1867 - An agreement between Austria and Hungary called Ausgleich (or 'the Compromise') was born through Act 12, which established the Austro-Hungarian Empire with its capital at Vienna; the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph was later crowned King of Hungary to solidify what became known as the Dual Monarchy.

1913 - Igor Stravinsky's ballet score for The Rite of Spring was premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, conducted by Pierre Monteux; almost from the first note of the opening movement the atonal music brought catcalls from the audience. When the dancers of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes - as choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky - appeared, eschewing the grace of classical ballet for what we would recognize as modern dance, a riot broke out.

1914 - In a heavy fog the ocean liner RMS Empress of Ireland collided with the Norwegian collier Storstad in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, near the Quebec town of Rimouski; in just 14 minutes the liner sank, with a loss of 1,024 lives, leaving just 453 survivors among the passengers and crew.

1919 - The Republic of Prekmurje was founded.

1953 - Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first known people to reach the summit of Mount Everest and return safely from the summit.

1954 - The first of the annual Bilderberg conferences was held in the Netherlands.

1964 - The Arab League met in East Jerusalem to discuss the Palestinian situation in Israel, which led to the formation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

1969 - A general strike in Córdoba, Argentina, led to a period of civil unrest known as Cordobazo.

1982 - Pope John Paul II became the first pontiff ever to visit Canterbury Cathedral.

1985 - Amputee Steve Fonyo completed his cross-Canada marathon at Victoria, British Columbia; the 14-month run was intended to complete the work left undone by Terry Fox on his earlier Marathon of Hope, as well as to honour him for having done it.

2004 - The World War II Memorial - located in the National Mall - was dedicated by President George W. Bush in Washington, DC; ironically, World War II was one war a member of the Bush family had actually fought in.
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