Despite all the wonderful modern recordings of Rach 3, Bickerstaff’s favorite has always been the first one made in 1940 on 78 rpm records, the soloist being none other than the old man himself, Rachmaninoff, he of the giant hands and fingers, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Even with its primitive audio, the composer’s performance, to these ears, has outclassed all the otherwise excellent later ones.
Today however your Tatler streamed a recording he had somehow missed before, the 1960 Mercury recording with the late Byron Janis piano and Antol Dorati conducting the London Philharmonic. Not only is the audio first rate, with its remastering in 192 kHz, 24-bit sound, Janis’s extraordinary playing is the equal of Rachmaninoff’s, an audacious claim indeed, but your Tatler stands by it. Listening to it is as if Rachmaninoff and Ormandy had come back from the dead to record it one last time.
Which is not to say Janis’s recording is a carbon copy of the first one. Janis was his own man and his interpretation differs from the composer’s throughout, but they are relatively minor differences. Rach 3 fans, if they haven’t heard this recording already, must listen to this one, whatever the format. Prepare to be dazzled.
He landed in Guadalcanal then saw action at Bougainville, lost his hearing under shelling on Guam, and was finally invalided at Iwo Jima
John Kinsel: devised by a cohort of Navajo, the code substituted a Navajo word for each English alphabet letter and for common military term
John Kinsel, who has died aged 103 (or possibly 107), was one of the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers, recruited by the US Marines in the Second World War to baffle Japanese cryptologists by sending messages in their native language.
The Americans had pioneered the use of Native American speakers to send secure messages in the First World War, and the practice was resurrected ad hoc in the Second World War, if a unit had enough speakers from the same tribe to make it viable. The Marines’ programme, however, differed in being far more extensive and systematic.
It was born out necessity, after the Japanese proved adept at breaking the codes that the Americans had time-consumingly devised. The idea came from Philip Johnston, a civil engineer in the Los Angeles shipyards who had been raised by his missionary parents on a Navajo reservation, and had read that Comanches were using their own language in training manoeuvres. In mid-1942 he was made director of a Navajo Code Talker training school at Camp Elliott.
The Code itself was devised by a cohort of 29 Navajo, who substituted a Navajo word for each English alphabet letter, and for common military words. John Kinsel was in the second cohort to be trained at Camp Elliott by the original 29, memorising over 400 terms, and helping them to devise extra words such as “route”, using the Navajo for “rabbit trail”. His own Navajo name, Hash-keh Nah-adah, meant “leader who does a lot of talking”.
Fresh out of high school, he breezed through the tests for complicated words like “amphibious” and “infiltrators”. He was tough and self-sufficient, the product of an early life that had been far from easy.
Born on January 22 (account vary as to whether the year was 1921 or 1917) on the Navajo reservation near Lukachukai, Arizona, he was a baby when he lost his father, and grew up herding his grandfather’s 1,000 sheep. His stepfather was indifferent to him, and he was parked in a disciplinarian government boarding school at Fort Defiance, where he was bullied, underfed and failed to learn English. “I probably just knew ‘yes’ and ‘no’,” he recalled. The language only came to him in 1929, when his grandfather moved him to St Michael Indian School, run by nuns.
In 1942 he joined the 9th Marine Regiment. After Camp Elliott, he spent eight months training in New Zealand before in 1943 landing in Guadalcanal, scene of the ferocious battle the year before, and still subject to Japanese bombing. They nicknamed the noisy enemy aircraft “Washing Machine Charlie”.
He first saw action in late 1943, at the Battle of Bougainville, where the jungle was so thick he lost any sense of where the front line was. When a coded message was needed, someone would say “New Mexico” or “Arizona”, cue for the Navajo signallers.
In July 1944 he landed on Guam, struggling through rice paddies under heavy fire from three Japanese positions. “It was just like lightning,” he recalled. His hearing never recovered. He could see the Japanese picking out high-value Marine targets with their binoculars. Later, he encountered decapitated Guamanian citizens, their hands tied behind their backs, but he did not disturb the bodies as they were often booby-trapped.
In February 1945 he joined the Battle of Iwo Jima five days after the initial landing, sprinting across the airfield to avoid the bullets which “you could see ricocheting off the floor”. He spent that night in a hole under heavy mortar and machine-gun fire. The next day, the transmission station he had set up in a nearby cave was blown up by the Japanese, and a boulder hit him in the leg. He was evacuated to the USA by ship and a fellow Navajo aboard brought him cake and ice-cream.
To reach his family on the reservation he had to walk the last seven miles with a suitcase. “It was the best day of my life, when I saw my mom,” he later said. The medicine man performed a ceremony to rid him of the war.
Postwar he found work at a school, walking 20 miles each way, and built a log cabin where he lived until his final years.
His war work was classified until 1968. In 1989 Kinsel received a Silver Heart and in 2001 a Congressional Silver Medal for his role as a Navajo Code Talker, of whom only two others are thought now to survive.
His survivors include a son, who found Catholic records that suggest his father may have been born in 1917, rather than 1921 as John Kinsel had believed, which would make him 107 at the time of his death.
John Kinsel, born January 22 1921 or 1917, died October 19 2024
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
He landed in Guadalcanal then saw action at Bougainville, lost his hearing under shelling on Guam, and was finally invalided at Iwo Jima
John Kinsel: devised by a cohort of Navajo, the code substituted a Navajo word for each English alphabet letter and for common military term
John Kinsel, who has died aged 103 (or possibly 107), was one of the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers, recruited by the US Marines in the Second World War to baffle Japanese cryptologists by sending messages in their native language.
The Americans had pioneered the use of Native American speakers to send secure messages in the First World War, and the practice was resurrected ad hoc in the Second World War, if a unit had enough speakers from the same tribe to make it viable. The Marines’ programme, however, differed in being far more extensive and systematic.
It was born out necessity, after the Japanese proved adept at breaking the codes that the Americans had time-consumingly devised. The idea came from Philip Johnston, a civil engineer in the Los Angeles shipyards who had been raised by his missionary parents on a Navajo reservation, and had read that Comanches were using their own language in training manoeuvres. In mid-1942 he was made director of a Navajo Code Talker training school at Camp Elliott.
The Code itself was devised by a cohort of 29 Navajo, who substituted a Navajo word for each English alphabet letter, and for common military words. John Kinsel was in the second cohort to be trained at Camp Elliott by the original 29, memorising over 400 terms, and helping them to devise extra words such as “route”, using the Navajo for “rabbit trail”. His own Navajo name, Hash-keh Nah-adah, meant “leader who does a lot of talking”.
Fresh out of high school, he breezed through the tests for complicated words like “amphibious” and “infiltrators”. He was tough and self-sufficient, the product of an early life that had been far from easy.
Born on January 22 (account vary as to whether the year was 1921 or 1917) on the Navajo reservation near Lukachukai, Arizona, he was a baby when he lost his father, and grew up herding his grandfather’s 1,000 sheep. His stepfather was indifferent to him, and he was parked in a disciplinarian government boarding school at Fort Defiance, where he was bullied, underfed and failed to learn English. “I probably just knew ‘yes’ and ‘no’,” he recalled. The language only came to him in 1929, when his grandfather moved him to St Michael Indian School, run by nuns.
In 1942 he joined the 9th Marine Regiment. After Camp Elliott, he spent eight months training in New Zealand before in 1943 landing in Guadalcanal, scene of the ferocious battle the year before, and still subject to Japanese bombing. They nicknamed the noisy enemy aircraft “Washing Machine Charlie”.
He first saw action in late 1943, at the Battle of Bougainville, where the jungle was so thick he lost any sense of where the front line was. When a coded message was needed, someone would say “New Mexico” or “Arizona”, cue for the Navajo signallers.
In July 1944 he landed on Guam, struggling through rice paddies under heavy fire from three Japanese positions. “It was just like lightning,” he recalled. His hearing never recovered. He could see the Japanese picking out high-value Marine targets with their binoculars. Later, he encountered decapitated Guamanian citizens, their hands tied behind their backs, but he did not disturb the bodies as they were often booby-trapped.
In February 1945 he joined the Battle of Iwo Jima five days after the initial landing, sprinting across the airfield to avoid the bullets which “you could see ricocheting off the floor”. He spent that night in a hole under heavy mortar and machine-gun fire. The next day, the transmission station he had set up in a nearby cave was blown up by the Japanese, and a boulder hit him in the leg. He was evacuated to the USA by ship and a fellow Navajo aboard brought him cake and ice-cream.
To reach his family on the reservation he had to walk the last seven miles with a suitcase. “It was the best day of my life, when I saw my mom,” he later said. The medicine man performed a ceremony to rid him of the war.
Postwar he found work at a school, walking 20 miles each way, and built a log cabin where he lived until his final years.
His war work was classified until 1968. In 1989 Kinsel received a Silver Heart and in 2001 a Congressional Silver Medal for his role as a Navajo Code Talker, of whom only two others are thought now to survive.
His survivors include a son, who found Catholic records that suggest his father may have been born in 1917, rather than 1921 as John Kinsel had believed, which would make him 107 at the time of his death.
John Kinsel, born January 22 1921 or 1917, died October 19 2024.
ATHENS, Ga. — Tren de Aragua gang member Jose Ibarra was sentenced to life without parole Wednesday for the vicious murder of promising nursing student Laken Riley in a case that ignited a national firestorm over the Biden administration’s open border policy and coddling of illegal immigrants.
At last a proper sentence for a vicious career gangster who was here illegally. Bickerstaff however would have preferred bringing Old Sparky out of retirement. It’s quicker and cheaper, justice is dispensed promptly and the expense of feeding and housing for life a murderous thug is eliminated. Just the same. this is a step in the right direction.
Panic engulfed MSNBC headquarters on Wednesday after parent company Comcast confirmed a massive spinoff of its cable properties — with a top executive even suggesting the left-leaning network may be forced to change its name.
Is it finally happening? Can one no longer espouse hard-core left-wing, self-righteous reporting and expect to get rich from it?
Hard to say. Even if the top MSNBC news readers get the ax, other left-wing media may snatch them up, though probably at more reasonable pay. It remains to be seen if Rachel Maddow would accept slumming it on a lower salary, say a paltry $25 million per annum compared with her present $30 million. After all, a gal has to maintain her standards and self-respect. Mingling with hoi polloi pulling in mere seven figure amounts may prove to be anathema to Ms Maddow.
To paraphrase, the likes of Rachel Maddow are different from you and me. Yes, they’ve got more money. Or as Bickerstaff’s father, quoting family friend Herman Westinghouse, liked to say: “the poor have their troubles as well as the rich.”
Poor little rich girl?Henry Herman“Uncle Herman” Westinghouse
American-made missiles just struck deep inside Russia. The Kremlin’s response was to authorize the use of nukes.
Biden’s parting gift?
From CNBC@CNN
Russia says Ukraine attacked it using U.S.-made missiles, signals it’s ready for nuclear response.
Of course, it wasn’t Biden’s decision to send up the rockets, since he’s non compos mentis, rather the yes men and toadies that surround the hapless fool. They told him to do it and they must know the possible ramifications of this act of war. The only real explanation why this blog can come up with is, they wanted to leave a parting gift for Donald Trump to deal with after he’s been sworn into office.
President-Elect Donald Trump announced Linda McMahon will be the next US Secretary of Education, which could be a short-lived job if Trump keeps his promise to end the Department of Education.Trump promises McMahon will fight to expand “Choice” to every state in America, even Connecticut.McMahon spent a couple years on the Connecticut State Board of Education and has served on Sacred Heart University’s Board of Trustees for over 16 years.She’s also been an advocate for Parents’ Rights through her work as Chair of the Board at the America First Policy Institute and America First Works where she worked to achieve universal school choice in 12 states.Congratulations, Linda!
Indeed, but your Tatler hopes, as alluded to above, President Trump will shut down this redundant, unneeded, and hugely expensive cabinet position. As Bickerstaff well remembers, this absurd department was the creation of the Carter White House and served as payback, nothing else, to the teachers’s unions for endorsing, campaigning and delivering lots of voters to Jimmy Carter’s successful presidential campaign.
The unions lusted for a DOE for one reason: to extend their reach by providing a mechanism for them to worm their way into every state in the Union’s educational programs. Since they knew their socialist ways would never pass in the voting booth, a powerful DOE could force them upon state and local governments via fiat. That was DOE’s raison d’être.
Since its creation, DOE has greatly expanded and now has 4400 employees and a budget of $238 billion. Not bad for a totally useless arm of the government.
Bickerstaff was in the waiting room of his garage while his auto was getting its 30K service. CNN was on the TV and as the sound was off, it was watchable, barely (it was the first time he had watched CNN in decades). The Chryon on the screen was declaring the big, big item of the day, which was Trump’s margin of victory had dropped to 49.9%. Zounds! It stayed up for at least 10 minutes while interviews, analyses, etc., ad nauseam were aired, thus proving these deluded jackasses will continue to grasp at anything and everything to delegitimize Trump’s election. Meanwhile, CNN’s ratings are at their lowest in decades.
Forget it, children, the game is lost. It’s 5 PM and it’s time to go home.
To have even more fun, pretend you’re Joe Biden dancing the Trump®. Then, after picking yourself up from the floor, pretend you’re Hillary doing the dance. Your Tatler found the latter to be impossible, but of course did have fun trying.
There really has been a sea change in this country.
Knife-wielding maniac goes on random NYC stabbing spree, leaving 2 men dead and one woman critical
Only two of the crime scenes
Two men were killed and a woman was critically injured by a knife-wielding maniac who went on a random stabbing spree in Manhattan Monday morning, cops and sources said.
The sickening spree began around 8:20 a.m. when the 51-year-old killer approached a 30-year-old man on West 19th Street near Eighth Avenue and knifed him in the stomach, police said.
Long ago in this ageing blogger’s life sickos like this were locked up, not only for our protection but their own. That is no longer the case and the time is long past to return to the practice. By no means should they be locked up in the manner of El Salvador’s prison for violent gang members, rather, since they are mentally ill, in institutions which in the past were titled “hospitals for the criminally insane”, or similarly. The purpose of the institutions, and admittedly there were numerous abuses committed by them leading to their eventual closure, was treatment, if they were treatable.
If the inmates can be cured of the maladies haunting them they can be released to halfway houses, where they enjoy greater freedom but still closely watched for signs of reversion. If so, back they go to the lockups.
When the criminally insane are not treatable they must remain incarcerated, but at least they will be in stable environments where they are fed, clothed and provided with diversions to make their lives tolerable.
Certainly mental institutions are not perfect but are vastly preferable to dumping sick people on the streets. The present situation can be blamed on, like so many of our social woes, the so-called advocates who insisted the incarceration of the mentally ill somehow violated their “civil rights,” nevermind the rights of the sane not to be attacked by knife-wielding nut jobs roaming the City. Like most left-wing social solutions, they failed and deadly chaos has resulted in the City streets.
Now that it is dawning on our citizenry that left-wing solutions to social problems only make things worse, it is time to revisit the notion of institutions dedicated to the care of those unable to care for themselves, removing them from the streets and protecting the rest of us from the havoc they create.
CNN (and good for them!) have given us a first-hand view of how career gang criminals are dealt with in El Salvador. The word “pampered” will not enter your mind while viewing it. Similar treatment in this country of violent career criminals would not be amiss. Mr Trump?
THE TAOS TATLER. 