http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Another+South+Carolina+Pol+Stirs+Up+Trouble-665
More politics: Although I haven't been President Obama's biggest fan lately, I must admit that his appearance at the Georgetown/Duke basketball game on Saturday was strategically brilliant. POTUS has been seeming a little distant lately, so what better way to recapture his regular guy vibe? We know he loves hoops, so there was nothing overly forced about this excursion; but it was very well staged, with the crowd-mingling, the commentary for CBS, and the array of other notables present -- Rahm Emanuel, Adrian Fenty, Robert Gibbs, David Axelrod. Having Obama and Joe Biden sit side by side must have given the Secret Service palpitations, but they looked relaxed and like they were having a great time, and given the national gloom of late, putting that image out there is worth the security nightmare. It was a photo op, yes, but it was also the first time recently that I've gotten the sense that the President's team knows what they're doing. Now if they could just get Tim Geithner to stop appearing before Congressional committees....
The New Zealand crime fiction blog Crime Watch has an interesting post on pioneering Kiwi mystery writer Fergus Hume and his once best-selling The Mystery of a Hansom Cab:
http://kiwicrime.blogspot.com/2010/01/long-forgotten-kiwi-crime-writer.html
A Journey Round My Skull has discovered a Ukrainian painter and illustrator, Issachar Ryback, who has a nice hand with animals:
http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2010/01/itsi-dreamt-that-he-went-to-forest.html
http://www.comite-ryback.org/
Carlin Romano at the Chronicle of Higher Education pays tribute to two recently departed philosophers, Stephen Toulmin and John E. Smith:
http://chronicle.com/article/Wise-Men-Gone-Stephen-Toulmin/63649/
Among notables born on this date are novelists Muriel Spark, Reynolds Price, and Yevgeny Zamyatin (Russia), poets Langston Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Gunter Eich (Germany), and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Austria), humorist S.J. Perelman, Monty Python member Terry Jones, soprano Renata Tebaldi, jazz pianist James P. Johnson, jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman, film directors John Ford and George Pal, composers Victor Herbert and Camargo Guarnieri (Brazil), and actors Clark Gable, Sherilynn Fenn, Linus Roache, and Michael C. Hall. In addition to his well-known prose pieces, S.J. Perelman wrote a wonderful play, The Beauty Part, which starred the incomparable Bert Lahr in multiple roles and premiered on Broadway in 1962. It had the misfortune to open (and close) during a four-month-long New York newspaper strike, effectively putting the kibosh (as Perelman himself might say) on a now-legendary production, which got no reviews in the halted papers and could not place ads in them either. The text can be read in Marilyn Stasio's superb compilation Broadway's Beautiful Losers, which gathers five excellent plays that failed on Broadway, along with Stasio's essays on them. Three of the plays are masterpieces -- The Beauty Part, Saul Bellow's The Last Analysis, and Jack Richardson's Xmas in Las Vegas.
