WilliamM

It was Liza, Her younger children (Lorna and Joey) were still fairly young. They appeared with Judy at the Palace in New York in the Summer of 1967.

Concerning "What's My Line" Judy Garland was so late , the show considered using moderstor John Daly as mystery guest and monderator. She supposedly asked when going on. The response 30 seconds. Judy, "Why the rush?"

Best wishes to @marylander1940 who is on "time out."

To be fair, Lyndon Johnson greatly exbanded a war he inherited from President John Kennedy. The direction of the war was set by Johnson in the Summer of 1965 when Johnson sent many more men to South East Asia. But, Kennedy was still president in early 1963 when President Diem was assassinated, what might be called now a fatal regime change.

Poor @Unicorn. He seems to never have forgetten the the rules, the procedures. ...to the detriment of kindness to patients

Lyndon famously encouraged folks at University of Texas football games to use the rest rooms at his presidential library. Encouraged on the pub;lic address system

In her own way, Lady Bird Johnson was fascinating too. She lived a long time, and knew everyone.

The first Johnson book is definitely worth reading because it presents both the positive and negative of a fascinating individual who was a great president on civil rights and the war on Poverty.

As much as a like Novak Djokovic, if the air conditions mean using the indoor courts only or even partly, just cancel the tournament. The players, coaches, sponsors and fans are still in Melbourne, dealing with horrid conditions. Yes, Melbourne is a wonderful place to be stuck, however, so there is that .

At least,l Robert Caro can rest a bit. He is not going to finish the last volume on Lyndon Johnson. But, in many ways neither did Mr. Johnson.

I am not suggesting Novak or anyone else is involved with Murdock NEWS ANALYSIS How Rupert Murdoch Is Influencing Australia’s Bushfire Debate Critics see a concerted effort to shift blame, protect conservative leaders and divert attention from climate change. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/world/australia/fires-murdoch-disinformation.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage By Damien Cave Jan. 8, 2020Updated 5:49 p.m. ET WOMBEYAN CAVES, Australia — Deep in the burning forests south of Sydney this week, volunteer firefighters were clearing a track through the woods, hoping to hold back a nearby blaze, when one of them shouted over the crunching of bulldozers. “Don’t take photos of any trees coming down,” he said. “The greenies will get a hold of it, and it’ll all be over.” The idea that “greenies” or environmentalists would oppose measures to prevent fires from ravaging homes and lives is simply false. But the comment reflects a narrative that’s been promoted for months by conservative Australian media outlets, especially the influential newspapers and television stations owned by Rupert Murdoch. And it’s far from the only Murdoch-fueled claim making the rounds. His standard-bearing national newspaper, The Australian, has also repeatedly argued that this year’s fires are no worse than those of the past — not true, scientists say, noting that 12 million acres have burned so far, with 2019 alone scorching more of New South Wales than the previous 15 years combined. And on Wednesday, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp, the largest media company in Australia, was found to be part of another wave of misinformation. An independent study found online bots and trolls exaggerating the role of arson in the fires, at the same time that an article in The Australian making similar assertions became the most popular offering on the newspaper’s website. It’s all part of what critics see as a relentless effort led by the powerful media outlet to do what it has also done in the United States and Britain — shift blame to the left, protect conservative leaders and divert attention from climate change. “It’s really reckless and extremely harmful,” said Joëlle Gergis, an award-winning climate scientist at the Australian National University. “It’s insidious because it grows. Once you plant those seeds of doubt, it stops an important conversation from taking place.” I News Corp denied playing such a role. “Our coverage has recognized Australia is having a conversation about climate change and how to respond to it,” the company said in an email. “The role of arsonists and policies that may have contributed to the spread of fire are, however, legitimate stories to report in the public interest.” Yet, for many critics, the Murdoch approach suddenly looks dangerous. They are increasingly connecting News Corp to the spread of misinformation and the government’s lackluster response to the fires. They argue that the company and the coalition led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison are responsible — together, as a team — for the failure to protect a country that scientists say is more vulnerable to climate change than any other developed nation. r. In late December, the Oz, as the News Corp-owned paper is known here, heavily promoted an interview with the government’s energy minister, Angus Taylor, warning that “top-down” pressure from the United Nations to address climate change would fail — followed by an opinion piece from Mr. Taylor on New Year’s Eve. Other News Corp outlets followed a similar playbook. Melbourne’s Herald Sun, for example, pushed news of the bushfires to Page 4 on New Year’s Eve, even as they threatened to devastate towns nearby and push thick smoke into the city. Days later, residents in a town nearly flattened by the fires during a visit to assess the damage. A new hire for Mr. Murdoch’s Sky News channel, Chris Smith, branded them “ferals” — slang for unkempt country hobos. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/05/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html?algo=bandit-story-geo&fellback=false&imp_id=507158257&imp_id=493724626&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/business/work-friend-office-cupcakes.html?algo=bandit-story-geo&fellback=false&imp_id=261397732&imp_id=152840737&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending As is often the case at Murdoch outlets around the world, there have been exceptions to the company line — an article about the Australian golfer Greg Norman’s declaration that “there is climate change taking place”; an interview with an international expert who explained why this year’s fires are unique. But a search for “climate change” in the main Murdoch outlets mostly yields stories condemning protesters who demand more aggressive action from the government; editorials arguing against “radical climate change policy”; and opinion columns emphasizing the need for more backburning to control fires — if only the left-wing greenies would allow it to happen. The Australian Greens party has made clear that it supports such hazard-reduction burns, issuing a statement online saying so. Climate scientists do acknowledge that there is room for improvement when it comes to burning the branches and dead trees on the ground that can fuel fires. But they also say that no amount of preventive burning will offset the impact of rising temperatures that accelerate evaporation, dry out land and make already-arid Australia a tinderbox. Even fire officials report that most of the off-season burns they want to do are hindered not by land-use laws but by weather — including the lengthier fire season and more extreme precipitation in winter that scientists attribute to climate change. Still, the Murdoch outlets continue to resist. “On a dry continent prone to deadly bushfires for centuries, fuel reduction through controlled burning is vital,” said an editorial published Thursday in The Australian. It went on to add: “Changes to climate change policy, however, would have no immediate impact on bushfires” — a stance that fits hand in glove with government officials’ frequent dismissals of the “bogey man of climate change.” I Timothy Graham, a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology who conducted the study of Twitter accounts exaggerating the role of arson in Australia’s fires, said media companies also needed to be cognizant of the disinformation ecosystem and stop contributing to the problem. That includes mainstream outlets, like ABC News, sharing inaccurate maps that exaggerate the reach of the fires. But in the case of the arson issue, he said, scores of bots and trolls — many of which previously posted support for President Trump — have joined conservative media like the Murdoch outlets in promoting the idea that Australia’s fires are not a “climate emergency” but an “arson emergency.” “Maybe 3 to 5 percent of fires could be attributed to arson, that’s what scientists tell us — nevertheless, media outlets, especially those that tend to be partisan, jump on that,” Dr. Graham said. y. [MEDIA=twitter]1214677210474266625[/MEDIA] Of course, it is often hard to know just how much influence any media company has. Gerard Henderson, a columnist for The Australian, said he didn’t think there was much need to address climate change because it was already a focal point across the rest of the media.

The new film 1917 is about The First World War. Hitler is still an obsession with film and TV many decades after his death How many books and films are there about Vietnam? Back to World War One. Over one hundred years later Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is essential to understanding the period just before the First World War. Most people have at least some vague idea of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his assassination in Sarajevo and the beginning of the Great War, the most written about subject ever.

Amazing and very discouraging. Caro is still writing about Medicare, still early in the Johnson Administration Robert Caro’s Papers Headed to New-York Historical Society After decades of dogged (and still unfinished) efforts to chronicle every detail about Lyndon B. Johnson, the master biographer’s vast paper trail has found a permanent home. Robert Caro in his office in Manhattan this month.Credit...Landon Speers for The New York Times By Jennifer Schuessler Jan. 8, 2020Updated 9:15 a.m. ET Robert Caro is famous for colossal biographies of colossal figures. “The Power Broker,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning life of Robert Moses, weighed in at nearly 1,300 pages. His as-yet-unfinished biography of Lyndon B. Johnson — he likes to call the volume-in-progress “the fifth of a projected three” — totals 3,444 pages and counting. The books are already monumental. And now Mr. Caro is getting monumental treatment himself. The New-York Historical Society has acquired Mr. Caro’s papers — some 200 linear feet of material that will be open to researchers in its library. And just as important to the 84-year-old Mr. Caro, it will create a permanent installation in its museum galleries dedicated to showing how he got the job done. “It’s like a true weight has been lifted from my shoulders,” he said last week in his office off Central Park West, where he was surrounded by hulking filing cabinets, piles of heavily scribbled-on legal pads and — tantalizingly — a wooden box holding typed pages of the eagerly awaited final Johnson volume. In discussing the plans for the permanent exhibition, he repeatedly stressed the permanent part. “With most archives, there’s a big splash, then two or three months later, it’s time for the next,” Mr. Caro said. “But I wanted something that wouldn’t go away.” A “I want people to be able to see how I gather my material and how I turn it into books, how I write,” he continued. “In my opinion, the quality of the prose is just as important in nonfiction as in fiction.” The archive will be among the largest of a single individual in the historical society’s collection. It includes research notes, drafts, annotated news clippings, correspondence and other documents, from once-classified memos excavated at the LBJ Presidential Library to at least one artifact literally coaxed out of a secret trunk. “This is an archive that will illuminate the 20th century through two outsize figures, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses,” she said. “It’s also the record of an extraordinary writer and thinker. Bob Caro is a historian whose methodology is of equal importance to the actual materials in his archive.” Mr. Caro has been talking a lot about those methods lately. Last spring, he published “Working,” an anecdote-rich collection of essays and interviews offered, he said, as a kind of promissory note on a proper memoir, which he has already started outlining. And the final volume of the Johnson biography? Don’t worry, he’s working on it. In fact, he said, checking the sheet of paper in the Smith-Corona Electra 210 on his desk, he has typed 604 manuscript pages so far. Asked where he was in the story, Mr. Caro paused, looking mildly stricken. But he allowed that he’s currently on a section relating to the creation of Medicare in 1965, with the debacle of Vietnam and Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election in 1968, to come. (Johnson died in 1973.) “It’s going to be a very long book,” he said. Mr. Caro’s office is a kind of museum of analog writing practices, including corkboards displaying the outline for his book.Credit...Landon Speers for The New York Times Image A file folder holding transcripts of interviews gives a long-ago piece of advice: “With Busby the key thing is simply to SHUT UP!”Credit...Landon Speers for The New York Times Image A page from one of Mr. Caro’s reporting notebooks, with parts that have been turned into typed transcripts crossed out. (He does not use a tape recorder.)Credit...Landon Speers for The New York Times Mr. Caro — who will keep some of his materials in his office until he’s done with the biography — is protective of details of work in progress. But looking into his notebooks and file drawers (sample tab: “Johnson Personal: Ruthlessness”), he was expansive, offering anecdotes within anecdotes about the events and people he was trying to reconstruct, and about how he and his wife and longtime research partner, Ina Caro, found sources, secured interviews and tracked down documents. (Neither the historical society nor Mr. Caro would disclose financial details of the acquisition, though Mr. Caro said the price was “more generous than I expected.”) Mr. Caro’s current office, which he moved to last summer, is itself a kind of museum of a vanishing analog world, down to a closet holding some of his 11 stockpiled Smith Coronas, ready to be cannibalized for parts. ADVERTISEMENT ry I A view into Mr. Caro’s files holding transcripts and notes from thousands of interviews. “All I can really think about as I go through the files is what I left out,” he said.Credit...Landon Speers for The New York Times An elaborate typed outline of his book in progress is tacked to corkboards lining the walls. Mr. Caro — who writes his first drafts by hand on legal pads — pulled out a thick binder to show how he writes each sentence from the outline on a loose sheet of lined paper. Next, he lists interviews and documents that support the point, all indexed according to a complicated, idiosyncratic system. But the real guts of the operation are in an adjacent room, in the files and cabinets holding his interview notes and other documents, including diaries and notes given to him over the years by Johnson associates and other journalists. Mr. Caro popped open a cabinet filled with reporter’s notebooks and pulled a purple Scribbletex pad labeled “LBJ I”; inside were his first interviews, with Lady Bird Johnson and Sam Houston Johnson, the president’s brother. He then pulled out “LBJ XXXII,” flipping through pages covered with neatly handwritten notes and, on one page, a list of cryptic numbers. “I hate flying, so I always write out how many minutes are left,” he said, laughing. One of his rules — Mr. Caro does not use a tape recorder — is to always type up his interview notes before going to bed, so as not to forget facial expressions or other details. “He can’t seem to sit still,” reads a note atop a transcript of one of his interviews with Moses. On a folder holding his 22 formal interviews with Horace Busby, a longtime Johnson aide, Mr. Caro pointed out a long-ago scribbled reminder: “With Busby the key thing is to SHUT UP! He doesn’t want to hear one word from you. His eyes get bored the minute you open your mouth to say anything.” As the interview drew to a close, Mr. Caro pulled out the photocopy of one of his most famous discoveries: an unpublished memoir by Luis Salas, a Texas election judge, explaining how he had helped Johnson eke out an 87-vote victory in his 1948 Senate race, by assigning him votes cast for his opponent. In “Working,” Mr. Caro describes how in 1986, a decade into work on the Johnson biography, he finally tracked Mr. Salas down in a mobile home near Houston. Mr. Caro was seeking hard proof that the election had been stolen. In the middle of their interview, Mr. Salas suddenly fished the manuscript out of a trunk, saying, “I have written it all down.” In his office, Mr. Caro read aloud a passage that might serve as a gloss on his own exhaustive, still-unfinished work. “Maybe I pass away before I see my book published,” Mr. Salas wrote, “but someday it will come out because it is part of the history of the United States, and people have the right to know the exact truth.”

Musical Events January 13, 2020 Issue Operatic Shows of Force At the Met, a new production of “Wozzeck” stays relentlessly focussed on war, and a young soprano brings prodigious power to “The Queen of Spades.” https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/alex-ross By Alex Ross January 6, 2020 The New Yorker Your judgment of the new Metropolitan Opera production of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck,” which runs through January 22nd, may depend on how you classify it. The director is the South African artist William Kentridge, who is steeped in the Central European Expressionist milieu from which Berg’s ferocious anti-military opera emerged. If the staging is considered as an entry in Kentridge’s multimedia œuvre, it delivers a potent distillation of signature motifs: brusque drawings and prints of wounded faces and ravaged landscapes; stop-action animation of spasmodically jerking figures; photographic collages and cinematic montages. If, however, you measure the work against the emotional breadth of Berg’s opera, you may find it wanting. On opening night, I admired the virtuosity of the director’s technique but wished that he had paid more heed to the desperate inner lives of the characters. Kentridge has transplanted “Wozzeck” from the early-nineteenth-century setting of Berg’s libretto to the period of the First World War. This makes good sense, since Berg served in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1915 to 1918 and began composing the opera during the conflict. Berg fashioned the libretto directly from Georg Büchner’s 1837 play, “Woyzeck,” an unblinking portrayal of an ordinary soldier’s degradation by military discipline and medical experiment. Berg wrote of Wozzeck, “There is a bit of me in this character, since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate, have been in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact humiliated.” Büchner’s text, fragmentary in form and corrosive in tone, is famously prophetic of twentieth-century concerns. Berg could hardly have found anything more modern among the playwrights of his own period; the young Bertolt Brecht was one of many under Büchner’s spell. Yet Berg brings to bear his own preoccupations—in particular, a nostalgia for a shattered fin-de-siècle world. Although the music of “Wozzeck” is ostensibly atonal, glimmers of Wagner, Puccini, Mahler, and Strauss shine through the work’s dark façade. The most piercing lyricism is reserved for Wozzeck’s common-law wife, Marie, who falls victim to his madness. Her monologue at the beginning of Act III, in which she reads from the Bible and ponders her child’s bleak future, is obviously modelled on Desdemona’s “Ave Maria” scene in Verdi’s “Otello.” It is this half-buried Romantic dimension that goes missing in Kentridge’s production. Although the Great War looms over every moment of the staging, it never becomes clear whether we are experiencing Wozzeck’s nightmarish premonitions of the conflict or his shell-shocked recollections of it. Characters often wear gas masks, hobble on crutches, and have bandages on their heads. Maps of troop movements in Flanders are projected onto a large screen behind the stage. The sets, designed by Sabine Theunissen, deploy sculptural accumulations of junk to render the locales where Wozzeck experiences successive humiliations: a captain’s quarters, a doctor’s laboratory, a tavern garden, a soldiers’ barracks. Greta Goiris, the costume designer, applies fantastical touches to drab uniforms and workaday wear. A blood-red gown for Marie stands out against a mostly black-and-white color scheme. Kentridge is at his best when crowds fill the stage, matching the teeming density of his visual aesthetic. His most bravura gesture comes in Act III, as Wozzeck staggers away from the pond where he has murdered Marie and into a bar full of drunkenly dancing figures. Berg prepares the change of scene with two enormous orchestral crescendos on the single note B, the second louder than the first. Kentridge made the inspired decision to have dancers enter during the second crescendo, both on the stage and on the screen at the back. They appear to be emanating from the concentrated beam of sound. Much less successful is Kentridge’s illustration of the overpowering final interlude, which follows Wozzeck’s death, by drowning. The triple-forte climax of the passage was marked by a groaningly obvious sequence of explosions on the screen. The unremitting focus on war iconography blotted out the opera’s main narrative thrust: the deterioration of Wozzeck’s mind in the grip of military routine. Crucially, in Büchner’s scenario, the soldier is not at war but serving in a town regiment; violence explodes from the machinery of the system. The baritone Peter Mattei, who took the lead role, is one of the finest singing actors in opera, but in this staging he had little opportunity to trace the character’s arc toward madness; too often he seemed like an extra in a larger tableau. Elza van den Heever, as Marie, was similarly sidelined by the pervasive imagery of masculine aggression. Psychology has never been Kentridge’s strong suit as a director—it was also a blind spot in his previous Met productions, of Shostakovich’s “The Nose” and of Berg’s “Lulu”—but here the characterizations are weaker than ever. It’s instructive to compare this brilliant but somehow hollow affair with “The Head and the Load,” Kentridge’s monumental theatrical tribute to African soldiers who served in the Great War. It played at the Park Avenue Armory at the end of 2018; I saw it in Amsterdam last May. Many of the same visual tropes were employed in that production, yet its episodic, pageantlike structure proved a better counterweight to Kentridge’s thematic obsessions. In “Wozzeck,” his agenda is too often at cross-purposes with that of Berg, for whom psychology was everything. The one singer who held his own amid the swirl of images was the tenor Gerhard Siegel, who delivered the part of the Captain with cartoonish flair and precisely biting diction. He was, perhaps not incidentally, the cast’s only native German speaker. Mattei and van den Heever both sang superbly, but the blunt force of Büchner’s language didn’t always register. I had similar reservations about the conducting of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. He showed unerring command of Berg’s devilishly difficult score, but he dispatched it too cleanly and efficiently. His pristine account of the final interlude failed to convey its melancholy collapse into the Mahlerian past. In all, this was a “Wozzeck” lacking in both horror and humanity.

Rentafriend seems irrelevant to the basic purpose. Right?

How is this so different than making friends in general?

How is this so different than making friends in general?

To my best friend: I could hear you fucking. and then taking those sheets out to dry on the line when you forget your were almost naked. To be fair, it only happened once