On radio:

The ARRL reports "On June 19, 1934, 75 years ago today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) -- replacing the Federal Radio Commission -- by signing Public Law 73-416, the Communications Act of 1934."

Not many people realize that the amateur radio callsign of the Amateur Radio Association at the University of Maryland, W3EAX is actually older than the Federal Communications Commission. According to their site, the callsign 3EAX (also predating the W/K notation) was assigned "no later than early 1934," implying that the license would have been issued by the FRC.

Wikipedia notes that prior to 1927, radio in the United States was regulated by the United States Department of Commerce. Some folks may remember in the past when I've told this story I thought they were the ones to issue the license, but that doesn't appear to fit the timeline.

(Nearly) free association:

Rob Sama points out via Adam Shostack that today is Juneteenth which is a celebration of the end of slavery in Texas in 1865 and also a portmanteau. Gerrymander is also a portmanteau (Elbridge Gerry and a salamander) and reminds me of the time in 2009 that 11 state senators ran to Albuquerque to keep Rick Perry from redistricting under Tom DeLay's plan.

#6944

The Baltimore Business Journal reports that the Enoch Pratt Free Library will reduce hours as part of a $2 million budget cut on July 1, 2009. Hat tip to Robert A. Oszakiewski via Artmobile.

Follow link to Enoch Pratt Free Library to reduce hours

#6942

A few days ago Elissa and I went to see Wittenberg performed by the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival. The play by David Davalos is an intersection of the lives of the fictional Hamlet, Faust, and a fictional portrayal of Martin Luther. The play is too complicated and interwoven for me to pretend to have understood completely. What I was able to take away came from the juxtaposition of a religious and deep-thinking Luther against a rational and sardonic Faust. As the Luther character is challeged about his objections to the practices of the church and forced to defend them, I was better able to understand the internal difficulty he must have faced between his belief in both the bible and his investment in the institution of the church.

This evening on All Things Considered, Melissa Block interviewed Joseph Sisto on the private collection of manuscripts, some of them illegal, that his father John Sisto had amassed over his lifetime. The interview on NPR is fascinating in its entirety, but more so the end where Sisto tells Block about the contents of the collection as it concerns Martin Luther. "No doubt the historians are going to find things that will be revealed to the public that will be pretty interesting," he says, "For example The Reformation by Martin Luther is documented in some of those manuscripts, and some of the papal decrees, and so forth. The persecution of the Jews in Europe is documented in some of those manuscripts. And the sale of indulgences that Luther was against is documented and actually signed and sealed by the popes. So finally proof that it actually happened and not just a dispute between Luther and the pope of the time."

Follow link to Deeper Understanding of Martin Luther

#6940

Over the last week or so I've been reading more than usual. I'm almost on par with how many pages I turned in my teenage years. Between occasional bouts with the feed reader and making my way slowly through the bookshelf of "must read" books over my desk, my mind's been awash in new information.

I noticed it particularly this evening while reading Diana Block's book Arm the Spirit. On page 40, Block and her compatriots are in Minneapolis and trying to settle into their new lifestyle. There on February 7, 1986 she is following the overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier with some enthusiasm.

Duvalier's unique nickname, "Baby Doc," rang a bell and after a few minutes of thought I realized I had read about him only a few days earlier in the story of "Learjet repo man" Nick Popovich. According to Salon, on the day of the coup, Popovich had been sitting in a Haitian prison for seven days for trying to seize a Boeing 707.

Nearly as Duvalier was flying to the U.S. in an Air Force jet, Popovich was flying home in that 707. And on June 9, 2009, more than 23 years later, a book and an online article have connected those three people with me and with each other.

#6938

Housecleaning for me is a series of room reclamations. This weekend was good because I was able to reclaim both the kitchen and the bedroom. The question of how long they will stay this tidy is another question, but I tend to have a pretty good ability to keep things tidy so long as they don't cross over a certain invisible threshold into excessive disarray.

For now an empty sink and clean counters mean that cooking a meal is only minutes away, and a clean desk and work table mean that all I need to descend on a project is to open the folder and process all the necessary tasks. Both rooms are a very precarious state -- if I need anything in any of the dozen cardboard storage boxes piled on the shelves, nearly every one of them wind up on the floor, and I found myself casually dropping dirty laundry on the floor just a few minutes ago.

The rule of thumb seems to be that 20 days in a row is enough to set a new habit, and if I can use and clean the sink every day for the rest of this month, and keep my bedroom floor free of anything out of place, I should be able to maintain better habits going forward.

#6935