Great Assholes of History: Judge Jeffreys

Earlier this year, I read  The History of England from the Accession of James II, by the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Macaulay (1800-1859).  Long but very readable, the five-volume work mainly treats the period ending with the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, during which the monarchy of James II was overthrown and his daughter Mary reigned jointly with her husband, the Dutchman William of Orange.

James II (1633-1701) was the fourth and final king of the house of Stuart, a dynasty of Scottish kings who succeeded to the throne after the death of Elizabeth I.  Succeeding his brother, Charles II, in 1685, James was a convert to Catholicism in a country where the established church of which he, as sovereign, was head, the Church of England, was Protestant, and his attempts to undermine the Anglican establishment and the parliamentary system in England began to alienate even his most loyal subjects, leading to his being deposed in 1688.  A vindictive, nasty man who tried to model his own monarchy after that of the absolutist Louis XIV of France, he was an asshole in his own right, but he couldn't come up to the standards of one of his most useful henchmen, the magistrate Sir George Jeffreys, the so-called “Hanging Judge” (1645-1689), an able legal mind but also an uncouth, drunken, foul-mouthed, bigoted, cruel, vindictive, corrupt son-of-a-bitch.

It was while reading Macaulay's book that the idea came to me of writing about Jeffreys.  Of the various personages in the book, he is one of the most memorable.  In fact, he is the only historical figure I have ever encountered whose description made me think, “Christ, what an asshole.”

I find it amusing in myself (though perhaps, not to be over-thought too much) that I would react this way to Jeffreys but not to someone like, say, Adolf Hitler.  For one thing, “asshole” is not a word that comes much to mind when reading history: usually, the characters of history seem too big and too far away to fit into such everyday vulgar language, and with figures like Hitler, the word seems scarcely appropriate or even to fit: it seems too small, too petty.  And perhaps it's only Macaulay's particularly vivid portrait of Jeffreys that triggered such a spontaneous and visceral response, but he was a man whose personal unpleasantness seems utterly, seamlessly of a piece with his career, which peaked with his presiding over the Bloody Assizes of 1685.  In Macaulay's pages he cuts a Snidely Whiplash-like figure, handing out sentences and penalties with a relish that would suit any good movie villain, scowling at his victims with a face that left them soiling themselves with terror, gloating over their fear and misery, cracking morbid jokes at their expense, and not caring a lick what people thought of him, provided James had his back.

Born to a family of Welsh gentry in Denbighshire, he went in for the law in 1663 at the Inner Temple in London after a year at Trinity College, Cambridge.  English law courts were notoriously ferocious, and Jeffreys was in his element.  As a barrister in London he examined and cross-examined scores of thieves, prostitutes, and other low criminals, honing his powers of invective, nastiness and cruelty and, quickly enough for men in his profession at the time, crossed from the bar to the bench.

Daily life in the seventeenth century was full of casual violence and brutality to an extent unimaginable to most of us: one popular spectator sport was watching bears torn apart by dogs, and far from being disinterested carryings-out of justice and statute, most criminal punishments were public spectacles designed to be as painful, humiliating and degrading as possible.  For capital crimes, hanging was one form of punishment, another was hanging, drawing and quartering, in which the body was cut down, disemboweled, and then dismembered, the various parts then either parboiled or dipped in pitch and salt and stuck on poles for public display.  If you were an important person, beheading was a somewhat more dignified end, but the operation might take several blows with the axe to finally separate the head from the body.  For more petty crimes, there was whipping at the cart's tail until the blood flowed; sometimes the sentence called for multiple applications of this punishment, increasing the chances that you would die as a result of wounds and shock.  “It is Christmas, a cold time to strip in!” Jeffreys reminded the hangman when passing this sentence on a woman convicted of prostitution.  “See that you warm her shoulders thoroughly!”  Or there was the pillory, where the criminal would be exposed to the fury of the public and pelted with objects of all sorts, some of which included rocks and brickbats.

Passing his sentences and verbally abusing his court officers, plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses and barristers, and spending his nights in drinking bouts with a crew of junior court officers and toadies (many of whom he would abuse from the bench the next morning, “having kept the court waiting long, and yet having but half slept off his debauch, his cheeks on fire, his eyes staring like those of a maniac”, according to Macaulay), Jeffreys also climbed the professional ladder, earning the posts first of Common Serjeant of London and later, Recorder of London.  Seeking to advance his career and fortune, he cultivated contacts with the royal court.

Charles II disliked the man, saying of him, according to Macaulay, that he had “no learning, no sense, no manners, and more impudence than ten carted street-walkers”, but Jeffreys found a patron in James, who was at the time Duke of York, and he advanced further, becoming a baronet in 1681, and Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench in 1683.  Jeffreys had presided at many of the trials that followed the so-called “Popish Plot”, a wild fictional conspiracy allegedly intending to kill Charles and put the Duke of York on the throne. The trials condemned innocent men on the false testimony of one Titus Oates, a defrocked Anglican priest and a former Roman Catholic who concocted wild stories of Jesuit plots to take over England for the Catholic Church.  Oates' ravings fanned anti-Catholic feeling in England, and Jeffreys, a staunch Anglican and even more staunch an asshole, took even more delight in punishing Catholic priests who were implicated in the plot than he did in punishing ordinary criminals, cruelly announcing to them that they were to be cut down while still alive and to see their own bowels burned before their eyes.  Nevertheless, he was useful to James in spite of his past treatment of Catholics, and he went on to prosecute Titus Oates for those same perjuries in 1685.

The minds of the English of the seventeenth century were unburdened by modern concepts such as ecumenicism, religious tolerance and church-state separation.  The Church of England—founded famously by the Tudor king Henry VIII, desirous of a male heir when Cardinal Wolsey refused, in the name of the Roman Catholic Church, to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who couldn't give him a male heir—was as much a political and state institution as a spiritual one, if not more.  Henry, devoted to making England a great power and competing with other kingdoms such as France and Spain, didn't want the loyalties of the English church divided between himself and the Holy See.  Considering himself a good Catholic in spite of his break with the church, and no theologian, he envisioned a sort of “independent” or “autonomous” national church, not with the Pope but the sovereign at its head.  Over the reigns of Elizabeth I and her successor, the first Stuart king of England, James I (who authorized the English translation of the Bible that bears his name today) the “C of E” counted itself in the Protestant camp, but steered a middle course between the elaborate theology, liturgy, and organization of Roman Catholicism and the stripped-down, decentralized Protestantism of Luther and Calvin.  In modified forms, it retained some of the liturgy and, even more importantly, the top-down ecclesiastical structure of its Roman Catholic origins while incorporating some of the theology and practices of Protestantism, most notably, the use of the vernacular instead of Latin and the rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Most importantly, the Church of England had legal supremacy over spiritual affairs in England, just as the Catholic church had over spiritual affairs in other countries.  It was part of the government, just as Parliament and the Crown were.  The bishops of the church sat in the House of Lords and deliberated along with the other nobles on matters of state.  More generally, the legal supremacy of the Anglican church gave an inevitable political cast to one's religious affiliations.  If you were an Anglican, everyone accepted you as a loyal and patriotic Englishman.  If you were of one of the more extreme varieties of Calvinist Protestant, such as the Scottish Presbyterians or the English Puritans, you were not only not respected as a faithful Christian, you were practically a Satanist and moreover, your loyalties were suspect.  This went double for Catholics, who evoked a whole history of bloody reaction against Protestants under the reign of Henry VIII's successor, “Bloody” Mary I, as well as tales of the Inquisition, the Gunpowder Plot, and more generally prejudicial stereotypes of being opposed to the traditional English way of life and government and being more loyal to the Pope than to one's country.  Catholicism in England at the time was identified with absolutism.  This is what made having a Catholic in the role of head of the Church of England such a sore point: it was like having a Communist in the White House during the McCarthy era.

In spite of some apprehension at having a Catholic in the line of succession, and some unsuccessful machinations designed to prevent such an event (the Rye House Plot of 1683, hatched at a fortified medieval mansion in Hertfordshire, was intended to kill Charles and the Duke of York as they rode to the races at Newmarket, included a number of conspirators and was the subject of high-profile trials resulting in many executions, imprisonments and exiles), English parliamentarians initially got on well with James on his accession.  Since he had at that time no male heirs, only daughters who were raised as Protestants in accordance with the orders of Charles, Parliament seemed to hope that he would keep his Catholicism to himself and not impose it on the country.  But not everyone was satisfied that he would preserve the privileges of the Church of England, and in June 1685, two rebellions, one in Scotland and one in the southwest of England, led by former Rye House conspirators who took refuge in Holland, took place that heightened tensions and brought on a new round of ominous fears of repression and Catholic absolutism.

The Scottish rebellion was led by Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, in coordination with the English one, which was led by James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, an illegitimate son of Charles II.  Both rebellions, which began with small numbers of followers and failed to attract enough troops to defeat even a small army of trained professional soldiers, were crushed handily enough by James' army, but it was James' intention to make an example of those who had had anything to do with taking up arms against the king, and he knew just the man for the job: an asshole.

Jeffreys was sent with four other judges to preside over the so-called “Bloody Assizes” (August-September 1685), a circuit court that went through the west country where Monmouth raised his army, mostly country people with crude weapons and no military experience or training, and in scaring the populace into submission to James' rule, Jeffreys did his work thoroughly.

The first notable case was that of Dame Alice Lyle (or Lisle), widow of an official of Cromwell's Commonwealth, who was accused of giving food and shelter to two fugitive rebels.  This made her liable to a charge of high treason, which in English law did not distinguish between principal and accessory, and one which would in more enlightened circumstances would have been treated leniently, since she was being threatened with death by burning at the stake for no more than being kind.  Even more, the two rebels in question had not yet been tried themselves.  Witnesses and jury alike were reluctant to send this woman, who was generally liked and respected in the community by people of all political persuasions, to the stake, but Jeffreys was determined to make an example of her, browbeating terrified witnesses and intimidating the jury until a guilty verdict was reached.  Dame Lyle was sentenced to be burned, but after appeals on her behalf to the King, the sentence was commuted to beheading.  After her execution, writes Macaulay, “the judicial massacre began.”

All in all, Macaulay estimated the number of rebels executed at 320, out of some fourteen hundred accused of rebelling against the king.  In the county of Somerset, Macaulay writes:

At every spot where two roads met, on every marketplace, on the green of every large village which had furnished Monmouth with soldiers, ironed corpses clattering in the wind, or heads and quarters stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the traveller sick with horror. In many parishes the peasantry could not assemble in the house of God without seeing the ghastly face of a neighbour grinning at them over the porch. The Chief Justice was all himself. His spirits rose higher and higher as the work went on. He laughed, shouted, joked, and swore in such a way that many thought him drunk from morning to night. But in him it was not easy to distinguish the madness produced by evil passions from the madness produced by brandy.

One local peer, a Tory named Lord Stawell, found a corpse hung in chains at his park gate in retribution for his publicly expressing horror at the butchery.

Most of the accused rebels not executed were sentenced to transportation for their crimes.  The conditions of their sentence were that they were to be sold as slaves, that they were not to be emancipated for ten years, and that they were to be shipped, not to North America, but to the West Indies.  The exiles were shipped over in the same manner as African slaves: packed below decks in extremely close quarters, never allowed on deck, and fed on small rations of water and ship-biscuit.  Many of the prisoners died during the voyage of disease and starvation.  Jeffreys distributed the rights to profit from their sale to members of James' court, and James' wife got the right to one hundred of the newly-enslaved rebels, and reportedly profited to the tune of at least a thousand guineas.

According to the law, the property of a man convicted of treason was forfeit, and the government of James II enforced this law, according to Macaulay, “with a rigour at once cruel and ludicrous. The brokenhearted widows and destitute orphans of the labouring men whose corpses hung at the cross roads were called upon by the agents of the Treasury to explain what had become of a basket, of a goose, of a flitch of bacon, of a keg of cider, of a sack of beans, of a truss of hay.”  Meanwhile, Jeffreys and his cronies also connived to profit from the better-off among the accused by doing a brisk trade in pardons and bribes.  He himself received fifteen thousand pounds (an immense fortune in those days) from one Edmund Prideaux, who it was certain had never taken up arms against the king, and against whom some prisoners had been convinced to bear evidence in exchange for mercy, and used it to purchase an estate, which the locals called, in reference to the field Judas Iscariot is supposed to have bought with his thirty silver pieces, Aceldama.  In addition, some of the most central figures of the Monmouth rebellion who would have been more fit to be punished according to the law than most of the ill-armed peasants whose heads and quarters were moldering all over the West Country, escaped retribution entirely, usually because they were financially worth more to James alive than dead.

When Jeffreys returned to London, he was rewarded by James with the political post of Lord Chancellor, was elevated to a peerage, becoming 1st Baron Jeffreys of Wem, and given a seat on the Privy Council.  But with his new honors came a decrease, despite his best efforts, in his usefulness to James: as a newly-created peer, he now sat in the House of Lords, no longer surrounded by toadies who owed him their jobs and defendants who owed him their necks, but by nobles who owed him nothing, and who were well aware that he was a coarse, brutal man, a dedicated hatchet-man for an increasingly unpopular king, and an asshole.

During the night of December 10, 1688, as William's troops approached London, James and his wife fled, and Jeffreys remained behind as the highest legal authority, but rioting broke out in the city, and Jeffreys attempted to flee and follow James.  On December 12 he was spotted in a public house in Wapping by a man who had been in his court, been scared out of his wits and never forgot that asshole's face, even though he was now dressed as a sailor with his eyebrows shaved and his clothing covered in coal-dust.  The public house was soon surrounded by an angry populace armed with cudgels, and Jeffreys was dragged by an armed guard first to the Lord Mayor, then, on his earnest pleading, to the Tower, where he could be safe from the mob.

Jeffreys had long suffered from painful kidney and bladder ailments, probably aggravated by his heavy drinking (it has been long speculated that his savage temper was probably aggravated both by the pain of his illnesses and his alcoholism), and he died of his kidney ailments while still in custody in the Tower, on April 18, 1689, aged 43.  His remains were first interred in the chapel at the Tower, and then moved three years later, to the church of St. Mary Aldermanbury.  All traces of Jeffreys' tomb were destroyed when the church was gutted by a German air raid during the Blitz (the remains of the church itself were later re-erected in, of all places, Fulton, Missouri, in the United States).

News of the Bloody Assizes horrified the public and did much damage to what was left of James' reputation among his subjects.  James ended up fleeing to France, where Louis XIV settled a pension on him and set him up in one of his palaces at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he lived to a ripe old age.  Predictably, James protested that Jeffreys went far further than he had intended, while Jeffreys said in the Tower that he actually didn't go nearly as far as James wanted.  James' son, James Francis Edward Stuart (1688-1766), went on to lead an unsuccessful uprising in Scotland in 1715, and his grandson Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), remembered as "Bonnie Prince Charlie", led a similarly unsuccessful rising in 1745.  The last legitimate heir to James was Charlie's brother Henry Benedict Stuart (1725-1807), who publicly claimed the throne of James but made no effort to seize it, preferring instead to live in the Papal States and pursue a career in the Catholic Church, becoming Dean of the College of Cardinals and the longest-serving cardinal in the Church's history.  After his death, the relatives of the Stuart family sort of let all the claims to the throne go.

While Jeffreys' reputation and his deeds live on in history and legend, his male line and his peerage both became extinct within a generation: he had one son, John, who acceded to his father's title, but John Jeffreys and his wife had no male children, though there were descendants through the female line.  According to Macaulay, one of these, the Duchess of Pomfret, Jeffreys' granddaughter, found that she could not travel through the West Country where the elder Jeffreys had held the Bloody Assizes without insults and physical danger from the populace.

Judge Jeffreys' reputation as an asshole lives on in fiction and literature, where he, characters inspired by him, or references to him, abound in novels and short stories by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Sabatini, Victor Hugo, Bram Stoker, M. R. James, Peter S. Beagle, and Neal Stephenson, among others.

The History of England from the Accession of James II can be found in full here at Project Gutenberg, in plain-text, HTML, EPUB and other electronic formats, all freely downloadable and in the public domain.

Being an atheist is okay: affirming your atheism is also okay

In which Plastic Exploding comes out to his blog readers as an atheist (horrors!) and stands up for being forthright and frank rather than silent on the subjects of religion and atheism

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

The above graphic was posted to my personal Facebook page last weekend by a close friend, who got it from a mutual acquaintance I know less well.  I slept on the message within for several days, and concluded that something about it stuck in my craw, and that I should respond to it.

Talking about atheism has never been the primary emphasis of this blog, but it seemed best that I respond to it here rather than on Facebook.  For one thing, I only go online a few times a week, and therefore turning this into a threaded discussion of some kind is neither practical for me, nor, I feel, particularly necessary.  For that reason, and out of respect for my Facebook friends, I am not assuming either endorsement or agreement with the substance of the graphic, nor that it originated with either of them.  I am responding just to the ideas expressed above, without reference to anything they have expressed in the past, as though they passed it along to me in the spirit of "hmm, look what I found: your thoughts?"

Well here are my thoughts, and they come mainly from the first two lines of the graphic:

Being an atheist is okay.
Being an atheist and shaming religions and spirituality as silly and not real is not okay.

Okay, there are some assumptions behind this statement that I have problems with.  The people: One is that atheists are motivated by malice and like to mock and belittle believers just because they are believers.  This is a negative stereotype no less than the notion that all Muslims are terrorists.  No atheist that I know, or know of in the greater atheist community, bullies people on account of their beliefs.  None.

The message: Another assumption is that the atheist-humanist message is about shaming or making people feel bad.  You could, I suppose, summarize the atheist-humanist perspective as "religion is silly and not real," but this would be a gross oversimplification and also, again, attribute motivations to us that are not there.

The subject: Still another assumption is that anything touching on religion is so personal that religion must always be exempted from critical evaluation, lest someone be offended.

The take-away from all this is that it's fine to be an atheist, but not okay to discuss atheism in public.  You can say, "I'm an atheist", but not express why you are an atheist.

There are many reasons why atheists should not be silent, even if what they have to say is something you don't want to hear.  For the last several years, organizations like American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, the United Coalition of Reason, the Center for Inquiry, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, along with their local affiliates and allies, have worked together to raise the visibility of secular Americans, urging closeted non-believers to come out as non-believers to their families, friends, co-workers and community  In a diverse urban community such as the one I live in, it's not too difficult to be an out atheist.  But in many, if not most areas of the country, where open declarations of piety and faith are virtually required and one of the first questions people are asked is "What church do you attend?", atheists live in isolation and fear of shunning, mistrust and sometimes threats.  Their invisibility is part of what perpetuates the misconceptions that atheists are bad people, that church-state separation is some sort of evil plot to take religion away from believers.

People can be shamed, ideas cannot.  Anyone who derides anyone else because of their beliefs is simply being a dick, and no group has a monopoly on dickishness.  If you follow the atheist blogosphere for any length of time, you will find a wealth of dicks saying dickish things, preachers, pundits, and politicians impugning the character and motives of people who fight for church-state separation and freedom of thought and conscience.  Most of the dickishness comes not from atheists toward believers but from believers toward other believers, and it's more toxic and hateful than any honest inquiry about the existence of gods or the rationality of religion-derived thinking.

But one thing needs to be made clear: being an atheist and holding religious ideas up to critical evaluation is okay.  Just as an example, as an atheist and a proponent of freedom of thought and conscience, I support the rights of American Muslims, who are currently encountering the brunt of believer-on-believer dickery in this country, to practice their religion, to freely associate, and to live free of harassment, discrimination or intimidation.  This does not oblige me to refrain from criticizing the tenets and practices of Islam, or from supporting the rights of Muslims who are questioning their faith to leave their religion without fear of retribution or retaliation.  If I have critical things to say about Islam (which I would rather leave to such prominent ex-Muslims as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, Maryam Namazie, or Taslima Nasrin, who are much more qualified), they will stand or fall on their own merits, and to anyone who can distinguish between criticizing ideas and shaming people, it will be obvious whether or not I am saying something valid or just being a dick.  I have no reason or desire to flag down a passing Muslim and give him a hard time, or to have discussions he does not wish to have, but if I think I have something to say, I am going to say it, and I cannot worry about people being too sensitive to hear dissenting views.  The same goes for any other religious group.  Cogent and rational criticism is not bigotry, it is the quest for truth.

I hope I have clearly made my point as to why the above graphic sort of didn't set well with me, and why people like you should not be afraid of people like me.

Back to your regularly scheduled blog.

Reason's Greetings, everyone.

Peter Bergman (1939-2012)

At the risk of having this blog turn into an obituary page, I am sad to report that Peter Paul Bergman, co-founder of the Firesign Theater, succumbed to leukemia this morning at the age of 72.

Born in Cleveland, OH, Bergman's talents for political humor and satire came early with school newspaper columns and a single, "Attention Convention," parodying the 1956 Democratic convention and made in a cut-up style similar to that of Buchanan & Goodman's humorous sound collages, that was released under the name The Four Candidates. He also lost a job as announcer over his high school's PA system when he announced that Chinese Communists had taken over and that a "mandatory voluntary assembly" was to take place immediately. He pursued undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale, did six months in the Army, and toured Europe. He worked with Tom Stoppard, Spike Milligan, and the Living Theater, the latter two forming two poles of influence between which the art of the Firesign Theater was to take shape.

In 1966 he did a nightly free-form radio show in Los Angeles, Radio Free Oz, where he began to work with poet and broadcaster David Ossman and actors Philip Proctor and Philip Austin, and under the name The Firesign Theater (so-called because all four were, astrologically speaking, "fire signs") the four recorded their first album, Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him, in 1968. In this and subsequent albums such as How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All and Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, the Firesign Theater explored a form of surreal, stream-of-consciousness audio comedy-drama that incorporated the techniques of old-time radio, a counterculture sensibility, puns and wordplay, full of recondite references and allusions to high culture and low, absurdity and dystopian science-fiction and utilized the resources of the multi-track recording studio.

I first heard the Firesign Theater in college when one of the local radio stations played a few of the albums (I believe I remember hearing excerpts from Don't Crush That Dwarf, I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, and In The Next World You're On Your Own) all in a segued, free-form mix that was hilariously funny and terrifying at the same time. I wasn't high at the time, but I could have been. It was one of those transformative moments, but I didn't know who the artists were until a year or so later.

To many, The Firesigns' humor was "head humor" and a lot of people lumped them in with acts such as Cheech & Chong, but their albums were mostly full-length plays for the medium of the long-playing record. If radio drama was the "theater of the mind," the Firesigns made full-on avant-garde movies for the mind, with a cinematic sensibility exquisitely translated into audio that somehow never got garbled in the presentation and always rewarded repeat listening.

In addition to Firesign, Bergman worked widely in radio and embraced the creative possibilities of high-tech and the internet early. He also worked in film and television, co-writing and appearing in the cult film J-Men Forever, which incorporated a great deal of footage from old movie serials, and Americathon, a dark satirical comedy about a future America attempting to stave off complete bankruptcy by holding a telethon. In recent years he worked as a speaker and lecturer and revived his old Radio Free Oz as a podcast. A dyed-in-the-wool progressive, his opinions were as fiery as his sign and his wit caustic.

Dear readers!

For me, it's something of an event when I manage to post twice in a month. The two most recent posts have been in various states of preparation for a number of months, and I hustled myself to finally post them and have done.

I think of myself as an essayist whose main medium is the weblog and who likes to use film as a springboard to talk about whatever subject moves me. But I do have a full-time job which pays little, gets less respect, and which I often find mentally and physically taxing. That and my constant diddling and overworking what I write means I don't post very often, though I am always on my own case to do more. I also have a touch of depressive illness or disthymia and that has an effect on my productivity as well.

If some of you have read my stuff here, have liked it and would like to read more, I imagine it can get rather frustrating to deal with months of silence before something comes up on the blog. It frustrates me as well, because it is a melancholy thing to see a seemingly abandoned website, and its air of ambitious ideas gone nowhere.

Now while I don't write for applause, I would like to keep any readers I have managed to get, and strongly urge those of you who don't use an RSS feed aggregator to start using one, so you don't have to constantly click back here, see nothing new, and then give up, thinking that I have stopped posting, because in spite of not posting often, I don't intend to stop posting. For those of you who don't consider yourselves web-savvy computer geeks, a feed aggregator monitors websites with frequently-updated content, letting you know if there is anything new on the websites you follow so you do not have to keep clicking your browser back. It's great to manage all the websites you follow, and for those like mine that tend to be inactive a lot, it also frees you from the frustrating experience of having to click back over and over before finding new content.

RSS feeds are not a new thing by any means, and as said, I was a little intimidated at first by all the talk about feeds and such, but take a little time to Google and learn about it, and I think you'll find that it'll be worth your while. Just to get you started, if you are a Windows user, you might want to try Newzie, a free standalone client (though there are lots of other freeware feedreaders out there), and if you like podcasts, as I do, you might also want to check out Newzie's sister client Ziepod, a client that allows you to manage and download all the podcasts you follow, though, again, there are many podcast aggregators you might want to try out.

This way, if there is something new here at Plastic Exploding, you'll know about it without having to make extra effort. Meanwhile, I'll try my best to post more often. Is it a deal?

For those of you who observe the end-of-year holidays, I hope you have a great holiday season.

Michael S. Hart (1947-2011)

Michael S. Hart, inventor of the electronic text or "etext" and founder of Project Gutenberg, passed away at his home in Urbana, Illinois on September 8 at the age of 64.

As a freshman at the University of Illinois, Hart entered the text of the US Declaration of Independence into the university's mainframe on the night of July 4, 1971, almost literally at a keystroke creating the first electronic text and inaugurating what was to become Project Gutenberg, the mission of which is to make electronic versions of as many literary works as possible available to anyone at no cost. He followed the Declaration of Independence a year later with the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights. A year later, a volunteer entered the entire text of the US Constitution.

For the first two decades of Project Gutenberg, Hart and a handful of volunteers worked at entering by hand works such as the King James Bible -- released as an ebook in 1989 -- and the collected works of William Shakespeare -- released in 1994. The development of hypertext and the World Wide Web in 1990, and the availability of the first public web browser, Mosaic, in 1993, facilitated the distribution of ebooks and the recruitment of volunteers, and from 1991 to 1996, the production of new ebooks doubled every year. Distributed digitization and proofreading led to further growth, and in August 1997, Project Gutenberg released its one-thousandth ebook, the original Italian text of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Other milestones in PG's growth included:

• #2000: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote (original Spanish text), May 1999
• #3000: Marcel Proust, Á L'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (original French text), December 2000
• #5000: Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, April 2002
• #10000: The Magna Carta, October 2003
• #20000: Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, December 2006
• #30000: Chester Albert Reed, The Bird Book, October 2009.

By June 2011, the collection listed over 36,000 titles in sixty languages, available in formats capable of being read using computers, PDAs, smartphones and ebook readers, and all freely downloadable and redistributable. Affiliated projects exist in Europe, Australia and Canada, and tens of thousands of titles are downloaded every day from the main sites and from 40 mirror sites worldwide.

I don't know who coined the phrase "information wants to be free," but Michael Hart embodied the spirit of that slogan. For four decades, he worked to make the collected cultural legacy of humankind available to all. Our thoughts are with Hart's family and friends. Project Gutenberg continues, a living monument to one of the digital age's most important yet uncelebrated visionaries.

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Today we are all Egyptians

Been sitting all day at my local library, using the wireless internet and watching the live feed of Al Jazeera English which has been showing the jubilation of Egyptians in Cairo at the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. Celebrations have also been going on other parts of the Middle East, Obama has said some good words, in spite of not having previously called for Mubarak to step down. Today is a relatively good day for the world, and I find myself quite moved, and happy and proud for the Egyptian people.

Congratulations on your victory, people of Egypt, and know that we here and everywhere share your happiness, and are inspired by your example, and keep partying.

Stupid white people.

A friend has been after me to start a Facebook account, which I intend to do at some point, when I actually have the time. Or at least, that was the plan... then I discovered People Who Said Nigger Today, a blog that shows screenshots of white people (with a couple of exceptions) using the n-word on their Facebook walls. And with few exceptions, these people are posting under their own names, proud to proclaim themselves as fearless individualists defying the political-correctness police by pronouncing racist epithets, repeating unfunny ethnic jokes, and defying the wrath of the Islamic world ("FUC ALLA") in unpunctuated tweet-speak, served up with snarky comments. This page will take your breath away, and then depress the hell out of you as it slowly dawns how many of your compatriots are walking billboards for Ugly America.

Today the blog has a whole raft of "sand nigger" posts as the nation remembers 9-11.

The blog has been in existence only since the beginning of the month, allowing you to read pretty much all the posts at a sitting, after which you will stand up a confirmed misanthrope. This stuff tends to lead me into a paranoid fantasy that someone hatched a plan a generation or so ago to grow a compliant, docile populace by making it progressively more ignorant, superstitious, self-absorbed, anxious, angry and fearful. If so, it seems to be working like a charm. Read it and scream.

Bettie Page (1923-2008)

Some sad news today. Betty Mae Page passed away last night in Los Angeles at the age of 85.

She will be missed.

Via Metafilter.
Some classic Page images at Flickr.

OTR: Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1949-53)

I probably picked up the interest in old time radio (OTR) from my father. He was never a huge collector of programs, but he occasionally bought albums available of various radio shows, or borrowed them from the library. I recall he was mostly into old radio comedy and Westerns, and pulp-style heroes such as The Shadow. My own tastes in OTR run mostly in the direction of detective series, and one of my current favorites is Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Part of the reason is star Dick Powell (1904-1963) the first, and my favorite, cinematic interpreter of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe character in Edward Dmytryk's Murder My Sweet (1944).

Powell's initial stock-in-trade was as a singer. Signed to Warner Bros. in 1932, he debuted in Blessed Event as a singing bandleader, and for twelve years he sang and hoofed in musicals such as 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Flirtation Walk, and On The Avenue, often appearing opposite Ruby Keeler. But he couldn't do the boyish roles he was known for forever, and in 1944 he landed a completely different role in Murder My Sweet, and entered on a new phase in his career as a tough-guy lead in crime and detective features. He also parlayed the new persona into radio, starring in a number of detective series in the forties and fifties.

Richard Diamond, Private Detective debuted on NBC in 1949, and ran until 1953. Sponsored at first by the Rexall drug chain and then by Camel cigarettes, the series' principal producer and writer by Blake Edwards, who was later to create the television series Peter Gunn and the Pink Panther film series. Beginning with a dramatic sting, segueing into a happy-go-lucky whistled rendition of "Leave It To Love" by Henry Russell, the series combined hard-boiled action and intrigue with a light touch of humor. Richard Diamond was a wisecracking shamus who, in typical private-eye fashion, was catnip to the women, handy with a gun, got knocked over the head and roughed up a lot, and narrated the episodes Philip Marlowe-style. He also had a knack for discovering dead bodies and had an adversarial but affectionate relationship with homicide detective Lt. Walt Levinson (Ed Begley), whose stomach always cried out for a bicarb of soda when Diamond was around, and his dim sidekick Sgt. Otis (Wilms Herbert) with whom Diamond frequently traded insults. Diamond's romantic interest was socialite Helen Asher (Virginia Gregg), whose cushy Park Avenue digs were a frequent destination after a tough case, and to whom he frequently sang a song at the conclusion of the show.

Parenthetical comments: other voice talents heard on the show included Alan Reed, who also played Lt. Levinson in some episodes and who is best known to people of my age as the voice of Fred Flintstone. Also heard on Richard Diamond was Jim Backus, best known as the voice of cartoon character Mr. Magoo and as Thurston Howell III on television's Gilligan's Island, as well as a frequent comic actor in films. Also, an interesting announcement heard on some of the episodes sponsored by Camel cigarettes informs listeners that smokers pay an over fifty percent tax on the cigarettes they buy -- a whopping eight cents a pack in Federal taxes and three or four cents more in state or local taxes. More interesting than how the price of a pack of smokes has changed over the years is the tone of the announcement, implying that smokers are performing a civic duty when paying taxes on a pack of cigarettes, an attitude that has certainly changed in the decades since this announcement aired.

Dick Powell went on to a third career in movie and television production with his Four Stars production company, and from 1957 to 1960 brought Richard Diamond to television starring David Janssen. Powell passed away in 1963, his stomach cancer rumored to be the result of his work on the Howard Hughes film The Conqueror, which was filmed on Nevada land where nuclear weapons had been tested; many members of the cast and crew of this film (most notably among them John Wayne) contracted cancer later in life.

The internet-based Old Time Radio Researchers group is a collection of volunteers dedicated to documenting and preserving old radio programs, and they occasionally put together "certified" collections of programs, along with any further information available about the programs. The OTRR certified collection of Richard Diamond, Private Detective hosted permanently at the Internet Archive contains, with the exception of a few missing or repeat episodes, the complete run of the series in five .zip files each of which is roughly the size of a CD-ROM, or together will fit on a data DVD. Along with the programs, most of which are high quality 128kb MP3s apparently taken from original transcription recordings, comes a great deal of documentation, including photos, bios, scripts and other information about the series. The collection also has specially-created artwork suitable for burning discs of the programs. Single episodes from the series are also available if you don't have a fast connection or you only wish to sample a few episodes from the series.