Fred Scherer and Walter Wiley departed at 1 p.m. Saturday, May 3, 1913 from Manhattan at the corner of Murray Street and Broadway, hoping to make San Francisco in 48 days. To pay for the project, they will sell post cards along the route. Poughkeepsie is their first stop, Schenectady the following night. They hope to average 70 miles a day, arrive in San Francisco on June 20. Whether or not they made it to San Francisco or even Poughkeepsie is not known.

Three girl singers

1. All for You, Diana Krall, vocals and piano; trio of bass, guitar, and percussion (1996)
2. s'Gershwin, Prudence Johnson, vocals; Dan Chouinard, piano (2003)
3. Surrender, Jane Monheit, vocals; orchestra {2007)

Chose these three CD's from the local library yesterday because jazz has been bulked up in recent years by an upsurge of women singers and I haven't paid much attention to them. My taste had been formed by Billy Holiday, Carmen McRae, Abby Lincoln, Ella Fitzgerald, Carol Sloane, Nina Simone, and others of my generation and earlier. The best of the three is the Krall recording, followed by Johnson. Monheit has the chops but this is an overproduced outing.

Finally, I begin The Journalist and the Murderer

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity,ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns--when the article or book appears--his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living."
The first paragraph of Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer

Being homo on the prairie in the Fifties

When New York legislators passed the gay marriage law tonight, I thought about the early 50's in my western North Dakota high school where the words homo and queer were seldom mentioned. My fellow students and I assumed the drama and English teachers were lesbians because they were single and lived together, but the only joke I heard was that one of them was adviser to the Thespian Society which sounded a lot like lesbian. There was an unspoken acknowledgement that my classmate George had experimented sexually with several other boys but sex, hetero or homo, seemed an open book then. You learned on your own because no one, not even your parents or the parish priests, were interested in discussing the matter. After we graduated, George went to college and found some men who actually preferred the company of other men and a few, especially Korean war veterans, who were loudly hostile about same sex sex. After a veteran told George in front of others that he would kick the shit out of him if he ever touched him, George's sexuality evaporated. From then on, he was to all appearances a nonsexual person. I learned that sexual preference was dictated by someone stronger than yourself, be it that vet or eventually religious authority and or the state.

My son Eric is on a billboard in downtown Minneapolis on Park Ave between 8th and 9th.

"What you see is not true," he said, "and what is true you cannot see, only feel. That is what Romania was before and it still is." He laughed. George enjoys being cryptic. "Reality is a secret here."--William McPherson in his Granta 33 piece In Romania on the first days of collapse of the Romanian communism in December, 1989.

Don't say you weren't warned:

11,013 BC—Creation. God created the world and man (Adam and Eve).

4990 BC—The flood of Noah’s day. All perished in a worldwide flood. Only Noah, his wife, and his 3 sons and their wives survived in the ark (6023 years from creation).

7 BC—The year Jesus Christ was born (11,006 years from creation).

33 AD—The year Jesus Christ was crucified and the church age began (11,045 years from creation; 5023 calendar years from the flood).

1988 AD—This year ended the church age and began the great tribulation period of 23 years (13,000 years from creation).

1994 AD—On September 7th, the first 2300-day period of the great tribulation came to an end and the latter rain began, commencing God’s plan to save a great multitude of people outside of the churches (13,006 years from creation).

2011 AD—On May 21st, Judgment Day will begin and the rapture (the taking up into heaven of God’s elect people) will occur at the end of the 23-year great tribulation. On October 21st, the world will be destroyed by fire (7000 years from the flood; 13,023 years from creation).