Random numbers

* Number of persons living in the United States: 300,000,000

* Number of persons in prison, on probation, or on parole in the United States: 7,000,000

* Number of lawyers in the United States: 950,000

* Number of millionaire households in the U.S.: 8,900,000

* Number of millionaire households in Los Angeles: 262,800

* Number of millionaire households in Middlesex Co. (MA): 67,552
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Photo: Social Security, Filing workers’ applications for Social Security account numbers. Courtesy Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

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Internet Public Library — check it out

One web resource that’s gaining attention is the Internet Public Library. It’s a project of the well regarded School of Information at the University of Michigan.

Although you can find a lot of the material available at IPL through other web searches, the good folks who put this together have taken a lot of care in selecting and arranging the material. The library’s “collection” is truly impressive, and the ease of access is greatly facilitated by the clean design and logical arrangement.

In addition to its many other outstanding features, including a comprehensive Ready Reference section, check out IPL’s Reading Room. Among other things, it has newspapers in a wide variety of languages from around the world. I’ve taken to reading The Daily Yomiuri from Japan, which is available in an English-language edition.

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Visual interest

 

 

ABSTRACT IN STEEL AND CONCRETE–BUILDINGS OF MIDTOWN MANHATTAN (1973)

I suppose the Environmental and Protection Agency doesn’t usually leap to mind when thinking about sources for abstract photography, but here’s a photo done for the EPA’s program to photographically document subjects of environmental concern in the 1970s. The project included this photo by Dan McCoy, taken in 1973.

This public domain image is from the collection of the National Archives & Records Administration’s facility in College Park, Maryland.

 

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American movie stars make headlines in Ho Chi Minh City

On the heels of George W. Bush’s historic trip to Vietnam, movie stars Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt surprised celebrity-watchers yesterday when they were spotted riding on a motorbike through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. (Many Americans still recall the city by its previous name of Saigon.) A photo of the pair appeared on the front pages of the state-run newspapers, though according to a Reuters account, this was “puzzling [to] some Vietnamese who had never heard of them.” Jolie and Pitt were apparently making a stop in Vietnam as part of a trip to Cambodia, the birthplace of one of their adopted children.

Jolie’s father is the actor Jon Voight, with whom she apparently has little communication. Years ago, Voight won an Academy Award for his lead role in director Hal Ashby’s movie Coming Home (1978). In the film, Voight played the lead role of a paraplegic Vietnam veteran opposite female lead Jane Fonda, the actress who is still often derided as “Hanoi Jane” because of her trip to North Vietnam while hostilities were still ongoing. Coming Home was one of the first American movies to deal with the impact of the war, and Voight received an Academy Award for his part in it.

 

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WICN’s Inquiry

I recently spent the morning in Worcester, Massachusetts, in order to tape an interview about The Afterlife of America’s War in Vietnam. The interview is for an upcoming edition of Mark Lynch’s wide-ranging Inquiry program on WICN, the NPR affiliate in central Massachusetts. It was great to talk with Mark about the book and about some of the people in Worcester we both knew years ago at the Worcester Art Museum and Clark University.

Thanks also to Mark for sending me a citation for what may be the first mention of the Vietnam War in an American television-entertainment program. It was in an episode of The Twilight Zone, first broadcast September 27, 1963. In the episode, which was titled “In Praise of Pip,” the actor Jack Klugman (later famous as Oscar in TV’s The Odd Couple and as Quincy, M.E.) says,

“Pip is dying. In a place called South Vietnam. There isn’t even supposed to be a war going on there, but my son is dying. It’s to laugh. I swear, it’s to laugh.”

According to writer Marc Scott Zicree’s book The Twilight Zone Companion, “Very possibly, this marks the first mention of an American causality in Vietnam in any dramatic TV show, and it seems remarkable for its perceptiveness.” (p. 364).

Thanks again to Mark Lynch for some good conversation and for sending along that quite interesting piece of trivia. How ironic, indeed, that the Vietnam War first shows up in The Twilight Zone.