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Fred Astaire should be in GQ's Hall of Fame if he isn't already. He was for many the benchmark of style and elegance. Although he is best known for his dancing with Ginger Rodgers, he had a number of partners over the years, including canes, hat racks, and other assorted props. He danced with the great Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, and Audrey Hepburn.
In one of his most famous numbers, "Bojangles in Harlem," he pays tribute to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (in blackface), and later he will partner with Sloppy Daniels at the beginning of The Bandwagon:
Astaire pays homage to his influences, and in the video above discovers the secret marked by the question mark near the end of the video clip: America.
Certainly, Astaire's choice of partner here is revealing, according to Stanley Cavell whose essay on this scene illuminates its greatness. Cavell also notes what it so apparent in Astaire just watching him walk: he always looks like he is about to break into dance.
Yet for all his skill as a dancer, Astaire, never blessed with the greatest voice, delivered the great songs of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, and George and Ira Gershwin as well as anyone who has ever done them. And he also played a pretty good piano, too.
He was one of the biggest stars Hollywood has ever known and a joy to watch.
Fred Astaire is great pick and I second that he truly was a "joy to watch". He also made it look so ease (a sign of greatness); this allows you to think you could dance like that too.
Alright, I'm going ahead. I'm going a bit outside the box again with this pick, so I doubt I'm stepping on any toes even if our arbitrary arbitrator thinks I'm going outside the spirit of the rules by making my pick. Hopefully this draft doesn't fall apart.
Round 9, Pick 4
Photograph
There are a large number of ways I could go in the photograph category that would fit my theme. There are a great number of photographs that admonish about the horrors of war. Some of the greatest have already been drafted. A few others, in particular, are fantastically perfect fits with my selections of von Neumann and Dr. Strangelove.
But, those selections would also be wrought with despair. I don't think that's the direction I want to take my civilization with this pick. I want to diversify a bit, keeping the themes of (largely) terrestrial science and technology, but expanding in to a new area of science and technology that is currently unrepresented in any culture (despite many people going big into science and technology), as well as adding some optimism to supplement the optimism of Star Trek and the Internet and to balance against a number of despairing picks in my draft.
Also, I think we need some more women up in this bitch. My count of the number of selections of things by women (or of women themselves) is literally 'bout tree fiddy, counting Dom's house as half for the wife and half for the husband. We're at pick #124 overall people.
I'm going to throw down. I select:
Spoiler:
Photograph 51, X-Ray Diffraction Photograph of DNA, by Rosalind Franklin
And don't try to tell me this isn't a photograph. Photons on film, dudes, even if they're not optical photons.
Rosalind Franklin literally died to make this photograph. The radiation exposure she suffered from the intense xrays used to generate this photograph killed her in 1958, before she could have received the Nobel Prize jointly with Watson and Crick for solving the structure of DNA:
Quote:
One of Rosalind Franklin's important contributions to the Crick and Watson model was her lecture at the seminar in November 1951, where she presented to those present, among them Watson, the two forms of the molecule, type A and type B, and her position whereby the phosphate units are located in the external part of the molecule. She also specified the amount of water to be found in the molecule in accordance with other parts of it, data that have considerable importance in terms of the stability of the molecule. Franklin was the first to discover and formulate these facts, which in fact constituted the basis for all later attempts to build a model of the molecule. The other contribution included an X-ray photograph of B-DNA (called photograph 51),[96] that was briefly shown to James Watson by Maurice Wilkins in January 1953,[97][98] and a report written for an MRC biophysics committee visit to King's in December 1952 which was shown by Dr. Max Perutz at the Cavendish Laboratory to both Crick and Watson. This MRC report contained data from the King's group, including some of Rosalind Franklin's and Raymond Gosling's work, and was given to Francis Crick — who was working on his thesis on haemoglobin structure — by his thesis supervisor Max Perutz, a member of the visiting committee.[99][100] Maurice Wilkins had been given photograph 51 by Rosalind Franklin's Ph.D. student Raymond Gosling, because she was leaving King's to work at Birkbeck. There was allegedly nothing untoward in this transfer of data to Wilkins,[101][102] since the Director Sir John Randall had insisted that all DNA work belonged exclusively to King's and had instructed Franklin in a letter to even stop thinking about it.[103] Also it was implied by Horace Freeland Judson, incorrectly, that Maurice Wilkins had taken the photograph out of Rosalind Franklin's drawer.[104] However, the B-DNA X-ray pattern photograph in question was shown to Watson by Wilkins — without Franklin's permission.
Watson and Crick used her data, this photograph, and they got all the credit. But nevertheless, this photograph revolutionized biology, biochemistry, biophysics, genetics, and biotechnology. The structure of DNA, which, as Watson and Crick said in their seminal paper presenting their model for the structure of DNA, immediately suggests a mechanism for replication, transformed the way the world looked at biology and opened up the door for technological revolutions like the polymerase chain reaction, sequencing, genetic transformation, site specific mutagenesis, and more.
I'm pretty impressed with the selections of photographs in this draft. Pretty much everyone has picked a photograph that has changed the world. But, if I should be so bold, none of them have revolutionized the world as much as this one. And, much like Earth Rise, the revolution was one of optimism and of the good that can be bestowed upon humanity.
James Thurber is maybe my favorite short story author. He specialized in humor and satire. The Unicorn in the Garden was published in the October 31, 1939 issue of the New Yorker. Thurber wrote a lot of stories for the New Yorker as well as doing cartoons. In both high school and college when tasked with reports and papers on authors and given the choice of my own I chose Thurber in both cases.
The Unicorn in the Garden is very funny and very short. Thurber did a whole series of "fables for our time" and Unicorn was one of them. They came with morals but the moral was typically a punchline. At only 530 words its short enough to just paste here since it shorter than a lot of lounge posts
The Unicorn in the Garden
By James Thurber
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Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses." She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him. "The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; he was now browsing among the tulips. "Here, unicorn," said the man and pulled up a lily and gave it to him. The unicorn ate it gravely. With a high heart, because there was a unicorn in his garden, the man went upstairs and roused his wife a gain. "The unicorn," he said, "ate a lily." His wife sat up in bed and looked at him, coldly. "You are a booby," she said, "and I am going to have you put in a booby-hatch." The man, who never liked the words "booby" and "booby-hatch," and who liked them even less on a shining morning when there was a unicorn in the garden, thought for a moment. "We'll see about that," he said. He walked over to the door. "He has a golden horn in the middle of his forehead," he told her. Then he went back to the garden to watch the unicorn; but the unicorn had gone away. The man sat among the roses and went to sleep.
And as soon as the husband had gone out of the house, the wife got up and dressed as fast as she could. She was very excited and there was a gloat in her eye. She telephoned the police and she telephoned the psychiatrist; she told them to hurry to her house and bring a strait-jacket. When the police and the psychiatrist looked at her with great interest. "My husband," she said, "saw a unicorn this morning." The police looked at the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist looked at the police. "He told me it ate a lily," she said. The psychiatrist looked at the police and the police looked at the psychiatrist. "He told me it had a golden horn in the middle of its forehead," she said. At a solemn signal from the signal from the psychiatrist, the police leaped fro m their chairs and seized the wife. They had a hard time subduing her, for she put up a terrific struggle, but they finally subdued her. Just as they got her into the strait-jacket, the husband came back into the house.
"Did you tell your wife you saw a unicorn?" asked the police. "Of course not," said the husband. "The unicorn is a mythical beast." "That's all I wanted to know," said the psychiatrist. "Take her away. I'm sorry, sir, but your wife is as crazy as a jay bi rd." So they took her away, cursing and screaming, and shut her up in an institution. The husband lived happily ever after.
Moral: Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
End
so far: Mount Rushmore (sculpture)
Golden Gate Bridge (architecture)
Casablanca (film)
The Kiss (photgraph)
Sing Sing Sing (music)
Game Called Because of Rain (painting)
The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson (television)
Babe Ruth (performer/athlete)
The Unicorn in the Garden (short form literature)
Two Plus Two
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