Thursday, January 01, 2015

Famous People Born 1915: It Was A Very Good Year 2

I'm going to send you to the original post here  that has video and pictures and a list of 37 folks who were born in 1915 and made names for themselves. I'm afraid the coding for the table was too big for Feedburner to send it to other blogrolls. I tried to make it simpler but after redoing the chart, I did something that screwed up all the formatting.


Image from here.



 This post gives me a chance to add a few pictures and a video that weren't in the original as a teaser.

This quote from Alan Watts (born Jan 6, 1915) seems an appropriate one for a post like this.












Image from Wouk website




And novelist Herman Wouk, born May 27, 1915 and one of three on the list who are still alive.














Or this short video of Anthony Quinn (born April 21, 1915) as Zorba.















Famous People Born In 1915 - It Was A Very Good Year

[1916 list is now up]

Billie Holiday was born 8 months before Frank Sinatra who was born a week before Edith Piaf.



It's always interesting to consider at all the folks who were born in the same year.  We don't normally think about famous people in terms of their birth year cohorts.    As kids, had they been in the same school, the months they were born in would have mattered quite a bit.  And it would be interesting to know which ones would have been friends.   How many actually got to meet each other?  How many were good friends?



Three of these folks born 100 years ago in 2015 appear to still be alive - Herman Wouk the novelist who wrote the WW II novel The Caine Mutiny, Nobel Prize winning Physicist Charles Townes who was part of the team that created laser beams, and banker David Rockefeller and could have their 100th birthdays in 2015.

[UPDATE Jan. 30, 2015:  Charles Townes died January 27, 2015]



Some of the best known are singers Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, and Billy Holiday.  Also best known are actors Orson Welles, Ingrid Bergman, and Anthony Quinn.  There's Moshe Dayan and guitarist Les Paul.





Sargent Shriver, as the first director of the Peace Corps, has special meaning for me.  And I actually got to meet Nobel Prize winning playwright Arthur Miller in the Anchorage museum when we were both waiting for our wives.  [UPDATE See Oct 17, 2015 post, Miller's 100th Birthday, with Alaska connections in Death of a Salesman.]

We've got some heavy thinkers like philosophers Roland Barthes and Thomas Merton.

*Picture sources at bottom of post


The women, not many, are all entertainers.

I cherry picked the names from NNDB which has a much longer list.  And most of the links go to NNDB.  I've sorted this table by the age they lived to.  It's always interesting (and a little creepy) to think about why some people live short lives and others long ones.  I know Thomas Merton was electrocuted in a hotel shower in Bangkok in 1968.  I was in Thailand at that time too, but didn't know anything about him then.




And there are some who are there simply because they were big names and their roles have had some influence on American culture like Barbara Billingsley -  June Cleaver, the mother on Leave It To Beaver - and Lorne Greene, the patriarch of Bonanza.

There are several Nobel Prize winners, no US presidents (but a Supreme Court Justice, Potter Stewart),  and at least one villain - Augusto Pinochet.


Edith Piaf

Dec 19 1915

Oct 11 1963

38
Fantastic French Singer
Thomas Merton Jan 31 1915 Dec 10 1968
43
Catholic Thinker
Billie Holiday Apr 7 1915 Jul 17 1959
44
Jazz Singer 
Philip L. Graham Jul 30 1915

Aug 3 1963

48
Washington Post publisher, 1947 - - 63
Billy Strayhorn Nov 29 1915

May 31 1967

51
Composer 
Take The A Train
Alan Watts Jan 6 1915

Nov 16 1973

58
Philosopher Zen
Bobby Hackett Jan 30 1915 Jun 7 1976
61
Jazz Musician
Zero Mostel Feb 28 1915 Sep 8 1977
62
Actor -
Fiddler on the Roof
Roland Barthes Nov 12, 1915 Mar 23  1980
64
Philosopher
Moshe Dayan

May 20 1915 Oct 16 1981
66
Israeli military leader, politician
Muddy Waters Apr 4 1915

Apr 30 1983

68
Amazing Blues Musician
Ingrid Bergman Aug 29 1915 Aug 29 1982
68
Actor
Potter Stewart Jan 23 1915 Dec 7 1985
70
US Supreme Court
Orson Welles May 6 1915

Oct 10 1985
70
Actor
Citizen Kane
Theodore H. White May 6 1915

May 15 1986
71
Historian
Robert Hofstadter Feb 5 1915 Nov 17 1990
75
Nobel Prize Physics
Robert Motherwell

Jan 24 1915 Jul 16 1991
76
Abstract Expressionist Painter
Lorne Greene Feb 12 1915

Sep 11 1987
77
Ben Cartwright on Bonanza
Fred Friendly Oct 30 1915 Mar 3 1998
82
President of CBS News, Journalist
Frank Sinatra Dec 12 1915 May 14 1998
82
The Boss
Ring Lardner, Jr. Aug 19 1915 Oct 31 2000
85
Playwright
Anthony Quinn Apr 21 1915

Jun 3 2001

86
Actor Zorba the Greek

John C. Lilly Jan 6 1915 Sep 30 2001

86
Human/dolphin communication
Abba Eban Feb 2 1915 Nov 17 2002
87
Foreign Minister of Israel
Alan Lomax Jan 30 1915 Jul 19 2002
87
Musicologist - Saved folksongs
Saul Bellow Jun 10 1915 Apr 5 2005
89
Nobel Prize Literature
Arthur Miller Oct 17 1915 Feb 2005
89
Playwright - Death of a Salesman
William Proxmire

Nov 11 1915

Dec 15 2005

90
US Senator Wisconsin
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf Sep 1915 Aug 2006
90
Opera Soprano
Augusto Pinochet

Nov 25 1915

Dec 2006
91
Chilean Dictator
Barbara Billingsley Dec 22 1915 Oct 16 2010
94
Leave It To Beaver’s Mother
Les Paul Jun 9 1915

Aug 13 2009

94
Electric guitar/multitrack recording pioneer
Paul Samuelson May 15 1915 Dec 13 2009
94
Nobel Prize Economics
Sargent Shriver Nov 9 1915

Jan 18 2011
95
1st Peace Corps Director
Charles H. Townes Jul 28 1915


99
Nobel Prize Phyics
Laser
David Rockefeller Jun 15 1915

99
Trilateral Commission Founder
Herman Wouk May 27 1915


99
Novelist
The Caine Mutiny



*Sources for photos in the image
Charles Townsend  (with James Gordon) http://aip.org/history/exhibits/laser/sections/themaser.html  (image enhanced)


Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Mugged By LA Parking Authority


[UPDATE Jan 28:  There are two followup posts:
January 2, 2015 and January 28, 2015]




I felt like I'd been mugged.  I was happily minding my own business, when the LA Parking Authority snatched $58 from me.

"The best way to make money is not to spend it."  That's a basic tenet I picked up along the way.  It doesn't mean you have to be a miser, but just don't spend money you don't need to spend.  And parking tickets are a good example of money you shouldn't have to spend.

So, I'm reasonably careful about parking.  Biking helps a lot, but I do use a car too.

People who knowingly park without putting money in the meter or who take up two parking places or park in a handicapped zone when their ego handicap hasn't been diagnosed, all should pay for parking tickets.

But this one feels more like entrapment.



We went to see the movie Wild.  After I got past the silliness of the early scene where she struggles to pick up her heavy pack, but then manages to walk with it for 5 miles, it got good.

We checked out some sale items in the mall, then got the car from the mall parking lot (there are three free hours) and decided to find street parking while we ate dinner.


Here's the scene of the crime:




1 (the numbers match the numbers in the satellite view above) - far right of the picture, is where we came out of the mall parking lot.












The view from the parking lot exit of the block we're going to park on.





You can (almost) see that there are 6 parking spaces.  It's a really short block.  We turned left out of the parking lot and stopped in the red space on the right of the Starbucks (2 on the map) so we could read the parking sign.  Basically, we wanted to know if we had to put money in the meter or not.



2.  Here's where we stopped when we got out of the parking lot to check the parking sign (2a) to see if you still had to feed the meters or not.

The sign (2a) says:  No Parking from 4-7pm on top.  It was just after 7pm
Below it says 2 hour parking from 8am - 4pm.







(I took this picture that night after we found the ticket and drove back to the scene.  The others I took the next afternoon when I biked back to see if there was a white curb where I parked or any other warning.)




So, it said that we didn't have to pay for the meter because it was after 4pm and we could park there because it was after 7pm.  We pulled out of this space and looked for an empty space.  There was one.  It was the sixth and last parking space on the block.  All the others were full.




3.   We were parked where that gray car is - the last spot.  As you can see, the curb is just cement and it has a parking meter like all the other spots.






















Just to emphasize that the two spaces on the end look exactly like the other four on the block, this picture is from the middle of the block.  There are the three cars you can see in front and three behind.  There's also a truck parked on the corner beyond the metered spaces.













This picture is from where we were parked.  You can see that in front of us it is painted red.  And there's enough room for about two cars and that truck.


We got out of the restaurant and as we walked back to the car, I noticed the car behind us had a note or something under the windshield wiper.  We got in the car and drove off.  But then I noticed there was something under our windshield wiper.  Some ad I assumed and we stopped the car to get rid of it.  It was an envelope with the ticket inside.

What the hell did we do wrong?  J read it - "Passenger loading only 7pm-2am"  Huh?

So we went back and looked.   The car behind us still had the ticket on the windshield.  There was also a car parked in the space we'd been in.   So they didn't see the sign either.   (By the way, did you notice the sign in the picture above by the truck?  This picture is during the day and we were there at night.)




This sign was behind the car behind us.  When we walked from the car we saw the back of this sign.  You can see this also two pictures above that says "Kitche" on it.  You probably didn't notice.

There's also a sign at the corner, next to the tree in the picture with the truck.  Its arrow points in the other direction.

So two spaces with meters and no white paint on the curbs are reserved in the evening for passenger loading.  We didn't see this sign.  We'd checked the sign at the other end of the block which had a convenient place to pull over and look at the sign without blocking traffic.  And there are only six parking spaces with meters on the whole block.


But even if we did see the sign at the corner - about the distance of three or four parking spaces away as you can see in the picture with the truck - I don't know that I would have realized that it meant my space.  First, the sign is very far from where I was parked.  Second, the arrow points to a long area of red pained curb.  There's room for three or four cars to stop and let off passengers.  Why would they  take two more metered parking spaces in addition?

Could I have figured this out before getting a parking ticket?  Well, if I had walked to the end of the block and checked the sign and then checked the sign behind where I parked, I might have figured it out.  Or at least been concerned and considered moving to another spot.  I like to walk so it wouldn't have mattered.  But I've never seen a no parking sign like this that took metered parking spaces away at night.  Passenger loading spaces I know about are painted red or white or yellow.  I'd looked at the sign to see when you had to use the meter.  It told me I didn't need to use it after 4pm and the sign also told me I could park there after 7pm.

This feels like entrapment.  The signs are so complicated and unexpected that an ordinary person wouldn't know he couldn't park there.  Even a reasonably careful person trying to obey the law and avoid a ticket.   The car behind us didn't know either.  Nor did the car that pulled into our space as soon as we left.

Am I whining or is this legitimate?  I checked on line and found  an October 2014 article that says parking signage is such an issue in LA that the  city council is trying to make the signs more consistent and less confusing.
Los Angeles officials pushed forward Wednesday with two programs that target one of the city's most ubiquitous problems: finding a place to park.
During a downtown committee meeting, City Council members asked transportation officials to test a simplified street parking sign that could replace the classic red, white and green placards, saying that the current, sometimes towering stacks of notices can confuse drivers and unintentionally result in parking tickets.
And there are a number of online stories about confusing parking signs in LA.  Here are a few:


Does this mean I won't have to pay the ticket?  I doubt it.  After all, they're still ticketing people at this tricky no parking spot.  And my ticket was at 7:32pm which means they are checking it right after it stops becoming a "no parking from 4-7pm" zone.


My son turned me onto a book long ago called  "Turn Signals Are The Facial Expressions of Automobiles" by 
"It's coping with the technology of quotidian life that wears us down, of course. Norman (Cognitive Psychology/UC San Diego) reassures us that it's not our fault: It's design flaws. If it's broke, Norman knows how to fix it."
The book gives lots of examples of bad design, where the message and the use conflict.  I remember particularly the example of a door with a handle to pull, but the sign says push.

I doubt the sign designers and the people who place them on the street are trying to entrap us. They are simply making signs that reflect laws or regulations that someone has passed and now the sign folks are required to implement the rules with signs.  And because they are so immersed in the making of the signs, they think it's all obvious and people should understand.  We all, generally know what we intend and it's clear to us, even though it may not be clear to others.  But part of me wonders whether this is the parking equivalent to a speed trap.  A way for LA to get needed revenue.  At $58 a pop (and that seems to be the minimum level ticket) they can ring up a lot of money.  100 tickets would be $5800.  And they got two tickets right there in a couple of minutes.  And I saw two parking enforcement vehicles when I biked over there to take the pictures.

The "Turn Signals" book points out numerous situations where this sort of rote filling out of orders results in bad design and poor instructions.

[UPDATE Jan 28:  There are two followup posts:  January 2, 2015 and January 28, 2015]