Through The Telescope

Today is the 25th day of August 2021, the 237th day of the year.  On this date in 1609, Galileo demonstrated one of his early telescopes, with a magnification of about 8 or 9, to Venetian lawmakers. Telescopes were a profitable sideline for Galileo, who sold them to merchants who found them useful at sea.

It's Wayne Shorter's birthday! "Mr. Gone" (aka "The Newark Flash") turns 87 today.

Shorter came to prominence in the late 1950s as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. From 1964 to 1968, he was a member of the legendary Miles Davis Quintet, and later co-founded the jazz fusion band Weather Report. 

Shorter played tenor and soprano sax and was a notable composer.  Among many other compositions, he wrote the titular song for Miles' 1968 album Nefertiti. On the track, the horn section repeats the melody numerous times but without individual solos.  The recording leaves a lot of open space between the instruments, and the rhythm section can clearly be heard improvising beneath the horns.  Those underlying layers of piano, bass, and drums are the more compelling and interesting part of the composition, reversing the traditional role of a rhythm section, and it's easy to get lost in the layers, especially if you've smoked marijuana before listening.  As much as any other single track, Nefertiti can be viewed as the transition from the bop and hard bop of the 40s through 60s to the post-bop of the late 60s and 70s.

Looking through the other end of the telescope, the yin to Wayne Shorter's yang, Air Force intelligence captain and OSS agent John Birch was killed in a confrontation with Chinese Communist soldiers on this date in 1945.  Coincidentally, George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, was shot and killed on this date in 1967. 

Speaking or right-wing extremist assholes, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis' Florida is leading the nation in new covid cases per day (21,263), hospitalizations per day (17,225), and deaths per day (227).  I'll go out on a limb here and say that it looks like DeSantis' anti-mandate policies, for both masks and vaccines, isn't working.  He's the only Governor in the U.S. with more current new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths per day than at any prior point during the pandemic.

He may not care. I fear that his strategy is to establish himself as the heir apparent to the Trump tradition, and that when it's time for his re-election or (shiver to imagine) next presidential election, enough people will have forgotten the body count and think, "Yeah, DeSantis.  The new Trump. He's my guy."  To put it ore bluntly, DeSantis is letting Floridians die so that he can burnish his conservative credentials.

I hope he catches the virus and has a particular painful illness. I don't want him dead, because it's actually worse for him to survive with a case of long-haul covids and the memory of his suffering, and to be haunted by the ghosts of those he let die. What a piece of shit!