'Interesting' Statue Honors Fallen Aviator

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia -- One time a University of Virginia student, James Rogers McConnell, became a 'patriotic adventurer' when he joined the Lafayette Escadrille to fight with the French in the great German offensive at Verdun.

Killed in a dogfight with two German plans above the Somme battlefields in 1917, he died shortly before the United States entered the war.

The 12-foot tall statue, sculpted by Gutzon Borglum who had a hand in Mount Rushmore, commemorates his spirited life and courageous death. At U.Va. he had been known for his bagpipe playing and a spirit of bonhomie. He was called a "man of originality" and a "dreamer".

McConnell's life is currently being told at the University's Clemons Library in a display that includes his cap, a strip of cloth from his plan, and bullet fragments from the German guns that downed him.

But most will remember him by this surreal bronze statue on a marble pedestal that depicts a muscular, nude man in aviator headgear--sporting powerful wings that suggest the Greek mythological figure of Icarus. Over the years it has been garbed in an athletic supporter, hung with toilet paper, and festooned with balloons.

Perhaps McConnell wouldn't mind. In a final letter, written before death but never sent, he said:

"My burial is of no import. Make it as easy as possible on yourselves. I have no religion and do not care for any service. If the omission would embarrass you, I presume I could stand the performance. Good luck to the rest of you. God damn Germany and Vive la France."

In 1917, U.Va. President Edwin A. Alderman wrote in a letter of tribute to McConnell's father:

"If he were my boy, though his broken body lies buried in a foreign land, I should be the proudest father in the world today."

from an article by Carlos Santos appearing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Sunday, July 30, 2006

Italian Police Free 113 Poles Living in Slave Labor Camps

ROME, July 18 (Reuters) — The police on Tuesday freed 113 Poles living “like slaves” in forced labor camps, where those refusing to work were raped, tortured with metal batons and attacked by dogs.

The authorities in Italy and Poland said that at least four workers appeared to have committed suicide in the camps, in Italy’s southern region of Puglia, but that those deaths were being investigated as suspicious.

Italy’s anti-Mafia chief, Piero Grasso, told reporters in the southern city of Bari.

“To call the situation revealed by the carabinieri investigation simply inhuman does in no way do it justice. We are talking about conditions similar to those of concentration camps, where people were not only exploited for their work, but also kept in a state of slavery.”

Twenty people were arrested for human trafficking, and the police were looking for seven more. They were said to be members of a ring that recruited people in Poland through advertisements in local newspapers promising them agricultural work in Italy.

Poland’s national police chief, Marek Bienkowski, said at a news conference in Warsaw that the workers were watched by Ukrainian, Italian and Polish armed guards. He added that there was evidence of rape and of torture with metal batons of those who tried to resist. Dogs were set against some victims.

The Italian police said the Poles were forced to work for up to 15 hours a day and were fed little more than bread and water. The Polish news agency PAP said more than 1,000 Poles may have been victims of the ring. Apart from the four suicides being investigated, the police in both countries did not rule out the possibility that more people might have been killed or died from exhaustion.

Ambassador of Music Dies

HERNDON, VIRGINIA -- Gordon Benson Ramsey was a musician and composer long before he took up an unusually interesting day job. For nearly 30 years, he was a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Distributing foreign aid around the world, he managed programs to build health clinics and roads. He supervised the evacuation of many Americans, including his own family during the Communist takeover of Laos in 1975.

Throughout it all he could always retreat to the deep well of music within him. Said his State Department colleague Dennis Chandler:

"After a hard day he would sit down at the piano, and the weight of the world would melt away."

Ramsey was hardly a dabbling amateur. He'd been a professional trumpet player since his teens, he was an excellent pianist, and he had a master's degree in composition from the University of Utah. He used the G.I. Bill in the early Fifties to to move to Paris and study with the composer Arthur Honegger.

The need to support his family led him to the U.S. Embassy in Paris to ask for a job, which later led to his first USAID assignment in Indonesia. As his daughter Brinton said of him:

"He was able to fit in in different places. He could be the distinguished diplomat, the intellectual, the cool musician, or he could just sit around and have a beer. When we would all be getting ready to go out, my dad would sit down at the piano and improvise. It's one of my favorite memories."

Gordon Ramsey retired from the State Department in 1980 and died June 19 at 80.

From an obituary by Matt Schudel in The Washington Post July 16, 2006

Use Your Own Songs as Ringtones

The easiest way to use your own song as a ringtone on your cellphone is to use Mobile 17 at:

mobile17.smashsworld.com

Sign up for the free account, enter your phone model and provider, and upload your sound file.

Choose the point in the song at which you want the ring to start and how long a clip you'd like.

In a few minutes, Mobile 17 will send a file in the proper format to your phone by e-mail or text message. You can then save the attachment as a ringtone.

There's been no definitive court ruling on copyright issues--even for your own song(!!)--so keep an eye out for that.

from a report in Popular Science March 2006

"An American Tragedy"

BIG MOOSE LAKE, NEW YORK--The murder that inspired the Theodore Dreiser novel An American Tragedy occurred here one hundred years ago on July 11, 1906.

The book was adapted in 1951 for the movie screen in "A Place in the Sun" starring Montgomery Clif, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley winters. It won six Oscars.

Said Robert Williams of his great-aunt, Grace Brown, who died at the hands of Chester Gillette out on the lake that day:

"This is very meaningful, especially since so many people in our extended family don't ever talk about it. By memorializing Grace like this, it feels like we're bringing her back into the family."

from an Associated Press report written by William Kates

Witch of Pungo Cleared

PUNGO, VIRGINIA -- Three hundred years after Grace Sherwood was convicted of being a witch, Governor of Virginia Timothy M. Kaine has pardoned her. Thrown into the Lynnhaven River with her thumbs tied to her feet, the rules of the trial were simple in those days: if you floated, you were guilty of being a witch; if you sank, you were cleared.

She floated and served more than seven years in jail. She's the only person convicted in Virginia by a "witch ducking trial."

Virginia Beach--which today includes the rural section of Pungo--revelled in the decision as the legend of Sherwood is so deeply ingrained in the city's folklore. The tale of the Witch of Pungo is told to schoolchildren. And every year they stage a reenactment of Sherwood's trial.

Because she inherited about 200 acres from her father, and was so successful in raising crops on it when her neighbors weren't, jealousy is considered now the motive behind the accusations.

She was known to heal sick animals, and even more mysteriously, she "worked with herbs".

originally appearing in The Washington Post.

Rembrandt: impoverished artist or brawler?

As the Dutch celebrate Rembrandt's 400th birthday on July 15, some of the myths about his life are being demolished. For centuries, his personal story was shrouded by the romanticism of admirers who preferred to perpetuate the legend of an artist toiling away in obscurity in an all-consuming quest to unravel the secrets of the soul.

Ernst van de Wetering, author of Rembrandt: the Painter at Work, dismisses the notion of Rembrandt as the impoverished artist driven to heights of creativity by his fiery emotions. Rather, he conceptualized his craft dispassionately, in a constant search for greatness. His inventiveness and originality did not come without hard work. He made small studies of light and shadow, of facial expressions before incorporating them into historical works or biblical allegories.

During his lifetime artist had 25 conflicts with his family, creditors, patrons and even sitters who claimed he cheated them.

Rembrandt was never the poor struggling artist. He won fame from an early age and commissions kept flowing. But he was a miserable money manager and profligate spender. He went bankrupt and was evicted from his home in 1658. Four years later he even sold his wife's gravesite to pay off debts.

He painted self-portraits throughout his life, not to satisfy his ego nor to explore his soul, but because he was a name brand and they sold well.

first appearing in Pravda