From The New York Times:
A Pilot Becomes a Hero Years in the Making
By RAY RIVERA

Published: January 16, 2009

Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III had just performed a remarkable feat of flying. Some were calling it a miracle. But there he stood, calmly, inside the glass waiting room at the New York Waterway terminal on Pier 79, speaking to police officials. His fine gray hair was unruffled, and his navy blue pilot’s uniform had barely a wrinkle.

“His tie wasn’t even loosened,” said Edward Skyler, a deputy mayor of New York City, who stood nearby.

Michael A. L. Balboni, the state’s deputy secretary for public safety, worked his way through the room to introduce himself. He shook the pilot’s hand, looked him in the eye and thanked him for a job done brilliantly: the precise, soft, lifesaving landing of a 50-ton jetliner in the Hudson River.

“He said to me, in the most unaffected, humble way, he says, ‘That’s what we’re trained to do,’ ” Mr. Balboni said. “No boasting, no emotion, no nothing.”

While the world clamored Friday for his story, and government leaders applauded his professionalism, and fan pages sprang up on the Internet, Captain Sullenberger retained his focus, avoiding the limelight as he awaited an interview Saturday with federal investigators studying what went wrong with US Airways Flight 1549.

Heroes are often born in an instant, the split second it takes to recognize a pending disaster and react, the blink of an eye it takes a Wesley Autrey to throw himself under a subway train to save a man fallen on the tracks.

In Captain Sullenberger’s case, it was years in the making.

Captain Sullenberger, 57, the US Airways pilot who safely brought the wounded Airbus A320 passenger plane to rest on the Hudson on Thursday, had been with the airline for nearly 30 years and was steeped in the safety side of the industry.

He had worked with federal aviation officials investigating crashes and improving training and methods for evacuating aircraft in emergencies. He got his pilot’s license as a teenager, flew F-4 Phantoms for the Air Force and was a 1973 graduate of the Air Force Academy, where he received the Outstanding Cadet in Airmanship Award, given to the top flier in each graduating class.

He even flew gliders, which is sort of what he was left with Thursday when something, perhaps birds, knocked out both engines in his plane.

Many people, from the first officer to members of the flight crew, from the passengers to the civilian and city rescue crews who converged on the craft to save them, earned accolades on Thursday. But Captain Sullenberger’s efforts, like twice checking the soaked cabin for stragglers before fleeing the sinking plane himself, emerged as singularly selfless leadership of a sort that seemed so removed from things like Ponzi schemes and subprime mortgages, corporate bailouts and deflected blame.

“If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here today,” said Mary Berkwits, a passenger from Stallings, N.C. “He was just wonderful.”

Another passenger, Nick Gamache, a software salesman from Raleigh, N.C., said he was the “picture of calm.”

“I mean, he was directing people to get on the raft,” Mr. Gamache said. “Then I saw him in the terminal. That’s where I was like, ‘Thank you, you just saved all our lives.’ ”

Howard J. Rubenstein, the public relations guru, called Captain Sullenberger a “publicist’s dream,” and envisioned lucrative book deals, movie pitches and product endorsements in his future.

“He’s got 150 people out there and their families out promoting him,” he said.

He is also a boon for an airline that has filed for bankruptcy twice in recent years and has been plagued by publicity nightmares. Two Christmases ago, US Airways lost 75,000 bags, some not found for months. Last year it became the first airline to charge for coffee, tea and bottled water.

Perhaps only in a coincidence, the airline’s share price shot up 13 percent Friday.

Captain Sullenberger fielded congratulatory phone calls from President Bush and President-elect Barack Obama on Friday, but mostly stayed secluded somewhere in the city. He did not attend a ceremony at City Hall, where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said his actions “inspired people around the city, and millions more around the world.”

The airline would not discuss his whereabouts or how he spent the day.

Friends, relatives and colleagues described Captain Sullenberger as even-tempered and unassuming. “He wouldn’t take easily to being called a hero,” said Jim Walberg, a family friend.

At Pier 79 on Thursday, while others huddled in thermal blankets, he stood without one while talking to detectives and aviation officials. One official there said Captain Sullenberger mentioned to an officer that one of his priorities was to call his wife and cancel a dinner reservation.

On Friday in Danville, Calif., 40 miles east of San Francisco, the quiet cul-de-sac where the Sullenbergers reside was abuzz with television and newspaper journalists. Lorrie Sullenberger, the wife, along with two daughters, a cat and a yellow Labrador retriever named Twinkle, has mostly been in seclusion since the accident, still shaken by the close call, said many neighbors, and looking forward to the pilot’s return.

Ms. Sullenberger stopped briefly to talk to reporters on her lawn as she ushered her daughters off to school Friday morning.

“My husband has said over years that it is highly unlikely for any pilot to have an incident in his career, let alone something like this,” Ms. Sullenberger said. “So I was stunned when he called and said there’s been an incident, and even then I thought maybe it was a tug that maybe had bumped the airplane. Your mind never goes to something like this.”

Jake Brown, a neighbor, said Captain Sullenberger’s feat was no surprise to those who knew him.

“He is someone who walks into a room and you know he is in charge,” said Mr. Brown.

Captain Sullenberger grew up in Denison, Tex., a town of about 23,000 on the Oklahoma border where his street was named for his mother’s family, the Hannas.

His father was a dentist. His mother taught grade school. Both are deceased.

His only sibling, Mary Wilson, said that even as a boy, Captain Sullenberger showed a meticulous attention for detail. He would build model aircraft carriers with tiny planes, careful to paint every last component.

“He’s very friendly,” she said, “but when it comes to being a pilot, that comes second.”

Ms. Wilson said her brother might have become interested in flying from listening to stories of his father’s Navy service. His high school friends say his passion came from watching jets from the now-defunct Perrin Air Force Base roar through the big skies over his home. In his teens, when most of his peers were learning to drive cars, he already had his pilot’s license.

Captain Sullenberger graduated near the top of his class of about 350 people and was the first-chair flautist in the marching band and involved in the Latin Club.

At the academy, he was selected along with about a dozen other freshmen to be involved in a cadet glider program, and by the end of the year was an instructor pilot.

“It was a tremendous asset to get exposed to that kind of flying early on,” said John Eisenhart, a fellow cadet in the program who now flies 767s for United Airlines. “And there’s no doubt in my mind that that came into play yesterday. When you’re in a glider you’ve got one shot at it. You’ve got to plan your energy, and of course your altitude is your energy, and that gives you one shot at the approach.”

Eric Vogel, who was in Captain Sullenberger’s squadron all four years at the academy and roomed with him during their freshman summer, said that even in the boot camp-like atmosphere that first summer, Captain Sullenberger was “unflappable.”

“You have all this pressure of a new lifestyle, and you have people yelling at you and things like that, and he would just take it and move on,” said Mr. Vogel, a pilot with Southwest Airlines.

Captain Sullenberger went on to earn two master’s degrees and become a safety expert who served on panels for the National Transportation Safety Board, among others. In one instance, he was among a group that studied emergency evacuation practices after a crash in Los Angeles, again a bit of experience likely to have come in handy on Thursday.

John Cox, a safety consultant and a former safety representative with Captain Sullenberger for the Air Line Pilots Association, said his friend personified what you wanted in a professional pilot.

“He’s naturally talented as an aviator, and he’s had very good training,” Mr. Cox said, “and it all came together on that landing in the Hudson.”

From USA TODAY:
God and sport a natural mix for Tebow
By Christine Brennan

The old argument that sports and religion should not mix is getting a workout from quarterback Tim Tebow, who wears his religion not on his sleeve, but on his eye black.

Tebow, 21, announced this week that he is coming back for his senior season at the University of Florida, presumably to try to win a third national title, as well as a second Heisman Trophy. His return as the college game's most visible superstar also rekindles the fascinating discussion over God's role in the game of football — the separation of church and Florida State, if you will.

Tebow, born in the Philippines to missionary parents, is a throwback, and not just because he combines the toughness of Bronko Nagurski with the flair of Sammy Baugh.

"I always have my milk the night before I go to sleep before a game," the 6-3, 240-pound Tebow said in the days leading up to last week's BCS national championship game.

Unusual? Perhaps, until you consider this: as a 15-year-old, Tebow preached to 10,000 high school students in the Philippines. "It gives me a sense of purpose of how to handle things knowing that football is not the most important thing," he said. "People always ask me, 'How do you handle the pressure, and how do you handle this or that?' Being places where I've been with people who are there trying to fight for their next meal, I think that's pressure, not trying to win a football game."

Try putting that on the locker room wall next year, SEC teams.

"I'm a people pleaser," Tebow says by way of explanation. "I want to please people, and I want to do the right thing and everything, but sometimes people are not going to see it for that, they're going to see it as, 'Oh, you're faking, you're just trying to make people like you and whatnot.' So that sometimes can be hurtful. But at the same time, my parents have really helped me with that. They'll say if you know that's the right thing to do and you're happy with it, then you shouldn't let those people say that. No matter what you do, there's going to be people who are going to try to bring you down, so that's human nature and that's what people try to do."

That said, there's always a valid conversation to be had about just what kind of role God plays in, say, the BCS title game. Even those of us who grew up in church and believe in God have every right to wonder if he really cares whether a field goal goes through the uprights or drifts to the left or right. Doesn't God have more important worries than who wins the SEC or Big 12?

In some ways, Tebow simply is the latest in a long line of athletes who have brought God into the locker room and onto the playing field. But, in other ways, he's not like them at all. His upbringing has given him a religious DNA that most athletes, not to mention the rest of us, never will possess. There is nothing forced about Tebow's religious ways, nothing overtly pious. His sentences flow from football to religion and back with the ease of a simple pitch to the tailback.

"Even more than playing football at the next level," he says, "my ultimate goal is to make a difference and to do something that matters. Football is just an opportunity for me to do that on a bigger platform, for me to make it bigger."

Which explains the eye black. After choosing Philippians 4:13 (shortened to Phil 4:13 because of the limited space under his eyes) during the regular season, Tebow switched to the ubiquitous John 3:16 for the BCS game. Perhaps the biblical passage is not as well known as we think, though, because for a time that evening, it was the most popularly searched item on Google.

Let's consider that for a moment. No matter how you feel about mixing religion and sports, the notion that people were looking up a Bible verse while watching a college football game is about as rare and refreshing as a true sophomore winning the Heisman Trophy. (There's been only one of those, of course: Tebow.)

The other day, after starting to walk off the stage at Florida's national championship celebration, Tebow slyly stepped back to announce that he was not turning pro and was coming back for his senior season. This means that, for another year, Saturdays will belong to one of the most intriguing young men to ever play the college game.

It also means that it will be another year before we get to find out how he'll do in the NFL. Then again, don't we already have a pretty good idea?

Sunday, after all, has always been a fine day for Tim Tebow.

From The New York Times:
Listening to Schroeder:
‘Peanuts’ Scholars Find Messages
in Cartoon’s Scores
By APRIL DEMBOSKY

January 14, 2009

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — In a “Peanuts” strip from the mid-1950s, Charlie Brown walks through the first panel and finds Schroeder sitting in front of an adult-size hi-fi, his ear to the speaker. “Shh,” Schroeder says, “I’m listening to Beethoven’s Ninth.” Charlie Brown inspects Schroeder’s outfit. “In an overcoat?” he asks. Schroeder leans even closer to the speaker and responds, “The first movement was so beautiful it gave me the chills!”

In the world of “Peanuts,” of course, Schroeder was the Beethoven-obsessed music nerd who lost patience when Lucy interrupted his practice and who called time-outs as a baseball catcher to share composer trivia with the pitcher. Yet musicologists and art curators have learned that there was much more than a punch line to Charles Schulz’s invocation of Beethoven’s music.

“If you don’t read music and you can’t identify the music in the strips, then you lose out on some of the meaning,” said William Meredith, the director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University, who has studied hundreds of Beethoven-themed “Peanuts” strips.

When Schroeder pounded on his piano, his eyes clenched in a trance, the notes floating above his head were no random ink spots dropped into the key of G. Schulz carefully chose each snatch of music he drew and transcribed the notes from the score. More than an illustration, the music was a soundtrack to the strip, introducing the characters’ state of emotion, prompting one of them to ask a question or punctuating an interaction.

“The music is a character in the strip as much as the people are, because the music sets the tone,” Mr. Meredith said. To understand what gave Schroeder chills, he said, you have to listen to the musical passage. “When you actually hear the symphony, the whole thing feels completely different.”

That linkage is the central theme of “Schulz’s Beethoven: Schroeder’s Muse,” an exhibition at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center here, which was jointly organized with the Beethoven center. (It continues through Jan. 26 at the museum and will reopen on May 1 at the center in San Jose.)

Mr. Meredith spent more than a year identifying the compositions, gathering recordings and reinterpreting the strips; Jane O’Cain, the museum’s curator, researched Schulz’s artistic process and music-listening habits.

In the resulting show visitors can gaze upon the Beethoven strips, then tap a number into their audio guide and hear the music Schroeder is playing.

In a strip from 1953 Schroeder embarks on an intensive workout. He does push-ups, jumps rope, lifts weights, touches his toes, does sit-ups (“Puff, Puff”), boxes, runs (“Pant, Pant”) and finally eats (“Chomp! Chomp!”). In the last two panels he walks to his piano with determination and begins playing furiously, sweat springing from his brow.

The eighth notes above Schroeder’s head are from the opening bars of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata (Op. 106), a piece so long, artistically complex and technically difficult that it is referred to as the “Giant” Sonata. When Beethoven delivered it to the publisher in 1819, he is believed to have said, “Now you will have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years from now.”

According to the exhibition notes, classical music was as much a priority for Mr. Schulz as drawing was when he attended art school in the 1940s. He once said of his classmates, “We all collected classical albums, which we frequently shared on evenings when we got together to listen to music and challenge each other in wild games of hearts.”

Sue Broadwell, who worked as Schulz’s secretary from 1963 to 1967, said he played classical and other records — “he had a weakness for country western,” she said — in his studio while he worked. “He encouraged me to take a music appreciation course, which I did,” she said. “Every once in a while, as I was learning different pieces, he’d whistle some for me and I had to guess them.”

Mr. Schulz also regularly attended classical music concerts here with his family.

“He could sit almost perfectly still the whole time, without squirming, without crossing his legs,” said Jeannie Schulz, the cartoonist’s widow, who helped found the museum and serves as president of its board.

During concerts, she said, “he would pull a notebook out of his breast pocket and write something down,” adding: “Later in the car, he would say, ‘How would it be if Marcie and Peppermint Patty were at a concert, and ...’ He was always thinking about his characters.”

Although Schulz greatly admired Beethoven, his favorite composer was actually Brahms. He simply found that the name Beethoven — the way it sounded and the way it looked on the page — was funnier, the exhibition notes remark.

Accuracy and authenticity are hallmarks of the strips, whether they deal with music, sports or medical conditions, Ms. O’Cain, the museum’s curator, said. “With figure skating, he would carefully study books to make sure the jumps or spins that he had characters portraying, that they were correct,” she said. He would add subtle twists or inside jokes for readers familiar with skating or surfing or shorthand.

Mr. Schulz also mined Beethoven’s life for material. He had numerous books in which he underlined details about Beethoven’s love life, clothing, even his favorite recipe (macaroni with cheese).

“I have read several biographies of Beethoven — being strangely fascinated by the lives of composers, much more so than the lives of painters,” he said in 1975. As a result, Schulz fans like to point out, the strips are as educational as they are entertaining.

“What you thought was a funny tagline was an absolutely true story out of Beethoven’s life,” said Karen Johnson, the Schulz museum’s director.

Beethoven’s birthday was a perennial “Peanuts” event. Schroeder appeared in “Peanuts” for 49 years, and the composer’s birthday was acknowledged in 27 of them. Sometime in the 1960s Mr. Schulz hosted a real-life birthday party for Beethoven in his home in Northern California, according to Ms. O’Cain’s curatorial research. He drew Beethoven sweatshirts for each of the guests, two of which have been tracked down. One with the composer’s portrait is in the show.

The other, owned by Lee Mendelson, the producer of the Peanuts animated specials, features a full-body drawing of Beethoven — in a Schroeder sweatshirt.

From Human Events:
An Unreflective Man

by Patrick J. Buchanan

With his public approval where Harry Truman's stood when he left office, George W. Bush gave his last press conference yesterday.

And like that predecessor he often identifies with, Bush showed a Trumanesque defiance of his critics -- and a Trumanesque failure to understand what ruined his presidency.

He denounced protectionism, as he has with dismissive contempt since he went to New Hampshire a decade ago. But nowhere in his defense of free trade was there any explanation for how Middle America lost 3 million manufacturing jobs in his first term and a million more in the last year.

Nowhere does there seem an awareness that the ideas he absorbed at his father's knee and the Harvard Business School had resulted in the de-industrialization of his country, an enormous and growing dependency on Japan, China and Asia for the essentials of our national life, and, now, for the borrowed money to pay for them.

Someone once defined tragedy as what happens when a beautiful theory collides with a fact. And this is what has happened every time a great empire -- be it the Spanish, British or American -- embraced free trade as its salvation.

President Bush says it was freedom that prevailed when he rejected the pleas of weak-sister Republicans and backed the surge. But what spared us a debacle in Iraq was an infusion of 30,000 combat troops, an uprising against the murderers of al-Qaida and a U.S. decision to buy off the Sunni tribes, a strategy besieged empires have pursued for centuries.

Nor does there appear in Bush's self-assurance any awareness of the cost of his Freedom Agenda. In Iraq, it is 4,000 U.S. dead, 30,000 wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, millions of refugees, a pogrom against an ancient Christian community, and a strategic victory for Iran and its Shia allies across the Middle East. When last heard from, the Ayatollah Sistani -- the chief Shia cleric in Iraq, who has welcomed Iranian but not American visitors -- was calling for Muslims to stand up against Israeli criminality in Gaza.

Like Woodrow Wilson before him, Bush appears to believe that the nobility of his goals -- expanding freedom and bringing an end to tyranny in our world -- validates and will sanctify his decisions.

Like Wilson, he is a utopian. He fails to understand that idealism has its delusions and disasters.

The war Wilson led us into "to make the world safe for democracy" gave us Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and 70 years of the most barbaric empire in all history. The peace Wilson brought home led straight to Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and a second world war far worse than the first.

The West's road to hell has been paved with good intentions.

President Bush rightly denounces Europeans who see Israel as always wrong. Yet he behaves as though Israel can do no wrong. Sixteen days into the Gaza war, with the Palestinian dead and wounded near 5,000, and a humanitarian catastrophe at hand, has our "compassionate conservative" president uttered one word of compassion for those whose losses outnumber the Israelis' 100 to one?

In defending his rejected immigration reform, President Bush clearly sees himself as in the vanguard of decency, and admonishes his party against being perceived as anti-immigrant.

But is this president oblivious to what is happening in his country because of his and his father's failure to secure the border? Even in rich, liberal Montgomery County, Md., one reads over the weekend that there is a hardening of attitudes toward illegal immigration after a spate of crimes and killings. Working-class Americans pay the price of the idealism around the dinner table at the Crawford ranch.

In his first five years, Bush himself has admitted, 6 million aliens were arrested at the border, breaking into this country. One in 12 -- 500,000 -- had criminal records. Is it anti-immigrant to demand a halt to this invasion, even if it means troops on the border? Is it truly compassionate, or an act of cravenness, to insist that the answer is amnesty for 12 million to 20 million illegals and absolution for the businesses that hired them?

Choleric and cocky Harry Truman may be Bush's role model. But it was Dwight D. Eisenhower who had to clean up the mess Harry left behind.

Six months into office, Ike had ended the Korean War. He had the courage no president has since shown to tell the Israelis they must get off occupied land. They did.

While surely repelled by Nikita Khrushchev, especially for the Hungarian bloodbath of 1956, Ike had him up to Camp David in 1959 because, wicked as the Bolsheviks were, they had nuclear weapons, and one must talk to them.

Prudence is the mark of the true conservative. Ike and Ronald Reagan had it. Neither Bush nor Truman did. And that is why the former left the country so much better off than did the latter.

Goodbye, Mr. President, and God bless.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."

From www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk:
The man who put the beat in Beatles
by Emma Johnson, Liverpool Daily Post

Jan 12 2009

As a new book about the songwriting genius is released, Spencer Leigh explores Buddy Holly’s influence on our own most famous band

THE Liverpool-dominated beat boom of the early 1960s was, and still is, the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to British popular music. Its reverberations are heard today as each new successful British band is hailed as the latest Beatles, and each new songwriter as the new Lennon or McCartney.

But, in the early stages at least, the Liverpool music was decidedly second-hand. Every group covered American rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, and sometimes country songs. The strongest single influence on The Beatles was Buddy Holly, so much so that it seemed that Lubbock, Texas, was only a ferry ride away.

Buddy Holly was born in Lubbock on September 7, 1936. Unlike Liverpool, the city offered little cultural life, but Buddy found friends with similar interests and he loved the new rock ’n’ roll music that he heard on the radio.

After a few false starts, his talent was nurtured by Norman Petty, who owned a studio 90 miles away in Clovis, New Mexico and, from the middle of 1957, he cut a succession of glorious singles with his group, The Crickets, including a UK Number 1, That’ll Be The Day, as well as Peggy Sue, Oh Boy! and Maybe Baby. Almost exclusively, Buddy sang about the ups and downs of teenage love.

In March, 1958, Buddy visited the UK for a month-long tour. Young British musicians were turning away from acoustic skiffle music and wanting something new, and here was Buddy Holly with a Fender Stratocaster, a space age instrument which could not even be bought in the UK.

“I saw Buddy Holly at the Phil and, from that night onwards, everything I learned, everything I played, was based on Holly,” says Mike Pender, of The Searchers. “Groups now have banks of amplifiers and speakers all over the place, but Holly came on stage with just a double-bass, drums and an amplifier. He didn’t have sex appeal and he wasn’t that good-looking but he brought the house down.”

Although John, Paul and George had a shared passion for Buddy Holly, they were not at the Phil. The booking coincided with the opening night of the Morgue skiffle cellar in Oakhill Park, and the Quarrymen were either playing or trying to curry favour with its management.

The Quarrymen were performing sporadically, and the plaque on 38 Kensington shows that they recorded there during the summer. They performed That’ll Be The Day, and they took turns in owning the record and playing it to their friends.

When Holly returned to the States, he was experimenting with Heartbeat and It’s So Easy. He cut Rave On in New York and had a string session for It Doesn’t Matter Any More, Raining In My Heart and a song for his bride, True Love Ways. He recorded some new songs in their apartment, including Crying, Waiting, Hoping and Learning The Game.

As Holly had fallen out with his manager over financial matters, he accepted top billing on the Winter Dance Party, which was touring the American Mid-west. It was the tour from Hell: the weather was Arctic and the buses, which were nothing like today’s luxury coaches, kept breaking down. When they reached the Surf Ballroom, Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 2, 1959, Buddy chartered a plane to take himself, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens to the next venue. It crashed five minutes after take-off with no survivors. Feburary 3, 1959, has become known, through Don McLean’s American Pie, as “the day the music died”.

John Lennon, at the Liverpool College of Art, was unusually quiet that day. He had lost his mother, a huge influence on his early music, the previous July, and now he had lost one of his heroes.

In October, 1959, they auditioned, as Johnny and the Moondogs, for Carroll Levis’s TV Star Search, at the Empire. They sang the Buddy Holly songs, Think It Over and It’s So Easy, and qualified for the final in Manchester. Unfortunately, they had to return to Liverpool before the public vote.

The group took an insect name, The Beatles, as a tribute to The Crickets, and during 1960, they were performing many of their songs. Over the years, they would jam Buddy’s numbers backstage, and they smoothed the waters during the fractious making of what became Let It Be in 1969. Many of the other bands – Searchers, Undertakers, Big Three, Fourmost, Merseybeats – were singing Buddy Holly songs. On The Beatles’ original demo of How Do You Do It?, John Lennon sounds like Holly at the end of the middle eights, the only inspired moments on that recording.

More importantly, Holly’s simple style and mannered vocals were influencing the way that John and Paul wrote songs. Paul has often cited Holly’s I’m Lookin’ For Someone To Love as a great example of economical lyric writing. There’s an unreleased rehearsal from 1960 of John’s first composition, Hello Little Girl, and it sounds straight out of Lubbock; but, by the time it got to the studio, in 1962, it had been re-arranged. One of their earliest songs, I’ll Be On My Way, sounds as if it were written for Buddy, and we also know that Love Me Do started out in the Holly vein, too, though unfortunately no such recording exists.

John and Paul developed fast and soon were emulating the more sophisticated songs from the Brill Building, in New York. They performed Don’t Ever Change, a Brill Building song written for The Crickets after Holly’s death.

In January, 1963, all four Beatles signed a letter to The Crickets thanking them for the interest shown in their work while they were touring the UK: “We’d just like to say that we take this as a great compliment and appreciate it very much.”

In the Melody Maker poll for 1963, the top three vocal groups were, in order, The Four Seasons, The Beatles and The Crickets.

The Beatles recorded a fine version of Words of Love, for Beatles For Sale, in 1964. The reference to “The sun is up, the sky is blue” in Dear Prudence on The White Album is surely a nod to Holly’s Raining In My Heart.

Going into the 1970s, John Lennon sang Peggy Sue on his Rock ’n’ Roll album, and Paul McCartney produced Denny Laine’s tribute album, Holly Days. Macca bought Buddy Holly’s catalogue not only as an investment but also because Buddy was a major influence.

Would Paul have written Yesterday if Buddy hadn’t come up with True Love Ways? Eat At Home (1971) isn’t one of Paul’s best songs, but it does demonstrate how Buddy Holly meets Day Tripper.

“It is obvious that The Beatles were influenced by Buddy Holly, especially John Lennon,” says Buddy’s widow, Maria Elena. “I am sure that Buddy would have been good friends with John. They would have co-operated with each other.”

Another songwriter from Merseyside, Paul Kennerley, who is now successful in Nashville, has bought Buddy Holly’s amplifier. “I can remember hearing Peggy Sue for the first time and it had a huge effect upon me and my life, “ he says. “Even today, Buddy Holly is as fresh as tomorrow. You put on those records and it’s like they’ve been sitting in the fridge. They are terribly easy for youngsters to play and sing, and so lively and simple and hummable. They’ll go on forever.”

SPENCER LEIGH is the author of Everyday: Getting Closer To Buddy Holly, published by SAF, in February, 2009.

From The New York Times:
Clemens’s Ex-Trainer to Meet With Prosecutors
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

Brian McNamee will travel to Washington in the next few weeks to meet with federal prosecutors who have now convened a grand jury in the perjury investigation of Roger Clemens, according to several lawyers who have been briefed on the matter.

The grand jury will begin hearing evidence to determine whether Clemens made false statements under oath last February, when he testified before a Congressional committee that he had never used performance-enhancing drugs. His statementscontradicted what McNamee, Clemens’s former trainer, told the committee.

McNamee will be meeting for the first time with officials from the United States attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which has had jurisdiction over the case since the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform referred the Clemens matter to the Department of Justice.

McNamee’s meeting with prosecutors is expected to lead to his testimony before a grand jury.

The meeting in Washington is the latest development in a string of events that began in August 2007. At that time, McNamee was compelled by federal authorities in San Francisco to cooperate with George J. Mitchell, who was conducting an investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. In exchange for his cooperation with Mitchell, McNamee was not charged with steroid distribution. Instead, he became Clemens’s public accuser, and Clemens, a seven-time Cy Young Award winner, vehemently denied McNamee’s claims.

Meanwhile, the authorities responsible for the McNamee deal have ended up on the periphery of the Clemens investigation over the past year. That includes the federal agent Jeff Novitzky, who has been the lead investigator on nearly all the major steroid cases over the past six years.

Those investigators were the ones who received needles, syringes, gauze pads and steroid vials from McNamee, who said he had used them to inject Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone. According to the lawyers who had been briefed on the case, there are now some results from the DNA and steroid tests that were conducted on those items, and those results were, in part, a factor in the decision to move ahead with the case.

The lawyers said that the Washington prosecutors showed a renewed interest in the case in the final months of 2008 and, at that point, increased the pace of their investigation. Kirk Radomski, a convicted steroid dealer who supplied McNamee with performance-enhancing drugs, is among those who have been asked to testify before the grand jury, according to one of the lawyers. The lawyers spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to sensitive information.

It is unclear how the prosecutors in Washington will proceed with the grand jury. In the case of Barry Bonds, who was indicted in 2007, the federal authorities in San Francisco used the grand jury as a tool for several years to put pressure on witnesses as the government continued to gather evidence.

In the Clemens case, investigators have sought to bolster their case by finding someone other than McNamee who can link Clemens to the use of steroids or H.G.H.

The lead investigator on the case, John Longmire, is an F.B.I. agent who is based in Washington. According to one person who was interviewed by Longmire in recent months, Longmire spent much of the meeting asking questions about women who had been linked to Clemens in published reports. The person said it did not appear that investigators had developed much new information.

Investigators have also focused their attention on Houston, where Longmire and other agents have interviewed Shaun Kelley, the owner of a fitness center, and several of his former employees as part of the attempt to find others with knowledge of Clemens’s activities.

In a telephone interview Monday, Kelley said that he had not been in touch with the F.B.I. recently and that no one had contacted him about testifying before a grand jury. He said that agents interviewed two of his clients about two months ago.

Kelley reiterated that he was barely acquainted with Clemens and that he had never supplied him with performance-enhancing drugs. “Whatever they want, I’ll give it to them,” he said of a possible subpoena. “I had absolutely nothing to do with this.”

Daniel C. Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School and a former federal prosecutor, said the government’s latest moves in the Clemens case indicated two possibilities. He said, “They are either just trying to show Congress that indeed they are doing something, or the other possibility is that this is the beginning of something interesting.”

Richard Emery, a lawyer for McNamee, said that his client had not received a subpoena. “Brian will cooperate with it in any way he is asked,” he said of the grand jury.

Rusty Hardin, a lawyer for Clemens, did not respond to a telephone message seeking comment.

From The New York Times:
Voters Cannot Forgive or Forget
Suspicions of McGwire’s Drug Use
By GEORGE VECSEY

The public shunning of Mark McGwire continues.

On a day when Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice were voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, maybe it sounds vindictive to dwell upon the rejection of McGwire for the third consecutive year, but he brought it on himself.

The country is taking a look at people who played us for suckers. We may as well include athletes in the scrutiny.

McGwire was turned down again even though he is eighth in the career standings with 583 home runs. Normally, that total would be enough to get anybody elected to the Hall, but times have not been normal since players’ shoulders began merging with their enlarged craniums back in the mid-90’s.

Since retiring after the 2001 season, McGwire has become the canary in the coal mine for Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Roger Clemens, all of whom are set to become eligible in 2013.

Come to think of it, Bonds and Sosa may be wise to find some team that needs an immobile designated hitter, to postpone their reckoning with the hangin’ jury of baseball writers, who vote for inclusion into the Hall.

That entire generation will be under suspicion for a very long time. McGwire did it to himself in 1998 when Steve Wilstein, then with The Associated Press, noticed a bottle of pills of something called androstenedione in McGwire’s locker. The curious reporter discovered it was an over-the-counter body-building substance, a form of anabolic steroid banned in other sports.

At first, McGwire blustered and made it a privacy issue, which it was not, since the bottle was in plain view. After he set the single-season home run record — now surpassed by Bonds — McGwire announced that he had stopped taking the stuff because he did not want to set a bad example for the youth of America, a noble sentiment, however tardy. Even more tardy, baseball ultimately banned andro.

McGwire would have been fine with his gesture of getting off the stuff, except that his old Bash Brother, Jose Canseco, wrote a book saying he and McGwire used to inject each other with steroids in Oakland. That brought McGwire to a Congressional hearing on March 17, 2005, along with Canseco and Sosa, plus Rafael Palmeiro, who denied all with a wag of his finger, and Curt Schilling, who knew nothing, nothing.

The biggest loser of the day was McGwire, who turned red and had tears in his eyes as he repeatedly told questioners, “I’m not here to talk about the past.” An educated man, he seemed to know what he was doing, but he blundered on. One committee member asked if McGwire was pleading the Fifth Amendment, the way mobsters used to do. Another threatened to take McGwire’s name down from a five-mile section of interstate in St. Louis.

•

That hearing still plays like an endless loop in people’s minds — one of the most embarrassing public moments any prominent athlete has ever endured. The eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox were too unsophisticated to comprehend the consequences of being permanently barred for their roles in throwing the World Series. Pete Rose was far too much of an addicted gambler to understand what he was doing to himself when he denied betting on baseball.

McGwire has not been ruled ineligible for the Hall the way Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Black Sox and Rose have been. I have no vote because The New York Times has a sensible policy of not allowing reporters to vote for awards, but I would have voted for Henderson, and probably for Rice, but definitely not for McGwire, who received 23.5 percent of the vote in 2007 and 23.6 last year and slipped to 21.9 this year. Players need 75 percent of the vote to be elected.

Tony La Russa, who managed McGwire in Oakland and St. Louis, still supports him for the Hall, saying McGwire was “overcoached” for that 2005 appearance. McGwire, who lives quietly in California, could still reveal exactly what he used, and when he used it. It’s his only way out.

I could also make the point that McGwire was a somewhat one-dimensional ballplayer who swatted a lot of home runs in an age when everybody else did. I might lump Sosa with McGwire, as a symptom of the times, despite Sosa’s 609 home runs.

Clemens was a great pitcher, but I would not vote for him because of growing suspicion that he was dirty. Federal prosecutors have convened a grand jury in Washington to investigate whether Clemens committed perjury last February when he denied ever using performance-enhancing drugs.

Bonds may yet be judged guilty of perjury and tax evasion, but was a great player, even without illegal help from a laboratory. However, if I had a vote, I would hold off on him, just because.

The funny thing is that while Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame have disqualified Jackson and Rose, the decision on the steroid generation is left to the 500-plus voters from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

•

In a terrible economic time for traditional journalism, the print writers who actually witness games and interview baseball people are still entrusted with this decision. A few knuckleheads occasionally decline to vote for Rickey Henderson or Tom Seaver or Joe DiMaggio, but they are the keepers of a flickering flame.

When the time comes, I expect many writers will vote with their suspicions about Sosa, Clemens and Bonds, the same way they overwhelmingly declined to vote for McGwire. It is his own fault.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

From The New York Times:
Henderson Cruises Into Hall; Rice Also Slips In
By JACK CURRY

January 13, 2009

Rickey Henderson never wanted to stop diving headfirst or dashing home or making a snatch catch of a fly ball or wearing a major league uniform. He never wanted to stop playing baseball. Even on the day that Henderson was elected into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, he still mused about playing one more game with the Oakland Athletics.

“I always want to reappear in a uniform with Oakland,” Henderson said.

Henderson’s superb career as a leadoff hitter was defined by speed and success, themes that continued Monday when he was elected into the Hall in his first year of eligibility. As Henderson sprinted into the Hall with 94.8 percent of the vote, Jim Rice squeezed in through a closing door. In Rice’s 15th and final year on the ballot, he received 76.4 percent.

For election, players need 75 percent of the vote from veteran members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. Of the 539 ballots cast, Henderson notched 511 votes and Rice 412. Rice, a slugger for the Boston Red Sox, surpassed the necessary threshold by seven votes. Outfielder Andre Dawson followed Rice with 67 percent and pitcher Bert Blyleven had 62.7.

“As far as what took so long, I have no idea,” Rice said. “The only thing I can say is I’m glad it’s over with.”

Rice had a prickly relationship with writers and, although he repeatedly stressed the positive outcome of the voting, he said that his lack of rapport “probably” contributed to his long wait. After Rice received 72.2 percent in the voting last year, he grew optimistic. All 20 players who had received at least 70 percent of the vote but less than 75 percent were eventually enshrined. Rice became the 21st.

Rice played his entire 16-year career in Boston. He batted .298 with 382 home runs and 1,451 runs batted in. He won the American League Most Valuable Player award in 1978, and he was considered one of baseball’s most feared hitters. Still, he waited through 15 ballots before getting the call from the Hall.

Rice promised that his acceptance speech would be brief and that he would let Henderson, whom he called Speedy, offer the compelling stories.

Dennis Eckersley, the Hall of Fame closer and Henderson’s former teammate with the A’s, said last week that he would be eager to hear Henderson rumble and ramble through his speech. Eckersley called Henderson’s candidacy “a slam dunk.”

The same is not true of Mark McGwire, another of Eckersley’s former teammates in Oakland. McGwire, whose career has been marred by the suspicion that he used steroids, saw his flimsy support drop to 21.9 percent from 23.6. Although Henderson said McGwire “deserves” to be in the Hall, he also referred to the questions about how much artificial help McGwire might have had in hitting some of his 583 home runs.

“But, in his era and what went on with that generation, we can’t really dictate what went on at that time,” Henderson said.

Paul Molitor, a Hall of Famer who often hit leadoff, said Henderson was “the greatest leadoff hitter of all-time.” Henderson was a player who was the best at being a pest. From the time Henderson played Little League, he said it was his goal to bat first so he could slap the first hit and score the first run. Playing for nine teams across 25 seasons, he skillfully followed that simple routine.

Henderson stole 1,406 bases, 468 more than any other player, and scored 2,295 runs, which also ranks first. He collected 2,190 walks, second on the career list, and had 3,055 hits.

“I played baseball because I loved the game,” Henderson said. “I wanted to continue playing. It came to a time that I had to stop.”

In keeping with Henderson’s free-spirited personality, he did not stop playing when he failed to secure a job in the majors after 2003. He played for two independent minor league teams.

Henderson was reluctant to say he was retired, wondering if there was a chance he could have another “day or two” with the A’s. He had four stints with the A’s, helping them win the 1989 World Series and then winning the M.V.P. award a year later. But Henderson sounded playful and glum as he acknowledged that “they said I had to be retired to go into the Hall of Fame.”

Without the influence of his mother, Bobbie, Henderson might have bypassed baseball and might not be pondering a must-hear speech. Henderson’s dream was to play in the N.F.L., but Bobbie thought he was too small and steered him toward baseball. Bobbie ended up helping steer her son into the Hall.

“I felt that I would have been a football star, not a baseball player,” Henderson said. “And it turned out to be a different sport and it turned out to be a great sport.”

From The Washington Times:
Obama climate czar has socialist ties
Stephen Dinan

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama's pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner's name and biography had been removed from Socialist International's Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group's congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world's social democratic political parties such as Britain's Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.

The group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, the organization's action arm on climate change, says the developed world must reduce consumption and commit to binding and punitive limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Obama, who has said action on climate change would be a priority in his administration, tapped Mrs. Browner last month to fill a new position as White House coordinator of climate and energy policies. The appointment does not need Senate confirmation.

Mr. Obama's transition team said Mrs. Browner's membership in the organization is not a problem and that it brings experience in U.S. policymaking to her new role.

"The Commission for a Sustainable World Society includes world leaders from a variety of political parties, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who succeeded Tony Blair, in serving as vice president of the convening organization," Obama transition spokesman Nick Shapiro said.

"Carol Browner was chosen to help the president-elect coordinate energy and climate policy because she understands that our efforts to create jobs, achieve energy security and combat climate change demand integration among different agencies; cooperation between federal, state and local governments; and partnership with the private sector," Mr. Shapiro said in an e-mail.

Mrs. Browner ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton. Until she was tapped for the Obama administration, she was on the board of directors for the National Audubon Society, the League of Conservation Voters, the Center for American Progress and former Vice President Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection.

Her name has been removed from the Gore organization's Web site list of directors, and the Audubon Society issued a press release about her departure from that organization.

Republicans said Mrs. Browner's work with Socialist International raises questions.

"Does she agree with the group's positions on global governance - that the United States should abdicate its international leadership to international organizations? Does she support its position that the international community should be the ultimate arbiter of climate change policy?" said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican.

"These are questions that merit answers - especially when you consider this group's deep skepticism about America's ability to be a force for positive change in the world," she said.

An aide on the Obama team said its information shows that Mrs. Browner resigned from the organization in June 2008. The aide, who asked not to be named because he was discussing internal matters, said the transition team was aware she had been a member of the group when she was vetted.

The Socialist International Web site didn't have a copy of her June 30 speech, but the agenda for the meeting had her scheduled to speak as part of a panel on "How do we strengthen the multilateral architecture for a sustainable future?"

Other panel participants were Sergey Mironov, speaker of the Russian legislature's upper chamber and a close ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin; Zhang Zhijun, vice minister of the International Department of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee; and Jesus Caldera, a former Minister of Employment and Social Affairs of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party.

A woman answering the phone at Socialist International's headquarters in London said all officers were traveling.

Nobody from the organization returned a message left Friday.

Socialist International bills itself as the world body of democratic socialist movements. It includes members ranging from Israel's Labor Party and France's Socialist Party to Angola's MPLA, which won the 1970s Angolan civil war with the aid of Soviet arms and Cuban troops.

The organization distinguishes itself from violent or revolutionary communist parties. However, some such groups, including the Chinese Communist Party, have been invited to its events as guest organizations.

The Democratic Socialists of America, not the Democratic Party, is listed as the group's U.S. representative. But Mrs. Browner was listed as an individual member of Socialist International, but not a member of the DSA.

While agreeing with Mr. Obama on the need for action to address climate change, the organization wants more draconian policies than the president-elect's preferred solution.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama called for a cap-and-trade system to control carbon emissions. He argued that such a system is efficient and lets the free market determine where it's easiest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Socialist International says such "flexible mechanisms" do not clamp down hard enough on polluters.

The organization often takes a decidedly critical view of the U.S.

At this summer's meeting, the group issued a statement on economics that blasted the "neo-liberal market ideology and the unilateralist, U.S.-dominated approach in the global economic system," and attacked the U.S. for dominating international financial institutions.

At its meeting earlier in 2008 in Santiago, Chile, Socialist International endorsed "global governance" as the solution to the world's problems of peace and climate change.

At a July meeting in St. Petersburg, the commission said developed countries "should think of decreasing current consumption levels" - which would mean shrinking their economies - in order to help the environment.

Socialist International regularly blasts the construction of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. The fence was approved by both houses of Congress, including with Mr. Obama's vote in the Senate.

Socialist International was congratulatory when Mr. Obama won the election, issuing a statement noting that "the sky may seem a bit brighter today" but warning still that "there are enormous global challenges that must be addressed effectively and without delay."

From The New York Times:
Notes From the Chairman
By BONO

Dublin

Once upon a couple of weeks ago ...

I’m in a crush in a Dublin pub around New Year’s. Glasses clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season’s blessings, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.

Interesting mood. The new Irish money has been gambled and lost; the Celtic Tiger’s tail is between its legs as builders and bankers laugh uneasy and hard at the last year, and swallow uneasy and hard at the new. There’s a voice on the speakers that wakes everyone out of the moment: it’s Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” His ode to defiance is four decades old this year and everyone sings along for a lifetime of reasons. I am struck by the one quality his voice lacks: Sentimentality.

Is this knotted fist of a voice a clue to the next year? In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn — such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.

A call to believability.

A voice that says, “Don’t lie to me now.”

That says, “Baby, if there’s someone else, tell me now.”

Fabulous, not fabulist. Honesty to hang your hat on.

As the year rolls over (and with it many carousers), the emotion in the room tussles between hope and fear, expectation and trepidation. Wherever you end up, his voice takes you by the hand.

•

Now I’m back in my own house in Dublin, uncorking some nice wine, ready for the vinegar it can turn to when families and friends overindulge, as I am about to. Right by the hole-in-the-wall cellar, I look up to see a vision in yellow: a painting Frank sent to me after I sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with him on the 1993 “Duets” album. One from his own hand. A mad yellow canvas of violent concentric circles gyrating across a desert plain. Francis Albert Sinatra, painter, modernista.

We had spent some time in his house in Palm Springs, which was a thrill — looking out onto the desert and hills, no gingham for miles. Plenty of miles, though, Miles Davis. And plenty of talk of jazz. That’s when he showed me the painting. I was thinking the circles were like the diameter of a horn, the bell of a trumpet, so I said so.

“The painting is called ‘Jazz’ and you can have it.”

I said I had heard he was one of Miles Davis’s biggest influences.

Little pithy replies:

“I don’t usually hang with men who wear earrings.”

“Miles Davis never wasted a note, kid — or a word on a fool.”

“Jazz is about the moment you’re in. Being modern’s not about the future, it’s about the present.”

I think about this now, in this new year. The Big Bang of pop music telling me it’s all about the moment, a fresh canvas and never overworking the paint. I wonder what he would have thought of the time it’s taken me and my bandmates to finish albums, he with his famous impatience for directors, producers — anyone, really — fussing about. I’m sure he’s right. Fully inhabiting the moment during that tiny dot of time after you’ve pressed “record” is what makes it eternal. If, like Frank, you sing it like you’ll never sing it again. If, like Frank, you sing it like you never have before.

If.

•

If you want to hear the least sentimental voice in the history of pop music finally crack, though — shhhh — find the version of Frank’s ode to insomnia, “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” hidden on “Duets.” Listen through to the end and you will hear the great man break as he truly sobs on the line, “It’s a long, long, long road.” I kid you not.

Like Bob Dylan’s, Nina Simone’s, Pavarotti’s, Sinatra’s voice is improved by age, by years spent fermenting in cracked and whiskeyed oak barrels. As a communicator, hitting the notes is only part of the story, of course.

Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know — as opposed to what they don’t want to know about the world. While there is a danger in this — the loss of naïveté, for instance, which holds its own certain power — interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused.

Want an example? Here’s an example. Take two of the versions of Sinatra singing “My Way.”

The first was recorded in 1969 when the Chairman of the Board said to Paul Anka, who wrote the song for him: “I’m quitting the business. I’m sick of it. I’m getting the hell out.” In this reading, the song is a boast — more kiss-off than send-off — embodying all the machismo a man can muster about the mistakes he’s made on the way from here to everywhere.

In the later recording, Frank is 78. The Nelson Riddle arrangement is the same, the words and melody are exactly the same, but this time the song has become a heart-stopping, heartbreaking song of defeat. The singer’s hubris is out the door. (This singer, i.e. me, is in a puddle.) The song has become an apology.

To what end? Duality, complexity. I was lucky to duet with a man who understood duality, who had the talent to hear two opposing ideas in a single song, and the wisdom to know which side to reveal at which moment.

This is our moment. What do we hear?

In the pub, on the occasion of this new year, as the room rises in a deafening chorus — “I did it my way” — I and this full house of Irish rabble-rousers hear in this staple of the American songbook both sides of the singer and the song, hubris and humility, blue eyes and red.

Bono, lead singer of the band U2 and co-founder of the advocacy group ONE, is a contributing columnist for The Times.