Etc.

There were at least three winners of last night's $640 million Mega Millions lottery. Winning tickets came from Maryland, Illinois, and Kansas:

Mike Lang, spokesman for the Illinois Lottery, said his state's winning ticket was sold in the small town of Red Bud, near St. Louis. The winner used a quick pick to select the numbers, he said.
The Maryland Lottery announced earlier Saturday that it had sold a winning ticket at a retail store in Baltimore County.

A winning ticket also was purchased in northeast Kansas, according to the Kansas Lottery website. A spokeswoman didn't immediately return a message Saturday morning.

Lang said each winning ticket was expected to be worth more than $213 million before taxes.

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The WSWS has an excellent overview of Earl Scruggs' life and work:

The Carolinas provided a rich musical environment during this period. Scruggs was influenced by a number of musicians in the area, both amateur and professional, including Snuffy Jenkins (1908-1990), who had begun to move away from the old-time “clawhammer” or “frailing” style of banjo in which the strings were strummed or rapped with the backs of the player’s fingernails. These new players utilized a freer, more syncopated finger-picking style. Scruggs surpassed them all, developing his own three-finger, virtuoso technique that would set the bar for all the players who came after him.

Scruggs’ big break in music came when he was hired by Bill Monroe, the “Father of Bluegrass,” in late 1945. Bluegrass music, which emerged and developed in the postwar period, was an energetic new style of folk music characterized by fast tempos and instrumental virtuosity, along with close harmony singing with soaring tenor vocalists taking the lead. The music seemed an almost cathartic release for the musicians who had finally put the Great Depression and the war years behind them.

Scruggs revitalized Monroe’s band the Blue Grass Boys, a group which also included the talented singer and guitarist Lester Flatt. Prior to Scruggs’ recruitment, David “Stringbean” Akeman had been the group’s banjo player. While a talented performer, Akeman played banjo in the old style and Monroe’s new musical experiments demanded something different. Scruggs’ new style of playing was the missing piece of the puzzle.

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While a handful of people did better in this economy thanks to the Mega Millions drawing, more people are suffering because of a new round of layoffs.
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Shelby's Cobra, a favorite of auto collectors, turns 50 this year.
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The Roberts court is known to make up shit as it goes along, and its attitude toward age discrimination is no exception. Given how much harder it is when one is over 50 to keep and get jobs, any bill to reverse the court's ruling is welcome:

The plaintiff in the case, Jack Gross, was from Iowa. In a welcome show of bipartisanship, his state’s two senators — Tom Harkin, a Democrat, and Charles Grassley, a Republican — recently introduced a bill to reverse the court’s age-bias ruling and restore older workers’ rights. Although this is not the first time that Mr. Harkin has offered such legislation, Mr. Grassley’s co-sponsorship of this year’s bill makes the outlook for Senate passage much brighter.

This is a matter of some urgency. Since the Supreme Court ruled three years ago, lower courts have applied its onerous standard of proof to deny thousands of age-discrimination claims.

You never know how the House is going to act, but at least this is a hopeful sign.
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Is bullying in schools really a crisis? Or is it just a bunch of overhyped garbage.
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Another reason the death penalty needs to be abolished. Although this guy was found to have had nothing whatever to do with the killing, he has yet to be exonerated.

On the morning of jury selection, the district attorney made another offer: if Mr. Cook pleaded no-contest with no admission of guilt, the case would be dismissed and he could go on with his life. Mr. Cook considered the deal. He had suffered terribly during his 19 years in prison — he had been stabbed, raped repeatedly and had tried to kill himself, once slitting his own throat after severing his penis, which was reattached.

He took the plea deal. Two months later, the DNA results returned. The semen belonged to James Mayfield, a married man with whom Ms. Edwards had been having an affair.

By then Mr. Cook was trying to move on with his life, but it was harder than he had imagined. The physical and emotional abuse he endured in prison causes nightmares and suicidal urges. And the murder conviction made him a second-class citizen.

That's because some officials are covering their asses.

Etc.

If a congressional bill has the title of something that seems to favor the average American, you can be rest assured its real intention is precisely the opposite:

Millions of people have been out of work for months and even years. Whatever jobs are available pay poverty-level wages. Thanks to the Obama administration, the profits of US corporations are at record highs. And behind the thin smokescreen of its “jobs” measures, the American political establishment is preparing the more serious task of launching a renewed assault on health care, pensions and social programs.

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If you have access to the New York Times, a nice obituary of Earl Scruggs is there:

With little else to do but chores on a Depression-era farm, he became obsessed with the banjo. He depended mainly on a two-fingered picking style until he was about 10. Then one day, alone in his bedroom and brooding about an argument he had just had with an older brother, he found himself picking a song called “Lonesome Reuben” (or “Reuben’s Train”) using three fingers instead of two — the thumb, index and middle finger. It was a style, indigenous to North Carolina, that he had been trying to learn.

By tuning his banjo in different keys, he found he could play any tune, but the notes sounded undifferentiated at first. “I can’t hear the melody,” his mother would tell him, he said. So he learned to emphasize melody by plucking it with his strong thumb in syncopation with harmonic notes picked with his first two fingers. The sound was like thumbtacks plinking rhythmically on a tin roof.

A good introduction to Scruggs' music is The Complete Mercury Sessions recorded during his early days with Lester Flatt and spanning the years 1948-1950.
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Speaking of obituaries, poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died of complications of rheumatoid arthritis:

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.

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Some good news for a change:

Scientists at the University of Guelph have found a way to successfully clone American elm trees that have survived repeated epidemics of their biggest killer — Dutch elm disease.

The breakthrough, published today in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research, is the first known use of in vitro culture technology to clone buds of mature American elm trees.

“This research has the potential to bring back the beloved American elm population to North America,” said Prof. Praveen Saxena, a plant scientist who worked on the project with Professor Alan Sullivan. Both are from Guelph’s Department of Plant Agriculture.

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Obituaries--Earl Scruggs

One of the greatest musicians of all time and certainly one of the most influential, Earl Scruggs, has died. He died early this morning at a Nashville, Tennessee, hospital at the age of 88.

He was perhaps the greatest of all banjo players, and his three-finger technique revolutionized banjo playing although he didn't invent it:

Before Scruggs came to popular attention in December 1945 when he joined Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys on the Grand Ole Opry, the banjo was as likely to be employed as a clattering comedy prop as it was a serious music-making tool.

Perhaps Scruggs did not "invent" the technique of striking the banjo strings with three right-hand fingers in a way that produced sounds of far greater intricacy than could be summoned through the then-popular "frailing" style of banjo playing. But while others in Scruggs' native North Carolina and in neighboring South Carolina practiced with three fingers, Scruggs perfected and popularized the style.

His wife and manager, Louise Certain Scruggs, died in 2006.





Another version, with Steve Martin and company. Can't get enough of this stuff:



And this:



It's hard to overestimate his influence.