tell?
A couple of years later Enrique Santos Discépolo painted a portrait of Argentinaâs days of infamy in his tango âCambalacheâ:
                          Today theyâre all of a piece
                          the friend, the damned cheat ,
                          the dumbbell, the genius, the thief ,
                          the generous soul, the deadbeat .
                          Go for it man, get it while you can . . .
May 7
T HE P ARTY P OOPERS
In 1954 Vietnamese rebels gave the French army a tremendous beating at their supposedly invulnerable base in Dien Bien Phu. After a century of conquering colonies, glorious France had to exit Vietnam in a hurry.
Then it was the United Statesâ turn. Unbelievable: the greatest power on earth and in space also suffered a humiliating defeat in this tiny, badly armed country populated by the poorest of the poor.
A peasant of slow gait, few words led both of these exploits.
His name was Ho Chi Minh, and they called him Uncle Ho.
Uncle Ho wasnât at all like other revolutionary leaders.
An activist returning from a village once reported that there was no way to organize those people. âTheyâre a bunch of Buddhist yahoos. They spend all day meditating.â
âGo back there and meditate,â Uncle Ho ordered.
May 9
B ORN TO F IND H IM
Howard Carter was born on this morning in 1874, and half a century later he understood why he had come into the world.
The revelation came to him when he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Carter located it through sheer stubbornness, after years of trying everywhere, battling discouragement and the fearmongering of his fellow Egyptologists.
On the day of the great find, he sat at the foot of the shortlived pharaoh, the boy surrounded by a thousand marvels, and spent long hours in silence.
He returned many times.
One of those times he saw what he had not seen before: there were seeds on the floor.
The seeds had spent three thousand two hundred years waiting for the hand that would plant them.
May 11
M R . E VERYTHING
Eugène François Vidocq died in Paris in 1857.
Beginning the moment he held up his fatherâs bakery at the age of fourteen, Eugène was a thief, a clown, a thug, a deserter, a smuggler, a schoolteacher chasing after little girls, the idol of the bordellos, a businessman, a stool pigeon, a spy, a criminologist, a ballistics expert, the director of the Sûreté Générale (the French FBI), and the founder of the very first private detective agency.
Twenty duels he fought. Five times he turned into a nun or a crippled veteran to escape from jail. He was a master of disguises, a criminal playing a policeman, a policeman playing a criminal, and he was the friend of his enemies and the enemy of his friends.
Sherlock Holmes and other notables of European detective literature owe many of their skills to the tricks Vidocq learned from his life of crime, which he later applied to fighting it.
May 14
S OMEONE E LSEâS D EBT
On this day in 1948 the state of Israel was born.
Within a few months, more than eight hundred thousand Palestinians had been deported and more than five hundred of their villages had been turned to rubble.
Those villages, where olive, fig, almond and other fruit trees grew, now lie buried under highways, shopping malls and amusement parks. They are dead and unnamed on the map rechristened by the Government Names Committee.
Not much of Palestine is left. The two thousand years of persecution suffered by the Jewish people was invoked to
A couple of years later Enrique Santos Discépolo painted a portrait of Argentinaâs days of infamy in his tango âCambalacheâ:
                          Today theyâre all of a piece
                          the friend, the damned cheat ,
                          the dumbbell, the genius, the thief ,
                          the generous soul, the deadbeat .
                          Go for it man, get it while you can . . .
May 7
T HE P ARTY P OOPERS
In 1954 Vietnamese rebels gave the French army a tremendous beating at their supposedly invulnerable base in Dien Bien Phu. After a century of conquering colonies, glorious France had to exit Vietnam in a hurry.
Then it was the United Statesâ turn. Unbelievable: the greatest power on earth and in space also suffered a humiliating defeat in this tiny, badly armed country populated by the poorest of the poor.
A peasant of slow gait, few words led both of these exploits.
His name was Ho Chi Minh, and they called him Uncle Ho.
Uncle Ho wasnât at all like other revolutionary leaders.
An activist returning from a village once reported that there was no way to organize those people. âTheyâre a bunch of Buddhist yahoos. They spend all day meditating.â
âGo back there and meditate,â Uncle Ho ordered.
May 9
B ORN TO F IND H IM
Howard Carter was born on this morning in 1874, and half a century later he understood why he had come into the world.
The revelation came to him when he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Carter located it through sheer stubbornness, after years of trying everywhere, battling discouragement and the fearmongering of his fellow Egyptologists.
On the day of the great find, he sat at the foot of the shortlived pharaoh, the boy surrounded by a thousand marvels, and spent long hours in silence.
He returned many times.
One of those times he saw what he had not seen before: there were seeds on the floor.
The seeds had spent three thousand two hundred years waiting for the hand that would plant them.
May 11
M R . E VERYTHING
Eugène François Vidocq died in Paris in 1857.
Beginning the moment he held up his fatherâs bakery at the age of fourteen, Eugène was a thief, a clown, a thug, a deserter, a smuggler, a schoolteacher chasing after little girls, the idol of the bordellos, a businessman, a stool pigeon, a spy, a criminologist, a ballistics expert, the director of the Sûreté Générale (the French FBI), and the founder of the very first private detective agency.
Twenty duels he fought. Five times he turned into a nun or a crippled veteran to escape from jail. He was a master of disguises, a criminal playing a policeman, a policeman playing a criminal, and he was the friend of his enemies and the enemy of his friends.
Sherlock Holmes and other notables of European detective literature owe many of their skills to the tricks Vidocq learned from his life of crime, which he later applied to fighting it.
May 14
S OMEONE E LSEâS D EBT
On this day in 1948 the state of Israel was born.
Within a few months, more than eight hundred thousand Palestinians had been deported and more than five hundred of their villages had been turned to rubble.
Those villages, where olive, fig, almond and other fruit trees grew, now lie buried under highways, shopping malls and amusement parks. They are dead and unnamed on the map rechristened by the Government Names Committee.
Not much of Palestine is left. The two thousand years of persecution suffered by the Jewish people was invoked to
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