2008 Wall Street Does it Again

That was the famous Variety headline following the stock market crash in 1929.

In 1929 it was quick and final. In 2008 it wasn’t so much a crash as it was exposing an Emperor that had no clothes. It was easy to identify the greedy folks on Wall Street – it’ll take longer to pin down the Washington politicians that let it happen.

So you see, things haven’t changed much since the 1930’s when Will Rogers made this observation. ‘We’ve got the best politicians in this country that money can buy.’

2008 Sport Stories on Rock The Tower Blog:

Feb. 1, 2008 The Super Bowl and the Triple Crown were both named after the fact. It took an untested horse named Sit Barton winning the 1919 Kentucky Derby, Preakness and a race at Belmont to put those three races into a super category and call it The Triple Crown.

It was 1967 when the National Football league’s Green Bay Packers played the American League’s Kansas City Chiefs, at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles; in a championship game that would later be called the Super Bowl.

Triple Crown madness.
There was a promising story to be written about a horse called Big Brown that had won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness races handily. The crowd at Belmont Park was excited and anxious to see a new 2008 Triple Crown winner. But they didn’t get the chance because a long shot named Da’ Tara was early out of the gate, took the lead and Alan Garcia’s masterful hold on the reins held his horse to a reasonable pace and led all the way to the finish line.

The favorite Big Brown no showed, oh he was on the track but in no mood to run.

The win gave trainer Nick Zito his 3rd Belmont Stakes win in the past five years denying the Triple Crown to previous winners of The Kentucky Derby and Preakness.

However, there will be another crop of three year olds next spring and who knows, maybe 2009 will give the racing world another Triple Crown winner.

Let’s Go to the Movies:

Told in a six-part series beginning April 9, 2008 was the story of the early American movie industry. From those early Nickelodeon days in New York and New Jersey, the move west with C.B. DeMille and the first feature film in Hollywood, The Squawman.

2008 Hurricane Watch:

From June 1 to November 30 we tracked a flurry of tropical storms and hurricanes from Arthur to Paloma. Fortunately there were none in the Category 5 catastrophic range, but during August Tropical Storm Fay came up from the south through the Florida Keys and roamed around Florida for almost a week giving the whole state a good soaking rain before moving along and sharing the misery with Alabama and Mississippi.

Fay had just made her exit when the Miami Hurricane Center spotted storms cropping up all over the place. Gustav, Hanna, Ike and Josephine all chose to make their appearance at almost the same time. Fortunately though Ike was the only one of the four to be a real threat, but the north Texas coast got the worst of it.

Hurricane Ike’s 110 mph winds and 14-foot storm surge thundered over Galveston Island at about 2:00 O’clock on the morning of September 13th. It was bad, devastating in fact but not the catastrophe that hit the Texas coast in 1900. That monster storm claimed between six and eight thousand lives, a tragedy still in the hearts and minds of many Texans.

There’s plenty of hard work ahead for the folks hit by Hurricane Ike, but they might take some solace from the past. Heading one of the many articles written about the earlier storm: ‘Rebuilding was ‘Galveston’s finest hour.’ The story of the 1900 Storm is one about the fate of people at the hands of nature…

Tombstone 1881 Post Gunfight at the OK Corral
Excerpt from Doc Holliday’s Road to Tombstone.

Coroner H.M. Matthews called for an inquest to begin Friday, Oct. 28th.
At the same hour the coroner's jury was being impaneled, ring lawyers filed papers with the Cochise County Court demanding the arrest of Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday. Charging them with the wanton and willful killing of Frank McLowry, Tom McLowry and Billy Clanton.

The Goring Collection
Will it ever end?

Art plundered by the Nazi’s during World War II continue to garner headlines and frustrate descendents of Holocaust victims.

Museum returns painting found to be Nazi loot
International Herald Tribune - France
... by cubist Fernand Leger back to the heirs of a Jewish art collector in France, after concluding it had been stolen by the Nazis during World War II. ...

Writers Notebook:
To finish 2008 on a solid note I decided to look back a couple of centuries.

I have copies, in my notebook, of a collection of letters written by Gustave Flaubert -- of Madame Bovary fame. The letters were written between 1851 and 1857 at the time he was writing Bovary. In the letters Flaubert writes about his problems in writing the novel.

This one to Louise Colet was written before he started work on Bovary, but gives us some of his thoughts on writing in general.

‘… Read, do not dream. Plunge into long studies; there’s nothing continually good but the habit of stubborn work. It releases an opium which lulls the soul. I have gone through periods of bleak despair and have turned endlessly in a void, desperate with boredom. This can be overcome by force of persistence and pride: try.’

To rearrange in an attempt to improve any phrase that has survived for a century or two, for example Thomas Pain’s ‘These are the times that try men’s souls,’ is probably impossible. Go ahead and try it.
E.B. White

Thanks Thomas Pain and you too Mr. White for the reminder. Pain’s line fits very nicely into our current 2008 situation.

2008 -- It’s a wrap…
Happy New Year everybody.

Tom Barnes -- Actor, Writer and Hurricane Hunter. Check out my website for books, blogs, western legends, a literary icon, reviews and interviews. Also my novels The Goring Collection and Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone along with a non fiction remembrance of The Hurricane Hunters and Lost in the Bermuda Triangle.

www.tombarnes39.com
www.RocktheTower.com