Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the United States. With 6,953,927 visitors to its three locations in 2018, it was the third most visited art museum in the world. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among seventeen curatorial departments. The main building, on the eastern edge of Central Park along Museum Mile in Manhattan's Upper East Side is by area one of the world's largest art galleries. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from Medieval Europe. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened the Met Breuer museum at Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side; it extends the museum's modern and contemporary art program.

History

The New York State Legislature granted the Metropolitan Museum of Art an Act of Incorporation on April 13, 1870 "for the purpose of establishing and maintaining in said City a Museum and Library of Art, of encouraging and developing the Study of the Fine Arts, and the application of Art to manufacture and natural life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and to that end of furnishing popular instruction and recreations". This legislation was supplemented later by the 1893 Act, Chapter 476, which required that its collections "shall be kept open and accessible to the public free of all charge throughout the year." The founders included businessmen and financiers, as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day, who wanted to open a museum to bring art and art education to the American people.

The Great Hall

The permanent collection consists of works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt, paintings, and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes, and accessories, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 for the purposes of opening a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue.

Wim Mertens (born 14 May 1953) is a Flemish Belgian composer, countertenor vocalist, pianist, guitarist, and musicologist. Mertens' style has continually evolved during the course of his prolific career, starting from downright experimental and avant-garde, always gravitating around minimalism, usually, however, preserving a melodic foundation to the forays that he makes into the worlds that he is exploring. His compositional quality has often overweighted the "labelling issue" and reached wider audiences although stemming from a far-from-mainstream musical.

Maximizing The Audience is the first solo release of Belgian multi-instrumentalist and composer Wim Mertens, after he dropped the group name Soft Verdict. The album was composed for the play The Power of Theatrical Madness by Jan Fabre and premiered in Venice on June 11, 1984

McCarthy launches anti-red crusade

The US Senator's anti-Communist 'Crusade' began on February 9th, 1950.

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was thirty-eight when he entered the United States Senate in 1946 as a Republican from Wisconsin. The product of a Wisconsin dairy farm and the Jesuits at Marquette University in Milwaukee, he had made a career as a lawyer and judge before joining up in 1942 and serving in the Pacific. He had a satisfactory war record, though nothing like as glittering as he made it seem afterwards, when he pretended to have been a tail-gunner. Parading as a war-hero, he narrowly defeated the veteran Robert M. La Follette Jr. for the Republican nomination for senator and then swamped the Democrat in the election.

McCarthy was a far lesser figure than La Follette and he quickly earned himself a bad reputation in the Senate. His colleagues distrusted his untruthfulness, unscrupulousness, dubious connections with business interests, apparent Nazi sympathies (he had many German-American voters in Wisconsin) and general lack of principle. He was allowed only an unimportant committee appointment. By 1950 he began to worry about his prospects for re-election and looked round for a band-wagon to climb on. He duly found one in the tide of anti-Communist feeling engendered by the sharpening tensions of the Cold War, already exploited by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Delivering a speech to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy warmed to the theme of concealed Communist traitors lurking in the recesses of the State Department and subtly bending the policy of the United States to their evil ideology. The speech echoed remarks made not long before by a Republican congressman named Richard M. Nixon, but by luck or judgment McCarthy had hit on a brilliant rhetorical device. He did not, he said, have the time to name all the Communists in the State Department, but ‘I have here in my hand,’ he announced, waving a piece of paper, ‘a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.’

Reporters covering what they had expected to be a yawn-making piece of routine party politicking woke up and set the wires humming to Washington and New York. What exactly the paper in McCarthy’s hand was has never been established. Maybe it was his laundry list, but certainly it was not a list of 205 names of State Department employees. The figure of 205 came from a 1946 exercise in loyalty screening which had identified ‘damaging information’ about 284 State Department bureaucrats out of 3,000. Of these 284, 79 had been discharged. Which left 205, but McCarthy would soon admit that he did not know the names of the 205 or what the ‘damaging information’ about them was. He had gleaned the figures from a letter written by Secretary of State James Byrnes to a congressman in 1946, and it may have been a copy of this letter that he held in his hand. The actual figure soon became confused anyway, as McCarthy kept plucking different numbers out of the air.

The Senator’s face scowled from newsstands all over the country on the covers of Time and Newsweek, the term ‘McCarthyism’ was coined by the Washington Post cartoonist Herblock and the polls showed his approval rating with the public climbing rapidly to fifty per cent. Growing ever more reckless, he hurled untrue accusations and insinuations at distinguished figures including Professor Owen Lattimore and the diplomat Philip Jessup, General Marshall and Dean Acheson, and called President Truman a drunken son-of-a-bitch who ought to be impeached.

Comfortably re-elected for Wisconsin in 1952, McCarthy was given the chairmanship of the hitherto unobtrusive Senate Committee on Government Operations by the Republican leadership. They intended to send him off the main line into a quiet siding, where he could do no harm, but the attempt misfired. He was now empowered to hire staff and conduct investigations, and in 1953 he and his committee embarked on extensive enquiries into Communist influence in the Federal government. They failed to unmask a single Communist, but they blackened many reputations, undermined the morale of the government service and made the United States an object of contempt abroad. President Eisenhower refused to tackle McCarthy and the senator’s downfall did not come until he went too far by accusing the Army of sheltering Communist traitors and the entire hearings were shown on television. They attracted a huge audience and millions of Americans saw McCarthy the crude and arrogant bully in action. They did not like what they saw. The Democrats on his committee, now in the public eye, turned against him. The senior counsel for the Army, a shrewd Boston trial lawyer named Joseph Welch, ran rings round McCarthy and showed him up for what he was. The investigation collapsed. The Senate formally censured him for bringing that august body into disrepute and the senator from Wisconsin, shunned by his colleagues and deserted by the media, retreated into drink and self-pity. He was forty-six when he died from complications of alcoholism in May 1957.

ALCATRAZ

At 9:40 am on August 11, 1934, the first batch of 137 prisoners arrived at Alcatraz, arriving by railroad from the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas at Santa Venetia, California, before being escorted to Alcatraz, handcuffed in high security coaches and guarded by some 60 special FBI agents, U.S. Marshals and railway security officials.
Most of the prisoners were notorious bank robbers and murderers.

The Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary or United States Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island (often just referred to as Alcatraz or The Rock) was a maximum high-security federal prison on Alcatraz Island, 1.25 miles (2.01 km) off the coast of San Francisco, California, which operated from August 11, 1934, until March 21, 1963.

The main prison building was built in 1910–1912 during its time as a United States Army military prison; Alcatraz had been the site of a citadel since the 1860s. The United States Disciplinary Barracks, Pacific Branch on Alcatraz was acquired by the United States Department of Justice on October 12, 1933, and the island became a prison of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in August 1934 after the buildings were modernized to meet the requirements of a top-notch security prison. Given this high security and the location of Alcatraz in the cold waters and strong currents of San Francisco Bay, the prison operators believed Alcatraz to be escape-proof and America's strongest prison.

Alcatraz was designed to hold prisoners who continuously caused trouble at other federal prisons. One of the world's most notorious and best known prisons over the years, Alcatraz housed some 1,576 of America's most ruthless criminals including Al Capone, Robert Franklin Stroud (the "Birdman of Alcatraz"), George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Bumpy Johnson, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Mickey Cohen, Arthur R. "Doc" Barker, Whitey Bulger, and Alvin "Creepy" Karpis (who served more time at Alcatraz than any other inmate). It also provided housing for the Bureau of Prisons' staff and their families. A total of 36 prisoners made 14 escape attempts during the 29 years of the prison's existence, the most notable of which were the violent escape attempt of May 1946 known as the "Battle of Alcatraz", and the arguably successful "Escape from Alcatraz" by Frank Morris, John Anglin, and Clarence Anglin in June 1962 in one of the most intricate escapes ever devised. Faced with high maintenance costs and a poor reputation, Alcatraz closed on March 21, 1963.

The three-story cellhouse included the main four blocks of the jail, A-block, B-block, C-block, and D-block, the warden's office, visitation room, the library, and the barber shop. The prison cells typically measured 9 feet (2.7 m) by 5 feet (1.5 m) and 7 feet (2.1 m) high. The cells were primitive and lacked privacy, with a bed, a desk and a washbasin and toilet on the back wall, with few furnishings except a blanket. African-Americans were segregated from the rest in cell designation due to racial abuse being prevalent. D-Block housed the worst inmates and five cells at the end of it were designated as "The Hole", where badly behaving prisoners would be sent for periods of punishment, often brutally so. The dining hall and kitchen lay off the main building in an extended part where both prisoners and staff would eat three meals a day together. The Alcatraz Hospital was above the dining hall.

Corridors of the prison were named after major American streets such as Broadway and Michigan Avenue. Working at the prison was considered a privilege for inmates and many of the better inmates were employed in the Model Industries Building and New Industries Building during the day, actively involved in providing for the military in jobs such as sewing and woodwork and performing various maintenance and laundry chores.

Today the penitentiary is a public museum and one of San Francisco's major tourist attractions, attracting some 1.5 million visitors annually. The former prison is now operated by the National Park Service's Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the badly eroded buildings of the former prison have been subject to restoration works in recent times and maintained.

National Paper Airplane Day

National Paper Airplane Day is an unofficial observance, celebrated on May 26 each year in the United States to commemorate the simple aeronautical toy.

Paper airplane day celebrations typically include social gatherings at which participants create and fly paper airplanes. These events often feature contests in two basic flight categories: "distance" and "time in air". As of 2012, Takuo Toda holds the world record for the longest time in air (27.9 seconds). The distance record (226 feet, 10 inches) was set by Joe Ayoob, with a plane constructed by John Collins, in February 2012.

How to Celebrate Paper Airplane Day

Celebrating Paper Airplane Day is simple and fun! Just pick up a piece of paper and fold it into your favorite airplane shape and give it a toss! Looking for something a bit more challenging? The typical wedge-shaped paper airplane is just the simplest form, there are books, clubs, and hobbyists who all engage in the past-time of creating complex paper airplanes that can reach amazing distances with surprising stability. Paper Airplane Day is your chance to show up your younger self by creating the best paper airplane ever!

United States presidential inauguration

The inauguration of the President of the United States is a ceremony to mark the commencement of a new four-year term of the President of the United States. This ceremony takes place for each new presidential term, even if the president is continuing in office for a second term. Since 1937, it has taken place on January 20, which is 72 to 78 days after the November presidential election (on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November). The term of a president commences at noon ("EST" - Eastern Standard Time) on that day, when the Chief Justice of the United States administers the oath of office to the president. However, when January 20 falls on a Sunday, the chief justice administers the oath to the president on that day privately and then again in a public ceremony the next day, on Monday, January 21. The most recent presidential inauguration ceremony was the swearing in of Donald Trump to a four-year term of office on Friday, January 20, 2017.

Recitation of the presidential oath of office is the only component in this ceremony mandated by the United States Constitution (in Article II, Section One, Clause 8). However, over the years, various traditions have arisen that have expanded the inauguration from a simple oath-taking ceremony to a day-long event, including parades and multiple social gatherings. The inauguration is carried live via the major U.S. commercial television networks, as well as cable news networks, which provide all-day coverage. Additionally, various networks streamed the ceremony live on their websites.

Since the 1981 inauguration of Ronald Reagan, the ceremony has been held at the west front of the United States Capitol facing the National Mall with its iconic Washington Monument and distant Lincoln Memorial. Other swearing-in ceremonies have taken place on a platform over the steps at the Capitol's east portico on a regular basis for 180 years, and occasionally inside the Old Senate Chamber on the old north side, the chamber of the House of Representatives in the south wing, and the central Rotunda under the dome.Additionally, on two occasions—in 1817 and 1945—they were held at other locations in Washington, D.C., at the Executive Mansion, (later known as the White House)