May 23rd, Thursday | Goodnight Moon and Mr. Moog

The date is May 23th, Thursday, and today I’m coming to you from Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

Today is Red Nose Day for the USA. Red Nose Day is a day of fundraising – all donations make their way to programs that serve children in need. The day was inspired by the BBC event of the same name and is run by the non-profit Comic Relief, Inc. The idea is to leverage the entertainment world to inspire giving, “making it fun to make a difference.” 

Today is the birthday of Robert Moog, American engineer and electronic music pioneer. Moog, in addition to having a fantastic last name, invented the first commercial synthesizer. Moog’s synthesizer was compact compared to the room-sized synthesizers on the market and it was the first to have a keyboard

Wendy Carlos, a peer of Moog’s, arranged selections of Bach for the Moog synthesizer. The compositions ended up on the album Switched-On Bach, which took home 3 Grammys and was the first classical album to go certified platinum. (Hear a track from the album.)

Today is the birthday of Carl Linnaeus, botanist and founder of Linnaean taxonomy, the system used for classifying flora and fauna. 

Even as a child, Carl showed a penchant for nature. It was said that giving him a flower as a tot would calm his tears and when he was just nine, his father gave him a little spot to grow a garden of his own. During his boarding school years and he often skipped classes to walk the grounds and voraciously read botany books.

His dedication to calling things as they were nearly got him killed at one point. When visiting Hamburg, Germany, he and a friend were greeted warmly by the mayor who proudly showed the two scholars a stuffed hydra he had lately acquired. Linnaeus was instantly skeptical and upon further inspection declared the hydra to be a fake and made his observations public. The mayor was enraged as he planned to sell the stuffed hydra for a sizeable sum. Carl and his traveling buddy promptly got out of dodge. 

Carl saw a good deal of Northern Europe, its landscape, and the botanical gardens of the elite before publishing his magnum opus, Systema Naturae, in 1735. Systema Naturae introduced a hierarchical system of taxonomy to be adapted for use by other scientists. Linneaus was the first taxonomist to include apes and monkeys in the same category as humans. In fact, he was one of the first to include humans as a part of the animal kingdom, not as a separate noble entity. He received an outpouring of correspondence from scholars and theologians arguing that he could not categorize humans with animals, but Linnaeus stood by his idea, noting that the basic anatomy of the primates is the same. 

Ever the taxonomist, Carl said: “If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too.”

Today is the birthday of Margaret Wise Brown, acclaimed children’s author and editor. Her book Goodnight Moon is a classic. First published in 1947, it has since been translated into a dozen languages and has sold an estimated 48 million copies. 

The success of Goodnight Moon is perhaps due to it being set in the present moment. The first line goes “Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.” Since children cannot sense time as adults do, perhaps the popularity of the book lies in its rejection of a linear story, and its embrace of and focus on a single moment in time, the quieting moment of saying goodnight.  

Margaret published a total of 39 books during her short lifetime and 18 were published posthumously.

Follies

Carl Sandburg

Shaken, 

The blossoms of lilac,     

  And shattered, 

The atoms of purple.      

Green dip the leaves,           

  Darker the bark,

Longer the shadows.      

Sheer lines of poplar      

Shimmer with masses of silver   

And down in a garden old with years             

And broken walls of ruin and story,         

Roses rise with red rain-memories.         

      May!             

  In the open world         

The sun comes and finds your face,                

  Remembering all.

Thank you for listening. I’m your host, Virginia Combs, wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.