Best Actors, True Grit, The King's Speech - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

The Best Actor Oscars are given out almost at random, it seems. Actors who play people who are physically impaired or mentally ill always have an advantage.

Thus Cliff Robertson (Charly) beat Peter O'Toole's brilliant portrayal of Henry II in The Lion in Winter and Dustin Hoffman's one-note performance in Rain Man won over Tom Hanks's astonishing performance in Big.

Hanks's revenge came when his performance as Forrest Gump defeated Paul Newman's best-of-career role in Nobody's Fool and Morgan Freeman's and Nigel Hawthorne's work in Shawshank Redemption and The Madness of King George, respectively.

Sometimes the award is given, not for the performance, but because the film was so admired that the effusion of love spatters votes all over the actors lucky enough to be in them.

Then there are the years when the list of nominees makes you scratch your head and wonder if the movies that year were so bad that these really were the best performances by actors in a leading role.

They can only be explained by saying that certain actors are regarded as nominatable, and so when they show up in a prestigious (i.e., much-hyped and "serious") movie, they are automatically going to be in the running.

The most perilous category, though, is "sentimental favorite." Certain actors become icons, and the Academy members long to give them an Oscar.

Sometimes such Oscars are given to actors who really were the best in one or more past years, but got passed over for one reason or another.

How else can you explain Al Pacino's win in 1992 for his self-indulgent performance in Scent of a Woman? Or Paul Newman's in 1986 for The Color of Money?

But then there are the Oscars that are given for sentiment alone -- because the Academy loves the persona that a very limited actor always plays.

Nobody can seriously think that there was any year in which Bing Crosby really gave the best performance of any actor -- but he was nominated three times and won once.

And anybody who has seen both versions of True Grit will simply laugh at the notion that John Wayne somehow earned his Best Actor Oscar.

His competition was weird that year. Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman divided the vote of those who admired Midnight Cowboy, a sentimental but "edgy" movie that had an X rating. (Today it would be given a PG-13.)

Richard Burton was nominated for Anne of a Thousand Days and Peter O'Toole for Goodbye, Mr. Chips -- both merely serviceable performances by actors who had truly deserved Oscars before, but never received them. Both had the severe Oscar disadvantage (in those days) of being Brits.

In the Coen brothers' remake of True Grit, Jeff Bridges shows just how inadequate John Wayne's performance really was. It must be understood, now if not all along, that John Wayne's Oscar was for "Best Acting by John Wayne, Making His Oscar Less Embarrassing to the Academy."

It must be pointed out, in all fairness, that Jeff Bridges was working with a far better script and with better direction, too.

It's not just that the Coens were more faithful to the book. It's that the Coens' script was better than the book, and instead of emphasizing the stilted dialogue that was so much praised in Charles Portis's novel (a gross mistake; Portis apparently thought that when writers of the era did not use contractions, it was because the people of the time did not use them), they directed the actors to make the dialogue feel natural.

There are things in True Grit that will make some viewers wince -- recently-cut-off fingers lying on a table, for instance. But overall, True Grit deserves serious consideration as, not just a "best" picture, but a great one.

The Coen brothers are hit-or-miss, but their hits are amazing. Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy are perennial favorites at our house, with some votes as well for Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?

But in True Grit, they may have found the perfect balance between savage realism and rueful human comedy. This is epitomized in the moment when Rooster Cogburn cheerfully offers to pull the partly-severed tongue of LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) from his mouth, promising that in time he will find a way to make his tongueless speech understood.

You don't know whether to laugh or screech. This is, I think, the reaction the Coens always try for.

These are directors who make you admire, not their own direction, and not even the actors' performances, because you are never forced to notice the direction or the acting.

Instead, you admire the characters, even when they are far from admirable. You love them because they are so appalling and well-meaning at the same time.

Will Jeff Bridges be nominated for this performance? On the one hand, he's an actor who not only gets nominations, but also wins -- he won last year, after all, for a faintly similar performance (aging drunken hero) in Crazy-Heart.

On the other hand ... he won last year, making an Oscar for him not such an urgent matter. The Academy owed him one for having ignored his performance in Starman back in 1984 -- but that debt is now discharged.

And we can't forget that Jeff Bridges also gave a definitely non-Oscar performance in TRON: Legacy. From trusted critics who've seen it, Bridges didn't even phone that performance in -- he left it as a post-it note on the fridge.

Well, who wouldn't be embarrassed to take part in either of the TRON movies? These are the stupidest movies about computers ever made -- yes, stupider than War Games -- and Bridges was in both TRONs.

(How stupid are they? They pretend to be all high-tech, but they're really about magic. To have an avatar inside a computer culture might have been interesting; but to have computers somehow make the person sitting at the computer disappear in the process is so mind-numbingly dumb that the actors who agreed to be in the film deserved to wear the embarrassing I'm-a-dummy hats.)

Except for the squeamish, yes it is. And not for the performances of Jeff Bridges or Matt Damon -- though both are excellent. (Actors tend to give their best performances for the Coens -- making them the opposite of George Lucas and Woody Allen, who, as far as I can tell, suck the talent right out of all but the most brilliant actors they work with.)

No, the performance that you will love and admire the most is that of Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross. She is the one who ought to be nominated, because in every scene where she speaks, she blows everybody else off the screen by the sheer truth of her performance.

Maybe there will never be another role that allows her such an opportunity -- great roles for women are rare in this world, alas -- but she absolutely nailed this one, and if she isn't nominated for Best Actress, what are the Oscars even for?

Right now, if you hurry, you can see the performance that shows an actor at such a fever pitch of perfection in his art that I do not expect to see its like again in a decade -- if ever.

I speak of Colin Firth's tour-de-force in the title role of The King's Speech.

We all know Colin Firth, right? As the aloof Mr. Darcy in the 1995 miniseries of Pride and Prejudice he permanently won the hearts of all women everywhere -- give it up, those hearts are owned.

Since then he played variations on "dignified Brit" until he was beginning to feel a little like a parody of himself. And then came Love Actually, in which his tender performance as the soul-injured man who falls in love across a language barrier stole a movie that was completely filled with brilliant performances.

But nothing prepared me to believe him capable of doing something so flat-out difficult as the role of Bertie (King George VI) in The King's Speech.

And that's something that seems almost never to be considered when people vote for acting Oscars: Was this performance actually hard to bring off?

Anthony Hopkins, for instance, is a wonderful actor and deserved the Oscar for his difficult performance of intense emotion behind a mask of imperturbability as the butler in Remains of the Day. Instead, he got it for the relatively easy scenery-chewing performance in Silence of the Lambs, where the mask was a mere prop instead of something he had to create himself.

This blindness of the Academy to the relative magnitude of various acting achievements is all the more surprising because the largest group of voters, by far, is actors.

How can they give awards to acting jobs that were showy but relatively easy (Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman), but then fail even to nominate performances that were actually incredibly hard to bring off?

They don't understand what they themselves do. It's all instinct. In America, at least, most actors are taught completely useless and meaningless "skills" like getting in touch with their own emotions. This is not art but therapy.

The Brits, however, are usually trained to actually understand what they're doing as actors. And so I daresay many a British actor understands exactly what Firth achieved in this role.

Here's what he had to do: He had to play a man whose actual speech and manner actually exist on film and in recordings. This man had an accent (or speech impediment?) that caused him to pronounce his initial Rs in a weird and twisted way.

On top of this accent, Firth then had to place a convincing stammer of a particular type -- hesitant rather than repetitive. I have known several people with such stammers, and while they are easy to mock (if you're that kind of person), they are devilishly hard to produce. Firth has it dead right.

But that's not the hardest part. The hardest thing is then to give a performance that is not about the stammer, but instead is about the human being.

While doing these tricks with language and mannerisms, Firth then had to produce the aloofness and ignorance of a man raised to be royal, yet obviously incompetent to perform key parts of his role in life. He has to be warm and likeable, but also angry and arrogant, damaged and desperate, all at once.

Firth brings it off -- and does it so brilliantly that you never notice him acting.

He never calls your attention to his effort. In fact, you are never even aware of it. He just is Bertie Windsor, the younger brother who was never, never going to have to be King of England.

And you won't. Even though I've just prepped you to see nothing but his performance, when you go to The King's Speech you will get caught up in the story and think only of the relationship between Prince Bertie and his Australian-born vocal coach, Lionel Logue, played to perfection by Geoffrey Rush, who will simply win the Best-Supporting Actor Oscar this year. (The other nominees might as well not bother writing a speech.)

The King's Speech is a truly private movie. The people are caught up in great events, but the dilemmas and relationships are all utterly domestic. And the acting is so good that you come out of the theater loving, not the actors, but the people they portrayed.

Like True Grit, The King's Speech has an absolutely astonishing supporting cast. It also has a sensitive, nearly perfect script, whose few imperfections are completely overcome by the actors and director.

Don't see this movie because of awards talk. Don't even see it in order to admire the best acting performance of the year.

See it because it is a beautiful story of human struggle, of friendship born in adversity, of good people doing good. See it because your life will be better for having this story inside your memory.

And see it soon, because unless word of mouth -- for instance, the words of my mouth -- fills the theaters quickly, this is the kind of movie that will come and go in a moment. Why? Because it just doesn't have the ingredients that can be touted in advance.

It doesn't sound compelling in quick promos or sound bytes. It is only after seeing it that you know how very much you wanted to, needed to see it.

There is only one warning I must give before you rush off to the theater. This movie is rated R. And by the MCAA rules it deserves it. It has not just one or two F-words, but dozens, and lots of other foul language, too.

And it is absolutely right to have those words. They could not have been cut out or replaced with euphemisms.

That's because in the real world, stammerers often find that while they cannot speak without interruption, they can sing and they can swear without a hint of a stammer.

That's right -- once we code various words as "forbidden" in our brains, they actually emerge on a different mental track (so to speak), and a stammer that blocks normal speech does not stop the curses.

So part of the therapy is for Bertie to let rip with strings of foul language. The very fact that Bertie is not a swearing man makes this all the more poignant.

If you are one who cannot bear the sound of really bad words (though not the worst -- there really are words more vile than the F-word, and they are not used), then this movie is simply not available to you.

But if you can experience these words as an honest part of a truthful story which truly cannot be told anywhere near as well without them, then go to this movie, for apart from this perfectly explicable language, everything else about the movie is PG or even G; there is nothing else to stop you from loving the whole experience.

Every Day Is Special

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.

Straws, If, Gravity, 12^th Night

Thursday, December 30 -- U.S.S.R. Day

Poet and storyteller Rudyard Kipling was born on this day in 1865 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, which was then a British possession. His father was a teacher at a local school of art, and his mother's sister was married to noted English artist Edward Burne-Jones. As a boy, Rudyard lived much of the time with the Burne-Joneses in England while his parents remained in India.

So it is no wonder that England and India were at the heart of much of Kipling's work; no wonder, either, that Kipling thought of an artist's life as something both possible and desirable. He first started selling his poems for publication before he was eighteen, and his first novel, The Light That Failed, was published the year he turned twenty-five.

Kipling lived in America for a time -- but only because his bank failed while he was on his honeymoon with his American wife. They had money enough to get to Vermont, where many of her family lived, and it was while he was living in Vermont that he wrote The Jungle Book. Later, he visited often in South Africa, where he collected material for his Just So stories.

Like Dickens before him and Winston Churchill after him, Kipling became a British institution, selling books enough to become quite wealthy, while making friends with powerful and influential people.

His name and fame also gave rise to a classic schoolboy joke:

Q: "Do you like Kipling?"

A: "I don't know. I've never kippled."

Nowadays, people think that Disney invented The Jungle Book; Kipling may be best known for his poem, If, which schoolchildren used to commit to memory, filling the place now occupied by Lady Gaga lyrics. The poem begins:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

And the poem ends:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Let's Make a Deal premiered on TV on this day in 1963, bringing public stupidity to a new low, which has since been surpassed a thousand times. Prior to that, the most empty-headed show on television might have been The Roy Rogers Show, which also premiered on this day, but in 1951. Roy and his wife, Dale Evans, periodically burst into song. Between times they fought bad guys. They rode on horses and in jeeps, putting their show sometime between 1870 and 1950.

The USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) was established on this day in 1922, after the Bolsheviks (the Reds) defeated their enemies, the counterrevolutionary Whites, in the Russian Civil War.

The USSR was, of course, a lie. While it pretended to be a union of independent nations -- Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Transcaucasion Federation (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) -- in fact it was the old Tsarist Russian Empire, only with less freedom and more poverty. But at least the old aristocratic class had either been killed or driven into exile, so the poor people didn't have to see any rich people.

Though the other "Soviet Socialist Republics" were no more independent than they had been under the Tsars, when the United Nations was formed after World War II, Stalin demanded -- and got! -- separate seats and votes in the United Nations for some of them. It would be as if the United States had been given 48 votes in the original U.N. -- certainly our states have always had more independence than the SSRs ever did.

The fraud of the USSR was finally dissolved on 8 December 1991, when the old Tsarist empire was finally dismantled in fact as well as in name. Russian dictator and imperialist Vladimir Putin, however, apparently wishes to restore Tsarism, with himself as Tsar -- and with the old imperial borders restored. So he bullies, subverts, bribes, assassinates leaders of, and occasionally invades the old SSRs.

And people say history doesn't repeat itself!

Friday, December 31 -- New Year's Eve

There is no particular reason that the year in the Julian/Gregorian calendar should end about ten days after the winter solstice. It has ended on other days of the year -- sometimes mid-month -- and there are other calendars still in use, with their own ending and starting dates.

For a while, my family and I celebrated on New Year's Eve by writing "time capsules" -- lists of important things that happened to us during the year, and also our favorite books and movies and music from that year. I think the reason we stopped was that as the kids got older, we all had so much to write that it started to feel like a burden rather than a celebration.

Many people celebrate the end of the old year by getting completely blitzed and making fools of themselves in public. Thus they begin each new year by waking up with a splitting headache and spend the day trying to find out what they did the night before and then apologize for it.

Make Up Your Mind Day requires that each of us make a decision today and follow through with it. Preferably before one starts drinking -- it's hard to follow through on decisions that you don't remember making. And it's hard to want to follow through on decisions you made when you were drunk.

Some people who live in fantasy-land also declared this to be No Interruptions Day. "At work, minimize or eliminate interruptions to our thought processes or tasks. At home, silence and shut down all devices that interrupt us so we can devote ourselves to our families or to ourselves. A day for quiet and/or focus. Renew your energy for the new year ahead."

It's hard to imagine how this little plan can be carried out on a day when people are getting ready to get drunk and run around shouting and throwing litter later that night.

Saturday, January 1 -- New Year's Day

This first day of the New Year is also listed as Z Day -- a time to give recognition to all persons and places whose names begin with the letter Z and who thus are always last in any alphabetized list.

Today we begin the following National Months:

Creativity Month. Creative people always do creative things because someone else told them to.

Be On-Purpose Month. We are urged to "put your good intentions into action." In other words, these people are nagging us to keep our New Year's resolutions. Well, some of us are too creative to stick to foolish lists.

Get Organized Month -- this is the occasion for people who thrive on neatness to pressure the rest of us -- who are busy being creative -- to stop that nonsense and make everything tidy. These are the people who keep their furniture and carpets covered in plastic. These are the people whose houses are photographed for Architectural Digest. These are the people who, when they are in management, drive all creative people out of their company so it can go broke and die.

For Mail-Order Gardening Month we are urged to "spend time dreaming and scheming about next spring's garden." Gee, I wonder which companies got Congress to pass a resolution establishing this commemoration.

On this day in 1959, the corrupt Cuban government of Fulgencio Batista was overthrown by Fidel Castro after a two-year civil war. Castro then proceeded to establish a government of pure altruism, in which his cronies got to live as richly as Batista's cronies used to, but only for the good of the people.

Education and health care were made available to all Cubans -- except those who were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered for their opposition to the regime. Those who escaped the regime mostly came to Florida, where, having lived under Communism, they generally declined to become Leftists, for which the Democratic Party hasn't forgiven them, since all minorities in America are supposed to be Democratic property.

Cuba remains the epitome of the Communist Paradise, and some political leaders have been known to envy Castro's ability to put his program into effect without having to deal with tedious things like "opponents" and "elections."

Ellis Island, New York, opened in 1892 as the largest processing center for immigration to America. Over the years, more than 20 million individuals were processed through the stations. It closed on 12 November 1954. In the years since then our immigration procedures have become the opposite of what they used to be. Now we allow only the rich, or people with rich friends, or people from white European countries, to come into our "land of opportunity."

Most Americans have at least some ancestors who only got here because immigration was essentially free, once you paid for transportation, and anybody could become a citizen. But now the doors are closed to the people who most want and need to come here for exactly the same reasons -- and with exactly the same proportion of criminals to civilized immigrants.

Many grandchildren of immigrants now utter the fatuous nonsense that we cannot fix the hideous problems with our immigration laws until we have "enforced the law" and "sealed the border." This is as sensible as saying we can't seal the broken gas main until we put out the raging fire. Never mind that if we fixed the main, there would be no fire.

Sunday, January 2 -- Asimov Day

Prolific American author Isaac Asimov was born on this day in 1920 in Petrovichi, Russia. In 1923 his family immigrated to America, presumably through Ellis Island, and settled in Brooklyn, where Isaac grew up helping out in the family candy store. He skipped several grades, went to university, earned a doctorate, and became a science professor.

(Now Republicans are proud to deny college educations to children of illegal immigrants, even when the children were under eight years of age when they were brought here by exactly the kind of people we used to welcome to our shores.)

Best known for his science fiction writing (he was one of the "big three" that first put sci-fi on the bestseller lists, the others being Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke), Asimov wrote about everything.

No one has ever been a better writer of the American Plain Style than Asimov, who wrote so clearly it's as if he inserted the ideas directly into your brain without the intervention of printed words. Nothing very interesting happened in his life, yet he wrote multiple volumes of autobiography and I couldn't put them down.

Once you start reading an Asimov book, you generally slide right on through until you're done. His book on organic chemistry is the only chemistry course I ever took, and I've managed to make sense of all the chemistry I've encountered since.

He was also one of the nicest people I've met, and while he cultivated a public image as a boaster, in fact he was humble and gave much praise to others. (This is like Jack Benny, who pretended to be a miser but in fact was generous to charities and individuals alike.)

If you don't know his work, read the three-volume epic Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation.

"Someday We'll Laugh About This" Week. It usually takes less than 7 days for people to violate 90 percent of their New Year's resolutions. So on this day, we recognize our own imperfections, weaknesses, addictions, and failures -- and laugh. Or at least smile.

"Someday I'll Break Your Arm" Week. This is the official response to people who think this week is for cataloguing your imperfections, weaknesses, addictions, and failures, while refusing to admit their own.

Monday, January 3 -- This Sucks Day

The drinking straw was patented on this day in 1888. A drinking straw made out of paraffin-covered paper was patented by Marvin Stone of Washington DC, replacing natural rye straws. From that day forward, the western world has avidly sucked on all kinds of cold drinks. (Hot drinks savagely burn the roof of your mouth when you suck them through a straw.)

Within minutes after learning to suck through straws, people -- especially children -- found that it was infinitely amusing to blow through them, too. Besides launching peas and spitwads, drinking straws have been used to annoy the person sitting in front of you in school by blowing on their neck and then hiding the straw, and to make your drink bubble noisily.

A few days after mastering sucking and blowing, straw users learn to perform the endlessly fascinating science experiment of closing off the top of a straw with a finger and then lifting it out of a liquid, carrying a strawful of the liquid to a new destination, where the finger is lifted off and the liquid plops out the bottom of the straw onto whatever target has been selected.

Along with the drinking straw came the straw wrapper, a slim envelope of paper that kept the straws sanitary until you actually wanted to use them. For many years, these wrappers fitted loosely on the straw, so you could tear off the end, blow on the straw, and send the wrapper flying like a ballistic missile.

Because of the litter problems this caused, surly owners of diners, drive-ins, and fast-food joints rejoiced at the invention of tight-clinging wrappers, which are also perforated (and therefore not sanitary), so that when you tear off the end and blow on the straw, absolutely nothing happens. Thus an incipient athletic event (straw-wrapper launching) was nipped in the bud by spoilsports.

Earth at Perihelion. At approximately 2:00 p.m. EST, planet Earth will reach perihelion, that point in its orbit when it is closest to the sun (about 91,400,000 miles.) This will cause more global warming than the entire history of human carbon emissions.

Scholar and writer J.R.R. Tolkien was born on this day in 1892 in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State, South Africa. For his health's sake, Tolkien's mother moved him and his younger brother back to England when he was but a lad. Within a year, their father died in South Africa; the mother died only a few years later.

They left behind little money, and because they had converted to Catholicism (and refused to give up that notion), their Anglican relatives provided little help. A Catholic priest became a powerful influence in Tolkien's life, and not just because he helped them find foster homes for a time. Later, Tolkien's committed Catholicism would help lead his friend C.S. Lewis to Christianity -- though in Tolkien's view, Lewis came only partway, stopping at Anglicanism.

Tolkien was fascinated by northern literature and languages, learning many and then inventing languages of his own, which later threaded through his fiction. A superb scholar and philologist, Tolkien won prestigious professorships. But at the peak of his scholarly career, he turned his fascination with fairy stories into work on his magnum opus, a series of books about Hobbits that allowed him to weave his fanciful myths, poems, and legends as deep background to these epic adventure stories.

Later, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was turned into three beautiful and expensive movies by Peter Jackson, who showed the normal arrogant stupidity of Hollywood by gutting the novels of their moral core ("The Scouring of the Shire") while adding his own foolish and amateurish "improvements" to the greatest work of literature of the twentieth century.

Tolkien single-handedly (and inadvertently) created the commercial genre of epic fantasy, but while many fine works have been written in that genre, Tolkien stands head and shoulders above them all, in large part because he wasn't writing popular fantasy, he was writing the epic of his beloved English people, a nation without an ancient past because it was cobbled together out of so many different cultures within historical times.

Tuesday, January 4 -- Gravity Day

Isaac Newton was born on this day in 1643. He invented calculus, which made modern technology and science possible, and his laws of motion still stand, even if Einstein later found exquisitely rare exceptions to them. Newton is best known for discovering, not gravity itself (everybody knew where "down" was), but the mathematical principles that allow us to make accurate predictions about the behavior of masses large and small.

There is no serious question that Newton's was the finest scientific and mathematical mind ever known; the only reason Einstein, da Vinci, and a few others are sometimes given that title is because along with his great scientific achievements, Newton devoted considerable time to areas of study now regarded as wacko.

But it's worth remembering that when he started out, the dividing lines between "science" and "wacko" were not clearly drawn. The great astronomers before him had had equally wacko ideas. It was time and further experimentation that sorted them out. Newton's success rate was so high that it is absurd to fault him for his missteps.

Trivia Day is a celebration of those who "know all sorts of facts and/or have doctorates in uselessology." It grieves me that I will be signing books in San Diego on a schedule that will make it impossible for me to join in the celebration of this day by playing Trivial Pursuit with family and friends.

The World's Tallest Building was dedicated on this day in 2010. The Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai unveiled Burj Khalifa, a 2,717-foot (828-meter) tower that, upon opening, became the world's tallest building, dwarfing Taiwan's Taipei 101, the previous record holder at 1,667 feet.

Called Burj Dubai during its construction, the skyscraper was unsurprisingly renamed to honor UAE (United Arab Emirates) president Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed who, in 2009, provided Dubai with $25 billion in bailout funds.

For a side-by-side comparison of Burj Khalifa with the other tallest buildings in the world, go to http://www.burjkhalifa.ae/the-tower/worlds-tallest-towers.aspx. Note the little arrows that allow you to move the other buildings left and right so you can slide any one of them next to the Burj.

Wednesday, January 5 -- Twelfth Night

In the Christian calendar, Twelfth Night is the evening before Epiphany (January 6). Twelfth Night marked the end of medieval Christmas festivities -- the twelve days of Christmas, you see, were not advent days, but after-days, starting on Christmas and proceeding until 5 January. Watch out for ladies dancing, lords a-leaping, pipers piping, and drummers drumming.

Wyoming inaugurated America's first woman governor in 1925 -- an appropriate place for this to happen, since Wyoming was the first state to give women the right to vote. (Utah Territory had previously given women the vote, but that was rescinded by the federal government during their long campaign against Mormon polygamy.)

Nellie Tayloe Ross became the first woman to be elected governor of a state when she ran for the office during a special election to finish out the term of her husband, the incumbent governor, a month after he died. She did not campaign (she had just been widowed, after all), but won easily. (In 1974 Ella Grasso of Connecticut became the first woman to be elected governor without succeeding her husband in the office.)