Casey at the Bat by Ernest Thayer  It all started in 1885 when George Hearst decided to run for state senator in California.  To self-promote his brand of politics, Hearst purchased the San Francisco Examiner.  At the completion of the election, Hearst gave the newspaper to his son, William Randolph Hearst.  William, who had experience editing the Harvard Lampoon while at Harvard College, took to California three Lampoon staff members.  One of those three was Ernest L. Thayer who signed his humorous Lampoon articles with the pen name Phin.  In the June 3, 1888 issue of The Examiner, Phin appeared as the author of the poem we all know as Casey at the Bat.  The poem received very little attention and a few weeks later it was partially republished in the New York Sun, though the author was now known as Anon.  A New Yorker named Archibald Gunter clipped out the poem and saved it as a reference item for a future novel.  Weeks later Gunter found another interesting article describing an upcoming performance at the Wallack Theatre by comedian De Wolf Hopper - who was also his personal friend.  The August 1888 show (exact date is unknown) had members from the New York and Chicago ball clubs in the audience and the clipping now had a clear and obvious use.  Gunter shared Casey at the Bat with Hopper and the performance was nothing short of legendary.  http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/po_case.shtml   

June 3, 2013  Worchester, MA   In its soul, “Casey at the Bat” is about failure, something baseball fans and players are far too familiar with.  Most at bats end in outs.  At the end of each season, one team goes home as champion and the rest — that makes it 29 in the major leagues — go home as losers.  That is probably the ultimate appeal of “Casey at the Bat.”  It reflects baseball's core reality.  The game, as the late Commissioner Bart Giamatti once wrote, is designed to break your heart.  Thayer spends 51 lines of verse setting the stage for Mudville's dramatic last-inning rally, but the last words of the poem sum everything up simply and accurately — “mighty Casey has struck out.”  We know that the poem was written here because Thayer said it was.  In a letter to the Syracuse Post-Standard in 1930, Thayer said that “Casey at the Bat” was composed in Worcester in the spring of 1888, adding that the poem had no basis in fact.  Stockton, Calif., has claimed to be Mudville for a long time, and its minor league teams have traded heavily on the connection for many years.  Stockton may be right — when Thayer was a reporter for the Examiner, he is thought to have covered some games there and a couple of the last names of the Stockton team match up with players in the poem.  More locally, Holliston has made “Mudville” claims about one of its villages.  When it was first published, nobody took much notice of it and “Casey at the Bat” might have remained nothing more than newsprint if not for vaudevillian DeWolf Hopper.  Thayer's literary skills created a poem that Hopper's theatrical skills turned into must-see stuff in the days of live entertainment.  Hopper was the father of William Hopper — Paul Drake of Perry Mason fame — and an ancestor of Dennis Hopper.  He performed “Casey at the Bat” at the Worcester Theatre on Exchange Street in December 1892.  Author and performer met backstage afterward and retired to the Worcester Club for dinner, and then both went on with their lives.  http://www.telegram.com/article/20130603/NEWS/106039943/1116 

American composer and educator, William Schuman spent from 1951 to 1953 working on his first opera, The Mighty Casey composed to a libretto by Jeremy Gury and based on the famous poem "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest L. Thayer. Schuman, an avid baseball fan, remarked "To me, baseball is the epitome of American life and character. The Mighty Casey . . . musically is a straight, serious piece . . . it requires no technical knowledge to enjoy it, and we shall be satisfied if it only appeals to baseball lovers."  The opera premiered on May 4, 1953, in Hartford, Connecticut.  http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/tri090.html 

Historically, the area known as "Languedoc" covered a large part of southern France; Roussillon is a much smaller area, being more or less the area covered by the Eastern Pyrenees department. Roussillon, in the past, was the northern part of Catalonia., and people here still speak Catalan as well as French.  The fertile coastal plain is given over to agriculture, vineyards and - particularly in Roussillon - fruit and vegetables.  Inland Languedoc is a beautiful area, characterised by vineyards and "garrigue", arid rocky Mediterranean hills with their vegetation of scrub, aromatic bushes and occasional fields.  Further inland, the valleys of the Cevennes, more wooded and rural, give way to the Cevennes hills, the southeastern peaks of the Massif Central.  The area has a lot of historic cities, such as Nimes with its superb Roman remains, the famous walled city of Carcassonne, the former Roman provincial capital of Narbonne, and other smaller ancient cities, such as Agde.  The Pyrenees, forming a natural land barrier between France and Spain, are a beautiful range of high mountains, wooded on their lower slopes, but offering good mountain and hill walking higher up - not to mention the attraction of day trips into Spain.  The coastline where they meet the sea is unlike the rest of the Languedoc coast, and is characterised by old coastal villages such as Banyuls and Collioure, rocky cliffs and small coves.  Access to Languedoc:  by TGV from Paris Gare de Lyon, or from Lille; train from many cities, motorway from Paris, Lille, Strasbourg, Nancy, Lyon, Geneva.  There are airports at Nimes, Montpellier, Carcassonne and Perpignan, with low-cost flights from the UK, Belgium and Holland.  http://about-france.com/regions/languedoc.htm  NOTE that in our recent trip to France, we learned that the Languedoc is the largest producer of wine in the world, both in area planted in grapes and number of bottles produced. 

In addition to visiting quaint villages in southern France, we went to Fontcaude Abbey in

Hérault where I was allowed to play the organ.  The abbey was constructed in the 12th century, 17th century and 18th century.  

See many pictures at:  http://en.patrimoine-de-france.com/herault/cazedarnes/abbaye-de-fontcaude-ancienne-1.php

We stayed just outside Puisserguier, less than half an hour's drive from the Mediterranean coast, and 15 minutes away from the large town of Beziers.  It is said that Clementine, a monk, who came from Puisserguier, discovered the small oranges that bears his name, in north Africa.  One of the roads in the village is named after him.  He was later to become Saint Clementine.  See pictures at:  http://www.languedoc-roussillon.eu.com/Puisserguier.html

June 14 is the 165th day of the year (166th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar.  There are 200 days remaining until the end of the year.  Selected events:

1775 – American Revolutionary War: the Continental Army is established by the Continental Congress, marking the birth of the United States Army.
1777 – The Stars and Stripes is adopted by Congress as the Flag of the United States.
1789 – Mutiny on the Bounty: HMS Bounty mutiny survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reach Timor after a nearly 7,400 km (4,600 mi) journey in an open boat.
1789 – Whiskey distilled from maize is first produced by American clergyman the Rev Elijah Craig. It is named Bourbon because Rev Craig lived in Bourbon County, Kentucky.
1822 – Charles Babbage proposes a difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables".
1900 – Hawaii becomes a United States territory.
1937 – Pennsylvania becomes the first (and only) state of the United States to celebrate Flag Day officially as a state holiday
1966 – The Vatican announces the abolition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("index of prohibited books"), which was originally instituted in 1557.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_14
 

It's a song known around the world; "Happy Birthday to You" is performed, heard, and played millions of times every day, but it's also a major moneymaker for Warner Music subsidiary Warner/Chappell, which owns the copyright to the song.  Jennifer Nelson, a filmmaker who was producing a documentary on the song, discovered that to use the track in a single scene would cost $1,500.  Although she agreed to the fee and signed a licensing deal, she's now filed a lawsuit in the hope that a New York court will invalidate Warner Music's copyright claim.

  Nelson says that the song, which is an adaption of the 19th Century song "Good Morning to All," is in the public domain.  A full copy of the filing at http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130613/11165823451/filmmaker-finally-aims-to-get-court-to-admit-that-happy-birthday-is-public-domain.shtml makes for entertaining reading.  The lawsuit says that "irrefutable documentary evidence" dating back as far as 1893 shows that the copyright to any part of the song expired no later than 1921.  It adds that if Warner Music "owns any rights to Happy Birthday to You, those rights are limited to the extremely narrow right to reproduce and distribute specific piano arrangements for the song published in 1935. " The filing calls for the song to be made public domain, and asks the Warns Music pays back the millions of dollars it's collected through "unlawful licensing fees."  Aaron Souppouris   See the "Good-Morning to All" song at:  http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/14/4429412/happy-birthday-lawsuit-demands-warner-music-pay-back-royalites