h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

i linked to, and read, this article without first checking the author

hah - i might have *known* it was you Mr G!

it's 'David-and-Goliath' stories like this which provide a salutary lesson to over-bearing bullies of all geometry and geography

the icing on the cake was the account of Pete Seeger's creative use of the rocks which were thrown at him!

thank you for contributing this entry to the Guide

Thanks, ALS. I'm glad you liked it - even better that you weren't just reading out of friendship.

If you want to see a dramatisation of Peekskill, look here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77vQCSJVtm8&feature=relmfu

Start at 4:33.

The novel this film is based on is called 'The Book of Daniel', by EL Doctorow, who plays around with history, combining historical figures - in this case, Paul Robeson and the Rosenbergs. But I believe the director had knowledge of the events.

A very moving story. Thank you, Dmitri.

Dmitry,
if you search the ´net you´ll find people telling you that song was written for a Hollywood movie and you´ll be sued for the truth.

Which song? 'Zog nit keynmol'? I haven't run across that claim. Do you have a link?

iirc I got flames on youtube. Btw, people looking for that song might get more hits by using the German Yiddish spelling Sog instead of Zog - we pronounce the letters the other way round.

You know, you're right, if you're starting with German.

My Yiddish professors, both in the US and in Germany, always insisted I use YIVO as the standard for transliteration, so that's what we did here. (YIVO thinks Lithuanian Yiddish is the 'best'.) If you'll notice, in the links provided, the title is given as 'Zog nit keynmol'.

YIVO does it that way, too:

http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Holocaust/Music_and_the_Holocaust

But if you're looking for German sources, it's a good idea to try to spell things in German. (Same as for Russian.)

As for Youtube, there's a lot of misinformation there. Recently, I was trying to research a Romanian song called 'Carul cu boi'. (Same tune as 'Ha-Tikvah'.) They got into silly discussions about who did what, with whose tune.