(View, from the rooftop lounge at the hotel, of Petco Park where the San Diego Padres play.)
Hey kiddos. Hope you've had an enjoyable spring break. I've missed you every minute of every day. When I get lonely, I take out the seating chart and run my hand over your names.
Greetings spring breakers. It's one of my favorite times of the year: NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament time. This year my UCLA Bruins earned a number one seed again. There will definitely be more blog posts to follow about the tournament, especially if my Bruins do well. Here's an article about the Bruins in the upcoming tourney.
One hundred ten--WOW! A few weeks ago I posted an article about the second to last American World War I veteran dying. Today, I came across an article about the final French World War I veteran dying. Thanks to Kayla A. for the heads-up.By LAURENT PIROT, Associated Press Writer
Wed Mar 12, 8:45 PM ET
France's last remaining veteran of World War I died Wednesday at age 110 after outliving 8.4 million Frenchmen who fought in what they called "la Grande Guerre."
Lazare Ponticelli, who was born in Italy but chose to fight for France and was a French citizen for most of the past century, died at his home in the Paris suburb of Kremlin-Bicetre, the national veterans' office said.
"It is to him and his generation that we owe in large part the peaceful and pacified Europe of today. It is up to us to be worthy of that," President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement.
France planned a national funeral ceremony Monday honoring Ponticelli and all the "poilus," an affectionate term meaning hairy or tough that the French use for their soldiers who fought in World War I.
The 1914-1918 conflict, known at the time as the Great War or the "war to end all wars," tore Europe apart and killed millions. Only a handful of World War I veterans are still living, scattered from Australia to the United States and Europe. Germany's last WWI veteran died on New Year's Day.
Monuments to battles and war dead cover swathes of France where trenches once divided the landscape during the war, which left 1.4 million French fighters dead of the 8.4 million who served.
The last survivor was an unlikely one.
Ponticelli was born Dec. 7, 1897, in Bettola, a town in northern Italy.
To escape a tough childhood, Ponticelli trooped off alone at age 9 to the nearest railway station, 21 miles away in Piacenza, where he took a train to join his brothers in France, eventually becoming a French citizen, according to the veterans' office in Versailles.
In the French capital, he worked as a chimney sweep and then as a newspaper boy. When the war broke out, he was just 16, so he lied about his age to enlist, the president's statement said.
Ponticelli decided to fight for France, because it had taken him in.
"It was my way of saying 'Thank you," he said in a 2005 interview with the newspaper Le Monde.
Ponticelli joined the Foreign Legion during the war and served in the Argonne region of forest, rivers and lakes in northeast France, digging burial pits and trenches.
"At the beginning, we barely knew how to fight and had hardly any ammunition. Every time that one of us died, we fell silent and waited for our turn," he said in the 2005 interview.
He also recalled running into no man's land to save a wounded comrade stuck in barbed wire.
"He was shouting, 'Come and get me, I've severed a leg.' The stretcher-bearers didn't dare go out. I couldn't bear it any longer," he said.
When Italy entered the war in 1915, Ponticelli was called up to fight with an Italian Alpine regiment. He tried to hide, but was found and sent to fight the Austrian army.
He described moments of fraternity with enemy Austrian soldiers.
"They gave us tobacco, and we gave them loaves of bread. No one was shooting any more. The headquarters found out, and moved us to a tougher zone," he told Le Monde.
He described the joy in receiving letters from a milkmaid who "adopted" him when he was serving in Italy. He couldn't read at the time, so comrades read them to him, according to a biography by the Versailles veterans' office.
The Italian President Giorgio Napolitano expressed condolences "in the name of all Italians" to the veteran's daughter, Jeannine Desbaucheron.
By fighting first for France and then for Italy, Ponticelli "offered an admirable example of an elevated sense of duty and dedication to both his adoptive country and his country of birth," Napolitano wrote in a message to her.
Ponticelli returned to France in 1921, and he and his brothers started a company that made factory smokestacks. The company, Ponticelli Freres, grew into a manufacturer of specialized industrial equipment and is still in business.
Ponticelli became a French citizen in 1939, his nephew said.
His family was uncomfortable with the elaborate national funeral ceremony planned. Ponticelli agreed to one before his death, as long as it honored all the poilus and not just himself.
"We are trying to keep this a bit personal. We didn't want all this ceremony," said his grandnephew, Daniel Ponticelli.
He will be interred in a family burial plot in Paris.
___
Associated Press writers John Leicester and Pauline Freour contributed to this report.
By Erik KirschbaumTue Mar 11, 9:23 PM ET
The director of a new film that explores the hypothetical question of whether another dictatorship could ever emerge in Germany has come to the chilling conclusion that it could happen again.
Dennis Gansel, whose film "Die Welle" (The Wave) opens on Thursday, said the horrors of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich haven't made modern-day Germans more immune to the lure of charismatic leaders or persuasive group dynamics than any other nationality.
"It's wrong to say, 'No way -- a Nazi dictatorship could never happen here'," Gansel said in an interview with Reuters ahead of the release of his film, adapted from a U.S. novel by Morton Rhue based on a California high school experiment in 1967.
"I think it would be possible even today for something like that to arise in Germany again," a claim that is unsettling for a country which studies its Nazi past intensively in schools and where the burden of guilt still weighs heavy six decades later.
Gansel's film has already electrified the German media even before its release. "It's already the most-talked about film of the year," wrote Bild newspaper. Bunte magazine said: "It shows how vulnerable people can be in authoritarian situations."
"Die Welle," a 4.6-million euro ($7 million) film, has attracted film buyers abroad. The foreign rights were quickly acquired by distributors in 20 countries after it won critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
The film set in a Berlin suburb is about bored, ill-mannered teenagers jolted out of their apathy by a dynamic teacher.
Just as in the 1967 experiment by California high school teacher Ron Jones, the students accept a new regime of discipline and obedience -- and ostracize any dissenters.
In the film, the German teens eagerly start snapping to attention in the classroom, wearing "uniforms" of white shirts, calling themselves "The Wave" and rallying to help each other.
As the powerful, if ominous, group dynamic gains momentum and the number of participants multiplies to include half the student body, a handful of students try in vain to stop it.
The original experiment in California was aborted after five days. The students were invited to a rally to see the leader of the movement but were instead shown a film about the Nazis.
But Gansel's film, adapted to conform with contemporary mores and modern-day violence at schools, takes a more sinister path with its own tragedy as the movement spins out of control.
"I read the book in high school and haven't stopped thinking of it since," said Gansel, 34, whose film also drew praise from Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and a standing-room only audience of 1,400 at a Berlin Film Festival screening.
The novel and a made-for-TV movie in 1981 may have long been forgotten in the United States but the book has remained popular in Germany, where it is required reading in many schools.
Gansel said group dynamics, though often benign, can be seen everywhere: from soccer fans to anti-globalization protesters at the Group of Eight summit in Heiligendamm last year.
"Group dynamics can be benevolent but they can also be menacing," he said. "It's frightening how fast it can change. Just look at what happened in the United States after 9/11."
We looked at this photograph last week in US History and I had mentioned that several people had come forward to claim that they were the ones in that historic photo. Here's a link to a Life Magazine article that discusses that controversy. Also the photo below is of another man who claims that he is the man in the photo.
Here's a site on the Berlin Airlift that I will be using with my US History classes. Props to Mr. Hemaidan for passing it along to me. Some good pictures here: U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission.
In my U.S. History classes, I've shown bits and pieces of a fantastic documentary on World War II called The War. It's by Ken Burns, the same guy behind THE authoritative documentary on the Civil War. Our librarian Mrs. Nielsen was able to purchase a copy of The War for our LMC and I've been watching some of it. It's fascinating and gives some terrific first-hand accounts of what World War II was like. If World War II interests you even a LITTLE, you will definitely want to have a look at this dvd set.
