Not the API I Had in Mind

 For years, I have wished that there were a website that could tell me who is demonstrating which day near the White House. Some group often is, and anyone without an encyclopedic knowledge of flags must sometimes walk over to the edge and ask someone what the group, and perhaps the grievance, is. I have to think that most of the groups have a permit. I suppose that the two or three fellows I see with East Turkmenistan flags on Pennsylvania Avenue don't have or really need one, nor probably does the bagpiper who is often there. But the people who march for blocks to get to Lafayette Square or set up stands and sound systems must have one.

 A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post on Hacker News that linked to the page for an API offered by the US Park Service. This, I thought, was just the thing, for the US Park Police is in charge of Lafayette Square, among other areas around the White House. With the free API key and the clear documentation, it took little time to put together a script to retrieve and print information about sites in the District of Columbia. It took not much more to write a script to retrieve and print out information about all of the week's events at the White House and President's Park. But there were no such events. A closer look said that the events listed would be those arranged by Park Service. I thought perhaps alerts would serve me better than events. They did not--the only alert told of masking status at the White House.

French

 One recalls that War and Peace begins with paragraphs of "that accurate French in which our grandparents spoke and even thought". I had not perhaps realized how far French served, until yesterday I encountered a paragraph by Peter Demetz on Maria Theresa:

The dynasty was her nation; she corresponded with her children in French; as for her German, she spoke it with the sophistication of a plebeian Vienna wet nurse, as a popular ditty of her time suggested, and wrote the language of Klopstock and Lessing quirkily and according to French syntactical rules (only Frederick of Prussia's German was worse, but he was, after all, a French writer of note).

 (Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of  a European City, chapter 6, "Mozart in Prague")

I had read that Frederick preferred French. I have not encountered his writings, and would be no judge of his French if I had, but Samuel Johnson thought poorly of his work:

 Sir Thomas [Robinson] said, that the king of Prussia valued himself upon
three things;--upon being a hero, a musician, and an authour. JOHNSON.
'Pretty well, Sir, for one man. As to his being an authour, I have not
looked at his poetry; but his prose is poor stuff. He writes just as you
might suppose Voltaire's footboy to do, who has been his amanuensis.
He has such parts as the valet might have, and about as much of the
colouring of the style as might be got by transcribing his works.'

 (Life of Johnson, entry for July 18, 1763)

 

A Long Career

Today's Washington Post carries a story about Louis Kokonis, a math teacher at Alexandria City High School who died on January 4. He was 91, and had checked in at the school on January 3. He spent more than 60 years teaching in Alexandria, Virginia--if the statement that he began teaching during Eisenhower's administration is correct, he likely had 65 or more years teaching there.

It was always my impression that Latin teachers were born 50, and remained 50 until their first students had retired from the workforce. But evidently math teachers can compete.