Go here now for my award-winning film “The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today” that started streaming on PBS.org and PBS apps last week (you can easily watch it via links here), plus a companion e-book.
John Oliver, the only late night host willing to repeatedly and strongly criticize Israel for its actions in Gaza and the West Bank—he has done that for years—opened his HBO show again last night with a powerful condemnation. That clip has not been posted, but here is what followed on how corporate criminals get off:
Today we entered the week that the world (or at least much of it) will mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As some know, this is a subject that I have explored in hundreds of articles, and in four books, since 1984, and now in an award-winning film “The Atomic Bowl” that started streaming on PBS.org and PBS apps this week (you can easily watch it via links here), plus a companion book.
This morning, Mother Jones published my new piece derived from research for the film and book, and it is a concise and I think powerful reflection. Follow link to read it. Please share it widely if you don’t mind… Much more coming this week from yours truly and, I trust, many, many others. From my piece:
In December, a Marine commander ordered that a football game be held in Japan for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Why did the military choose Nagaskai of all places as the site for this game, on a field so close to ground zero? No written records documenting the reasons exist. Additionally, later in 1946, US servicemen helped organize—and served as judges for—a Miss Atom Bomb beauty pageant in Nagasaki for local women.
One of the organizers of the Atomic Bowl football contest, Lt. Gerald Sanders later noted that the game was a kind of tribute to fallen colleagues. “We thought it would be totally appropriate,” he said. “It was certainly not to look like there was a joyful glee in what had happened there… We were there, yet we had many buddies that didn’t make it through the war.”
A gridiron was cleared in front of a middle school which had lost 162 students and 13 teachers to the atomic bomb. Angelo Bertelli, who had won the Heisman Trophy in 1943 as quarterback for Notre Dame, and “Bullet Bill” Osmanski, the Chicago Bears' star running back, were selected as captains. A top officer wrote a press release promising that the game would have “all the color—and more” of the bowl games to be played that day back in the States. On hand would be a Marine band and Japanese girl cheerleaders.
But they would have to play touch, not tackle, football because shards from the atomic blast still littered the field.
Full piece here.
Then there’s this from the Washington Post:
A radioactive wasp nest was found inside a sprawling Cold War-era nuclear site in South Carolina. Locals fear there could be an undetected leak, although authorities said that the discoveries were not cause for alarm.
Yes, women can play and sing “Layla.” Here is proof, with Larkin Poe:
The swell “Once” duo, Glen and Marketa, have reunited for album and tour, and did new song on CBS over the weekend:
From Tunes to Toons for Today
Ann Telnaes:
I wonder how many of those football players later died of odd cancers? My dearly loved uncle believed agent orange ate away at his brain after Vietnam. And of course those burn pits that destroyed so many. Our military has a lot to answer for.
Just watched The Atomic Bowl. The complete denial of the horrors surrounding the soldiers is amazing. To be playing a sports game while still surrounded by the remnants of those that were vaporized is unimaginable.
Humanity is blind and dumb to the pain of history. Where do we go from here?