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From LeMonde, Paris, Sorry we can't, par Robert Solé

Sorry. No column today. The keyboard is not responding. History is a page being turned. Three words on the screen: "Yes we can." While it is impossible to joke with genocide or disaster, it is equally impossible to joke with an event that makes you weep for joy. The first worldwide good news since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 needs more than a pirouette or an amused wink. At this moment - but for how long ? - we can say with far more conviction than on 11 September 2001 : we are all Americans.

Is that the exorcism, that curse reversed, dingdong the witch is dead? We can hope.

Dark ages:

Martin Luther King brought his campaign for civil rights to Chicago in 1965, giving my father yet another excuse to rail on and on about Negroes not knowing their place. When he was at home he was restricted to the term "Negro" - our mother saw to that - but to the embarrassment of everyone in our family he was allowed to let loose whenever his own parents held a family party with his many brothers and sisters...

So begins a brilliant and moving essay (Lessons Learned on the Loading Dock) by Numerian at The Agonist that somewhat mirrors my own experience growing up.

Not my father -- who promoted a black man to supervisor because he was the most qualified, who thereafter dropped off a bottle of whiskey every Christmas for the rest of his life -- but an uncle and an aunt.

The uncle had been a straight-ticket Democrat since "FDR put food on my table," and his better situation depended on making sure newcomers didn't take it away from him.

His sister, the aunt, after a few drinks on a holiday afternoon, would mutter the ethnicity of every name that came up in conversation, and explain their natures -- all unflattering stereotypes -- if you gave her an opening.

Meanwhile, the civil rights struggles on TV and on the front page of The Evening Bulletin were forming our budding sense of justice.

For Numerian, resolution came from a Beatle. It's a good read.

AP/ L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art

A gold and rock crystal pocket watch made for the French queen Marie Antoinette by the famed watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet --called "the Mona Lisa of the clock world." -- is one of the items returned after Israeli police detectives cracked a legendary 1983 heist of 106 clocks at a Jerusalem museum after a 25-year search.
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Hide the piano player: Mathematician Cracks Mystery Beatles Chord

It's the most famous chord in rock 'n' roll, an instantly recognizable twang rolling through the open strings on George Harrison's 12-string Rickenbacker. It evokes a Pavlovian response from music fans as they sing along to the refrain that follows:

It's been a hard day's night
And I've been working like a dog

The opening chord to A Hard Day's Night is also famous because for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing. Musicians, scholars and amateur guitar players alike had all come up with their own theories, but it took a Dalhousie mathematician to figure out the exact formula...

CNN's "holograms" busted. Two sources:

CNN's holograms not really holograms

Uh, Wolf, That CNN Election Image Wasn't a Hologram

"Blue screen" effects, since the people were only visible on your TV screen; the CNN anchors couldn't see the people they were talking to except on the monitor. They weren't standing before them as they appeared to be.

"The bandwidth that exists with today's technology hardly exists to record that much information," commercial holographer Jason Sapan told CIO Today (the first link).