Posts Tagged ‘Jim Bakker’
So many books, so little time!…
Readers will remember David McCandless (e.g., here), proprietor of Information is Beautiful, champion of elegant, effective infographics, and (with Miriam Quick and Matt Hancock) creator of “Books Everyone Should Read,” as featured in his Guardian column:
click the image above, or here, for the full chart
Do Top 100 Books polls and charts agree on a set of classics? I scraped the results of over 15 notable book polls, readers surveys and top 100’s. Both popular and high-brow. They included all Pulitzer Prize winners, Desert Island Discs choices from recent years, Oprah’s Bookclub list, and, of course, The Guardian’s Top 100 Books of All Time. A simple frequency analysis on the gathered titles gives us a neat ‘consensus cloud’ visualisation of the most mentioned books titles across the polls. Do you agree with the consensus?
Check the data and analysis here: bit.ly/BooksEveryone
As we reorder our reading piles, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that Jim Bakker, beset by scandals both financial and sexual, resigned his stewardship of The PTL Club, a television, publishing, and theme-park empire that he had founded in 1975 with his (then) wife, Tammy Faye Bakker. In an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to avoid a “hostile takeover” that Bakker feared would expose his intimate (and allegedly coercive) relations with PTL employee Jessica Hahn, he arranged for PTL to be taken over by fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell.
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker (source)
A Monument for Mr. Wilson…
Long-time (pre-blog) readers will recall the passing of Anthony H. “Tony” Wilson in 2007. In 1976, Wilson, a recent graduate of Cambridge serving as a feature reporter for Granada TV in the British Midlands, saw the Sex Pistols at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall. It was, he said, “nothing short of an epiphany.”
Wilson booked the Pistols onto his weekly cultural show, So It Goes (their first appearance on TV), and over the next few years turned the program into the leading broadcast outlet for new music in the U.K.
Much of that music was percolating in Manchester; Wilson became it’s catalyst. In 1978, with a couple of friends, he started Factory Records, the seminal label that introduced such bands as Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column, Happy Mondays, James, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.
But Wilson remained devoted to live performance, anxious that others should share the conversion he had experienced in 1976, He founded the Hacienda, a nightclub/performance space, where Factory acts and other leading bands of the 80s played– and where the rave was born.
Both Factory and the Hacienda faded with the decade. But Wilson remained a fixture in British culture, largely as a political commentator on the BBC and ITV.
Tony Wilson died in August 2007. Just over three years later, a memorial headstone designed collaboratively by Wilson’s long-time associates Peter Saville (the art director for Factory Records) and Ben Kelly (the designer of The Hacienda), was unveiled in The Southern Cemetery in Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, Manchester.
More, at Creative Review.
As we hum “God Save the Queen,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1992 that Jesus did not appear on earth and the Rapture did not occur.
Edgar C. Whisenant, a former NASA engineer and an avid student of the Bible had predicted the Rapture would occur in 1988, between September 11 and 13. Whisenant’s predictions were taken seriously in some parts of the evangelical Christian community. Indeed, as the window approached, regular programming on Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) was interrupted to provide special instructions on preparing for the Rapture.
When it didn’t materialize, Whisenant revised his estimate to 1989. When that date passed uneventfully, he returned to his sources and returned with an even more confident prediction that it would be on October 28, 1992. Subsequent predictions were for 1993, 1994, and 1997.
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