Archive for November 2010
Old habits, dying hard…
From the afore-cited and ever-amusing Criggo.com (“Newspapers are going away. That’s too bad.”) TotH to Miss Cellania.
As we realize that it’s time to get to work on our New Year’s resolutions, we might pause to wish the happiest of birthdays to Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain; he was born on this date in 1835 in Florida, Missouri.
Clemens began his career as a newspaper man– first as a typesetter, then as a reporter. But he had no fear of new technologies: he was the first author to submit a typewritten manuscript to his publisher.
The Annals of Exhibitionism, Vol. 12: Specialization…
Museums preserve and celebrate the extraordinary scope of human experience and accomplishment; they educate and entertain; they are, at once, a culture’s treasure chests and its hope chests.
And thus, museums come in an equally-extraordinary ranges of sizes, shapes, and foci. While the best-known tend to be either broad in the purview (e.g., The Museum of Natural History) or focused on something central to the zeitgeist (The Air and Space Museum), there are thousands of others, devoted to more… well, more particular corners of the human experience.
Consider for example, The Vent Haven Museum of Ventriloquism…
So, what do you get when you combine the loneliness of a pet cemetery with the creepy flair of vaudeville? The Vent Haven Ventriloquist Museum, of course—where dummies go to die. The Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, museum was the brainchild of the late William Shakespeare Berger, who founded the site as a home for retired wooden puppets. In fact, he collected figures from some of the country’s most famous ventriloquist acts. And with more than 700 dummies stacked from floor to ceiling, you’re bound to feel like you’re stuck inside a 1970s horror flick—albeit a really good one. But sadly, when Berger gave the tour, you could totally tell his mouth was moving. [Image courtesy of Vic.]
Or The Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia…
…did you know that PEZ was originally marketed as an adult mint for people trying to quit smoking?
Founded in 1993, The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) in Boston is “a community-based, private institution dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition and celebration of bad art in all its forms and in all its glory.” The art featured on the site is not of the middle-school drivel variety; rather, the pieces seem to be the product of people who think that if they light candles and play Mozart loudly, the talent will come. It doesn’t, but the results are fun.
Thanks to the good folks at Mental Floss, readers can discover nine other rare gems at “12 Oddly Specific Museums Preserving Our History.”
As we celebrate enthusiasms for their own sakes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965, at 11:00 pm, that Dale Cummings did the first sit-up in the set that would, almost exactly twelve hours later, result in his having set a new world record– 14,118 sit-ups.
click here to see enlargement at source
Queen takes Knight; checkmate…
Alexandra Kosteniuk of Russia, Grandmaster and Women’s World Chess Champion (source)
We explore the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We use a large international panel dataset on chess competitions which includes a control for the players’ skill in chess. This data is combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the photos of 626 expert chess players according to attractiveness. Our results suggest that male chess players choose significantly riskier strategies when playing against an attractive female opponent, even though this does not improve their performance. Women’s strategies are not affected by the attractiveness of the opponent.
From a recent IZA research paper “Beauty Queens and Battling Knights: Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess” (pdf download here). Via Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution.
As we are reminded by headlines (today as everyday) that chess is a metaphor for life, we might recall that it was on this date in 1919 that Nancy Witcher Astor, Viscountess Astor CH, was elected to Parliament. She was the first woman to sit in the House of Commons.
Lady Astor, as painted ten years before her election by John Singer Sargeant (source)
Constance Georgine Markiewicz was actually the first woman elected to Parliament, one year earlier. But Countess Markiewicz was a staunch Irish patriot who refused to take her seat. Rather, along with other Sinn Féin TDs, she formed the first Dáil Éireann, and subsequently became one of the first women in the world to hold a national cabinet position (Minister of Labor).
Countess Markiewicz (source)
All the news that’s fit to spit…
Your correspondent is an admirer of the stylings of Matt Taibbi; consider, e.g., “The Great Bubble Machine,” wherein Taibbi compares Goldman Sachs to “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
So one can imagine the delight of discovering that, thanks to New York Magazine, one can play along with the Master:
Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi… is perhaps best known for is his willingness to say Bad Things about Important People in a Colorful Way. This talent is on copious display in his new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, which is ostensibly about how America is becoming “a vast ghetto in which all of us … are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government” but mostly serves as a 252-page delivery mechanism for ad hominem insults*… we’ve put together a quiz using some of his most vivid descriptions of public figures. See how many you can figure out!
It’s a particularly-challenging game in that so many of the questions have several answers that could easily be correct. An example:
Try to “Match the Matt Taibbi Insult to the Public Figure.”
* New York’s opinion, not your correspondent’s (though the insults are in fact epic)…
As we Question Authority, we might recall that it was on this date in 2005 that Kenny G, Don Henley, Stevie Nicks, and Tom Petty performed at the Rainbow Room on a bill topped by Aerosmith and 50 Cent for a private bat mitzvah. The doting dad who sprang for the lavish coming-of-age-fest (at which, in addition to the entertainment, guests were treated to gift bags containing over $1,000 of personal electronics) was defense contractor David H. Brooks, CEO of DHB Industries, a Long Island company that manufactured body armor for the United States military.
Two years after the lavish event, Brooks was served with a 71-page federal indictment featuring charges of insider trading, tax evasion and raiding his company’s coffers for personal gain– including for the $10 million he used to pay for his daughter’s soiree. Other questionable items charged to the company (thus, via cost-plus contracts, to the Government): pornographic videos for his son, plastic surgery for his wife, a burial plot for his mother, prostitutes for his employees– and, for himself, a $100,000 American-flag belt buckle encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds.
Steven Tyler singing to Our Miss Brooks at her Bat Mitzvah (source)
Shaken, not stirred…
Altoids tins are the “universal container,” repurposed into paperclip holders, sewing sets, survival kits– and now, from Instructables, something genuinely useful: a portable emergency martini…
FURTHER TO “Hands Up!…” (and “Comply With Me”): airport security cartoons from The New Yorker…
As we realize that we can streamline even further by simply eliminating the vermouth altogether, we might recall that it was on this date in 1942 that Rick (Humphrey Bogart) was first publicly heard to utter the famous words “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” in the premiere screening of Casablanca.
Later, he delivers an even more famous line– “Here’s looking at you, kid”– that’s not in the draft screenplays at all, but has been attributed to something Bogart said to Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa) as he taught her poker between takes.
They’ll always have Paris… (source)
You must be logged in to post a comment.