Archive for October 2013
“I *am* big. It’s the *pictures* that got small…”*
Russia, in “Goldeneye”
Rub al Khali Desert, in “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark”
More movie magic at “24 Famous Miniature Movie Sets That Will Blow Your Mind.”
* Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard
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As we keep everything in perspective, we might send epic birthday greetings to Carrie Frances Fisher; she was born on this date in 1956. An actress, novelist, screenwriter, and performance artist, she is surely best remembered for her central role in some very big movies indeed: the original Star Wars trilogy.
(Wet Your) Whistle While You Work…
From the ever-illuminating Lapham’s Quarterly.
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As we remember to use a coaster, we might send shocking birthday greetings to a man who genrrously lubricated his labors, the enfant terrible of French letters, Arthur Rimbaud; he was born on this date in 1854. With his buddy, Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud was a leader of the Decadent Movement; fueled by absinthe and hashish, he succeeded in shocking a literary establishment that was nonetheless awed by his visionary verse, which influenced modern literature and arts, inspired various musicians, and prefigured Surrealism.
All known literature is written in the language of common sense—except Rimbaud’s
– Paul Valéry
Extra Large, With Butter…
Movie theater popcorn is a concession stand staple whose scent has spawned marketing ploys and copycat recipes, but movie theaters haven’t always been saturated with the tempting smell of salt and butter. The history of popcorn is vast, and it intersects with movies in the relatively recent past–a symbiosis of taste and place created to save the fledgling movie theater industry from near collapse during the Great Depression…
Read the whole story– which starts 8.000 years ago– in “Why Do We Eat Popcorn at the Movies?”
email readers click here for video
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As we politely suggest that our companions acquire their own buckets, we might recall that it was on this date in 1985 that the first Blockbuster store opened in Dallas, Texas with 8,000 tapes (of 6,500 titles). The founder, David Cook, was in the oil business; but as his company floundered, he took his wife’s advice and diversified into home entertainment rentals. Two years (and three more stores) later, he sold part of the business to a group of investors that included Wayne Huizenga, founder of Waste Management, Inc., the world’s biggest garbage disposal company; Huizenga took control and oversaw the company’s rapid expansion.
It’s probably no coincidence that Cook’s success followed closely on the heels of the 1984 introduction of microwave popcorn. (In fact, Pillsbury had introduced microwave popcorn in 1981– but in a form that required the unpopped bags to be frozen before use. In 1984, an engineer on that project, James Watkins, who’d left the company, figured out how to make the popcorn and oils shelf stable. He patented his improvement and marketed it as Act II in 1984.)
True Confessions…
Librarians come clean on the riveting Tumblr “Librarian Shaming”
More.
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As we check it out, we might send free-thinking birthday greetings to Henri Bergson; he was born on this date in 1859. A philosopher especially influential in the first half of the 20th Century, Bergson convinced many of the primacy of immediate experience and intuition over rationalism and science for the understanding reality…. many, but not the likes of Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore, and Santayana, who thought that he willfully misunderstood the scientific method in order to justify his “projection of subjectivity onto the physical world.” Still, in 1927 Bergson won the Nobel Prize (in Literature); and in 1930, received France’s highest honor, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d’honneur.
Bergson’s influence waned mightily later in the century. To the extent that there’s been a bit of a resurgence of interest, it’s largely the result of Gilles Deleuze’s appropriation of Bergson’s concept of “mulitplicity” and his treatment of duration, which Deleuze used in his critique of Hegel’s dialectic.
The mother of all tongues…
The spread of Indo-European, the product of Proto-Indo-European, 4,000-1,000 BCE
By the 19th century, linguists knew that all modern Indo-European languages descended from a single tongue. Called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, it was spoken by a people who lived from roughly 4500 to 2500 B.C., and left no written texts. The question became, what did PIE sound like? In 1868, German linguist August Schleicher used reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary to create a fable in order to hear some approximation of PIE. Called “The Sheep and the Horses,” and also known today as Schleicher’s Fable, the short parable tells the story of a shorn sheep who encounters a group of unpleasant horses. As linguists have continued to discover more about PIE, this sonic experiment continues and the fable is periodically updated to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some six thousand years ago. Since there is considerable disagreement among scholars about PIE, no one version can be considered definitive.
More of the story– and another cool fable in PIE– at “Telling Tales in Proto-Indo-European” in Archaeology.
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As we practice pronunciation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1814 that London suffered “The Great Beer Flood Disaster” when the metal bands on an immense vat at Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery snapped, releasing a tidal wave of 3,555 barrels of Porter (571 tons– more than 1 million pints), which swept away the brewery walls, flooded nearby basements, and collapsed several adjacent tenements. While there were reports of over twenty fatalities resulting from poisoning by the porter fumes or alcohol coma, it appears that the death toll was 8, and those from the destruction caused by the huge wave of beer in the structures surrounding the brewery.
(The U.S. had its own vat mishap in 1919, when a Boston molasses plant suffered similarly-burst bands, creating a heavy wave of molasses moving at a speed of an estimated 35 mph; it killed 21 and injured 150.)
Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery
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