The blurb at Digg said this video was about how Jean Shepherd gave birth to "a salacious historical novel that was completely make up..." Of course, my first thought was, aren't all novels made up? But I soon learned that he didn't write I, Libertine, he just made up the fact that it existed at all. And people fell for it! In the process, Shepherd made a point about pretentiousness and cultivating one's image through pure lies.
Jean Shepherd was a radio star and humorist with plenty of stories to tell. Decades after the I, Libertine saga, he used some stories from his own childhood to write and narrate the film A Christmas Story.
Unless you are celebrating INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY or are just sloppy at typing, you use upper case and lower case letters more or less according to standardized rules when writing or typing in the English language.
Historically speaking, though, this is a fairly modern invention. Many languages do not use different cases, including languages that use varieties of the Latin alphabet. Why? YouTuber The Generalist Papers explains in a recent video.
The origin of the difference lies in whether Romans were writing Latin on stone or paper. Modern Latin alphabet letters can be found in ancient Roman inscriptions, but what we call lower case letters began in how Latin was written with ink on parchment.
Later, during the Carolingian Renaissance (that's the reign of Charlemagne and his immediate successors), monks began copying manuscripts using large block letters at the beginnings of passages. When Italian Renaissance scholars discovered these different writing styles, they adopted them, believing incorrectly that they were proper Roman writings, not debased medieval writing systems.
But The Generalist Papers is just getting started. He takes us on to the physical arrangement of printing presses and then to fairly recent standardization of capitalization rules by English grammarians. English written civilization then culminated in the publication of the novel Shatnerquake.
The last bit is more of my opinion than that of The Generalist Papers, but I think it's intellectually sound.
Rich people are different from you and me. Great wealth often requires hosting lavish banquets to bring friends and allies together, to shower favors, and to show off one's taste and generosity. Great wealth also allows one to use friends and allies for entertainment purposes, to exact revenge, show contempt, or to feel power over others. So every once in a while, there have been black banquets, or hell banquets, in which invitees were expecting the usual fancy evening of food and camaraderie, but instead were terrified by all-black decor, seats with accompanying tombstones or coffins, and disgusting food displays.
As with many things, we don't know if the custom originated from fact or fiction. A first-century hell banquet was described by a writer a hundred years later, which inspired others to pull the same prank. But we don't know if that written account was at all true. Hell banquets happened occasionally from ancient Rome to the 19th century. Read what they were and how they horrified those who attended them at Atlas Obscura.
It's not just a video that dogs can respond to. The DogPhone system allows dogs to initiate a video phone call with their human by squeezing a soft toy.
Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, a professor of "Animal-Computer Interaction" at the University of Glasgow, developed the DogPhone with the assistance of Zach, her black labrador retriever. When Zach squeezes the ball, the dog's laptop triggers a video call to her. When Hirskyj-Douglas calls Zach, a ringing tone informs him that he has an incoming call. If he squeezes the ball, the call opens.
Hirskyj-Douglas explains to The Guardian that her goal for the DogPhone is to create a technology that animals can control. Animals, she argues, should have choices about how they interact with humans.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, about 400 of them would be "haha" in this case. Redditor Johnny-Virgil and his wife were vacationing in Mexico, at a hotel that had a hammock. He set up the camera timer to take a picture, then rushed to join her to get a nice couple's selfie. But you know what happens when you rush to get in a hammock.
To drive home the point of how perfect this image is, JiveMonkey made them a digital painting. He calls it "Falling in Love."
Of course, it's not the first time this has happened. In the replies, magnament shared a note from 1949.
Hammock disasters are common, but the existence and timing of this photograph are a miracle to brighten our day.
How would you make a modern street corner look like it was from in 1930? To find out, Insider talked to Rena DeAngelo, a master set designer who works at Eclectic/Encore Props. This company provides props and scene design for television and movie productions for many historical pieces that you've seen, such as West Side Story.
DeAngelo has astonishingly detailed expertise in her field, addressing every visual aspect of a historical scene. It's a lot more than just finding the right cars for an era. The license plates on those cars are essential, too. The signs around a city are important, but DeAngelo also ensures that the materials used to create those signs and the fonts used on them are historically accurate. Watch and learn how much thought goes into the creation of scene that may last for only seconds on the screen.
In this video, Felton describes Thailand's contribution to World War I in Europe. Eager to prove to the great powers that Thailand was a modern nation, King Vajiravudh ordered the assembly of a military expeditionary force to France to participate in the final stages of the war, followed by the occupation of a portion of western Germany after the armistice.
What was the worst Christmas gift you ever received? I don't recall any traumatic gifts, but once my boyfriend's cousin stopped at a convenience store and bought a 50 cent coffee cup because he didn't know I was coming to the family gathering until the last minute. I was touched, because he needn't have gotten me anything at all. But if you ask enough people, you will get some pretty horrific stories. An AskReddit thread posed the question, and generated more than 16,000 comments, many of them with awful gift stories.
People tell stories of receiving used gifts, unthoughtful gifts, and inappropriate gifts (a dish towel for an 8-year old?). Some stories involve bait-and-switch, when one gift is promised and another delivered. Others are sad tales of siblings who were obviously shortchanged in favor of another child. And some folks use the occasion to get rid of extra stuff lying around the house, like the 36-year-old man who received a kindergarten backpack that was rejected by a child years earlier. Read an overview of the top worst gift stories at Digg, or even more of them in the original reddit thread.
Max Read found himself pulling up familiar old movies to watch while he was at home with a new baby during lockdown. He got to thinking about what they had in common and why he liked a particular kind of movie so much, and so did his contemporaries, Gen X men who are now raising kids and populating the internet. He dubbed these movies Dad Thrillers.
If you're anywhere near me in age, you know the kind of movies I'm talking about: Movies set on submarines; movies set on aircraft carriers; movies where lawyers are good guys; movies where guys secure the perimeter and/or the package; movies where a guy has to yell to make himself heard over a helicopter; movies where guys with guns break the door into a room decorated with cut-out newspaper headlines. Movies starring guys like Harrison Ford, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Costner, and Wesley Snipes and directed by guys like Martin Campbell, Wolfgang Petersen, Philip Noyce, and John McTiernan. Movies where men are men, Bravo Teams are Bravo Teams, and women are sexy but humorless ball-busters who are nonetheless ultimately susceptible to the roguish charm of state security-apparatus functionaries. Movies that dads like.
He not only identified and named these movies, Read analyzed them and gives us a guide to recognizing them, with several graphs and charts that you will relate to. See them in his recent newsletter. If this is your kind of movie, you'll find plenty of titles that you'll want to watch, even if you've seen them more than once before. -via Boing Boing
Dr. Renée Trilling is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her teaching and research emphases are in medieval English literature, so it is no coincidence that she discovered this passage in Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500-1500, a scholarly anthology published in 2017. Her photo is from p. 119 of Dr. Lucy Donkin's contribution titled "Earth from Elsewhere: Burial in Terra Sancta beyond the Holy Land."
Donkin's passage here relates to the movement of dirt from the grave of Saint Peter by Saint Lolan, an 11th Century Scottish bishop. That's a long haul from Rome, but four well-built asses were up to the charge.
In Shakepeare's Twelfth Night, the insuffrable Malvolio reads from a letter stating that "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon 'em." Let us count this woman among the second category, for she must have labored for many years to achieve such facial athleticism. Let us hope that she is able to display her skills to even more demanding music, such as "Flight of the Bumblebee."
This video comes courtesy of the mysterious blogger Born in Space, who comments that everyone has a secret talent. What is yours? I share this woman's ability, although I need fishing hooks and line to do it properly.
One email changed this woman’s life. Not in the sense of money, or some grand opportunity to obtain power and fame. Kama Einhorn was emailed by a guy in Florida about her being his half-sister. When she looked at the guy’s profile picture, he looked like her long-lost twin-- except she didn’t have a twin.
They initially thought that Einhorn’s father had an affair with her new brother’s mother. However, after speaking to family members, it turns out there was no affair at all. The two individuals had been conceived from donor sperm. The donor had been a resident at Yale New Haven Hospital, where scientists were pioneering intrauterine insemination. Read the full story here.
This man was purposely hidden from sight. Archaeologists discovered a skeleton of a young man with stab wounds. This body led them to a 1300-year-old Chinese murder mystery in a tomb raiders' shaft. Experts believe that the murder took place between 640 and 680 AD. In addition, the man, who was estimated to be around 25-years-old, was probably alive when he was thrown into the shaft and left to die. Tragic.
"The victim was dumped in this shaft to purposely kept from sight," the team wrote. "The strategy of hiding victims’ bodies in existing tombs or graveyards as a means of disposal, akin to 'hiding a leaf in the forest,' has been practiced since antiquity."
Well, people who live in Silicon Valley are smart people, so this development shouldn’t really be unexpected. Matt Krisiloff, owner of Conception wanted to help biology labs in deciphering the recipe needed to copy how an embryo develops in order to copy it and transmute any cell into an egg.“I was interested in the idea of ‘When can same-sex couples have children together?’” Krisiloff told Technology Review. “I thought that this was the promising technology for doing this.”
Conception is the largest commercial establishment that specializes in vitro gametogenesis, which refers to turning adult cells into gametes—sperm or egg cells. The company is trying to make replacement eggs for women. Learn more about Krisiloff and his company’s pursuits here.
Jane Pearson and her husband were surprised to find a cat in the house they planned to buy. Thinking that the current homeowners would take the animal with them once the transactions were finalized, they didn’t pay attention to the cat lounging on the home’s screened porch. However, the Pearsons were informed that the cat would be a permanent fixture in the house.
The previous owners of the home took care of the kitten, Hidey. The wife kept her well-fed, loved, and cared for until the woman developedAlzheimer’s disease and could no longer take care of Hidey. Eight weeks after the woman died, the husband sold the house to Pearsons. “As we talked, it became apparent that she was just the wife’s cat, and the man missed his wife so much,”said Jane. Learn how the Pearsons ended up taking care of the cat here!
