Thousands of soldiers were wounded during the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862 -150 years ago today. Medics on both sides were overwhelmed, and some of those wounded had to wait quite some time for treatment.
Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname “Angel’s Glow.”
In 2001, almost one hundred and forty years after the battle, seventeen-year-old Bill Martin was visiting the Shiloh battlefield with his family. When he heard about the glowing wounds, he asked his mom – a microbiologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service who had studied luminescent bacteria that lived in soil – about it.
“So you know, he comes home and, ‘Mom, you’re working with a glowing bacteria. Could that have caused the glowing wounds?’” Martin told Science Netlinks. “And so, being a scientist, of course I said, ‘Well, you can do an experiment to find out.’”
And that’s just what Bill did.
Martin and a friend worked on the question and their research eventually won a science fair competition. Read about their findings at mental_floss. Link
It's been years since we checked in on the Ryugyong Hotel, the monolithic concrete building in Pyongyang, North Korea, that was never completed. After work was abandoned in 1992, officials even denied its existence! But in 2008, the 105-floor structure got a second chance from the Orascom Group of Egypt. A new glass facade gives a less foreboding and more modern look. See more pictures and read about the history of the Ryugyong Hotel at Urban Ghosts. Link
(Image credits: Wikpedia users Timon (left) and Pocketchef (right))
Movie producers and designers tend to use outdated ideas because it's just easier to do things they way they've always been done -even if they make no sense in the modern world. For example, my daughters first saw nuns wearing habits in a restaurant when they were 8 and 9 years old and asked me about it. See, they had been going to a parochial school for years already! They knew plenty of nuns, but they hadn't seen enough movies.
Nuns, for their part, mostly stopped wearing habits in the '60s, totally missing out on the whole nunsploitation genre. In fact, the number of habit-wearing nuns in the U.S. went from 180,000 in 1964 to a third of that in 2009, and today, the vast majority of religious women dress like ... women. This means that there are probably more nun costumes in America right now than there are actual nun habits, begging the question: Who is dressing up as whom?
But that's just one of the seven outdated assumptions you see in movies. Read the rest at Cracked. Link
This song does what it says in the title, and will make you laugh. It was meant as a study aid, but it didn't help me memorize the elements at all. How about you? Oh yeah, in case it went a little fast for you, the lyrics at the YouTube page ...or on any periodic table of elements. -via Metafilter
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
An actor playing Adolf Hitler -now that's an interesting proposition. As anyone in Hollywood well knows, correct, precise casting can make or break a movie. So let's imagine we're doing a movie about Der Fuhrer. Who should we cast to play him?
Okay, the logical choice is painfully obvious, and actually ironic. Ironic only because the perfect actor to portray Adolf Hitler was, indeed, also the first American actor ever to play/satirize Der Fuhrer in a movie. Not to mention he was also a Jew. Hitler, okay, let's see, a loud-mouthed, quick-tempered blowhard, an overbearing bully who enjoyed punishing those who didn't follow his orders exactly. Does Moe Howard of the Three Stooges come to mind? Hmmm...
It was in January of 1940 that Moe and his two pals, those hilariously funny slapstick comics known the world over as the Three Stooges, made the very first movie satirizing Adolf Hitler and the then-growing Nazi movement in Germany and other countries. Nine months later, Charlie Chaplin came out with his more famous Hitler satire The Great Dictator. But I repeat, the Stooges were the historic first.
At the time the Stooges filmed You Nazty Spy! the United States was still very ambivalent about entering World War II. Isolationist sentiment ran rife across America and many feared making any film about Hitler and the Third Reich might stir up anti-Nazi feelings among the public. Many senators, such as Burton Wheeler and Geraldine Nye, were also severe isolationists who objected to any anti-Nazi movies on the grounds that they were propaganda designed to mobilize American fervor for war.
While the Three Stooges are often looked down upon by the "elites" and many film intellectuals, one must be fair and give them at least some credit for their courage in taking on the unpopular subject almost two full years before the U.S. entered World War II. The contemporary comparisons between certain segments of the American public and their widely diverse opinions on "offending our enemies" in 2012 are all too obvious.
You Natzy Spy!, the boys' 44th short for Columbia Pictures, was Moe's favorite Three Stooges short (pretty high praise, considering he appeared in 189 others). According to some sources, it was also Larry's favorite Stooge short.
Moronika appears on a map in the later short I'll Never Heil Again.
Moe stars as Moe Hailstone, a small-time paperhanger, along with his buddies: Curly Gallstone and Larry Pebble (while Moe was obviously Hitler, Curly was Hermann Goering and Larry was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's two chief Nazi pals). The country of Moronica needs a dictator to take over and sway the angry masses into a more cooperative state.
Long-distance communication at a relatively high speed (compared to carrying messages) came about with the invention of the optical telegraph in France, fifty years before the electrical telegraph.
The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers, each placed 5 to 20 kilometres apart from each other. On each of these towers a wooden semaphore and two telescopes were mounted (the telescope was invented in 1600). The semaphore had two signalling arms which each could be placed in seven positions. The wooden post itself could also be turned in 4 positions, so that 196 different positions were possible. Every one of these arrangements corresponded with a code for a letter, a number, a word or (a part of) a sentence.
1,380 kilometres an hour
Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through the telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. Next he used the telescope to look at the succeeding tower in the chain, to control if the next telegrapher had copied the symbol correctly. In this way, messages were signed through symbol by symbol from tower to tower. The semaphore was operated by two levers. A telegrapher could reach a speed of 1 to 3 symbols per minute.
The technology spread through Europe, but was confounded by wars and governments. It eventually faded when the electrical telegraph came into use. Read all about this amazing but obsolete technology at Low-tech Magazine. Link -via the Presurfer
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
It is the most famous rock album cover of all time: The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. One of the many things that still fascinate us about this incredible album is the cover. The concept for the cover was called "people we like."
According to artist Peter Blake, the designer of the iconic Sgt. Pepper cover: "In my mind I was making a piece of art rather than an album cover. It was almost a piece of theater design."
Blake continues: "I offered the idea that if they had just played a concert in the park, the cover would be a photograph of them with the group who had watched the concert. If we did this by using cardboard cutouts, it could be whomever they wanted."
Each of the four Beatles was told to compile a list of people they admired, and their choices would all be featured on the album's cover. Ringo, always the least pretentious of the four, declined right off the bat. "Whoever the others choose is okay with me," Ringo said.
John Lennon's off-kilter mind immediately came up with Adolf Hitler and Mohandas Gandhi. Hitler was immediately nixed for obvious reasons. But, incredibly, a paper cutout of Adolf Hitler was actually made and was there at the photo session on March 30, 1967. Legend has it that Hitler was actually in the final shot, but during the session, one of the Beatles stood in front of him, covering the camera's view. Gandhi got the axe by EMI executives, believing it would hurt album sales in the Far East.
George, "the mystic Beatle," of course, chose four Indian gurus. Bob Dylan was a clear choice by all the Beatles, who worshiped Dylan.
Fred Astaire was definitely a "Paul" choice. The legendary dancer was an easy sell and was reportedly delighted to be featured. However, despite Paul's initial assurance to EMI that all the requested "guests" would "love to do anything to please us," several of the chosen figures gave EMI more than a bit of difficulty. Shirley Temple asked to hear the finished product produced before giving her consent.
The Beatles all wanted Mae West to be on the cover, but she was apprehensive. "What would I be doing in a lonely heart's club band?" Mae asked. To placate the legendary sex symbol, all four Beatles wrote and signed a letter to Mae, and she finally agreed.
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And, of course, you can go browse and watch as you like. The picture shown is from a silent reel of a nightclub act filmed the in 1930s. There's a long list of subjects to see. Link -via Boing Boing
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
The actual genesis of The Beatles is a bit nebulous and could be argued. However, most Beatles historians cite the date of July 6, 1957 as the official beginning of The Beatles.
John Lennon, a Liverpool guitar player (and local troublemaker, part-time shoplifter and full-time egomaniac) had been playing a few local gigs in the area for a year or so. John's initial band was called The Blackjacks, consisting of a few of his mates from school. Soon thereafter, the band's name was changed to The Quarrymen, in honor of their present school, Quarry Bank High School.
It was on July 6, 1957 that John and his ragtag band were playing twice at the St. Peter's Church fete in the Woolton parish. This date is significant as possibly the single most important seminal date in the history of rock music. Why? It was on this day that John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met.
The Quarrymen, led by John, played on the back of a coal truck, giving one performance in the afternoon and another in the early evening. Several cameras were out that day, and the very brash Lennon took the lead vocals on a few of the popular rock'n'roll songs of the day. Lennon was decked out in a checked shirt, tight pants ("drainies'), and his hair was slicked-up in the fashion of his supreme idol, Elvis Presley.
The event was a bit bittersweet, too, although Lennon didn't know it at the time. John's beloved mother, Julia, was there in the crowd, rabidly cheering her teenage son on. As a sad sidebar, Julia was to be killed tragically, a little over a year later, in a car accident. Julia was killed by a drunken off-duty policeman as she was walking across the street to catch a bus. John was never to really get over the loss of his mother, and called it "the worst thing that ever happened to me."
Paul had been invited to watch The Quarrymen by a mutual friend, and he watched with curious interest as John sang. John and his Quarrymen were actually scheduled to play twice that day, once in the afternoon and later in the evening. After the band's first concert Paul was introduced to John, who, Paul later recalled, had breath smelling of illegally-obtained beer.
Outside the city of Šiauliai, Lithuania, there's an area covered with an estimated 55,000 crosses. They are memorials to Lithuanian patriots who died in campaign after campaign to free the nation from various occupying forces. The crosses have been bulldozed several times, but spring back starting immediately afterward. Read the history of this amazing memorial at Environmental Graffiti. Link -via the Presurfer
Seven-year-old Audri built a monster trap in the Rube Goldberg style. Although it's not his first such machine, he had to have learned a lot doing this, besides having fun. What really impressed me was his realistically modest expectations and his complete joy when the contraption worked. -via Boing Boing
This gif, which probably originated at 4chan, shows a cat realizing who is actually moving that feather. Oh yes, that's anthropomorphizing, but is certainly what it looks like to us. Let's just hope he never finds out about the laser pointer, because he might never recover! Link
Can a plastic orb connect you to the spirit world and life the future's filmy veil? OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD. Can it at least give good advice? REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN. Can a toy company make money selling it? SIGNS POINT TO YES!
A SEEKER BORN EVERY MINUTE
Wartime has long been a boom time for spiritualists, mostly because people long for any news about loved ones a the battlefront. In the 1940s, a woman named "Madame" Mary Carter was capitalizing on that opportunity, plying her trade as a professional clairvoyant in Cincinnati. Her best seance stunt was one she called the Psycho-Slate, consisting of a chalkboard inside a box, with a lid covering it. When a client asked a question, Carter would close the lid, and after a short interval of muffled chalkboard scratching, she would dramatically flip open the lid to reveal the spirit world's answer, written with chalk in a ghostly scrawl. (How she did it remains a mystery.)
TELL A FORTUNE, MAKE A FORTUNE?
Mary Carter had a son named Albert who had little use for any spirits that couldn't be drunk straight from the bottle. When sober, however, he fancied himself an inventor, and seeing the success of his mother's Psycho-Slate, Albert Carter came up with his best idea ever: a portable fortune-telling device that any spiritual seeker could use at any time or place.
It took some time for Carter to work out the details. It had to look mysterious, it had to offer a variety of answers and, because he had no capital to work with, it had to be cheap to build. He went to work using what he knew best -murky liquids in cans and bottles- and developed what he called the Syco-Seer Miracle Home Fortune Teller -a seven inch can-shaped device with a glass window on each end. The inside of the can was divided in two; each half contained a six-side die floating in the dark, viscous liquid (according to some accounts, molasses from his mother's kitchen) and each of the die's six sides was inscribed with a short answer. His reasoning for having two compartments isn't clear, but perhaps it was for efficiency: You could get an answer from one end, then turn it over and get the next answer with little lag time. In 1944 Carter filed for a patent, made a prototype, and began showing it around Cincinnati's toy and hobby shops.
YOU WILL MEET A HELPFUL STRANGER
One of the storekeepers, Max Levinson, not only wanted to stock Syco-Seers, he was very interested in helping Carter produce and market them. Levinson brought in his brother-in-law, Abe Bookman, an engineer from the Ohio Mechanical Institute, who suggested improvements to Carter's design -adding ridges inside the chamber to make the die spin and better randomize the answers. He also hired a designer to give the Syco-Seer's outer label a mystical appeal.
In 1946 the three men formed a partnership, which -in a nod to his two creative partners' first names- Levinson called the Alabe Crafts Corporation. Bookman arranged for a manufacturer and planned for the retail release of the Syco-Seer in 1947. At just about the same time, Albert Carter's alcoholism and self-neglect had finally caught up with him and he died. "While he was sober, he was a genius," Bookman recalled to a Cincinnati Post reporter a few years later. "He stayed in flophouses and was always broke. But I bought every idea he ever had, and that gave him enough to keep going."
I SEE A PATENT IN YOUR FUTURE
Carter's patent came through the following year, and luckily for Bookman and Levinson, he had signed rights over to the partnership before he died. Given new creative freedom to experiment with the design, Bookman began making changes that Carter had resisted.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Any artist is lucky if he produces one enduring, immortal work. Jackie Gleason was to produce 39. They were called The Honeymooners.
I was October 1, 1955 and Gleason had been starring in and hosting his very popular variety show called, logically enough, The Jackie Gleason Show. The Jackie Gleason Show was a huge ratings hit, ranking at #2 in popularity of the then-current TV shows. The show, like any variety show, consisted of singing, dancing, jokes, and comedy sketches.
Gleason, an incredibly talented and versatile entertainer, actor, and comedian, had played several different characters on the show, including Reggie van Gleason, Joe the Bartender, Fenwick Babbit, and the Poor Soul. But Gleason's masterpiece of a character was to be an average everyday guy who lived in Brooklyn, a blustery braggart bus driver named Ralph Kramden.
Ralph Kramden was originally seen as the main character in one of the sketches on Cavalcade of Stars (Cavalcade of Stars was a previous variety series Gleason had hosted on the old Dumont network). Original suggestions for the sketch's title were "The Lovers," "The Couple Next Door," and aptly, "The Beast." It was finally decided to call the bit "The Honeymooners."
The very first "Honeymooners" sketch was aired on October 5, 1951. Interestingly, the show was broadcast exactly ten days before that other immortal cultural TV comedy icon of the fifties, I Love Lucy.
The original "Honeymooners" was much different from the show we all know and love. The first-ever "Honeymooners" was just Jackie as Ralph and his wife Alice. The original Alice Kramden was played by Pert Kelton, a fairly grim (in both looks and personality) actress, who had to leave the show after seven episodes. The public reason given was that she had health (heart) problems. It was later revealed that Kelton had been blacklisted because of her then-considered-radical political beliefs.
This first sketch was much darker (and less funny) than the later episodes. It lacked in humor, sentiment, and pathos, all later trademarks of the show. It also lacked a very important ingredient: Art Carney. Carney, a wonderful "second banana," had played a policeman in that original "Honeymooners" sketch, but was later written into the series as Ralph's best pal, sewer worker Ed Norton.
We love Vincent Chase and his HBO cohorts as much as the next magazine, but we’re not going to stand idly by while they hog the entourage limelight. Those guys might make waves in Hollywood, but the following power crews made history.
1. The Algonquin Round Table
Ringleader: Dorothy Parker, a writer, poet, and critic for such venerable publications as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Esquire. Yet Parker is perhaps most famous for her memorable witticisms, including “I love a martini—but two at the most. Three, I’m under the table; four, I’m under the host” (currently printed on the cocktail napkins at The Algonquin Hotel bar in New York).
Core Crew: What started as an afternoon roast of The New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott soon morphed into a daily luncheon that would establish the most celebrated entourage in the history of American letters. In addition to Parker and Wollcott, the literary group included Robert Benchley (Life drama editor), Franklin P. Adams (New York Tribune columnist), Robert E. Sherwood (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright), Harpo Marx (the “silent” Marx Brother), Harold Ross (editor of The New Yorker), George S. Kaufman (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright), and Heywood Broun (founder of the American Newspaper Guild).
Turf: New York City
Mission: From 1919 to 1929 “The Vicious Circle” (as they referred to themselves) met every weekday at The Algonquin Hotel to share ideas and opinions and unleash savage barbs—often at one another’s expense. A sampling:
Parker: “That woman speaks 18 languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them.” Kaufman: “Epitaph for a dead waiter—God finally caught his eye.” Benchley: “Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it’s compounding a felony.”
By the mid-1920s, a spot at the entourage’s table was incredibly coveted. Mrs. Parker and her cronies had standing reservations, but other notables—such as actor-playwright Noel Coward, actress Tallulah Bankhead, and humorist Will Rogers—were known to drop in to share in the nips and quips.
While best known for their much-ballyhooed drollness, The Vicious Circle’s impact reached far beyond heavy boozing and memorable zingers. Harold Ross, for instance, used the lunches to secure funding for a new magazine he planned to launch and edit: The New Yorker. Not only that, but he recruited Parker and Benchley as his respective book and drama critics.
Perhaps the entourage’s most enduring influence, however, was the way it shaped the artistic tastes and sensibilities of the times. Having such tremendous influence and reach in the press (even into the 1930s), the group effectively redefined American humor with its off-the-cuff observations. It was reported, for example, that when Parker was informed that President Coolidge had died, she responded, “How can they tell?”
The group’s aesthetic changed the tenor of book, movie, and stage reviews and profoundly influenced modern media criticism. The Algonquin’s widely circulated irreverence underlined not just its members own rebelliousness, but also the spirit of the Roaring Twenties that saw this entourage at its peak.
2. Jesus & Co.
Ringleader: Jesus Christ
Core Crew: The disciples or, as they were called after Jesus’ death, apostles. The posse included two guys named James, two Simons, and to use J.C.’s words, eight other “fishers of men.”
Turf: Galilee, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and other Mideast hotspots
Mission: Experts estimate that the core of this God squad was formed in the 20s—meaning around 26 CE. That’s when Jesus picked up key members John and Andrew via their connection to John the Baptist, who—as you may recall from either the Bible or your high school’s production of Godspell—earned his name by dunking the faithful and preparing the way of the Lord. He was way ahead of the curve in declaring Jesus the Son of God.
After that, the group expanded by luring family and friends. Andrew brought his brother, Simon, into the mix. Then Philip, from Andrew’s hometown of Bethsaida, joined along with his buddy, Nathanael (otherwise known as Bartholomew). Simon’s fishing partners, brothers James and John, caught wind of the charismatic healer next, as did tax collector Matthew down in Cana—and so on and so forth.
If we take the Gospel writers’ word for it, this scruffy dozen toured the holy lands in support of Jesus’ teachings and did a good job of staying in the background. With one notorious exception (we’re looking at you, Judas Iscariot), this was a darn loyal group. How loyal? During his public ministry years, Jesus is estimated to have legged about 3,125 miles, and you better believe his boys were with him most of the way. That’s a pretty impressive series of road trips—and they didn’t stop there. Even after their boss moved on to the newly ungated promised land (thanks in part to a political climate that didn’t welcome his ideas), this posse aggressively kept the faith, preaching their way from India to Ethiopia to Spain. Needless to say, all that walking paid off. Today, Christianity has spread around the world, with an estimated 2 billion believers worldwide.
3. The Junto Society (later, the American Philosophical Society)
