Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
"Twin Peaks" is almost 25 years old...but still a television masterpiece
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| ABC |
Nominally about the investigation into the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the serialized drama was responsible for creating the nightmares of many as it delved into both the seedy underbelly of a seemingly idyllic town in the Pacific Northwest and into a haunting dream world where giants and dwarves roamed the halls of the Great Northern Hotel, perfect cherry pie could be had at the local greasy spoon, and murder most foul could rip a town in two. The show itself embraced the somnambulist visuals of its co-creator, infusing the whodunnit with a lyrical, somber, and, at times, terrifying feel. (You all know which moments I mean: a tableau of lovelorn teenagers singing a song segues into a nightmarish encounter. A skipping record signals doom. Red curtains part to reveal horrors.)
For those of us who experienced the show as it aired, tuning in each week to gather more clues about Laura’s killer and marvel at the deductive reasoning skills of the show’s resident Sherlock, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), it’s almost impossible to describe the strange appeal that Twin Peaks had and the hunger to solve the murder in the days before Twitter, Television Without Pitymessage boards, or social media at all. It was a true watercooler show in the days when such things as watercooler conversation still existed. It caused many a sleepless night as you pondered just what the dwarf meant, or whether Laura’s lookalike cousin Maddy Ferguson (also played by Lee) was connected somehow to the specifics of her death.
But Laura’s murder was a MacGuffin of sorts: It was intended merely as an introduction to this odd little place and these very strange individuals that populated the town of Twin Peaks. And that town itself represented a sort of thwarted and idealized past, one stuck in the facade of the 1950s, a great society that prided itself on its saddle shoes and fitted angora sweaters, where unspeakable acts occurred behind closed doors. What the show did was take the viewer inside the conscious and subconscious minds of those quirky denizens, giving us a saintly hero in the form of Cooper who would be tempted again and again with the easy lures of lust, power, and complacency. Teenagers investigated the murder of their peers, biker gangs squared off as torch singers swayed in the half-darkness at boozy backwater bars, femme fatales ran their red lacquered nails over the backs of their oblivious lovers. Twin Peaks took our collective desires and dreams and ran them through the dark prism of classic film noir.
It’s Laura’s best friend, Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) — reeling from the murder and a blossoming affair with Laura’s secret lover James Hurley (James Marshall) — who says it best: “It’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream… and the most terrible nightmare, all at once.”
And that’s Twin Peaks in a sentence, really.
Source
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Rwandan women have helped the nation thrive
Rwanda has the highest percentage of women appointed to government in the world. Women account for 64 percent of its parliament. (In comparison, America ranks 83rd with 18 percent.)
This is the same country that 20 years ago was in the throes of a genocide that consumed its population at a speed unparalleled in modern history. In 1994, Rwanda experienced 100 days of bloodshed that left some 800,000 people dead.
In the aftermath, the country was shattered. As the liberating rebel army moved in, it pushed the genocidal militias, along with hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees, into neighboring countries. While the world focused on the refugees, the Rwandans who remained in their own country were left to fend for themselves in a decimated nation. The population that stayed behind in the ruins was about 70 percent female.
The traditionally patriarchal society thrust its women into the role of rebuilding the country. They formed local councils, headed judicial proceedings, tilled the land, and rose through the ranks of government. Amazingly, against a backdrop of near total ruin, they ushered in a level of peace and reconciliation that whipped the country into the model of development and gender equality it is today.
One of those rebuilding was Eugenie Mukeshimana. In 1994, she was 22 years old and 8 months pregnant when war broke out and her husband was killed. Pursued for being a Tutsi, she took refuge with three different families, who hid her in the capital of Kigali. She gave birth in the outhouse of one of those families. The next day, she was taken to be killed, but, thanks to muddled instructions, her life was spared and she was subsequently liberated by the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) army.
It took months, she said, for any semblance of normality to take root. The abnormal “became normal,” Mukeshimana remembers: On the weekends, they would dig up human remains from outdoor latrines and wash and rebury bones.
Finances were another burden. “Under normal circumstances, family would help if I lost my husband. After the genocide, there was no such luxury,” she says. She remembers her female friends discovering that they had homes to pay off, their husband’s businesses to run, or legal obstacles blocking inheritance money to overcome. They—and she—felt, “that either way you have to go out and earn a living. You could not stay at home when you have kids dependent on you.”
Mukeshimana, who had a high school education, got a job as an office manager for a construction company. She would visit the building sites and observed the women coming to apply for jobs. “The men were ridiculing them, but not only were the women faster, they were much better then the guys. But they had to prove they could do it,” she remembers.
“It was women really simply saying, ‘I’ve been a housewife and now instead of taking care of a house I need to build a house, so someone show me how to make bricks,’” says Swanee Hunt, founder and chair of the Institute for Inclusive Security. Hunt, who has been working in Rwandasince 2000, remembers an early meeting she had with President Paul Kagame. She asked him if there was a difference in how men and women responded in the aftermath? “Women stepped out and rolled up their sleeves when men were destroyed emotionally and psychologically,” he told her.
The women discovered they could convey the needs of communities: they knew about issues of health, education, and family life. Before the genocide, men made the moneymaking decisions. Now, with women at the helm, the income was being invested in families and households. On a national level, leaders of both genders were seeing the obstacles facing their female relatives and friends and channeling them into policy reform.
The reversal didn’t have the markings of a textbook feminist revolution: there was no picketing, there were no marches and no political pleas. “We don’t talk too much, but we get things done,” says Mukeshimana. “Before men knew it—or women themselves—they’d built something incredible that cannot be taken away.”
Leadership started on the community level, where six women would compose a local women’s council. “A decade earlier in society for a woman to speak in a meeting with men, it was not just socially uncommon, it was impossible,” says Hunt. She remembers Kagame once telling her that he decided at an early age that there would be no exclusions in his work. “If I’m working on people’s rights, how do I exclude women?” he thought. The movement of Rwandan women through government was made permanent by a 30 percent quota prescribed by the new government’s constitution, which also established a gender monitoring office.
“After 1994 genocide [the RPF was] encouraging all groups of communities to take part in rebuilding the country. For us it was an open involvement for anyone who was ready to work for their country,” says Oda Gasinzigwa, minister of Gender and Family Promotion. “There’s no way you can ignore a part of your community if you want it really to develop.”
Gasinzigwa was one of the many Rwandan refugees who returned home to rebuild their decimated country in the war’s aftermath, and she found a force of women leaders in place motivating the younger ones to join their ranks.
In 2001, after working to coordinate empowerment programs for the National Women’s Council, she was also elected to the council at the grassroots level by her village.
This was a story repeated many times over: women holding community council seats rose through the regional levels to the national council. The secret to “how they broke every record,” Hunt says, was that women on the lower councils ran for the set-aside national seats to fill the government quota and women on the national council ran against men.
These groups of female leaders became a model for reconciliation. “Women whose families had been slaughtered [were] sitting next to another woman going every day to deliver food to a husband in prison because he was genocidaire—and they’re forming a women’s caucus in the parliament,” Hunt says. Meanwhile, the Rwandan Gacaca courts—community-run justice systems that tried some two million genocide perpetrators—had strong female leadership.
“The chaos can either set you back 100 years or crack open the culture,” says Hunt. “Things are never going back to where they were before and if you are adept enough as women, you can slip into those places where there are cracks and vacuums and fill them.”
In December, Hunt says she asked Louise Mushikiwabo, minister of foreign affairs and cooperation, what would ensure a woman’s place in Rwanda when there was a new administration. “She said, ‘It’s no longer a question of quota insuring anything in the culture, it is the culture now.’”
Hunt, who is compiling interviews with the country’s female leaders in a forthcoming book called Rwandan Women Rising, has been bringing a contingency of the country’s top women to a program she runs out of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she serves as the Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy. The program unites female leaders of former or current conflict zones, from Kosovo, to Colombia, to Afghanistan.
Now other countries look to Rwanda as an example of women’s impact on government and the peace process. Recently, Hunt says, Rwandan women told their counterparts in Syria, “Look, we have been through what you’re going through… we have been through it and look at us.”
The Rwandan success story was not without a price, and for some the scars were slow to heal, when they healed at all. After seven and a half years in Rwanda after the war, Mukeshimana moved to the United States on a student visa, and later was granted asylum. “I could not see myself living next door to people who have victimized me and family,” she says.
Today, she lives in Newark, N.J., and runs the Genocide Survivors Support Network, which she founded in 2010 to help victims and asylum seekers resettle in the United States. The legal and social hoops are taxing for immigrant survivors, who are forced to repeat their stories over and over in a process that can be traumatizing.
For mothers of the genocide, personal histories can be hard to pass on to the next generation. “It’s hard to be a parent and also to be a survivor: to talk to your kid as if you are like everybody else, but you know you’re not,” says Mukeshimana, whose daughter is “almost 20 and I don’t know when to have this conversation.” For advice, she has sought the counsel of Holocaust survivors, whose wisdom resonated across the half-century separating the two genocides.
Meanwhile, in Rwanda, a generation the same age as Mukeshimana’s daughter has grown up without memories of the genocide—or the patriarchal society that preceded it. They’re getting educated, with 98 percent of girls enrolled in primary school, and they have plenty of role models to emulate.
This generation of young women is “doing things that in my time at their age I wasn’t thinking about because society spelled it out to me that there were those limitations,” Mukeshimana says.
“I am amazed, I’m proud—but at the same time, it shouldn’t take a conflict as big as genocide for these changes to take place. There should be a better way to make the transition to gender equality without having conflict as a backdrop.”
Source
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
The best April Fool's pranks ever
Wisconsin Capital Collapses – 1933
The Madison Capital-Times’ 1933 April Fools’ edition included a doctored photo of the Wisconsin state capital in ruins. The accompanying story claimed that the building was felled by a serious of unusual explosions caused by hot gas produced by the “verbose debates” in the chambers. Readers weren’t amused by the trick, but Washington, D.C., had to be relieved it was merely a hoax. If such explosions were possible, there would be nary a building left standing in the District.
The Spaghetti Tree – 1957
The British media have a unique affinity for pulling April Fools’ pranks, matched only by the British public’s unique ability to fall for them. On April 1, 1976, BBC Radio 2 astronomer Sir Patrick Moore gave listeners some bunk about how, at 9:47 a.m., Pluto and Jupiter would align in such a way as to temporarily reduce Earth’s gravity. Moore told listeners to jump at exactly that time to experience the once-in-a-lifetime effect. At 9:48, callers flooded the lines, eager to describe how they had briefly floated. News that Moore had played them no doubt brought everyone crashing back to earth.
Sidd Finch – 1985
The Madison Capital-Times’ 1933 April Fools’ edition included a doctored photo of the Wisconsin state capital in ruins. The accompanying story claimed that the building was felled by a serious of unusual explosions caused by hot gas produced by the “verbose debates” in the chambers. Readers weren’t amused by the trick, but Washington, D.C., had to be relieved it was merely a hoax. If such explosions were possible, there would be nary a building left standing in the District.
The Spaghetti Tree – 1957
Switzerland is known for banks and chocolate, not spaghetti, right? Tell that to the millions who fell victim to a BBC April Fools’ report touting the bumper harvests from Swiss spaghetti trees. The report, which ran three minutes, even led some to ask how they could have a spaghetti tree of their own. The Beeb’s response? Put a strand of spaghetti in tomato sauce and “hope for the best.”
Do-It-Yourself Color TV – 1962
Color television wasn’t widespread until 1966, but some Swedes armed with nylon stockings tried to get it four years earlier. They fell victim to a hoax by Sweden’s Sveriges Television, which trotted out a “technical expert” to explain on-air — in thoroughly technical terms — how a thinly stretched nylon screen in front of a television would bend light’s wavelengths and produce a color image. The thousands who tried it learned quickly that there was no such trick — and were out a pair of stockings to boot.
Planetary Alignment – 1976
Do-It-Yourself Color TV – 1962
Color television wasn’t widespread until 1966, but some Swedes armed with nylon stockings tried to get it four years earlier. They fell victim to a hoax by Sweden’s Sveriges Television, which trotted out a “technical expert” to explain on-air — in thoroughly technical terms — how a thinly stretched nylon screen in front of a television would bend light’s wavelengths and produce a color image. The thousands who tried it learned quickly that there was no such trick — and were out a pair of stockings to boot.
Planetary Alignment – 1976
The British media have a unique affinity for pulling April Fools’ pranks, matched only by the British public’s unique ability to fall for them. On April 1, 1976, BBC Radio 2 astronomer Sir Patrick Moore gave listeners some bunk about how, at 9:47 a.m., Pluto and Jupiter would align in such a way as to temporarily reduce Earth’s gravity. Moore told listeners to jump at exactly that time to experience the once-in-a-lifetime effect. At 9:48, callers flooded the lines, eager to describe how they had briefly floated. News that Moore had played them no doubt brought everyone crashing back to earth.
Sidd Finch – 1985
A fastball that cracks 165 m.p.h. A devoted student of “yogic mastery.” A name like “Hayden Siddhartha Finch.” A baseball player like that has to be too good to be true — and he was. Sidd (for short) was merely the figment of Sports Illustrated writer George Plimpton’s imagination. That was enough to get him a 1985 article in the magazine. Mets coach Mel Stottlemyre got in on the ruse, posing for a photo talking to “Sidd,” who was actually an art teacher masquerading as the fake baseball player.
Richard Nixon for President – 1992
Richard Nixon for President – 1992
“I never did anything wrong, and I won’t do it again.”
Certainly not the makings of a great campaign slogan, but it’s the memorable line from Richard Nixon’s ill-fated 1992 campaign for President. Never mind that Nixon himself wasn’t involved — comedian and Nixon impressionist Rich Little and NPR’s John Hockenberry teamed up to pull off the prank on the radio network’s Talk of the Nation program. Befuddled listeners called in to let “Nixon” know just how certain they were that they didn’t want to give him the chance to, um, not do anything wrong again.
The Taco Liberty Bell – 1996
Freedom doesn’t ring as sweet when Taco Bell is footing the bill. America was outraged when the fast-food chain took out a full-page ad in six major newspapers, claiming it had purchased the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. But no worries — they planned to leave it on display. The prank’s real victims were hapless National Park Services employees manning the phones at the Liberty Bell. Unaware of the media blitz, they spent their April Fools’ Day reassuring Americans that no, their national monument hadn’t been sold off to the highest bidder.
The Left-Handed Whopper – 1998
Burger King cooked up a whopper of a different sort in 1998, but that didn’t mean fast-food customers were any less willing to swallow it. In a full-page ad in USA Today, Burger King announced a solution for the 1.4 million left-handed customers visiting their restaurants every day: the Left-Handed Whopper. Burger King said all the condiments were rotated 180° to suit the left-handed burger connoisseur. Southpaws eagerly tried to order the burger the next day, but they had to wait in line behind right-handed folks equally caught up with making sure they got the correct Whopper. The thought that a burger is basically, you know, a circle apparently never crossed their minds.
Alabama Redefines Pi – 1998
Scientists aren’t exactly friendly toward Alabama’s efforts to push intelligent design in schools, but one hit below the belt when he published an article in the April 1998 issue of New Mexicans for Science and Reason suggesting that the Alabama legislature was tampering with the mathematical constant pi. The article, penned by physicist Mark Boslough writing under the pseudonym April Holiday, suggested Alabama was redefining pi as 3.0 instead of 3.14 to keep it closer to the “biblical value.” State legislators were swamped by angry callers beseeching them to leave pi alone.
Gmail Paper – 2007
Share
“You click. We stack. You get.”
Google has long encouraged users of its Gmail service to archive, rather than delete, their e-mail. But paper archives too? That was the idea behind the 2007 launch of Gmail Paper, which promised to provide on-demand printed copies of e-mails for users. The massive costs of printing and shipping would be offset by advertisements on the back of each sheet, printed in “red, bold, 36-pt. Helvetica.”
The hoax website lives on today. But paper lovers beware — there’s still no word on how Google planned to handle the Viagra ads and Nigerian e-mail scams that would undoubtedly clutter every shipment.
Highchair for Dogs – 2011
This video uploaded by IKEA Australia unveils the IKEA HUNDSTOL, a highchair for dogs with a hole in the back for tails and water plus built-in bowls for water and food.
The YouTube Collection – 2012
YouTube announced it was putting every video ever uploaded onto DVDs, which would initially be delivered in 175 trucks — pack mule for users who live in rural areas. To make a comment, users would have to complete a paper form and mail it to the video creator directly.
Military Working Cats – 2013
The U.S. Army announced it was enlisting cats to reduce military spending. Thenews release said “a young, healthy cat can jump over eight feet in a single bound so if an enemy approaches a cat, the cat will be able to jump on him and either disable him, or claw him to death if he fails to stop resisting capture.”
Source
Certainly not the makings of a great campaign slogan, but it’s the memorable line from Richard Nixon’s ill-fated 1992 campaign for President. Never mind that Nixon himself wasn’t involved — comedian and Nixon impressionist Rich Little and NPR’s John Hockenberry teamed up to pull off the prank on the radio network’s Talk of the Nation program. Befuddled listeners called in to let “Nixon” know just how certain they were that they didn’t want to give him the chance to, um, not do anything wrong again.
The Taco Liberty Bell – 1996
Freedom doesn’t ring as sweet when Taco Bell is footing the bill. America was outraged when the fast-food chain took out a full-page ad in six major newspapers, claiming it had purchased the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. But no worries — they planned to leave it on display. The prank’s real victims were hapless National Park Services employees manning the phones at the Liberty Bell. Unaware of the media blitz, they spent their April Fools’ Day reassuring Americans that no, their national monument hadn’t been sold off to the highest bidder.
The Left-Handed Whopper – 1998
Burger King cooked up a whopper of a different sort in 1998, but that didn’t mean fast-food customers were any less willing to swallow it. In a full-page ad in USA Today, Burger King announced a solution for the 1.4 million left-handed customers visiting their restaurants every day: the Left-Handed Whopper. Burger King said all the condiments were rotated 180° to suit the left-handed burger connoisseur. Southpaws eagerly tried to order the burger the next day, but they had to wait in line behind right-handed folks equally caught up with making sure they got the correct Whopper. The thought that a burger is basically, you know, a circle apparently never crossed their minds.
Alabama Redefines Pi – 1998
Scientists aren’t exactly friendly toward Alabama’s efforts to push intelligent design in schools, but one hit below the belt when he published an article in the April 1998 issue of New Mexicans for Science and Reason suggesting that the Alabama legislature was tampering with the mathematical constant pi. The article, penned by physicist Mark Boslough writing under the pseudonym April Holiday, suggested Alabama was redefining pi as 3.0 instead of 3.14 to keep it closer to the “biblical value.” State legislators were swamped by angry callers beseeching them to leave pi alone.
Gmail Paper – 2007
Share“You click. We stack. You get.”
Google has long encouraged users of its Gmail service to archive, rather than delete, their e-mail. But paper archives too? That was the idea behind the 2007 launch of Gmail Paper, which promised to provide on-demand printed copies of e-mails for users. The massive costs of printing and shipping would be offset by advertisements on the back of each sheet, printed in “red, bold, 36-pt. Helvetica.”
The hoax website lives on today. But paper lovers beware — there’s still no word on how Google planned to handle the Viagra ads and Nigerian e-mail scams that would undoubtedly clutter every shipment.
Highchair for Dogs – 2011
This video uploaded by IKEA Australia unveils the IKEA HUNDSTOL, a highchair for dogs with a hole in the back for tails and water plus built-in bowls for water and food.
The YouTube Collection – 2012
YouTube announced it was putting every video ever uploaded onto DVDs, which would initially be delivered in 175 trucks — pack mule for users who live in rural areas. To make a comment, users would have to complete a paper form and mail it to the video creator directly.
Military Working Cats – 2013
The U.S. Army announced it was enlisting cats to reduce military spending. Thenews release said “a young, healthy cat can jump over eight feet in a single bound so if an enemy approaches a cat, the cat will be able to jump on him and either disable him, or claw him to death if he fails to stop resisting capture.”
Source
Saturday, March 22, 2014
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Eight surprising historical facts that will change your concept of time
You probably should know these things didn't happen anywhere near when you thought they did...
Not everyone can be a world history master, especially when we tend to learn about it in specifically segmented classes like "European History" or "American Revolutionary History." Maybe you have an exceptional grasp on the global historical timeline. But for those of us who don't, the list below, inspired by a recent Reddit thread called "What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don't seem like they would have?" puts key historical moments into some much-needed context.
1. Betty White is older than sliced bread.
Sliced bread was introduced in 1928 by inventor Otto Frederick Rohwedder. Before this moment, bread was sold in whole loaves as bakers didn't trust sliced bread couldstay fresh. Betty White was born in 1922 and spent her early years not eating sliced bread. But White recently celebrated her 92nd birthday, which means she's been able to experience the first "greatest invention" much longer than most of us.
2. Harvard University was founded before calculus was invented.
Established in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher education in the U.S. The "New College," as it was originally called, had no calculus classes because it didn't exist yet. The invention of calculus would come in the late 17th century with Gottfried Leibniz's 1684 publication of "Nova Methodus," and in part with Isaac Newton's"Principia" in 1687, followed by additional explanations and reformulations by subsequent mathematicians. Also, European physicist, mathematician and astronomer Galileo was still alive during Harvard's early years -- he died in 1642.
3. The last time the Chicago Cubs won a World Series, the Ottoman Empire still existed.
The Chicago Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908. This was back when there were still teams such as the Brooklyn Superbas and the Boston Doves. The Ottoman Empire, which was founded in the 13th century, also existed back then. Mehmed VIwas the last sultan of the empire and his reign ended in 1922 when the sultanate was abolished and the Turkish government took governing control over the new republic -- 14 years after the Cubs last won the World Series.
4. The Pyramids of Giza were built in the time of wooly mammoths.From what we can tell, the last of the wooly mammoth died out around 1700 B.C. on Russia’s Wrangel Island. In Egypt, the Pyramids of Giza were built around 4,000 years ago, although there have been claims that they're even older. This also means that Cleopatra's time on Earth is actually closer to us in history than to the construction of the pyramids.
5. The fax machine was invented the same year as the Oregon trail migration.
The first fax machine was invented in 1843 by a Scottish mechanic named Alexander Bain. This early model used a combination of synchronized pendulums, electric probes and electrochemically sensitive paper to scan documents, and then send the information over a series of wires to be reproduced. The "Great Migration" on the Oregon trail began the same year, when a wagon train of about 1,000 migrants attempted to travel west, but probably died of dysentery along the way.
6. The jewelry store Tiffany & Co. was founded before Italy was a country.While Rome was officially a holdout for a number of years after, in 1861 General Giuseppe Garibaldi led a successful campaign to gather the various city-states and bring them under one nation. Charles Lewis Tiffany and John B. Young founded Tiffany & Young in 1837 and then became Tiffany & Co. in 1853. This means Audrey Hepburn could have gotten "breakfast at Tiffany's" before she could have had her Italian "Roman Holiday.
Similarly, Macy's was founded in 1858, also before Italy became the nation we know it as today.
7. France was still using the guillotine when "Star Wars" came out.
The last time the guillotine was used as a form of execution in France was in 1977. The guillotine lasted for about two centuries. The first "Star Wars" film was also released in 1977 a few months before the execution.
Another mind-blow French historical fact: The Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889, which is the same year Nintendo was founded and that Van Gogh painted "The Starry Night."
8. Two of President John Tyler's grandsons are still alive.
John Tyler was America's 10th President, serving from 1841 to 1845, but somehow two of his grandsons are still alive. Mental Floss first reported on this fact in 2012, but since then Snopes has verified their identities, while New York Magazine even interviewed one of the grandsons. As of last year, both Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. and Harrison Tyler were still only in their 80s.
Not everyone can be a world history master, especially when we tend to learn about it in specifically segmented classes like "European History" or "American Revolutionary History." Maybe you have an exceptional grasp on the global historical timeline. But for those of us who don't, the list below, inspired by a recent Reddit thread called "What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don't seem like they would have?" puts key historical moments into some much-needed context.
1. Betty White is older than sliced bread.
Sliced bread was introduced in 1928 by inventor Otto Frederick Rohwedder. Before this moment, bread was sold in whole loaves as bakers didn't trust sliced bread couldstay fresh. Betty White was born in 1922 and spent her early years not eating sliced bread. But White recently celebrated her 92nd birthday, which means she's been able to experience the first "greatest invention" much longer than most of us.
2. Harvard University was founded before calculus was invented.
Established in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher education in the U.S. The "New College," as it was originally called, had no calculus classes because it didn't exist yet. The invention of calculus would come in the late 17th century with Gottfried Leibniz's 1684 publication of "Nova Methodus," and in part with Isaac Newton's"Principia" in 1687, followed by additional explanations and reformulations by subsequent mathematicians. Also, European physicist, mathematician and astronomer Galileo was still alive during Harvard's early years -- he died in 1642.
3. The last time the Chicago Cubs won a World Series, the Ottoman Empire still existed.
The Chicago Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908. This was back when there were still teams such as the Brooklyn Superbas and the Boston Doves. The Ottoman Empire, which was founded in the 13th century, also existed back then. Mehmed VIwas the last sultan of the empire and his reign ended in 1922 when the sultanate was abolished and the Turkish government took governing control over the new republic -- 14 years after the Cubs last won the World Series.
4. The Pyramids of Giza were built in the time of wooly mammoths.From what we can tell, the last of the wooly mammoth died out around 1700 B.C. on Russia’s Wrangel Island. In Egypt, the Pyramids of Giza were built around 4,000 years ago, although there have been claims that they're even older. This also means that Cleopatra's time on Earth is actually closer to us in history than to the construction of the pyramids.
5. The fax machine was invented the same year as the Oregon trail migration.
The first fax machine was invented in 1843 by a Scottish mechanic named Alexander Bain. This early model used a combination of synchronized pendulums, electric probes and electrochemically sensitive paper to scan documents, and then send the information over a series of wires to be reproduced. The "Great Migration" on the Oregon trail began the same year, when a wagon train of about 1,000 migrants attempted to travel west, but probably died of dysentery along the way.
6. The jewelry store Tiffany & Co. was founded before Italy was a country.While Rome was officially a holdout for a number of years after, in 1861 General Giuseppe Garibaldi led a successful campaign to gather the various city-states and bring them under one nation. Charles Lewis Tiffany and John B. Young founded Tiffany & Young in 1837 and then became Tiffany & Co. in 1853. This means Audrey Hepburn could have gotten "breakfast at Tiffany's" before she could have had her Italian "Roman Holiday.
Similarly, Macy's was founded in 1858, also before Italy became the nation we know it as today.
7. France was still using the guillotine when "Star Wars" came out.
The last time the guillotine was used as a form of execution in France was in 1977. The guillotine lasted for about two centuries. The first "Star Wars" film was also released in 1977 a few months before the execution.
Another mind-blow French historical fact: The Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889, which is the same year Nintendo was founded and that Van Gogh painted "The Starry Night."
8. Two of President John Tyler's grandsons are still alive.
John Tyler was America's 10th President, serving from 1841 to 1845, but somehow two of his grandsons are still alive. Mental Floss first reported on this fact in 2012, but since then Snopes has verified their identities, while New York Magazine even interviewed one of the grandsons. As of last year, both Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. and Harrison Tyler were still only in their 80s.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
The curious American accent
Hey youz! Whah do ‘Mericans have all different aks-ay-ents? It’s, like, totally confusing and somewhat bizzah, dontcha know.
TALK THIS WAY
An accent is “a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation.” That’s not to be confused with dialect, which is a specific form of a language that has its own unique lexicon (words), grammatical structures, and phonology (a fancy word for accent). So an accent can be a part of a dialect, but not vice versa. Because dialects can be traced to geographical regions, they give linguists important clues to the origin of accents. And discovering where accents came from can explain why an American says “ta-may-to” and a Brit says “ta-mah-toe,” or why Bostonians say “park the cah” and a Nebraskan says “park the car.”
BRITISH INVASIONS
The United States began as colonies of Great Britain, but the settlers didn’t trickle across the Atlantic at random. According to Brandeis University Professor David Hackett Fischer in his bookAlbion’s Seed, there are four primary American accents, which derive from the major migrations from England to the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries.
1. East Anglia to Massachusetts (1620-40). Puritans who fled to the New World to escape religious persecution were, by and large, from the eastern counties of England. To this day, in remote parts of East Anglia, there are rural folk who speak in what is sometimes referred to as the “Norfolk whine.” When they came to New England, that accent came along with them. You may recall the TV commercials where an old fellow says “Pepperidge Fahm remembers…” That’s the Norfolk whine.
2. South and West of England to Virginia (1642-75). Immigrants who settled in the colony of Virginia tended to be wealthy Cavaliers (that is, loyal to the King) who came to the New World to become planters. Many elements of their accent can still be heard in rural Virginia, such as their penchant for elongated vowels -stretching “you” into “yeew,” and shortened consonants- “ax” forask, and “dis” and “dat” for this and that.
3. North Midlands to Pennsylvania and Delaware (1675-1725). In another flight to escape religious persecution, Quakers, largely from the middle and northern parts of England, also settled in the New World. Their speech patterns, characterized by shorter vowel sounds -a short “a” fordance, not the Yankee and East Anglican “dahnce,” or the South England and Virginia “day-ence”- formed the basis for the flat Midwestern American accent we hear today, which has since been adopted as the standard American “non-regional” accent spoken by most newscasters.
4. Borderlands to the Backcountry (1715-75). The so-called “Scotch-Irish” fled their poverty-stricken homeland of northern England and southern Scotland, first to northern Ireland and then to America’s mid-Atlantic coast. These new arrivals were considered uncultured and unruly and didn’t mix well with the established settlers, so most kept going to settle in the backcountry of the Appalachian Mountains. Their distinctive accent can still be heard in many Southern regions: “far” for fire, and “winder” for window. The Borderlands accent gave rise to the twangy “country” accent heard in the poorer parts of the South -as opposed to the more south-of-England “Southern gentleman” drawl heard in more affluent regions. Thank you Yosemite Sam for the former and Foghorn Leghorn for the latter.
THE HUDDLED MASSES
After achieving independence, the United States expanded westward and fresh waves of immigrants arrived in New York, New Orleans, and other port cities. The Northeast kept closer ties with Britain, which explains why Bostonians caught onto the English trend of broadening the “a” in bath, while the flatter pronunciation was used in most of the rest of the country.
WORLD TOUR
Just as it was with the English, immigrants from other countries tended to stick together when they got to America. Here’s a look at where they came from, where they ended up, and how the way they spoke then still affects the way people in the United States speak today.
* Germany. After England, Germany produced the largest wave of U.S. immigrants between the 1680s and the 1760s. Arriving first in Pennsylvania, the newcomers adopted the nasal tones of their Quaker neighbors who had come from England, then added their own clipped German speech patterns. The biggest German influence is the hard “r” found at the end of words -“river” vs. “rivah”- and is the feature that most distinguishes American speech from British. The trend spread as settlers moved into the Midwest and beyond.
* The Netherlands. When settlers from New England moved south to New York, there was already a sizable Dutch population. The mixture of the two groups formed the famous Brooklyn accent (think of Bugs Bunny), in which bird is often pronounced “boid,” these and those, “deez” and “doze,” andcoffee, “caw-fee.” Unlike most other immigrant languages, which were abandoned for English within a generation or two, the Dutch language lingered in New York for three centuries. (Theodore Roosevelt grew up hearing his grandparents speak it at the dinner table as late as the 1860s.) While other immigrant groups have influenced the classic New York accent, it come primarily from original Dutch settlers.
* Russia and Poland. Arriving in New York in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe added many new words and humorous turns of phrase to English, including “I should live so long,” “I need it like I need a hole in the head!” and “What’s up?” Interestingly, although “New Yawk tawk” has become strongly associated with Jewish immigrants, Yiddish seems to have had little affect on the accent itself, which was adopted by the Irish, Italians, Chinese, and dozens of other ethnicities who live in New York. Actual spoken Yiddish -which is very clipped and Germanic- sounds very little like the New York accent.
* Scandinavia. Immigrants from northern Europe settled in the upper Midwest, and many aspects of their Old World accents persist to this day. Referred to as both the Minnesota accent and the Great Lakes accent, it is most notable for the overpronunciation of vowels, especially the long “o” sound, as in “dontcha know.” If you’ve seen the 1996 dark comedy Fargo, that’s a good example of the Minnesota accent (although most native speakers claim that it’s a bit exaggerated in the film).
* France. Much of the French influence on the American accent ended up in Louisiana. Cajuns were originally French settlers who had moved down from Acadia in the eastern part of Canada. In 1765 the British took over, and loyal Acadians fled and resettled in New Orleans, still French territory. Cajun French is very old, dating from the 1600s. It might be understood by someone in Paris today, but only with some effort. The Cajun accent (like the food) has a very distinctive flavor -“un-Yon,” “ve-HIC-le,” and “gay-Ron-tee,” and “LOO-ziana.”
* Africa. The speech of slaves brought over from West Africa had a strong effect on American English. However, its exact origin is hard to trace. There are a number of West African languages, and slaves were intentionally separated from members of their own groups to make it difficult for them to conspire. That led to what are called pidgins -simple languages with few rules that were cobbled together from two or more languages. According to some theories, this was the origin of what is now called African American Vernacular English (AAVE). It has been called ebonics, but use of that term is controversial. Many linguists now believe that West African languages had little if any influence on AAVE, and that its origin can be traced to early Southern dialects brought over from England. Nevertheless, some of the cadence and lilt of the Southern accent -spoken by both blacks and whites- probably comes from African slaves. Some linguists believe this could be because black women served as nannies to white children, and those relationships helped blend the two speaking styles.
BARN IN THE USA
Not all accents were brought over from other countries. A few are as American as apple pie.
* In a small section of southern Utah, there is an accent in which “ar” sounds are transposed with “or” sounds. It’s uncertain how this way of speaking came about, but people who live in this region don’t say “born in a barn,” rather “barn in a born.”
* A relatively young accent, Valley Girl, or “Valspeak,” began in the 1980s. The most defining characteristic: Raising the intonation at the end of a sentence as if it were a question. Originating in the San Fernando Valley of southern California, Valspeak may be one of the most uniquely American accents. Some linguists speculate its roots may be traced to refugees from the Ozarks who moved to California during the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.
HOMOGENIZATION
U.S. regional accents are in danger of being lost. Because of TV, movies, video games, and YouTube, kids learn less about speaking from their parents and their grandparents than they do from the likes of the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, and Pixar. Result: A young boy in Boston might pretend to “park the car,” and a teenage girl in Georgia might roll her eyes when her mother says “Y’all.” If this trends continues, then perhaps one day there will be just one American accent.
TALK THIS WAYAn accent is “a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation.” That’s not to be confused with dialect, which is a specific form of a language that has its own unique lexicon (words), grammatical structures, and phonology (a fancy word for accent). So an accent can be a part of a dialect, but not vice versa. Because dialects can be traced to geographical regions, they give linguists important clues to the origin of accents. And discovering where accents came from can explain why an American says “ta-may-to” and a Brit says “ta-mah-toe,” or why Bostonians say “park the cah” and a Nebraskan says “park the car.”
BRITISH INVASIONS
The United States began as colonies of Great Britain, but the settlers didn’t trickle across the Atlantic at random. According to Brandeis University Professor David Hackett Fischer in his bookAlbion’s Seed, there are four primary American accents, which derive from the major migrations from England to the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries.
1. East Anglia to Massachusetts (1620-40). Puritans who fled to the New World to escape religious persecution were, by and large, from the eastern counties of England. To this day, in remote parts of East Anglia, there are rural folk who speak in what is sometimes referred to as the “Norfolk whine.” When they came to New England, that accent came along with them. You may recall the TV commercials where an old fellow says “Pepperidge Fahm remembers…” That’s the Norfolk whine.
2. South and West of England to Virginia (1642-75). Immigrants who settled in the colony of Virginia tended to be wealthy Cavaliers (that is, loyal to the King) who came to the New World to become planters. Many elements of their accent can still be heard in rural Virginia, such as their penchant for elongated vowels -stretching “you” into “yeew,” and shortened consonants- “ax” forask, and “dis” and “dat” for this and that.
3. North Midlands to Pennsylvania and Delaware (1675-1725). In another flight to escape religious persecution, Quakers, largely from the middle and northern parts of England, also settled in the New World. Their speech patterns, characterized by shorter vowel sounds -a short “a” fordance, not the Yankee and East Anglican “dahnce,” or the South England and Virginia “day-ence”- formed the basis for the flat Midwestern American accent we hear today, which has since been adopted as the standard American “non-regional” accent spoken by most newscasters.
4. Borderlands to the Backcountry (1715-75). The so-called “Scotch-Irish” fled their poverty-stricken homeland of northern England and southern Scotland, first to northern Ireland and then to America’s mid-Atlantic coast. These new arrivals were considered uncultured and unruly and didn’t mix well with the established settlers, so most kept going to settle in the backcountry of the Appalachian Mountains. Their distinctive accent can still be heard in many Southern regions: “far” for fire, and “winder” for window. The Borderlands accent gave rise to the twangy “country” accent heard in the poorer parts of the South -as opposed to the more south-of-England “Southern gentleman” drawl heard in more affluent regions. Thank you Yosemite Sam for the former and Foghorn Leghorn for the latter.
THE HUDDLED MASSES
After achieving independence, the United States expanded westward and fresh waves of immigrants arrived in New York, New Orleans, and other port cities. The Northeast kept closer ties with Britain, which explains why Bostonians caught onto the English trend of broadening the “a” in bath, while the flatter pronunciation was used in most of the rest of the country.
WORLD TOUR
Just as it was with the English, immigrants from other countries tended to stick together when they got to America. Here’s a look at where they came from, where they ended up, and how the way they spoke then still affects the way people in the United States speak today.
* Germany. After England, Germany produced the largest wave of U.S. immigrants between the 1680s and the 1760s. Arriving first in Pennsylvania, the newcomers adopted the nasal tones of their Quaker neighbors who had come from England, then added their own clipped German speech patterns. The biggest German influence is the hard “r” found at the end of words -“river” vs. “rivah”- and is the feature that most distinguishes American speech from British. The trend spread as settlers moved into the Midwest and beyond.
* The Netherlands. When settlers from New England moved south to New York, there was already a sizable Dutch population. The mixture of the two groups formed the famous Brooklyn accent (think of Bugs Bunny), in which bird is often pronounced “boid,” these and those, “deez” and “doze,” andcoffee, “caw-fee.” Unlike most other immigrant languages, which were abandoned for English within a generation or two, the Dutch language lingered in New York for three centuries. (Theodore Roosevelt grew up hearing his grandparents speak it at the dinner table as late as the 1860s.) While other immigrant groups have influenced the classic New York accent, it come primarily from original Dutch settlers.
* Russia and Poland. Arriving in New York in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe added many new words and humorous turns of phrase to English, including “I should live so long,” “I need it like I need a hole in the head!” and “What’s up?” Interestingly, although “New Yawk tawk” has become strongly associated with Jewish immigrants, Yiddish seems to have had little affect on the accent itself, which was adopted by the Irish, Italians, Chinese, and dozens of other ethnicities who live in New York. Actual spoken Yiddish -which is very clipped and Germanic- sounds very little like the New York accent.
* Scandinavia. Immigrants from northern Europe settled in the upper Midwest, and many aspects of their Old World accents persist to this day. Referred to as both the Minnesota accent and the Great Lakes accent, it is most notable for the overpronunciation of vowels, especially the long “o” sound, as in “dontcha know.” If you’ve seen the 1996 dark comedy Fargo, that’s a good example of the Minnesota accent (although most native speakers claim that it’s a bit exaggerated in the film).
* France. Much of the French influence on the American accent ended up in Louisiana. Cajuns were originally French settlers who had moved down from Acadia in the eastern part of Canada. In 1765 the British took over, and loyal Acadians fled and resettled in New Orleans, still French territory. Cajun French is very old, dating from the 1600s. It might be understood by someone in Paris today, but only with some effort. The Cajun accent (like the food) has a very distinctive flavor -“un-Yon,” “ve-HIC-le,” and “gay-Ron-tee,” and “LOO-ziana.”
* Africa. The speech of slaves brought over from West Africa had a strong effect on American English. However, its exact origin is hard to trace. There are a number of West African languages, and slaves were intentionally separated from members of their own groups to make it difficult for them to conspire. That led to what are called pidgins -simple languages with few rules that were cobbled together from two or more languages. According to some theories, this was the origin of what is now called African American Vernacular English (AAVE). It has been called ebonics, but use of that term is controversial. Many linguists now believe that West African languages had little if any influence on AAVE, and that its origin can be traced to early Southern dialects brought over from England. Nevertheless, some of the cadence and lilt of the Southern accent -spoken by both blacks and whites- probably comes from African slaves. Some linguists believe this could be because black women served as nannies to white children, and those relationships helped blend the two speaking styles.
BARN IN THE USA
Not all accents were brought over from other countries. A few are as American as apple pie.
* In a small section of southern Utah, there is an accent in which “ar” sounds are transposed with “or” sounds. It’s uncertain how this way of speaking came about, but people who live in this region don’t say “born in a barn,” rather “barn in a born.”
* A relatively young accent, Valley Girl, or “Valspeak,” began in the 1980s. The most defining characteristic: Raising the intonation at the end of a sentence as if it were a question. Originating in the San Fernando Valley of southern California, Valspeak may be one of the most uniquely American accents. Some linguists speculate its roots may be traced to refugees from the Ozarks who moved to California during the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.
HOMOGENIZATION
U.S. regional accents are in danger of being lost. Because of TV, movies, video games, and YouTube, kids learn less about speaking from their parents and their grandparents than they do from the likes of the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, and Pixar. Result: A young boy in Boston might pretend to “park the car,” and a teenage girl in Georgia might roll her eyes when her mother says “Y’all.” If this trends continues, then perhaps one day there will be just one American accent.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Landmarks that may not stand the test of time
Ancient civilizations have long written about the power and force that weather once brought upon them. There have been descriptions of grueling heat from the ancient Egyptians to accounts of great typhoons passed down by the ancient Greeks.
Centuries have passed and few visible signs of ancient people still exist today; we regard monuments across the world as major tourists attractions. Slowly but surely, extreme weather is weakening popular monuments across the globe. Meteorologist Jim Andrews, who specializes in international weather, weighs in on this list of the world's wonders and whether they can outlast the test of time.
1. The Colosseum (Rome, Italy)
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| Getty Images |
The Colosseum, built from 70-80AD, was the center for Roman gladiatorial fights and spectacles of survival. Andrews mentioned that the ancient stage may be in its own fight for survival.
"Snow and freezing temperatures are infrequent visitors in Rome. However, when it does snow, if it sits on the rock by day, with above-freezing temperatures, it will melt. Water trickles out and at night if a cold wave of below-freezing temperatures enters the area, it will cause the rock to crack."
Water getting into the monument's nooks and crannies is an issue, warned Andrews.
"It's just like a chisel, an extremely powerful force. I would say that it's most like if you've ever put an aluminum can in the freezer and the bottom pops out. That's what's happened to the Colosseum over time."
This freezing and thawing cycle that has taken place in the Colosseum is causing it to crumble. It's made it 1,942 years thus far so perhaps saying 'arrivederci' won't be in the ancient monument's near future.
2. The Temple of Epicurean Apollo (Eira, Greece)
This temple was dedicated to Apollo after saving the inhabitants of the local area from deadly epidemics that cursed the area. It stands in the hilly landscape of Greece approximately 1,131 m above sea level.
Andrews noted, "The Peloponnese Peninsula (mainland Greece) is a relatively wet place because of the mountains. Temperatures during the winter period, in the Mediterranean climate, don't get very low despite that Greece shares a latitude of that similar to Boston, Mass."
Built in 420-400BC, archeologists found water lies within the pores of the marble, and during the rare times that lower temperatures reached the Mediterranean, the water has frozen and expanded the ancient rock past its original construction.
"This monument is near the highest point of the peninsula, and as elevation rises, temperatures drop. In January alone, the area received half of the month's average rainfall so it is a place where precipitation plays a role," said Andrews of the water within the local limestone.
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| WikiMedia |
This temple was dedicated to Apollo after saving the inhabitants of the local area from deadly epidemics that cursed the area. It stands in the hilly landscape of Greece approximately 1,131 m above sea level.
Andrews noted, "The Peloponnese Peninsula (mainland Greece) is a relatively wet place because of the mountains. Temperatures during the winter period, in the Mediterranean climate, don't get very low despite that Greece shares a latitude of that similar to Boston, Mass."
Built in 420-400BC, archeologists found water lies within the pores of the marble, and during the rare times that lower temperatures reached the Mediterranean, the water has frozen and expanded the ancient rock past its original construction.
"This monument is near the highest point of the peninsula, and as elevation rises, temperatures drop. In January alone, the area received half of the month's average rainfall so it is a place where precipitation plays a role," said Andrews of the water within the local limestone.
3. The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial (Washington, D.C.)
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| Flickr |
The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial is located across the street from the Capitol Building and is a prime example of the effects that acid rain has on bronze. Bronze is a metal mostly made up of copper and a small amount of tin and does not take kindly to acid.
Andrews echoed, "Carbonic acid is naturally present in rainfall and will react with copper thus making those green stains on the statue. Being located further down south doesn't help the monument either. Chemical attacks will occur faster because of the seasonal temperatures. Higher temperatures speed up weathering and damage."
According to the National Park Service, wax is applied to the monument at least once a year to protect and preserve the metal like wearing a raincoat to protect yourself from getting wet.
Andrews echoed, "Carbonic acid is naturally present in rainfall and will react with copper thus making those green stains on the statue. Being located further down south doesn't help the monument either. Chemical attacks will occur faster because of the seasonal temperatures. Higher temperatures speed up weathering and damage."
According to the National Park Service, wax is applied to the monument at least once a year to protect and preserve the metal like wearing a raincoat to protect yourself from getting wet.
4. The Statue of Liberty (New York, N.Y.)
Often associated with the city of New York, Lady Liberty stands tall amidst the Hudson River. The monument was originally a gift given to America from France in recognition of the "friendship established during the American Revolution," according to the U.S. National Park Service (NPS).
After years of being exposed to the elements, the Statue of Liberty has experienced severe amounts of natural weathering. Entirely made of copper, years of rain has turned the once-bronze exterior green.
"Copper reacts with oxygen causing carbonation. Normal rain water reacts with the copper and the wetness makes it dissolve. Water puts the reactants in direct contact with each other," said Andrews.
The green coloring occurs due to chemical reactions between water and metal.
The addition of pollutants in the air also speeds up this chemical reaction process. Weather-related repairs were made in 1937 because water leaked into the base, and careful maintenance over the years has protected the statue from further weathering issues.
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| Getty Images |
Often associated with the city of New York, Lady Liberty stands tall amidst the Hudson River. The monument was originally a gift given to America from France in recognition of the "friendship established during the American Revolution," according to the U.S. National Park Service (NPS).
After years of being exposed to the elements, the Statue of Liberty has experienced severe amounts of natural weathering. Entirely made of copper, years of rain has turned the once-bronze exterior green.
"Copper reacts with oxygen causing carbonation. Normal rain water reacts with the copper and the wetness makes it dissolve. Water puts the reactants in direct contact with each other," said Andrews.
The green coloring occurs due to chemical reactions between water and metal.
The addition of pollutants in the air also speeds up this chemical reaction process. Weather-related repairs were made in 1937 because water leaked into the base, and careful maintenance over the years has protected the statue from further weathering issues.
5. The Sphinx (Giza, Egypt)
Built in the ancient Egyptian period known as the Old Kingdom (c. 2686-2134 BC), the great Sphinx is now eroding before our very eyes. Its location, the Giza Plateau, has an eastward sloping topography.
The topography surrounding the monument has created a natural rainwater run-off into the west part of the Sphinx that has added to the eroding limestone for years.
"They do get a rare torrential downpour in the desert, so yes, rain and run-off do happen," said Andrews.
Erosion by water is not the only issue the Sphinx is undergoing, Andrews warned. "Being in the desert, in that exposed environment, a lot can move especially with high winds. It's kin to sandblasting, that sand, being a grainy material, it's like a hand with a tool in it. Damage will be done."
Another water-related issue the porous rock of the Sphinx faces is ground water. Andrews said, "Salt-laden groundwater can wick up into porous rock from the salt in the soil. Moisture isn't good for this type of large structures."
Years have passed, and these monuments have survived. However, some of them may have a shorter lifespan than we think. Andrews warned not to take the lifetime of these monuments for granted. "Anything on Earth that is man-made or sticking up will be attacked by the elements. Atmospheric forces will take their toll," Andrews said.
 |
| Getty Images |
Built in the ancient Egyptian period known as the Old Kingdom (c. 2686-2134 BC), the great Sphinx is now eroding before our very eyes. Its location, the Giza Plateau, has an eastward sloping topography.
The topography surrounding the monument has created a natural rainwater run-off into the west part of the Sphinx that has added to the eroding limestone for years.
"They do get a rare torrential downpour in the desert, so yes, rain and run-off do happen," said Andrews.
Erosion by water is not the only issue the Sphinx is undergoing, Andrews warned. "Being in the desert, in that exposed environment, a lot can move especially with high winds. It's kin to sandblasting, that sand, being a grainy material, it's like a hand with a tool in it. Damage will be done."
Another water-related issue the porous rock of the Sphinx faces is ground water. Andrews said, "Salt-laden groundwater can wick up into porous rock from the salt in the soil. Moisture isn't good for this type of large structures."
Years have passed, and these monuments have survived. However, some of them may have a shorter lifespan than we think. Andrews warned not to take the lifetime of these monuments for granted. "Anything on Earth that is man-made or sticking up will be attacked by the elements. Atmospheric forces will take their toll," Andrews said.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Monday, January 13, 2014
Fact-checking five Oscar contenders
Awards season kicks into high gear this weekend, with the Golden Globes set to crown winners that will probably go on to score more than a few Oscars in March. As always, the list of nominees is packed with films that claim to be based in reality — but a closer look reveals that they may not even resemble the truth.
If you missed it, we already fact-checked Saving Mr. Banks, 12 Years a Slave, The Butler, Captain Phillips, Philomena, and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. Check it out here.
And now, let's fact check five more of this year's contenders:
1. American Hustle
David O. Russell's star-studded period caper is based on the FBI's ABSCAM sting in the late '70s, which began as a simple investigation into stolen property but wound up implicating a number of corrupt public officials, including several members of Congress. In the film, Christian Bale stars as FBI informant Irving Rosenfeld — a character based on the real-life swindler Melvin Weinberg, who cooked up the idea of using agents dressed as Arab Sheikhs to lure potentially corrupt politicians into illegal deals.
American Hustle's title card concedes that only "some of these things actually happened," and mostly focuses on the characters surrounding the sting. But the film does leave out some of the key ramifications of ABSCAM, as Evan Hughes writes for Slate: "Abscam had some interesting postscripts that don't get aired in the movie. A debate that became central to the trial outlasted the case: Had the targets been entrapped? Didn't Weinberg put words in Senator Williams's mouth on that one tape? Apart from trying to impeach Weinberg's character, crying entrapment was just about the only defense that anyone could muster given the hard evidence. The Justice Department ended up overhauling the rules for undercover work to clarify what constitutes fair play."
A few other facts were changed for the film, such as the depiction of Camden Mayor Angelo Errichetti (who is rechristened Carmine Polito and played by Jeremy Renner in American Hustle). In real life, Errichetti was the big link between the slew of politicians eventually caught up in the sting and Weinberg and the FBI, who orchestrated it. As Jimmy So writes for The Daily Beast: "Christian Bale's Irving Rosenfeld liked Polito so much that he engineered a scheme to blackmail the FBI into giving Polito a reduced sentence. That's completely made up, although Weinberg did like Errichetti very much, not because he was a good man but because he was the biggest crook of them all. 'He's a likeable guy… he didn't beat around the bush,' Weinberg told 60 Minutes. 'He wanted to make money.'"
In addition, as So points out, American Hustle's FBI could only find a Mexican-American to pose as the Arab Sheikh. In real life, they started out with an agent who wasn't Mexican but didn't speak any Arabic, though they later managed to find a Lebanese-American to play the role.
2. The Wolf of Wall Street
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as famed Wall Street con man Jordan Belfort in Martin Scorsese's hedonistic look at the excesses of '80s and '90s finance culture. The Wolf of Wall Street has become somewhat controversial for its unapologetic (and non-stop) depictions of sex and drug use — so much so that DiCaprio and Scorsese themselves have had to defend the film. The movie is based on a memoir of the same name by Belfort, whose brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont defrauded investors, leading to Belfort's 1998 indictment for money laundering and securities fraud. As Eliana Dockterman points out at TIME, the fact that the film is based on Belfort's own memoir is problematic to begin with: "After all, Belfort was a scam artist — he made a living by lying. Scorsese, knowing this, portrays Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) as an unreliable narrator in the film."
The focus on Belfort is also, perhaps, why the film skipped over any depiction of his victims. Joel M. Cohen, a former assistant United States Attorney who prosecuted Belfort, writes for The New York Times that victims "don't figure in the Belfort books, though thousands have not been recompensed. Similarly, remorse is merely a convenient word for Mr. Belfort, sandwiched between stories of drug-addled fraud and nasty put-downs of those closest to him….The filmmakers have said that they didn't want to depict Stratton's victims because it would detract from their focus on the brutality of the wrongdoers. The details that animate a successful criminal prosecution don't always make for compelling on-screen storytelling."
As for some of the seedier elements depicted in the film, such as dwarf-tossing: Though this came straight from Belfort's book, it's been disputed by Danny Porush, the co-founder and former president of Stratton Oakmont, Belfort's former firm. "The book... is a distant relative of the truth, and the film is a distant relative of the book," he told Asawin Suebsaeng of Mother Jones. Though Porush did admit to eating a goldfish, as his on-screen counterpart Jonah Hill does in the movie, Porush says "there was never a chimpanzee in the office... we never abused [or threw] the midgets in the office; we were friendly to them...There was no physical abuse."
3. Inside Llewyn Davis
The unsuccessful Greenwich Village folk singer at the center of the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis is a fictional character, but the film itself involves many composites of real people. Davis is loosely based on Dave Van Ronk, a folk singer living in the Village at the time, and Inside Dave Van Ronk was the album that inspired the film's title and the title character's own record. Though Van Ronk never made it big, he was integral to the scene, and, in fact, New York Times folk reporter Robert Shelton once labeled him "the musical mayor of MacDougal Street."
There are a lot of similarities between Oscar Isaac's Davis and the real Van Ronk. For instance, Van Ronk's past career as a merchant marine and his plan to give up music and return to the profession — a plan ultimately thwarted by his realization that he lost the necessary paperwork — were real. But Van Ronk did not start out in a duo, as Davis did, and was by many accounts not as much of a sad sack as Davis either. Van Ronk also has the distinction of being credited as a mentor to Bob Dylan, teaching him a thing or two about playing guitar, and even writing the version of "House of the Rising Sun" that Dylan later made famous (and possibly stole). "The character is not at all Dave, but the music is," Elijah Wald, who co-wrote Van Ronk's memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, told the The New York Times.
As for the folk world in general, a number of people living the scene at the time have disputed the Coens' take on Greenwich during the era. "The performers reflect absolutely nobody I knew in the folk-music world," Van Ronk's first wife, Terri Thal, told Vulture. "The world that they live in is a depressing, unhappy place, and we lived in a fun, musically vibrant, intellectually interesting world. People were competitive only in the sense that they were trying to be heard — they weren't out to score above anybody else."
4. Rush
Ron Howard adapted this story of the bitter rivalry between motor racers James Hunt, a Brit played by Chris Hemsworth, and Niki Lauda, an Austrian played by Daniel Brühl, and how their relationship evolved throughout their parallel careers.
But, as Alex von Tunzelmann writes for The Guardian, the main conceit of the film is largely embellished: "In fact, judging by Gerald Donaldson's biography of Hunt, their rivalry was quite friendly. Hunt won a Formula Two race against Lauda at Oulton Park in 1972; Donaldson notes that Lauda and another driver, Ronnie Peterson, congratulated him and 'were genuinely happy to see James finally get a share of the success they felt he deserved'. Hunt — who was not in the habit of sugar-coating anything he said to the press — said: 'I got on very well with Niki and always had done since we first met in Formula Three and gypsied around Europe together. We raced against each other but we also teamed up as mates, not just casual acquaintances.'"
Though this inaccuracy is not exactly confidence-inspiring, one major part of the movie is real: James Hunt's incessant partying. As Grantland's Patricia Lee writes, Hunt was something of a lothario. "Hunt was believed to have slept with more than 5,000 women, 'sometimes having sex minutes before a race.' Apparently 'Hunt's appetite for wine and women was legendary.' Exactly how legendary? Well, Hunt slept with 33 British Airways stewardesses and a number of Japanese fans during his two-week stay in Tokyo for the 1976 Japanese Grand Prix."
5. Dallas Buyer's Club
Matthew McConaughey plays Ronald Woodroof, a Texas electrician who is diagnosed with AIDS and eventually sets up the titular drug ring that helped procure unauthorized AIDS drugs for those who couldn't afford AZT or had a negative reaction to it.
According to TIME, Woodroof did indeed smuggle the drugs across the border from Mexico, occasionally disguised as a doctor or a priest, and "even once filled a suitcase with dry ice when moving through customs in Japan to conceal drugs (after bribing a Japanese doctor for a shipment of drugs not-yet-approved in America)." The film is also accurate in its portrayal of Woodruff as an initially homophobic womanizer who remained in denial about his disease for some time, but who evolved as he came into contact with gay people through his work.
But other aspects of the film were purely fictional, including Woodruff's partnerships with Jared Leto's transgender character Rayon and Jennifer Garner's Dr. Eve Saks. As Aisha Harris writes forSlate: "[Co-writers Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack] interviewed a number of transgendered activists and doctors who faced similar struggles with access to drugs during the course of their writing, and they created composites of those people for the film...Rayon in particular was created as a character to give Ron a dramatic challenge to his prejudices while facing disease, Borten told me. The real Woodroof didn't have any particular Rayon in his life, but he was, in fact, deeply changed by his diagnosis and his subsequent work with the Dallas Buyers Club. The character arc, from bigotry to tolerance, does, Borten says, reflect Woodroof's own transformation from a homophobe to a compassionate advocate."
Source
If you missed it, we already fact-checked Saving Mr. Banks, 12 Years a Slave, The Butler, Captain Phillips, Philomena, and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. Check it out here.
And now, let's fact check five more of this year's contenders:
1. American Hustle
David O. Russell's star-studded period caper is based on the FBI's ABSCAM sting in the late '70s, which began as a simple investigation into stolen property but wound up implicating a number of corrupt public officials, including several members of Congress. In the film, Christian Bale stars as FBI informant Irving Rosenfeld — a character based on the real-life swindler Melvin Weinberg, who cooked up the idea of using agents dressed as Arab Sheikhs to lure potentially corrupt politicians into illegal deals.American Hustle's title card concedes that only "some of these things actually happened," and mostly focuses on the characters surrounding the sting. But the film does leave out some of the key ramifications of ABSCAM, as Evan Hughes writes for Slate: "Abscam had some interesting postscripts that don't get aired in the movie. A debate that became central to the trial outlasted the case: Had the targets been entrapped? Didn't Weinberg put words in Senator Williams's mouth on that one tape? Apart from trying to impeach Weinberg's character, crying entrapment was just about the only defense that anyone could muster given the hard evidence. The Justice Department ended up overhauling the rules for undercover work to clarify what constitutes fair play."
A few other facts were changed for the film, such as the depiction of Camden Mayor Angelo Errichetti (who is rechristened Carmine Polito and played by Jeremy Renner in American Hustle). In real life, Errichetti was the big link between the slew of politicians eventually caught up in the sting and Weinberg and the FBI, who orchestrated it. As Jimmy So writes for The Daily Beast: "Christian Bale's Irving Rosenfeld liked Polito so much that he engineered a scheme to blackmail the FBI into giving Polito a reduced sentence. That's completely made up, although Weinberg did like Errichetti very much, not because he was a good man but because he was the biggest crook of them all. 'He's a likeable guy… he didn't beat around the bush,' Weinberg told 60 Minutes. 'He wanted to make money.'"
In addition, as So points out, American Hustle's FBI could only find a Mexican-American to pose as the Arab Sheikh. In real life, they started out with an agent who wasn't Mexican but didn't speak any Arabic, though they later managed to find a Lebanese-American to play the role.
2. The Wolf of Wall Street
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as famed Wall Street con man Jordan Belfort in Martin Scorsese's hedonistic look at the excesses of '80s and '90s finance culture. The Wolf of Wall Street has become somewhat controversial for its unapologetic (and non-stop) depictions of sex and drug use — so much so that DiCaprio and Scorsese themselves have had to defend the film. The movie is based on a memoir of the same name by Belfort, whose brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont defrauded investors, leading to Belfort's 1998 indictment for money laundering and securities fraud. As Eliana Dockterman points out at TIME, the fact that the film is based on Belfort's own memoir is problematic to begin with: "After all, Belfort was a scam artist — he made a living by lying. Scorsese, knowing this, portrays Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) as an unreliable narrator in the film."The focus on Belfort is also, perhaps, why the film skipped over any depiction of his victims. Joel M. Cohen, a former assistant United States Attorney who prosecuted Belfort, writes for The New York Times that victims "don't figure in the Belfort books, though thousands have not been recompensed. Similarly, remorse is merely a convenient word for Mr. Belfort, sandwiched between stories of drug-addled fraud and nasty put-downs of those closest to him….The filmmakers have said that they didn't want to depict Stratton's victims because it would detract from their focus on the brutality of the wrongdoers. The details that animate a successful criminal prosecution don't always make for compelling on-screen storytelling."
As for some of the seedier elements depicted in the film, such as dwarf-tossing: Though this came straight from Belfort's book, it's been disputed by Danny Porush, the co-founder and former president of Stratton Oakmont, Belfort's former firm. "The book... is a distant relative of the truth, and the film is a distant relative of the book," he told Asawin Suebsaeng of Mother Jones. Though Porush did admit to eating a goldfish, as his on-screen counterpart Jonah Hill does in the movie, Porush says "there was never a chimpanzee in the office... we never abused [or threw] the midgets in the office; we were friendly to them...There was no physical abuse."
3. Inside Llewyn Davis
There are a lot of similarities between Oscar Isaac's Davis and the real Van Ronk. For instance, Van Ronk's past career as a merchant marine and his plan to give up music and return to the profession — a plan ultimately thwarted by his realization that he lost the necessary paperwork — were real. But Van Ronk did not start out in a duo, as Davis did, and was by many accounts not as much of a sad sack as Davis either. Van Ronk also has the distinction of being credited as a mentor to Bob Dylan, teaching him a thing or two about playing guitar, and even writing the version of "House of the Rising Sun" that Dylan later made famous (and possibly stole). "The character is not at all Dave, but the music is," Elijah Wald, who co-wrote Van Ronk's memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, told the The New York Times.
As for the folk world in general, a number of people living the scene at the time have disputed the Coens' take on Greenwich during the era. "The performers reflect absolutely nobody I knew in the folk-music world," Van Ronk's first wife, Terri Thal, told Vulture. "The world that they live in is a depressing, unhappy place, and we lived in a fun, musically vibrant, intellectually interesting world. People were competitive only in the sense that they were trying to be heard — they weren't out to score above anybody else."
4. Rush
But, as Alex von Tunzelmann writes for The Guardian, the main conceit of the film is largely embellished: "In fact, judging by Gerald Donaldson's biography of Hunt, their rivalry was quite friendly. Hunt won a Formula Two race against Lauda at Oulton Park in 1972; Donaldson notes that Lauda and another driver, Ronnie Peterson, congratulated him and 'were genuinely happy to see James finally get a share of the success they felt he deserved'. Hunt — who was not in the habit of sugar-coating anything he said to the press — said: 'I got on very well with Niki and always had done since we first met in Formula Three and gypsied around Europe together. We raced against each other but we also teamed up as mates, not just casual acquaintances.'"
Though this inaccuracy is not exactly confidence-inspiring, one major part of the movie is real: James Hunt's incessant partying. As Grantland's Patricia Lee writes, Hunt was something of a lothario. "Hunt was believed to have slept with more than 5,000 women, 'sometimes having sex minutes before a race.' Apparently 'Hunt's appetite for wine and women was legendary.' Exactly how legendary? Well, Hunt slept with 33 British Airways stewardesses and a number of Japanese fans during his two-week stay in Tokyo for the 1976 Japanese Grand Prix."
5. Dallas Buyer's Club
Matthew McConaughey plays Ronald Woodroof, a Texas electrician who is diagnosed with AIDS and eventually sets up the titular drug ring that helped procure unauthorized AIDS drugs for those who couldn't afford AZT or had a negative reaction to it.According to TIME, Woodroof did indeed smuggle the drugs across the border from Mexico, occasionally disguised as a doctor or a priest, and "even once filled a suitcase with dry ice when moving through customs in Japan to conceal drugs (after bribing a Japanese doctor for a shipment of drugs not-yet-approved in America)." The film is also accurate in its portrayal of Woodruff as an initially homophobic womanizer who remained in denial about his disease for some time, but who evolved as he came into contact with gay people through his work.
But other aspects of the film were purely fictional, including Woodruff's partnerships with Jared Leto's transgender character Rayon and Jennifer Garner's Dr. Eve Saks. As Aisha Harris writes forSlate: "[Co-writers Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack] interviewed a number of transgendered activists and doctors who faced similar struggles with access to drugs during the course of their writing, and they created composites of those people for the film...Rayon in particular was created as a character to give Ron a dramatic challenge to his prejudices while facing disease, Borten told me. The real Woodroof didn't have any particular Rayon in his life, but he was, in fact, deeply changed by his diagnosis and his subsequent work with the Dallas Buyers Club. The character arc, from bigotry to tolerance, does, Borten says, reflect Woodroof's own transformation from a homophobe to a compassionate advocate."
Source
Sunday, January 12, 2014
"Catching Fire" is the first film with a female lead to top the box office in 40 years
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire made history on Thursday, surpassing Iron Man 3as the top domestic grossing film released in 2013, with $409.4 million at the box office. It’s a remarkable achievement for the sequel, especially since, as Lionsgate crowed in a release on Friday, it is the first time two films in a franchise have both grossed more than $400 million in the U.S. (The first Hunger Games made $408 million domestically in 2012.)
But Catching Fire reached an even bigger milestone on Thursday, and it is a doozy. As entertainment journalist Mark Harris first pointed out on Twitter:
Insane.
To be fair, since The Exorcist opened in 1973, there have been films featuring women in arguably lead roles that have topped the domestic box office for the year: 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and 2001’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone both starred Emma Watson; 2009’s Avatar starred Zoe Saldana; 1997’s Titanic starred Kate Winslet; and 1978’s Grease starred Olivia Newton-John. But all of those movies also featured a male actor either as a co-lead or the film’s main protagonist (respectively, Daniel Radcliffe, Sam Worthington, Leonardo DiCaprio, and John Travolta).
Jennifer Lawrence, by contrast, is inarguably the sole protagonist of Catching Fire. Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, and Sam Claflin fill in the main supporting roles, but we do not track their emotional story in the movie. We only track Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen.
In truth, The Exorcist just barely qualifies as a film with a solo female protagonist. The Oscar-winning horror film starts off following Chris MacNeil’s (Ellen Burstyn) terror at the deteriorating health of her young daughter Regan (Linda Blair). But the second half of the film essentially drops Burstyn’s role as two priests played by Max von Sydow and Jason Miller perform the titular exorcism on Regan.
If you want to find a No. 1 movie with a woman as the clear, unambiguous lead, you’ve got to go back to 1968’s Funny Girl, starring Barbra Streisand as groundbreaking comedienne Fanny Brice. (Omar Sharif plays Brice’s first husband Nicky Arnstein, and though the film tracks the arc of their relationship, it does so from Brice’s point of view.)
The fact that it’s taken four decades for a film driven solely by a female character to be the most popular movie of the year in the U.S. is yet another damning indictmentof both American moviegoing taste and where Hollywood chooses to invest the bulk of its filmmaking capital. It should also perhaps indicate once more to studio chiefs that modern-day audiences are not allergic to female-driven movies — if theydidn’t have enough hints already.
Meanwhile, even though Catching Fire’s current total global gross of $832.8 million is a 20% improvement over its predecessor, it isn’t enough to beat Iron Man 3’s $1.2 billion worldwide box office number — and global box office is increasingly what drives Hollywood’s bottom line. But if the next two Hunger Games films, 2014’sMockingjay Part 1 and 2015’s Mockingjay Part 2, follow the same global box office trajectory, the franchise could very well soon be the biggest in the world, as well.
But Catching Fire reached an even bigger milestone on Thursday, and it is a doozy. As entertainment journalist Mark Harris first pointed out on Twitter:
Remarkable stat: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is the first movie with a solo female lead to be the year's #1 film since The Exorcist.
To be fair, since The Exorcist opened in 1973, there have been films featuring women in arguably lead roles that have topped the domestic box office for the year: 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and 2001’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone both starred Emma Watson; 2009’s Avatar starred Zoe Saldana; 1997’s Titanic starred Kate Winslet; and 1978’s Grease starred Olivia Newton-John. But all of those movies also featured a male actor either as a co-lead or the film’s main protagonist (respectively, Daniel Radcliffe, Sam Worthington, Leonardo DiCaprio, and John Travolta).
Jennifer Lawrence, by contrast, is inarguably the sole protagonist of Catching Fire. Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, and Sam Claflin fill in the main supporting roles, but we do not track their emotional story in the movie. We only track Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen.
In truth, The Exorcist just barely qualifies as a film with a solo female protagonist. The Oscar-winning horror film starts off following Chris MacNeil’s (Ellen Burstyn) terror at the deteriorating health of her young daughter Regan (Linda Blair). But the second half of the film essentially drops Burstyn’s role as two priests played by Max von Sydow and Jason Miller perform the titular exorcism on Regan.
If you want to find a No. 1 movie with a woman as the clear, unambiguous lead, you’ve got to go back to 1968’s Funny Girl, starring Barbra Streisand as groundbreaking comedienne Fanny Brice. (Omar Sharif plays Brice’s first husband Nicky Arnstein, and though the film tracks the arc of their relationship, it does so from Brice’s point of view.)
The fact that it’s taken four decades for a film driven solely by a female character to be the most popular movie of the year in the U.S. is yet another damning indictmentof both American moviegoing taste and where Hollywood chooses to invest the bulk of its filmmaking capital. It should also perhaps indicate once more to studio chiefs that modern-day audiences are not allergic to female-driven movies — if theydidn’t have enough hints already.
Meanwhile, even though Catching Fire’s current total global gross of $832.8 million is a 20% improvement over its predecessor, it isn’t enough to beat Iron Man 3’s $1.2 billion worldwide box office number — and global box office is increasingly what drives Hollywood’s bottom line. But if the next two Hunger Games films, 2014’sMockingjay Part 1 and 2015’s Mockingjay Part 2, follow the same global box office trajectory, the franchise could very well soon be the biggest in the world, as well.
Friday, December 27, 2013
Based on a true story? Fact-checking 6 Oscar contenders
Every year, Hollywood delivers a handful of movies that are "based on a true story," and every year, a number of them become front-runners for Oscars. Unfortunately for Hollywood, that leads to yet another annual tradition: Experts and real-life counterparts weighing in and picking nits.It doesn't seem to hurt anyone's Oscar chances. Last year, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, and Lincolnpicked up an admirable number of nominations and prizes among them, despite misgivings about their accuracy.
So how realistic are some of this year's "based on a true story" Oscar contenders? Let's fact-check this year's lineup:
1. The Butler
Lee Daniels directed this portrayal of Eugene Allen, an African-American butler who worked at the White House over the course of eight presidential administrations, and consequently was a fly-on-the-wall witness to landmark civil rights battles and other major events in U.S. history. The movie takes a few liberties from the start: For one thing, the name of the protagonist was changed to Cecil Gaines. For another, many of the characters are composites of real people. "I felt by combining all of these different stories, I would be able to create a more universal experience for the audience of what it meant to be a member of the White House staff during these extremely tumultuous times,"said screenwriter Danny Strong.
One big invention was the depiction of Gaines' son as a Black Panther, which becomes a primary source of dramatic conflict in the movie. "Though tension between father and son over civil rights issues fuels most of the drama in the film, Charles Allen was not the radical political activist that Gaines' son is in the movie," writes Eliana Dockterman at TIME. "Charles Allen worked as an investigator for the State Department and never ran for public office."
2. Saving Mr. Banks
The making of Mary Poppins was famously rocky. Creator P.L. Travers wrote the first book in 1934, but it took another 30 years for Walt Disney to finally release the now-beloved movie version.Saving Mr. Banks follows the story behind the story, tracking the ups and down of the Travers-Disney relationship as portrayed by Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks.
But though there is much truth to the tale, the film is also "corporate myth-making on a large scale," as Drew McWeeny writes for HitFix, since it mostly glosses over the real-life personality of Disney. "The difficult part of Walt Disney Studios telling this story is that they have a vested interest in making sure that Walt Disney, the icon, emerges from this as the hero of the story," he writes.
Alex von Tunzelmann expands on this at The Guardian: "The film goes soft on Uncle Walt, who by many accounts may have been less sweet-natured than he is portrayed here."
Also: Disney was a notorious chain smoker, which was entirely left out of the movie, complying with modern Hollywood's unwritten rule that only bad guys can smoke.
3. 12 Years A Slave
Based on the story of Solomon Northup — a free man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery for 12 years — the accuracy of 12 Years A Slave has been questioned mostly because that of its source material has also been questioned. Northup's account of his time enslaved in Louisiana has been the subject of much scholarly study over the years, because at the time of the book's writing there existed "pressures that created a certain uniformity of content in the popular slave narratives," asThe New York Times explains, "with recurring themes that involved insistence on sometimes questioned personal identity, harrowing descriptions of oppression, and open advocacy for the abolitionist cause."
But, as Forrest Wickman writes for Slate, "salient facts were authenticated by the historian Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon for their landmark 1968 edition of the book." As for the movie itself, Wickman writes that while "much of the story is condensed, and a few small scenes are invented, nearly all of the most unbelievable details come straight from the book, and many lines are taken verbatim."
One particular scene that was purely fiction: A female slave named Patsey, the favorite of slave owner Edwin Epps ("favorite" being something of a euphemism, as Patsey would as often evoke Epps' affection as his violent, jealous rage), asks Solomon to kill her. "Her request afterward that Northup kill her, to put her out of her misery, is the movie's own invention, but it's a logical one: Patsey is described as falling into a deep depression and, it's implied, dreaming of the relief death would offer her," writes Wickman.
4. Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom
Much of the publicity surrounding Idris Elba's turn as Nelson Mandela comes from the timing of the film's release, which in a sad coincidence occurred just before the actual Mandela passed away. The movie, very closely based on Mandela's autobiography, tells a broad and fairly complete story of the South African freedom fighter's political work and long imprisonment.
If anything, some critics argue that it's a little too broad, covering so much ground that it glosses over some key details. "In trying to fit in so much, the film suffers in some respects — for example the characterization of the 'comrades' imprisoned with Mandela, and therefore the relationships between the men," writes Sally Williams at The Telegraph. "Nor is there a thorough accounting of how Mandela came to found the African National Congress's guerrilla force — known simply as MK — and become its commander-in-chief. Nor of how the trade-union movement mobilized mass campaigns of resistance and economic boycott that, along with international pressure, contributed to Mandela's release."
And as Andrew O'Hehir argues at Salon, the film leaves out some difficult truths about Mandela: "Unsurprisingly, Chadwick's film skips lightly over the whole period when Mandela was closely allied with Marxist and/or anti-colonial revolutionaries all over the world, from sub-Saharan Africa to Palestine to Latin America to Northern Ireland."
5. Philomena
Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan star as unlikely road trip buddies in this story of Philomena Lee, an Irish woman who goes looking for her long-lost son. Lee was sent to a convent as a pregnant teenager in 1952 and forced to sign away the rights to her child, who was then adopted by a couple in the U.S. Coogan plays a former reporter for the BBC, Martin Sixsmith, who follows Philomena to the U.S. as she searches for her son, and then writes a book about it.
The film has taken some criticism for its portrayal of Catholics (not to mention Republicans), as the convent nuns become the de facto villains in the story. As Alex von Tunzelmann writes for The Guardian, "The Catholic Church doesn't come out of this story well however you slice it, but in the book its cruelty seems to be largely in the past. 'The nuns were lovely,' writes the real Sixsmith, after visiting Roscrea with Philomena. He describes the mother superior as 'a friendly, educated woman… who had devoted her life to the care of disadvantaged and disabled people.' This doesn't come across at all in the film."
The nuns themselves have come forward and decried certain aspects of the film. "We do feel however that the film, even though it is not a documentary, does not tell the whole truth and in many ways is very misleading," Sister Julie Rose of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary told Sarah MacDonald of the Irish Independent. And Kyle Smith of the New York Post somewhat less diplomatically described it as a "diabolical-Catholics film, straight up."
The real Lee addressed the criticism in a letter: "The story it tells has resonated with people not because it's some mockery of ideas or institutions that they're in disagreement with. This is not a rally cry against the church or politics. In fact, despite some of the troubles that befell me as a young girl, I have always maintained a very strong hold on my faith."
6. Captain Phillips
Tom Hanks makes it into another movie of questionable veracity in Captain Phillips, playing Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama, a cargo ship that was taken hostage by Somali pirates in April 2009. Though many of the film's details have been taken straight from Phillips' account of the harrowing incident, some of the crew members have disputed his version of the attack, albeit anonymously. "Phillips wasn't the big leader like he is in the movie," one anonymous crew member told the New York Post, adding, "No one wants to sail with him."
Writes Forrest Wickman for Slate: "Many of Phillips' crew members, some of whom are in the midst of a lawsuit they filed against the ship's owners, claim his account misrepresents the story. According to them, Phillips behaved irresponsibly: They say he ignored warnings about pirates in the area and sailed too close to the Somali coast. One of Phillips' crew, a man who goes by the name ATM, has also claimed that he alerted Phillips to the pirates only to have Phillips dismiss him... Phillips denies this."
Paul Greengrass, the film's director, responded to the anonymous crew members in a Reddit Ask Me Anything. "When we started the film, it was a top priority for me to look into this issue in every detail," he said, adding that he and his partner "researched the background of the Maersk Alabamahighjacking [sic] in exhausting detail over many months. We spoke to every member of theAlabama crew bar one, all of the U.S. military responders that played a leading role in these events, and thoroughly researched backgrounds of the four pirates and the issue of Somali piracy generally. And I'm 100 percent satisfied that the picture we present of these events in the film, including the role playing by Captain Phillips, is authentic. I stand by the picture I give in the film, absolutely."
Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan star as unlikely road trip buddies in this story of Philomena Lee, an Irish woman who goes looking for her long-lost son. Lee was sent to a convent as a pregnant teenager in 1952 and forced to sign away the rights to her child, who was then adopted by a couple in the U.S. Coogan plays a former reporter for the BBC, Martin Sixsmith, who follows Philomena to the U.S. as she searches for her son, and then writes a book about it.
The film has taken some criticism for its portrayal of Catholics (not to mention Republicans), as the convent nuns become the de facto villains in the story. As Alex von Tunzelmann writes for The Guardian, "The Catholic Church doesn't come out of this story well however you slice it, but in the book its cruelty seems to be largely in the past. 'The nuns were lovely,' writes the real Sixsmith, after visiting Roscrea with Philomena. He describes the mother superior as 'a friendly, educated woman… who had devoted her life to the care of disadvantaged and disabled people.' This doesn't come across at all in the film."
The nuns themselves have come forward and decried certain aspects of the film. "We do feel however that the film, even though it is not a documentary, does not tell the whole truth and in many ways is very misleading," Sister Julie Rose of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary told Sarah MacDonald of the Irish Independent. And Kyle Smith of the New York Post somewhat less diplomatically described it as a "diabolical-Catholics film, straight up."
The real Lee addressed the criticism in a letter: "The story it tells has resonated with people not because it's some mockery of ideas or institutions that they're in disagreement with. This is not a rally cry against the church or politics. In fact, despite some of the troubles that befell me as a young girl, I have always maintained a very strong hold on my faith."
6. Captain Phillips
Tom Hanks makes it into another movie of questionable veracity in Captain Phillips, playing Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama, a cargo ship that was taken hostage by Somali pirates in April 2009. Though many of the film's details have been taken straight from Phillips' account of the harrowing incident, some of the crew members have disputed his version of the attack, albeit anonymously. "Phillips wasn't the big leader like he is in the movie," one anonymous crew member told the New York Post, adding, "No one wants to sail with him."
Writes Forrest Wickman for Slate: "Many of Phillips' crew members, some of whom are in the midst of a lawsuit they filed against the ship's owners, claim his account misrepresents the story. According to them, Phillips behaved irresponsibly: They say he ignored warnings about pirates in the area and sailed too close to the Somali coast. One of Phillips' crew, a man who goes by the name ATM, has also claimed that he alerted Phillips to the pirates only to have Phillips dismiss him... Phillips denies this."
Paul Greengrass, the film's director, responded to the anonymous crew members in a Reddit Ask Me Anything. "When we started the film, it was a top priority for me to look into this issue in every detail," he said, adding that he and his partner "researched the background of the Maersk Alabamahighjacking [sic] in exhausting detail over many months. We spoke to every member of theAlabama crew bar one, all of the U.S. military responders that played a leading role in these events, and thoroughly researched backgrounds of the four pirates and the issue of Somali piracy generally. And I'm 100 percent satisfied that the picture we present of these events in the film, including the role playing by Captain Phillips, is authentic. I stand by the picture I give in the film, absolutely."
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
The top 10 Doctor Who episodes for history buffs
“Doctor Who,” the classic British sci-fi television show, celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend. For those who’ve never seen the program, which in the United States has aired mostly on PBS stations and, more recently, BBCAmerica, here’s a short rundown: The main character is a man called the Doctor. He’s an alien from a race called the Time Lords. He travels through time and space in a blue police box that’s really a disguise for his bigger-on-the-inside ship called the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space). In each episode, the Doctor and a companion (or two or three) explore the universe while fighting monsters and other enemies along the way. And every so often, the doctor “regenerates,” taking on a new body and face, letting a new actor take over the lead role.
The formula has changed little since “Doctor Who” first premiered on BBC on November 23, 1963. The show has survived poor production values, the Doctor getting stranded on Earth for years, declining public interest in the show, cancellation in the late 1980s, as well as a failed attempt to reboot the series in 1996 only to come back in 2005, gaining new fans and new respect.
“Doctor Who” has been distinct from other members of the science fiction genre, such as “Star Trek,” which focused solely on the future, by taking advantage of the ability to travel through time and periodically visiting the past. This focus on history has waxed and waned over the years, reflecting the interests and wants of the show’s producers and viewers, but it produced some unique storylines centered on pivotal moments in human history. Nearly all of these episodes are available on DVD or Netflix, although two of the episodes from the Crusades are preserved only as audio.
“The Aztecs” (1964)
Adventures in the first season of “Doctor Who” took viewers into historical events such as Marco Polo’s 1289 expedition to Central Asia and the Reign of Terror in late 18th-century France. Though the show’s most iconic monsters, the pepperpot-shaped Daleks, had already been introduced by this time, these history stories got their drama from human events. In “The Aztecs,” the Doctor (William Hartnell) and his companions become trapped in 15th-century Mexico. One of the companions, history teacher Barbara, is briefly hailed as a divine reincarnation of a high priest and tries to put an end to the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. Her efforts fail, and history moves on.
“The Crusade” (1965)
“Doctor Who” has frequently celebrated and explored iconic periods in British history while putting a bit of twist on them. In “The Crusade,” the Doctor (again played by William Hartnell) and his companions find themselves in 12th-century Palestine, caught in the middle of the conflict between the European crusaders, led by King Richard the Lionheart, who have conquered the land and the Saracens, led by Saladin, who are trying to kick them out. The story highlights the political machinations of the real-life leaders and the bloodthirsty nature of the Crusades themselves. The Doctor tries not to get caught up in court politics, as Richard attempts to broker a peace agreement by marrying off his sister to Saladin’s brother. But of course the Doctor fails, barely escaping a death sentence.
“Pyramids of Mars” (1975)
The Doctor may be known for traveling through time and space, but his third incarnation (played by Jon Pertwee) was banished by his fellow Time Lords to present-day Earth. Time travel stories returned, however, with the Fourth Doctor (portrayed by Tom Baker). In 1975, he and his frequent companion, journalist Sarah Jane Smith, found themselves in England in 1911 in the home of a professor who had gone missing while excavating a pyramid in Egypt. The professor had accidently released an alien named Sutekh—which fans of Egyptian history will recognize as another name for the chaos god Set—who had been locked in that pyramid by his brother Horus and their fellow Osirians. The Doctor and Sarah Jane must battle robotic mummies roaming the grounds before taking down Sutekh and saving the human race.
“The King’s Demons” (1983)
One of the Doctor’s greatest enemies was another Time Lord, the Master. In The King’s Demons, the Doctor (now played by Peter Davison) encounters his arch-nemesis at a medieval joust in the time of King John. In one of the Master’s smaller evil machinations—in later years, for example, the Master turns every human on Earth into a copy of himself—he tries to thwart the course of human history by provoking a rebellion that will depose King John and prevent the creation of the Magna Carta, the foundation of constitutional government in the English-speaking world. The Doctor intervenes, setting history back on course.
“The Mark of the Rani” (1985)
The Master is messing with earthlings again, this time paired with another renegade Time Lord, the Rani, in the English town of Killingworth. This is the time of the Luddites, a group of English textile workers who were protesting changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s. Key to the Doctor Who story is real-life engineer and inventor of the steam locomotive engine George Stephenson, who saves the Doctor (portrayed by Colin Baker) from a group of Luddites who pushed him down a mineshaft.
“The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” (2005)
History episodes became more frequent with the 2005 reboot of the “Doctor Who” franchise. The show’s producers, in their efforts to reintroduce the Doctor (played by Christopher Eccleston) to a new generation, set the entire first season on Earth. In a memorable pair of episodes, the Doctor and companion Rose find themselves in London during World War II, pursued by a creepy gas-mask-wearing child with a deadly touch. While later WWII-themed episodes feature notable historical figures from that era, including Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, these episodes instead center on the sad story of homeless, orphaned children who had been cast adrift amidst the chaos of the London Blitz.
“The Girl in the Fireplace” (2006)
The Girl in the Fireplace is a masterful marriage of futuristic science fiction with a real person from the past. The Doctor (portrayed by David Tennant) and his companions find themselves on an abandoned spaceship in the 51st century. The crew is missing, but throughout the ship are portals into 18th-century France, points in time along the life of a Frenchwoman named Reinette. The young girl grows up to become Madame de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV, pursued her whole life by the clockwork men of the spaceship who believe that only her brain can fix their ship.
A classic “Doctor Who” trope is to take an event in history and provide another explanation for what happened. In this case, it’s “volcano day” in the city of Pompeii. Shortly after his arrival, the Doctor (again, David Tennant) is temporarily stranded when a merchant sells his TARDIS to a local businessman, Lucius Caecilius, who thinks the blue box is a piece of avant-garde art. Caecilius was based on a real person, Lucius Caecilius Iucundus, a banker whose villa was found in excavations of the Italian town that was buried under volcanic ash in 79 A.D. In the Doctor Who version of Iucundus’ story, the explosion that likely killed him was caused not by a volcano but by the Doctor. He and his companion Donna initiate the explosion to save the world from a race of aliens, the Pyrovillians, who were living in Vesuvius and planning to take over the Earth.
“The Unicorn and the Wasp” (2008)
The renewal of “Doctor Who” brought a new type of history episode based on literary figures. The first explained how Charles Dickens got inspired to write about ghosts at Christmas. A later story showed what happened to William Shakespeare’s missing play Love’s Labour’s Won. The third of this genre, The Unicorn and the Wasp, cleared up a mystery regarding the world’s greatest mystery writer, Agatha Christie—what happened to her during the 11 days in 1926 that she simply disappeared? In the Doctor Who story, set at a house party during the 1920s, Christie was helping the Doctor (David Tennant) solve a Christie-inspired murder mystery and then did a little traveling in the TARDIS.
“Vincent and the Doctor” (2010)
While at a Van Gogh exhibit at the Musee d’Orsay in modern-day Paris, the Doctor (played by Matt Smith) notices a curious monster peeking out a window in Van Gogh’s The Church at Auvers and decides to investigate, quickly jumping back in time to visit the great painter in 1890. Scenes directly reference paintings such as Café Terrace at Night and Bedroom in Arles, while the story revolves around Van Gogh’s periods of exhaustion and depression, as well as his eventual suicide. The Doctor’s companion Amy Pond tries to avert Van Gogh’s tragic end by taking him to the exhibition where the episode began, where he can hear his work praised. But Amy is saddened to discover that her efforts had no effect, and Van Gogh eventually killed himself, as history remembers. As with all Doctor Who’s history stories, this one reminds the viewer that although the Doctor can’t change the past’s biggest events, he can bring a bit of joy and happiness to some of our saddest moments.
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The formula has changed little since “Doctor Who” first premiered on BBC on November 23, 1963. The show has survived poor production values, the Doctor getting stranded on Earth for years, declining public interest in the show, cancellation in the late 1980s, as well as a failed attempt to reboot the series in 1996 only to come back in 2005, gaining new fans and new respect.
“Doctor Who” has been distinct from other members of the science fiction genre, such as “Star Trek,” which focused solely on the future, by taking advantage of the ability to travel through time and periodically visiting the past. This focus on history has waxed and waned over the years, reflecting the interests and wants of the show’s producers and viewers, but it produced some unique storylines centered on pivotal moments in human history. Nearly all of these episodes are available on DVD or Netflix, although two of the episodes from the Crusades are preserved only as audio.
“The Aztecs” (1964)
Adventures in the first season of “Doctor Who” took viewers into historical events such as Marco Polo’s 1289 expedition to Central Asia and the Reign of Terror in late 18th-century France. Though the show’s most iconic monsters, the pepperpot-shaped Daleks, had already been introduced by this time, these history stories got their drama from human events. In “The Aztecs,” the Doctor (William Hartnell) and his companions become trapped in 15th-century Mexico. One of the companions, history teacher Barbara, is briefly hailed as a divine reincarnation of a high priest and tries to put an end to the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. Her efforts fail, and history moves on.
“The Crusade” (1965)
“Doctor Who” has frequently celebrated and explored iconic periods in British history while putting a bit of twist on them. In “The Crusade,” the Doctor (again played by William Hartnell) and his companions find themselves in 12th-century Palestine, caught in the middle of the conflict between the European crusaders, led by King Richard the Lionheart, who have conquered the land and the Saracens, led by Saladin, who are trying to kick them out. The story highlights the political machinations of the real-life leaders and the bloodthirsty nature of the Crusades themselves. The Doctor tries not to get caught up in court politics, as Richard attempts to broker a peace agreement by marrying off his sister to Saladin’s brother. But of course the Doctor fails, barely escaping a death sentence.
“Pyramids of Mars” (1975)
The Doctor may be known for traveling through time and space, but his third incarnation (played by Jon Pertwee) was banished by his fellow Time Lords to present-day Earth. Time travel stories returned, however, with the Fourth Doctor (portrayed by Tom Baker). In 1975, he and his frequent companion, journalist Sarah Jane Smith, found themselves in England in 1911 in the home of a professor who had gone missing while excavating a pyramid in Egypt. The professor had accidently released an alien named Sutekh—which fans of Egyptian history will recognize as another name for the chaos god Set—who had been locked in that pyramid by his brother Horus and their fellow Osirians. The Doctor and Sarah Jane must battle robotic mummies roaming the grounds before taking down Sutekh and saving the human race.
“The King’s Demons” (1983)
One of the Doctor’s greatest enemies was another Time Lord, the Master. In The King’s Demons, the Doctor (now played by Peter Davison) encounters his arch-nemesis at a medieval joust in the time of King John. In one of the Master’s smaller evil machinations—in later years, for example, the Master turns every human on Earth into a copy of himself—he tries to thwart the course of human history by provoking a rebellion that will depose King John and prevent the creation of the Magna Carta, the foundation of constitutional government in the English-speaking world. The Doctor intervenes, setting history back on course.
“The Mark of the Rani” (1985)
The Master is messing with earthlings again, this time paired with another renegade Time Lord, the Rani, in the English town of Killingworth. This is the time of the Luddites, a group of English textile workers who were protesting changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s. Key to the Doctor Who story is real-life engineer and inventor of the steam locomotive engine George Stephenson, who saves the Doctor (portrayed by Colin Baker) from a group of Luddites who pushed him down a mineshaft.
“The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” (2005)
“The Girl in the Fireplace” (2006)
The Girl in the Fireplace is a masterful marriage of futuristic science fiction with a real person from the past. The Doctor (portrayed by David Tennant) and his companions find themselves on an abandoned spaceship in the 51st century. The crew is missing, but throughout the ship are portals into 18th-century France, points in time along the life of a Frenchwoman named Reinette. The young girl grows up to become Madame de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV, pursued her whole life by the clockwork men of the spaceship who believe that only her brain can fix their ship.
“The Fires of Pompeii” (2008)
“The Unicorn and the Wasp” (2008)
The renewal of “Doctor Who” brought a new type of history episode based on literary figures. The first explained how Charles Dickens got inspired to write about ghosts at Christmas. A later story showed what happened to William Shakespeare’s missing play Love’s Labour’s Won. The third of this genre, The Unicorn and the Wasp, cleared up a mystery regarding the world’s greatest mystery writer, Agatha Christie—what happened to her during the 11 days in 1926 that she simply disappeared? In the Doctor Who story, set at a house party during the 1920s, Christie was helping the Doctor (David Tennant) solve a Christie-inspired murder mystery and then did a little traveling in the TARDIS.
“Vincent and the Doctor” (2010)
While at a Van Gogh exhibit at the Musee d’Orsay in modern-day Paris, the Doctor (played by Matt Smith) notices a curious monster peeking out a window in Van Gogh’s The Church at Auvers and decides to investigate, quickly jumping back in time to visit the great painter in 1890. Scenes directly reference paintings such as Café Terrace at Night and Bedroom in Arles, while the story revolves around Van Gogh’s periods of exhaustion and depression, as well as his eventual suicide. The Doctor’s companion Amy Pond tries to avert Van Gogh’s tragic end by taking him to the exhibition where the episode began, where he can hear his work praised. But Amy is saddened to discover that her efforts had no effect, and Van Gogh eventually killed himself, as history remembers. As with all Doctor Who’s history stories, this one reminds the viewer that although the Doctor can’t change the past’s biggest events, he can bring a bit of joy and happiness to some of our saddest moments.
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