Fact of the Day

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BARBARIC BUTTER

Did you know... Our friends in ancient Rome indulged in a lot of activities that we would find unseemly today — including and especially gladiators fighting to the death — but they drew the line at eating butter. To do so was considered barbaric, with Pliny the Elder going so far as to call butter “the choicest food among barbarian tribes.” In addition to a general disdain for drinking too much milk, Romans took issue with butter specifically because they used it for treating burns and thus thought of it as a medicinal salve, not a food. 

 

They weren’t alone in their contempt. The Greeks also considered the dairy product uncivilized, and “butter eater” was among the most cutting insults of the day. In both cases, this can be partly explained by climate — butter didn’t keep as well in warm southern climates as it did in northern Europe, where groups such as the Celts gloried in their butter. Instead, the Greeks and Romans relied on olive oil, which served a similar purpose. To be fair, though, Romans considered anyone who lived beyond the Empire’s borders (read: most of the world) to be barbarians, so butter eaters were in good company.

 

Nero didn’t actually fiddle while Rome burned.
It would have been impossible for him to do so, as the fiddle didn’t exist yet. That’s not to say that Nero was a good emperor (or person), however. In addition to murdering his mother, first wife, and possibly his second wife as well, Nero may have even started the infamous fire that burned for six days in 64 CE and destroyed 70% of the city so that he could expand his Golden Palace and nearby gardens. (Or at least, that’s what some of the populace and some ancient writers suspected.) For all that, Rome’s fifth emperor wasn’t entirely reviled during his time — and it’s been suggested that his cruelty was at least somewhat exaggerated by later historians who were looking to smear his dynastic line, known as the Julio-Claudians. And he was a gifted musician who played the cithara, an ancient stringed instrument similar to a lyre — just not the fiddle.

 

 

Source: The ancient Romans thought eating butter was barbaric.

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - THE TITANIC

Did you know... The ‘Titanic’ didn’t sink immediately on the early morning of April 15, 1912.

 

On April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg, kicking off one of the 20th century’s most devastating civilian catastrophes. But the date typically cited for the ship’s sinking is April 15. And that’s because, as anyone who’s seen James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) already knows, the vessel didn’t plunge immediately to its icy doom—the whole process took a good two hours and change.

 

Ship Meets Iceberg

The starboard side of the Titanic brushed up against the iceberg at 11:40 p.m. the night of April 14, causing enough damage that at least five watertight compartments in the hull began to fill with water. After a brief investigation, the ship’s chief designer Thomas Andrews determined that they wouldn’t be able to stay afloat, and by midnight, the crew had started preparing the lifeboats.

 

The scene over the next two hours gradually escalated into pandemonium as passengers were roused from their berths and loaded—women and children first—into a fleet of lifeboats that clearly couldn’t accommodate everyone. At about 2 a.m., the ship’s bow had tipped so far beneath the surface that its stern was partially above the water, and at 2:17 a.m., wireless operator Jack Phillips transmitted one last distress call.

 

Beneath the Surface

 

Over the next three or so minutes, the lights would shut off, and the bow’s downward trajectory would force the stern to break from the ship. It’s generally believed that the bow started to sink, and the stern moved into a vertical position before sinking, too.

 

By 2:20 a.m., the Titanic had vanished. As for how long it took for the ship to actually hit the ocean floor, it depends on whom you ask. In his book The Discovery of the Titanic, Robert Ballard—the oceanographer who discovered the wreck—estimated that the descent may have lasted just six minutes, though he made it clear that “there are simply too many variables involved” to be sure.

 

Where Did the Titanic Sink?
The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean about 370 miles southeast of Newfoundland. Its rough position wasn’t a mystery—after all, ships showed up to rescue survivors in the area. But technology to locate lost shipwrecks wasn’t very advanced in 1912, and it would be another 73 years before Ballard and his team found the vessel some 13,000 feet under the surface.

 

 

Source: How Long Did It Take for the ‘Titanic’ to Sink?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - PUBLIC CONTESTS

Did you know... Like many classic Hollywood stars, Joan Crawford was known by a stage name rather than her real name. Born Lucille Fay LeSueur, the future Oscar winner made her silver-screen debut in 1925’s Lady of the Night under her birth name. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had signed her to a $75-a-week contract, saw potential in the starlet but feared her name would be a hindrance; Pete Smith, the head of publicity at MGM, thought her surname sounded too much like the word “sewer.” 

 

So the upper brass at MGM landed on a novel solution: a contest run in the fan magazine Movie Weekly, which offered between $50 and $500 for coming up with a new name for “a beautiful young screen actress.” The perfect name, according to MGM, “must be moderately short and euphonious. It must not imitate the name of some already established artiste. It must be easy to spell, pronounce, and remember. It must be impressive and suitable to the bearer’s type.”

 

The winner, as fate would have it, wasn’t Joan Crawford; it was Joan Arden, which was already the name of an extra who threatened to sue MGM. And so the second-place winner was chosen instead, not that the new Joan Crawford was happy about it — she initially hated the name before making the most of it.

 

Crawford accepted her Oscar from bed.
After a string of hits in the late 1920s and early ’30s, Crawford’s luck so reversed itself that she was deemed “box-office poison” in TIME magazine by the end of the decade. Her comeback wasn’t fully solidified until she took the title role in 1945’s Mildred Pierce, which resulted in her sole Academy Award — not that she was expecting to win.

 

Believing Ingrid Bergman would take home the Oscar for The Bells of St. Mary’s, Crawford was disinclined to attend any ceremony where she wouldn’t be victorious and opted to feign illness. Upon learning she’d won, however, she put on her makeup, invited members of the press to her bedroom, and accepted the statuette from the comfort of her own bed.

 

Source: Joan Crawford’s stage name came from a public contest.

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the day - KIDNAPPED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

Did you know... Milne was neither rich nor famous, but his grandfather was both.

 

The three young men walking along Old York Road in late December of 1935 were about to come across a sight they'd remember for the rest of their lives. There, lying in a ditch at the bottom of a hill just outside Doylestown, Pennsylvania, was a man. His wrists, knees, and ankles were bound; his mouth and eyes were taped shut. He was missing his socks and had only one shoe, the other lost as he tumbled down the hill from the roadway above.

 

The boys flagged down a motorist, who quickly worked to get the man loose from his bonds and into his vehicle. The stranger moaned as he was driven to the hospital. There, doctors discovered a series of puncture marks on his arm.

 

Before long, word came down from authorities: The man was confirmed to be 24-year-old Caleb Milne IV, who had been missing for the better part of a week. Kidnappers had demanded $20,000 for his safe return. While this was a considerable sum during the Great Depression, Milne’s grandfather, Caleb Milne II, was an incredibly wealthy businessman—and from the looks of things, the elder Milne had finally consented to pay for his grandson’s life.

 

Soon, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the Milne case was “definitely” a kidnapping. But Hoover’s agents would quickly learn there was far more to the crime. As Milne began to talk, he detailed another story even more sensational than his abduction.

 

The Special Delivery
The Milne family arrived in the United States from Scotland in 1837, when David Milne immigrated and founded a textile company in Philadelphia. The business was passed down through generations before arriving in the hands of Caleb Milne II, who sired Milne III, who raised Milne IV.

 

Despite his grandfather’s fortune, Milne IV (heretofore just Milne) was set on his own path in life. A graduate of Germantown Academy and the University of Pennsylvania, Milne was a trim 5 feet, 11 inches tall and photogenic. His interests leaned toward the arts, and he settled in New York City to pursue a theater career, taking odd jobs while going on auditions. He shared an apartment on 157 East 37th Street with his brother, Frederic, which cost the two $15 a week.

 

On Saturday, December 14, 1935, Frederic awoke to a scribbled note. Milne had written he was off to Philadelphia with a “Dr. Greene of Gracie Square.” Gracie Square was a psychiatric hospital in New York.

 

Frederic was unconcerned by the note and thought little of it until the following morning, when he received a letter right at 6 a.m. It came via special Sunday delivery. Inside was a missive composed of letters clipped from magazines, a technique familiar to any mystery fiction writer.

 

“We have your brother in the country,” it read. “Keep in touch with your grandfather in Philadelphia and have a large sum in cash available. We will communicate with you again.” Ominously, the ransom note was accompanied by Milne’s wristwatch.

 

Frederic notified police, who tried to track down a Doctor Greene at Gracie Square to no avail. Milne’s landlord informed them that Milne hurried out of the building after receiving a phone call, insisting his grandfather had fallen ill and that he needed to tend to him. But the older Milne was fine. They contacted Milne’s mother, Frederica, as well as his aunt Anita, who spoke to the press.

 

“I can’t give any information except that Caleb has been kidnapped in New York and that a ransom note has been received,” she said. “Naturally, we are all very upset at this occurrence.”

 

East Coast newspapers quickly picked up on the story, which invited plenty of morbid curiosity. The victim was an attractive young man—“more than ordinarily handsome,” Frederic said—whose grandfather was wealthy. His safe return seemed to hinge on his grandfather’s capitulation to criminals.

 

Milne II, however, didn’t seem all that bothered, and didn’t seem to regard the ransom note with much gravity. Police in New York, he said, weren’t alarmed and considered him a missing, not kidnapped, person. “I don’t think there is anything to worry about,” he said. “I think he just stayed away and his brother became excited.”

 

As the week wore on, more reports came in. The ransom was $20,000, or possibly $25,000. It was said that Milne II received a demand for even more money—$50,000—and that the kidnappers had phoned him at his home. “Philadelphia is still the place,” a voice said. “We will—” Then the call cut off.

 

Soon, federal agents were descending on the various Milne residences. A mailman was said to be detained after delivering a suspiciously large number of letters. One reporter observed Milne’s aunt being ushered into a vehicle quickly, leading to speculation she might be en route to greet Milne—or Milne’s body.

 

Finally, on Wednesday, December 18, Milne was discovered near Doylestown, bound and bedraggled. As he convalesced, he explained to authorities that four men, one of whom had claimed to be a doctor, had taken him by force outside his apartment and driven him to a cabin hideout near Doylestown. There, he said, they kept him groggy with narcotics by administering injections. With the ransom paid and his usefulness gone, he was tossed down the hill from a moving vehicle.

 

Upon his arrival at the hospital, Milne was thought to be in too much distress for further questioning by agents, but after several hours, he finally agreed to talk. He would soon wish he hadn’t.

 

A Likely Story
Federal agents who questioned Milne were curious about the 26 puncture marks on his arm. That many injections, they reasoned, would likely result in a fatal dose of narcotics over such a short period of time. And there was another inconsistency: Milne told investigators he had been driven through the Holland Tunnel and checked his wristwatch, which read 11 a.m. But the ransom note sent to Frederic and containing Milne’s wristwatch had been postmarked prior to 11 a.m. How could he have known what time it was without his watch?

 

Law enforcement asked Milne to repeat his story over and over again. Each time, the details failed to add up. The way he was bound could have been an act of self-restraint, with a slipknot to make cinching it easy. Inside his hat they found hairs belonging to a wig.

 

Finally, Milne confessed. He was not a kidnap victim but had instead played the part of one. During his “disappearance,” he merely fled to a hotel in Trenton, New Jersey, where he donned a disguise and deployed the ransom demand to his grandfather. After waiting, he traveled to Pennsylvania, bound himself, and tumbled down the hill to be found. The needle marks were made with a pin.

 

“I admit that my alleged kidnapping was perpetuated by myself,” he wrote. “Because of my desperate financial condition and inability to find a job, I felt … that if I could get some publicity I could get a job.”

 

Authorities were further amused to discover Milne was also an aspiring author and had written a short mystery story, “The Perfect Crime,” two weeks prior to his self-imposed exile.

His grandfather, Milne II, was as laconic after the confession as he had been during the so-called kidnapping. “You know, my grandson had those G-men fooled very badly,” he said.

 

The justice system was less amused. Milne was charged with extortion and held over on $7500 bond (more than $178,000 today), which his father posted. In February 1936, a grand jury failed to formally indict him, allowing Milne to dodge a possible 20 years in prison and a $5000 fine.

 

There were still consequences to the staging of his own kidnapping. Upon his grandfather’s death in 1941, Milne learned he had been denied any inheritance: His grandfather had written him out of his will. (His father and uncles split a $431,000 estate.)

 

Milne himself would only outlive his grandfather by just two years. In 1943, while volunteering as an ambulance driver in Tunisia, he was killed when enemy fire sent shells in his direction. At the time, Milne was attempting to rescue two injured men from the battlefield.

 

His obituaries hailed his heroism, though never failed to mention the scheme he had perpetuated years earlier that had briefly fooled federal agents. But the New York detectives apparently knew something they did not. In their files, Milne’s initial missing persons report was marked with one addendum: “publicity.”

 

 

Source: Caleb Milne, the 1930s Actor Kidnapped in Broad Daylight

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - AMERICAN GOTHIC

Did you know... “American Gothic” is one of the most famous U.S. paintings of the 20th century, and one that nearly everyone — art aficionado or not — can recognize. The 1930 painting depicts a proud Iowan farmer and his relative (whether it’s meant to be his wife or daughter is up for debate) standing in front of their small farmhouse. While the house — along with its Carpenter Gothic window — is very much a real farmhouse in Eldon, Iowa (and still exists today), its famous occupants never lived in the home at all. In fact, they weren’t even farmers. 

 

“I imagined American Gothic people with their faces stretched out long to go with this American Gothic house,” the painting’s artist, Grant Wood, once said. He found those long faces in his dentist, Byron McKeeby, and his own sister, Nan (though he painted her with a more elongated face). Wood modeled these elements separately, so the painting’s famous “farmers” never stood in front of the house. Today, some critics call Wood’s work America’s “Mona Lisa.” The painting is one of the most popular residents at the Art Institute of Chicago and remains a masterwork of American Regionalism, an art movement popular in the 1920s and ’30s that focused on realistic scenes of rural life in the U.S. heartland. Ironically, Wood’s painting helped make Eldon, Iowa, a little less rural — today, about 15,000 people from around the world come each year to see the Gothic house that started it all.

 

Iowa farmers initially hated “American Gothic.”
Not everyone has enjoyed “American Gothic,” including the very people it was meant to honor. When the painting appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, many Iowan farmers saw it as a joke rather than a thoughtful homage. One Iowan even threatened that Wood should have his “head bashed in.” At the time, the U.S. was rapidly industrializing and the traditional farm was often a subject of commentary and satire. Even novelist Gertrude Stein assumed the painting was meant to deride rural life, calling it a “devastating satire.” (For his own part, Wood said, “There is satire in it, but only as there is satire in any realistic statement.”) But as the Great Depression wore on, the perception of Wood’s work transformed from a perceived country caricature to an image of resolute perseverance. In other words, “American Gothic” became an embodiment of the American spirit.

 

 

Source: The models for the painting ‘American Gothic’ were the artist’s sister and dentist.

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BAT SPECIES

Did you know... Earth is home to a staggering number of creatures: By one estimate, more than 8.7 million species of plants and animals live on its lands and in its waters. Mammals, however, make up a small fraction of that number — just 6,495 species. If you’re wondering which warm-blooded animals are most numerous, glance to the night sky. That’s where you’ll probably find bats, which account for 21% of all the mammals in the world. 

 

The bat family boasts amazing diversity. The tiny bumblebee bat (only about an inch big) is the world’s smallest mammal, while the flying fox bat has a 5-foot wingspan. Scientists classify these mostly nocturnal creatures into two categories: microbats and megabats. Microbats are generally smaller, nighttime flyers that rely on echolocation to hunt insects, whereas megabats are often much larger, and some of them hunt in the daytime. Megabats primarily live in the tropics, where they use their larger eyes and better olfactory senses in place of echolocation to locate fruit for their meals. 

 

Bats have been around for more than 50 million years, which helps explain why they’re such a fine-tuned part of our ecosystem. Nectar-eating bats are master pollinators of more than 500 plant species (including cacao for chocolate and agave for tequila), thanks to their ability to fly and transport pollen further than bees. They’re also nature’s bug zappers, keeping mosquito, moth, and beetle populations in check. The flying insect hunters are so effective — eating half their body weight in bugs each night — that scientists credit them with saving U.S. farmers $1 billion in pesticides and crop damage each year. Bats even help combat deforestation by dropping seeds over barren areas: Bat-dropped seeds can account for up to 95% of regrowth in cleared forests in tropical areas, a huge accomplishment for such small creatures.

 

Vampire bats create close friendships.
Vampire bats are at best feared and at worst maligned as sinister predators, but chiropterologists (scientists who study bats) believe Desmodus rotundus are actually incredibly social animals that survive thanks to their selective, long-term friendships. Vampire bats, which live in Mexico, Central America, and South America, have genetic mutations that separate them from their fruit- and bug-eating brethren, affecting how they taste and digest their food. They only survive on blood (usually from livestock and birds), and consume nearly 1.4 times their body weight per meal to get the nutrients they need. But blood isn’t always readily available, which puts vampire bats at risk of starvation, especially since they must eat every 48 hours or so. Researchers think this could be why these flying mammals have learned to share food with family members, regurgitating the substance in a manner similar to how birds feed their young. But vampire bats will also help roost-mates they have close, nonfamilial relationships with — and those bats remember and return the favor, creating a long-term bond that increases both animals’ odds of survival. Researchers say watching these high-flying friendships develop can help us better understand how other social species (like humans) bond, too.

 

 

Source: Bat species make up 21% of all mammals.

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - MOST COMMON WRITTEN WORD

Did you know... English words today come from a variety of languages, originating from Greek, French, Latin, and many others. But perhaps the most important of them all is German, whose words form the backbone of English. That’s why English is considered a Germanic language, as opposed to a Romance language like French (although English also shares a considerable number of similarities with French, thanks to the Normans). Taking a look at the most commonly written words in English around the world, as compiled by the Oxford English Dictionary, illustrates German’s indelible influence.

 

At the top of the list of the most common written words is, unsurprisingly, “the,” related to German’s gendered der, die, and das. Germanic function words, such as “and,” “but,” and “that,” pepper the rest of the list. English’s most-written noun (“time”), verb (“be”), and adjective (“good”) are also Germanic in origin. Today, English borrows liberally for its vocabulary — scholars estimate that words from more than 350 languages have entered English — but the roots of its linguistic tree are considered Western Germanic. English speakers are far from alone: Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian (spoken in parts of the Netherlands and Germany), Yiddish, and of course German also developed from the same West Germanic roots. In total, these tongues are spoken as primary languages by about 450 million people throughout the world.

 

English has more than twice as many non-native speakers as native ones.
English is one of the most universal languages in human history, thanks to the former expanse of the British empire, the dominance of the U.S. post-World War II, and other factors. It’s because of this ubiquity that it has the strange distinction of having more than twice as many non-native speakers (1.1 billion) as native ones (380 million). When factoring in both of these numbers, English has (just barely) more speakers than Mandarin, which has 929 million native speakers — by far the most in the world — but only 198 million non-native speakers. In total, English is spoken by 1.5 billion speakers around the world, compared to Mandarin’s 1.1 billion.

 

 

Source: The most common written word in English is ‘the.’

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - WINE

Did you know.... Then you think of wine, places such as Bordeaux, Tuscany, and Napa Valley tend to come to mind first. One place you probably don’t think of is Antarctica, and yet vino is indeed made on the world’s coldest, windiest continent. 

 

Fittingly, it’s an ice wine, a dessert wine made from grapes that freeze naturally while still on the vine, and it’s made by just one person: James Pope, whose McMurdo Dry Valleys vineyard is located on the side of the continent near New Zealand. The high saline content of the “soil” (which is closer in texture to sand) gives the wine a unique salty flavor.

 

As that soil is in permafrost throughout much of the year, Pope’s wine is cultivated in the summer with vines placed at least 60 feet apart — any closer and they wouldn’t get enough nutrients. Some of those nutrients are obtained through Adélie penguin droppings, though it may take a sommelier to properly describe the effect that has on taste. Though it isn’t produced on a large scale and can’t exactly be bought at your local wine store, the ice wine’s mere existence is testament to the scientific — and culinary — ingenuity on display in Antarctica.

 

Dinosaurs roamed Antarctica.
Antarctica wasn’t always cold enough to reach a temperature of -133.6 degrees Fahrenheit (as can sometimes happen nowadays). During the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 145 million to 66 million years ago, the continent was ice-free and blanketed by forests — and inhabited by dinosaurs.

 

Among the dinos who roamed Antarctica were the carnivorous Cryolophosaurus and the armored, aptly named Antarctopelta, neither of which was immortalized in the Jurassic Park franchise. Antarctica began freezing about 34 million years ago, when the greenhouse climate that had been stable since the dinosaurs went extinct drastically cooled and created the icehouse phase the continent is still in today.

 

 

Source: There is wine made in Antarctica.

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - HUMP DAY

Did you know.... The phrase may seem recent, but it’s been around for a surprisingly long time. As modern as it might sound, Wednesday has been informally and somewhat jokingly known as “Hump Day” since the mid 1900s, with the earliest record of the term unearthed so far dating back to 1955. 

 

Ever since then, though, this moniker has continued to grow in popularity, with the term soaring into mainstream use in the early 2000s and 2010s. But where on Earth has such a peculiar name come from? 

 

The Surprisingly Straightforward Origins of “Hump Day”
The historical record seems to suggest that this is a squarely North American term, with the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citations coming from local newspapers in California (“The high light of any patrol ... is Hump Day,” 1959), and Nebraska (“Happy ‘hump’ day … the week is half over,” 1965). Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang, meanwhile, has an isolated record of Wednesday being referred to as “Hump night” in an American periodical from 1966.  

 

 

 

Green’s dictionary also provides a neat explanation of the surprisingly straightforward metaphor that lies behind the term. The “hump” in your working week’s Hump Day is exactly the same as the sloping bump you would see on the back of a camel, or protruding out of an otherwise flat landscape. With most people working Monday through Friday, ultimately, Wednesday represents the midpoint or highpoint of the working week’s “hump,” after which it is all a smooth, easy, downhill journey to the weekend. 

 

The prospect of a rapidly approaching weekend (plus all of the free time that it brings with it) might be enough for some of us, but several northern European countries and cultures like to take the notion of a Hump Day one step further. 

 

The Swedish Method
In Sweden, the fact that Wednesday is the turning point of week—and so half the working week is now behind us—has led to it being nicknamed “lillördag,” or literally “little Saturday.” As a result, lillördag is seen by many Swedes as an opportunity to break up the working week and celebrate the upcoming weekend with a couple of post-work drinks. Some Swedish bars, restaurants, clubs, and even museums and other cultural hotspots offer later opening hours midweek, and university students often use Wednesday night as a night to go out drinking or celebrating. It’s essentially a more raucous and rambunctious version of Hump Day that’s also observed in Sweden’s neighboring Nordic countries of Norway, Denmark, and Finland. 

 

That being said, however, Sweden’s “Little Saturday” might have a more practical and less hedonistic explanation behind it than simply celebrating the fast-approaching weekend. According to some theories, the tradition of lillördag actually dates back to a time when many well-to-do households in Sweden had maids and other servants on their staff, many of whom (unlike the household’s members themselves) would be expected to work on a Saturday. 

 

Ultimately, the staff were offered a midweek day off to make up for working the weekends instead, and typically opted for Wednesday as it broke up the rest of the working week the most evenly. Perhaps, then, it is this old tradition of a midweek day of rest that lies behind Sweden’s Hump Day, rather than a simple downhill slide into the weekend.

 

Source: Why Is Wednesday Called “Hump Day”?

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - THE COLOR RED

Did you know... You’d be forgiven for failing to notice some of The Shining’s more intricate details, since there’s a good chance you were covering your eyes with your hands the first time you watched it. Those details really do add to the experience of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic, however, including the fact that the color red appears in nearly every shot. Some of these appearances are obvious — that famous scene of blood pouring out of the elevator, the red-walled men’s room where Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) freshens up — but many are quite subtle. Did you ever notice, for example, that the darts young Danny (Danny Lloyd) plays with are red, or that a book placed on a table in the opening scene and the dress Wendy (Shelley Duvall) wears are red as well?

 

According to one analysis, the inclusion of the scarlet hue is meant to be a visual nod to Jack’s deteriorating mental condition as the Overlook Hotel takes hold of him. It’s just one reason The Shining has been the target of so much theorizing on the part of academics and fans alike; there’s even a documentary devoted to unpacking ideas about the film, called Room 237. Some of the theories are more outlandish than others — the idea that Kubrick used The Shining to confess to helping NASA fake the moon landing is pretty out-there — while others are just strange enough to feel at home in the Overlook.

 

The interior of the Overlook Hotel doesn’t make any sense.
Stanley Kubrick was perhaps the most meticulous filmmaker of all time, with every detail carefully planned and many scenes requiring dozens of takes to get perfect. So while it might seem like a mistake that the Overlook Hotel’s interior is deeply odd — not everything lines up and aspects of it are spatially impossible — that was as deliberate as everything else about the film. “The interiors don’t make sense,” Jan Harlan, one of the film’s executive producers, said in 2012. “Those huge corridors and ballrooms couldn’t fit inside. In fact, nothing makes sense.” The Overlook Hotel was inspired by the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King was staying when the idea came to him. Oregon’s Timberline Lodge was used for the exteriors, and interior scenes were filmed just outside of London at Elstree Studios. Yet the hotel in the film is something else entirely — and exists only as a product of Kubrick’s imagination.

 

 

Source: The color red appears in nearly every shot of ‘The Shining.’

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - THE BROTHERS GRIMM

Did you know... The cultural impact of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, originally published in 1812 as Kinder- und Hausmärchen, or Nursery and Household Tales, is hard to overstate. Two centuries after its publication, the tales have been the creative backbone for hundreds (or even thousands) of films, TV shows, plays, and works of art — whether as direct adaptations or loose inspirations. But while you’re probably familiar with stories such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Rumplestiltskin,” and “Sleeping Beauty,” you may not know that German linguists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm didn’t actually create the narratives themselves. Instead, they compiled tales that had been passed down through the oral tradition, some for perhaps millennia. The two brothers began interviewing family and friends to collect the tales while they were still teenagers studying at the University of Marburg. After publishing their first collection of 86 tales, the brothers delivered a second edition three years later with an additional 70 tales. The seventh and final edition in 1857 featured 211 tales.

 

Originally, the stories weren’t meant for children — many were violent, sexual, or otherwise R-rated. Instead, the Grimms intended for the tales to be an excavation of cultural heritage, and they first introduced them as scholarly work. But as literacy rates climbed in the 19th century, subsequent editions edited out a lot of the original tales’ brutality in order to appeal to wider audiences, especially children. Today, many kids become acquainted with the Grimms’ fairy tales through Walt Disney, who used the stories as far back as 1922 for some of his earliest animations. But Disney is far from the only one inspired by the Grimms — more recently, their work has provided the narrative fuel for Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods, Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre TV series, 2020’s fantasy-horror film Gretel & Hansel, and NBC’s aptly named television show Grimm, to name just a few folklore-filled examples.

 

The Brothers Grimm’s other great work was a German dictionary.
While history remembers them as saviors of the folktale, in their own time the Brothers Grimm were widely respected medievalist scholars and German linguists. In fact, they were so respected that the predictable patterns of phonetic changes from Proto-Indo-European language (the theorized common ancestor of all modern languages) to Germanic tongues are now known as “Grimm’s Law.” But their most ambitious work was creating Deutsches Wörterbuch (“The German Dictionary”), which they began working on in 1838. Originally estimating that it would be only four volumes long, Jacob eventually revised that number to seven and thought they’d need about 10 years to complete it. Instead, it took more than a century for all 32 volumes to finally appear in print — the last in 1961. Of course, the Brothers Grimm didn’t live to see the end of their ambitious project. When Jacob Grimm died in 1863, four years after his brother Wilhelm, he had only finished up to the letter “F.” His final word was frucht, meaning “fruit.”

 

 

Source: The Brothers Grimm didn’t create their own fairy tales.

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - AUTUMN

Did you know.... As beloved as the crisp fall weather seems to be, English speakers haven’t always paid attention to it … at least not linguistically. Historically, the more extreme seasons have always been named — specifically winter, which was so important that it was used to mark the passage of time by the Anglo-Saxons, who counted their years in winters. But when English speakers of the past referred to summer’s end, they often used the term “harvest,” from the Old English (and ultimately Germanic) haerfest. The first recorded usage of “harvest” to mean a season appears in the 10th century, but the word didn’t stick around in common usage (it was considered outdated by the 1700s). It could be that it was just too confusing a term, considering it was used for both the time of year and the task of plucking crops from trees and fields.

 

Eventually, the English language began recognizing the transitional seasons. Spring was first known as “lent” or “lenten” in the 12th and 13th centuries, then “spryngyng time,” among other terms, around the 14th century. “Autumn” emerged around the 1300s, taken from the Latin autumnus and French automne, and slowly pushing out “harvest.” “Fall” cropped up around the 1500s as part of “fall of the leaf,” mirroring the popular phrase “spring of the leaf” used for the vernal equinox, and it’s likely that these phrases were simply shortened to give the seasons their modern names. “Autumn” and “fall” have been used interchangeably ever since, with their popularity waxing and waning over time, though English speakers today primarily use one or the other based on their homeland. “Autumn” reigns supreme in the U.K., while most Americans typically use “fall.” The vocabulary variation harkens back to the Revolutionary period, when disgruntled colonists attempted to split both governmentally and culturally from the British, in part by modifying their speech. Less than 100 years after the U.S. declared independence, “fall” was considered an entirely American word, used in a young country that would go on to establish its own season-defining traditions, such as trick-or-treating and Thanksgiving dinners.

 

The first English dictionary had only 3,000 words.
Dictionaries were once popular graduation gifts and required purchases for college students, but the first English-only compendium wasn’t nearly as large as modern tomes. Lexicographer Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, featured around 3,000 words with brief descriptions of their meanings on 130 pages — and unlike more recent dictionaries, it didn’t contain commonly used words. Instead, Cawdrey’s text listed difficult, unusual words that had crept into English thanks to a wave of literary, scientific, and artistic advances during the 1500s. (Many, like “ocean” or “hazard,” we wouldn’t think of as particularly challenging today.) Table Alphabeticall’s limited focus is often why its historical significance is overshadowed by Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language — an important language contribution that attempted to standardize the spelling of everyday words for the first time, but didn’t go to press until 1775.

 

 

Source: Autumn was once called ‘harvest.’

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - THE WORD "SCIENTIST"

Did you know... For most of human history, scientists haven’t been called “scientists.” From the ancient Greeks to 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers, terms such as “natural philosopher” or the (unfortunately gendered) “man of science” described those who devoted themselves to understanding the laws of the natural world. But by 1834, that pursuit had become so wide and varied that English academic William Whewell feared that science itself would become like “a great empire falling to pieces.” He decided that the field needed a simple word that could unify its disparate branches toward one goal — and the inspiration for this word came from someone who wasn’t a “man” of science at all.

 

Scottish mathematician and science writer Mary Somerville’s book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences is a masterwork of science communication. Published in 1834, it’s often considered the very first piece of popular science, a work that successfully described the complex scientific world for a general audience. Crucially, it also framed the pursuit of science as a connected, global effort and not as fractured professions siloed in separate “societies.” While writing a review of Somerville’s book, Whewell used his new word to describe the men and women striving for this previously unknown knowledge. Much like an “artist” can create using a variety of media, so too can a “scientist” seek to understand the world in a variety of ways.

 

Some argue that the scientific method was first used by a Muslim natural philosopher in the 11th century CE.
During the Islamic Golden Age (mid-seventh to mid-13th centuries, often concentrated in Baghdad), Muslim thinkers expanded human knowledge with advancements in astronomy, engineering, music, optics, manufacturing, and (some argue) by creating the very bedrock of modern science itself, the scientific method. At its most basic, the scientific method is a framework that guides scientists toward facts by using hypotheses tested with controlled experiments. Working mostly in Cairo in the early 11th century, polymath Ibn al-Haytham used this method to produce some of his greatest breakthroughs in optics, one of which included the camera obscura (an optical device that was a forerunner of the modern camera). By the 13th century, al-Haytham’s work had been anonymously translated and found its way into the hands of Roger Bacon, an English philosopher who embraced al-Haytham’s empirical approach and formed the foundations of modern European science.

 

 

Source: The word ‘scientist’ dates back only to 1834.