Fact of the Day

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (Western Animation)

 

Did you know.... that Les Triplettes de Belleville, a.k.a. The Triplets of Belleville or Belleville Rendez-vous, is a 2003 French animated film by animator and writer Sylvain Chomet. For all its quirky twists and turns, it ultimately becomes an introspective character study rather than simply a piece of popular entertainment. It's also tied together by some truly fantastic jazz and period-inspired music by Benoît Charest and features almost no dialogue.

 

The film features the voices of Michèle Caucheteux, Jean-Claude Donda, Michel Robin, and Monica Viegas. There is little dialogue; much of the narrative is conveyed through song and pantomime. It tells the story of Madame Souza, an elderly woman who goes on a quest to rescue her grandson Champion, a Tour de France cyclist, who has been kidnapped by the French mafia for gambling purposes and taken to the fanciful city of Belleville (an amalgam of New York City, Montreal and Quebec City). She is accompanied by Champion's loyal and obese hound, Bruno, and joined by the Triplets of Belleville, music hall singers from the 1930s, whom she meets in the city.  The triplets, aged former Vaudeville stars now living out their days fishing for frogs with hand grenades and playing trios on the newspaper, refrigerator, and vacuum cleaner.

 

Madame Souza and Bruno

 

The film was highly praised by audiences and critics for its unique style of animation. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards—Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song for "Belleville Rendez-vous" (French version). It was also screened out of competition (hors concours) at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.

 

Music and Appliances as Instruments
Devoid of any significant dialogue, the film relied on its prevalent musicality to create its irreverent tone and to denote its more mournful moments. For example, Chomet considered pivotal to use Mozart’s Mass C Minor during the scene in which Madame Souza and her dog Bruno cross the Atlantic to rescue Champion. It was one of the director’s favorite sequences because of the poignancy and defiance of her actions.

 

Madam Souza & Bruno Crossing the Atlantic

 

The rest of the music was combination between composer Benoit Charest’s creations and Chomet’s ideas. In order to create the song for the scene known as “Vacuum Cleaner Cabaret,” or "Cabaret Hoover" where the triplets and Madame Souza perform together, the director suggested Charet used a vacuum cleaner to elicit strange sounds. He played the vacuum's tube as a wind instrument. He would place his hand over the hole to figure out what kind of sounds it would make and he would control the airflow with his fingers. The vacuum cleaner used for the film was eventually named “Mouf-Mouf.”

 

Other household appliances and objects turned into percussions included refrigerator grills, which came from Chomet’s own fridge, a newspaper, and bicycle wheel. Essentially, what the characters on screen are playing is exactly what was employed to construct the track.

 

Refrigerator Grills, Newspaper, Vacuum Cleaner Tube and Bicycle wheel

 

Animator and Character Become One
According to Chomet, animation is the medium where the characters express their feelings through the way they move. He explained that what he learned in England, which is very different from the North American style of doing things, is that everything is based on timing. At first a character doesn’t do anything and then with just a little gesture his emotions come to life, and those emotions transform it into a funny or sad character.

 

In Chomet’s experience, when people spend eight hours a day, five days a week, and sometimes two years animating on a film, they connect with the character and when they see it on screen they feel like they are the character, or that in a way the character is like them. Animator Hugues Martel, who was in charge of Blanche, the triplet with the braids, figured out how to animate her hair by acting it out and exaggerating the motions when she tosses one braid first and then the other.

 

Blanche and Bruno

 

Belleville’s Architectural Style
To design Belleville, art director Evgeni Tomov’s objective was to imagine a city that could instantly be perceived as a place that really exists, but without resembling one specific town in reality. Belleville feels like a city, but not one that you would fully recognize. It’s a combination between Paris, New York, and Montreal. Chomet was very precise about his wishes regarding Belleville’s architectural style and the ambience. It needed to be a very rich and interesting metropolis where the majority of the people follow the cult of consumerism and food.

 

Local characters are mostly overweight, as a commentary on their material and superfluous wealth. The ornate nature of the skyline complicated the work of the art department in one early scene shortly after Madame Souza and Bruno arrive in Belleville. As the camera cranes up from characters to a view of the entire city, the buildings closer to the camera were moving faster and were on a different angle, and behind them there was a huge panoramic rendering. This shot required five different overlays of buildings moving at different speeds to produce a sense of space.

 

 

3D Vehicles and Explosions
Conscious that without the use of digital tools some elements wouldn’t be possible Sylvain Chomet and his team decided to use 3d animation to show bicycles, cars, boats, traffic jams, and the Tour de France. Since they wanted to have the 2d and 3d animation coexist in the same film and not come across as disjointed parts, they tried to destroy the perfect and clean look of cg and make it feel as if it was drawn by hand.

 

Chomet also noted that the reasoning behind this was because if you give a 2d animator something like a car or a bicycle, he is going to go mad and it’s going to be a terrible job for him because there is no life to a bicycle. Another practical use of cg was for the multiple explosions in the story, in particular the enormous one the triplets use to catch frogs where tons of mud flies in the air. Hand-drawn effects weren’t satisfactory, so compositing supervisor Pieter Van Houte added 3d elements to it.

 

 

Expressive Colors
Selecting the color palette for the background in each sequence was a process based on the emotional tone of the story in that moment. The childhood scenes are very nostalgic and take place during the 1950s, thus they have sepia hues or gentle coloring. Industrialized Paris is dull, sad, and marked by constant raining, so the colors are dark and cold. For the Tour de France segment, which is very sunny and hot, orange shades were the obvious choice. Belleville, on the other hand, is meant to resemble the North American way of lighting streets and buildings, specifically in Montreal or Quebec. Chomet felt that in those cities the streetlights showcase very strong green color spots like Edward Hopper paintings.

 

Purposeful and Fragile Characters
Curiously enough, most of the characters in this film were inspired by people director Sylvain Chomet knew or ran into. Bruno is based on a real dog he saw on the streets of Montpellier, France. He describes it as “an absolutely enormous and fat dog.” The eponymous triplets were a reflection of his grandmother on his mother’s side. She was a colorful character and a strong woman. He never met her, but everyone in his family would tell him anecdotes about her. He grew up knowing she was a lovely person with a big heart. The essence of the triplets comes from her.

 

Champion, the kidnapped cyclist, emerged from the artist’s encounter with a mechanic working in a garage who was repairing some cars. It was the first character he envisioned and eventually transformed him from a repairman to an athlete. Courageous Madame Souza was based on an idea he had about a Portuguese lady with clubfoot.

 

Because it’s a nearly silent movie, Chomet knew the audience wouldn’t be able to recognize the character through their voices, so he gave each of them singular shapes. When viewers see a short figure they immediately know it’s Madame Souza and when they see the tall and rectangular figures dressed in black they associate them with the mafia. It’s a great trick that can be done in animation, but not in live action.

 

French Mafia

 

There is a certain melancholy to The Triplets of Belleville because the characters exhibit human flaws and undergo painful situations. Chomet birthed the characters to be fragile, to have meaningful childhoods, lives of their own, and to exist with more purpose than just being funny cartoons.

 

Iconic Opening Sequence and PG-13 Rating
The black-and-white opening represents the best days in the lives of the triplets and the city alike. Animator Benoit Feroumont was in charge of this sequence, and had to find a particular dance style for the triplets so they could be instantly recognized later in the film despite the passage of time. Pushing to make the footage look as if ripped from a 1930s newsreel, the team digitally scratched the film to give it that worn feel. The effect was so convincing that some projectionists at movie theaters panicked when they first saw it, believing the film had been damaged in transit.

 

Now an iconic song, Belleville Rendez-vous was based on a piece composer Benoit Charest had made for another film. The song was too playful for the topic of the original picture it was intended for, so he put it on the demo for Sylvain Chomet, who immediately thought it was the perfect theme song for The Triplets of Belleville.

 

 

The Triplets of Belleville Trailer

 

There are multiple cameos in this energetic set piece, including emblematic jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, whose dexterity is magnified for comedy purposes. Dancer Josephine Baker appears topless for a few seconds, which was enough to earn the film a PG-13 rating in the U.S. (and the equivalent 12A in the U.K.). Lastly, entertainer Fred Astaire, animated by Gerard Boulet, is shown having a confrontation with his shoes. This occurrence propelled a Canadian animator working on the film to voice his dissatisfaction, as he believed it was unfair for Fred to lose the fight with the shoes.

 

 

Source: Cartoon Brew - The Triplets of Belleville, Wikipedia - The Triplets of Belleville, TVTropes - The Triplets of Belleville

 

Edited July 27, 2020 by DarkRavie

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - PLASTICINE

 

Did you know... that plasticine is a putty-like modelling material made from calcium salts, petroleum jelly and aliphatic acids. Plasticine is used for children's play and as a modelling medium for more formal or permanent structures. Because of its non-drying property, it is a popular choice of material for stop-motion animation, including several Oscar-winning films by Nick Park. The brand-name clay is sometimes mentioned in British music, such as the "plasticine porters" in the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", the Oasis songs "Little James" and "Shakermaker", the Placebo song "Plasticine", and the Thom Yorke song "Plasticine Figures". (Wikipedia)

 

William Harbutt, an art teacher in Bath, England, formulated Plasticine in 1897. Harbutt wanted a non-drying clay for his sculpture students. He created a non-toxic, sterile, soft and malleable clay that did not dry when exposed to air.

 

Harbutt received a patent in 1899 and commercial production started at a factory in Bathampton in 1900. The original Plasticine was grey. Four colours were produced for initial sale to the public. Plasticine was popular with children, was widely used in schools for teaching art, and has found a wide variety of other uses (for example moulding casts for plaster, and plastics).

 

 

Plasticine is approximately 65% bulking agent (principally gypsum), 10% petroleum jelly, 5% lime, 10% lanolin and 10% stearic acid. It cannot be hardened by firing, melts when exposed to heat, and is flammable at higher temperatures.

 

Harbutt patented a different formulation in 1915, which added wool fibres to give plasticine a stronger composition intended for ear plugs, and as a sterile dressing for wounds and burns.

 

The Harbutt company marketed Plasticine as a children's toy by producing modelling kits based on characters from children's stories, such as Noddy, the Mr. Men and Paddington Bear.

 

 

The original Plasticine factory was destroyed by fire in 1963 and replaced by a modern building. The Harbutt company produced Plasticine in Bathampton until 1983, when production was moved to Thailand.

 

Harbutts Factory where Plasticine was made, Bathampton
 

The Colorforms company was the major American licensee of Plasticine from 1979 until at least 1984. The use of a different chalk compound caused a product inconsistency, and the U.S. version was considered inferior to the original mix.

 

Bluebird Toys plc acquired Plasticine through its purchase of Peter Pan, Harbutt's parent company. In 1998, Mattel bought Bluebird and the brand was sold to Humbrol Ltd, famous for its model paints and owner of the Airfix model kit brand. Flair Leisure licensed the brand from Humbrol in 2005 and relaunched Plasticine. It acquired the brand outright, when Humbrol went into administration a year later.

 

 

Plasticine is a popular product to use in clay animation, also known as claymation, a form of stop-motion animation using 3D models. Plasticine is good for this as it’s both malleable and flexible; the characters can be moved in many ways. It works well with wire armature as it holds its form and doesn’t dry out between takes.

 

Industrial plasticine

 

Besides its use in film and schoolroom art projects, Plasticine is used in long-jump competitions to assist judges in seeing if the jumps are legal.

 

 

 

The 10 cm indicator board from which the athlete leaps is edged with Plasticine; it is prepared this way so the marked board can be kept to one side in case of challenges, and this form of verification does not slow down the competition.

 

Plasticine has been used to make a stunning garden at the 2009 The 2009 Chelsea Flower Show 10 cm indicator board from which the athlete leaps is edged with Plasticine, and it was also used in World War II to assist in disarming German Type Y bomb fuses.

 

A life-size vegetable plot in James May’s Paradise in Plasticine

 

Sources: Wikipedia - Plasticine | The Vintage News - Plasticine

[Lonewolfe187]

On 7/25/2020 at 4:49 PM, DarkRavie said:

Well, here's some facts I found about this anime that you've got me interested in and hope will interest others who like me haven't watched it.

 

Fact of the Day - PSYCHO-PASS

 

Did you know... that Psycho-Pass is a Japanese cyberpunk anime television series produced by Production I.G. It was co-directed by Naoyoshi Shiotani and Katsuyuki Motohiro and written by Gen Urobuchi, with character designs by Akira Amano and featuring music by Yugo Kanno.

 

The series aired on Fuji TV's Noitamina programming block between October 2012 and March 2013. A second season aired between October and December 2014, with a feature film titled, Psycho-Pass: The Movie released in January 2015. In 2019, Psycho-Pass: Sinners of the System premiered the first of its three independent films, spanning release dates between January and March. All of the stories take place in an authoritarian future dystopia where omnipresent public sensors continuously scan the mental states of every passing citizen. A third season aired between October and December 2019, with a sequel film, Psycho-Pass 3: First Inspector, released in March 2020.

 

 

 

Psycho-Pass originated from Production I.G.'s interest in making a successor to Mamoru Oshii's achievements. The series was inspired by several live-action films. Chief director Katsuyuki Motohiro aimed to explore psychological themes in society's youth using dystopian storylines. Multiple books and movies influenced Psycho-Pass with the most notable being the 1982 American science fiction film Blade Runner. The series was licensed by Funimation in North America.

 

Two manga adaptations have been serialized in Shueisha's Jump Square magazine. Several novels, including an adaptation and prequels to the original story, have been published. An episodic video game adaptation called Chimi Chara Psycho-Pass was developed by Nitroplus staffers in collaboration with Production I.G. New novels and another manga were serialized in 2014. A prequel manga centered around Kogami's past has been written.

 

Psycho-Pass is set in a futuristic Japan where the Sibyl System, a powerful bio-mechanical computer network, endlessly measures the biometrics of Japanese citizens' brains and mentalities using a "cymatic scan." The resulting assessment is called a Psycho-Pass, which includes a numeric Crime Coefficient index, revealing the citizen's criminality potential, and a color-coded Hue, alerting law enforcement to other data, as well as the improvement (clearing) or decline (clouding) of said Psycho-Pass.

 

When a targeted individual's Crime Coefficient index exceeds the accepted threshold (100), they are pursued, apprehended, and either arrested or decomposed by the field officers of the Crime Investigation Department of the Ministry of Welfare's Public Safety Bureau. Elite officers known as Inspectors research and evaluate crime scenes, including all personnel involved, with the assistance of Enforcers.

 

Enforcers are latent criminals charged with protecting the Inspectors, adding their expertise and carrying out Inspectors' instructions. Both are equipped with personally activated, hand-held weapons called "Dominators" whose integrated scanners provide the target's immediate Psycho-pass. The gun-like weapon can only fire when approved by the Sibyl System and triggered by its owner. Inspectors and Enforcers work as a team, though Inspectors have jurisdiction to fire their Dominators on the Enforcers should they pose a danger to the public or the Inspectors themselves.

 

Dominator Standard Edition

 

Motohiro wanted the series to counter concurrent anime trends. The use of moe (slang) was banned at staff meetings because they appreciated dramas like Mobile Suit Gundam and Patlabor that focused on conflicts between male characters. As the series was "anti-moe," the team decided to avoid having Tsunemori remove her clothes and instead had Kogami do it. Nevertheless, the show attracted a female viewership because the conflict between the male characters appeared to attract the shonen ai genre fans. Although Shiotani also wanted the series to avoid romance between male characters, he believed the fight scenes between male characters unintentionally attracted female fans. The staff decided to focus on friendships rather than romantic relationships.

 

Makishima VS Kogami

 

The series was inspired by several Western films, most notably L.A. Confidential. Director Naoyoshi Shiotani cited several other influences, including Minority Report, Gattaca, Brazil and Blade Runner; the latter of which he compared very closely to Psycho-Pass. Before the making of the series, Urobuchi insisted on using a Philip K. Dick-inspired, dystopian narrative. The psychological themes were based on the time Shiotani watched Lupin III during his childhood because he thought about adding "today's youth trauma" to the series. The rivalry between the main characters was based on the several dramas the staff liked. Other voice actors have been credited in the making of the series because of the ways they added traits to the characters. Since the third series was handled by new writers (Fukami and Yoshigami), the new members used ideas from their superiors when writing the script such as Ubukata's novels Mardock Scramble and Spiegel.

 

Click below  to read more about Psycho-Pass

 

Source: Wikipedia - Psycho-Pass ; Psycho=Pass Wiki | Fandom

 

 

 

This is really by far one of the best anime i've ever watched in my life. 

[Lonewolfe187]

Many of the shadows that the phantom thieves use are named after famous thieves in fiction like Aresene named after Aresene Lupin.

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - RICHARD PRYOR

Pryor in February 1986

 

Did you know... that Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was an American stand-up comedian, actor, and writer. He reached a broad audience with his trenchant observations and storytelling style, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential stand-up comedians of all time. (Wikipedia)

 

Richard Pryor, in full Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III, (born December 1, 1940, Peoria, Illinois, U.S.—died December 10, 2005, Los Angeles, California), American comedian and actor, who was one of the leading comics of the 1970s and ’80s. His comedy routines drew on a variety of downtrodden urban characters, rendered with brutal emotional honesty.

 

Pryor, an African American, began working in clubs in the early 1960s, developing his brand of controversial, race-based humour. His success influenced many later comics. He appeared in motion pictures such as Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and Silver Streak (1976), becoming a major box-office attraction. He also had success with his own concert films, including Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (1982). In 1986 he starred in the autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. His stand-up performances also were documented in comedy albums, for which he won five Grammy Awards. As a comedy writer, Pryor received an Emmy for the Lily Tomlin television special Lily (1973) and a Writers Guild Award as co-writer of the screenplay for Blazing Saddles (1974).

 

Left: Alan Alda, center: Lily Tomlin, Right: Richard Pryor in the Lily Tomlin Special, Lily. 

 

Pryor struggled with drug problems, and in 1980 he was seriously burned in what was reported as a cocaine-related incident. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986, he made few appearances after the early 1990s. Pryor was presented with the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize in 1998. His autobiography, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences (co-written with Todd Gold), was published in 1995.

 

 

Pryor is considered by many to be the greatest stand-up comedian of all time. Jerry Seinfeld referred to him as “the Picasso of our profession.” Chris Rock has called him comedy’s Rosa Parks. Yet the indelible mark Pryor made on the world of comedy only tells part of his story.

 

Like his career in the spotlight, Pryor’s world offstage was also highly compelling and full of shocking turns. He’s one of those people whose real life was so off-the-wall at times that it becomes tough to separate fact from fiction. Here are just a few stories about the brilliant and chaotic life of the great Richard Pryor.

 

RICHARD PRYOR HAD A TRAGIC CHILDHOOD.
Richard Pryor had a tragic early life, experiencing things that no child should have to endure: Born to a prostitute named Gertrude on December 1, 1940 in Peoria, Illinois, Pryor’s father was a former boxer and hustler named LeRoy Pryor. For much of his childhood, Pryor was raised in the actual brothel where his mother worked, which was owned by his own no-nonsense grandmother, Marie Carter. With his mother periodically dropping out of his life for long stretches, it was Marie who served as Pryor’s central guardian and caretaker.

 

In 2015, The New Yorker published an article to mark the 10th anniversary of Pryor’s passing, which offered further details on his turbulent early life, noting:

 

Pryor said that one of the reasons he adored movies as a boy was that you were never in doubt as to why the women in them were screaming. As for the sounds that Richard heard in the middle of the night in his room on the top floor of one of Marie’s businesses, he had no idea what was happening to those girls. A number of times, he saw his mother, Gertrude, one of the women in Marie’s employ, nearly beaten to death by his father. Gertrude left when Richard was five. He later registered no resentment over this. “At least Gertrude didn’t flush me down the toilet,” he said. (This was not a joke. As a child, Pryor opened a shoebox and found a dead baby inside.)

 

 

 

RICHARD PRYOR WALKED AWAY FROM A SUCCESSFUL CAREER.

Early in his career Pryor found success by modeling his comedy largely on the work on Bill Cosby, which led to many comparisons being drawn between the two—a fact that Cosby reportedly grew to dislike.

 

There are conflicting tales of just how Pryor made the 180-degree change in style that led to him becoming a comedic legend. One of the most well traveled tales, and one that Pryor himself confirmed on more than one occasion, states that Pryor was performing his clean-cut act in Las Vegas one night when he looked out into the audience and saw Dean Martin among the crowd. If you believe the story, seeing the legendarily cool Rat Packer’s face made Pryor question what exactly he was doing and caused him to abruptly leave the stage mid-performance. Around this time Pryor moved to the San Francisco Bay area, dropped out of the comedy limelight for several years, and later reemerged with the more pointed, in-your-face style that made him an icon.

 

 

RICHARD PRYOR MADE LORNE MICHAELS QUIT SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.
Back in 1975, Saturday Night Live was brand new, so at the time the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, wasn’t yet a powerful TV icon. Therefore, when Michaels stuck his neck out and demanded the right to have Pryor on as a guest host, he was really risking a lot. It took Michaels handing in a fake resignation to convince NBC executives to allow the famously foulmouthed comic to appear. Michaels himself had to implement a secret five-second delay for that night’s episode to be sure that any off-the-cuff, unscripted choice language didn’t make its way out over the airwaves. The delay was kept from Pryor who, upon later finding out, confirmed that he would have refused to do the show had he known about it

 

The episode, the seventh one of SNL’s premiere season, contained one of the most memorable and edgy sketches ever to appear on the show: (the NSFW) Word Association. Chevy Chase and Pryor’s personal writer, Paul Mooney, have each claimed to have written the sketch.

RICHARD PRYOR LOST THE STARRING ROLE IN BLAZING SADDLES.

 

 

Pryor and Gene Wilder made four films together (Silver Streak; Stir Crazy; See No Evil, Hear No Evil; and Another You), but there could have been at least one more. Pryor was one of the credited writers on Mel Brooks’s classic Blazing Saddles and the plan for a time was that he would also co-star in the film, playing Sheriff Bart alongside Wilder as the Waco Kid. In the clip above, Wilder explained how Pryor’s infamous drug use caused him to end up in a remote city and subsequently lose the starring role to Cleavon Little.

 

Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder

 

 

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica - Richard Pryor | Wikipedia - Richard Pryor

 

Click below  to read more on Richard Pryor.

 

Source: MentalFloss - Richard Pryor

[Lonewolfe187]

5 hours ago, DarkRavie said:

Fact of the Day - RICHARD PRYOR

Pryor in February 1986

 

Did you know... that Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was an American stand-up comedian, actor, and writer. He reached a broad audience with his trenchant observations and storytelling style, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential stand-up comedians of all time. (Wikipedia)

 

Richard Pryor, in full Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III, (born December 1, 1940, Peoria, Illinois, U.S.—died December 10, 2005, Los Angeles, California), American comedian and actor, who was one of the leading comics of the 1970s and ’80s. His comedy routines drew on a variety of downtrodden urban characters, rendered with brutal emotional honesty.

 

Pryor, an African American, began working in clubs in the early 1960s, developing his brand of controversial, race-based humour. His success influenced many later comics. He appeared in motion pictures such as Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and Silver Streak (1976), becoming a major box-office attraction. He also had success with his own concert films, including Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (1982). In 1986 he starred in the autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling. His stand-up performances also were documented in comedy albums, for which he won five Grammy Awards. As a comedy writer, Pryor received an Emmy for the Lily Tomlin television special Lily (1973) and a Writers Guild Award as co-writer of the screenplay for Blazing Saddles (1974).

 

Left: Alan Alda, center: Lily Tomlin, Right: Richard Pryor in the Lily Tomlin Special, Lily. 

 

Pryor struggled with drug problems, and in 1980 he was seriously burned in what was reported as a cocaine-related incident. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986, he made few appearances after the early 1990s. Pryor was presented with the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize in 1998. His autobiography, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences (co-written with Todd Gold), was published in 1995.

 

 

Pryor is considered by many to be the greatest stand-up comedian of all time. Jerry Seinfeld referred to him as “the Picasso of our profession.” Chris Rock has called him comedy’s Rosa Parks. Yet the indelible mark Pryor made on the world of comedy only tells part of his story.

 

Like his career in the spotlight, Pryor’s world offstage was also highly compelling and full of shocking turns. He’s one of those people whose real life was so off-the-wall at times that it becomes tough to separate fact from fiction. Here are just a few stories about the brilliant and chaotic life of the great Richard Pryor.

 

RICHARD PRYOR HAD A TRAGIC CHILDHOOD.
Richard Pryor had a tragic early life, experiencing things that no child should have to endure: Born to a prostitute named Gertrude on December 1, 1940 in Peoria, Illinois, Pryor’s father was a former boxer and hustler named LeRoy Pryor. For much of his childhood, Pryor was raised in the actual brothel where his mother worked, which was owned by his own no-nonsense grandmother, Marie Carter. With his mother periodically dropping out of his life for long stretches, it was Marie who served as Pryor’s central guardian and caretaker.

 

In 2015, The New Yorker published an article to mark the 10th anniversary of Pryor’s passing, which offered further details on his turbulent early life, noting:

 

Pryor said that one of the reasons he adored movies as a boy was that you were never in doubt as to why the women in them were screaming. As for the sounds that Richard heard in the middle of the night in his room on the top floor of one of Marie’s businesses, he had no idea what was happening to those girls. A number of times, he saw his mother, Gertrude, one of the women in Marie’s employ, nearly beaten to death by his father. Gertrude left when Richard was five. He later registered no resentment over this. “At least Gertrude didn’t flush me down the toilet,” he said. (This was not a joke. As a child, Pryor opened a shoebox and found a dead baby inside.)

 

 

 

RICHARD PRYOR WALKED AWAY FROM A SUCCESSFUL CAREER.

Early in his career Pryor found success by modeling his comedy largely on the work on Bill Cosby, which led to many comparisons being drawn between the two—a fact that Cosby reportedly grew to dislike.

 

There are conflicting tales of just how Pryor made the 180-degree change in style that led to him becoming a comedic legend. One of the most well traveled tales, and one that Pryor himself confirmed on more than one occasion, states that Pryor was performing his clean-cut act in Las Vegas one night when he looked out into the audience and saw Dean Martin among the crowd. If you believe the story, seeing the legendarily cool Rat Packer’s face made Pryor question what exactly he was doing and caused him to abruptly leave the stage mid-performance. Around this time Pryor moved to the San Francisco Bay area, dropped out of the comedy limelight for several years, and later reemerged with the more pointed, in-your-face style that made him an icon.

 

 

RICHARD PRYOR MADE LORNE MICHAELS QUIT SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.
Back in 1975, Saturday Night Live was brand new, so at the time the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, wasn’t yet a powerful TV icon. Therefore, when Michaels stuck his neck out and demanded the right to have Pryor on as a guest host, he was really risking a lot. It took Michaels handing in a fake resignation to convince NBC executives to allow the famously foulmouthed comic to appear. Michaels himself had to implement a secret five-second delay for that night’s episode to be sure that any off-the-cuff, unscripted choice language didn’t make its way out over the airwaves. The delay was kept from Pryor who, upon later finding out, confirmed that he would have refused to do the show had he known about it

 

The episode, the seventh one of SNL’s premiere season, contained one of the most memorable and edgy sketches ever to appear on the show: (the NSFW) Word Association. Chevy Chase and Pryor’s personal writer, Paul Mooney, have each claimed to have written the sketch.

 

RICHARD PRYOR LOST THE STARRING ROLE IN BLAZING SADDLES.

 

 

Pryor and Gene Wilder made four films together (Silver Streak; Stir Crazy; See No Evil, Hear No Evil; and Another You), but there could have been at least one more. Pryor was one of the credited writers on Mel Brooks’s classic Blazing Saddles and the plan for a time was that he would also co-star in the film, playing Sheriff Bart alongside Wilder as the Waco Kid. In the clip above, Wilder explained how Pryor’s infamous drug use caused him to end up in a remote city and subsequently lose the starring role to Cleavon Little.

 

Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder

 

 

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica - Richard Pryor | Wikipedia - Richard Pryor

 

Click below  to read more on Richard Pryor.

 

Source: MentalFloss - Richard Pryor

My dad loves Richard Pryor ,Gene Wilder and George Carlin.

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BLACK AND WHITE TV

 

Did you know... that the earliest television broadcasts were transmitted in black-and-white, and received and displayed by black-and-white only television sets. (Wikipedia)

 

TV Licensing have today announced that there are now fewer than 12,000 black and white television licensees remaining in Britain (compared to over 25 million colour TV licensees). Today, watching a black and white television is unusual if not exceptional, but of course, it was not always so.

 

For 30 years of its existence (1936–1967) television was entirely in black and white. And for a few thousand lookers-in who tuned in to mechanical television broadcasts (1929–1935), images were black and orange due to the orange colour of the neon gas in the lamps used in the first TV sets.

 

In this post, I look back at the decline of black and white TV, and consider what black and white television still means to us today. If you’re on Twitter, let us know what you think about black and white telly using the hashtag #BlackAndWhiteTV.

 

V210A Monochrome Television receiver, c. 1958, Pye © Science

Museum Group collection

 

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF BLACK AND WHITE TV
It was not until 1954 that colour broadcasting officially began anywhere. This happened in the USA, but it was not without its troubles.

 

A field-sequential colour system, based on a rotating colour filter wheel, had been unceremoniously shut down by the FCC in 1951, with the American television giants CBS and RCA proceeding to battle it out for control of colour.

 

The second generation American colour TV set, which became available in 1954, was an RCA set with a CBS picture tube. By the late 1950s, colour TV had become established in several major US cities. However, the early American colour TV sets were extremely expensive, and required a lot of adjustment and maintenance.

 

1954 RCA CT-100 TV

 

Meanwhile in Britain, due to a combination of cost, caution, and lack of a clear way forward technologically, colour broadcasting would take a few more years to arrive.

 

In 1967, it was our own BBC who pioneered the first colour broadcasting anywhere in Europe. However, the standard selected, PAL, which stands for Phase Alternating Line, was in fact a German improvement of the mid-50s American colour system. PAL was developed at Telefunken under Walter Bruch between 1962 and 1965.

 

Colour broadcasts began on BBC 2 in 1967, arriving on ITV and BBC 1 in 1969. To support the costs, colour TV licences were introduced on 1st January 1968, costing £10—twice the price of the standard £5 black and white TV license. Today, the colour license costs £145.50—three times the price of the black and white license at £49.

 

BBC2 originally launched in black and white on 20th April 1964, but intrinsic in its higher bandwidth television signal (Ultra High Frequency, as opposed to BBC1’s Very High Frequency) was the ability to transmit 625 lines in black and white, and eventually, PAL colour.

 

Graphic celebrating the launch of BBC2, British Broadcasting

Corporation © Science Museum Group collection

 

Famously, BBC2’s opening night was ruined by a major power failure. As a result, Play School unexpectedly became the first proper BBC2 broadcast—at 11am the following day.

 

THE BLACK AND WHITE TELEVISION IMAGE
Cinema retained the monopoly on colour moving images during television’s first three decades. This helped to keep audiences going to films but it also whetted the public appetite for colour on television.

 

However, the film industry’s monopoly of colour did not help it to survive the arrival of television unscathed. Television led to the closure of many cinemas in the 1950s, as well as having similarly negative impacts on national magazines, pubs and nightclubs.

 

The television image was lower in resolution in those days, with the BBC1 image comprising 405 horizontal lines. As I’ve already mentioned, 625 line images arrived with BBC2 in 1964, but surprisingly little was made of the fact that this meant sharper and more watchable black and white images.

A photograph of a 405 line television screen showing a production of 

John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, 4 November 1949,

A. Tanner © Science Museum Group collection
Until about 1960 the only way in which a complete programme could

be recorded was on cine film, and this was rarely done because of the cost.

 

1964 was the same year in which Marshall McLuhan published his best-known book, Understanding Media. In the years leading up to 1964 most viewers’ experience of television, like that of McLuhan, had been via small sets which also had an image that was rather small, an image that would be called ‘blurry’ by today’s standards.

 

McLuhan observed how television programmes in those days called for special production techniques in terms of both image and sound.

 

The TV producer will point out that speech on television must not have the careful precision necessary in the theater. The TV actor does not have to project either his voice or himself. Likewise, TV acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement of the viewer with the completion or ‘closing’ of the TV image, that the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on stage. For the audience participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life of the movie star. Technically, TV tends to be a close-up medium. The close-up that in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, a quite casual thing. And whereas a glossy photo the size of the TV screen would show a dozen faces in adequate detail, a dozen faces on the TV screen are only a blur.

 

Televised production of Magyar Melody at His Majesty’s Theatre,

27 March 1939 © Science Museum Group collection
Magyar Melody was the first musical to be broadcast directly from a

theatre and shown on television. Captions on screen introduced the

television audience to the actors and actresses.

 

COLOUR COMES TO BRITAIN
In July 1967, the BBC led the way in broadcasting the first regular colour television service in Europe. The first programme was an outside broadcast of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships.

 

By mid-1968 almost every BBC2 programme was in colour. Six months later, colour came to BBC1.

 

The impact of the arrival of colour in 1967 cannot easily be isolated from that of the improved 625 line resolution of 1964. Colour and image quality cannot be made exclusive from one another having been introduced at essentially the same time, plus their effects on the viewer are already similar.

 

Improved picture detail and colour both mean more realism in images, and improved images mean less interpretation and involvement—less guesswork required for the viewer.

 

Technically, with the arrival of bigger and better colour sets, television could—very gradually—become less of the close-up medium as described by McLuhan, with screen sizes increasing, more detail in images, and less burden on the viewer to ‘fill in’ the missing colour information.

 

Colour made television more valuable as a medium, as the license fee would indicate. Involvement ‘work’ in decoding the image was exchanged for more desirable experience ‘play’ of the programmes themselves.

 

This evolution of television technology epitomises the goal of television engineers—to create a more effective illusion of reality. Similarly, an improved television image is desirable to both the TV producer and the TV viewer.

 

First Telefunken colour tv set PALcolor 708T from 1967

 

WHY KEEP A BLACK AND WHITE SET?
Perhaps the most interesting application in which a black and white television display makes sense today is for the viewing of black and white films, because colour displays can only approximate black and white images, as they do all colours, by blending red, blue and green, using the additive colour principle.

 

In mixing colours to produce black and white, colour displays are simply not as efficient as the old black and white sets purpose-built for showing black and white images.

 

The old black and white picture tube TVs have a phosphorescent coating distributed uniformly behind the glass screen. When this coating is struck by the rapidly moving electron beam (raster) generated by the electron gun at the rear of the picture tube, the screen illuminates accordingly.

Monochrome television receiver, c. 1951, His Master’s Voice (HMV)

© Science Museum Group collection

 

The beautifully simple way this works also means that the screen on a black and white set requires no metal grid to align sets of colour pixels (this grid is known as a shadow mask). With no shadow mask, black and white sets have no ‘screen door’ effect. In other words, the area of the screen that actually lights up, known as ‘the pixel fill rate’, is 100%. Today, our modern colour sets cannot achieve a 100% pixel fill rate, although some organic (OLED) display sets come close.

 

Therefore, if you are a serious black and white film and TV enthusiast, and are relatively uninterested in modern programmes, an old black and white set may be just the thing for you.

 

The following recording was made in the Lime Grove Studios in London on 3 January 1985. It depicts the final moments of 405 line transmission from the BBC Crystal Palace transmitter. The TV receiver is a model T-18 Baird set manufactured in 1938. The set is actually working and picking up the transmission via a VHF roof top antenna at the studio.

 

 

 

 

Source: Science Media Museum - Black and White TV - Iain Baird

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - LADY JUSTICE

Justitia blindfolded and holding

balance scales and a sword.

Court of Final Appeal, Hong Kong

 

Did you know... that Lady Justice (Latin: Iustitia) is an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems. Her attributes are a blindfold, a balance, and a sword. She often appears as a pair with Prudentia, who holds a mirror and a snake.

 

Lady Justice originates from the personification of Justice in Ancient Roman art known as Iustitia or Justitia after Latin: Iustitia, who is equivalent to the Greek goddesses Themis and Dike.

 

The goddess Iustitia
The origin of Lady Justice was Iustitia, the goddess of Justice within Roman mythology. Iustitia was introduced by emperor Augustus, and was thus not a very old deity in the Roman pantheon.

 

Justice was one of the virtues celebrated by emperor Augustus in his clipeus virtutis, and a temple of Iustitia was established in Rome on 8 January 13 BC by emperor Tiberius. Iustitia became a symbol for the virtue of justice with which every emperor wished to associate his regime; emperor Vespasian minted coins with the image of the goddess seated on a throne called Iustitia Augusta, and many emperors after him used the image of the goddess to proclaim themselves protectors of justice.

 

Though formally called a goddess with her own temple and cult shrine in Rome, it appears that she was from the onset viewed more as an artistic symbolic personification rather than as an actual deity with religious significance.

 

Themis, Old courthouse, Ghent, Belgium

 

Depiction

The personification of justice balancing the scales dates back to the goddess Maat, and later Isis, of ancient Egypt. The Hellenic deities Themis and Dike were later goddesses of justice. Themis was the embodiment of divine order, law, and custom, in her aspect as the personification of the divine rightness of law.

 

The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead

depicts a scene in which a deceased

person's heart is weighed against the

feather of truth.

 

 

Scales
Lady Justice is most often depicted with a set of scales typically suspended from one hand, upon which she measures the strengths of a case's support and opposition.

 

The Greek goddess Dike is depicted holding a set of scales.

 

Themis, Greek Goddess of Justice

 

Bacchylides, Fragment 5 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric IV) (Greek lyric c. 5th B.C.):

"If some god had been holding level the balance of Dike (Justice)".

 

The scales represent the weighing of evidence, and the scales lack a foundation in order to signify that evidence should stand on its own.

 

Blindfold

Since the 16th century, Lady Justice has often been depicted wearing a blindfold. The blindfold represents impartiality, the ideal that justice should be applied without regard to wealth, power, or other status. The earliest Roman coins depicted Justitia with the sword in one hand and the scale in the other, but with her eyes uncovered. Justitia was only commonly represented as "blind" since the middle of the 16th century. The first known representation of blind Justice is Hans Gieng's 1543 statue on the Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen (Fountain of Justice) in Berne.

 

Lady Justice with sword, scales and blindfold on the

Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen in Berne, Switzerland—1543

 

Sword

The sword represented authority in ancient times, and conveys the idea that justice can be swift and final.

 

Toga

The Greco-Roman garment symbolizes the status of the philosophical attitude that embodies justice.

 

Sources: Wikipedia - Lady Justice | Kids Encyclopedia - Lady Justice

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - PELECANIFORMS

Did you know... that pelicans are a genus of large water birds that make up the family Pelecanidae. They are characterised by a long beak and a large throat pouch used for catching prey and draining water from the scooped-up contents before swallowing. (Wikipedia)

 

Pelecaniform, (order Pelecaniformes), any of the relatively large and diverse group of aquatic birds that share the common characteristic of webbing between all four toes. The order Pelecaniformes conventionally contains six families: Anhingidae (anhingas or snakebirds), Phalacrocoracidae (cormorants), Phaethontidae (tropic birds), Fregatidae (frigate birds), Sulidae (gannets and boobies), and Pelecanidae (pelicans).

 

European white pelicans (Pelicanus onocrotalus) in flight.

 

Although this article observes the traditional taxonomic structure, the taxonomic relationships between those families are in flux. The most widely accepted alternate classification puts the pelicans in the Pelecaniformes with herons and egrets (family Ardeidae) and ibises and spoonbills (family Threskiornithidae), along with the hammerhead (Scopus umbretta) and the shoebill (Balaeniceps rex). In that classification, the anhingas, the cormorants, the frigate birds, the gannets, and the boobies are placed in their own family, Suliformes, and the tropic birds are also placed in their own family, Phaethontiformes.

 

GENERAL FEATURES
All pelecaniforms are relatively large birds: they range in length from about 40 cm (about 16 inches), excluding the elongated central tail feathers, in the white-tailed tropic bird (Phaethon lepturus) to 1.8 metres (6 feet) in the Dalmatian pelican (Pelecanus crispus).

 

Brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis).

 

In terms of their way of life, the pelecaniform birds fall into four adaptive groups: the frigate birds are long-winged masters of piracy and aerial pursuit of surface-living marine prey; the tropic birds and boobies are wide-ranging flyers that capture prey underwater by plunging from a height; the pelicans are large, large-billed, long-necked, buoyant birds that fish mostly by reaching down while swimming at the surface; and the cormorants and anhingas are heavy-bodied, long-necked, underwater swimmers, respectively pursuing and lying in wait for their prey below the surface. The anhingas are largely confined to fresh water; pelicans and cormorants occur in both freshwater and marine habitats; and the other groups are entirely marine.

 

American darter, or anhinga (Anhinga anhinga).

 

IMPORTANCE TO HUMANS
Most pelecaniform birds are of rather little significance to humans, but the guano (excrement) of cormorants, boobies, and pelicans is an important fertilizer. Exploitation of old accumulations of guano reached its peak in the mid-19th century, and since then only the current production of guano has been available in most areas, but even this provides a substantial resource where the bird populations are large. There were an estimated 18 million guano birds on the coast of Peru early in the 1960s. Of these, about 15 million were guanay cormorants (Phalacrocorax bougainvillii), and the remainder were Peruvian boobies (Sula variegata) and brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis). The harvest of guano at that time amounted to about 180,000 tons per year. The guano birds in the area feed largely on the Peruvian anchovy, and, now that this fish is directly exploited on a large scale for fish meal and fish oil, guano-producing birds have declined to fewer than five million animals. In Walvis Bay, Namibia, artificial platforms have been constructed in coastal lagoons and on an offshore reef, greatly facilitating the collection of guano.

 

Each year, squadrons of workers manually scrape, sift and bag the bird guano

from islands off the coast of Peru. 

 

Some pelecaniforms are thought to compete with humans for fish. Cormorants are often accused of reducing sport fish populations, which engenders a strong negative backlash by anglers in both Europe and North America. Typically, cormorants are convenient scapegoats for poor fishing due to other causes. Increasingly, however, they have a negative impact on the fish populations of aquaculture ponds in the southeastern United States. Conversely, cormorants are used by fishermen in some countries (such as China and Japan) to catch fish, which they retrieve to a waiting boat; a collar prevents the cormorants from swallowing the fish for themselves.

 

Pelicans, feeding on fish from inland and coastal waters, are among the animals whose diet tends to ensure that they will accumulate residues of insecticides (especially DDT) in their bodies. Among the physiological effects of these substances on birds are changes in calcium metabolism that result in their laying eggs with abnormally thin shells or no shells at all; these eggs usually break before hatching. These effects prevented the successful reproduction of brown pelicans during the early 1970s on the coasts of California and the Gulf of Mexico in the United States, and their populations became endangered as a result. Since the ban on DDT went into effect in the United States at the end of 1972, brown pelicans have been able to rebound in substantial numbers.

 

Brown Pelican

 

DISTRIBUTION AND ABUNDANCE

Pelecaniform birds occur all over the world except in parts of the interior of North America, Africa, Asia, and Australia, in the high Arctic, and in most of Antarctica. Two groups, the tropic birds and frigate birds, are essentially confined to the tropics; the boobies, pelicans, and anhingas are widespread in the tropics but also penetrate far into the temperate zones; and cormorants breed from the Equator to the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic Peninsula.

 

The tropic birds are the most pelagic (free-flying over open ocean) of the pelecaniforms and can be seen even in the most unproductive central parts of tropical seas. Some boobies and frigate birds are found far out at sea, but most of them return to land to roost at night. Pelicans, cormorants, and anhingas do not venture far from land but may commute some distance between roosting or breeding places and their feeding grounds.

 

Frigate Bird in Flight

 

NATURAL HISTORY
Reproduction
The breeding of pelecaniform birds is essentially restricted to places free of mammalian predators. Tropic birds, boobies, and frigate birds typically breed on oceanic islands or on small islets and stacks off continental coasts. Where man introduced predators (such as cats) to isolated islands, pelecaniforms and other marine birds were often eliminated from their traditional breeding grounds. On Ascension Island and St. Helena in the South Atlantic, for example, tropic birds, frigate birds, and boobies, which used to breed in large numbers on the main islands, have either been exterminated or have been forced to confine their nesting to sites on small offshore islets. Pelicans and cormorants are not normally found on islands far from continental land but breed on islands in lakes or offshore or in other protected sites such as trees standing in water or on cliffs. Anhingas breed in trees or bushes close to the sheltered waters where they prefer to feed.

 

Nesting Anhings

 

Click the link below  to right more on Pelecaniforms.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica - Pelecaniforms | Wikipedia - Pelican

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - BIBLIOPHILIA

 

Did you know... that bibliophilia or bibliophilism is the love of books, and a bibliophile or bookworm is an individual who loves and frequently reads books. (Wikipedia)

 

For book lovers, every day is another chance to plunge into a new tale. But August 9 is an even more extraordinary day than usual —  it’s National Book Lovers Day! In celebration of this incredible holiday, here are 30 reasons why being a bookworm totally rules.

 

1. You’re always losing yourself in your latest literary adventure.

2. You believe there’s a little magic in every story.

3. You make the most of every opportunity to read.

4. This is how you pack for a big trip.
5. You know that there’s so much more to a book than just reading it.

6. Sometimes you know book characters better than you know yourself.
7. Your current relationship status is complicated, thanks to your reading list.
8. Besides, you’ve already met the perfect man.
9. You know there’s nothing nerdy about being a book lover.
10. You always manage to get plenty of exercise.

11. You are constantly faced with tough choices.
12. You know that reading a new book is like life renewing itself.
13. And happiness is just a page and a fresh cup of coffee away.
14. Of course, a good catnap helps, too.
15. Because you know the struggle is real.
16. It doesn’t matter what you’re reading — you hate having to put it down.
17. But if you have to, you get creative.

18. The alternative is just too scary.

19. You love reading so much, you’ve even tried to join a book club.
20. But that often leads to two kinds of hangovers.
21. In your opinion, there’s no such thing as a room with too many books.
22. And you’d give anything for your own library.

23. For now, you’ll settle for the public library.

24. Or borrowing books from a friend.

25. No matter what, finishing a book always makes you a little sad.

26. Unless you can’t believe that ending, of course.

27. You know the book is always better than the movie.

 

28. This is you.

29. Describing yourself as a book lover doesn’t quite cut it.

30. But you wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

The classic bibliophile is one who loves to read, admire and collect books, often amassing a large and specialized collection. Bibliophiles usually possess books they love or that hold special value as well as old editions with unusual bindings, autographed, or illustrated copies. "Bibliophile" is an appropriate term for a minority of those who are book collectors.

 

Bibliophilia is not to be confused with bibliomania, a potential symptom of obsessive–compulsive disorder involving the collecting of books to the extent that interpersonal relations or health may be negatively affected, and in which the mere fact that a physical object is a book is sufficient for it to be collected or beloved. Some use the term "bibliomania" interchangeably with "bibliophily", and in fact, the Library of Congress does not use the term "bibliophily," but rather refers to its readers as either book collectors or bibliomaniacs.

 

The Bookworm, 1850, by Carl Spitzweg

 

According to Arthur H. Minters, the "private collecting of books was a fashion indulged in by many Romans, including Cicero and Atticus". The term bibliophile entered the English language in 1824. A bibliophile is to be distinguished from the much older notion of a bookman (which dates back to 1583), who is one who loves books, and especially reading; more generally, a bookman is one who participates in writing, publishing, or selling books.

 

Lord Spencer and the Marquess of Blandford were noted bibliophiles. "The Roxburghe sale quickly became a foundational myth for the burgeoning secondhand book trade, and remains so to this day"; this sale is memorable due to the competition between "Lord Spencer and the marquis of Blandford [which] drove [the price of a probable first edition of Boccaccio's Decameron up to the astonishing and unprecedented sum of £2,260". J. P. Morgan was also a noted bibliophile. In 1884, he paid $24,750 for a 1459 edition of the Mainz Psalter.

 

Of course, a bookworm is an insect that eats books. The term "bookworm" is often used as a metaphor to describe a voracious reader, an indiscriminate reader, or a bibliophile. In its earliest iterations, it had a negative connotation, e.g., an idler who read rather than worked. Over the years its meaning has drifted in a more positive direction. Another meaning of the phrase is "a person who pays more attention to formal rules and book learning than they merit."

 

If you'd like to know if you are a Bibliophile, click the image.

 

 

Source: Bookbub - Shayna Murphy | Wikipedia - Bibliophilia

[Lonewolfe187]

Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer were actually trying to make the punk version of hard days night called "Who klilled bambi"? but with the sex pistols as the cast members but it never went into frutition but Roger Ebert managed to put the full screenplay on his personal website.  

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - MARINE INVERTEBRATES

An octopus at the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island.

 

Did you know.... that marine invertebrates are the invertebrates that live in marine habitats. Invertebrate is a blanket term that includes all animals apart from the vertebrate members of the chordate phylum. Invertebrates lack a vertebral column, and some have evolved a shell or a hard exoskeleton. (Wikipedia)

 

Invertebrates are animals without a backbone or bony skeleton.

 

They range in size from microscopic mites and almost invisible flies to giant squid with soccer-ball-size eyes.

 

This is by far the largest group in the animal kingdom: 97 percent of all animals are invertebrates. So far, 1.25 million species have been described, most of which are insects, and there are millions more to be discovered. The total number of invertebrate species could be 5, 10, or even 30 million, compared to just 60,000 vertebrates.

 

One reason for the success of invertebrates is how quickly they reproduce. Sponges and corals, for example, produce both eggs and sperm. Social insects such as ants and bees lay eggs that can develop without fertilization—they become the workers.

 

Colorful Red Sea Sponge

 

Insects in particular are successful because they are so adaptable. They are opportunistic eaters, feeding on plants, animals, and decaying organic material. They are able to survive in extreme environments, including very hot, dry habitats. And many can fly—either to escape predators or to find new sources of food, water, and shelter.

 

Like vertebrates, invertebrates are classified based upon their body structure, life cycle, and evolutionary history. (National Geographic)

 

Some invertebrate phyla have only one species, while others like Arthropoda include more than 83% of all described animal species with over a million species. The most common marine invertebrates are sponges, cnidarians, marine worms, lophophorates, molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and the hemichordates. (MarineBio)

 

 

The earliest animals were marine invertebrates, that is, vertebrates came later. Animals are multicellular eukaryotes, and are distinguished from plants, algae, and fungi by lacking cell walls. Marine invertebrates are animals that inhabit a marine environment apart from the vertebrate members of the chordate phylum; invertebrates lack a vertebral column. Some have evolved a shell or a hard exoskeleton.

 

The earliest animals may belong to the genus Dickinsonia, 571 million to 541 million years ago. Individual Dickinsonia typically resemble a bilaterally symmetrical ribbed oval. They kept growing until they were covered with sediment or otherwise killed, and spent most of their lives with their bodies firmly anchored to the sediment. Their taxonomic affinities are presently unknown, but their mode of growth is consistent with a bilaterian affinity.

 

Vendian fossils.Dickinsonia costata.

 

Apart from Dickinsonia, the earliest widely accepted animal fossils are the rather modern-looking cnidarians (the group that includes jellyfish, sea anemones and Hydra), possibly from around 580 Ma The Ediacara biota, which flourished for the last 40 million years before the start of the Cambrian, were the first animals more than a very few centimetres long. Like Dickinsonia, many were flat with a "quilted" appearance, and seemed so strange that there was a proposal to classify them as a separate kingdom, Vendozoa. Others, however, have been interpreted as early molluscs (Kimberella), echinoderms (Arkarua), and arthropods (Spriggina, Parvancorina). There is still debate about the classification of these specimens, mainly because the diagnostic features which allow taxonomists to classify more recent organisms, such as similarities to living organisms, are generally absent in the Ediacarans. However, there seems little doubt that Kimberella was at least a triploblastic bilaterian animal, in other words, an animal significantly more complex than the cnidarians.

 

Vendian fossils.Kimberella quadrata.

 

The small shelly fauna are a very mixed collection of fossils found between the Late Ediacaran and Middle Cambrian periods. The earliest, Cloudina, shows signs of successful defense against predation and may indicate the start of an evolutionary arms race. Some tiny Early Cambrian shells almost certainly belonged to molluscs, while the owners of some "armor plates," Halkieria and Microdictyon, were eventually identified when more complete specimens were found in Cambrian lagerstätten that preserved soft-bodied animals.

 

In the 1970s there was already a debate about whether the emergence of the modern phyla was "explosive" or gradual but hidden by the shortage of Precambrian animal fossils. A re-analysis of fossils from the Burgess Shale lagerstätte increased interest in the issue when it revealed animals, such as Opabinia, which did not fit into any known phylum. At the time these were interpreted as evidence that the modern phyla had evolved very rapidly in the Cambrian explosion and that the Burgess Shale's "weird wonders" showed that the Early Cambrian was a uniquely experimental period of animal evolution. 

 

Opabinia

 

Later discoveries of similar animals and the development of new theoretical approaches led to the conclusion that many of the "weird wonders" were evolutionary "aunts" or "cousins" of modern groups—for example that Opabinia was a member of the lobopods, a group which includes the ancestors of the arthropods, and that it may have been closely related to the modern tardigrades. Nevertheless, there is still much debate about whether the Cambrian explosion was really explosive and, if so, how and why it happened and why it appears unique in the history of animals.

 

Click the link below  to read more on Marine Invertebrates.

 

Source: Wikipedia - Marine Invertebrates

 

Edited August 3, 2020 by DarkRavie

[DarkRavie]

8 hours ago, Lonewolfe187 said:

Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer were actually trying to make the punk version of hard days night called "Who klilled bambi"? but with the sex pistols as the cast members but it never went into frutition but Roger Ebert managed to put the full screenplay on his personal website.  

That's interesting.   I didn't know that.

[Lonewolfe187]

44 minutes ago, DarkRavie said:

That's interesting.   I didn't know that.

https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/who-killed-bambi-a-screenplay

Here's the link of the screenplay itself 

[warriorpirate]

I just found out that the national animal of Scotland is a Unicorn! 

[DarkRavie]

Now, I may have posted about this before, I don't recall and going back to check I don't feel like it.

 

Fact of the Day - HOT AIR BALLOONS

 

Did you know... that A hot air balloon is a lighter-than-air aircraft consisting of a bag, called an envelope, which contains heated air. Suspended beneath is a gondola or wicker basket, which carries passengers and a source of heat, in most cases an open flame caused by burning liquid propane.  The heated air inside the envelope makes it buoyant since it has a lower density than the colder air outside the envelope. As with all aircraft, hot air balloons cannot fly beyond the atmosphere. The envelope does not have to be sealed at the bottom, since the air inside the envelope there is at about the same pressure as the surrounding air. In modern sport balloons the envelope is generally made from nylon fabric and the inlet of the balloon (closest to the burner flame) is made from a fire resistant material such as Nomex. Modern balloons have been made in all kinds of shapes, such as rocket ships and the shapes of various commercial products, though the traditional shape is used for most non-commercial, and many commercial, applications.

 

Alien Rocket Ship

 

The hot air balloon is the first successful human-carrying flight technology. The first untethered manned hot air balloon flight was performed by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes on November 21, 1783, in Paris, France, in a balloon created by the Montgolfier brothers. The first hot-air balloon flown in the Americas was launched from the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia on January 9, 1793 by the French aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard. Hot air balloons that can be propelled through the air rather than simply drifting with the wind are known as thermal airships. (Wikipedia)

 

Out of all the interesting facts about the hot air balloon, this might be one of the lesser known ones, even though when you think about it, the connection is quite obvious.

 

The first manned hot air balloon flight took place in the 18th century, but China has been experimenting with hot air technology for more than two thousand years, with the first documented tests performed as early as the 3rd century BCE.

 

The biggest hot air balloon innovator in China was Zhuge Liang, a military strategist and inventor, who adapted the hot air balloon mechanism to send messages to supporting troops in case his army was surrounded

 

The type of old hot air balloon that the Chinese used was basically an airborne lantern, similar to those that people still like to launch today at weddings and similar occasions. They were in essence small hot air balloons that could be seen from many miles away, making the ancient Chinese hot air balloon a perfect tool for communicating the need for help and allowing to see the approximate location.

 

Sky Lantern

 

 

One of the more interesting facts is that people weren’t the first balloonists who flew it.

 

When brothers Montgolfier were tweaking their hot air balloon design in 18th century France, they started doing test flights to see if it was safe. And after launching successful unmanned flights, they decided that the next step was to launch animals.

 

So, they put a sheep, a rooster, and a duck into a hot air balloon and set it to the skies. The balloon rose as high as 600 meters, and after traveling for more than 2 miles, landed safely in a field after the fabric became damaged.

 

The animals were then inspected by a physician, who determined they were alive and well, and so the three animals became pioneers of hot air balloon flight and paved the way for successful human flights of the future.

 

For their brave efforts, the three animals were hailed as heroes and even got to spend their remaining days in the Menagerie in Versailles.

 

In this list, we cover quite a few hot air balloon fun facts, but this one is not as uplifting, even though it’s still no less important.

 

Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier became the first person ever to take flight in a hot air balloon when he agreed to man the brother Montgolfier balloon in 1783. But although his first flight was a resounding success, he would eventually wind up becoming the first fatality of the hot air balloon as well.

 

After the initial success, he and another passenger wanted to push the boundaries of hot air balloons of the time by flying across the English Channel.

 

Unfortunately, something went wrong, and the balloon caught on fire, which sent both Rozier and his colleague falling to their deaths.

 

Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier

 

One of the more fun facts about balloons comes from the time that they were first invented.

 

As you probably know, drinking champagne is a very popular tradition when flying a hot air balloon – it’s common to take part in the “balloonist's prayer” before a flight and have a toast with a glass of champagne.

 

 

But even though it may seem like a traditional celebration of a fun activity, it actually has an interesting story behind it.

 

Back when brothers Montgolfier were performing test flights of their balloons, local farmers weren’t too happy – they didn’t like the balloons landing in their fields, mainly because they were afraid that the balloons were dragons descending from the skies and posed a danger.

 

To ease tensions and allow their experiments to continue, the brothers started offering champagne to the farmers in whose land the balloons would land, soothing their anger and allowing them to continue with their work.

 

 

If you want to learn one of the coolest facts that will impress your Civil War enthusiast friends, here’s one that won’t disappoint.

 

Even though flying hot air balloons is mostly regarded as a fun recreational activity, they actually played an important role during the Civil War, acting as a vital reconnaissance tool for spotting enemy movements and artillery.

 

The balloons could rise to thousands of feet and see far in the distance, providing crucial information that could give an upper hand to those that could use them.

 

The balloonists would provide intel using the telegraph or with the help of special signal flags, and were vital in the Union’s efforts of winning some crucial battles during the war.

 

 

 

Out of all the facts about hot air balloons, this might be the one that can be the scariest, especially for those that aren’t too excited about heights.

 

Even though there are plenty of stunning views in a traditional air balloon basket, today, you can take the experience to a whole new level by taking flight on a hot air balloon with a glass floor.

 

Although this type of ride is definitely not for everyone, looking under your legs and seeing thousands of feet between you and the ground can be a thrilling experience that you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

 

 

Source: Napa Valley Balloons, Inc. | Wikipedia - Hot Air Balloon

 

 

 

 

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - TENNIS

 

Did you know... that Tennis is a racket sport that can be played individually against a single opponent (singles) or between two teams of two players each (doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over or around a net and into the opponent's court. The object of the game is to maneuver the ball in such a way that the opponent is not able to play a valid return. The player who is unable to return the ball will not gain a point, while the opposite player will. (Wikipedia)

 

Games using some form of ball and racquet have been played in numerous civilizations dating back as far as Neolithic times. Ruins in Mesoamerica indicate a particularly important place for ball games in several cultures. There's also evidence that ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians played some version of a game that resembled tennis. However, court tennis—also called "real tennis" and "royal tennis" in Great Britain and Australia—owes its beginnings to a game enjoyed by French monks that can be traced back to the 11th century.

Lawn and Real Tennis

 

The Beginnings of Modern Tennis
Monks played the French game of paume (meaning "palm") on a court. Rather than a racquet, the ball was struck with the hand. Paume eventually evolved into jeu de paume ("game of the palm") in which racquets were used. By the year 1500, racquets constructed of wood frames and gut strings had been developed, as well as balls made of cork and leather, and by the time the game spread to England—where both Henry VII and Henry VIII were big fans—there were as many as 1,800 indoor courts.

Even with its growing popularity, tennis in the days of Henry VIII was a very different sport from today's version of the game. Played exclusively indoors, the game consisted of hitting a ball into a netted opening in the roof of a long, narrow tennis house. The net was five feet high at each end and three feet high in the center. 

 

The Tudors Henry VIII - Sports, Real Tennis (Click link and listen to video)

 

Outdoor Tennis
By the 1700s, the game's popularity had seriously dwindled but that changed dramatically with the invention of vulcanized rubber in 1850. The new hard rubber balls revolutionized the sport, making it possible for tennis to be adapted to an outdoor game played on grass.

 

In 1873, Londoner Major Walter Wingfield invented a game called he called Sphairistikè (Greek for "playing ball"). Played on an hourglass-shaped court, Wingfield's game created a sensation in Europe, the United States, and even China, and is the source from which tennis as we know it today eventually evolved.

When the game was adopted by croquet clubs that had acres of manicured lawns, the hourglass shape gave way to a longer, rectangular court. In 1877, the former All England Croquet Club held its first tennis tournament at Wimbledon. The rules of this tournament set the standard for tennis as it's played today—with some notable differences: service was exclusively underhand and women were not allowed to play in the tournament until 1884.

 

1884 Maud Watson was the very first champion in the first Wimbledon

Championships for Ladies.

 

Tennis Scoring
No one is sure where tennis scoring—love, 15, 30, 40, deuce—came from, but most sources agree it originated in France. One theory for the origin of the 60-point system is that it's simply based on the number 60, which had positive connotations in medieval numerology. The 60 was then divided into four segments.

 

The more popular explanation is that the scoring was invented to match the face of a clock with the score given in quarter-hours: 15, 30, 45 (shortened to the French for 40 quarante, rather than the longer quarante cinq for 45). It wasn't necessary to use 60 because reaching the hour meant the game was over anyway—unless it was tied at "deuce." That term may have derived from the French deux, or "two," indicating that from then on, two points were required to win the match. Some say the term "love" comes from the French word l'oeuf, or "egg," a symbol for "nothing," like a goose egg.

 

 

The Evolution of Tennis Attire
Perhaps the most conspicuous way tennis has evolved has do do with the game's attire. At the end of the19th century, male players wore hats and ties, while pioneering women wore a version of street clothing that actually included corsets and bustles. A strict dress code was adopted by the 1890s that decreed tennis wear must be exclusively white in color (with the exception of some accent trim, and even that had to conform with stringent guidelines).

 

1920 Tennis Men's Apparel

 

From Corsets to Culottes Women's Tennis Apparel

 

The tradition of tennis whites lasted well into the 20th century. Initially, the game of tennis was for the rich. White clothing, although practical because it tends to be cooler, had to be vigorously laundered, and so it wasn't really a viable option for most working-class people. The advent of modern technology, especially the washing machine, made the game more accessible to the middle class. By the swinging ’60s, as societal rules relaxed—nowhere more so than in the realm of fashion—more and more colorful clothing began to make its way onto tennis courts. There remain some places, such as Wimbledon, where tennis whites are still required for play.

Source: ThoughtCo. | Wikipedia - Tennis | Wikipedia - History of Tennis

[DarkRavie]

Fact of the Day - HISTORICAL FIGURES

 

Did you know... that history is defined by people and their actions. The following historical figures have ultimately helped to change the course of history, influencing electricity, politics, religion, and scientific discoveries.Yet, their lives or deaths may have taken rather bizarre turns. Although these are not the accomplishments for which these people are ultimately remembered, here are 10 strange facts about historical figures.

 

Albert Einstein’s Cubed Brain

 

Albert Einstein, a theoretical physicist, took his last breath at 1:15 AM on April 18, 1955. Unfortunately, his final words were lost forever as the nurse at Princeton Hospital did not speak German. Later that day, Einstein’s cremation was held in Trenton, New Jersey. Sadly, his son, Hans Albert, discovered that his father’s body had not been intact prior to his cremation. Dr. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed the autopsy, investigated Einstein’s body to discover more than just his cause of death, which was a burst aorta. As he may have hoped to make a name for himself in medicine, Harvey chose to saw open Einstein’s cranium before removing his brain. In 1978, Steven Levy, a budding reporter, met with Harvey and learned what had happened to the organ. After much convincing, Harvey pulled out Einstein’s brain, which was not only pickled but sliced into 240 cubes. The brain had remained in a box marked “Costa Cider” for 20 years.

 

Sir Walter Raleigh’s Decapitated Head

Born: 22 January 1552 (or 1554) Hayes Barton, East Budleigh, Devon, England
Died : 29 October 1618 (aged c. 65) London, England

 

Sir Walter Raleigh was an English adventurer and writer and one of the most notable figures during the Elizabethan era. Despite being a favorite courtier of Queen Elizabeth I, who died in 1603, he was beheaded in 1618 for conspiring against King James I. His decapitated head was embalmed and presented to his wife, Elizabeth, who was one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. As she could not bear to be apart from her husband, Lady Raleigh is believed to have kept his decapitated head in her red leather bag for 29 years. His head was later returned to his tomb at St. Margaret’s Church.

 

King Henry VIII’s Grooms Of The Stool

 

King Henry VIII of England appointed four Grooms of the Stool, who were responsible for wiping his bottom during his reign. His grooms were Sir William Compton (1509–1526), Sir Henry Norris (1526–1536), Sir Thomas Heneage (1536–1546), and Sir Anthony Denny (1546–1547). Each groom was knighted. The official title of the role was the “Groom of the King’s Close Stool.” These men were responsible for attending to the monarch’s toilet needs, but they also supplied water, a washbowl, and a towel for the king. They monitored King Henry VIII’s diet and mealtimes to predict his needs. The Grooms of the Stool were the king’s most intimate courtiers and would often be privy to his closely guarded secrets as a result of the job. The position became more important throughout the decades because a Groom of the Stool was viewed as an influential man due to his close proximity to the king. Therefore, many people attempted to speak to the groom to pass important matters on to the monarch. King Henry VIII also shared his personal thoughts with the Grooms of the Stool. Each was given lodgings where the king chose to reside and received his old clothing and furniture.

 

Thomas Edison’s Last Breath

 

Thomas Edison has been deemed America’s greatest inventor by many as he was responsible for the motion picture camera, phonograph, and a long-lasting, electric light bulb, to name just a few. His innovations undoubtedly inspired Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, who worked for Edison Illuminating Company in 1896. Ford’s dream came true when he was able to meet Thomas Edison and explain his new automobile to the inventor, who was impressed by his idea. His words ultimately inspired Ford to create a prototype of the Model T. The two men also shared a friendship throughout Edison’s life. Sadly, Edison died of complications from diabetes in 1931 at his home in West Orange, New Jersey. After sharing a great friendship with the inventor, Ford supposedly convinced Edison’s son, Charles, to hold a test tube to Edison’s mouth to catch his last breath. Many believe that the eccentric Ford was trying to capture Thomas Edison’s soul as it escaped his body. However, it might be easier to believe the story that eight test tubes were located near Edison’s bed as he died and his son sent one to Henry Ford. Either way, the last breath is on display at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit.

 

King George III’s Blue Urine

 

In addition to his so-called erratic behavior, King George III will always be known to the British as the king who lost America. It was known that the king was prone to repeating himself, and he would often talk until foam ran out of his mouth. Yet, one of the strangest facts about King George III is that he supposedly had blue urine. He was posthumously diagnosed with acute intermittent porphyria, which is a genetic blood disorder. The condition would have been the cause of his mania and strange-colored urine.

 

Galileo’s Three Fingers And Tooth

 

Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer who famously heard of the construction of the telescope and developed a superior version without seeing the initial example. As a result, he made many astronomical discoveries throughout his lifetime, including the mountains and valleys on the Moon’s surface and the phases of the planet Venus. The notable inventor died at age 77 on January 8, 1642. Weirdly, before he was buried, three of his fingers and a tooth were removed from his body by his admirers. The body parts are now on display at the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy.

 

Click the link below if you are interested in reading about the next 4 Historical Figures.

 

Source: Strange Facts about Historical Figures

 

[tyranus52173]

600 years ago, the Japanese placed ancient stone markers along the coastline to warn future generations not to build there due to risk of tsunamis.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ancient-stone-markers-warned-of-tsunamis/

[DarkRavie]

5 hours ago, rainydays1971 said:

600 years ago, the Japanese placed ancient stone markers along the coastline to warn future generations not to build there due to risk of tsunamis.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ancient-stone-markers-warned-of-tsunamis/

 That was interesting.