The Januarist - A Blog about Design, Culture, History & Language

Charlie Chaplin: Fun Facts

By Dan Zambonini, July 21, 2010, 6:51 pm in Film, Past

A portrait of Charlie Chaplin

There’s some fascinating trivia about Charlie Chaplin over on IMDB:

He was born four days before Adolf Hitler, in 1889.
He had bright blue eyes.
His understudy in England was Stan Laurel; they sailed to America together and shared a boarding house when they arrived.
In 1925, he was the first actor to appear on the cover of Time magazine.
At the height of his popularity, he failed to win a Charlie Chaplin look-a-like contest.
His imprints were removed (and subsequently lost) from the Hollywood walk of fame because of his suspected communist views.
Although Adolf Hitler despised Chaplin, he was aware of his popularity, and grew the Chaplin moustache to endear himself to the people.
He never became a U.S. citizen.
He composed about 500 melodies, including Smile.
The last film he saw, in 1976, was Rocky.
In 1978, his dead body was stolen for over two months. When it was recovered, it was re-buried in a vault encased in cement.

Credit: Portrait photograph of Charlie Chaplin via Wikimedia.

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Clan Kerr and The Legend of The Spiral Staircase

By Dan Zambonini, July 7, 2010, 4:09 pm in Architecture, Culture, Design, History, Past

Spiral staircases were a clever defence in medieval castles. They were almost always built with the spiral in the same direction (clockwise, when looking up from the bottom) so that the defending swordsman, who would either be coming down the stairs or backing up in reverse, could freely swing his sword. Conversely, the attacking swordsman (ascending the stairs) would have his swing blocked by the wall.

This, of course, assumed that both attacker an defender were right-handed, which most were.

Left-handed swordsman, though rare, had the advantage of surprise when attacking out-in-the-open – they had fought (and trained against) more right-handed opponents than their adversary had fought left-handed opponents. Their attack when ascending standard spiral staircases was also not blocked by the wall.

The warlike Clan Kerr trained to use their weapons with their left hands. Scottish Poet James Hogg (1770-1835) wrote, in The Raid of the Kerrs:

But the Kerrs were aye the deadliest foes
That e’er to Englishmen were known
For they were all bred left handed men
And fence [defence] against them there was none

and Walter Laidlaw wrote, in The Reprisal:

So well the Kerrs their left-hands ply
The dead and dying round them lie

Legend has it that, to allow them to more easily defend Ferniehirst Castle – seat of the Clan Kerr – the staircase was built spiralling in the other direction (see illustration above, with left-handed Kerr shown with ginger hair).

Is this true? Certainly, the castle does feature a reverse spiral staircase, but a 1993 study found no increased incidence of left-handedness in Kerrs.

Personally, I don’t Kerr whether it’s true or not – it’s a great story.

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Numbers Stations – The Soundtrack to Your Nightmares

By Dan Zambonini, June 24, 2010, 8:32 am in History, Music, Past, Psychology

Listen to a minute of this, from about 0:50 onwards: The Swedish Rhapsody (MP3).

This spooky sound is sampled from a Numbers Station. Hundreds of these shortwave radio stations exist around the world, transmitting numbers, letters, beeps and simple tunes. Their origin – and ongoing transmissions – still largely remain a mystery.

Are they secret codes and directives for spies in foreign countries? Are they sources of misinformation to distract the enemy? Perhaps messages between druglords? Hoaxes by amateur enthusiasts? The answer is probably: yes, all of these, and more besides.

The Conet Project sampled 150 transmissions from 20 years and released them on a 4CD set (“Not available in stores!“, I suspect). This is currently “out of stock”, but the recordings are also available on archive.org, should you wish to disturb yourself some more.

You can read more about Numbers Stations on Damn Interesting, and Boing Boing’s coverage of the copyright fight between The Conet Project and Wilco, who used a sample of the recordings on their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album. Wikipedia also has entries for some individual stations, including The Lincolnshire Poacher, Cherry Ripe, and UVB-76.

Lego spy photo under Creative Commons license from Flickr user Dunechaser.

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Portrait of a Real Rock Rebel: Bill Drummond

By Dan Zambonini, June 20, 2010, 6:15 pm in Art, Business, Culture, Music, Past

Twinned With Your Darkest Thought - sign by Bill Drummond

It’s frustrating how the media, hungry to fill their 24-hour schedule for thousands of television and online outlets, so easily present the hissy-fits and staged faux dissention of music celebrities as acts of rebellion.

I’d like to highlight some of the exploits of a real revolutionary: Bill Drummond. Sure, much – if not all – of what he did and does is for the same self-serving publicity purposes, but at least he does it with style and originality. And above all, he takes risks – the real mark of a rebel.

Sources for the following information include Wikipedia, The Independent, The Telegraph, KLF.de and Drummond’s Penkiln Burn website.

1977: Recording debut as guitar player with Big in Japan, alongside members Holly Johnson (Frankie Goes to Hollywood) and Ian Broudie (The Lightning Seeds). Later sets up Zoo Records, before becoming an A&R executive for Warners.
Late 1970s: As manager for Echo & The Bunnymen (EATB), Drummond books tour venues based on the shape they make, “If you look at a map of the world, the whole tour’s in the shape of a rabbit’s ears.”
1980s: Ian Curtis, of Joy Division, commits suicide, sending their sales rocketing. Noticing this, Drummond tries to convince the EATB singer to kill himself (Note: another source relays this same story with Julian Cope, rather than EATB, possibly via Drummond’s solo song “Julian Cope is Dead”).
1980s: Drummond believes there’s a line of cosmic energy that bounced off Iceland, was channelled down a manhole in Merseyside (England), and exited the other side in Papua New Guinea. He tests this theory by getting EATB to play in Reykjavik while he stands on the manhole cover.
1986: Resigns from Warners via a press release, which states that he is nearly 33⅓ years old (33⅓ RPM being the speed at which vinyl albums revolve).
1987: Forms the group The Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu with Jimmy Cauty (later, of The Orb), whose first single All You Need Is Love is recorded in a week. The song, and later album (1987), makes blatant use of copyrighted samples, taking “plagiarism to its absurd conclusion”.
1987: After a legal conflict with ABBA regarding samples, the 1987 album is forcibly withdrawn from sale. Drummond and Cauty travel to Sweden hoping to talk to ABBA. Unable to get in contact with ABBA, they present the gold disc of the album to a prostitute, who they pretend is Agnetha “fallen on hard times”.
1987: Re-releases the 1987 album as “1987: The JAMs 45 Edits”, with all unauthorised samples removed, leaving long periods of protracted silence, and less than 25 minutes of music.
1988: Achieves a number one novelty hit, “Doctorin’ the Tardis” under the name The Timelords (with Cauty). It sells over a million copies.
1988: Co-writes the book, “The Manual (How to Have a Number One The Easy Way)” with Cauty, detailing instructions on how to create a novelty number one record. This later gets translated into a German stage musical.
1988: Drummond and Cauty form The KLF, who go on to pioneer ambient and trance electronic music.
1991: The KLF become the biggest-selling singles act of the year.
1992: Having received the Best British Group award, KLF perform at the Brit Awards with hardcore metal band Extreme Noise Terror, fire machine gun blanks into the industry-executive-filled audience, and dump a dead sheep at the aftershow party.
1992: At their peak, The KLF announce their retirement from the music industry and proceed to delete their entire back catalogue, ensuring no future revenue could be earned from it.
1993: Establishes the art foundation, “The K Foundation”, which awards a “worst artist of the year” award to Rachel Whiteread, the same winner of that year’s Turner Prize. Whiteread refuses to collect the £40,000 award – double that of the Turner Prize – until Drummond threatens to set fire to it outside the Tate.
1994: The K Foundation withdraws £1 million in cash, the remaining earnings from KLF. After failing to sell it (nailed to a board) to the Tate Gallery for £750,000, they burn it. Drummond later comments, “Our accountant couldn’t write it off as an artistic statement. We had to pay £330,000 extra. Which was unexpected”.
1995: Drummond buys A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind by his favourite artist, Richard Long, for $20,000. Six years later, he cuts it into 20,000 pieces (4mm x 11mm each) and sells each for $1.
1995: Drives around London on Christmas Eve, distributing over 6,000 cans of lager to the homeless and street-drinkers.
1999: Plans to destroy Stonehenge (but doesn’t).
2002: Puts up 100 posters in Liverpool, offering to have sex with anyone for £10,000, with a signed testimonial.
2003: Launches mydeath.net – a website where you can make preparations for your own death – with the tagline, “Prepare To Die”.
2003: Launches youwhores.com, a site for you to “advertise what you are willing to do and the price you are willing to do it for”.
2004: Devises an imaginary line from Belfast to Nottingham called “The Soup Line”. If anyone who lives in a town on the line asks him, he will visit and make a hearty vegetable broth.

For more information about Bill Drummond’s latest activities (including The17 Choir), see the Penkiln Burn website.

Photograph of Bill Drummond’s Twinned With Your Darkest Thought sign by Flickr User Squirmelia, under a Creative Commons license.

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The Poetry Brothel

By Amy Thibodeau, June 18, 2010, 12:00 am in Art, Culture, Past

Poetry has always been passionate and even a wee bit sexy. From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Kissing Helena, “Kissing Helena, together/With my kiss, my soul beside it/Came to my lips, and there I kept it …” to Dylan Thomas’s In My Craft or Sudden Art, “When only the moon rages/And the lovers lie abed/With all their griefs in their arms …” sex and love have been a natural theme throughout the ages.

In an excellent acknowledgment of this fact, a group called the Poetry Brothel are looking to throw off the shackles of black, itchy woolen turtlenecks and berets, and reclaim the fun, quirky spirit of poetry:

The Poetry Brothel is foremost interested in showcasing a diverse roster of emerging and established poets. However, our events are also interactive performance art pieces based on the concept of the prewar brothels in the United States and Europe. Each night The Madame presents a rotating cast of both male and female poets engaged in a night of literary debauchery and private poetry readings. The poets act as “whores,” making audience members “johns,” but instead of physical intimacy, the poets offer the intimacy of their poetry in private, one-on-one readings. For a small fee, all of the resident “whores” are available for these sequestered readings at any time during the event. Of course, any good brothel need a furtive “front” or cover; ours is part saloon and part salon, offering a full bar with absinthe, live music, live painting, fortune-tellers, gypsies, and gamblers with newly integrated performances and installations from our poets and other artists at each event. (source)

Where can I sign up?

Image: The Poetry Brothel xxx by mirosim

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Eggcorns, Mondegreens and Charactonyms

By Dan Zambonini, July 14, 2010, 3:32 pm in Language, Present

I like discovering linguistic terms for things that I thought were too trivial to be given an official name.

Eggcorns

An Eggcorn is a special case of a malapropism: a mistaken phrase that retains some of the original meaning. For example, where a malapropism might be the nonsensical, “He is the very pineapple [pinnacle] of politeness“, an eggcorn might be, ”Chickens coming home to roast“.

The term derives from a woman who thought acorns were egg corns.

Mondegreens

A Mondegreen is a mis-construal of a phrase in a song, poem or lyric. The most famous of these is the Jimi Hendrix line, “Excuse me while I kiss the sky“, which is often misheard as, “Excuse me while I kiss this guy“. However, some argue that this particular example is not really a mishearing, as Jimi may have purposefully sung the line to be interpreted both ways.

The Kiss This Guy database has an excellent collection of mondegreens, including the awesome, “Might as well face it, you’re a d**k with a glove” – Addicted to Love, by Robert Palmer.

The term derives from a misheard line in a poem, that was originally, “And laid him on the green“.

(Thanks to Francesco Cetraro for pointing me to the video above, which has some wonderful mondegreens, including “Steven Seagal”, which is always funny, in any context.)

Charactonyms / Aptronyms

An Aptronym is a person’s name that suits them, such as the American football player Chuck Long. Similarly, a Charactonym is the name of a fictional character that describes their personality, such as Mr. Bumble from Oliver Twist, or many of the adult character names from Harry Potter.

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Competitive Eating and the Fourth of July

By Amy Thibodeau, July 5, 2010, 12:19 am in Culture, Present

“We are thrilled to offer this spirited event on America’s most patriotic day,” said Wayne Norbitz, president and CEO of Nathan’s Famous [hotdogs], Coney Island competition sponsor.

Food competitions are a big deal in America. Today at the annual Coney Island hotdog eating competition, high jinx ensued as previous champion Takeru Kobayashi was arrested after taking the stage in protest after Joey “Jaws” Chestnut was awarded the top prize. Kobayashi wasn’t allowed to compete because he refused to sign an exclusivity contract with Major League Eating, the organisation responsible for the event. With all this brouhaha, we thought we’d do some hard hitting journalism and give you some facts about eating for sport:

In today’s competition Chestnut became ‘top dog’ after eating 54 hotdogs in just under ten minutes. According to most sources an average hotdog contains about 110 calories and a bun somewhere around 105. Assuming there are no condiments involved, that’s approximately 215 calories per dog, meaning Chestnut ingested a whopping 11,610 calories in ten minutes, 1161 calories per minute and 19.35 calories per second. It would take someone weighing 150 pounds over ten hours straight of running at 10 mph to burn his total calorie intake. (source)
According to their website, Major League Eating holds around 80 events per year and the ESPN broadcast of their fourth of July Hotdog competition has generated more viewers than any Major League Baseball telecast on the same day in the US. Their website also has a page featuring world records in eating where people have ingested mass quantities of an impressive list the includes slurpees, vienna sausages, asparagus, beef tongue, butter, cabbage, clams, cow brains, gyoza, haggis, bannock and yes, spam.
Competitive eating is more popular in Japan and the USA than any other countries.
There is apparently some bad blood between Major Eating League and the other organisation that officially represents competitive eaters, the Association of Independent Competitive Eaters. According to Wikipedia, the AICE was “established by competitive eater Arnie “Chowhound” Chapman, also sanctions contests. Chapman was a former IFOCE member who defected to form an independent league after disputes over IFOCE contractual restrictions.” AICE members also refer to themselves as ‘food warriors’.
‘Chipmunking’ is the practice of shoving a bunch of food in your mouth during a competition but not swallowing it. Generally this isn’t cool. People who do this are usually given a specified amount of time to swallow the food in their mouth once the competition is over and if they can’t then they’re disqualified. Vomiting is also not allowed and competitors are asked to maintain a fairly rubbish free eating area.
Competitive eating can actually be a dangerous sport with side effects including: a bleeding overstretched stomach, ulcers, water intoxication and stomach paralysis.

In a 2007 piece for the Huffington Post, actor Ryan Reynolds summed up competitive eating aptly: “we are ALL bound together by the vibrant spirit of competition and grotesque displays of boundless, unapologetic shitheadery.”

Happy Independence day America!

Image Credit: Hot Dog by benjibot

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Change Blindness, Saccadic Masking: Eye Hacks – Oh My!

By Dan Zambonini, June 30, 2010, 5:39 pm in Physiology, Present, Psychology

In the above video, 75% of the people tested failed to notice that the person they were talking to was swapped with a different person during their conversation. In a similar experiment conducted by Derren Brown, about 50% of people failed to notice that a person asking them for directions was swapped-out during their interaction. This phenomenon is referred to as Change Blindess or Inattentional Blindness – our inability to detect large changes in a scene.

We also experience some form of ‘blindness’ on a very small scale. Our brain performs something called Saccadic Masking during certain types of fast eye movements (saccades), where our vision is massively impaired during the movement, but our brain uses before and after snapshots to hide the fact that we were unable to clearly see during the movement – in effect, it is hiding the useless blurred image of movement from us.

You can see this in action with a simple experiment. Grab a friend and a mirror. Look into the mirror, and stare at one eye, then switch to the other, then back again. You won’t be able to see your eye movement (your brain is masking it), but your friend will.

For more information, check out Hack #17, Glimpse the Gaps in Your Vision (pdf) from O’Reilly’s excellent Mind Hacks book.

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Round-Up: Five Great Online Comic Strips

By Amy Thibodeau, June 23, 2010, 10:32 pm in Art, Present

In no particular order:

Dakota McFadzean: Tries to create a new comic each day, usually published on his site once a week. Funny, sad and a bit nostalgic, McFadzean’s best work is like Peanuts for a new generation. Notable strips: Post Apocalyptic Puppy and anything featuring Dakota himself.

A Softer World: Written and photographed by Emily Horne and Joey Comeau, it’s a unique take on the genre using photos instead of illustrations. Offering a social commentary on the most mundane of experiences, it is sad, weird and often laugh-out-loud funny.

XKCD: Simple drawings, complex ideas; “a web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.” The guy who writes and illustrates these self-describes as a graduate with a degree in physics whose previous experience includes working on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. This strip was nominated by Dan Zambonini.

Beatonna: Excellent collection of mainly historically-based comics with a particular interest in the crazy Victorians. Written by Kate Beaton (whose personal website seems to be down at the moment) and nominated by Dave Joyner.

Garfield Minus Garfield: Nothing else to say really.

Honourable mentions go to Concerned (nominated by Jim O’Donnell) and User Friendly (nominated by John Greenaway – sorry I just didn’t get it!).

Do you have favourite online comics? Please share in the comments.

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Imaginary Places: Neil Young’s Greendale

By Amy Thibodeau, June 16, 2010, 8:59 pm in Books, Film, Music, Present

A few months ago, we wrote about John Hughes and the fictional town of Shermer, Illinois, which crops up in almost all of his films. This ongoing fictional relationship an artist has with an imaginary place or set of people is uncommon but, apart from Hughes there are some other great examples: Salinger and the Glass family, the Brontes and fictional world of Angria and Neil Young’s Greendale, has recently been turned into a graphic novel.

Greendale is the name of the last album Young released with Crazy Horse. The ten tracks tell the story of the small California town and some of the people who live there. There is also an accompanying short film about the place, which Young made using an old super eight camera, and a spoken word audio recording about the various characters:

This is a story about a little town called Greendale and a family that lives there – actually, they live outside of town. The Green family lives at the Double E Rancho about two miles outside of Greendale. The Double E is the home of Sun Green, an 18-year-old girl who goes to school in Greendale, and she’s a cheerleader. And she’s a good student. And her mom and dad, Earl Green and Edith Green. Earl Green is a Vietnam vet. (Voice in audience: Why?) I don’t know why, actually. It’s a question that’s been haunting everybody for ages. There wouldn’t be any vets without war, so I guess we have to go back to war. Like most vets, he wanders around trying to forget what he knows. And he’s a painter. He paints psychedelic paintings and he tries to sell them at the galleries around town and in the area, without much luck. He hardly ever sells a painting. (source)

This week Vertigo, a division of DC Comics, released a graphic novel called Neil Young’s Greendale, which “focuses on Sun Green, the great-granddaughter of Jay Green, the man who founded Greendale. Through Sun, the artists tell a story about personal responsibility, war and the environment.” (source) Young, who was a collaborator on the graphic novel doesn’t think this will be last fans see of Greendale, “There are all kinds of things that we talked about doing that aren’t in this book, that have to do with her next episode and her story. These characters have been designed to last a long time.” (source)

Image Credit: Neil Young’s Greendale Graphic Novel Cover, Young Family Trust and DC Comics

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