#project 1952 60 days

[project1939]

Project 1952: Day 60 Round Up! 

First, here are some stats from days 31-60: 

TV: I watched 72 episodes of TV, and 19 different shows. The total for all sixty days is- 129 episodes, 39 different shows! 

Radio: I listened to 78 episodes, and 25 different shows. The total for all sixty days is 156 episodes, 37 different shows. 

Film: I watched 30 films, 31 if you count the Westinghouse sales film Ellis in Freedomland. In total over the last 60 days, I've watched 59 films.

Magazines: I read 13 magazines, 7 different titles 

Books: Still zero. I’m going to postpone reading books until after the project ends. For any kind of life balance, I just can’t do it right now. I don’t have the time. When I did project 1939, I only had radio to listen to/watch besides films. Now, with the addition of TV, it’s just too much. 

Awards!  

Best TV show: Of the new ones I’ve seen since day 31, it's gotta be What’s My Line? I look forward to every episode I watch. 

Best Radio show: Again, counting only the new ones since day 31- The Chase. Honorable mention: NBC’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention. 

Best Film: High Noon. Honorable Mention: Europa 51. 

Best Magazine: Good Housekeeping 

Worst Film: There haven’t been any atrocities like there were in the first 30 days, but I would say Son of Paleface and What Price Glory? are the two worst/least entertaining films on my list. 

Worst TV: Maybe Guiding Light or Gangbusters? 

Worst Radio: Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve listened to any new shows that are all that bad. 

Surprises and Trends! 

Biggest surprises about specific shows/episodes:  

Esther Williams! I unexpectedly fell totally in love with her. She’s got it all- she's gorgeous, talented, and she’s got this certain grace and dignity about her. I also find her speaking voice soothing. 

I could listen to 3 ½ hours of radio coverage of a political convention and be utterly riveted. Never would have guessed that! 

The movie The Girl in White really surprised me. I expected it to be a saccharine melodrama, but it turned into a thrilling riveting story about a pioneering female doctor.  It's the kind of movie that sticks with you so much, you tell your friends and family about it.

Biggest overall surprises/trends: 

Vintage puzzles! I didn’t think I’d be able to find any reasonably priced puzzles from the 40s or 50s, but I have. Those Tuco puzzles are a joy to work with- the pieces are so thick and satisfying, and the colors are vibrant.  

A Jello mold obsession re-occurring! But now that I’ve been sick, I can’t even look at most Jello molds without wanting to retch. Literally. I don’t know how many I can make from here on out. 

I didn’t expect to get so wrapped up in the political landscape of 1952. It’s been fascinating to see the way both parties have changed in the last 71 years. Republicans boasting about their progressive ideas? Democrats fighting with segregationist racists within their own party? It’s trippy, man. 

Unsurprisingly, the horrible way men talk to women has continued unabated. 

The East Asian racism in media has toned down somewhat in what I’ve seen from day 31-60. It’s still disgustingly there, but it’s not nearly as ubiquitous as it was the first 30 days. I have no idea why- it could even be just random chance. 

The group of people this time that have been the victims of the most overt racism are the Native Americans. All the sorry old stereotypes have been there, with a heaping dose of dehumanization. 

Racism against African Americans has been more overt in these last 30 days. I’ve seen several of those stereotypes of stupid or childish black porters, elevator operators, servants, etc. It has surprised me just how awful the portrayals are. It’s everything you think of when you hear the name Stepin Fetchit or Butterfly McQueen. Even on The Beulah Show, which I think was created with good intentions, it’s noticeably bad.  

There has continued to be almost no hint of gayness anywhere. This time, there was one “sissy” comedic role with undertones of queerness, but that’s literally been it. There was also an ad in the back of a magazine (in the cheap ads section) for some Gold Medal paperbacks, one of which was a lesbian pulp novel. It again gave hints as to what it was about, but it didn’t come out and actually say it. 

Stuffed green olives! Apparently stuffed green olives were considered fancy haute cuisine by middle class folk, cause they put them in everything! In all the worst most stomach-churning places you can imagine! With salmon and celery soup! With mac and cheese! In lemon Jello with grapefruit! With a pineapple lime Jello dessert! It’s insane. 

This project is getting to be hard. I didn’t expect to struggle so much to keep going, or even consider throwing in the towel. I’m not going to quit now, while I’m 2/3 of the way there, but this is a challenge in every sense! Being sick for a week and a half now has not helped, either, I know. 

[handeaux]

Cincinnati’s Kit Kapp Mapped Uncharted Waters, Popularized Indigenous Art & Was Forgotten By His Hometown

When Amor Smith “Kit” Kapp Jr. died in Florida at the age of 86 in 2013, not a single Cincinnati news outlet carried an obituary or, in fact, any mention at all. The oversight was remarkable since Kit Kapp had been featured in more than 60 Cincinnati news stories between the 1940s and the 1970s.

Almost every day of Kit Kapp’s long life was worthy of a news story somewhere. He was born in 1926 to Loretta and Amor Smith Kapp Sr. in Walnut Hills. His father was a lumber dealer and the marriage was rocky. Loretta sued for divorce twice. The second time, it took. Throughout high school and college, Kit lived with his father.

As a youngster, Kit was bedridden with scarlet fever. He told his father he wanted to build a boat, so Amor Kapp Sr. drove down to the Ohio River and took photos of a towboat. Dad told the Cincinnati Post [18 December 1955]:

“I put those pictures on a drafting board and we started to build. That darn boat took nine months to make, but Kit still has it. It has 144 miniature lights that work and a miniature paddle wheel.”

Inspired by the towboat project, Kit launched his own business, the American Model Company, to sell model boat kits to hobbyists while still a student at Anderson High School.

While living in Mount Washington, Kit walked down to Coney Island and pestered the concessionaires into letting him exercise their ponies and horses. He was just 15 when he signed up to work on a dude ranch in Oklahoma. The next summer found him at a “real” ranch in Arizona. Diving into the cowboy culture, Kit became fascinated by the guns of the Old West and managed to become, at age 17, the youngest person licensed as a firearms dealer by the U.S. government. He boasted that he owned more Smith & Wesson sidearms than any collector in the country.

Kit enrolled at the University of Cincinnati in 1944 but was almost immediately drafted into the Army. He served as a paratrooper in an airborne division based in Japan during the post-war occupation. While overseas, he discovered two new passions: mountain climbing and the Ainu, an indigenous people found in the far northern reaches of the Japanese archipelago. Typically, Kit located every book published on the Ainu – 15 in total, all in Japanese – and hired Japanese students to translate them. He amassed a significant collection of Ainu artifacts and set about connecting Japanese scholars at Hokkaido Imperial University with anthropology faculty at UC.

Returning to UC after his discharge as a sergeant, Kit convinced the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity to climb Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the contiguous United States. But, when the time came for the expedition to depart, Kit found himself alone. He told the Cincinnati Post [24 June 1947]:

“A couple of my fraternity brothers were going along, too, but they apparently thought it was just a lot of talk and made other plans for the summer. So I’m going alone.”

On his way west, Kit climbed Signal Peak in Utah and El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. He summited Mount Whitney, hauling a 63-pound pack, and then climbed nearby Mount Muir, not as tall but treacherously steep. According to the Post [29 December 1952]:

“He reached the peak, then gazed down on 1200 feet of sheer precipice. The descent was more a rock-grasping operation than anything else. Kit’s foot slipped and he went tumbling. The whole slope seemed to slide with him. In the best mountain-climbing manner, he stuck out his arms and spread his legs to provide the best brakeage possible.”

Kit ended up with a twisted right leg, a heel pried from one boot, and a determination to find another mountain to climb. Instead, he bought a cheap automobile and drove it through Central America. He blamed it on Burton Holmes.

Almost forgotten today, Burton Holmes was something like a Depression-era globe-trotting Rick Steves. Holmes filmed exotic locales and traveled the country narrating his movies in very popular and remunerative lectures. In April 1946, Holmes presented a filmed tour of Mexico at UC’s Wilson Auditorium, extolling the fine automotive route along the new Pan-American Highway, but warning his audience not to attempt driving further into Central America, because it couldn’t be done.

That sounded like a dare to Kit Kapp. Boasting, as he put it, a bankroll “just thick enough to see through,” Kapp bought a 1929 Model-A Ford for $64 in 1948 and drove it all the way to Costa Rica. As a friend later wrote:

“Claiming to be a journalism student, Kit succeeded in meeting and interviewing the presidents of both Nicaragua and Guatemala during his trip. His car survived the journey back to the US, despite suffering 18 bullet holes passing through a small revolution in Nicaragua.”

Kit changed 51 flat tires and somehow made it back to Cincinnati without the benefit of second gear just in time to enroll for his junior year at UC’s College of Business Administration. Soon after graduation in 1950, Kit sold his model boat company and his firearm collection and bought a 41-foot ketch he named Fairwinds and sailed for the Caribbean. The original Fairwinds was wrecked in a gale, so Kit acquired a 50-foot “bugeye” ketch and christened it Fairwinds II.

With St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands as a base, Kit launched a charter company, hauling tourists around the area, eventually wandering farther and farther afield. Along the way, he met and married his first wife, the former Lois Fatzinger of Palmerton, Pennsylvania. After a decade running charters, that marriage dissolved, and Kit decided that he would rather go exploring than stick to a charter’s set schedule. He told the Post [18 December 1965]:

“I decided to get out of the high rent district. Running a charter boat is like running a sea-going taxi.”

Instead, he offered expeditions to crew members who paid him for the privilege of exploring rarely visited islands and coasts.

“I make plans ahead of time and if anyone wants to go along they pay $200 for two weeks. They work, but not hard. They help clean up, aid in survey work, help carry equipment on the island beaches. We work about five hours a day, then we swim or loaf.”

Many of those expeditions were sponsored officially by the Explorer’s Club of New York. That organization designated Kit as a fellow of the society. Among his regular customers was physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kit’s travels took him into previously uncharted waters near the coast of Panama, and it was here that he generated his most culturally impactful discovery.

Kit’s efforts to survey the San Blas Islands off the north coast of Panama led to a lifelong interest in the Guna tribespeople who lived there. The Guna (or Kuna) produced unique fabric designs known as mola, vibrantly colored and intricately layered fabric pieces worn by the Guna women. The process involved in creating molas is often described as “reverse appliqué,” in which pieces of fabric are cut away to reveal layers underneath. Kit was among the first outsiders to appreciate and study these dynamic artworks and to bring them to the attention of scholars worldwide. His self-published 1972 monograph, “Mola art from the San Blas Islands” remains the definitive introduction to the art form.

During dozens of voyages around the San Blas Islands, Kit’s quest for reliable charts inspired him to seek out, collect, study and sell antique maps. Some of the maps he found were quite valuable. One sold at auction for $34,000. By 1967, Kit had accumulated a substantial inventory, enough to mount an exhibition in Jamaica. During the opening reception for that exhibit, Kit met his second wife, Valerie, born on the Isle of Wight, who helped coordinate his buying and selling trips to England and the Continent.

As Kit and Valerie shared their discoveries in Guna art, their travels brought them to Cincinnati, where they coordinated a landmark exhibition of molas and ritual Guna statuary at the Studio San Guiseppe at the College of Mount St. Joseph in 1972. Enquirer [13 February 1972] art critic Owen Findsen was impressed:

“Leaving the ethnology to Captain Kapp, the Mola can be seen as a pure art form. One must be taken by the intense coloring of many of them which can set up visual vibrations to compete with the Op artists. And the designs are clever in the same way that the pseudo-primitive art of Paul Klee is clever, by its directness and its innocence.”

The colors and patterns of mola fabric art filtered into popular fashions throughout the 1970s. Women around the world wore clothing and carried handbags replicating Guna mola designs, usually with no awareness of the original source.

As a dealer in antique maps, Kit built a reputation as a discerning connoisseur and befriended several other influential collectors. British map dealer Simon Hunter was one such colleague. He recalled:

“Kit was a very astute buyer, but he was also a most entertaining character whose good humor and traveler’s tales made it impossible to resent the large discounts he invariably managed to obtain on his many purchases.”

All the while he was buying and selling maps, Kit earned acclaim as a formidable scholar who also had the expertise to create his own maps. His many academic publications include analyses of maps, inventories of known charts and monographs on native peoples. Worldcat lists more than 40 publications under his name, with at least a dozen publications being maps of previously unfathomed waters.

After 25 years devoted to collecting and selling maps, Kit and Valerie decided that their business, no matter how successful, was detracting from the time available for exploring their beloved Caribbean. They pivoted toward selling by consignment through other dealers, rather than issuing their own catalogs. The sheer volume of their collections necessitated buying a house with a large garage on land, and they settled in Nokomis, Florida.

Over the years, significant honors accrued. In addition to the prestigious Explorers’ Club, Kit was awarded a permanent card for the British Museum Reading Room and memberships in the Royal Geographical Society, the Adventurers' Club of New York, the Archaeological Institute of America and the American Geographical Society.

After Kit’s death in 2013, his widow discovered more than 60 cartons of uncatalogued Guna art that he had packed away since the early 1970s. While itemizing that substantial collection, she discovered a room covered by a false wall in the garage with even more fabrics and statuary. Much of this new inventory is now available through various auction houses.

[drnikolatesla]

What Happened to Nikola Tesla’s Missing Papers After His Death?

In 1943 immediately following Nikola Tesla’s death, the FBI ordered the Office of Alien Property (OAP) to seize all of Tesla's belongings, including the safe from his apartment, his possessions stored in the basement of the New Yorker, up to 80 trunks stored in various storage units around Manhattan, and a mysterious safety deposit box at the Governor Clinton Hotel. This is somewhat of a controversial subject in that Nikola Tesla had been a naturalized U.S. citizen for over 50 years, thus the OAP had no legal right to raid his room. The FBI's justification for allowing the OAP to investigate Tesla's belongings was based on the premise that Sava Kosanovic, Tesla’s nephew who was affiliated with the Yugoslavian government at that time, was entitled to his uncle's estate. Since World War II was currently underway and Germany controlled a large part of Europe, Kosanovic was not trusted so the FBI felt it was necessary to seize "enemy assets" without a court order. However, the main reason they seized Tesla's belongings was because there was word that he had completed a working model of his "particle beam" weapon. This device was a natural extension of his high frequency work where he produced 100 foot long sparks in his laboratory experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899. The next step was to control and direct this energy as a weapon. The device he proposed was a open vacuum tube that could charge small or large particles to millions of volts and project these highly charged “non-dispersive” particles through free air to bring down hundreds of enemy airplanes. Since the U.S. government was already skeptical of Kosanovic and was worried that Tesla’s device might get into enemy hands, they impounded all of Tesla's possessions.

John O. Trump (uncle to former president Donald J. Trump), director of MIT's High Voltage Research Laboratory, and a small team of government officials conducted an investigation into Tesla’s possessions. Since Trump was the only qualified scientist to comprehend Tesla's work, he likely spent half the time going over all of Tesla's contents. In their two days of inspection, the team found nothing of value to the U.S. or to the enemy. As for the mysterious safety deposit box, it was found by Trump to contain a wooden chest containing a 20 year old resistance box used for Wheatstone bridge resistance measurements. This, Trump noted, was a common item found in every electric laboratory before the turn of the century. Although the investigation took only two days, it would take nine years for the government to return Tesla's possessions to his family.

Did the U.S. government secretly hold onto important information and acted as if there was nothing of value in Tesla’s possessions? Presumably we'll never really know, but it is a possibility. First, letters from researchers were written to both the FBI and the OAP about Tesla's property during their impound (1943-1952), and neither department claimed they were in possession of his belongings. Each pointed fingers at each other saying to talk to the opposing party. Another reason to be skeptical is that for years, the U.S. government denied having any paperwork, microfilm, or any details on Nikola Tesla. It wasn't until the Freedom of Information Act was enacted that it was exposed that there were in fact documents and microfilm on Tesla. Furthermore, out of the 80 trunks taken from Tesla's belongings, only 60 were returned to his family. This could simply be that his possessions were broken down to save space, but this detail has caused a tremendous amount of conspiracies on this topic.

Did Tesla really complete his weapon of mass destruction? No one really knows. There are many breadcrumbs that hint it may be plausible. One story is based on a woman whose husband's grandfather used to be one of Tesla's trusted employees. He would tell actual stories of Tesla bouncing beams off the moon. A reporter who once interviewed Tesla in his later years told of Tesla describing his work with cathode-ray tubes where sometimes a particle larger than an electron would break off from the cathode, pass out of the tube, and strike him. Tesla said he could feel a sharp, stinging pain where it first hit him and also where it passed out through him. That being said, the closest we can get to the truth is Tesla's elaborate technical paper on the subject (including diagrams), that he sent to a number of allied nations including the United States, Canada, England, France, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, titled “New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media" (circa 1935). The paper described the first technical description of his charged particle beam weapon. Tesla was directly communicating with the U.S. government and Prime Minster Chamberlain of Great Britain in an effort to promote his particle beam for defense against enemy aerial attacks. His correspondence with Prime Minster Chamberlain was his attempt to prevent Nazi Germany from taking over his native homeland, but when Great Britain, France and Italy agreed to let Germany annex Czechoslovakia at the Munich Conference in 1938, his communication with the government came to an end.

In the end, we'll really never know what happened to his missing papers, or even if there are any missing papers. Tesla made many statements in his later years that his defense weapon was completed and he was going to give it to the Geneva Conference for World Peace, but it never happened. OR NAZI SPIES KILLED HIM AND TOOK ALL HIS BLUEPRINTS BUT STILL ULTIMATELY LOST WORLD WAR II FOR SOME REASON. Lol jk!

What do you all think happened to his papers?

[non-binary-laurie-strode]

Reflections on my Universal Horror marathon

It is November 1st, 2023. As anyone can tell after being around me for, I don't know, five minutes, I am a huge horror queen. For my birthday this year, I got a big book on Universal horror, filled with production photos, background, trivia, actor bios, etc. I decided to use this book as a sort of guided reading list, where I would marathon all of the movies discussed in the book and read along. When I was first seriously doing a deep dive into horror in 2018, the classic 30s horror franchises were some of the first that I chose to get into, and so it had been five years or so since I had seen some of my old monster friends. (And many of the movies on this list I had not seen before!) I was excited for this project and decided to start it at 99 days until Halloween; I had found a Sam (1) "Countdown to Halloween" clock that counted from 99 days to 0 days last year, at the Spirit Halloween clearence sale. (2) So, 99 days to do a book's worth of movies—how hard could it be?

(1) from Trick r Treat, 2007

(2) He's currently sitting on my bedside table, at 0 days left!

Turns out, it was rather difficult! I hadn't expected the book to have so many entries in it.

The entire list of films that I did is as follows, broken down by chapter:

Silent Era (5 films): The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1923, The Phantom of the Opera 1925, The Phantom of the Opera 1943, The Cat and the Canary 1927, The Man Who Laughs 1928

Dracula (5 films): Dracula 1931, Drácula 1931, Dracula's Daughter 1936, Son of Dracula 1943, House of Dracula 1945

Frankenstein (4): Frankenstein 1931, Bride of Frankenstein 1935, Son of Frankenstein 1939, Ghost of Frankenstein 1942

The Wolf Man (5): Werewolf of London 1935, The Wolf Man 1941, Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man 1943, House of Frankenstein 1944, She-Wolf of London 1946

The Mummy (5): The Mummy, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Curse

The Invisible Man (5): The Invisible Man 1933, The Invisible Man Returns 1940, The Invisible Woman 1941, Invisible Agent 1942, The Invisible Man's Revenge 1944

The Gill Man (3): Creature From the Black Lagoon 1954, Revenge of the Creature 1955, The Creature Walks Among Us 1955

"Universal's Lesser Known Monsters" (3+3+6): Paula the Ape Woman—Captive Wild Woman 1943, Jungle Woman 1944, The Jungle Captive 1945; The Creeper—Pearl of Death 1944, House of Horrors 1946, The Brute Man 1946; The Inner Sanctum Mystery Series—Calling Dr Death 1943, Weird Woman 1944, Dead Man's Eyes 1944, The Frozen Ghost 1944, Strange Confession 1945, Pillow of Death 1945

Non-serial horror (14): The Old Dark House 1932, Murders in the Rue Morgue 1932, The Black Cat 1934, The Raven 1935, Black Friday 1940, Man-Made Monster 1941, Horror Island 1941, Night Monster 1942, The Mad Ghoul 1943, The Strange Door 1951, The Black Castle 1952, Tarantula 1955, The Mole People 1956, Monster on the Campus 1958

That's 68 movies in 99 days by my reckoning. I also only did these on the nights that Mack worked or was dancing, which further tightened the number of days that I had. Good thing they were each about 60 minutes. I could never do this in the modern era where everyone bloats their movies to an absurd degree.

See, I thought it would be something small, with like... 30 movies in 99 days. I didn't expect all of this! Maybe I should have checked how many movies that would be before solidly deciding to do this challenge, eh? And it's not even allll of the Universal horror movies—Lugosi and Karloff did like six "duet" movies like The Raven and The Black Cat, but the book only focused on two and briefly name-dropped the others. By the mid-October, when I was in the final chapter, I was doing two or three movies per night, and it was quite a stressful thing, not knowing how I'd get it all to line up before Mack took his Halloweek vacation!

But I did it. I'm extremely proud that I stuck to it. And also, I will absolutely not do it again! Perhaps in another five years I'll have a craving for the Universal horror movies again, and I'll do my favourite 30 or so, but this insanity will not be repeated, or at least not with this time scale.

Anyway. Here are some things I wish to talk about:

Appreciating Silent Film

The silent era has always been one that I've wanted to get into, but I've never known how exactly to break into it. I've done a few silent movies before—if you're looking for a rec, Häxan from 1923 is a very disturbing and deeply effective look at medieval witchcraft—but I never felt like I had a sure footing in it.

And, well, the book starts at 1923 with Hunchback, no easing into it. And, turns out, it was mostly fine!

The 1925 Phantom was stunning. I love the tinted vibes of the silent era, and this film had a rare Technicolor sequence during the Masquerade bit where all the costumes were in colour, and it was amazing to see. There's a 19...29, I think?, scored version, which is what I watched, and the score pops off.

The 1927 Cat and the Canary ended up as one of my favourites of the whole marathon—there's no scoring option for this, but it's so fun I didn't care. The story revolves around a will reading on a dark and stormy night, a will reading, and a sudden heiress who has to prove her sanity as a condition of the will, all while an antagonistic family and a killer are loose in the mansion. It's a horror-comedy, and it is such a good time. I had rated it 5/5 on letterboxd years ago, but I had forgotten why, and I quickly rediscovered the reason!

So yeah, I got a couple silents to add to my résumé, next to stuff like Häxan and the typical Dr Caligari.

2. The Evolution of What Horror Is

One of my favourite things to think about and consider is what society's horror fixation is in a given era and how it all ties together in a sort of greater historiography.

This marathon covers the 20s through the late 50s, with most of it happening in the 30s and 40s. There's a pretty clear chain of where the focus goes in these—in the 20s, it's a lot of classic adaptations that have a gruesome element but which may not be yknow categorical Genre Horror as we recognise it and label it on a dvd box. The 30s explore the more typical folk myths and superstitions, such as vampires and werewolves; if there is science, it is either rather crude or primitive (Frankenstein using lightning bolts and sewing pieces of body together) or even has a mystical connection (Werewolf of London's Tibetan miracle flower—often this mysticism can unfortunately veer into Orientalist tropes :/). The 40s, and particularly around 1945 with the atomic bomb, the old superstitions lose steam and modern science begins to catch up, to the point that the 50s horror movies are, essentially, all a world away in terms of science—I mean, they try behavioural therapy on the Creature from the Black Lagoon in Revenge of the Creature! The later "Monster Mash" movies where all of the classic monsters join up have them turning to modern science to solve their problems—I believe it's in House of Dracula where the Wolf Man is legitimately ""cured"" by a cranial surgery based on some science, and Dracula gets cured by looking at the particulates in his blood and stuff. Anyway, continuing in the 50s, There's all this talk of atoms and radiation and such, and it's such a strong blend of science fiction and horror, such that the two genres are practically constant bedmates for this era. (Contrary to a popular tumblr post comparing Godzilla to 50s superhero comics, radiation actually did inspire a lot of monsters in America too; you just needed to know where to look, and it's here, in the giant Creature Features, where Godzilla would fit right in.)

I remember shortly after House of Dracula, I was talking to Mack, and I essentially launched into a ten minute lecture about this stuff, how it all ties into what was happening in society and whatnot. I have so much to say, but I won't word vomit it here.

3. These Movies Said, Continuity WHO?

One of the recurrent jokes I had while watching these movies is that the writers were clearly not interested in keeping continuity between films. There are two instances that I internally screamed at because of how insane they were—(1) In House of Frankenstein, Dracula is destroyed in the sunlight, The Wolf Man is shot by a silver bullet and dies, and the Frankenstein creature sinks into quicksand and disappears. Most of the plot of House of Frankenstein is quickly retold by the mad scientist character of House of Dracula; he leaves out the Wolf Man's death, probably because it would upset the Wolf Man, to whom he is speaking. Dracula is also back without explanation. (2) The Mummy's Ghost is set in Connecticut; they are very emphatic that they are in Connecticut. It is said over and over. At the end, the Mummy is chased into the swamp of Connecticut (yknow, the famous swamps of Connecticut) —at the very beginning of The Mummy's Curse, they point to a stretch of swampland, say that THIS is where Kharis sank all those years ago (it was 6 months in real time btw), and that he should still be there. This movie is set in the bayou of Louisiana, with a cheerful barkeep woman singing in French to evoke the whole "Cajun French" world. How Kharis went from Connecticut to "this is the exact spot where he fell" in Louisiana? Never mentioned.

Additionally, in one of the later Frankensteins, Ygor has his brain transplanted into the Frankenstein Monster in a scheme; Ygor-Frankenstein Monster triumphantly turns to the assembled characters and speaks to them, telling them how he tricked them and won. In the next movie, which I believe is Meets The Wolf Man, the Frankenstein Monster is a mute brute once more, and Ygor does not exist anymore. Now, the wildest thing is that this is not the writers cherrypicking what is canon and what is not—no, in the script the Frankenstein Monster-Ygor was to have deep conversations with the Wolf Man, and this was recorded. It was only in post-production that all of this was struck; all those scenes were either tossed or edited down. Apparently there are visuals of those scenes in the movie where you can watch the FM's mouth move, but the audio has been replaced with music or sound effects. Wild stuff.

There's more, plenty more, but you get the picture. I suppose in a world without home video, where your audience may not have seen the previous films or may not remember them well, you can convince them of anything and continuity matters less.

4. Some of these movies destroyed my will to go on (with the marathon)

Overall, I greatly enjoyed my time with this marathon. I found most of these movies to be very interesting and illuminating.

But there are two series in this that just crushed my spirit—The Mummy and Paula the Ape Woman. They were so awful that it made me not want to keep going.

The Mummy is just such a confused mess; the worst time I had was with The Mummy's Tomb. Tomb is the third movie in the series, so of course there's some catch-up that has to be done to get the audience up to speed. (They all do it, it's normal.) Now, this is a 60 minute movie. Tomb begins with a TWELVE MINUTE "recap" of the first two movies, using a flashback to show scenes from the old movies—all the while narrating them to construct a new story of what supposedly happened and wildly making up new stuff that directly contradicts what is visible on screen. TWELVE MINUTES out of SIXTY, one fifth of the movie, is just incredibly out of context scenes to do whatever the writers want.

And that's not even getting into the cultural sensitivity discussions around these movies, because girl........... girl. It's rough on that front, to say the least. (They reuse an Incan temple, if I remember right, as an Egyptian tomb in the last one, I think it was, and you can clearly see Mesoamerican imagery all over the walls, but they're yelling about pharoahs and stuff. And that's the tip of the iceberg.)

Paula the Ape Woman is about an ape who gets a brain and blood transplant and becomes a real woman, or at least temporarily. Now, audience, given that this an early 40s movie... do you think this uncontrollable, animalistic beast of a woman is going to be white or no? :////

The Paula movies just need to be forgotten. Not every Universal horror movie is a lost gem in the sands of time. Let's just say that.

5. James Whale, Lon Chaney Jr, and thoughts on recurring names and faces

With the studio system firmly in place for most of this marathon's concerned eras, there are many repeating names throughout the movies. It became something of a scavenger hunt to find "Gowns by Vera West" in the title credits of most movies—according to letterboxd, I think I hit 37 movies with her credited on wardrobe.

Some of these repeating names I grew to really like. James Whale really is among the greats, isn't he? Bride of Frankenstein is nothing short of a masterpiece, and his other work (especially The Old Dark House) is great. I would love to do a deeper dive just into his other works. He seems so fascinating! And he was gay, and apparently very very open about it.

A name I came to dislike, unexpectedly really, was Lon Chaney Jr, most known for The Wolf Man. I went in with a higher opinion of him, only knowing him from The Wolf Man; he eventually became a bit of a golden boy on the Universal horror sets, and so he got into a ton of different projects. And boy, did he ever only play one character across everything! He's extremely good at it, but he only ever played a sad, pathetic little man who is overwhelmed by the weight of the world! We get it, dude. Play a different character!

6. Conclusions

This is getting away from me, so I'll wrap this up. Thank you if you even skimmed this far!

I really did enjoy this marathon. It was stressful, a little, but a fun stress, all things considered.

Rapidshot overall favs: The Bride of Frankenstein, the Cat and the Canary, Revenge of the Creature, Dracula, The Old Dark House, Tarantula, 1925's Phantom of the Opera, the Raven.

Rapid boots: The Mummy franchise, Paula the Ape Woman series, She-Wolf of London, the Black Cat, Ghost of Frankenstein.

I love this era of horror: It's almost a cosy horror to me, with giant fog machines, goofy big analog science contraptions, and painted backdrops (you can see the painted backdrops and their flatness during the early 30s ones especially). I like that there are fewer cuts compared to the modern day: They hold the camera on the actors, and often the camera is not on a close-up, giving plenty of time for interesting physicality. It almost feels staged or traditionally theatrical in a way that modern movies do not. (Which makes sense, as the earlier writers and directors and actors all came from and routinely did theatre. Lugosi got Dracula after he did the stage version of it.) Many of them are very comfortable feeling, and they're short too!

I don't think I could do another grand tour like this again for years, at mininum,—and I won't revisit Paula and probably not The Mummy—but I do want to revisit it more than I have in the last few years. These monsters are my FRIENDS!

Anyway. Stan Boris Karloff, James Whale, and especially Elsa Lanchester

[qutemag]

The only problem with Babylon is Chazelle directed La La Land first -- an essay on La La Land and Babylon

by Benjamin Harkin

(Spoilers for both movies.)

Damien Chazelle is one of the most talented auteurs working today in Hollywood, and his two epics La La Land and Babylon are inverse meta mirrors Hollywood sees itself in and Chazelle interrogates the nature of the industry with a beautiful sense of composition, acting, scripting, and music. He recalls the classic Golden Ages where Hollywood is wistfully looked back on and punctures these periods where other directors of similar stature at their time in their careers tried and failed. Babylon should have been THE movie of 2022 into 2023, sabotaged only by a botched ad campaign and a sense that it wasn't another uplifting light movie like La La Land that everyone expected.

Take La La Land. Although set in modern day, the film is obviously a pastiche and ode to the cheerfully innocent and brightly coloured world of the 50s and 60s spate of Hollywood big budget musicals about young love and finally making it in the big town, following your dreams and being rejected right up until you find yourself, the person you're meant to be with, and then seeing everything fall into place with your passions. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a talented jazz piano player who is sick of marching to other people's drums. He diverts from the set list of his gig at a bar to play a melancholy but more tuneful song, leading to JK Simmons giving him the sack for his repeated impertinence, proving to be a pivotal moment when Mia (Emma Stone), a struggling up and coming actress who's spritely but can't quite land roles, bumps into him and looks to compliment him on the sheer artistry and vulnerability but he pushes past her, a Hollywood moment of meet cute that's tailor made to elicit a sweet moment. Their first date isn't told in flirty dialogue and smiles like a Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan rom-com, but purely in a song and tap dance number that channels Sinatra and Singin' in the Rain (1952), not as overdone and rigidly artificial as (500) Days of Summer's memorable break out of song but more a heartfelt melding of two people, realising they compliment each other against a scenic sunset perfectly.

The film effortlessly transitions in and out of song and dance numbers, each telegraphing where the two main characters are at in their lives, playing out character building scenes with music rather than words. Unlike Scorsese's flaming wreck of a passion project New York, New York (1977) that endeavoured to do the same sort of thing but got the cardinal rule of Hollywood musicals wrong: they can't be a downer. Chazelle covers the same material but ditches the abusive relationship angle that mucked up Scorsese's go for having between the musical numbers a wonderfully blossoming young love. This is a master at his craft firing on all cylinders. The party scene where she runs into him again is hilariously goofy, thoughtfully playful, and the camera tracks across everything going on and Mia's POV with a zest I've not seen from any other director. He gives the filmic electricity to let Emma Stone's bouncy acting and Ryan Gosling's smoldering nervous hot guy energy soar. Chazelle lets the camera roam free over his set pieces and its such an exhilaratingly unrestrained feeling that you can't help but be swept along.

Sebastian sells Mia on picking yourself up and following your dreams, and of course after he unloads on his love of jazz in a bar (winning her over on the genre as well) she of course starts getting call backs on her auditions. He's so thrilled after the date he wanders ponderingly along a beachside walkway and where any other two-bit director would have a silent scene of the waves methodically lapping and the protagonist deep in thought, Chazelle has Gosling whistle and play with a hat he spies on the ground, singing softly "city of stars, are you shining just for me?" in the fact he can't believe his luck, before taking the wife of an old couple passing by for a few dancing spins before moving on, the trace of a song done in what's both an understated way and faithful to the mood of that oft reused trope across romance movies of a protagonist staring into a public bench in contemplation of what could be.

Mia still flubs a few auditions but ducks out of some boring career networking dinner to find the one person she connects with and show him her passion -- cinema. They reunite when Sebastian thinks he's been stood up and goes into the movie anyway, and she walks in front of the screen and almost beckons him to join her in the movie onscreen as she walks to his seat and it moves swiftly to that classic shot of their fingers sliding together over their thighs, before the projector cutely goes on the fritz and they decide instead to reenact the scene portrayed in the movie they were just seeing and visit the observatory, sparks depicted as flying literally of a shot of a tesla coil shooting them out. They consummate their love in dancing into the stars of the observatory, the film breaking all reality with them floating up into the galaxy of the space observatory ceiling and they dance on the Milky Way briefly before coming back to the real, sitting in chairs making out.

The film then zips along all the familiar beats of these young love stories, with an extended cameo by John Legend to ruminate on the state of modern jazz thrown in for good measure. Sebastian and Mia start a scene bathed in bisexual lighting for no other reason than Chazelle is on his victory lap, then sit at a piano in Sebastian's cramped apartment and sing through the relationship.

Sebastian's music career goes on the up, his lame two key piano accompaniment for the big act to make a living no longer some hokey party band hire but John Legend's sold out rock band performances, the spotlight starting with him, then another on Mia so he can wink at her sitting in the audience that he's made it.

Cut to the fall season in Mia feeling left out with his career obligations. He makes an effort to win her over with an intimate dinner date but it proves a failure, Mia already is emotionally checked out underneath the familiar banter. The dinner becomes an uncomfortable truth when she confronts him on the fact he's in a steady ridiculously successful band career doing shit two key piano accompaniments for a rockstar. No better than when he was doing the trashy electronic keyboard at the party. Mia, despite all her career failings, remains true to her passion and Sebastian trades in his dream of owning a jazz club to follow the money. The dinner unceremoniously fails when Sebastian breaks any sense of politeness to take a shot at both Mia's failures in securing any acting roles and his belief rigidly pursuing her dreams has blinkered her to any chance at success, saying that she only liked him when he was down and out like her.

The movie goes the way you expect. At a photo shoot where Sebastian is expected to embrace his inner hated rockstar persona when asked to play something for a little flavour, he plays that same melancholy tune that got him booted from the jazz bar gig. He tries and tries to get Mia back but she's moved on.

The film balances an innocent sense of naivety with a bittersweet reverance as La La Land moves effortlessly to the climax of their time together. The film transcends reality once again and ends in a beautiful montage curving backwards on itself, running back all the memorable points of their relationship that could've gone wonderfully different with a swelling medley of song and dance set pieces. Their romance seen one final time through Hollywood's saccharine musical pomp. One final waltz and encore. A thoroughly Hollywood ending. The film of course was the talk of 2016 and an awards darling. Oscar bait at its finest.

Babylon is a similar structure and filmic style, only transplanted onto a film so radically different in tone, character, and outlook that you'd think someone attempted to recreate La La Land in hell and all they had was the putrid and terrifying scenes lying around them. The film is a three hour bravura tour de force of disgust, near constant nods to abuse and exploitation in Hollywood, and a thesis that with the transition from the silent era to sound, practically every actor, filmmaker, and crew member, was hung out to dry as Hollywood reinvented itself for new technology, and yet Babylon is still somehow also a celebration of cinema like La La Land if only by showing just how much blood, sweat and tears goes on behind the camera of that perfect shot. It's Fellini's 8½ with arthouse sensibilities substituted for too much cocaine and elephant scat play. In the film production moments you can see Chazelle like Fellini getting out his frustrations and reaching catharsis in throwing the curtain back on the downsides of filmmaking.

The film opens with an elephant shitting onto the camera, a too long and too uncomfortable moment almost telling the audience to abandon hope and turn this off barely minutes in. This moves to an utterly depraved Hollywood orgy of all kinds of unspeakable acts, some based in real stories of scandal. Fatty Arbuckle, the first in a long line of Hollywood players revealed to be utterly depraved people, has his scandal depicted here of what could've been some sort of sexual assault or a lethal case of peritonitis, the story nobody could quite figure (still opinion is firmly divided on what transpired, even now), despite multiple trials that resulted in a woman dying in a trashed hotel room, and his career the first in the industry to have to be properly amputated over alleged sexual misconduct, unable to make the comeback only because the whole incident ended up a gift to fatphobia and a fateful heart attack the day Hollywood signed him another contract. Babylon depicts this as her peeing on him and then OD'ing and he left bawling in the aftermath shaking her limp body like a toddler having had his toy broken from smashing it too hard against the ground. The executives stand over the dead woman and Fatty's pathetic display and decide to move the real life elephant (yes, the one who shat on you) crashing the party up from 4am to 2am to distract while they wheel out the corpse.

Oh there's still a jazz band in this one all right (not a Chazelle film if there's no jazz), playing in the middle of the debauched proceedings all African-Americans, seemingly the only ones there among a sea of white writhing bodies, playing some twisted version of the last salute to decency. Threesomes, foursomes, fivesomes, and the masses between people writhing in ungodly dance, mountains of cocaine for the people who start to lag, some guy bemoaning the fact he put an erratic chicken on too much coke and it has to be rescued, offhand mentions of pedophilia going on upstairs. Despite being about 100 years ago, not much has changed in Hollywood's dark corners.

Margot Robbie arrives as perhaps Emma Stone's shadow from the underworld, the complete loss of innocence after Mia actually having gotten parts and seen the inside of the industry rather than turned away every audition, abused and traumatised already so much before the movie begun that she enters the fray fooling the bouncer with a ridiculous stage name Nellie LaRoy as a vain and shallow attention-seeking hanger on, but her looks and scant dress, barely rags, wins over the rest as the life of the party, and her dream of living whatever heights of this twisted Hollywood life are realised on that fateful night. She dances with the best of them, spinning out of control only to prostrate herself and run her hand along the filthy floor like it was a plush couch for a moment before jumping back up to toss her cigarette and continue the dance. Her turn at stardom only comes because an executive sees her dancing on a table in his eyeline in the middle of dealing with corpse disposal and needs to give a director a hot woman to trial for their titillating silent film the next day.

Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) turns up in a suit as the classic A-lister, the Humphrey Bogart, frequent relationship troubles in lieu of his deep insecurities over career and inability to settle in tow. He is too good to get involved in anything overtly morally reprehensible but he still leaves every woman unhappy in marriage. He orders far too many bottles of alcohol in watching the nightmare to wash out his thoughts on the latest impending divorce.

The film centres on Manny (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant who works as a low rung assistant at this party, somehow both in the background and involved in making calls the executives don't want to dirty their hands doing. He weaves in and out of the party as our vehicle into the picture, his shock long left for a determination to get the job done well and a possible promotion into a start in Hollywood. He consults the executive after suggesting to him the elephant to distract from the unsightly body, and the party wound down to strewn party streamers and the odd hungover person stumbling around, to suggest an aspiration to the Hollywood ladder and is instantly cut off and shot down: "You are where you belong."

This sets the stage for the next three hours. Manny falls in love with Nellie's wild child affect and is left in the dust for her celebrity-chasing, the first moment of many. He helps a thoroughly drunk Jack Conrad back to his mansion, where Jack pontificates a bit incoherently on the direction of Hollywood to an opera record he puts on before falling off his balcony, hitting a tiled roof on the way to splash in his pool face down, getting out with a flourish like his absolutely hammered behaviour was another one of his great performances.

Then comes arguably the best set piece in the film. Babylon splits into an utterly inspired montage of insanity in film production. Underpaid and unsafe crew members assemble en masse to chase Manny around a paddock after he drives a still deeply hungover Conrad to set. Producers throw Manny as a sacrificial lamb to the workers in their unwillingness to negotiate. The filmmakers talk over a shot with their star while he's chased by a giant crowd of angry labourers far below in the background.

Nellie LaRoy, having been picked at random, gets her dreams come true as a woman director sighs that she doesn't have the big tits they wanted but she'll have to do. Chazelle casted his wife Olivia Hamilton as the director and she does what's one of the best performances in the film, a woman director making her way in an industry of sleazy men, drama queens and kings, and so many flaming out alcoholics, dead focused on nothing but getting the movie in the can, but with enough funny hand gestures and eyebrow cocks to make the moments that much more farcical. Manny winds up having to be a director assistant to an absolute nutcase of an 'eccentric director', staging epic battle scenes where people are both fake and really are being killed in pursuit of the shot. They stand over a flag bearer who died by being run through by a flag, and make up the excuse on the fly he somehow did it himself and also he was probably going to die anyway. The montage contrasts with Nellie LaRoy getting her chance in a bar scene, which she dutifully whores her body in a drunk sweaty manic ballet of flashing and groping to all the men for the perverted pleasure of the camera capturing the moment. The woman director watches and is suitably impressed, like her, for Nellie's willingness to absolutely give herself up for the movie. Although of course there's a visible boner in an extra's pants that ruins the take. On top of this, Chazelle contrasts with Jack Conrad dictating a rewrite of his scene, doing his whoring offscreen, riffing for dirtier versions of famous lines in cinema that go beyond the period (this is set in the mid 20s) -- "And then he says hasta la vista, motherfucker." "And then he says frankly Scarlett, you're a cunt." And ending each with a "Type it!"

All this is hung on a narrative of Manny rushing to town to grab a replacement camera before the camera hire store closes, as the horses in the battle scene trampled over the ten the production had. He's told it'll be a half hour wait that becomes an hour. He gets back with whatever type of lens they had spare and Jack Conrad manages to stumble out his tent for the single most perfect shot of a romantic embrace at sunset, all the chaos and destruction for this one minute of film. The score in all these scenes is this bizarre riff on La La Land's music, a musical narration technique to have a throughline in these moments, a cacophony of drums and saxophone that keep the pace brisk and at tempo. Chazelle's work is frenetic filmmaking that's perfectly controlled.

The rest of the film is similar scenes of chaos in filmmaking and the industry. And nearly all the characters are composites or loose adaptations of real Hollywood figures of the time. Jack Conrad can't make the leap from silent to talking films and blames the one movie critic who used to flatter him. Nellie projectile vomiting at an upper class party with Hollywood elites where she's supposed to be upping her career profile. There's a subplot of the first major Asian-American actress in Hollywood Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) (based on real life counterpart Nancy Kwan of The World of Suzie Wong (1960) fame, a film exemplifying the issues), someone of grace and considered thought, her secret pleasure being the unspeakable lesbianism of the time, only to also be debased and wrote off constantly as 'the exotic Oriental' stereotype that dogged representation in Hollywood until only recently. Manny finally getting a chance at director, only to fuck up by trying to cast a by this time well off the rails coke fiend Nellie, and then debasing the African-American jazz lead Sidney (Jovan Adepo) by making him do the performance in caricature, blackface because the lights shining on him make his skin lighter than his colleagues, and they need the American South demographics to make profit so there has to be racism. A Mexican immigrant selling out another person of colour in order to make it.

And yet, beneath all the chaos and exploitation and Hollywood fucking over everyone, the film finishes with Manny years later coming back and seeing his beloved industry onscreen. Babylon ends with a romp through the history of film and Manny watching with tears flowing, a triumphant celebration of cinema magic set to a brilliant image of film being developed in the chemicals as all the noted movie scenes interplay across history. Babylon reveals itself as a tortured love letter to film, and at the same time the opposite message of La La Land, a thoroughly deranged epitaph to the fact Hollywood has no soul, and all those people who were hurt in bringing you that cinematic experience.

Babylon of course came out and bombed. The biggest flop of 2022. The trailer for the film sells you on fun parties and a deliciously gaudy time when the film goes out of its way to be uncomfortable in amidst the farcical comedy. Nobody who turned out for Margot Robbie in Barbie will want to tune in for her unhinged performance here.

The biggest problem though is unfortunately just which movie came first. Expectations were set by La La Land, and then torn apart by Babylon. Chazelle made a terrible calculation that the dark of Babylon would be a fitting follow up to one of the biggest and most upbeat Oscar darlings of the past decade. People went into Babylon expecting La La Land, and while they indeed got the most perfect companion piece, unfortunately people don't want to look at those dark corners Chazelle spotlighted. They wanted La La Land 2, and that closed mindedness and conservative nature of the mainstream moviegoing public is a shame. I can understand people not having the stomach for the film, but I thought there would be a few more interested.

(This actually isn't the first 8 minutes, but this is probably the most illustrative section of the film for this essay.)

La La Land is currently streaming on Stan.

Babylon is currently streaming on Paramount+.

[todaysdocument]

Flight Plan for Mercury-Atlas Mission 6, the first American orbital spaceflight. Flight plan dated 12/21/1961. 

File Unit: Flight Plan for Mercury Atlas Mission 6, 12/21/1961 - 12/21/1961

Series: Source Files on Project Mercury, 1952 - 1968

Record Group 255: Records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1903 - 2006

Transcription:

[page 1] 

[stamp at top of page: "FLIGHT OPERATIONS DIVISION JAN 2 1962"]

[handwritten in upper right corner: "C. C. Kraft, Jr."]

[printed in upper right corner: "Copy"]

[handwritten note: "Who has priority for Astro contact between ATS + KNO on 2nd orbit?"]

[handwritten note: "file copy"]

FLIGHT PLAN

FOR

MERCURY-ATLAS MISSION 6

NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION

MANNED SPACECRAFT CENTER

Langley Air Force Base, Va.

December 21, 1961

[page 2]

MA-6 FLIGHT PLAN

Standard reports during powered flight every 30 seconds.

Report: Fuel, cabin pressure, O2 quantity, amps, comments.

00:02:11 Report BEOO

00:02:34 Report tower jettison

00:04:20 CapCom reports MCC is GO

00:04:30 Astro reports he is GO

00:05:04 Report SEOO - Cap Sep

00:05:  - Report turnaround and retro attitude

00:05:  - CapCom reports "GO" condition - orbit capability and Astro reports switch positions

00:06:  - BDA gives Atsro retrofire times. CET check

00:08:  - Control systems check - check all control modes.

00:16:30 Blood pressure measurement over CYI

00:24:00 60° yaw maneuver to check ability to determine yaw ref. thru periscope.

00:28:00 Dark side checklist - includes control sys. warmup and check. (All axis MP and FBW)

00:30:00 Make 30 minute report to ZZB

00:43:00 Night horizon check - checks reference capability at night using window pitch, roll, and yaw maneuver

00:44:00 IOS flare observation - CET check

00:54:  - Astro maintains 0, 0, 34 on FBW to determine capability on dark side.

00:56:00 30 minute report.  Blood pressure, vision test, exercise etc.

01:04:00 All systems HF check

01:10:10 Star navigation capability

01:12:00 First meal

01:16:00 Go thru pre-retro checklist

01:2---    Observe sunrise. Go to ASCS in preparation for GO NO-GO decision at GYM

01:34:00 30 minute report to MCC

01:40:00 CET check, HF check from Astro

01:44:00 All stations HF check

01:49:00 Day horizon check - checks reference capability in daylight using window pitch, roll, and yaw maneuver

01:54:00 180° yaw maneuver (Gyro's free)

02:01:00 30 minute report to ZZB

02:14:00 IOS flare observation

02:17:00 Star tracking

02:28:00 Observe cities if possible

02:29:00 30 minute report, blood pressure, vision, exercise, etc.

02:37:00 Night observations and stra tracking, star observations, etc.

02:45:00 Second meal on ASCS

02:53:00 Go thru pre-retro checklist

02:58:00 Go to ASCS - make GO NO-GO decision on 3rd orbit

03:07:00 30 minute report - blood pressure, etc.

03:09:00 Weather observation

03:25:00 30 minute report - blood pressure, etc.

03:37:00 Night observation - stars, etc.

03:56:00 30 minute report - command voice check

04:15:00 Begin preparation for retrofire

04:18:00 Occulogyric test

04:20:00 Thruster warmup of Man. Cont. Sys.

04:22:00 Go thru equip. stowage and pre-retro checklist with HAW CapCom.

04:30:00 Exercise - ready to control retrofire

04:32:28 Retro sequence

04:32:58 Retrofire on ASCS - Man. backup

04:41:00 MCC give IP, recovery time, etc.

[introvertguide]

Well, after almost 4 years of watching films, the group and I finally made it through all 100 films. Besides just watching the films, this project also included one hundred reviews that ranged between 1000 and 3000 words each, one hundred short introductions for each film, and 138 movie related side posts. In total, it accounts for a little over 300,000 words and over 400 double-spaced pages describing all the movies on the list. It has been quite the journey and helped me keep my sanity during a rather rough time for world. I still would like to review movies and learn about filmmaking, but I think I am done with this AFI list for a while. Below are all the movies in the order that I saw them, along with the year they were released, the AFI ranking from the 10th anniversary list, and the day that I watched the film. It has really been a pleasure.

1 Blade Runner 1982 #97 8/15/18 2 Raging Bull 1980 #4 8/24/18 3 Jaws 1975 #56 8/26/18 4 To Kill a Mockingbird 1962 #25 9/1/18 5 The Searchers 1956 #12 9/10/18 6 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans 1927 #82 9/15/18 7 Unforgiven 1992 #68 9/21/18 8 Double Indemnity 1944 #29 9/24/18 9 The Godfather 1972 #2 9/30/18 10 Raiders of the Lost Ark 1981 #66 10/4/18 11 Annie Hall 1977 #35 10/8/18 12 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 1975 #32 10/13/18 13 12 Angry Men 1957 #87 10/18/18 14 Psycho 1960 #14 10/25/18 15 Cabaret 1972 #63 11/10/18 16 Last Picture Show 1971 #95 11/22/18 17 Godfather 2 1974 #32 11/30/18 18 Ben-Hur 1959 #100 12/10/18 19 It's a Wonderful Life 1946 #20 12/27/18 20 Snow White 1937 #34 1/7/19 21 In the Heat of the Night 1967 #75 1/12/19 22 Sophie's Choice 1982 #91 2/2/19 23 The Philadelphia Story 1940 #44 2/11/19 24 The Sixth Sense 1999 #89 2/19/19 25 West Side Story 1961 #51 2/22/19 26 ET 1982 #24 3/22/19 27 A Night at the Opera 1935 #85 4/18/19 28 Apocalypse Now 1979 #30 6/24/19 29 Swing Time 1936 #90 7/5/19 30 Yankee Doodle Dandy 1942 #98 7/21/19 31 Rear Window 1954 #54 7/28/19 32 All About Eve 1950 #28 8/29/19 33 The General 1926 #18 9/13/19 34 Tootsie 1982 #69 10/1/19 35 Rocky 1976 #57 10/12/19 36 Shane 1953 #45 10/30/19 37 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf 1966 #67 11/14/19 38 Sunset Boulevard 1950 #16 11/28/19 39 Vertigo 1958 #9 12/15/19 40 Singin in the Rain 1953 #5 1/15/20 41 Nashville 1975 #59 1/25/20 42 Bringing Up Baby 1938 #88 2/2/20 43 Midnight Cowboy 1969 #43 2/6/20 44 Spartacus 1960 #81 3/7/20 45 Network 1976 #64 3/11/20 46 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 1969 #73 3/23/20 47 Sullivan's Travels 1941 #61 4/11/20 48 On the Waterfront 1953 #19 4/25/20 49 Lord of the Rings 2001 #50 5/8/20 50 All the President's Men 1976 #77 5/12/20 51 Casablanca 1942 #3 5/17/20 52 North by Northwest 1959 #55 5/25/20 53 The Gold Rush 1925 #58 6/4/20 54 Toy Story 1995 #99 6/20/20 55 The French Connection 1971 #93 7/11/20 56 City Lights 1931 #11 7/25/20 57 Some Like it Hot 1959 #22 8/8/20 58 Gone with the Wind 1939 #6 8/30/20 59 Goodfellas 1990 #92 9/19/20 60 High Noon 1952 #27 9/30/20 61 King Kong 1933 #41 10/12/20 62 The Silence of the Lambs 1991 #74 10/25/20 63 The Bridge on the River Kwai 1957 #36 10/30/20 64 The Graduate 1967 #17 11/18/20 65 Wizard of Oz 1939 #10 12/22/20 66 The Apartment 1960 #80 12/26/20 67 Intolerance 1916 #49 1/3/21 68 MASH 1970 #54 1/20/21 69 Dr Strangelove 1964 #39 1/25/21 70 Saving Private Ryan 1998 #71 2/11/21 71 Do the Right Thing 1989 #96 2/24/21 72 Pulp Fiction 1994 #94 3/7/21 73 A Clockwork Orange 1971 #70 3/19/21 74 Chinatown 1974 #21 3/25/21 75 The Sound of Music 1965 #40 4/10/21 76 Duck Soup 1933 #60 4/15/21 77 Easy Rider 1969 #84 4/23/21 78 Star Wars 1977 #13 5/4/21 79 The Maltese Falcon 1941 #31 5/10/21 80 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 1948 #38 5/19/21 81 African Queen 1951 #65 5/26/21 82 Lawrence of Arabia 1962 #7 6/1/21 83 Bonnie and Clyde 1967 #42 6/6/21 84 Schindler's List 1993 #8 6/26/21 85 Modern Times 1936 #78 7/19/21 86 The Best Years of Our Lives 1946 #37 8/8/21 87 Taxi Driver 1976 #52 10/13/21 88 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 1939 #26 10/29/21 89 The Shawshank Redemption 1994 #72 11/13/21 90 American Graffiti 1973 #62 12/8/21 91 A Streetcar Named Desire 1951 #47 12/13/21 92 The Wild Bunch 1969 #79 12/26/21 93 Titanic 1997 #83 2/1/22 94 It Happened One Night 1934 #46 2/15/22 95 The Deer Hunter 1978 #53 3/25/22 96 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968 #15 4/22/22 97 Forrest Gump 1994 #76 5/1/22 98 Platoon 1986 #86 5/11/22 99 The Grapes of Wrath 1940 #23 6/1/22 100 Citizen Kane 1941 #1 6/26/22

If you look at the archive for this blog, you can find reviews of every one of these films along with side essays about the characters and the production surrounding the films. Feel free to ask questions, because I know the whole list quite well at this point.

[moonwatchuniverse]

60 years ago... NASA astronaut Thomas Stafford In 1952 Lieutenant Thomas Stafford graduated from the USNA - United States Naval Academy but went on to become an US Air Force officer and test pilot. After his 1958 formation at the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, Stafford was selected as NASA astronaut in 1962. Stafford flew on Gemini VI & IX, Apollo 10 and the 1975 ASTP Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. During the latter mission, he held the rank of Brigadier-General and became the first general officer to conduct a spaceflight mission. Stafford totalled 21 days 3 hours in space! In 1979, Tom Stafford became a member of the American board of Omega watches as he has always been a huge fan of the Speedmaster! Note how in both these 1966 official portraits, Stafford had the NASA-issued Speedmaster chronograph running, timing the photo session with his NASA-issued Speedmaster 105.003 n°27... (Photo: NASA)

[justforbooks]

Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI, was born on January 20, 1920 in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. He was an Italian film director and screenwriter known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of Cahiers du cinéma and Sight & Sound, which lists his 1963 film ​8 1⁄2 as the 10th-greatest film.

For La Dolce Vita Fellini won the Palme d'Or, was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, and won four in the category of Best Foreign Language Film, the most for any director in the history of the Academy. He received an honorary award for Lifetime Achievement at the 65th Academy Awards in Los Angeles. His other well-known films include La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957), Juliet of the Spirits (1967), the "Toby Dammit" segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968), Fellini Satyricon (1969), Roma (1972), Amarcord (1973), and Fellini's Casanova (1976).

Personal and highly idiosyncratic visions of society, Fellini's films are a unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy and desire. The adjectives "Fellinian" and "Felliniesque" are "synonymous with any kind of extravagant, fanciful, even baroque image in the cinema and in art in general". La Dolce Vita contributed the term paparazzi to the English language, derived from Paparazzo, the photographer friend of journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni).

Contemporary filmmakers such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Emir Kusturica, and David Lynch have cited Fellini's influence on their work.

Polish director Wojciech Has, whose two best-received films, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) and The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973), are examples of modernist fantasies, has been compared to Fellini for the sheer "luxuriance of his images".

I Vitelloni inspired European directors Juan Antonio Bardem, Marco Ferreri, and Lina Wertmüller and influenced Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), George Lucas's American Graffiti (1974), Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire (1985), and Barry Levinson's Diner (1982), among many others. When the American magazine Cinema asked Stanley Kubrick in 1963 to name his ten favorite films, he ranked I Vitelloni number one.

Nights of Cabiria was adapted as the Broadway musical Sweet Charity and the movie Sweet Charity (1969) by Bob Fosse starring Shirley MacLaine. City of Women was adapted for the Berlin stage by Frank Castorf in 1992.

​8 1⁄2 inspired, among others, Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965), Alex in Wonderland (Paul Mazursky, 1970), Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971), Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973), All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979), Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980), Sogni d'oro (Nanni Moretti, 1981), Parad Planet (Vadim Abdrashitov, 1984), La Pelicula del rey (Carlos Sorin, 1986), Living in Oblivion (Tom DiCillo, 1995), ​8 1⁄2 Women (Peter Greenaway, 1999), Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993), and the Broadway musical Nine (Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, 1982). Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), a Spanish novel by Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi, features a dream sequence with Fellini inspired by ​8 1⁄2.

Fellini's work is referenced on the albums Fellini Days (2001) by Fish, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) by Bob Dylan with Motorpsycho Nitemare, Funplex (2008) by the B-52's with the song Juliet of the Spirits, and in the opening traffic jam of the music video Everybody Hurts by R.E.M. American singer Lana Del Rey has cited Fellini as an influence. His work influenced the American TV shows Northern Exposure and Third Rock from the Sun. Wes Anderson's short film Castello Cavalcanti (2013) is in many places a direct homage to Fellini.

Various film-related material and personal papers of Fellini are in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives, to which scholars and media experts have full access. In October 2009, the Jeu de Paume in Paris opened an exhibit devoted to Fellini that included ephemera, television interviews, behind-the-scenes photographs, Book of Dreams (based on 30 years of the director's illustrated dreams and notes), along with excerpts from La dolce vita and ​8 1⁄2.

In 2015, the Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps of Concord, California, performed "Felliniesque", a show themed around Fellini's work, with which they won a record 16th Drum Corps International World Class championship with a record score of 99.650. That same year, the weekly entertainment-trade magazine Variety announced that French director Sylvain Chomet was moving forward with The Thousand Miles, a project based on various Fellini works and first developed with Demian Gregory and Tommaso Rossellini, including his unpublished drawings and writings.

Filmography

As a director

1950 Variety Lights co-credited with Alberto Lattuada

1952 The White Sheik 

1953 I vitelloni

1953 Love in the City Segment: Un'agenzia matrimoniale

1954 La strada

1955 Il bidone

1957 Nights of Cabiria

1960 La Dolce Vita

1962 Boccaccio '70 Segment: Le tentazioni del Dottor Antonio

1963 ​8 1⁄2

1965 Juliet of the Spirits

1968 Spirits of the Dead Segment: Toby Dammit

1969 Fellini: A Director's Notebook

1969 Fellini Satyricon

1970 I Clowns

1972 Roma

1973 Amarcord

1976 Fellini's Casanova

1978 Orchestra Rehearsal

1980 City of Women

1983 And the Ship Sails On

1986 Ginger and Fred

1987 Intervista

1990 The Voice of the Moon 

As a screenwriter

1942 Knights of the Desert

1942 Before the Postman

1943 The Peddler and the Lady

1943 L'ultima carrozzella Co-scriptwriter

1945 Tutta la città canta Co-screenwriter and story author

1945 Rome, Open City Co-scriptwriter

1946 Paisà Co-scriptwriter

1947 Il delitto di Giovanni Episcopo Co-scriptwriter

1948 Senza pietà Co-scriptwriter

1948 Il miracolo Co-scriptwriter

1949 Il mulino del Po Co-scriptwriter

1950 Francesco, giullare di Dio Co-scriptwriter

1950 Il Cammino della speranza Co-scriptwriter

1951 La città si difende Co-scriptwriter

1951 Persiane chiuse Co-scriptwriter

1952 Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo Co-scriptwriter

1958 Fortunella Co-scriptwriter

1979 Lovers and Liars Fellini not credited

Television commercials

TV commercial for Campari Soda (1984)

TV commercial for Barilla pasta (1984)

Three TV commercials for Banca di Roma (1992)

Documentaries on Fellini

Ciao Federico (1969). Dir. Gideon Bachmann. (60')

Federico Fellini - un autoritratto ritrovato (2000). Dir. Paquito Del Bosco. (RAI TV, 68')

Fellini: I'm a Born Liar (2002). Dir. Damian Pettigrew. Feature documentary. (Arte, Eurimages, Scottish Screen, 102')

How Strange to Be Named Federico (2013). Dir. Ettore Scola.

Fellini died in Rome on 31 October 1993 at the age of 73 after a heart attack he suffered a few weeks earlier, a day after his 50th wedding anniversary. The memorial service, in Studio 5 at Cinecittà, was attended by an estimated 70,000 people. At Giulietta Masina's request, trumpeter Mauro Maur played Nino Rota's "Improvviso dell'Angelo" during the ceremony.

Five months later, on 23 March 1994, Masina died of lung cancer. Fellini, Masina and their son, Pierfederico, are buried in a bronze sepulchre sculpted by Arnaldo Pomodoro. Designed as a ship's prow, the tomb is at the main entrance to the Cemetery of Rimini. The Federico Fellini Airport in Rimini is named in his honour.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[project1939]

Day 69- Film: Limelight 

Release date: October 23rd, 1952. 

Studio: United Artists 

Genre: Comedy/Drama 

Director: Charlie Chaplin 

Producer: Charlie Chaplin 

Actors: Charlie Chaplin, Claire Bloom, Sydney Chaplin, Nigel Bruce, Norman Lloyd, Buster Keaton 

Plot Summary: A washed up old Music Hall comedian saves his pretty young neighbor from committing suicide. He nurses her back to health and inspires her to dance as a ballerina again. Once she’s doing well, she tries to help him with his career, like he helped with hers. Things get complicated when she confesses she loves him and wants to get married. 

My Rating (out of five stars): ***½ 

This is another film that is hard to rate as a whole for me, because it was so mixed. A lot of it was moving and interesting. But then a girl barely more than 18 falls in love with a 63 year old man.  

The Good: 

Charlie Chaplin. He’s a star in every sense of the word- you can’t take your eyes off him. He can be funny, pathetic, sweet, and mentally tortured, and he does it all affectingly. Seeing him play a character confronting the decline in his career and his own mortality was almost hard to watch sometimes, because I cared about both this character and the real Chaplin himself. 

Claire Bloom. Her character was kind of boring in a lot of ways, but she transcended the material with her charm and warmth. 

All of the side characters/actors. There were lots of fun and interesting characters in this, and the acting was top notch all around. Even Chaplin’s son, who played Bloom’s young love interest, was good. You wouldn’t think he was cast only because of nepotism.  

Chaplin and Keaton! There is a long sequence of scenes near the end of the movie where Keaton plays another washed up comedian who is friends with Chaplin’s character. The two of them talk backstage and then perform a comedy routine together. Even though the routine isn’t the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen, watching Keaton and Chaplin together was absolutely priceless. I almost couldn’t believe it was happening. (Keaton’s old “stone face” still made me giggle a lot, btw!)

Chaplin resisting the love of Bloom. At least Chaplin mostly tried to discourage this young girl from marrying him. He never 100 percent committed to pushing her away, though. 

The mixture of comedy and pathos. This film probably lands more on the drama side than the comedy, but I liked that there was a strong mixture of both. 

The Bad: 

Bloom as a very young woman falling in love with the elderly Chaplin. It was weird enough, but Chaplin is a man with a long and disturbing history of marrying teenagers. I hated that the plot went there. For most of the beginning of the movie, I literally kept saying to myself, “Please don’t make her fall in love with him! Please!” When she did, I was angry. Why couldn’t he have saved a more mature woman, even someone in her 30s? Why couldn’t he and Bloom just have had a very sweet father and daughter or grandfather and granddaughter relationship? I don’t understand why anyone would write this, unless he was a 60-ish actor and wanted to play out a plot with a beautiful young girl. It was made more ludicrous when a handsome and kind young man she used to have a serious crush on vies for her affection. She flatly refuses him, saying she’s marrying Chaplin. 

I know I have a pet peeve about bad rear projection, but this had some terrible rear projection in it! Thankfully it was only a few scenes. 

The melodrama at the very end was a little too much for me.  

[whenerosmetpsyche]

Elements, Direction and Time

Tibetan astrology uniquely combines Chinese and Indian astrology. Originally brought to Tibet by bodhisattva Manjusri, Tibetan astrology was developed as a tool to explore the nature of apparent reality and relative truth. It is a system based upon a relational understanding between the directions of the Earth, the elements, the body, and the sky that underpins the foundation of Chinese astrology. This philosophy informs every day, month, and year. Below is a partial breakdown of this philosophy.

Directions

Cardinal directions and elements have associations with one another: South [summer]: Fire East [spring]: Wood West [fall]: Metal North [winter]: Water While ordinal directions (SE, NE, etc) are associated with the Earth.

These elements are associated with directions, periods of time, activities of nature, organs, and the planets and are considered forces of transformation that continually come together in harmony or conflict. 

Wood / East / Spring / Dawn / Vitality / Mobility / Liver / Jupiter Fire / South / Summer / Midday / Ardor / Destruction / Heart / Sun & Mars Earth / Center / Transitions / Fertility / Solidification / Spleen / Saturn Metal / West / Autumn / Evening / Rigidity / Cutting / Lungs / Venus Water / North / Winter / Night / Rest / Impregnation / Kidneys / Mercury & Moon

Animals were later developed to describe the characteristics of these transformations. Although they are most popularly known through their year associations, these characteristics are associated with with months, days, and even hours as well.

It is this cycle of time that is particularly interesting to my inner-astrologer, as understanding these flows can help us understand how the sky is impacting us. These cycles also view time as in context with historical patterns rather than stand-alone events that come out of nowhere as tends to be the perspective of rampant individualism.

Elemental Characteristics

Wood gives an animal sign mobility and vitality, creative power, and a softness. Wood years are transformative.

Fire gives an animal sign vitality, brilliance and transforming energy, as well as violence and intolerance. Fire years are marked by rapid evolution, conflict, and scarcity.

Earth gives stability to an animal sign along with realism and thoughtful action. Earth years are calm, prosperous and stabilizing.

Metal makes an animal sign rigid, cutting, and authoritative. Metal years are energetic and generally positive but disturbing. Few compromises can be expected.

Water gives an animal sign an open mind, flexibility, communication and intuition. Water signs are generally associated with thoughtfulness and sensitivity, but also passivity. Water years are auspicious for change and communication.

You have probably heard that this year is the year of the Metal Rat, but interestingly Tibet has a more descriptive name for this year: Kunden which means “Having all qualities” and pretty much sums up the ride we’ve been on. Tibetan year names are based on the Tibetan 60-year Jupiter cycle (adopted from India) made up a progression of elements, animals, and their resulting active or receptive polarities begin with the year of the Fire Hare and end with the year of the Fire Tiger. 

Yearly Cycles

Year of the Rat is about prosperity, progress, growth and investment. It is not a year to take risks. Year of the Cow is a year of toil that requires sustained effort to yield rewards. It is a bad year to stay idle. Year of the Tiger is unpredictable, dramatic and full of sudden developments. It is turbulent and should be approached with caution. Year of the Hare is a quiet, relaxing year that can sometimes manifests as lethargy.  Year of the Dragon is energetic and grandiose, an auspicious year for marriage and new beginnings. Usually characterized by natural disturbances.

Year of the Snake is a year of healing and rebirth. Many life-altering changes are likely akin to the snake shedding its skin. This is a powerful year where confidence tends to run high. 

Year of the Horse is a great year for energetic and ambitiousness. It is a year that brings about the impulsive urge to complete projects

Year of the Sheep is a year of rest after effort, and is a good time to pursue the arts. Year of the Monkey is an exciting year where anything can happen. A good year to seize new initiatives and take advantage of opportunity. Year of the Bird  is energetic but scattered. Many opportunities will arise, but it is difficult to see them through as distractions abound. Geopolitically this is a year associated with hardlining and repression. Year of the Dog is idealistic and justice-oriented. It is a year that brings about reflection and generosity. The year feels a bit too serious and is favorable towards those with good intentions.

Year of the Pig is optimistic and indulgent. It brings prosperity and abundance but can lead to excess. 

The elemental and animal associations align with Chinese astrology, but have additional descriptions in the Tibetan tradition. Below are the years’ English to Tibetan translations as they appear in Philipe Cornu’s Tibetan Astrology. Each year begins with the lunar new year (so January babies may be considered part of the previous year).

If a year you are interested in is not listed below, this calculator can tell you the corresponding element + animal. 

1945  Wood Bird - Protector of Earth 1946  Fire Dog + Inflexible 1947  Fire Pig - All Conquering 1948  Earth Rat + Stopping All 1949  Earth Cow - Error 1950  Metal Tiger + Custom 1951  Metal Hare - Ass 1952  Water Dragon + Happiness 1953  Water Snake - Totally victorious 1954  Wood Horse + Victorious 1955  Wood Sheep - Intoxicating 1956  Fire Monkey + Ugly face 1957  Fire Bird - Gold pendant 1958  Earth Dog + Hanging 1959  Earth Pig - Transformer 1960  Metal Rat + Having all qualities 1961  Metal Cow - Wild dog 1962  Water Tiger + Virtuous 1963  Water Hare - Beautiful 1964  Wood Dragon + Terrible 1965  Wood Snake - Varied wealth 1966  Fire Horse + Evil-crushing splendor 1967  Fire Sheep - Monkey 1968  Earth Monkey + Dagger, Jupiter 1969  Earth Bird - Peaceful 1970  Metal Dog + Ordinary 1971  Metal Pig - Erroneous, contradictory 1972  Water Rat + Guardian 1973  Water Cow - Irreligious, impudent  1974  Water Tiger + Total joy 1975  Wood Hare - Insects 1976  Fire Dragon + Fire 1977  Fire Snake - Orange 1978  Earth Horse + Messenger of time 1979  Earth Sheep - All-accomplishing 1980  Metal Monkey + Ferocious 1981  Metal Bird - Evil-minded 1982  Water Dog + Great drum 1983  Water Pig - Blood-vomiting 1984  Wood Rat + Mars 1985  Wood Cow - Wrathful 1986  Fire Tiger + Exhaustion 1987  Fire Hare - Initial 1988  Earth Dragon + Totally Born 1989  Earth Snake - White  1990  Metal Horse + Totally drunk 1991  Metal Sheep - Lord of birth 1992  Water Monkey + Name 1993  Water Bird - Glorious face 1994  Wood Dog + Substance 1995  Wood Pig - Yellow 1996  Fire Rat + Holder 1997  Fire Cow - Mighty Lord 1998  Earth Tiger + Much grain 1999  Earth Hare - Mad, drunk 2000  Metal Dragon + Oppression 2001  Metal Snake - Perfect cube 2002  Water Horse + Varied 2003  Water Sheep - Sun 2004  Wood Monkey + Liberating Sun

Some of these names are more metaphorical than others (e.g, blood is associated with wisdom and intoxication takes many forms), but more importantly point to the interaction between the element and the animal of that year. Likewise, the effects of the year can be calculated according to element and animal friendliness. 

[spurgie-cousin]

Weird History Wednesday: UFO Encounters in American History (Part 2)🛸

(feat. my 2 favorite international UFO stories of all time!)

1. The American Airship Wave (1896-1897) Beginning in California in 1896, sightings of strange ships and lights in the sky began to be reported in unprecedented numbers across the Western United States. Many of the encounters describe hearing singing, voices, or strange noises accompanying the sighting of strange lights or crafts. One account by Colonel H.G. Shaw from Stockton, CA claims while driving his buggy, Shaw came across a strange metallic object rested in a field. He stated that 3 slender figures around 7 ft tall approached his buggy making a ‘strange warbling noise’, and tried to force him back to their craft with them. Despite their size, he was able to fight them off, after which they fled back to their craft and disappeared into the sky.

2. Mantell UFO incident (1948) A little before 2pm on January 7th, 1948, Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas F. Mantell was sent out in a P-51 Mustang Fighter to pursue an unidentified flying object in the vicinity. The only description of the object was that is was circular in shape and around 80-90 meters in diameter. Mantell pursued the object until he encountered an unstable altitude that caused him to spiral downward and crash, resulting in his death. Some have wondered if the object was a military weather balloon, but the object in question has never been definitely identified.

3. The Flatwoods Monster (1952) The Flatwoods monster is an entity reported to have been sighted in the town of Flatwoods in Braxton County, West Virginia, United States, on September 12, 1952, following the appearance of a bright object crossing the night sky. After seeing the strange object seemingly crash land on a neighboring farm, 3 boys went to notify the owners of the farm, and they walked as a group into the property’s woods to investigate. While looking for the object, they describe encountering a humanoid figure approximately 10ft tall, with glowing green eyes, small ‘claw like’ hands, and a head that resemble ‘an ace of spades’. It appeared to glide toward the group making a hissing noise, before the residents dropped their flashlights and fled.

4. The Incident in Aurora, Texas (1897) Another bizarre encounter from the airship ‘wave’ of 1896-1897 happened in Aurora, Texas on April 17, 1897. According to reports, a strange metallic craft reportedly crash landed on local farm after hitting a windmill. After finding the site of the crash, the residents are said to have found metallic debris along with a body described as ‘not of this world’. The farmers, for some reason, decided to dispose of the craft remnants in a well, and buried the strange body on the property with traditional ‘Christian Rites’ as well as a grave marker (which has since been taken down). 5. Allagash Abductions (1976) Brothers Jim Weiner and Jack Weiner were on a camping trip in Allagash, Maine with friends Charles Foltz and Charles Rak when they claimed that they were abducted by aliens on August, 20, 1976. During a hypnosis session, they recalled being taken aboard a circular UFO and being "probed and tested by four-fingered beings with almond-shaped eyes and languid limbs". In a later interview by the St. John Valley Times, Charles Rak changed his story, saying he saw strange lights during the camping trip, but the abduction part of the story was a fabrication. The other three members of the group though stand by the abduction story, saying that “...after all these years, (we) are still in agreement with the Eagle Lake event as we remember it. We also accept the results of the hypnotic regression sessions and subsequent polygraph tests as supportive of an abduction scenario".

6. Nash-Fortenberry UFO sighting (1952) The Nash-Fortenberry UFO incident was an unidentified flying object sighting that occurred on July 14, 1952, when two commercial pilots (William B. Nash and William H. Fortenberry) claimed to have seen eight UFOs flying in a tight arrow formation over Chesapeake Bay. The crafts were described as balls of light flying in an eerily precise manner. The case was listed in the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book as an "unknown” and there has still been no credible explanation found for the incident to this day.

7. Japan Airlines Flight 1628 incident (1986) On November, 17, 1986, Japan Airlines Flight 1628 was en route from Paris to Narita International Airport, near Tokyo, with a cargo of Beaujolais wine. While flying over eastern Alaska, the crew witnessed two unidentified objects flying to their left. According to their accounts, the figures abruptly rose from below and closed in seemingly to escort their aircraft as it flew. Each object had two rectangular arrays of what appeared to be glowing nozzles or thrusters, though the bodies of the crafts remained obscured by darkness. When the objects were at their closest, the aircraft's cabin lit up and the captain described being able to feel their heat on his face. When the two craft disappeared, the crew noticed a third, much larger disk-shaped object had began trailing their aircraft. The sighting lasted 50 minutes and ended in the vicinity of Denali National Park, Alaska.

Illustration of the first two objects, based on Captain Terauchi's drawings and descriptions. 8. The Stonehenge Incident (1975) The ‘Stonehenge Incident’ or the ‘North Hudson Park UFO sightings’ occurred on January 12, 1975 in New Jersey, at a tall grey apartment building nicknamed the ‘Stonehenge’. According to resident George O'Barski, while out driving he began hearing static over his radio and saw in North Hudson Park a dark, round flying object with brightly lit windows hovering over the ground. He then observed ten small, hooded, identically-dressed figures emerge from the UFO and appear to dig up soil, collect it in bag-like receptacles, and return to the craft. O'Barski returned to the site the next day and claims to have found the holes in the vicinity of his sighting. Months later, O'Barski told the story to ufologist Budd Hopkins, who with other ufologists allegedly found other independent witnesses (like the doormen at the Stonehenge) who also reported seeing the strange object.

9. The Ariel School Sighting (1994) In 1994 at the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, over 60 students reported witnessing a strange craft land on a lawn near their school in broad daylight. Several students reported feeling compelled to approach the object, and said they were communicated with telepathically by the beings inside. The students report feeling an extreme urgency combined with a message of conservation for the earth, nature, and our natural resources, as well as being given visions of possible disaster scenarios if humans didn’t heed these instructions. Many students who experienced this stand by their stories to this day, and say that it affects the decisions they make regarding conservation to this day.

10. The Celestial Phenomenon Over Nuremberg (1561) On the morning of April 14th of 1561, a mass UFO sighting was recorded via broadsheet in Nuremberg, Germany. The story says that around dawn, residents of Nuremberg saw what they described as an aerial battle, followed by the appearance of a large black triangular object and then a large crash outside of the city. The broadsheet claims that witnesses observed hundreds of spheres, cylinders and other bizarre-shaped objects that moved erratically in the sky. It also describes objects of various shapes including crosses, globes, two lunar crescents, a black spear and tubular objects from which several smaller, round objects emerged and darted around the sky at dawn. A quote from the original report states: “...there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes. These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour.”

An illustration of the Phenomenon over Nuremberg

[greatworldwar2]

• Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, and computer scientist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer.

Turing was born on June 23rd, 1912 in Maida Vale, London, while his father, Julius Mathison Turing, was on leave from his position with the Indian Civil Service (ICS) at Chatrapur, then in the Madras Presidency and presently in Odisha state, in India. Turing's mother, Julius' wife, was Ethel Sara Turing. Julius' work with the ICS brought the family to British India, where his grandfather had been a general in the Bengal Army. However, both Julius and Ethel wanted their children to be brought up in Britain, so they moved to Maida Vale, London, as recorded by a blue plaque on the outside of the house of his birth. Turing had an elder brother, John. Turing's father's civil service commission was still active and during Turing's childhood years Turing's parents travelled between Hastings in the United Kingdom and India, leaving their two sons to stay with a retired Army couple. Very early in life, Turing showed signs of the genius that he was later to display prominently.

Turing's parents enrolled him at St Michael's, a day school at 20 Charles Road, St Leonards-on-Sea, at the age of six. The headmistress recognised his talent early on, as did many of his subsequent teachers. Between January 1922 and 1926, Turing was educated at Hazelhurst Preparatory School, an independent school in the village of Frant in Sussex (now East Sussex). In 1926, at the age of 13, he went on to Sherborne School, a boarding independent school in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset. The first day of term coincided with the 1926 General Strike, in Britain, but Turing was so determined to attend, that he rode his bicycle unaccompanied 60 miles (97 km) from Southampton to Sherborne, stopping overnight at an inn. Turing's natural inclination towards mathematics and science did not earn him respect from some of the teachers at Sherborne, whose definition of education placed more emphasis on the classics. Despite this, Turing continued to show remarkable ability in the studies he loved, solving advanced problems in 1927 without having studied even elementary calculus. In 1928, aged 16, Turing encountered Albert Einstein's work; not only did he grasp it, but it is possible that he managed to deduce Einstein's questioning of Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit.

After Sherborne, Turing studied as an undergraduate from 1931 to 1934 at King's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded first-class honours in mathematics. In 1935, at the age of 22, he was elected a Fellow of King's College. In 1936, Turing published his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". In this paper, Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel's 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with the formal and simple hypothetical devices that became known as Turing machines. From September 1936 to July 1938, Turing spent most of his time studying under Church at Princeton University, in the second year as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow. In addition to his purely mathematical work, he studied cryptology and also built three of four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier. In June 1938, he obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathematics at Princeton. When Turing returned to Cambridge, he attended lectures given in 1939 by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the foundations of mathematics. Turing and Wittgenstein argued and disagreed, with Turing defending formalism and Wittgenstein propounding his view that mathematics does not discover any absolute truths, but rather invents them.

During the Second World War, Turing was a leading participant in the breaking of German ciphers at Bletchley Park. From September 1938, Turing worked part-time with the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), the British codebreaking organisation. He concentrated on cryptanalysis of the Enigma cipher machine used by Nazi Germany, together with Dilly Knox, a senior GC&CS codebreaker. Soon after the July 1939 meeting near Warsaw at which the Polish Cipher Bureau gave the British and French details of the wiring of Enigma machine's rotors and their method of decrypting Enigma machine's messages, Turing and Knox developed a broader solution. Turing's approach was rather general, using crib-based decryption for which he produced the functional specification of the bombe. On September 4th, 1939, the day after the UK declared war on Germany, Turing reported to Bletchley Park, the wartime station of GC&CS. Specifying the bombe was the first of five major cryptanalytical advances that Turing made during the war. By using statistical techniques to optimise the trial of different possibilities in the code breaking process, Turing made an innovative contribution to the subject. Turing had a reputation for eccentricity at Bletchley Park. He was known to his colleagues as "Prof" and his treatise on Enigma was known as the "Prof's Book". While working at Bletchley, Turing, who was a talented long-distance runner, occasionally ran the 40 miles (64 km) to London when he was needed for meetings, and he was capable of world-class marathon standards.

Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park, Turing had specified an electromechanical machine called the bombe, which could break Enigma more effectively than the Polish bomba kryptologiczna, from which its name was derived. The bombe, with an enhancement suggested by mathematician Gordon Welchman, became one of the primary tools, and the major automated one, used to attack Enigma. The bombe searched for possible correct settings used for an Enigma message (i.e., rotor order, rotor settings and plugboard settings) using a suitable crib: a fragment of probable plaintext. By late 1941, Turing and his fellow cryptanalysts Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry were frustrated. Building on the work of the Poles, they had set up a good working system for decrypting Enigma signals, but their limited staff and bombes meant they could not translate all the signals. In the summer, they had considerable success, and shipping losses had fallen to under 100,000 tons a month; however, they badly needed more resources to keep abreast of German adjustments. At the park, he further developed his knowledge of electronics with the assistance of engineer Donald Bayley. Together they undertook the design and construction of a portable secure voice communications machine codenamed Delilah. Though the system worked fully, with Turing demonstrating it to officials by encrypting and decrypting a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, Delilah was not adopted for use. Turing also consulted with Bell Labs on the development of SIGSALY, a secure voice system that was used in the later years of the war.

Between 1945 and 1947, Turing lived in Hampton, London, while he worked on the design of the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). Although ACE was a feasible design, the secrecy surrounding the wartime work at Bletchley Park led to delays in starting the project and he became disillusioned. In late 1947 he returned to Cambridge for a sabbatical year during which he produced a seminal work on Intelligent Machinery that was not published in his lifetime. In 1948, Turing was appointed reader in the Mathematics Department at the Victoria University of Manchester. A year later, he became Deputy Director of the Computing Machine Laboratory, where he worked on software for one of the earliest stored-program computers—the Manchester Mark 1. When Turing was 39 years old in 1951, he turned to mathematical biology, finally publishing his masterpiece "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" in January 1952.

In 1941, Turing proposed marriage to colleague Joan Clarke, a fellow mathematician and cryptanalyst, but their engagement was short-lived. After admitting his homosexuality to his fiancée, who was reportedly "unfazed" by the revelation, Turing decided that he could not go through with the marriage. In January 1952, Turing was 39 when he started a relationship with Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old unemployed man. On 23 January, Turing's house was burgled. Murray told Turing that he and the burglar were acquainted, and Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation, he acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were criminal offences in the United Kingdom at that time, and both men were charged with "gross indecency". Trials were held on 27 February during which Turing's solicitor "reserved his defence", i.e., did not argue or provide evidence against the allegations. Turing was later convinced by the advice of his brother and his own solicitor, and he entered a plea of guilty.

Turing was convicted and given a choice between imprisonment and probation. His probation would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal physical changes designed to reduce libido. He accepted the option of injections of what was then called stilboestrol. a synthetic oestrogen; this feminization of his body was continued for the course of one year. The treatment rendered Turing impotent and caused breast tissue to form, fulfilling in the literal sense Turing's prediction that "no doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I've not found out". Turing's conviction led to the removal of his security clearance and barred him from continuing with his cryptographic consultancy for the Government Communications Headquarters. On June 8th, 1954, Turing's housekeeper found him dead at the age of 41; he had died the previous day. Cyanide poisoning was established as the cause of death. An inquest determined that he had committed suicide. Turing's remains were cremated at Woking Crematorium on June 12th, 1954, and his ashes were scattered in the gardens of the crematorium.

In August 2009, British programmer John Graham-Cumming started a petition urging the British government to apologise for Turing's prosecution as a homosexual. The petition received more than 30,000 signatures. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, acknowledged the petition, releasing a statement on 10 September 2009 apologising and describing the treatment of Turing as "appalling".

[timeless-hollywood-classics]

Glenda Farrell (June 30, 1904 – May 1, 1971) was an American actress. With a career spanning more than 50 years, Farrell appeared in over 100 films and television series, as well as numerous Broadway play. She won an Emmy Award in 1963 for Outstanding Supporting Actress for her performance as Martha Morrison in the medical drama television series Ben Casey.

Farrell began acting on stage as a child and continued with various theatre companies and on Broadway before signing with Warner Bros. Embodying the brassy blonde character of the early talkies. Farrell was a signature 1930s Warner Bros. star, starring in films such as Little Caesar (1931), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and Lady for a Day (1933). Starting with Smart Blonde (1937), Farrell played Torchy Blane, the hard-boiled, wisecracking reporter in a series of popular films; which later was credited by comic book writer Jerry Siegel as the inspiration for the DC Comics reporter, Lois Lane. After leaving Warner Bros. in 1939, Farrell remained active in film, television and theatre throughout rest of her career.

Farrell was born in Enid, Oklahoma, to Wilhelmina "Minnie" (nee Messer, 1879-1931) of German descent and Charles A. Farrell (1873-1937) of Irish and Cherokee descent. Farrell was the only daughter and had two younger brothers, Eugene and Richard. After her family moved to Wichita, Kansas, Farrell began acting on stage with a theatrical company at age seven, playing the role of Little Eva in the play Uncle Tom's Cabin. Farrell's mother had never achieved her desire of being an actress, encouraged and supported her daughter's acting interests. When her family moved to San Diego, California, a teenage Farrell joined the Virginia Brissac Stock Company. Farrell made the third honour roll in Motion Picture Magazine's "Fame and Fortune Contest". Her picture and biography were featured in the magazine's April 1919 issue, which also stated that Farrell had some experience in the chorus, vaudeville, and camp entertainments. Farrell received a formal education at the Mount Carmel Catholic Academy.

In 1928, Farrell was cast as the lead actress in the play The Spider and made her film debut in a minor role in Lucky Boy. Farrell moved to New York City in 1929, where she replaced Erin O'Brien-Moore as Marion Hardy in Aurania Rouverol's play Skidding. The play later served as the basis for the Andy Hardy film series. By April 1929, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that she had played the role 355 times. Farrell appeared in a number of other plays, including Divided Honors, Recapture, and Love, Honor and Betray with George Brent, Alice Brady, and Clark Gable.

In 1930, she starred in the comedy short film The Lucky Break with Harry Fox, and in July 1930 Film Daily announced that Farrell had been cast in Mervyn LeRoy's film Little Caesar as the female lead, Olga Stassoff. Afterward, she returned to Broadway and starred in On the Spot at the Forrest Theater. At the time, Farrell conceded that motion pictures offered immense salaries, but felt the theater was the foundation of the actor's profession.[6] She appeared in several more plays.

In 1932, Farrell starred in the hit play Life Begins. Her performance caught the attention of Jack Warner, who signed her to a contract with the Warner Bros. film studio and cast her to recreate the role in Warner Bros.' film adaptation of Life Begins later that year. Farrell did not return to the stage until 1939.

In her first two years with Warner Bros., Farrell starred in 17 films, including Girl Missing (1933), Gambling Ship (1933), Man's Castle (1933) opposite Spencer Tracy, and Columbia Pictures' Lady for a Day (1933) by director Frank Capra. Farrell sometimes would work on three pictures that were shooting at the same time and managed to transition from one role to another effortlessly. She worked in over 20 movies between 1934 and 1936, starring in films such as Go into Your Dance (1935), Little Big Shot (1935) and High Tension (1936).

Farrell was close friends with fellow Warner Bros. actress Joan Blondell,[8] and throughout the early 1930s, they were paired as a comedy duo in a series of five Warner Bros. movies: Havana Widows (1933), Kansas City Princess (1934), Traveling Saleslady (1935), We're in the Money (1935) and Miss Pacific Fleet (1935). She also appeared with Blondell in the Academy Award-nominated Gold Diggers of 1935 and Gold Diggers of 1937 musical film series. Farrell and Blondell co-starred in a total of nine films. Together, they came to personify the smart and sassy, wisecracking dames of '30s and '40s film.

In 1937, Farrell began starring as Torchy Blane, the fast-talking wisecracking newspaper reporter.[9] Warner Bros. had started to develop a film adaptation of "MacBride and Kennedy" stories by detective novelist Frederick Nebel in 1936. For the film version, Kennedy is changed to a woman named Theresa "Torchy" Blane and is in love with MacBride's character. Director Frank MacDonald immediately knew whom he wanted for the role of Torchy Blane. Farrell had already proved that she could play hard-boiled reporters in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and Hi, Nellie! (1934); and was quickly cast as Torchy with Barton MacLane playing detective Steve McBride in the first Torchy Blane film Smart Blonde (1937).

Smart Blonde was a surprise hit and became a popular second feature with moviegoers. Warner Bros. starred her in several more Torchy Blane movies opposite Barton MacLane. She portrayed Torchy in seven films from 1937 to 1939. The films took Farrell's popularity to a new level. She was beloved by the moviegoing public and received a huge amount of fan mail for the films. On her portrayal of the Torchy Blane character, Farrell said in her 1969 Time interview: "So before I undertook to do the first Torchy, I determined to create a real human being—and not an exaggerated comedy type. I met those [news-women] who visited Hollywood and watched them work on visits to New York City. They were generally young, intelligent, refined, and attractive. By making Torchy true to life, I tried to create a character practically unique in movies."

Along with starring in the Torchy Blane series, Farrell appeared in a number of other films, including Breakfast for Two (1937), Hollywood Hotel (1937), and Prison Break (1938). Additionally, she performed in several radio series, including Vanity and Playhouse in 1937, and Manhattan Latin with Humphrey Bogart in 1938.

Farrell was elected to a one-year term as the honorary mayor of North Hollywood in 1937, beating her competition Bing Crosby and Lewis Stone by a three-to-one margin. Even though it began as a Warner Bros. publicity stunt, Farrell took the job seriously, attending functions, presentations, and ceremonies. She was also put in charge when the North Hollywood Chamber of Commerce announced that it wanted to put sewers along Ventura Highway and started the groundwork for that project.

In 1939, Farrell left Warner Bros. when her contract expired. Several factors resulted in her decision including, feeling Warner Bros. was typecasting her as a newspaper reporter, a disagreement by Jack Warner for a pay rise, and wanting to return to the theatre. Farrell later told syndicated columnist Bob Thomas in 1952: "There's something more satisfying about working in a play. You get that immediate response from the audience, and you feel that your performance is your own. In pictures, you get frustrated because you feel you have no power over what you're doing".

In July 1939, Farrell starred in the lead role in the play Anna Christie at the Westport Country Playhouse, then followed that with a summer stock production of S. N. Behrman's play Brief Moment. She co-starred with Lyle Talbot and Alan Dinehart in the long-running play Separate Rooms at Broadway's Plymouth Theater for a successful 613-performance run throughout 1940 and 1941. In April 1942, she starred in the Broadway play, The Life of Reilly.

Farrell returned to motion pictures in 1941, starring in director Mervyn LeRoy's film noir, Johnny Eager. Throughout the '40s, '50s, and '60s, Farrell continued to appear in numerous films, including the Academy Award-nominated The Talk of the Town (1942), Heading for Heaven (1947) and the 1954 Charlton Heston adventure epic Secret of the Incas.

Farrell made her television debut in 1949 in the anthology series The Chevrolet Tele-Theatre. She appeared in over 40 television series between 1950 and 1969, including Kraft Theatre, Studio One in Hollywood, The United States Steel Hour, Bonanza, and Bewitched.

In 1963, she guest-starred in the ABC medical drama series Ben Casey as Martha Morrison in the two-part episode "A Cardinal Act of Mercy". She won the Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding performance in a supporting role by an actress. Farrell co-starred with her son Tommy Farrell in two comedy films in 1964: Kissin' Cousins with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis in The Disorderly Orderly.

Farrell briefly retired in 1968, but soon decided to return to acting. Farrell's final work in her long career was the Broadway play Forty Carats. She was appearing in Forty Carats at the Morosco Theatre until ill health forced her to leave the play a few months later. Farrell was eventually diagnosed with lung cancer.

In 1920, Farrell was hired to do a dance routine at a Navy benefit ball in San Diego. There she met her first husband, Thomas Richards. They were married from 1921 to 1929. Their son, actor Tommy Farrell, was born in 1921. In 1931, she was engaged to Jack Durant of the comedy duo "Mitchell and Durant" but never married him. She dated screenwriter Robert Riskin a few years later.

In 1941, Farrell married Dr. Henry Ross. The couple met when Farrell sprained her ankle during a performance of the play Separate Rooms and was treated backstage by Ross, who had been called forth from the audience. Ross was a staff surgeon at New York's Polyclinic Hospital and West Point graduate, who later served as chief of the public health section on General Eisenhower's staff. Farrell and Ross remained married until her death 30 years later. Farrell was a devout Catholic.

In 1971, Farrell died from lung cancer, aged 66, at her home in New York City and was interred in the West Point Cemetery in West Point, New York. When Ross, who did not remarry, died in 1991, he was buried with her.

Comic book writer Jerry Siegel credits Farrell's portrayal of Torchy Blane as the inspiration for the fictional Daily Planet reporter and Superman's love interest, Lois Lane. Siegel also named June Farrell, one of the characters in his Funnyman comic book series, after Farrell.

On February 8, 1960, Farrell received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to motion pictures, at 6524 Hollywood Boulevard.

In 1977, Farrell's husband Dr. Henry Ross donated 38 acres of land to the Putnam County Land Trust, establishing the Glenda Farrell–Henry Ross Preserve.

[southeastasianists]

On a warm December day in one of the last cemeteries in Singapore, Man Zu begins to chant. His orange Taoist robes stand out amidst the thousands of gray gravestones; his round face is tan and leathered from years of working in the sun. He is here today to help a group of siblings exhume and relocate the remains of their father, mother, and uncle.

Choa Chu Kang Cemetery does not look like the busy metropolis that is Singapore. There is barely a building in sight; the tallest structure stands about 1,000 feet away, a single-story building equipped with a food stall. In the vicinity, there is a branch of the National Environment Agency, situated near the cemetery to help families exhume their ancestral graves.

Much of the cemetery looks dilapidated, dotted with heaps of rubble and clumps of weeds. The air smells of mud, sand, and grass. Destroyed tombstones stand next to others that are still intact, scattered with miscellaneous debris: incense holders, empty Oreo packets, broken vase fragments. Stray dogs, a rare sight in urban Singapore, patrol the area.

The mass obliteration of graves—or, as it is more commonly known, exhumation—is a result of the government’s redevelopment plans. The Choa Chu Kang Cemetery Exhumation Programme was announced in 2017 to make space for the expansion of an airbase, which necessitates the relocation of more than 80,000 graves. The Cemetery is home to Chinese, Muslim, and Hindu graves. In the current phase, more than 45,500 Chinese graves will be exhumed.

Choa Chu Kang Cemetery’s fate is a mirror of what happened to Bukit Brown Cemetery in 2013. At the time, Singaporeans protested its destruction. Bukit Brown was the resting place of key historical figures and home to a quarter of the bird species in Singapore, but it was was demolished to make space for a new highway.

As recently as 1978, there were 213 cemeteries in Singapore, with burial grounds both large and small scattered across the island. (At approximately 278 square miles, the entire country is smaller than New York City.) By 2011, there were only 60 cemeteries. Many estates and malls stand on former cemeteries, from Singapore’s most popular shopping district, Orchard Road, to residential neighborhoods in the heart of the city-state.

Though most cemeteries have been demolished, the few that remain serve as reminders of the many communities that have called Singapore home. The Japanese Cemetery Park, established in 1891, offers a glimpse into the world of early Japanese settlers: soldiers, merchants, young women brought to Singapore as sex workers. Cemeteries also showcase Singapore’s religious and cultural diversity, with designated sites for Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and the different Chinese clans.

Today, only one—Choa Chu Kang Cemetery—is active. Even then, the government imposes a burial period of 15 years, after which families must relocate the remains.

Jo’s father, mother, and uncle have resided here since the 1980s. She is here today with the rest of her family to exhume all three graves. Since each exhumation takes about an hour, they have decided to divide and conquer: Jo oversees the exhumation of her mother’s grave with her children, and her brothers have split up to attend to the other two graves.

Two workers from the National Environment Agency stand by to help collect the remains, which will be cremated and stored at the government-owned Mandai Crematorium and Columbarium.

After the Taoist rites are complete, gravediggers clear away the soil, revealing the surface of a wooden coffin. A tarp, propped up by poles, covers the grave, preventing the dead from being exposed to sunlight. “Ma!” Jo exclaims, when they approach the grave. She starts singing a classic Chinese children’s song: “Only mother is good in this world.”

The worker breaks open the coffin. The lid is still intact, though visibly worn down. They had used good quality wood, Jo points out. The worker descends into the grave, muddy water coming up to his knees.

Calmly and deliberately, the gravedigger moves remains from the coffin into a white bucket. He also recovers pieces of clothing and a rectangular black block: joss paper, or paper money that was buried with the dead. Some of the bones are blackened from their years underground; some are large and long, while others are small and brittle. The last to come out is the skull. Jo calls out in the Chinese dialect of Hokkien: “Mama, we’re moving house.”

In 2019, a man named Tan helped his family move his grandmother’s remains from Choa Chu Kang Cemetery to a repository for ashes of the deceased, Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Columbarium. The family has yet to celebrate the annual Qing Ming, or Tomb-Sweeping Day, at his grandmother’s new home. He fears that few people will show up. “There’s no space here,” he explains, gesturing down a narrow aisle.

Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery is the largest monastery in Singapore, with two dedicated columbaria within the compound. Tan’s grandmother is located at the newer, more modern one, next to thousands of cremated neighbors. (Due to COVID-19, visits are currently by appointment only, masks are required, and groups are restricted to five members of the same household.)

The niches for each set of ashes are organized into blocks and lined up in rows inside the air-conditioned room. Some are so high that they can’t even be seen, and nearly touch the ceiling.

Death is expensive in Singapore, given the scarcity of land here: Prices run up to $7,000 for a single niche (less-visible units are cheaper). A few niches have been purchased but are not yet occupied, and some are marked with a hongbao, the red envelope usually stuffed with money for Chinese New Year. Others show signs of recent visits, such as flowers, keychains, and even small food magnets.

Tan says that his grandmother’s new home has changed the family’s traditions. “We would gather at seven in the morning at my father’s place, and then drive to the cemetery,” Tan explains. “Then we would sweep the tomb and the whole family would picnic together. How can you do that here?”

In the columbarium, there’s not enough space for the usual offerings of rice, roast pork, and other dishes to be placed near the ashes. Instead, the monastery has an allocated outdoor space where families can lay out feasts for the dead.

The practice of burning joss paper, too, has been streamlined for efficiency. An Eco-Burner has been installed in a parking structure nearby, where joss paper is collected from families and burnt in bulk by staff members.

By 1985, Singapore had already exhumed 21 cemeteries. According to the government, cemeteries take up too much space, and Singapore needs to grow if it is to accommodate its nearly six million residents. Some families scatter their ancestors’ ashes at sea; columbaria are a more permanent alternative.

Tightly pressed together, the rows of niches in columbaria look almost like Singapore’s ubiquitous public housing blocks, each one almost indiscernible from the next. It’s even possible that apartments will eventually replace columbaria, says Bernard Chen, who studied history at Oxford University and has experience in the funeral services industry.

Under British colonial rule, Chen explains, burial grounds were located on the outskirts of the downtown area. But as the city of Singapore grew and more space was needed, cemeteries were seen as “space wasters.” As early as 1952, a Burials Committee had already been set up to encourage cremation instead of burials.

“Whenever the state appropriates land for the dead as land for the living, it always uses the same narrative, which is that the land is for national development.” Chen says. “If you bring this to its logical conclusion, in time to come, there will be zero land for the dead.”

“When we are left without cemeteries, what is the next collective community to be sacrificed on the altar of national development? Columbariums.”

For the sake of national development, the dead are constantly moving house: from cemeteries to columbaria and perhaps even into homes. “Because the state squeezes the land out for the living, it's either you dump the ashes out to sea, or you bring the ashes home,” Chen says. “Every single unit [becomes] an urn space.”

In land-scarce Singapore, where a luxury apartment can cost thousands of dollars per square foot, urban redevelopment demands that the dead make way for the living. With that, rituals of death like Taoist rites and ancestral worship are uprooted along with places of death.

The destruction of Singapore’s cemeteries is striking, but it is not sudden or surprising. It is an ongoing project that started before the nation’s independence, and Singaporeans have accepted and adapted to it, with some reluctance. Still, Tan worries about what will be lost in a country without cemeteries as places to gather and remember the dead. “At Qing Ming, we would have 40, 50 people, three generations all attending,” he recalls. “It was the only time they would come together.” He looks at the columbarium, holds out a photo of his family at the cemetery, and shrugs. “It’s different, right?”

[introvertguide]

Getting awfully close to finishing up the whole reviewing project and it has been over three years since we started. We are 90% through the list and I have really enjoyed it. There have been a lot of really great films and I am getting the feel for the trademarks of different actors, directors, and cinematographers. As always, the progress is presented by order in which the movie was watched, the name of the film, the year the film was released, the AFI ranking, and the day that I first watched it first for this particular project (I have watched almost all of the films multiple times for these reviews):

1 Blade Runner 1982 #97 8/15/18

2 Raging Bull 1980 #4 8/24/18

3 Jaws 1975 #56 8/26/18

4 To Kill a Mockingbird 1962 #25 9/1/18

5 The Searchers 1956 #12 9/10/18

6 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans 1927 #82 9/15/18

7 Unforgiven 1992 #68 9/21/18

8 Double Indemnity 1944 #29 9/24/18

9 The Godfather 1972 #2 9/30/18

10 Raiders of the Lost Ark 1981 #66 10/4/18

11 Annie Hall 1977 #35 10/8/18

12 One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest 1975 #32 10/13/18

13 12 Angry Men 1957 #87 10/18/18

14 Psycho 1960 #14 10/25/18

15 Cabaret 1972 #63 11/10/18

16 Last Picture Show 1971 #95 11/22/18

17 Godfather 2 1974 #32 11/30/18

18 Ben-Hur 1959 #100 12/10/18

19 It's a Wonderful Life 1946 #20 12/27/18

20 Snow White 1937 #34 1/7/19

21 In the Heat of the Night 1967 #75 1/12/19

22 Sophie's Choice 1982 #91 2/2/19

23 The Philadelphia Story 1940 #44 2/11/19

24 The Sixth Sense 1999 #89 2/19/19

25 West Side Story 1961 #51 2/22/19

26 ET 1982 #24 3/22/19

27 A Night at the Opera 1935 #85 4/18/19

28 Apocalypse Now 1979 #30 6/24/19

29 Swing Time 1936 #90 7/5/19

30 Yankee Doodle Dandy 1942 #98 7/21/19

31 Rear Window 1954 #54 7/28/19

32 All About Eve 1950 #28 8/29/19

33 The General 1926 #18 9/13/19

34 Tootsie 1982 #69 10/1/19

35 Rocky 1976 #57 10/12/19

36 Shane 1953 #45 10/30/19

37 Virginia Woolf 1966 #67 11/14/19

38 Sunset Boulevard 1950 #16 11/28/19

39 Vertigo 1958 #9 12/15/19

40 Singin in the Rain 1953 #5 1/15/20

41 Nashville 1975 #59 1/25/20

42 Bringing Up Baby 1938 #88 2/2/20

43 Midnight Cowboy 1969 #43 2/6/20

44 Spartacus 1960 #81 3/7/20

45 Network 1976 #64 3/11/20

46 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 1969 #73 3/23/20

47 Sullivan's Travels 1941 #61 4/11/20

48 On the Waterfront 1953 #19 4/25/20

49 Lord of the Rings 2001 #50 5/8/20

50 All the President's Men 1976 #77 5/12/20

51 Casablanca 1942 #3 5/17/20

52 North by Northwest 1959 #55 5/25/20

53 The Gold Rush 1925 #58 6/4/20

54 Toy Story 1995 #99 6/20/20

55 The French Connection 1971 #93 7/11/20

56 City Lights 1931 #11 7/25/20

57 Some Like it Hot 1959 #22 8/8/20

58 Gone With the Wind 1939 #6 8/30/20

59 Goodfellas 1990 #92 9/19/20

60 High Noon 1952 #27 9/30/20

61 King Kong 1933 #41 10/12/20

62 The Silence of the Lambs 1991 #74 10/25/20

63 The Bridge on the River Kwai 1957 #36 10/30/20

64 The Graduate 1967 #17 11/18/20

65 Wizard of Oz 1939 #10 12/22/20

66 The Apartment 1960 #80 12/26/20

67 Intolerance 1916 #49 1/3/21

68 MASH 1970 #54 1/20/21

69 Dr. Strangelove 1964 #39 1/25/21

70 Saving Private Ryan 1998 #71 2/11/21

71 Do The Right Thing 1989 #96 2/24/21

72 Pulp Fiction 1994 #94 3/7/21

73 A Clockwork Orange 1971 #70 3/19/21

74 Chinatown 1974 #21 3/25/21

75 The Sound of Music 1965 #40 4/10/21

76 Duck Soup 1933 #60 4/15/21

77 Easy Rider 1969 #84 4/23/21

78 Star Wars 1977 #13 5/4/21

79 The Maltese Falcon 1941 #31 5/10/21

80 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 1948 #38 5/19/21

81 African Queen 1951 #65 5/26/21

82 Lawrence of Arabia 1962 #7 6/1/21

83 Bonnie and Clyde 1967 #42 6/6/21

84 Schindler's List 1993 #8 6/26/21

85 Modern Times 1936 #78 7/19/21

86 The Best Years of Our Lives 1946 #37 8/8/21

87 Taxi Driver 1976 #52 10/13/21

88 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 1939 #26 10/29/21

89 The Shawshank Redemption 1994 #72 11/13/21

90 American Graffiti 1973 #62 12/8/21