Donald Duck taught me how to play billiards
via Boing Boing by Michael Borys
Before the age of YouTube, you cherished the chance to see a rerun – and you had to take notes.
Are you too young to remember the television series, The Wonderful World Of Disney? It ran once a week and you never knew what you were going to get. It may have been a classic Disney film, a live action tour of the Disney parks or a set of animated shorts.
If you've never seen the show, you're probably also unfamiliar with Donald In Mathmagic Land.
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Against Honeymoons
via 3 Quarks Daily: Charles Comey in The Point
The honeymoon as we know it, the postnuptial trip for two, hasn’t been around all that long. In the nineteenth century there was something called a “bridal tour,” where newlyweds would travel, sometimes accompanied by friends and family, to visit relatives who hadn’t been able to attend the wedding. The bridal tour made sense when a marriage was much more about social ties and the joining of two families than it is now: the pair journeyed not as tourists but as a tour. At the turn of the century couples began to adapt the bridal tour to make it a private pleasure trip instead. In Marriage, a History Stephanie Coontz talks about the transition from bridal tour to honeymoon as part of a larger revolution in the form of family life in general: the increasing interiority and privacy of the family unit, as well as marriage becoming obsessively all about the two individuals and their bond.
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The Man With No Name, my role model for life
via Boing Boing by Michael Borys
Read the story for yourself
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Man of Steel: 1942
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
May 1942
“Denver, Colorado. Interior of a shipbuilding plant, showing workman who previously assembled incubator parts and amusement park devices, now working on hulls and decks of escort vessels. He and his co-workers will be invited to Mare Island, 1,300 miles away, to help launch the ships they are building’
4x5 nitrate negative for the Office of War Information
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Is This New Swim Stroke the Fastest Yet?
via 3 Quarks Daily: Regan Penaluna in Nautilus
Humans are land animals, and not natural swimmers. We have to learn how to swim, and it is up to us to find the fastest way to do so. The search may finally be coming to an end. In the last few decades, stroke mechanic experts have discovered that swimming under the surface is faster than swimming on the surface. “It’s hard to fathom that this could happen in track and field,” says Rick Madge, a swim coach and blogger. “Nobody is going to come up with a new way of running that is going to be faster than anything else. Yet we just did that in swimming.” And the fish kick may be the fastest subsurface form yet.
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A tiny instrument with a tremendous history: the piccolo
via OUP Blog by Dani Mermelstein
Although often overlooked, the piccolo is an important part of the woodwind instrument family. This high-pitched petite woodwind packs a huge punch. Historically, the piccolo had no keys, but over the years, it has transformed into an instrument similar in fingering and form to the flute. It still serves as a unique asset to the woodwinds.
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The most amazing building in the world was started in 1883 – still not finished building it
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
One of the most amazing things I've ever seen was Spanish Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The basilica looks like a giant drippy asymmetrical sandcastle. Gaudi started working on it in 1883. He was still working on it in 1926 when a tram ran over him and killed him. It was not complete when I visited it 20 years ago. This video shows what Sagrada Familia will look like when it is complete in 2026 (this is wishful thinking on their part). In a way, I hope they keep working on Sagrada Familia for as long as intelligent lifeforms exist on Earth - it's a worthy Long Now project.
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Gay Berlin
via 3 Quarks Daily: Ian P. Beacock in The Point
One evening in October 1905, when most Berliners were bundled away at home, Kurt Hiller wandered alone through the Tiergarten. Well, not quite alone. Walking in the southeast corner of the park between Lennéstraße and the Brandenburg Gate, the nineteen-year-old law student found himself boxed in by silhouettes: men searching the shadows for the company of other men, the “warm brothers” (warme Brüder) for which Berlin was so well-known. It was Hiller’s first visit to the city’s most notorious cruising ground, but he quickly found what he was looking for. He sat down on a bench next to a wiry man perhaps ten years his senior, rakish and mysterious in the moonlight. The law student wasted little time with small talk; he asked about the most important things. The man raised his arm and flexed. “I checked for myself,” Hiller recalled. “His bicep was broad, curved, and strong as steel.” Returning to the apartment of his anonymous lover, Hiller noticed with some distaste that the man’s body was quilted with tattoos. This was a man of the outskirts: a sailor or a criminal, a soldier or a circus performer. Taken briefly aback, the law student was rapidly overcome by lust for the man’s taut, sculpted frame. He let the door to the hallway close behind him
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Good stories of bad Bloomsbury behaviour
via Arts & Letters Daily: Anne Chisholm in Spectator
Bunny Garnett and Henrietta Bingham may have been borderline members of the Group, but they made up for it with their scandalous escapades, as Sarah Knights and Emily Bingham reveal
In March 1923 a large birthday party was held in a studio in Bloomsbury. It is often assumed that the eponymous Group was habitually glum or intense; but there were a lot of parties. The artists were Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the birthday was David Garnett’s 31st. David (known as Bunny) was a handsome, fair-haired fellow of bisexual charm, beloved by Grant, among others. His second novel, Lady into Fox, inspired and illustrated by his wife, Ray, had been a literary sensation the year before.
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Severed heads on the Elizabethan stage
via OUP Blog by Michael J. Hirrel
On Tower Hill, 25 February 1601, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, was beheaded with three blows of an axe before some 150 spectators. The headsman held the head up for the spectators to see. He called out, “God save the Queen”. This beheading and others of that time color an important question for Shakespeare scholars. Severed heads populate many Elizabethan period plays. What objects represented those heads on stage? Elizabethan acting companies did, as we know from the records of theatre owner Philip Henslowe, employ realistic stage properties. But all stage performances require audience imagination. So might the heads have been pumpkins or were they in fact realistic representations of the actors themselves.
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