"If you’re not from Boston you may not be familiar with a man who lived on the streets of Allston named Mr.Butch. He’s dead now, but during college until his passing in 2007 he was a reliable, eccentric, larger than life character who invaded your day when you least expected it. Original Moog/Guitarist Matt Brown and I were putting up flyers in Allston one evening when Mr.Butch approached us. “Just tape the top of the poster,” he explained, “and let the bottom fly free. Let it wave. So people walk by it, see it flapping, and go ‘what the fuck?’ Then you got people at your show.” We did and it worked!"
The Hitler dream
My mom says, “We went to see a comedian with the group from the temple. He comes on stage and says, I’m Benny Hitler. I could’t believe it. I think it’s going to be a joke but he never mentioned it again. No one laughed.”
“He has nerve,” says dad.
“If he’s somehow related to Hitler, that’s bad enough, but why wouldn’t he change his name?” says mom.
My dad says, “I’ve never been so offended in my life. Six million Jews die and I have to sit there and listen to Hitler?”
“So what did you do?” I ask.
“What could we do? I said we should walk out but your father didn’t want to make a scene.”
“Was Hitler funny?”
“Very funny but that’s not the point.”
Thursday 4/25/2013
9:26am (1 note)
Noah’s Ark & Michael Curtiz
Noah’s Ark is a 1928 American early romantic melodramatic disaster film directed by Michael Curtiz (who won the Academy Award for directing Casablanca).
During the filming of the climactic flood scene, the great volume of water used was so overwhelming that three extras drowned, one was so badly injured that his leg needed to be amputated, and a number suffered broken limbs and other serious injuries, which led to implementation of stunt safety regulations the following year. Dolores Costello caught a severe case of pneumonia.
Bette Davis refused to work with Michael Curtiz again after he called her a “goddamned nothing no good sexless son of a bitch”; he had a low opinion of actors in general, saying that acting “is fifty percent a big bag of tricks. The other fifty percent should be talent and ability, although it seldom is”.
Late Barthes
In 1977, Roland Barthes’ mother, Henriette, died, aged 85. They had lived together for 60 years.
On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes was knocked down by a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. One month later he succumbed to the chest injuries sustained in that accident.
1957: Replica of the Mayflower entering New York harbour.
(Source: retronaut.com)
Boilerplate
“Boiler plate” originally referred to the maker’s label used to identify the builder of steam boilers.
In the field of printing, the term dates back to the early 1900s. From the 1890s onwards, printing plates of text for widespread reproduction such as advertisements or syndicated columns were cast or stamped in steel ready for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United States. They came to be known as ‘boilerplates’. Until the 1950s, thousands of newspapers received and used this kind of boilerplate from the nation’s largest supplier, the Western Newspaper Union.
Some companies also sent out press releases as boilerplate so that they had to be printed as written.
Pope’s Nose
The pygostyle is the main component of the structure colloquially known as parson’s nose, Pope’s nose, or sultan’s nose. This is the fleshy protuberance visible at the posterior end of a bird (most commonly a chicken or turkey) that has been dressed for cooking.
“Pygostyle” is of Ancient Greek origin, literally meaning “rump pillar”.
The phrase “parson’s nose”, from the notion that an English parson may ‘have his nose in the air’, upturned like the chicken’s rear end. The term must have been known as early as around 1400 AD, when a carpenter had been contracted to provide new choir stalls for St Mary’s Church, Nantwich. The vicar was either slow to pay the artisan, or did not pay at all. In retaliation, on the last misericord in the stalls, the carpenter carved a bird with an image of that Vicar’s face with protuberant nose as rump. The carving is still visible today.
A similar derivation applies to the phrase “Pope’s nose”, which may have originated as a derogatory term meant to demean Catholics in England during the late 17th century.
"You can turn on your phone on in Green Bank, W.Va., but you won’t get a trace of a signal. If you hit scan on your car’s radio, it’ll cycle through the dial endlessly, never pausing on a station. This remote mountainous town is inside the U.S. National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000–square-mile area where most types of electromagnetic radiation on the radio spectrum (which includes radio and TV broadcasts, Wi-Fi networks, cell signals, Bluetooth, and the signals used by virtually every other wireless device) are banned to minimize disturbance around the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, home to the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. For most people, this restriction is a nuisance. But a few dozen people have moved to Green Bank (population: 147) specifically because of it. They say they suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS—a disease not recognized by the scientific community in which these frequencies can trigger acute symptoms like dizziness, nausea, rashes, irregular heartbeat, weakness, and chest pains."
"The new Chaplin film is much more important. People actually fought for entrance the other night at the opening. They applauded all during the picture, and half the house was prostrate with laughter when it was over. Marcel Duchamp brought a whole boxful of friends and the whole crowd comically went through the ceremony of wringing out their handkerchiefs after having tried in vain to dry their tears of joy."
October 5, 1925 Letter From Paris, New Yorker.
(Reference probably to The Gold Rush)
“Stay” was written by Maurice Williams in 1953 when he was 15 years old. He had been trying to convince his date not to go home at 10 o’clock as she was supposed to. In 1960, the song was put on a demo by Williams and his band, the Zodiacs. The song was re-recorded with one line, “Let’s have another smoke,” removed in order for the song to be played on commercial radio. “Stay” remains the shortest single ever to reach the top of the American record charts, being only 1 minute and 37 seconds long.
(Source: Spotify)
Pseudonymous Don DeLillo novel. 1980
