Yesterday,E.O. Wilson’sLife on Earth was released asa free iBook on iTunes. It features “state-of-the-art digital media animations, video, and interactive modules in a comprehensive 41-chapter text covering standards-based biology curriculum.” Created under the direction of Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard naturalist Edward O.Wilson, Life on Earth can be downloaded in 7 units on iTunes. The free book also comes with a free iTunesU course. In addition to reading assignments, the course “incorporates activities such as field observations, writing assignments, project-based learning exercises,” using apps and other materials. Combining information from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, National Geographic, and the Encyclopedia of Life, the course covers a variety of important themes — citizen science, evolution, climate change, and protecting biodiversity. The first nine chapters of the iTunesU course are available now, and the remaining materials for the 41-chapter course will be released throughout 2014.
Bill Watterson, creator of arguably the last great comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, wrote the following about perhaps the greatest comic strip ever. “Peanuts pretty much defines the modern comic strip, so even now it’s hard to see it with fresh eyes. The clean, minimalist drawings, the sarcastic humor, the unflinching emotional honesty….” Charles Schulz, the artistic force behind Peanuts, funneled a lifetime of loneliness and emotional pain into these spare little drawings, creating a strip that was bleakly funny, philosophical and real. Characters like the socially inept Charlie Brown or the bossy though oddly tragic Lucy connected with audiences in a way that few ever did.
The one way that Watterson and Schulz differed, and differed greatly, was in the area of merchandising. While Watterson famously refused to license any of his characters (those praying/peeing Calvin car decals, it might surprise you to learn, are not officially sanctioned), Schulz licensed his creations far and wide. For those who grew up in the ‘70s, a Snoopy plush toy was simply de rigueur. The Peanuts characters hawked Dolly Madison snack cakes, MetLife insurance, and Wendy’s kids meals. And those sponsorship deals paid spectacularly well. By the time that Schulz died in February 2000 — the night before the final Peanuts strip was to go to print — he had reportedly earned over the course of his life $1.1 billion dollars.
The first instance of Charlie, Snoopy and the gang being corporate spokescharacters happened to be also the first time they were animated. The Ford Motor Company licensed them in 1959 to do TV commercials along with intros to the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show. You can watch them above. Probably the most striking thing about the commercials is that the adults are intelligible, not the incomprehensible muted trumpet bleats of the Peanuts movies.
The spots proved to be such a success that Schulz and animator Bill Meléndez were soon producing half-hour long TV specials, including the Emmy-winning A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. In a 1984 interview, Meléndez talked about working with Schulz, who went by the nickname of “Sparky,” for those first Ford spots.
Well, I was doing Ford commercials at J. Walter Thompson when it was decided that Charlie Brown would be the spokesman for the Ford Falcon. I was told Charles Schulz was very shy and reticent about commercializing his strip. So I went to San Francisco and met Sparky and we hit it off. I told him what we did, and he nodded and said, “All right, we’ll try it.” He was very leery of getting involved with “Hollywood types” as he used to call us.
Of course he understands that his drawings are flat, two-dimensional designs, and that, for example, the front view is very different from the side view. They are not three-dimensional characters. You can’t turn them around the way we used to turn the Walt Disney characters, who were designed to be round and three-dimensional. To animate Peanuts characters we have to be more inventive, because we tend not to be realistic. We don’t try to ape real live action as we did in animating Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.
I imagine Sparky must have been curious about how we were going to do it, but he never gave us any kind of a hint or anything at all about what he wanted. So we showed him how we thought it should move, how we thought they should turn, how we thought they should walk and he accepted everything. From then on we hit it off pretty well.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
We know that Neil deGrasse Tyson was something of a wunderkind during his high school years. If you’re an OC regular, you’ve read all about how Carl Sagan personally recruited Tyson to study with him at Cornell. Deftly, politely, the young Tyson declined and went to Harvard.
There’s perhaps another side of the precocious Tyson you might not know as much about. The athletic side. While a student at The Bronx High School of Science, Tyson (class of 1976) wore basketball sneakers belonging to the Knick’s Walt “Clyde” Frazier. He ran an impressive 4:25 mile. And he captained the school’s wrestling team, during which time he conjured up a new-fangled wrestling move. In professional wrestling, Ric Flair had the dreaded Figure Four Leg Lock, and Jimmy Snuka, a devastating Superfly Splash. Tyson? He had the feared “Double Tidal Lock.” He explains and demonstrates the physics-based move in the video below, originally recorded at the University of Indianapolis.
They Might Be Giants released their eponymous debut album in November, 1986 and it immediately attracted the attention of Village Voice music critic, Robert Christgau, who, in giving the album an “A,” said “the hits just keep on coming in an exuberantly annoying show of creative superabundance”. Almost thirty years later, the band performed the seminal first album live in its entirety during its 2013 world tour. And now, as a special gift to fans old and new, they’re making available a recording of those performances for free. It runs 47 minutes. To get the recording, click the “Free Album Download” button below, and follow the instructions. Or click here.
If you live in England, you’re probably familiar with the Shipping Forecast, a nightly BBC radio broadcast that details the weather conditions for the seas surrounding Britain. The broadcast has been on the airwaves since 1911. And many Brits will tell you that the forecast, always read in a soporific voice, can lull you to sleep quicker than a dose of Ambien. The broadcast has a strict format. It can’t exceed 350 words, and it always begins: “And now the Shipping Forecast, issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at [fill in the time] today.” Below y0u can listen to a recording of actual forecasts. (Or catch the one from 6/29/2014 here.) Don’t listen to it while driving, or operating heavy machinery. A primer that decodes the unfamiliar terminology in the radio transmission can be found here.
All of this gives you just enough context to appreciate Stephen Fry’s parody reading of the Shipping Forecast. It was recorded in 1988, for the first episode of his radio show Saturday Night Fry. (Full episode here.) You can read along with the transcript, while listening to the clip up top:
And now, before the news and weather, here is the Shipping Forecast issued by the Meteorological Office at 1400 hours Greenwich Mean Time.
Finisterre, Dogger, Rockall, Bailey: no.
Wednesday, variable, imminent, super.
South Utsire, North Utsire, Sheerness, Foulness, Eliot Ness:
If you will, often, eminent, 447, 22 yards, touchdown, stupidly.
Malin, Hebrides, Shetland, Jersey, Fair Isle, Turtle-Neck, Tank Top, Courtelle:
Blowy, quite misty, sea sickness. Not many fish around, come home, veering suggestively.
That was the Shipping Forecast for 1700 hours, Wednesday 18 August.
A great deal of mythology has built up around the life of Jack Kerouac, and especially around the experiences that went into his best-known work, the 1957 novel On the Road. Even the very act of its composition — perhaps especially the act of its composition — has, in the imaginations of many of Kerouac’s readers, turned into an image of the man “writing the book on a long scroll of teletype paper in three coffee-soaked-benzedrine-fueled days.” With this image in mind, illustrator Paul Rogers of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design created On the Road, the illustrated scroll, featuring “a drawing for every page” of the novel, and depicting the historically researched “cars, buses, roadside architecture, and old signs” from Kerouac’s America of the late 1940s and early 50s, one that “looked awfully different than it does now.” You can scroll, as it were, through this work in progress at Rogers’ site.
We’ve here included only four of the over 100 drawings Rogers has so far made, but these examples capture the novel’s multigenerationally intoxicating mix of Americana and pure momentum. You’ll also notice that, underneath each image, Rogers excerpts a passage of Kerouac’s. “Adding Kerouac’s words as captions to the drawings makes the series feel like a journal and not a carefully planned out illustrated book,” he writes, “and it seems to capture some of the spirit of Kerouac’s ‘this-happened-then-this-then-this’ writing style.”
You can read the scroll part-by-part on these pages: one through three, four, five, six, seven. Though I never took quite the lifestyle inspiration from On the Road some have, I can’t wait to see what visual inspiration Rogers draws from the bit about fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
Don’t mistake that metaphor for real life, however. Judging by his 1920 Toronto Star how-to on maximizing comfort on camping vacations, he would not have stood for charred weenies and marshmallows on a stick. Rather, a little cookery know-how was something for a man to be proud of:
“…a frying pan is a most necessary thing to any trip, but you also need the old stew kettle and the folding reflector baker.”
Clearly, the man did not trust readers to independently seek out such sources as The Perry Ladies’ Cookbook of 1920 for instructions. Instead, he painstakingly details his method for successful preparation of Trout Wrapped in Bacon, including his preferred brands of vegetable shortening.
Would your mouth water less if I tell you that literary food blog Paper and Salt has updated Hem’s trout recipe à laEmeril Lagasse, omitting the Crisco and tossing in a few fresh herbs? No campfire required. You can get ‘er done in the broiler:
Bacon-Wrapped Trout: (adapted from Emeril Lagasse)
2 (10-ounce) whole trout, cleaned and gutted
1/2 cup cornmeal
Salt and ground pepper, to taste
8 sprigs fresh thyme
1 lemon, sliced
6 slices bacon
Fresh parsley, for garnish
1. Preheat broiler and set oven rack 4 to 6 inches from heat. With a paper towel, pat trout dry inside and out. Dredge outside of each fish in cornmeal, then season cavity with salt and pepper. Place 4 sprigs of thyme and 2 lemon slices inside each fish.
2. Wrap 3 bacon slices around the middle of each fish, so that the edges overlap slightly. Line a roasting pan with aluminum foil, and place fish on pan. Broil until bacon is crisp, about 5 minutes. With a spatula, carefully flip fish over and cook another 5 minutes, until flesh is firm.
Like any thoughtful hostess (simile!), Hemingway didn’t leave his guests to starve whilst waiting for the main event. His choice of hors d’oeuvres was little pancakes made from a mix, and again, he leaves nothing to chance, or Aunt Jemima’s instructions…
With the prepared pancake flours you take a cupful of pancake flour and add a cup of water. Mix the water and flour and as soon as the lumps are out it is ready for cooking. Have the skillet hot and keep it well greased. Drop the batter in and as soon as it is done on one side loosen it in the skillet and flip it over. Apple butter, syrup or cinnamon and sugar go well with the cakes.
Corn Cakes:
1 1/2 cups corn kernels (either fresh off the cob or thawed)
2 green onions, white parts only, coarsely chopped
2/3 cup flour
1/3 cup stone-ground yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon red chile flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
2/3 cup buttermilk
2 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled
Canola oil, for frying
1. In a food processor, add corn and green onions and pulse 4 to 5 times, until finely chopped. In a large bowl, stir together corn mixture, flour, cornmeal, baking powder, red chile flakes, salt, and sugar.
2. In a small bowl, combine egg, buttermilk, and butter. Add to corn mixture, stirring until just combined.
3. Coat a large skillet or pancake griddle with oil. Over medium heat, spoon batter onto pan in 1/4 cups and fry until cakes are golden on both sides, 1 to 2 minutes per side.
Villeneuve opts out of recreating Hemingway’s dessert, an al fresco fruit pie so good “your pals … will kiss you” (provided, of course, that they’re Frenchmen). Because I, too, aim higher than weenies and marshmallows, here are his lengthy, rather self-congratulatory instructions:
In the baker, mere man comes into his own, for he can make a pie that to his bush appetite will have it all over the product that mother used to make, like a tent. Men have always believed that there was something mysterious and difficult about making a pie. Here is a great secret. There is nothing to it. We’ve been kidded for years. Any man of average office intelligence can make at least as good a pie as his wife.
All there is to a pie is a cup and a half of flour, one-half teaspoonful of salt, one-half cup of lard and cold water. That will make pie crust that will bring tears of joy into your camping partner’s eyes.
Mix the salt with the flour, work the lard into the flour, make it up into a good workmanlike dough with cold water. Spread some flour on the back of a box or something flat, and pat the dough around a while. Then roll it out with whatever kind of round bottle you prefer. Put a little more lard on the surface of the sheet of dough and then slosh a little flour on and roll it up and then roll it out again with the bottle.
Cut out a piece of the rolled out dough big enough to line a pie tin. I like the kind with holes in the bottom. Then put in your dried apples that have soaked all night and been sweetened, or your apricots, or your blueberries, and then take another sheet of the dough and drape it gracefully over the top, soldering it down at the edges with your fingers. Cut a couple of slits in the top dough sheet and prick it a few times with a fork in an artistic manner.
Put it in the baker with a good slow fire for forty-five minutes and then take it out.
Remember, campers: The real woodsman is the man who can be really comfortable in the bush. — Ernest Hemingway
Indian mystic and philosopher Patanjali supposedly created modern yoga by transmitting his doctrine and disciplines to seven sages. In the mid-1950s, those teachings came down through the centuries to another sage, Sonny Rollins, who, like his good friend John Coltrane, incorporated his experiments with Eastern spirituality into his jazz improvisations. In Rollins’ case, yoga has given him, as he recounts in the short video above, “spiritual understanding” and “direction.” Setting out for India in 1967 to find “upliftment,” Rollins checked himself into an Ashram, with nothing but a bag and his horn, “and it worked out well,” he says. Rollins and his jazz “compatriots” like Coltrane “were trying to find a way to express life through our improvisations,” he tells NPR. “The music has got to mean something,” he says, “Jazz improvisation is supposed to be the highest form of communication, and getting that to the people is our job as musicians.”
In his new set of live recordings, Road Shows, Vol. 3, Rollins plays a “mantra-like” song called “Patanjali,” a tribute to the discipline that keeps him physically and musically vital. In his “Morning Edition” interview above, Rollins describes his yoga practice as helping his “concentration level.” “The thing is this,” he says, “When I play, what I try to do is to reach my subconscious level. I don’t want to overtly think about anything, because you can’t think and play at the same time—believe me, I’ve tried.” At age 83, and still sounding as fresh as he does, one imagines he’s tried it all and learned some valuable lessons. In 1963, Rollins met the Oki Yoga group in Japan, who combine yoga, Zen, and martial arts principles, and he’s also studied Rosicrucianism, Buddhism, and “Kabbalah, even—I was really into those philosophies of life.”
As for whether Sonny Rollins considers himself a member of any particular sect, hear his thoughts on organized religion in answer to a recent Google Hangout question (above). While he may not subscribe to a specific belief system, he’s certainly found spiritual techniques that give him—as he puts it in an interview with Yoga Journal—“a center.” Rollins “still practices asana [poses] every day, including Halasana (Plow Pose) and Urdhva Dhanurasana (Upward Bow Pose).” Want to learn more about yoga? You could always read Patanjali’s famous sutras. For more practical instruction in this peaceful physical discipline, perhaps take a look at the rather ironically named Lesley Fightmaster’s Youtube channel, with free lessons for virtually everyone.
Of course, no one teacher should be considered the authority on yoga. Like every spiritual practice, yoga has its many schisms and divisions, even so-called “Yoga Wars”: among Hindus and Christians, between corporate giants like Lululemon (and Western teachers like Fightmaster) and traditional Indian practitioners, between “Hot Yoga” (and its controversial founder) and everyone else…. I doubt Sonny Rollins has time to get enmeshed in these squabbles, and maybe neither do you. For a much less uptight fusion of Eastern practice and Western spirit, perhaps try some Star Wars Yoga. In this video, instructor Erica Vetra offers a free beginner’s class for those who “A. love Star Wars, B. have never seen Star Wars, C. love yoga, or D. have never done yoga.” The ecumenical Sonny Rollins might approve, though the venerable Patanjali, indifferent to “fancy” and “illusion,” may not have been amused.
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