On December 21, Willis Gibson, a 13-year-old from Stillwater, Oklahoma, became the first person to push Tetris to its absolute limit. Around the 38:20 mark of the video above, Gibson advances to Level 157 and soon encounters Tetris’ “kill screen.” Realizing that he’s broken Tetris for the first time (Alexey Pajitnov designed the game in 1985), the youngster nearly hyperventilates. Eventually catching his breath, he declares, “I can’t feel my fingers.”
On YouTube, Gibson adds: “When I started playing this game I never expected to ever crash the game, or beat it.” According to The Oklahoman, Gibson “dedicated his win to his dad, who died last month.”
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They Might Be Giants achieved pop-cultural immortality when they covered Jimmy Kennedy and music by Nat Simon’s novelty song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” in 1990. Key to the the lyrics’ humor is their simultaneous fixation on and apparent disinterest in the reason for the re-naming of the Turkish metropolis. As often as you hear the song — and we’ve all heard it countless times over the past few decades — you’ll learn only that Constantinople became Istanbul, not why. In his new video above, on how the cities of the Roman Empire got their modern names, ancient history YouTuber Garrett Ryan, creator of Youtube channel Told in Stone, provides a little more detail.
“Istanbul seems to be a Turkish rendering of the Greek phrase eis ten polin, ‘into the city,” Ryan says. Other of that country’s urban settlements have names that would be more recognizable to an ancient Roman citizen: “Bursa is Prusa, Smyrna is Izmir, Attaleia is Antalya, Iconium is Konya, and Ancyra is Ankara.”
Iznik was originally called Nicaea, but so was Nice, France (though only the former has the historical distinction of having produced the Nicene Creed). “The French towns Aix and Dax are descendants of the Latin aquae, springs. The same word, literally translated, is behind Baden Baden, Germany, and Bath, England.”
For some cities, the transition from a Roman to post-Roman name didn’t happen in one simple step. It’s well known that, in the days of the Roman Empire, London was called Londinium; what’s less well known is that it also took on the names Lundenwic and Lundenburg in the eras between. And “although the classical name of Paris was Lutetia” — as previously featured here on Open Culture — “the city was already known by the name of a local tribe, the Parisii, by late antiquity.” If you can guess the current names of Forum Traiani, Igilgili, or, Borbetomagus, you’ve got a keener sense of ancient history than most. Modern Western civilization may descend from the Roman Empire, but that legacy comes through much more clearly in some places than others.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Are pinecones related to pineapples? This was the unexpected question with which my wife confronted me as we woke up this morning. As luck would have it, Dominic Walliman has given us an entertaining way to check: just a few days ago he released his Map of Plants, through which he gives a guided tour in the video from his Youtube channel Domain of Science. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured Walliman’s maps of biology, chemistry, medicine, quantum physics, quantum computing, and doom, all of which may seem more complex and daunting than the relatively familiar plant kingdom.
But if you compare the Map of Plants to Walliman’s previous creations, downloadable from his Flickr account, you’ll find that it takes quite a different shape — and, unsurprisingly, a more organic one.
It’s a help to anyone’s understanding that Walliman shot sections of his explanatory video at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which affords him the ability to illustrate the species involved with not just his drawings, but also real-life specimens, starting at the bottom of the “evolutionary tree” with humble algae. From there on, he works his way up to land plants and bryophytes (mostly mosses), vascular plants and ferns, and then seed plants and gymnosperms (like conifers and Ginkgo).
It is in this section, about six and a half minutes in, that Walliman comes to pinecones, mentioning — among other notable characteristics — that they come in both male and female varieties. But he only reaches pineapples six or so minutes thereafter, having passed through fungi, lichens, angiosperms, and flowers. Belonging to the monocots (or monocotyledons), a group that also includes lilies, orchids, and bananas, the pineapple sits just about on the exact opposite end of the Map of Plants from the pinecone. The similarity of their names stems from seventeenth-century colonists in the new world encountering pineapples for the first time and regarding them as very large pinecones — an association visibly refuted by Walliman’s map, but forever preserved in the language nevertheless.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
More than thirty years after it was first privately published in 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover became the subject of the most famous obscenity trial in English history. Though the ultimate decision of R v Penguin Books Ltd in favor of the publisher opened a cultural floodgate in that country, the novel was also subject to bans elsewhere, including the United States and Japan. Nearly a century after D. H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover — and a world apart as regards attitudes about public morality — it can be somewhat difficult to understand what all the fuss was about. But now that the book has entered the public domain in the United States, it could potentially be made artistically and socially dangerous again.
The same could be said of a number of other notable works of literature, from Virginia Woolf’s sex-switching satire Orlando to Bertolt Brecht’s piece of revolutionary theater Die Dreigroschenoper (known in translation as The Threepenny Opera) to a cultural phenomenon-spawning story like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.
These and others are named on this year’s Public Domain Day post by Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. If not for multiple extensions of copyright law, she notes, all of them would have originally gone public domain in 1984, and we would now have almost four decades’ worth of additional creations reinterpreting, re-imagining, and re-using them. Still, “better late than never!”
At this point in history, the artifacts freed for anyone’s use aren’t just written works, but also films, musical compositions, and even actual sound recordings. These include classic Disney cartoons Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy, which introduced the world to a certain Mickey Mouse; live-action movies from major filmmakers, like Charlie Chaplin’s TheCircus and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc; and such songs with broad cultural footprints as “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” “When You’re Smiling,” and “Mack the Knife” — or rather “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” in the original German from Die Dreigroschenoper. Alas, those of us who want to do our own thing with Bobby Darin’s version will have to wait until February of 2067.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
When The Great Gatsby was first published, it flopped; nearly a century later, its place at the pinnacle of American literature is almost universally agreed upon. Of the objectors, many no doubt remember too vividly having to answer essay questions about the meaning of the green light on the Buchanans’ dock. Perhaps “the most debated symbol in the history of American literature,” it tends to be interpreted simultaneously as “Gatsby’s love for Daisy, money, and the American dream,” as James Payne puts it in his new Great Books Explained video above. Examined more closely, “what it may suggest is that the American dream’s most un-discussed quality is its inaccessibility.”
“Fitzgerald felt that the American dream has lost its way,” Payne says. “Baseball, America’s pastime and the purest of games, had been corrupted by the Black Sox game fixing of 1919, a real-life scandal mentioned in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald used it as an allegory of America: if baseball is corrupt, then we are really in trouble.”
Hence Gatsby’s ultimate discovery that Daisy, the woman for whom he had wholly reinvented himself (in that quintessentially American way), falls so far short of what he’d imagined; hence how Gatsby’s own “classic rags-to-riches story” is “complicated by the fact that he made his money in bootlegging.” In the end, “the American dream only belongs to establishment figures,” those “who were born into it. Everyone’s class is fixed, just like the World Series.”
Though not well-received in its day, The Great Gatsby offered a premonition of disaster ahead that subsequently came true in both the American economy and Fitzgerald’s personal life. But even in the book, “despite his fear that America is lost, he still offers hope.” Hence the vivid quasi-optimism of the closing lines about how “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us,” which frames Americans as “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” — a passage whose interpretation teachers are always liable to demand. If you happen to be a student yourself, saving Payne’s video in hopes of a quick and easy A on your English lit exam, know that there are few more time-honored techniques in pursuit of the American dream than looking for shortcuts.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We can now “do to Disney what Disney did to the great works of the public domain before him,” according to Harvard law professor and public domain expert, Lawrence Lessig, hailed by The New Yorker as “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era.”
Disney has been notoriously protective of its control over its spokesmouse, successfully pushing Congress to adopt the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, which kept the public’s mitts off of Steamboat Willie, and, more to the point, Mickey Mouse, for 25 years beyond the terms of the Copyright Act of 1976.
Walt Disney embraced the freedom to take, change and return ideas from our popular culture. The rip, mix and burn culture of the Internet is Disney-familiar.
Steamboat Willie wasn’t conjured from thin air either. Its plot and title character were inspired by Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, released two months before Disney’s animated short went into production.
A few caveats for those eager to take a crack at the Mouse…
Steamboat Willie’s newfound public domain status doesn’t give you carte blanche to mess around with Mickey and Minnie in all their many forms.
Stick to the music-loving black-and-white trickster with rubberhose arms, button-trimmed short-shorts, and the distinctly rodent-like tail that went by the wayside for Mickey’s appearance in 1941’s The Little Whirlwind.
Nor can Steamboat Willie-era Mickey become your new logo. Plop the character down in new narratives, yes. Use him in a recognizable way for purposes of advertising unrelated products, no.
Mislead viewers into thinking your mash up is Disney-approved at your own risk. A Disney spokesperson told CNN:
We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright, and we will work to safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters.
Don’t think they don’t mean it.
Author Robert Thompson, the founding director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culturetold The Guardian that even though “the original Mickey isn’t the one we all think of and have on our T‑shirts or pillowcases up in the attic someplace,” the company is hypervigilant about protecting its assets:
Symbolically of course, copyright is important to Disney and it has been very careful about their copyrights to the extent that laws have changed to protect them. This is the only place I know that some obscure high school in the middle of nowhere can put on The Lion King and the Disney copyright people show up.
Fumi Games is already poised to take a similar gamble with MOUSE, a blood-soaked, “gritty, jazz-fueled shooter” set to drop in 2025:
If you’re not yet ready to take the plunge, Mickey’s pals Pluto and Donald Duck will join him in the public domain later this decade, so don your thinking caps and mark your calendars.
For a more in-depth look at the ways you can — and cannot — use Steamboat Willie-era Mickey Mouse in your own work, Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain supplies a very thorough guide here.
From 2006 to 2009, Bob Dylan hosted the Theme Time Radio Hour on Sirius Satellite Radio. Each show featured “an eclectic mix of songs, from a wide variety of musical genres, … along with Dylan’s on-air thoughts and commentary interspersed with phone calls, email readings, contributions from special guests and an array of classic radio IDs, jingles and promos from the past.” That eclectic mix also gave us this: Dylan reading, in his distinctive, quirky way, a list of the most oft-cited New Year’s Resolutions, ones that we annually make and sometimes break. Sound familiar? Welcome to 2024!
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Early in his collecting odyssey, animation historian, archivist, and educator Tommy José Stathes earned the honorific Cartoon Cryptozoologist from Cinebeasts, a “New York-based collective of film nerds, vidiots, and programmers investigating the furthest reaches of the moving image universe.”
More recently, George Willeman, a nitrate film expert on the Library of Congress’ film preservation team dubbed him “the King of Silent Animation.”
The seed of Stathes’ enduring passion took root in his 90s childhood, when slapped together VHS anthologies of cartoons from the 30s and 40s could be picked up for a couple of bucks in groceries and drugstores. These finds typically included one or two silent-era rarities, which is how he became acquainted with Felix the Cat and other favorites who now dominate his Early Animation Archive.
He squeezed his parents and grandparents for memories of cartoons screened on television and in theaters during their youth, and began researching the history of animation.
Realizing how few of the early cartoons he was learning about could be widely viewed, he set out to collect and archive as many examples as possible, and to share these treasures with new audiences.
His collection currently consists of some 4,000 animated reels, truffled up from antique shops, flea markets, and eBay. In addition to his Cartoons on Film YouTube channel, he hosts regular in-person Cartoon Carnivals, often curated around holiday themes.
Stathes’ passion project is giving many once-popular characters a second and in some cases, third act.
Take Farmer Alfalfa, (occasionally rendered as Al Falfa), the star of 1923’s The Fable of the Alley Cat, an installment in the Aesop’s Fables series, which ran from 1921 to 1929.
His first appearance was in director Paul Terry’s Down on Phoney Farm from 1915, but as Stathes observes, baby boomers grew up watching him on TV:
Nearly all of these folks who mention the character will also reference ‘hundreds’ of mice. Few may have realized that, while the Farmer Alfalfa cartoons running on television at that time were already old, the films starred one of the earliest recurring cartoon characters, and one that enjoyed an incredibly long career compared with his cartoon contemporaries.
The Fable of the Alley Cat honks a lot of familiar vintage cartoon horns — slapstick, mayhem, David triumphing over Goliath… cats and mice.
Stathes describes it as “a rather sinister day in the life of Farmer Al Falfa — It’s clear that the animal kingdom tends to despise him! — and his documentation is meticulous:
The version seen here was prepared for TV distribution in the 1950s by Stuart Productions. The music tracks were originally composed by Winston Sharples for the Van Beuren ‘Rainbow Parade’ cartoons in the mid-1930s.
The mismatched duo, Mutt and Jeff, got their start in daily newspaper comics, before making the leap to animated shorts.
Animation connoisseurs go bananas for the perspective shift at the 14 second mark of Laughing Gas (1917), a rarity Stathes shares as a reference copy from the original 35mm nitrate form, with the promise of a full restoration in the future.
(A number of Stathes’ acquisitions have deteriorated over the years or sustained damage through improper storage.)
Dinky Doodle and his dog Weakheart were 1920s Bray Studios crowdpleasers whose stint on television is evidenced by the midcentury voice over that was added to Dinky Doodle’s Bedtime Story (1926).
The characters’ creator, director Walter Lantz appears as “Pop” in the above live sequences.
Stathes’ collection also dredges up some objectionable period titles and content, Little Black Sambo, Redskin Blues, and Korn Plastered in Africa to name a few.
Stathes is mindful of contemporary sensibilities, but stops short of allowing them to scrub these works from the historic record. He warns would-be viewers of The Chinaman that it contains a “racist speech balloon as well as an intertitle that was cut from the later TV version for obvious reasons:”
Such was the vulgar terminology in those days. To question or censor these films would be denying our history.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. — Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
History favors the eyes.
Visual art can tell us what individuals who died long before the advent of photography looked like, as well as the sort of fashions, food and decor one might encounter in households both opulent and humble.
Pity the poor neglected nose. Scents are ephemeral! How often have we wondered what Versailles really smelled back in the 17th century, when unbathed aristocrats in unlaundered finery packed into high society’s unventilated salons?
On the other hand, given the opportunity, do we really want to know?
Odeuropa, the European olfactory heritage project, answers with a resounding yes.
Among its initiatives is an interactive Smell Explorer that invites visitors to dive deep into smells as cultural phenomena.
Developed by an international team of computer scientists, AI experts and humanities scholars, the Smell Explorer is a vast compendium of smells as represented in 23,000 images and 62,000 public domain texts, including novels, theatrical scripts, travelogues, botanical textbooks, court records, sanitary reports, sermons, and medical handbooks.
This resource offers a fresh lens for considering the past through our noses, an unflinching look at various olfactory realities of life in Europe from the 15th through early 20th centuries.
Survivors of earlier plagues and pandemics might have associated their trials with the purifying aromas of burning rosemary and hot tar, just as the scents of sourdough and the way a handsewn cotton face mask’s interior smelled after several hours of wear conjure the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic for many of us.
There are a number of interesting ways to explore this scent-rich database — by geographic location, time period, associated emotion, or aromatic quality.
Of course, you could go straight to a smell source.
The squeamish are advised to steer clear of vomit (421 results) in favor of the Smell Explorer’s pleasurable and abundant food-related entries — bread, chocolate, coffee, pomegranate, pastry, and wine, to name but a few.
Each scent is built as a collection of cards or “nose witness reports” with information as to the title of the work cited, its author or artist, year of creation and characterization (“good”, “rank”, “peculiarly unpleasant and permanent”…)
Even more ambitiously, Odeuropa aims to give 21st-century noses an actual whiff of Europe’s olfactory heritage by enlisting perfumers and scent designers to recreate over a hundred historic odors and aromas.
While everyone stands to benefit from the added olfactory dimension of such exhibits, this initiative is of particular service to blind and visually-impaired visitors. Expertise is no doubt required to get it right.
We’re reminded of satirist PJ O’Rourke early-80’s visit to the Exxon-sponsored Universe of Energy Pavilion in Walt Disney World’s EPCOT center, where animatronic dinosaurs were “depicted without accuracy and much too close to your face:”
One of the few real novelties at Epcot is the use of smell to aggravate illusions. Of course, no one knows what dinosaurs smelled like, but Exxon has decided they smelled bad.
However detailed they may be in other respects, many accounts of daily life centuries and centuries ago pass over the use of the toilet in silence. Even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t involve the kind of toilets we would recognize today, but rather chamber pots, outhouses, and other kinds of specialized rooms with chutes emptying straight out into rivers and onto back gardens. And that was just the residences. What would public facilities have been like? We have one answer in the Told in Stone video above, which describes “public latrines in ancient Rome,” the facilities constructed in almost every Roman town “where citizens could relieve themselves en masse.”
These usually had at least a dozen seats, Told in Stone creator Garrett Ryan explains, though some were grander in scale than others: the Roman agora of Athens, for example, boasted a 68-seater. A facility in Timgad, the “African Pompeii” previously featured here on Open Culture, had “fancy armrests in the shape of leaping dolphins.”
Judged by their ruins, these public “restrooms” may seem unexpectedly impressive in their engineering and elegant in their design. But we may feel somewhat less inclined toward time-travel fantasies when Ryan gets into such details as “the sponge on a stick that served as toilet paper” that remains “one of the more notorious aspects of daily life in ancient Rome.”
These weren’t technically latrines, as Lina Zeldovich notes at Smithsonian.com. “The word ‘latrine,’ or latrina in Latin, was used to describe a private toilet in someone’s home, usually constructed over a cesspit. Public toilets were called foricae,” and their construction tended to rely on deep-pocketed organizations or individuals. “Upper-class Romans, who sometimes paid for the foricae to be erected, generally wouldn’t set foot in these places. They constructed them for the poor and the enslaved — but not because they took pity on the lower classes. They built these public toilets so they wouldn’t have to walk knee-deep in excrement on the streets.”
The problem of large-scale human waste disposal is as old as urban civilization, and Rome hardly solved it once and for all. The Absolute History short above shows how the castles of medieval England handled it, using lavatories with holes over the moat (and piles of “moss, grass, or hay” in lieu of yet-to-be-invented toilet paper). At Medievalists.net, Lucie Laumonier writes that the urban equivalent of Roman foricae were “often built over bridges and on quays to facilitate the evacuation of human waste that went directly into running water.” Innovative as this was, it must have posed difficulties for boaters passing below, to say nothing of the users unfortunate enough to sit on a wooden seat just rotten enough to give out — the prospect of which, for all the deficiencies of Modern Western civilization’s public restrooms, at least no longer worries us quite so much today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
From 1967 to 1969, Tom and Dick Smothers hosted The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a politely edgy comedy show that tested the boundaries of mainstream television and the patience of CBS executives. Playing to a younger demographic, the show took positions against the Vietnam War and for the Civil Rights Movement, while featuring musical acts that challenged the norms of the era–everyone from Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, to the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, to Buffalo Springfield and Simon and Garfunkel.
Then came The Who in September 1967. Making its American network TV debut, the band picked up where they left off a few months ago at the Monterey Pop Festival. They performed “My Generation” and went into auto-destruction mode, smashing their guitars, toppling their drums, and creating general mayhem, before bringing the song to a close. But for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Who added a special twist, packing Keith Moon’s drum kit with explosives, a few too many, it turns out.
Here’s how Allan Blye, a producer-writer for the show, remembers it:
The Who wanted to do a big explosion at the end of their performance. In dress rehearsal, it was a powder puff. So, I say to the special effects guy, “We have to make a bigger boom.” Unbeknownst to us, The Who had told their own guy the same thing. When the explosion went off, it affected Pete Townshend’s hearing permanently. Keith Moon got blown off his drumstand, but was too out of it to know.
Stunned yet poised, Tom Smothers walked onto the stage, only to find his acoustic guitar snatched from his hands and smashed to smithereens too. He later recalled: “Everyone was so shocked.” “When Townshend came over and grabbed my guitar, I was busy just seeing where the bodies were, seeing if anyone was injured. He picked the guitar up, and people kept saying, ‘Did he really ruin your guitar? It looked so real!’ And I’d say. ‘Well it was real! I was confused as hell!’ ”
The suits at CBS abruptly canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1969, leading the brothers to file a breach of contract lawsuit, which they eventually won. (They discuss the sting of that whole experience with David Letterman here.)
Tom Smothers died yesterday at age 86, “following a recent battle with cancer.” His brother Dick announced his passing, stating: “Tom was not only the loving older brother that everyone would want in their life, he was a one-of-a-kind creative partner. I am forever grateful to have spent a lifetime together with him, on and off stage, for over 60 years. Our relationship was like a good marriage – the longer we were together, the more we loved and respected one another. We were truly blessed.” And so were the rest of us.
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