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Cast your mind, if you will, to the city of Ceuta. If you’ve never heard of it, or can’t quite recall its location, you can easily find out by searching for it on your map application of choice. Back in the twelfth century, however, you might have had to consult an image of the known world engraved on a 300-pound, six-and-a-half-foot wide silver disk — but then, if you had access to that disk, you’d know full well where Ceuta was in the first place. For it belonged to King Roger II of Sicily, who’d commissioned it from the geographer, traveler, and scholar Abū Abdallāh Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Abdallāh ibn Idrīs al-sharif al-Idrīsī — more succinctly known as Muhammad al-Idrisi — perhaps Ceuta’s most accomplished son.
“Al-Idrisi studied in Cordoba and traveled widely as a young man, visiting Asia Minor, Hungary, the French Atlantic coast, and even as far north as York, England,” writes Big Think’s Frank Jacobs. In 1138, Roger II “invited al-Idrisi to his court at Palermo, possibly to explore whether he could install the Muslim nobleman as a puppet ruler in the bits of North Africa under his dominion, or in Spain, which he hoped to conquer.” The project that resulted from this meeting, fifteen years of work later, was “a new and accurate map of the world.” In addition to knowledge gained on his own extensive travels, Al-Isidiri consulted ancient sources like Ptolemy’s Geography and “interviewed ship’s crews and other seasoned travelers, but retained only those stories on which all were in agreement,” leaving out the mythical tribes and fantastical creatures.
In addition to the grand disk, Al-Idrisi created an atlas consisting of 70 detailed, annotated maps called Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi’khtirāq āl-āfāq. That Arabic title has been variously translated — “the book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands,” “the excursion of the one who yearns to penetrate the horizons,” “the excursion of one who is eager to traverse the regions of the world” — but in Latin, the book was simply called the Tabula Rogeriana. Alas, writes Jacobs, “the original Latin version of the atlas (and the silver disk) were destroyed in 1160 in the chaos of a coup against William the Wicked, Roger’s unpopular son and successor.” Still, Al-Idrisi did manage to bring the Arabic version back with him to North Africa, where it became an influential example of scientific cartography for the Islamic world.
A glance at the Library of Congress’ German facsimile from 1928 at the top of the post reveals that Al-Idrisi’s world map looks quite unlike the ones we know today. He put south, not north, at the top, the better for Islamic converts to orient themselves toward Mecca. “His Europe is sketchy, his Asia amorphous, and his Africa manages to be both partial and oversized,” Jacobs notes, but nevertheless, he got a lot right, including such little-known regions as the kingdom of Silla (located in modern-day Korea) and calculating — approximately, but still impressively — the circumference of the entire Earth. We might consider paying tribute to Al-Idrisi’s achievements by making a trip to his hometown (a Spanish-held city, for the record, at the very tip of Africa north-east of Morocco), which seems like a pleasant place to spend a few weeks — and a promising starting point from which to penetrate a few horizons of our own.
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.
It was something of a Christmas ritual at Hunter S. Thompson’s Colorado cabin, Owl Farm. Every year, his secretary Deborah Fuller would take down the Christmas tree and leave it on the front porch rather than dispose of it entirely. That’s because Hunter, more often than not, wanted to set it on fire. In 1990, Sam Allis, a writer for then formidable TIME magazine, visited Thompson’s home and watched the fiery tradition unfold. He wrote:
I gave up on the interview and started worrying about my life when Hunter Thompson squirted two cans of fire starter on the Christmas tree he was going to burn in his living-room fireplace, a few feet away from an unopened wooden crate of 9‑mm bullets. That the tree was far too large to fit into the fireplace mattered not a whit to Hunter, who was sporting a dime-store wig at the time and resembled Tony Perkins in Psycho. Minutes earlier, he had smashed a Polaroid camera on the floor.
Hunter had decided to videotape the Christmas tree burning, and we later heard on the replay the terrified voices of Deborah Fuller, his longtime secretary-baby sitter, and me off-camera pleading with him, “NO, HUNTER, NO! PLEASE, HUNTER, DON’T DO IT!” The original manuscript of Hell’s Angels was on the table, and there were the bullets. Nothing doing. Thompson was a man possessed by now, full of the Chivas Regal he had been slurping straight from the bottle and the gin he had been mixing with pink lemonade for hours.
The wooden mantle above the fireplace apparently still has burn marks on it today.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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As far as narrators of documentaries that offer a hypnotically close view of nature, David Attenborough has long stood unopposed. But just this year, a relatively young challenger has emerged: the Icelandic musician-actress Björk Guðmundsdóttir, much better known by her given name alone. “The living world is connected by a vast kingdom of life we are only just beginning to discover,” she says, her distinctive accent and cadence recognizable at once, in the trailer above for the documentary Fungi: Web of Life. And she emphasizes that fungi — known or unknown, prevalent or at risk of vanishing altogether — are so much more than mushrooms.”
Nature documentaries exist in part to correct just such careless conflations, and other misconceptions besides. But Fungi: Web of Life has larger ambitions, following biologist Merlin Sheldrake “as he embarks on a journey through the ancient Tarkine rainforest of Tasmania,” writes Colossal’s Kate Mothes. “Timelapse cinematography reveals up-close details of rarely seen fungal phenomena, from the dispersion of spores to vast subterranean networks known fondly as the ‘wood wide web.’ ” Sheldrake “visits scientists and designers at the forefront of their fields, discovering never-before-seen species and learning from mycelium to create new, sustainable products and environmental solutions.”
The young, fungi-dedicated Sheldrake is the kind of protagonist for whom documentarians hope. And the participation of Björk in a project like this isn’t as much of a fluke as some may assume, given the presence of a standout track called “Fungal City” on her most recent album, Fossora. Its visuals, writes Ryan Waddoups at Surface, “paint a hyper-vivid portrait of Björk fully immersed in her mushroom era,” which began when “she returned to her hometown Reykjavik to record during lockdown” in the time of COVID. “To distract herself, she watched nature documentaries like Netflix’s Fantastic Fungi, becoming enamored with its magical time lapse footage of mushrooms slowly overtaking their surroundings” — not that she’s the first musician with avant-garde associations to develop such interests.
Björk’s participation in Fungi: Web of Life may also bring to mind that of Stevie Wonder in the now-obscure 1979 documentary The Secret Life of Plants. But Wonder provided only music to that film, not narration, while Björk seems to have done the opposite. It may be that her songs, which tend to have a certain psychedelic effect in themselves, would have distracted from the wonders of the fungal realm on display. If you seek admission to that realm, Mothes notes that “Fungi: Web of Life is currently showing in five theaters across North America, including IMAX Victoria at the Royal B.C. Museum, with numerous releases scheduled across the U.S. and the U.K. next year.” You can find a screening at the film’s web site — and why not schedule a dinner of champignons à la provençale thereafter?
Bonus: Below you can watch biologist Merlin Sheldrake eat mushrooms sprouting from his book, Entangled Life. Enjoy.
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.
Netflix once delivered movies not by streaming them over the internet, but by literally delivering them: on DVDs, that is, shipped through the postal service. This tends to come as a surprise to the service’s many users under the age of about 35, or in countries other than the United States. What’s more, Netflix ended its DVD service only this past September, after 25 years, occasioning quite a few tributes from the generation of cinephiles for whom it played a major part in their film education. In this moment of reflection, many of us have looked around and noticed that something else seems to have gone away: cinema itself, if not as a medium, then at least as a major force in the culture. Who, or what, did away with it?
That’s the question movie Youtuber Patrick Willems investigates in his recent video “Who Is Killing Cinema? — A Murder Mystery.” Today, he says, “every major hit movie is a $200 million franchise installment aimed at thirteen-year-old boys, but a couple decades ago, right alongside those blockbusters were dramas and comedies aimed at different audiences, including adults, starring major movie stars.” Even if a drama like Rain Man — not just the winner of Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay, but also the highest-grossing film of the year — got the green light today, “it would be made for a fraction of the budget it had in the eighties, and would probably go straight to a streaming platform with a one-week limited theatrical run to qualify for awards”.
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From behind this sorry state of affairs Willems turns up a variety of suspects. These include Marvel, a synecdoche for the system of internationally marketed franchises based on known intellectual property that “put pleasing the fans as their top priority”; “the death of the movie star,” the presence of whom once got audiences into the theaters to see movies for adults; Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and other high-powered executives with no apparent interest in cinema per se; and attention-fracturing entertainment apps like Tiktok. Willems’ lineup even includes Netflix itself, which — despite its funding the work of auteurs up to and including Orson Welles — he calls “largely responsible for bringing the idea of ‘content’ to traditional media, of taking movies and TV and flattening them all into an endless sea of gray sludge they just dump more and more into every day.”
“Have you ever tried to take a moment and reflect on something you’ve just watched on Netflix, only to have the end credits instantly minimized in favor of some obnoxious ad for what to watch next?” Willems asks in the earlier video just above. “That’s content, baby.” The relevant shift in mindset occurred as services like Willems’ own platform, Youtube, “started prioritizing the steady stream of content over individual videos,” and “when Netflix started producing their own shows” in a manner geared toward binge-watchers. Once, “individual movies or TV shows mattered”; now, “the content mindset just drags traditional media down into a giant ugly pit, and it all becomes this homogeneous goop just waiting to be halfheartedly consumed and discarded.” (Witness the now-shabby reputation of “Netflix movies,” no matter how big-budgeted.)
Both of these videos include quotes from no less a cinematic icon than Martin Scorsese, a high-profile critic of the debasement of cinema into “content.” Though he’s been able to do serious work in the streaming era, Scorsese was forged well before, having emerged in the late sixties when, as Willems reminds us, “audiences had grown tired of overblown big-budget studio movies like Doctor Doolittle” and “a new breed of smaller movies made by younger, innovative, independent artists arrived, led by Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Easy Rider,” with the likes of The Godfather, The Deer Hunter, and Scorsese’s own Taxi Driver to come. “Audiences went nuts for them, and they ushered in this new golden age of American filmmaking.” That was the director-led “new Hollywood”; dare we twenty-first-century cinephiles, now that franchise blockbusters are showing signs of commercial frailty, hope for a new new Hollywood?
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.
You can hang onto the source of Rudolph’s shame and eventual triumph — the glowing red nose that got him bounced from his playmates’ reindeer games before saving Christmas.
Lose all those other now-iconic elements — the Island of Misfit Toys, long-lashed love interest Clarice, the Abominable Snow Monster of the North, Yukon Cornelius, Sam the Snowman, and Hermey the aspirant dentist elf.
As originally conceived, Rudolph (runner up names: Rollo, Rodney, Roland, Roderick and Reginald) wasn’t even a resident of the North Pole.
He lived with a bunch of other reindeer in an unremarkable house somewhere along Santa’s delivery route.
Santa treated Rudolph’s household as if it were a human address, coming down the chimney with presents while the occupants were asleep in their beds.
To get to Rudolph’s origin story we must travel back in time to January 1939, when a Montgomery Ward department head was already looking for a nationwide holiday promotion to draw customers to its stores during the December holidays.
He settled on a book to be produced in house and given away free of charge to any child accompanying their parent to the store.
Copywriter Robert L. May was charged with coming up with a holiday narrative starring an animal similar to Ferdinand the Bull.
After giving the matter some thought, May tapped Denver Gillen, a pal in Montgomery Ward’s art department, to draw his underdog hero, an appealing-looking young deer with a red nose big enough to guide a sleigh through thick fog.
(That schnozz is not without controversy. Prior to Caitlin Flanagan’s 2020 essay in the Atlantic chafing at the television special’s explicitly cruel depictions of othering the oddball, Montgomery Ward fretted that customers would interpret a red nose as drunkenness. In May’s telling, Santa is so uncomfortable bringing up the true nature of the deer’s abnormality, he pretends that Rudolph’s “wonderful forehead” is the necessary headlamp for his sleigh…)
On the strength of Gillen’s sketches, May was given the go-ahead to write the text.
His rhyming couplets weren’t exactly the stuff of great children’s literature. A sampling:
Twas the day before Christmas, and all through the hills,
The reindeer were playing, enjoying the spills.
Of skating and coasting, and climbing the willows,
And hopscotch and leapfrog, protected by pillows.
___
And Santa was right (as he usually is)
The fog was as thick as a soda’s white fizz
—-
The room he came down in was blacker than ink
He went for a chair and then found it a sink!
No matter.
May’s employer wasn’t much concerned with the artfulness of the tale. It was far more interested in its potential as a marketing tool.
“We believe that an exclusive story like this aggressively advertised in our newspaper ads and circulars…can bring every store an incalculable amount of publicity, and, far more important, a tremendous amount of Christmas traffic,” read the announcement that the Retail Sales Department sent to all Montgomery Ward retail store managers on September 1, 1939.
Over 800 stores opted in, ordering 2,365,016 copies at 1½¢ per unit.
Promotional posters touted the 32-page freebie as “the rollickingest, rip-roaringest, riot-provokingest, Christmas give-away your town has ever seen!”
The advertising manager of Iowa’s Clinton Herald formally apologized for the paper’s failure to cover the Rudolph phenomenon — its local Montgomery Ward branch had opted out of the promotion and there was a sense that any story it ran might indeed create a riot on the sales floor.
His letter is just but one piece of Rudolph-related ephemera preserved in a 54-page scrapbook that is now part of the Robert Lewis May Collection at Dartmouth, May’s alma mater.
Another page boasts a letter from a boy named Robert Rosenbaum, who wrote to thank Montgomery Ward for his copy:
I enjoyed the book very much. My sister could not read it so I read it to her. The man that wrote it done better than I could in all my born days, and that’s nine years.
The magic ingredient that transformed a marketing scheme into an evergreen if not universally beloved Christmas tradition is a song …with an unexpected side order of corporate generosity.
May’s wife died of cancer when he was working on Rudolph, leaving him a single parent with a pile of medical bills. After Montgomery Ward repeated the Rudolph promotion in 1946, distributing an additional 3,600,000 copies, its Board of Directors voted to ease his burden by granting him the copyright to his creation.
Once he held the reins to the “most famous reindeer of all”, May enlisted his songwriter brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, to adapt Rudolph’s story.
The simple lyrics, made famous by singing cowboy Gene Autry’s 1949 hit recording, provided May with a revenue stream and Rankin/Bass with a skeletal outline for its 1964 stop-animation special.
Jesus Christ: as soon as you hear those words, assuming they’re not being used exclamatorily, you see a face. In almost all cases, that face is bearded and framed by long brown hair. Usually it has strong, somewhat sharp features and an expression of benevolence, patience, faint expectancy, or (depending on the relevant Christian tradition) complete agony. Whatever the details of his appearance, even the least religious among us has a personal Jesus in our imagination, a composite of the many depictions we’ve seen throughout our lives. But where, exactly, did those depictions come from?
The UsefulCharts video above assembles the ten earliest known images of Jesus in art, organizing them in a countdown that works its way back from the sixth century. Remarkably, these examples remain immediately recognizable even a millennium and a half back, though beyond that point the son of God becomes rather more clean-cut.
“Originally, Jesus was always depicted without a beard,” explains UsefulCarts creator Matt Baker, “and as we’re about to see, he usually just looks like a typical Roman from the time of the Roman Empire.” Ancient-Rome enthusiasts will recognize his manner of dress, although they might be surprised to see him using a magic wand, in one late-third-century image, to raise Lazarus from the dead.
The holiday season is an especially appropriate time to consider where our cultural conception of Jesus comes from, given that he is — at least as some Christians put it — the very “reason for the season.” And indeed, among these ten earliest artworks featuring Jesus is a sarcophagus lid inscribed with a classic Christmas tableau, which depicts him as a “baby being held by his mother, Mary. Standing behind them is, presumably, Joseph, and in front of them are the three wise men and the star of Bethlehem.” That’s certainly a depiction of Jesus for all time. As for what depiction of Jesus reflects our own time, we can hardly stop a certain “restored” nineteen-thirties Spanish fresco turned internet phenomenon from coming to mind.
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.
Last year, the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine conducted its once-a-decade poll to determine the greatest films of all time. As usual, the results were divided into two sections: one for the critics’ votes, and the other for the filmmakers’. The latter put Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at the top, displacing Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story, which itself had displaced Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. The former had their own reign of Kane, which came to an end in 2012 with the rise of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. All these pictures are well-known classics of cinema, and even if you haven’t seen them, you may feel as if you have. But did you have the same reaction to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles when it came out number one in the critics poll last year?
This month, the BFI published a new list of 101 films that make Jeanne Dielman look like Home Alone. Léontine’s Electric Battery, My Survival as an Aboriginal, The 8 Diagram PoleFighter, Qabyo 2, and all the rest of these “hidden gems” received just one vote in the latest S&S poll, meaning that just one participating critic or filmmaker ranks it among the ten best films ever made.
“Hailing from every continent but Antarctica and spanning more than 120 years, this selection is, in its way, as representative of the riches of cinema history as that other list we released at the end of last year,” writes contributor Thomas Flew. “Fiction rubs shoulders with nonfiction, films made by collectives sit alongside hand-crafted animation, and a healthy dose of comedy sidles up to heartbreaking drama — and then there are the films that defy all categorization.”
On this list you’ll find lesser-known works from brand-name directors like Oliver Assayas, whose Cold Water is to cinema “what The Catcher in the Rye is to literature,” or Kathryn Bigelow, whose The Loveless, “set in a generic 1950s Americana landscape, is saturated with libido, candid charm and formal invention.” Other films come recommended by major auteurs: Apichatpong Weerasethakul describes Bruce Baillie’s Quick Billy as “Muybridge’s horse resurrected, experiencing death, rebirth and death once more”; Guy Maddin picks Desire Me, which had four different directors, and “all of them were foolish enough to take their names off this thing because it’s pretty wild”; the late Terence Davies praises Curtis Bernhardt’s Possessed as a film in which “America has never seemed bleaker or less romantic.”
Perhaps you’re the type of cinephile who can imagine no more compelling recommendation than “David Lynch cites it as the first movie he remembers watching,” which Beatrice Loyaza writes of Henry King’s Wait till the Sun Shines, Nellie. Or perhaps you’re more intrigued by Henry Blake’s endorsement of Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby: “If you can get past the incest and violence in the first 45 minutes of this film, it is an achingly powerful story about love and it urges the audience to never give up on anyone.” This is not to say that all of the BFI’s hidden gems are harrowing spectacles, though it’s a safe bet that none of them offer a viewing experience quite like any you’ve ever had before — except, perhaps, the earliest one, Le chat qui joue by cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière, a “cat video” avant la lettre.
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.
If you really want to impress your family, friends, and social-media following with your next voyage abroad, consider booking a trip to Thule. But where, exactly, is it? It could be Iceland or Greenland within the Orkney archipelago of northern Scotland; it could be the Estonian island of Saaremaa; it could be the Norwegian island of Smøla. To understand the location of the much-mythologized Thule for yourself — and more so, its meaning — you should consult not sources nor modern but ancient, or at least medieval. That’s the modus operandi of the video above from Voices of the Past, which spends an hour and 45 minutes gathering historical impressions of not just Thule, but every extremity of the known world reached by the Roman Empire.
To much of humanity in antiquity, “the known world” was more or less a synonym for the territory of the Roman Empire. It was through the exertions of that mighty empire’s adventures, traders, and military men that, with time, the world to the north, east, west, and south of Rome itself became ever more “known,” and it is along those four cardinal directions that this video organized its tales.
Telling of expeditions “beyond Carthage,” it draws upon the words of ancient historians Appian of Alexandria, Polybius, and Arrian of Nicomedia; telling of the Roman pursuit of the trade-route “incense trails,” it brings in the Greek polymath Strabo as well as the King James Bible. Accounts of such even farther-flung places as the source of the Nile and the forests of Germania come from Pliny the Elder and the Roman Emperor Augustus.
This is all in keeping with the orientation toward primary sources of Voices of the Past, a Youtube channel previously featured here on Open Culture for videos on Nikola Tesla’s predictions for the world of 2026, Plato’s creation of the myth of Atlantis, ancient Japan as described by ancient Japanese, and the Roman Empire as described by an ancient Chinese historian. However you define it, Rome never constituted the entire world, nor even the entirety of the civilized world. But no previous civilization had ever made such a consistent effort to push its boundaries outward, reaching — and, if possible, mastering — distant realms of seemingly fantastical beasts, unfathomable landscapes, and uninhabitable climates. We might do well to imagine that it was just such places (or at least the Roman perception of those places) best symbolized by Thule, though whether you trust Plutarch, Josephus, or Tacitus’ description of it is up to you.
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.
In December 1931, having just embarked on a 40-stop lecture tour of the United States, Winston Churchill was running late to dine with financier Bernard Baruch on New York City’s Upper East Side. He hadn’t bothered to bring Baruch’s address, operating under the incorrect assumption that his friend was so distinguished a personage, any random cab-driving commoner would automatically recognize his building.
Such were the days before cell phones and Google Maps.…
Eventually, Churchill bagged the cab, and shot out across 5th Avenue mid-block, thinking he would fare better on foot.
In England we frequently cross roads along which fast traffic is moving in both directions. I did not think the task I set myself now either difficult or rash. But at this moment habit played me a deadly trick. I no sooner got out of the cab somewhere about the middle of the road and told the driver to wait than I instinctively turned my eyes to the left. About 200 yards away were the yellow headlights of an approaching car. I thought I had just time to cross the road before it arrived; and I started to do so in the prepossession—wholly unwarranted— that my only dangers were from the left.
Another cab ferried the wounded Churchill to Lenox Hill Hospital, where he identified himself as “Winston Churchill, a British Statesman” and was treated for a deep gash to the head, a fractured nose, fractured ribs, and severe shock.
“I do not wish to be hurt any more. Give me chloroform or something,” he directed, while waiting for the anesthetist.
After two weeks in the hospital, where he managed to develop pleurisy in addition to his injuries, Churchill and his family repaired to the Bahamas for some R&R.
It didn’t take long to feel the financial pinch of all those cancelled lecture dates, however. Six weeks after the accident, he resumed an abbreviated but still grueling 14-stop version of the tour, despite his fears that he would prove unfit.
Otto Pickhardt, Lenox Hill’s admitting physician came to the rescue by issuing Churchill the Get Out of Prohibition Free Pass, above. To wit:
…the post-accident convalescence of the Hon. Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times. The quantity is naturally indefinite but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters.
Perhaps this is what the eminent British Statesman meant by chloroform “or something”? No doubt he was relieved about those indefinite quantities. Cheers.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She lives in New York City, some 30 blocks to the north of the scene of Churchill’s accident. Follow her @AyunHalliday
The Beatles or the Stones? We’ve been debating that question for the past 60 years. Above, the London-based company Dog & Rabbit continues the conversation with a clever video that animates Beatles and Stones album covers. From there, all kinds of high jinks ensue.
The “Beatles vs The Stones” animation has won awards at various festivals. Recently made available online, you can watch it above.
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