11/30/2023

Part 9

Unlike a light switch, language survival is rarely binary. Many, whose last native speakers are long gone, may remain fully documented and even taught. Coptic, Sanskrit, and Church Slavonic, nonliving as vernaculars, thrive in the best of health in either academic or liturgical circles.

The classical Qing Dynasty language Manchu had dwindled to a mere handful of native speakers by the early 21st century and was deemed critically endangered as such. Yet thousands study it and speak it as a second language. Not so with others like Beothuk (page 41) and Pecheneg (page 295).

Opening up the panel below will show the 180 or so entries in the book that list with 1000 or fewer native speakers. Among them, green stars indicate those that, as in some of the examples above, remain vital nonetheless.

11/22/2023

Part 8

Like many pre-modern regimes, the Khazarian Khaganate (ca. 650-969 C.E.) reveled in colorful mayhem and bloodlust both on and off the battlefield and you certainly wouldn’t have wanted to mess with it.

The map shows its approximate major expanse in pink. It served as a buffer between the Western Roman and Byzantine Empires on one side and their Mongol and Muslim adversaries on the other.

A two-king diarchy reigned over Khazaria: the greater, called the xaqan, and the lesser, the isha. Let’s just call them King Major and King Minor.

King Major’s role was more priestly than administrative. He lived in shadowy seclusion and performed the elaborate but necessary rituals to earn his subjects maximal favor from the gods. King Minor commanded the military.

The nobility would select King Major from its own ranks. In a horrific ceremony their lucky candidate, strangled to within an inch of his life, would croak out the number of years he wished his reign to last.

No retirement plans would be necessary. He would die at the end of it.



Yet rank still had its privileges. Minor could only rarely approach Major. And even then, only by removing his shoes, prostrating himself in the dust, lighting a piece of kindling, and waiting to be acknowledged.

The Bulgarians, among the Khazars’ other subject peoples at that time, spoke a Turkic language we call Bulgar. Despite its name, Bulgar bore no relation to the Indo-European Slavic language — Bulgarian — that would first overlap and ultimately supplant it by the 14th century.

As for the Khaganate itself, nothing lasts forever.

Sviatoslav I of Kievan Rus, aided by Pecheneg (page 295) and Hungarian (page 139) mercenaries, would destroy it once and for all in 969. In time he would move his capital from Kiev to what is now Nuf ăru, in southeastern Romania, but in 972 be assassinated by the very same Pechenegs who had helped him earlier. Their Khan would celebrate the event by making a chalice out of his skull.

As I was saying, colorful.

www.languages850.com

11/18/2023

Part 7

Pop quiz: Which of the following long-defunct empires or kingdoms, shown alphabetically, does the book not mention? Or, less of a challenge, which ones haven’t you heard of?

1.	Ahom
2.	Champa
3.	Khazarian
4.	Kushite
5.	Oyo
6.	Palmyrene
7.	Sogdian
8.	Tocharian
9.	T⁠wipra
10.	W⁠agadu

OK, the first question was easy. The book has all of them and covers the Sogdian and Tocharian kingdoms in further depth. I’ll let you answer the second question on your own.

Number 7, known as Sogdia, lay in an area now shared by Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. It flourished during the Silk Road’s earlier years, when its merchants served as the Old World’s middlemen from the time of Alexander the Great until it fell to the Arab Muslim Conquest in the 8th century CE. Whatever you wanted, the conical-hatted Sogdians could make you a killer deal for it.

Sogdia’s Iranic language, a lingua franca in its heyday, merits special treatment in the book’s section that lists Armenian’s, Batak’s, and Sogdian’s names for the individual days of the month. For Sogdian alone I go for broke by showing not just one but all three right-to-left writing systems most frequently used for it.

The columns needed to show (1) the day number, (2) the word in Old Sogdian script, (3) the same word with Western Syriac script, (4) the same with Manichaean, and finally (5) a transliteration in “IPA Lite,” my friendlier, homespun version of the more hardcore IPA — International Phonetic Alphabet.

(*Click below to enlarge.)



Western Syriac script makes its flagship appearance in the Syriac Aramaic entry on page 370. Old Sogdian and Manichaean were less familiar but their Unicode proposals, drafted by recognized experts in their respective fields, were more than helpful.

All three scripts are abjads (showing consonants only), and each looks quite distinctive. In that section I point out what they share in common with each other and even with many modern scripts all the way up to Cyrillic.

It should have been a cakewalk. Create a perfectly ordinary array with 30 records, each with five fields: day number, Old Sogdian, Western Syriac, Manichaean, and “IPA Lite.” Then just print it all out.



So far, so good. But as Columbo would invariably add on his way out the door, there’s just one more thing:

The text in column 1, the day number, was an ordinary numeral that had to be L (plain old sinistrodextral or left-to-right-reading); the following three Semitic scripts would all be R (right-to-left-reading); and finally the last column, the transliteration, needed to be L again.

How little I knew. As a consequence of mixing L and R scripts in the same table, my browser went completely bananas and re-sorted all five columns with no particular rhyme or reason I could make out. I didn’t want them re-sorted. Much less randomly.

Now when a browser sees R scripts in columns, it quite logically assumes its viewers are accustomed to reading entire pages right-to-left also and thus automatically reverses that column order. But here, remember, the outer two columns needed to display Ls. Not only that, but I didn’t want any of my Rs re-ordered either.

It was the worst of Jenga and Whac-A-Mole. I could sometimes get the sequence almost perfect except for two columns that needed to change places, say 1 and 2. I’d make that switch in my array, but the browser would respond with say, 1 and 5 switched instead. Or 3 and 4, or with the entire set scrolled horizontally with the frontmost rejoining the line at the rear.

So I threw up my hands and simply had my code scramble the column orders at random until it hit on the combination that would finally — entirely by accident — render out in the order I wanted them to show. Done.

Later I noticed someone else had tackled a similar L + R problem by placing empty, zero-width columns between the real ones to trick the browser into starting fresh on each so it wouldn’t re-order anything at all.

Next time, I guess.

--------------------



www.languages850.com

11/16/2023

Part 6

he first term for a language in such a book — the one under which that entry alphabetizes, as in an encyclopedia — is called the headword.

It isn’t always an easy decision.

Should you list that language first as “Chippewa” or “Ojibwe?” Would the Masurians cry fowl if you list theirs, not independently but as a Polish dialect? Will readers assume Elfdalian is something from a J.R.R. Tolkien epic?

The following criteria might need to be weighed:

1. Popularity. For some that can be obvious; for others, anything but. One way out of the latter might be to find the language’s internationally recognized English name by looking up its ISO code. But in some cases that term can be obscure even to its own speakers, all the more so to the rest of us.

2. A language name that doesn’t conflict with that of another, unrelated one either in or out of the book. If reasonable, that is. Otherwise I use braces: “Macedonian {Hellenic}” versus “Macedonian {Slavic}.”

3. A name that’s maybe less popular but more distinctive. There’s a long-deceased language in the book whose ISO code is “PRG” and that SIL International lists officially as “Prussian.” “Ah, Prussian!” most might think, “Must be some kind of German presumably spoken by the people whose soldiers wore those peculiar helmets with a spike on top.”

Not so fast. PRG was a Baltic language akin to Latvian, Lithuanian, and extinct Curonian — an entirely different “Prussian.”

“Prussian [Old]?” Worse yet. Square brackets break out dialects or subdivisions. “Georgian [Old]” makes perfect sense, for example, because we know at least roughly that Georgian is a living language, and from there can infer we’re seeing a pre-modern incarnation of it. But for Prussian that’s spurious because there’s no current Prussian.

“Baltic Prussian” I didn’t care for because it begins with a modifier, making it harder to locate from just thumbing through. So then how about “Old Baltic Prussian” (under O)? The problem there is that many entries in the book are certainly “Old” and I didn’t want to clog up its alphabetization with a large, impenetrable “Old” block.

So I elected “Samlandish.” This term for PRG appears in older, more obscure literature and tends to refer more often to the actual tribespeople who spoke it. But if that’s not both apt and distinctive I don’t know what is. So the complete subject line appears, quite informatively, as:

Samlandish (Old Baltic Prussian)

with “Old Baltic Prussian” duly cited in the Index for Alternate Language Names.

And then finally —

4. A name neither the academic community nor the language’s speakers would consider obsolete, unfair, or at worst, derogatory. Romani is no longer “Gypsy,” Sami is no longer “Lapp,” and Khoekhoe is no longer “Hottentot.”

A major subset of this is your classical language-versus-dialect dispute. There, you just have to referee your sources as best you can, maybe mollify any possible objections in the profile (famed screenwriter William Goldman called that “skilling your way around” the problem), keep your doors locked at night, and accept that you can’t please everyone.

And while you’re at it, train yourself to avoid expressions like “I’ve been gypped!!”

www.languages850.com

11/15/2023

Part 5

Curse those crazy accent marks! There’s no getting around it. Since the book deals with so many languages and their descriptions and anecdotes, it’s going to be utterly swarming with them.

As the Roman alphabet does for most languages post-Latin, it often drops the ball for English, too. Since for our own part we utterly hate accent marks, except as marketing ploys for brands like Häagen-Dazs (from the Bronx) and Mötley Crüe (Los Angeles), we make up for that phonological poverty mostly with our chaotic spelling and blind faith that EFL speakers will be clairvoyant.

But other languages strive to be far more user- and learner-friendly. Here are a few of the most common accent marks — generically referred to as diacritics — and what they most typically tell us:

1. Acute accent (e.g., é) || As in Czech and Hungarian, this can signal the long version of a vowel; with other languages like Spanish, it can distinguish homonyms (where si means “if ” while sí means “yes”); or it can show stress, optionally for some languages but by academy-enforced mandate for others.

2. Umlaut (e.g., ö) || When they go by this name, double dots change the sound of a vowel into a more constricted version. In German, for example, ä asks you to close your mouth further to make the vowel more like the one in “cat” or “pet.” Sometimes you’ll see an e appended to the vowel in place of an umlaut (Stöber becomes Stoeber), but only rubes do that. Or so I’m told.

3. Dieresis (e.g., also ö) || But under this term, those very same dots signal that a vowel normally assumed to be silent or part of a blend needs to be fully pronounced. A Spanish example is pingüino, to show that the u, normally used only to harden a g when it occurs in a gu combo, gets promoted: peeng-GWEE-no.

Or with English you might dieresize “zoölogy” to signal that its first two vowels are separate. In The New Yorker they go the whole hog with that: “coördinate,” “reënlist,” “reënter,” etc. I think that’s cool.

4. Ring or Overcircle (e.g., Ångstrom) || This occurs in North Germanic languages to show an a must be pronounced more like an o. This is because the speech changed faster than the spelling could keep up with it — a distressingly common occurrence. (The initial k in English words like “knight” and “know” was pronounced until the late 1600s, for example, but don’t tell your local Shakespeare troupe.)

Czech also uses the ring, through a similar rationale, over the letter u. It shows up where the sound used to be a diphthong, uo, but has since vowel-shifted into an ordinary long u, as in the name of composer Bohuslav Martinů.

5. Double acute (Bonus!) || Most famously in Hungarian, this causes its umlauted vowel ö to be lengthened at the same time: ő. But most extraordinarily, double acutes signal the linguolabial consonants (tongue against upper lip) m̋ and p̋ for the Polynesian language Mavea spoken in Vanuatu. Mavea is described as moribund, though, so if you expect to hear those I’d hurry over there before it’s too late.

So how did I type these in the book by the thousands? It’s true my keyboard has 120 characters, but this brings up yet another pleasure of the software approach: arranging things so I could enter a character in my database like, say, “e[acute]” and have it automatically display on the page as “é.”

Here, for plain, unextended Roman script alone, is a more complete diacritic rogues’ gallery as best I can recall:





www.languages850.com

11/14/2023

Part 4

The previous entry touched on the main section’s page layout, so let’s explore some of the thinking behind that.

Each entry consists of a language heading, a smaller subheading in sans-serif for that language’s ISO code, a variable-length profile, and a numbered list for January through December. Each of 430 pages in the main section consists of two such entries, upstairs and downstairs, split by a horizontal gutter. Here’s page 38:



Given that each entry’s height will vary, what’s the visually optimal way to fill the pages?

1. Give the gutters a fixed width and allow only the pages’ bottom margins to vary.
2. Maintain fixed bottom margins and allow only the gutters to vary.
3. Keep both gutter and bottom margin fixed but just vary the leadings — line spacing — in the body copy.

Obviously the third option, with the spaces between its lines varying wildly from page to page, would look ridiculous. And with either the first or second option you could end up with some uncomfortably large voids on pages with briefer profiles (such as that of a certain Central Asian language, courtesy of its local autocrat), with the second option looking as though all the downstairs entries had been torn free and super-glued to the bottom.

That leaves the first option as the least of three evils. Agreed?

Well, heck, why not modulate the gutter, the margin, and the leading? That would allow the sizes of the gutter and the bottom margin to vary far less than they would if either by itself had to do all the work. Plus running a thin dashed line down the middle of that gutter to split it in two would conceal its variability even more.

Now unlike the gutter and the bottom margin, the leading variance would need to be subtle — mere fractions of a pixel. But you’d be surprised. An unnoticeable reduction or expansion there, times the number of lines, can buy you some precious additional adjustment.

Now let’s drill down a bit further.

Depending on its word count and other factors, each entry in the book filled out its own particular (and often unique) amount of vertical space. The total lines of profile per page ranged from 2 to 7. If, say, the upstairs entry had 3 lines of profile copy and the downstairs one had 4, they would combine for that allowable maximum of 7. As things ultimately turned out, the pages averaged around 6.

Further, many month lists needed extra breathing room. One group that comes to mind are the Ottoman-influenced languages and some of the Iranic ones like Pashto and Southern Kurdish that traditionally favor a more flowing style of Arabic script called Nastaliq.

Nastaliq can be tricky enough for outsiders to decipher as it is. Swooping lower and climbing higher up the page than Roman or even standard Arabic, inclined to overlap its neighbors above and below, it deserves not to be sold short. So that’s two sets of dynamic leadings for those situations.

Computers are wonderful like that. Yeah, they are.

www.languages850.com

11/13/2023

Part 3

Typically when you create a book — most commonly because some burning inspiration isn’t letting you not create a book — you compose it with your favorite tool; rewrite and rewrite and rewrite until every paragraph crackles; copy edit and proofread it to within an inch of its life; show your progress to your friends and family until they learn to hide when they see you coming; then fire up (or pay someone else through the nose to fire up) something like Quark or Adobe InDesign to manage its its layout and typography.

And since things will invariably screw up, you repeat one or more of those earlier steps, get back into Quark/InDesign, and so on until you have your book.

Now first of all I don’t own Quark or InDesign. But that alone wouldn’t have been nearly enough of an excuse to pass on them. This book would be an entirely different animal. Its outlandish typographical demands, need to weather frequent re-shufflings and re-paginations of its entries at the slightest whim, and sheer bulk exceeding 90,000 words made a programmed organizational approach compulsory.

The result would generate a 429-foot-long web page dynamically, paginated at proper intervals. I’d display it through a browser where I could see everything I needed to amend, enrich, or fact-check; do exactly that; and then save it out as a pdf once everything passes muster. The book would draw its content entirely from ordinary text files — where all editing would take place — and from about 950 images created through Photoshop. The pdf for its body copy would emerge fresh on each run as a finished product and never be edited at that end.

And now here we are. The database feeding the main section, i.e., the language entries, is a single text file with 860 records. Since it would turn out that Assiniboine, Chechen, Fox, Ingush, Kiga, Tundra Nenets, Turkmen, and Yi would offer more than one calendar version, they total ten more than 850. Under-promise and over-deliver, I always say.

Here’s the pipe-delimited record in my data file, which I would type out and subsequently edit time and again by hand, for the Native American language Haida:

Haida|HAI|-|-|-|-|-|Language isolate native to the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of British Columbia, with 14 reported speakers. Instead of adjectives, it uses verbs to assign qualities. Some linguists submit that Haida uses a sound, the voiced epiglottal affricate (IPA ʡʢ), that occurs in no other known language.|01:@Táan Kungáay “Bear hunting moon”@|02:@Hlgit’ún Kungáay “Goose moon”@|03:@Xitgáas Kungáay “Noisy goose moon”@|04:@Xíit Kungáay “Migratory geese moon”@|05:@Tahálaa Kungáay “Food gathering moon”@|06:@Gáan Kungáay “Berries ripen moon”@|07:@Chíin Kungáay “Salmon moon”@|08:@K’íit’aas Kungáay “Cedar bark (for hats and baskets)”@|09:@Kálk Kungáay “Ice moon”@|10:@Cha’áaw Kungáay “Bears hibernate”@|11:@T’a’áaw Kungáay “Snow moon”@|12:@Gáangálang Kungáay “Ripe berries”@|-|-|

And here is what each field represents. Some data, shown by [ ], has to be derived by the program internally and inserted as the record gets processed. I show those values, as they turned out with Haida, in red.

1	Language name
2	ISO code
3	[Language label number to be inserted] 253
4	[Position of language entry on its page — top or bottom] bottom
5	[Entry’s page number] 129
6	Artwork prefix if the language’s writing system requires it
7	[How many lines of text the profile will take up] 3
8	Profile string
9 to 20	The entry string for each month (format will vary)
21	[Alternate names for language]
22	[Language family] Isolate

Fields 8 through 20 (profile, months) might house ordinary Roman text, foreign characters in text or unicode formats, links to pieces of artwork, or any combination.

On the very first pass through each record, the program checks to make sure its format is flawless. The record must be a single line. It must contain exactly 22 fields, all quotes and other enclosures need to balance, and each month name needs to be enclosed by “XX:@” and “@” where XX is its two-digit number 01 to 12.

The slightest format glitches can raise holy hell, and with 860 records continually undergoing revisions it would be a sisyphean folly to keep checking them by eye. So whenever the program finds anything that’s less than squeaky-clean in there, it lets me know exactly what it is and where.

The beauty of this system is that you can rework any language entry with a text editor without having to know or care where in the book it gets displayed and how it gets formatted, spaced out, cross-referenced, or whatever. Ahhh.

Since this very same data file gets used by the “Today’s Date” page on my personal website, that system interprets its records in a somewhat different fashion and makes its own modifications.

But in any case, as far as my hard-won data is concerned, that’s all there is to it.

Largely.



www.languages850.com

11/12/2023

Part 2

Answer: Diminishing returns combined with quality control. It was getting progressively harder to find languages that were remarkable enough (in one sense or another) and for which I could find sufficient reliable information.

Plus, as outlined in the Introduction, their speakers needed to possess terms coinciding with Gregorian or Julian months or at least something temporally close. That requirement alone eliminated quite a few.

Now in the course of the project I exceeded 850 many times when I would stumble across qualifying candidates further on that I just HAD to have. To keep that total unchanged, for each new entry I would find one to delete that I felt I could most easily afford to lose. Much the way when you buy new socks and go through your drawer to exchange them for the ones worn thinnest, net quality goes up.

On the other hand there were a number of philological “holy grails” I wasn’t able to smoke out. Included among them were Tangwang, Nihali, Norn, Hutterite German, Ubykh, and Archi.

Tangwang is a Mandarin Chinese heavily influenced by a Mongolic language called Dongxiang. It has 20,000 speakers in Northwest China’s Gansu Province.

Nihali is a language isolate — i.e., one unrelated to anything traceable — spoken by around 2500 in Maharashtra State in Central India. It’s moribund and over half its vocabulary has been displaced by borrowings from Korku (page 184) and other neighboring languages.

Norn was a thinly documented North Germanic language, akin to Icelandic (page 142) and Old Norse, heard in the Orkney and Shetland Islands and extreme Northern Scotland until about 1850. There’s at least one party attempting to restore/revive Norn, but I don’t buy into it so far unless they can convince me of their credentials. The language doesn’t appear to have left enough literature.

The Hutterites are an anabaptist sect living communally in the Northwestern US and Southwestern Canada and named for its Tyrolean-born reformationist founder, Jacob Hutter (ca. 1500–1536). Like the Plautdietsch spoken by Mennonites (page 118), with which it’s said to be only partially interintelligible, Hutterite German is primarily oral and rarely printed.

The Northwest Caucasian language Ubykh — of much song and fame — appears to have borrowed its calendrical terms primarily from Ottoman Turkish (page 396). In any case, while Dr. Rhona Fenwick of the University of Queensland currently labors daily and nightly to compile a dictionary, there isn’t enough information generally available to list them without leaving many gaps. Ubykh gets its due elsewhere in the book, though.

Archi (the ch is like the ch in Bach) is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by a thousand or so in Southern Dagestan. Its complexities include some 75-80 consonants, 26 vowels, and approximately 1.5 million verb forms due to the permutations one can build from a group of different qualities. Archi’s modern month terms simply mimic the Russian and I wasn’t able to unearth its premodern, native versions which I’m sure are far more interesting. It’s quite possible no one remembers them.

While my T⁠aki T⁠aki (page 373) entry does mention Toki Pona, a similarly named language conceived by Canadian linguist Sonja Lang, all 850 are natural human languages. As the book is a work of nonfiction, I didn’t want to compromise its integrity with Esperanto, Volapük, Interlingua, or anything else someone has deliberately dreamt up.

There’s a profusion of those, some with lengthy, storied pedigrees and others largely without. Some grew out of fantasy novels, comic books, movie franchises, or simply a noble aim to unite the world’s people under a single philological umbrella. One, Solresol, consists entirely of musical notes. I know little about constructed languages and, even if I did, I’d have no idea where to divide the revered from the also-rans, or even what to do with either.

www.languages850.com

11/11/2023

Part 1

More than many books, The Twelve Months of the Year in 850 Languages and Dialects (Mostly Ones You’ve Probably Never Heard Of) should enjoy a shelf life that can hold its own with a sea shell collection. Fully-formed new languages aren’t likely to splash onto the scene to obsolete it, while those long dead can’t get any deader.

But among that second group, as a matter of fact, we’re seeing much the opposite. Continual discoveries through multispectral imagery, machine learning, and other wonders are bringing many languages — thought lost forever — back to us.

Those of living memory too, including the hundreds still spoken but threatened with extinction, are gaining fresh support and enthusiasm thanks to the power of the Internet to draw us from our individual niches and bring us together. Discovering and appreciating them is the first step.

This book needed an equally timeless feel. To whatever extent it achieves that, it owes much to its soft-spoken typeface, Cardo, designed by David Perry to emulate one that appears in de Aetna ad Angelum Chabrielem liber by scholar, poet, and Knights Hospitaller member Pietro Cardinal Bembo (1470-1547).

Perry developed Cardo for epigraphers — scholars who analyze ancient and medieval documents — and it accordingly offers a staggering array of 3,831 characters and symbols. Among them are several foreign scripts along with ligatures, those splendid composites of two or more letters that largely fell out of fashion during the 20th century but appear to be undergoing a resurgence. Old Style numerals that alternate their heights and alignments are here, too.

The engraving that opens the Introduction and returns on page 431 is “Cleopatra Embarking on the Cydnus,” after a painting by Francis Danby (1793–1861), published by Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green in 1828 and scanned from a volume I bought for a song at a used book store. The original plate is less than five inches wide. You can click on the image below to open it in a new tab and magnify it.



www.languages850.com

10/22/2020

But after overturning every couch cushion and checking through your other pants and jacket, you found them 30 billion years minus 20 minutes ago. Could that be literally possible?

There’s a variation on the Big Bang theory called the Big Bounce. This one assumes there’s enough dark matter-induced gravity in the universe to slow its Big Bang expansion to a standstill, eventually, and then reverse it toward what’s called the Big Crunch. Ultimately, the entire universe squeezes back into the dimensionless point from whence it arose. Everything then starts out all over again with the next Big Bang and the cycle continues, ad infinitum.

So here’s my own variation ON that variation: The Big Rerun. For that, each succeeding universe is absolutely identical — down to every elementary particle and atom, including you and me. Even time itself is duplicated.

There are all sorts of estimates for the cyclical period of any hypothetical Big Bounce, but for the sake of discussion let’s call it 30 billion years. The Big Rerun aspect of it means you are reborn and live your life over and over, exactly the same way in every detail, with 30-billion-year intermissions in between.

Since you’re nonexistent most of that time, your memory doesn’t carry over and you have no way of knowing any of this is happening.

Now physicists normally scowl at perpetual Big Bounce scenarios in general because they would violate the second law of thermodynamics: As energy is transferred or transformed, more and more of it gets wasted and, along with that, there is a natural tendency for order to degenerate into disorder. Everything eventually decays and rusts away, in other words, and that process cannot be reversed. One Bang is all you get.

But really, could you trust any physical law, including that one, to apply to an entire universe progressively crushing itself into an infinitely dense point? Are you kidding? After all, some of the most cherished physical laws break down even under the conditions of a black hole — a veritable Garden of Earthly Delights in comparison.

~~~

So maybe we’re all immortal after all.

Thirty billion years seems like a heck of a long time to wait between each rerun. But since the last Big Bang, about 14 billion years went by before you were born. Did that bother you?

5/10/2020

Whenever I’m in a wintry climate, I just love it when someone comes in and complains, “My car is stuck in the driveway.” Just hand over the keys. I’m not any kind of mastermind and honestly don’t know any more about the subject than anyone else, but I CAN free a car stuck in the snow, without external help, at least two thirds of the time. Often after the owner has given up.

As long as there isn’t pure glare ice under the tires or a steep grade tilting away from where I need to exit, and as long as the wheels can move the car at least a smidgen at the outset, chances are good to excellent. It’s just a matter of taking advantage of the fact that snow is both movable and compressible.

You’re creating a rut that gets longer and longer; now and again not even by an inch, other times much more. You’re also widening it from the occasional turning. Eventually you have enough room to get the running start you need, if you accelerate gingerly without spinning the tires, to get out.

Nowadays many or most vehicles offer features like ABS and traction control — and in some cases can park and even drive themselves. So an engineering team should certainly be able to develop software that would not only get you out of a snow trap, but quicker and more efficiently than any human driver.

The SES would be entirely hands-off. Just sit back and let the car do its thing. With feedback from the wheels it knows EXACTLY when to switch directions and how to steer. It figures in the temperature-dependent consistency of the snow, jockeys between reverse and forward gears so smoothly you can scarcely feel it, feathers the acceleration to move the car as fast as possible at mid-stroke without sliding, and perhaps even vibrates the suspension or the wheels at times if that might contribute.

Who knows, maybe it could stand a better chance with some of the tougher cases described above. To deal with a patch of glare ice, say, it would know how slowly to rotate the wheels* to maintain their grip — moving the vehicle mere fractions of an inch per second if necessary until it’s safely out. No telling what such a system might be capable of. It would demand nothing beyond what the vehicle can physically offer, but then combine that with super-human planning, calculation, and precision.

Just get someone to push or call AAA? Motorists will invariably maroon themselves in snow in the middle of nowhere, in deadly cold, without passersby or an operating cell phone. An SES would literally be a life saver.

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5/31/2019

Veteran character actor Hank Patterson (1888-1975), best remembered as Mr. Ziffel in the US sitcoms Petticoat Junction and Green Acres (1963-1971), originally aspired to be a classical concert pianist. One of his earliest appearances as an actor was in the 1939 Civil War film The Arizona Kid starring Roy Rogers and Gabby Hayes. Since Patterson had gone essentially deaf by the time he was cast in Green Acres, a dialog coach had to lie on the floor off-camera and cue him by tapping his leg with a yardstick. Patterson’s great niece is actress Téa Leoni.

There is a condition known as Bonnet’s Syndrome. In its classical form — typically triggered by a stroke or other brain injury — it causes halucinatory human or animal characters dressed in brightly colored costumes, often wearing hats and/or clownlike attire, to appear and move around. It occurs when there’s a gap in the visual field and the mind tries to fill it in. Even while healthy and perfectly dope-free, many or most of us can experience a super-mild form of Bonnet’s Syndrome under certain conditions while gazing for long periods at a blank surface. As the visual receptors in the retina tire from lack of stimulation and stop firing, the antics begin in the form of wavy lines, spots, or other artifacts — even cartoon-like characters.

Speaking of hallucinations, there’s a dark red variety of honey from Turkey called deli bal. This “Mad” honey offers elevated levels of the psychoactive compound grayanotoxin that gets in there when its bees visit certain species of rhododendrons. Historically, deli bal has been mixed with wine for recreational purposes and even employed as a form of chemical warfare by soldiers leaving combs of it around for their enemies to discover and consume. The honey can be lethal to many animals. Though in large doses it can pose a danger to humans in the form of abnormally low blood pressure, nausea, blurred vision and slowed heartbeat, fatalities have been rare.

The term “guy” for a boy or man — and less formally, it seems, for pretty much anyone — was inspired by Guy Fawkes, who famously tried to blow up the English Parliament in 1605. Similarly, the word “kid” originally referred only to a baby goat. The surname Kidd, as in the famous captain-cum-pirate William Kidd (ca. 1645-1701), shares that derivation. The word began to appear as a slang term for a child in the 1500s and by the 19th century was firmly established as such. Bob Keeshan, who played Captain Kangaroo on a children’s TV show from 1955 to 1984, strongly discouraged people from referring to children as kids as he felt it demeaned them.

3/21/2019

1. High-profile deniers of climate change, and by extension the enormity of environmental despoilment in general, are for the most part aware of the real situation. The most influential among them tend to be industrialists involved with fossil fuels, uncontrolled logging, and similarly destructive and unsustainable enterprises.

They’re just being fatalistic and working to maximize their fortunes while they can. They know full well that by the time conditions become untenable they’ll either be lavishly retired or dead. Publicly they characterize the environmental problem as a “liberal” myth or hoax, since that’s literally the only way they can explain themselves without leaking their true motives.

2. All human behaviors, no matter how aberrant at one end or noble at the other, are part of an extremely intricate, collective survival strategy that has refined itself over millions of years. The rationales for some behaviors such as childhood bullying and how they contribute toward that goal might be hard for us to explain readily — nature doesn’t care how well we understand it — but ultimately there’s a functional purpose for them.

3. Physiognomy, the pseudoscience of determining personality traits from one’s facial features, has long been discredited. But there’s such as thing as reverse physiognomy. To a greater or lesser extent, people unconsciously tend to adjust their behavior to correspond — at least in a stereotypical sense — to their appearance.

4. Some say only humans are conscious and self-aware. Others extend this talent to their dogs and other cherished mammals; others, to those blackbirds that steal quarters from car washes; and so forth. So where does the line get drawn? Most likely, nowhere. All living things are conscious. The cockroaches. Your potato crops. The very grass you walk on.

We now know, for instance, that trees and other plant life enjoy a range of senses that don’t necessarily correspond to ours, that they respond actively to their surroundings, and that they communicate and issue danger warnings to each other at least electrically through the soil and chemically through the air. Caltech researchers have recently shown that even humans can sense magnetic fields, so there may well be biospheric information traffic in that realm also.

What obscures our realization of that consciousness is our sense of time. To trees, we move at best in a blur if not invisibly. An hour to a human is like a minute to a tree. Think of that science fiction trope of the hero drinking a magic potion that speeds him up so much that the rest of the world and everyone else in it appears to freeze. This allows him, provided he doesn’t get lazy and linger in one spot too long, to rob that bank unobserved.

Flies, for example, are the opposite. A few seconds to us creaks along more like a minute to them. That’s why they’re so hard to swat. The best strategy here is to take advantage of a fly’s sped-up time scale. If you approach it from the front, ve-e-e-e-ry slowly, it can’t perceive the movement of your hand because it’s thinking too fast. When you finally get within a few inches of its head, where you might even see it start to wonder what your game is, WHACK! It will notice you then, but too late for it to turn around.

5. If all you care about is losing weight, all diets, from the most hair-brained to the soberest, AMA-sanctioned, “work.” The theories and philosophies behind them may differ wildly, but they all force you to restrict your menu choices and, in many cases, eat foods you wouldn’t otherwise. This adds an element of monotony and predictability that makes eating a less pleasurable activity than it was before. Your appetite falters and you take in fewer calories. Even if it’s as little as a 10% difference, this adds up over time.

So you’ll go ahead and chow down on those rice cakes, watercress sandwiches, bananas, and blanched artichoke hearts all washed down with iced organic goat milk. You might seriously compromise your health on some of those diets, but in any case the pounds will melt away. Then you’ll eventually tire of whatever diet you got sucked into and your body will return to its original state. The only real solution would be to readjust your microbiome — specifically the proportions of the hundreds of varieties of microbes in your GI tract — but the science isn’t there yet.

6. Upon meeting, for the first time, a politician running for state or federal office, ask one question: To the best of your knowledge, would the policies you favor decrease or increase income disparity? Those falling into the first category will say so immediately. The others will evade the question.

11/26/2018

The clerihew was named after its inventor, novelist Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1950). It’s a biographical quatrain, rhyming aabb, with the subject at or near the top.

Original by Bentley:

9/13/2018

Geta, Roman Emperor between 209 and 211 CE, liked to quiz people on the finer points of language and grammar. From the section of Augustan Histories discussing him, this would be his answer guide for the Classical Latin terms that refer to the noises various animals make. In English, for example, we would say dogs bark and ducks quack.

Bears	urcant
Birds, small	1. stridunt 2. pipiunt 3. zinzilulant
Blackbirds	1. zinziant 2. grocant
Camels	blatterant
Cows	mugiunt
Dogs	latrant
Ducks	tetrissitant
Elephants	barriunt
Frogs	coaxant
Geese	1. gingriunt 2. glicciunt 3. sclingunt
Hens, when incubating	glocidant
Horses	hinniunt
Lambs	balant
Leopards	1. feliunt 2. rictant
Lynxes	urcant
Mice	mintriunt
Owls	cuccubiunt
Panthers	cauriunt
Peacocks	paupulant
Rams	blatterant
Shrews	desticant
Snakes	sibilant
Sparrowhawks	plipiant
Storks	crotolant
Swans	drensant
Weasels	drindrant
Wild boars	quiritant
Wolves	ululant

A few of these verbs reference the name of the animal. For example, the word for bear was ursa/vrsa, peacock was pauo/pavo, and to us a hinny is the foal of a stallion and a female donkey. Also, as snakes hiss, sibilant is the modern English term for any hissing sound in speech like S or SH.

8/18/2018

Romance novelist Barbara Cartland was a glider pilot in her early years, concentrating on long distance tows. Her accomplishment of a record 200-mile-long tow in 1931 became the inspiration for the troop-carrying gliders used in World War II. For that she was honored with the Bishop Wright Air Industry Award in 1984.

The woman feeding the birds in the 1964 film Mary Poppins was played by Oscar winner Jane Darwell, best remembered as Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath from 1940. Walt Disney brought her out of retirement for the role. She had originally planned to be an opera singer.

Lysol disinfectant was first introduced in 1889 to combat a colera epidemic in Germany. Drinking Lysol was cited as the single most popular suicide method in Australia in 1911. From the late 1920s until the availability of “the pill” in the 1960s, watered-down Lysol was widely used, albeit mistakenly, for birth control. Ads from the era aimed toward married women say, reassuringly, “Yet needs no poison label!”

We English speakers don’t say “oneteen, twoteen” for eleven and twelve. That’s because we rely instead on old Germanic terms for “one left” and “two left” describing those extra items beyond ten. All Germanic languages follow this pattern (for example elf and twaalf for Dutch), then revert to the logical sequence for thirteen through nineteen.

The Caesar Salad was invented on July 4, 1924 at the San Diego eatery owned by Italian-American restaurateur Caesar Cardini and his brother Alex. It originally called for croutons, romaine lettuce (whole leaves that were meant to be eaten by hand), coddled egg, Parmesan cheese, olive oil, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, and black pepper. Cardini himself always insisted anchovies not be added, since the macerated anchovy in the Worstershire sauce sufficed.

5/12/2018

Human head hair grows at, typically, four-tenths of a millimeter per day. If you have 100,000 hairs, that comes to about 40 meters (130 feet) of hair you’re extruding every 24 hours. A finger nail grows only a quarter the speed of a hair, plus you have far fewer of them. In total, your fingers and toes collectively produce a bit over a millimeter of nail each day.

The King James Bible was published in 1611 before English spelling was standardized. Consequently a word like he could also appear as hee or hie. The letters U and V were being distinguished from each other by this time, though in the opposite way we eventually settled on: trust was spelled trvst, live was spelled liue. There was no distinction between I and J, though for Roman numerals with trailing units the final I was printed with that curve: xviij. The project took about seven years. By year three the 50-odd translators still hadn’t been paid for their work so they went on strike until The Most High and Mightie &c himself relented. The first edition was received poorly.

It’s not you: For all practical purposes the human body per se does not generate disagreeable odors. Those such as bad breath, sebaceous and apocrine body odor, the sulfurous components of intestinal gas, and that swamp foot you reel back from when you finally get to take your shoes off at the end of the day are compounds excreted instead by the many varieties of microbes that live with us symbiotically. We depend on some of those thousands of species and sub-species for our survival as quite a few of them process nutrients we wouldn’t otherwise be able to absorb while others defend us against attack from pathogens.

Researchers at Arizona State University have determined experimentally that puppies are at their cutest (to humans, anyway) at around four months of age. That’s also approximately when their mothers wean them. Since domestic dogs, even those who have gone feral, have depended on human contact to thrive as a species, this ability to bond with us at an early age likely evolved as a survival benefit. As reinforcement, many domestic varieties have been either consciously or unconsciously bred to retain a childlike appearance throughout adulthood. Even wild canines such as foxes, when experimentally domesticated, sport floppier ears and more rounded snouts after only three or four generations. Nature’s pulling a mind game on us!

5/9/2018

I’ve just finished publishing the lipogram section on Curious Notions. Since its last entry involves my shameless butchering of William Shakespeare’s Richard The Third, I thought I’d share some notes I collected sometime back on the play’s film versions. There have been at least four motion pictures based more or less directly on it (1912, 1955, 1995, and 2008) along with a number of others focusing on various parts of the story.

The absolute barnburner among all of these is 1955’s Richard III starring Laurence Olivier (who also produced and directed), Ralph Richardson, Claire Bloom, Cedric Hardwicke, and John Gielgud. Sir William Turner Walton, who collaborated with Olivier on three other films, wrote the score for Richard III which like some of his others is so towering it’s more often than not performed and savored entirely on its own.

Sir Cedric has always been one of my favorites. He shows up in approximately eighty films, and I particularly enjoyed him in Richard III as well as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and The Ten Commandments.

He also appeared on TV in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode Wet Saturday as a patriarch sanitizing a murder scene his snivelling daughter threatens to blow the lid off of, and on the original Twilight Zone as the tyrannical Uncle Simon who builds Robby the Robot so he can continue browbeating his niece in proxy from beyond the grave. His son is Edward Cedric Hardwicke, now 78, Lord Stanley in the 1995 film version of Richard III.

Young soon-to-be-murdered Edward V was played in the 1955 film by Paul Huson who, most atypically, went on to establish himself as an authority on the occult and write a number of books on it.

Vincent Price starred as King Richard in Roger Corman’s 1962 Tower of London in which he gleefully smothers his nephews played by Eugene Martin (who like Paul Huson above still busies himself in film if not necessarily witchcraft) and Donald Losby (later a familiar face in many TV shows of the 60s and 70s).

4/27/2018

Way back during the Carter administration I sold encyclopedias door-to-door in Los Angeles. Or to be more precise, I rarely sold encyclopedias door-to-door in Los Angeles.

I had been shopping my art portfolio around town in those days. I wrangled interviews with such disparate prospects as the studios of Saul Bass, a company making shower curtains looking for someone to design their patterns, the Farrah Fawcett Fan Club, and a white goods store where the sales manager staged a phone call for my benefit as I entered his office (“Is he worth it? No? Then GET RID OF HIM!!"). I also got a letter from Larry Flynt Enterprises inviting me to drop by but chickened out just in time for him to get shot.

Now this particular help wanted directed me to the Taft Building at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, across from the Pantages Theatre. The Taft is best known for having housed the Hayes office that enforced the Motion Picture Code from 1930 to 1968. For the job: Young folks right out of school welcome? Check! No experience necessary? Check!

They held a five-day class for us to practice our pitch on “Mr and Mrs Jones,” then cut us into groups who would pile into cars each midafternoon and fan out to young, childbearing neighborhoods calculated by the Home Office to be at least slightly less hostile toward door-to-door peddlers than usual. At the time, Monty Python had aired a piece showing “an unsuccessful encyclopedia salesman” (obviously a mannequin) leaping from a high-rise. Ho, ho.

When you canvass “the field” for hours and hours, knocking on doors by the dozen while simultaneously trying to remain invisible to apartment managers, your chief preoccupations come down to water and restroom opportunities. We couldn’t be direct while introducing ourselves, which would have been, “Hi. I’m selling a set of encyclopedias for about six hundred forty dollars, growing to maybe twice that if you opt for easy monthly payments that go on forever. May I come in?”

Rather, you were there to talk about education, to “ask a few questions,” to reply “I can help you out, there” should they explicitly demand to know what you’re up to, and to reveal the contents of your increasingly wondered-about satchel but only if you can get into their living room and adjudge them “qualified” (meaning did they have a phone and a checking account at the very minimum). We strove to be scrupulously honest, though, and never say anything that wasn't, at least technically or obliquely, true. At one presentation I gave to a couple, the wife gave a little smirk and said, “Hmm. Every time we ask you a pointed question you give us a non-answer. I’m a lawyer and I give non-answers for a living.”

I only averaged a half dozen or so sales a month, though I do recall one couple in particular who did readily sign on the dotted line. In sales, you grab onto what’s handed to you. The husband mentioned he had recently arrived from Egypt. I brought up my childhood King Tut-nuttery and also asked him how on earth you pronounce those mysterious emphatic consonants ص and ض and ط and ظ in the Arabic alphabet. Sold!!

Epiphany: The sort of people who would appreciate our Merit Students Encyclopedia — which was, quite honestly, wonderful — already owned a set of Britannicas or the like plus typically dozens or hundreds of books beyond that and therefore had no need for it, while those who could have benefitted the most were of the incurious type who couldn’t care less which side their spleen was on, how fast hummingbirds beat their wings, or why the capital of Bolivia has such little use for a fire department.

Like 98 percent of the people who sign on, I saw the futility of trying to scrape by on about eighty dollars a week and quit long after I should have. As it happened I would revisit the Taft Building a couple of years later, to have two wisdom teeth pulled by a Sayeed Ali, DDS, also late of Egypt, while I was working on the TV series Buck Rogers. Through the miracle of the modern Internet, I now know Clark Gable also went to a dentist there.

12/22/2014

Low treason Rebelling against one’s boss or, if a slave, one’s master

Low explosive An explosive, typically a gunpowder, whose expansion velocity is generally subsonic

Low Holy Days Celebration periods in the Jewish calendar of secondary importance, such as the Shabbat Hagadol and Yom Rishon Hagadol

Low energy physics The areas of physics not directly involving atomic-scale dimensions, substantial radioactivity, or relativistic speeds

Low Sierra The Sierra Nevada region in the western U.S. of medium altitude — 7000–8500 feet (2100–2600 meters) on the east side and 3000–7000 (900–2100) on the west. This is the sole habitat of the celebrated sequoia.

Low C

The note two octaves below high C or one below middle C, sounding at approximately 130.813 Hz*. Expressed in technical literature as C ₃, this is also the lowest note on the viola and the banjo.

Low German Alluding roughly to altitude, the West Germanic languages and dialects spoken in northern Germany and some eastern regions of the Netherlands. Less formally the term can expand to include Dutch and Frisian and their dialects.

Low temperature superconductor A substance that needs to be cooled to 30 K (-243 °C or -406 °F) or lower to conduct electricity without resistance. In other words, the easier superconductors to procure since any metal will superconduct if you get it cold enough.

Low tension line Informally, a power line carrying 1000 volts or less. (The high tension Ekibastuz-Kokshetau line in Kazakhstan holds the world’s record at the other extreme, 1.15 million volts.)

Low horse The figurative position of someone boasting or arrogantly making an assertion, but doing so while intoxicated or relying on faulty information. (Not especially common, but attested at least as far back as 1930.)

Low altar A secondary, shorter altar in a house of worship placed forward of the main (high) altar. As the officiant can stand between the two and face the congregation, the structure can serve as a kind of lectern. In a temporal context the term can refer to a coffee table or a low-slung chest of drawers.

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5/11/2014

A man named Quintus Pompeius Senecio Roscius Murena Coelius Sextus Julius Frontinus Silius Decianus Gaius Julius Eurycles Herculaneus Lucius Vibullius Pius Augustanus Alpinus Bellicus Sollers Julius Aper Ducenius Proculus Rutilianus Rufinus Silius Valens Valerius Niger Claudius Fuscus Saxa Amyntianus Sosius Priscus was appointed Roman consul in 169. His name repeats “Julius” three times and “Silius” twice. He was known as Quintus Pompeius Senecio Sosius Priscus for short.

Peach Melba (peaches served with raspberry sauce and vanilla ice cream) and Melba toast were named after legendary soprano Nellie Melba. Born Helen Porter Mitchell, she had chosen her stage name to honor her birthplace of Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne had in turn been named after British Prime Minister William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, whose title referred to Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire, UK. That site’s name evolved from an Old English term for a mill stream or spring and was first mentioned in the Domesday book of 1086.

William Windom, great grandfather of TV actor William Windom (My World… and Welcome to It), was U.S. Secretary of the Treasury in 1881 and from 1889 to 1891. Ivy Baker Priest, mother of actress Pat Priest (best known for having played Marilyn on The Munsters), was U.S. Treasurer from 1953 to 1961. Ivy Baker Priest appeared as the mystery guest on the TV show What’s My Line? in August 1954.

You often see old-time newsreel footage of what was originally represented to be the Titanic departing for America in which there are spooky blobs wiggling around on surfaces where you would expect to see the name of the ship. That’s because all genuine moving footage of the Titanic's departure and voyage was lost with it along with its cinematographer, first-class passenger William Harbeck. To sidestep that inconvenient detail the newsreel producers of the day took footage of its sister ship Olympic and had someone paint out its name frame-by-frame. It’s theoretically possible that any nitrate film at the wreck site is still physically intact and viewable, should anyone manage to retrieve it.

Two anagrams of “Ronald Wilson Reagan” are “No, darlings, no ERA law“ and “insane Anglo warlord.” An anagram of "Reaganomics” is "A con game, sir.”

Kerosene was originally marketed as a substitute for whale oil in lamps. It’s a mixture of molecular chains containing between 6 and 16 atoms of carbon, more or less. Gasoline, whose carbon chains average about 20 per cent shorter, was originally discarded as a worthless byproduct of kerosene production though some was bottled and sold off at the time under the trade name Petrol as an effective — if horrendously dangerous — head lice cure.

11/1/2013

One busy Friday evening I found myself working the cash register at the Hamburger Hamlet at 6914 Hollywood Blvd, right across from Mann’s Chinese Theater.

To the left you see Rex Reed and Raquel Welch negotiating that very same eatery’s terrazzo steps about eight years earlier, so you can do the math. Back then you had to phone in customers’ credit card numbers to validate them and then do your ka-chunk ka-chunk with a mechanical imprinter. Hamburger Hamlet was founded by actor Harry Lewis (you might have seen him in the film Key Largo as one of Edward G. Robinson’s henchmen, the one who keeps making the wisecracks) and his wife Marilyn.

Now a week and a half before, I had thrown in the towel from the strain of that very same job at the Pasadena outlet. The stroke-inducing pace of it, not to mention my inability to scarf down my complimentary dinner fast enough that after a few interruptions to ring up more customers the food would still be there when I ran back, had done me in. The manager said she was sorry I had quit and all, but her Hollywood counterpart Omar had no cashier to work that particular night and so could I please, please drive over there and come through for them just this once.

It turned out to be a singular experience.

Like me, Omar had lately arrived from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Small world. Both he and his senior waitress were glad to help out when my work load got out of hand. There was also plenty of bittersweet diversion. A customer went wild in the bar section and police had to be called to help Omar eighty-six him, a garishly made-up woman sat at the counter nursing her coffee and muttering to herself (“They told me I was going to be an actress…" one could speculate) for almost five hours before she left, and at around half-past ten two cars collided just outside and their drivers exited and started duking it out.

When the disturbance threatened to work its way toward our front door Omar got ready to lock it. At that point I noticed the bottom glass section had been boarded over, which he explained had taken place earlier in the week when a potential customer crashed through it an hour after closing time to ask for a hamburger.

Other memories of that same corner linger, like the time the Popeye cast and crew had my yellow VW Rabbit towed away late one night while I was watching their competition Flash Gordon at the Chinese.

I had parked it legally enough on Orange Drive. But to accommodate the limousines shuttling celebrants to the Popeye wrap party I knew nothing about, the management installed temporary NO PARKING — TOW AWAY signs along that stretch shortly thereafter while I was inside the theater ogling Ornella Muti.

Choice #1: Commit to a midnight stroll twelve blocks northeast to my apartment and then see to getting the car back the next day, likely with added storage fees. Side streets, dark, no witnesses.

Choice #2: Brave a similarly unnerving trek southward, but this time only ten blocks, to the impound garage. (The facility stood just across an alley from where many of us had produced art for a Star Trek movie, but I was in no mood to reminisce.)

I yielded to #2, plus the eighty-dollar extortion. The attendant, a lanky, bespectacled sort in a white short-sleeved dress shirt, lept between me and the car and did the windmill thing with his arms to make sure I didn’t try to escape with it.

Coda: Popeye was critically panned.

8/5/2013

Timeline mission No. 5 takes us to the Kingdom of England.

First of all, William the Conqueror did not directly succeed his former ally and dinner companion Harold Godwinson. Edmund Ironside’s teenaged grandson Edgar the Ætheling (“throne-worthy”) actually held the strongest genealogical claim to the English throne back when Edward the Confessor died childless in January of 1066. But the committee of Anglo-Saxon nobles known as the Witan adjudged him too young and instead crowned Harold, Edward’s brother-in-law.

It took 71 days for William to kill Harold at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October; subdue Dover, Canterbury, and Winchester; and then hack his way to London to take the crown on Christmas. During that interval the Witan — albeit with waning enthusiasm — recognized Edgar as King.

William took Edgar back with him to Normandy in 1067. Edgar wouldn’t reign over much of anything for the remaining sixty years of his life — though scarcely for lack of trying. Alternating between throne-seeking and running for cover, pledging fealty and then reneging, his peregrinations continued roughly as follows: to Scotland in 1068; England, 1069; Scotland, 1070; Flanders, 1072; Scotland again, 1074; later, back to England; to Sicily and Italy in 1086; Scotland again, 1091; back to Normandy, then England, and finally back to Scotland by 1093; England again, then Scotland in 1097; Jerusalem (Why not?) in 1102; Normandy, 1106; and finally back to Scotland in 1120 to die peacefully around 1126.

England came very close to crowning its first female sovereign upon the death of Henry I. Henry’s eldest legitimate son, William, had drowned in 1120 when his vessel foundered in the English Channel. Daughter Matilda consequently moved to the front of the line. But when Henry succumbed to his legendary “surfeit of lampreys” in late 1135 Matilda was busy in France and his nephew Stephen of Blois stepped in before her supporters could stop him.

Stephen was a usurper, granted, but otherwise a pushover. “When traitors saw that Stephen was a good-humored, kindly, and easygoing man who inflicted no punishment,” the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us, “they committed all manner of horrible crimes.” Stephen had his hands full putting down one rebellion after another. During a six-month gap you can see in the circle above, Matilda’s forces imprisoned him and proclaimed her as Queen. Moneyers of Stephen’s era muddled the legends on their coins to avoid the personal risk of taking sides.

Stephen declared his son Eustace co-regent but outlived him. A similar situation played out with his successor Henry II and his son Henry, Jr., remembered as The Young King. Louis the Lion (later Louis VIII of France) claimed the throne in 1216 while King John still had four months to live; but 10,000 silver marks and other fabulous prizes persuaded him to renounce it in favor of Henry III.

Skipping forward a couple of centuries we can spot the musical chairs between Henry VI and Edward IV and then the brief showing of Edward V, the elder of the two princes in the Tower of London widely believed to have been murdered by order of usurper Richard III.

In the second circled area we find Henry VII fending off his own insurrectionists. Intrigues against Henry tended to involve pre-Tudor holdovers who hoped to reverse his victory over Richard III at Bosworth Field. Rationales grew out of revisionist scenarios featuring the Tower Princes and/or the Earl of Warwick and other second-stringers. The two standout pretenders were Lambert Simnel and the “feigned lad” of Henry’s description in our title, Perkin Warbeck.

Simnel’s supporters crowned him “Edward VI” in Dublin on 24 May 1487 and passed him off as the 17th Earl of Warwick, whom Richard III had supposedly anointed as his rightful successor. All this was news to Henry who, last he checked, was holding the real 17th Earl of Warwick in the Tower. Henry’s forces trounced Simnel’s on 16 June at the Battle of Stoke Field. Realizing the ten-year-old Simnel was little more than a Yorkist puppet, he pardoned him and gave him a job in the royal kitchen.

Perkin Warbeck fared less well. In 1491 word reached Henry that Richard Duke of York, the younger of the Tower Princes, had somehow survived and vowed to overthrow him. The Royal Army captured Warbeck in Cornwall in 1497. Henry put him and his wife under a kind of honorary house arrest on the palace grounds; but when Warbeck abused that leniency by dusting off his old plot and scheming with the [genuine] Earl of Warwick, Henry hanged them both.

The lilac bar highlights the singular moment in English history — late October 1683 to early February 1685 — when eight past, present, and future autocrats lived simultaneously. It skips over “James III” and “Charles III” who were pretenders and therefore show striped reigns.

Richard Cromwell succeeded his father Oliver as Lord Protector and held the post for almost nine months, but his heart wasn’t in it and he yielded to what ultimately resulted in the Restoration. Since Richard lived to the age of 85, his “career ratio” (time in office divided by total lifespan) hits the lowest of any undisputed English autocrat at 0.008. Henry III, who ascended the throne aged 9 years and 18 days, still holds the highest at 0.861.

4/4/2013

Our fourth timeline machine installment will examine the Roman Catholic popes — also known as bishops of Rome.

Since these chronologies lack any real precision up until the year 1000 or so, I won’t graph anything before that. Where records show no birth year, I’ll approximate a pope’s pre-accession interval by assuming the average age of an electee (about 64 years) and shade it in green stripes. Again, pretenders — within this genre known as antipopes — will show blue-striped terms.

Let’s first zoom in to the very prince of pontifical chaos and mayhem, Theophylactus. He was a scion of the Tusculuns, the richest and most powerful family in Rome at the time. Popes Benedict VII and VIII; John XI, XII, and XIX; and Sergius III were paternal uncles. His father installed him as Pope Benedict IX (second bar from the top) in October 1032.

In 1036 an opposing faction drove Benedict out of Rome for the short time approximated by the tiny green gap. John, Bishop of Sabina, ousted him unequivocally in a bloody coup in September 1044 and reigned as Sylvester III. But Benedict was just warming up. He raised an army, and by the following April retook the papacy. Come May, though, he had second thoughts and sold it — for around 20,000 troy ounces of gold, according to some sources — to his godfather John Gratian who became Gregory VI.

But Benedict returned later that same year. The record doesn’t say whether or not Gregory got his money back, but in either case Benedict considered himself Pope again. (I’m giving him antipope stripes for this period because Gregory continued to be recognized.) In December 1046 the Council of Sutri ejected both Gregory and Benedict and installed Clement II. When Clement died from lead poisoning a year later, back came Benedict. He enjoyed another eight months until he was deposed for good, in favor of Damasus II, on 17 July 1048.

The interval highlighted by the thin lilac bar to the left is unique as it saw one sitting and 16 future pontiffs living simultaneously. You can also see that among them Celestine IV served only 17 days before he died in November 1241.

This graph also shows two major vacancies. The first, between the death of Clement IV on 29 November 1268 and the election of Gregory X on 1 September 1271, remains the longest on record at 1006 days.

Up until this era the cardinals would deliberate intermittently on papal candidates but otherwise go about their daily lives. But by late 1269 the French/Italian deadlock had dragged on for almost a year, so officials of the host city of Viterbo sequestered them. Further along they snatched the roof from the building to let in the rain and cut the occupants’ menu choices to bread and water. Two of the cardinals present during this ordeal died and a third cited health problems and resigned.

The celebrated Western Schism opened in 1378 when the Catholic church split into two factions, that of Rome and of Avignon, and each recognized its own pope. In June 1409 Pisa got into the act and three popes coexisted during the time shown by the darker highlight. Though the Schism is generally recognized to have ended with the election of Martin V toward the end of 1417, Avignon-based Benedict XIII flipped the Council the bird and kept up his pretense until he died at 95.

Further antipope shuffles continued until almost 1450, which included two Benedict XIVs in succession. Both were Antipope Benedict XIII partisans. The first, born Bernard Garnier, operated from a lair and died sometime in 1430, at which point the four cardinals he had created elected a successor who awarded himself the same name and Roman numeral. Some accounts have this Antipope Benedict XIVb captured by [at that point former] Antipope Clement VIII in 1433 and spending his last days imprisoned in the Château Foix.

As we’ve learned from recent news stories concerning Benedict XVI, papal retirements are rare — some 3.5% of the total — and usually involuntary. Excluding antipopes, the timeline machine reports the following:

Benedict IX’s nemesis Sylvester III (~6534 days), Benedict IX himself (~2907 days), Gregory XII (837 days), Martin I (821 days), Benedict IX’s godfather Gregory VI (~560 days), Celestine V (523 days), Benedict V (376 days), John XVIII (a few months or less), Silverius (~3 months), and Pontian (~2 weeks).

3/26/2013

Where would Russian art, literature, and opera be without the Time of Troubles (1598-1613)?

England’s Henry VIII had nothing on Ivan the Terrible, whose own family values ran, as far as his wives were concerned, as follows.

Anastasia: Believed poisoned by Boyars
Maria #1: Believed poisoned by Ivan
Marfa: Accidentally poisoned by her mother
Anna #1: Infertile, and so banished to the nunnery
Anna #2: Banished to the nunnery, later tortured to death
Vasilisa: Forced to watch her paramour impaled, then off to the cloisters
Maria #2: Figment of someone’s imagination (Ivans?)
Maria #3: Survived (but wound up in a nunnery anyway)

Three of those valiant souls produced eight children, but out of that brood only Feodor and Dmitry survived their dad. The elder Feodor acceded, but though adored by his subjects he was incapacitated in vaguely documented ways and entirely ineffectual.

His brother-in-law Boris Godunov graciously filled that power vacuum and, upon Feodor’s death at 40, seized the throne officially.

Ivan IV’s younger son Dmitry most likely met his end through Godunov’s henchmen in May 1591, but once Godunov himself was out of the picture three Dmitry Ivanovich impostors emerged in rapid succession to exploit that ambiguity. Among them False Dmitry I was by all accounts the most convincing, but ten months into his pretense a mob shot him, cremated him, then combined his ashes with gunpowder and fired him out of a cannon aimed toward Poland.

For the record, Russia also saw its largest royal crowd-sourcing during this era with ten simultaneously living emperors and emperors-to-be between 12 July 1596 and 7 January 1598. (I’m generously including Irina Godunova, Feodor I’s widow, who in principle served as empress for about a week before checking in — by her own volition, in this case — to another nunnery.)

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Here’s a chart extending from 1755 to the present, showing the last six Russian emperors and arguably a few more. Again, pretenders — more fairly referred to in this case as claimants, since all carry unassailable pedigrees — are indicated by stripes on their styled reigns.

In an alternate universe, Russia would have had a democratically elected Emperor: Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich Romanov, youngest son of Alexander III, who would have been Michael II. When Nicholas II abdicated on 15 March 1917 at the Pskov railway station he signed the throne over to his son Alexei (“Baby”). Toward midnight he had second thoughts in light of Alexei’s hemophilia, though, and shifted that onus to brother Michael with a decree backdated to 3 PM. The latter immediately made it known he would only accede on the condition that the Russian people agree “by universal, direct, equal and secret suffrage.”

Nicholas had been conceding most of the old Divine Right orthodoxy lately and might eventually have approved. In any event Michael found himself under several variations of house arrest and imprisonment over the next few months. Finally, despite his wife Natalia Brasova’s repeated personal appeals to Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik officials, five secret police agents rousted him from his hotel room and shot him on 12 June 1918. Natalia lived, first in London and then Paris, until 1952.

Next: The Vatican

3/17/2013

I couldn’t resist the temptation to run my graphic timeline machine (which you’ll recognize from the previous blog entry) on chronological listings of autocrats in past centuries to see what kinds of patterns pop out.

US presidents past, present, and prospective can play hardball but unless they’ve had a very bad day tend to draw the line at intramural murder and kidnapping. Royalty and nobility haven’t always been quite so circumspect — or until the last century stood such a fighting chance against serious injury or disease — so let the fun begin. For educational purposes only, of course.

Let’s start with France.

Carolingian France shows a logjam of seven simultaneously living kings and future kings between 867 and approximately 882. For reference, you’re seeing the last half of Charlemagne’s 46-year tenure at the top.

From 867 through most of 877 there was Charles II and kings-to-be Louis II and III, Carloman II, Charles the Fat, Odo, and Robert I. By 882 Charles II and Louis II were gone but Charles III the Simple and (possibly — his birth year is a wild guess)

Rudolph had come aboard.

Having weathered this entire period, Robert would finally get his chance but reign a scant 352 days before being killed by the forces of his predecessor Charles III. Charles himself lost that battle, though, and spent the rest of his days in a dungeon.

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Jumping forward eight and a half centuries, here are the last hundred years of the French autocracy. Its other two periods of seven-stacking occurred at that time: 1785-1793 (Louis XVI, the theoretical Louis XVII, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis XIX, Louis-Philippe) and 1811-1821 (losing Louis XVI and XVII and gaining Napoleons II and III).

Louis XVI and his family made a break for the Austrian border in June 1791 (Marie Antoinette was a sister of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II) but he was recognized from his portrait on all the coins and hauled back to Paris. He remained king, at least officially, until 21 September 1792; so his “retirement” from that point until his date with the guillotine lasted 122 days.

Royalists recognized his sole surviving son as Louis XVII. The boy succumbed in captivity to tuberculosis on 8 June, 1795 and chief surgeon Philippe-Jean Pelletan preserved his heart the following day; but for the next couple of generations dozens of claimants came forward as Le dauphin perdu. Some of them spun some pretty good yarns. Over the holiday season of 1999-2000 mitochondrial DNA from Marie Antoinette’s hair and from that heart was compared by two independent laboratories and the samples matched as closely as one would expect between mother and child.

In the second lavender area you can spot the musical chairs between Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and Napoleon II (“King of Rome"). It’s interesting to note Napoleon’s cumulative exile (2487 days) ran fully two thirds the length of his career as emperor (3709 days). The second Napoleon, twice emperor but only in name, spent the balance of his life in Austria and died at 21 of tuberculosis.

The gray ellipse indicates the singular moment during the July Revolution of 1830 when, with the encouragement of angry mobs, Charles X abdicated and Louis-Philippe and his supporters took to the throne. Some recognized Charles’s son Louis Antoine as Charles’s successor Louis XIX. In any event the son abdicated some twenty minutes into his own supposed reign in favor of his nephew the Duke of Bordeaux who, until his death in 1883, stood by as pretender Henry V.

Next: The Russian Empire

3/6/2013

Unlikely as it might seem, there have been four separate moments in history during which no fewer than eighteen U.S. presidents — former, sitting, and future — were all living. The first nine presidents of the longest (1479 days) of those streaks are pictured above; the remaining nine, at the bottom of this entry.

Here’s a chart I generated starting on the left side with the 1732 birth of George Washington and extending to 2016 when President Omama’s second term finishes and assuming all four of his current living predecessors stay that way.

Green indicates lifespan; blue, terms of office. (Note the two separate blue blocks in Grover “Big Steve” Cleveland’s timeline where he bookended one-termer Benjamin Harrison.)

The lilac bar highlights that 1479-day period. It extended from Grover Cleveland’s birth on March 18, 1837 to William Henry Harrison’s death on April 4, 1841. The following were alive at that time: John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James “Old Buck” Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, U.S. Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Alan Arthur, Cleveland himself, and Benjamin Harrison. A touch wider and it would have taken in Madison and McKinley.

The chart yields some other intriguing perspectives. One thing you can see in there, for example, is that when Abraham Lincoln was born (1809) all his future predecessors except George Washington were still alive. Warren G. Harding would be the first U.S. president after Lincoln not to have had a living memory of him.

On a related subject, the following presidential siblings or half-siblings aside from those of Barack Obama and George W. Bush are still with us as I write: Bill Clinton’s half-sister Sharon Lee Pettijohn (born 1941) and brother Roger (1956), George H.W. Bush’s sister Nancy Walker Bush Ellis (1926) and brothers Jonathan James Bush (1931) and William Henry Trotter “Bucky” Bush (1938), Richard Addison Ford (1924), Edward Nixon (1930), and Jean Kennedy Smith (1928).

8/25/2012

John B. “Jack” Kelly, Sr, perhaps best remembered nowadays as the father of actress and later Monaco princess Grace Kelly, won three Olympic gold medals for rowing during the 1920s. As a brickwork contractor, he ensured payment by secretly installing a sheet of glass inside his clients’ chimneys to block the draft. When the check cleared he’d have an employee drop a brick down the chimney from the top.

The title song from Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 album (and later 1969 film) “Alice’s Restaurant” exactly parallels, in its phrasing and 8-measure structure, the 1918 song “Ja-Da” by Bob Carleton. If you play them together they harmonize and counterpoint precisely.

Actor Eddie Albert first appeared on television on 6 November 1936 for a live presentation of his 40-minute play “The Love Nest.” The show, also featuring the Ink Spots and comedian Ed Wynn, emanated from Radio City in New York at 346 lines of resolution. (“Green Acres” premiered almost 29 years later on 15 September 1965.)

History’s first charge card transaction took place on 8 February 1950 at Major’s Cabin Grill adjacent to the Empire State Building in New York City. The party consisted of attorney Frank McNamara, loan company executive Ralph Schneider, and press agent Matty Simmons who later founded The National Lampoon. The card was Diner’s Club (#1000).

Author, commentator, spy novelist, and National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr’s first language as a child was Spanish. His second was French.

Incandescent light bulbs convert only a small fraction of their energy input to light, but that extra energy isn’t necessarily wasted. If the bulbs are indoors and the weather is cool enough for the furnace to run, they simply share some of that burden. Modern LEDs generate virtually no heat, but that can actually be a problem for such applications as traffic lights since during the winter the snow and ice won’t melt off.

Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan was such an enthusiastic archaeology buff he rarely hesitated to help himself to any little treasures he’d come across. Throughout his lifetime he amassed a spectacular collection this way. Shortly after the Six-Day War of 1967 Dayan sneaked alone into a dig near Holon, south of Tel Aviv, to try his luck. The dirt caved in on him, leaving only one hand visible. Children happened onto the hand sometime later and directed rescuers to dig him out.

6/16/2012

Back in 1986 I was working at an animation facility in Burbank, California when we got a job to design and shoot a bunch of writhing pink tunnels for the live action fantasy film Howard the Duck.

I won’t mention names, but a certain concern in northern California had more work than it could comfortably handle at that moment and so farmed this project out to us through our art director on the condition that we keep the whole thing a deep, dark secret and expect no screen credit. Plus there would be hell to pay if they could see any “ridging” (superfine stripes caused by equipment vibration or rattle) in the textures on the final product. The code name they instructed us to use for the film was “Huey.”

It was an exasperating effort involving half a dozen of us but we eventually turned out between 20 and 30 tunnel sequences and several of them wound up in the final film. I had high hopes for “Huey” because I remembered the title character as the wry, cigar-chomping, wisecracking waterfowl not entirely dissimilar to Bobby London’s Dirty Duck who appeared regularly in the National Lampoon’s funny pages during the 70s.

Shortly before Howard the Duck was released to the public we were welcomed to attend a screening at the Alfred Hitchcock Theater at Universal City. The room was packed and I was told Stephen Spielberg was in attendance.

Now being perfectly aware of how much blood and sweat go into making a movie — whether it turns out good, bad, or indifferent — I always try to find something to like and appreciate when I watch one. Howard the Duck certainly did have its moments, and I think so even more to this day. But you could hear a pin drop in there at times when it was obvious we were all supposed to be laughing. As we filed out at the end there was a lot of polite murmuring.

The next day at work we were saying things like, “That’s OK, the kids’ll like it!” and “Boy, there was a lot happening in that movie, wasn’t there?” As everyone knows, the film went down in history as a spectacular failure. The trade magazines tried to outdo each other by brandishing headlines like “HOWARD THE DUCK, A NEW BREED OF TURKEY,” “THE DUCK LAYS AN EGG,” and so forth. Rumors even flew that Universal production heads Sid Sheinberg and Frank Price literally got into fisticuffs over who had been more to blame for greenlighting Howard in the first place.

One of the more amusing aspects of this was something Michelle Pfeiffer said in a 1990 issue of People magazine: “You know, I look like a duck. I just do. And I’m not the only person who thinks that. It’s the way my mouth sort of curls up or my nose tilts up. I should have played Howard the Duck.”

5/28/2011

The other day while I was driving I saw something flutter through the air that I thought was so important I immediately pulled over, got out, and backtracked half a block.

It was an enormous woodpecker, mostly black but with small white markings and a head with a scarlet crest.

Now the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) has been presumed extinct for decades and was officially declared as such in 1994. About every couple of years the papers will carry a story about an alleged sighting of them. The ornithological community will then furrow its collective brow and examine all the evidence, but so far its skepticism has prevailed.

As in the case of Bigfoot and the Tasmanian tiger, there are also some infuriatingly ambiguous photographs and sound recordings making the rounds. Cornell University has an outstanding offer of $50,000 to anyone who can lead their researchers to an indisputably living, breathing ivory-billed.

The bird alit on the trunk of a honey locust next to the road and started its rapid thonk-thonk-thonk, but it was cagey enough to stay on the side I couldn’t see. As I rounded the tree it scooched in the same direction to stay ahead of me but eventually decided to hell with it and flew off. As it did so, I could see large white areas on the trailing undersides of its wings.

This was in Michigan. Since ivory-billed woodpeckers live (or lived) primarily in the southeastern US and the Caribbean I wasn’t expecting any big miracle here. It turned out that, yes, what I had spotted was actually a ringer for it, the perfectly common pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus). A true ivory-billed would have been even larger — about 20 inches long with a 30-inch wingspan — and would have had more white on the top near its tail. In addition it had a doubled pecking rhythm whereas the bird I saw and heard kept things perfectly even.

There’s an ivory-billed lookalike that’s larger yet, and again rare if not extinct: the imperial woodpecker (C. imperialis). Their traffic-stopping appearance sped their final demise as it encouraged people to shoot them simply out of curiosity. The last confirmed live specimen was dispatched in this manner in Mexico in 1956 (specifically Durango, where The Treasure of Sierra Madre had been filmed a decade earlier), so you might keep a semi-jaundiced eye out for this bird, too.

1/1/2011

Empty nose syndrome

Inside our nasal passages on each side there’s a set of three roughly parallel horizontal folds called turbinates. Since the early 1900s people suffering from serious nasal blockages have undergone surgery to cut away some of this tissue.

It turns out the turbinates induce a necessary turbulence into the airflow through the nose and help slow evaporation, and that overly zealous excision of these structures can paradoxically make the patient’s nose feel even more stuffed up than before. This can be fiendishly distressing and has been referred to as empty nose syndrome. Treatment typically involves restoring the moisture inside with a saline mist.

Zero stroke (or cipher stroke)

This was first identified in patients by their doctors during the German Weimar Republic hyperinflation of the early 1920s. The constant stress of having prices rise so feverishly — at the peak of the crisis they doubled every 90 hours — caused some people to pass into a sort of trance and obsessively write down row upon row of zeros on sheets of paper.

The Weimar hyperinflation hasn’t been the worst, though. That honor belongs to the Hungarian version which maxed out in July 1946 when prices were doubling about every 15 hours.

Situs inversus

It’s exceedingly rare, but some people are born with all their major internal organs flipped horizontally so that their heart is on the right, their liver is on the left, and so on. Normally this doesn’t produce any symptoms and the patient only learns of this state of affairs through a routine x-ray or while being prepped for an organ transplant. Humorist Catherine O’Hara is switched around like this.

But there are partial versions of situs inversus in which, say, the heart is on the left side as normal (levocardia) with everything else flipped or the heart alone is on the right (dextrocardia) with everything else in the normal location. Either of these invariably give rise to serious circulatory problems.

11/12/2008

William Castle (1914-1977) and Roger Corman (b. 1926) are known for their [usually] low-budget, [usually] high-concept movies.

Castle typically incorporated some kind of gimmick into his pictures — joy buzzers installed into selected seats, nurses stationed in the lobby, a magic coin, a 45-second “fright break” timer overlaid onto the screen, burial insurance for patrons who might die of shock, and so forth.

Corman is probably best known for 1960’s Little Shop of Horrors which featured a human-eating plant and Jack Nicholson as a masochistic dental patient. It went on to spawn a stage musical — which itself then ricocheted back into yet another movie, directed by John Waters (who himself grew up as a Castle zealot).

Naturally Vincent Price saw plenty of action with both Castle and Corman. He plays child-killing Richard III in Tower of London, and in The Tingler he exhorts us to "Scream! Scream for your lives!!”

In The Thing With Two Heads, Ray Milland is a cantankerous and openly racist physician who, as a consequence of multiple organ failure, has to have his head grafted onto the body of a black death row inmate played by Rosey Greer. Much of the film consists of this bizarre Milland-Greer “Thing” racing around the countryside on a minibike.

The one A-list picture in this glorious morass was Rosemary’s Baby, produced by William Castle and directed by a new Polish kid hardly anybody had then heard of named Roman Polanski. Castle himself appears in a cameo as the man waiting for Mia Farrow to get off a pay phone.

Let’s see if you can tell some of the pictures of William Castle and Roger Corman apart. Click below for the answers:

1. 13 Frightened Girls (banned in Finland)
2. Attack of the Crab Monsters
3. House on Haunted Hill
4. Let’s Kill Uncle
5. Not of This Earth
6. The Thing With Two Heads
7. The Tingler
8. X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
9. Tower of London
10. Zotz!