5 (Other) Reasons to Beware the Ides of March

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology


Beware the Ides of March, they say...or at least have since Julius Caesar got the business end of a dagger for being a despot and pissing off Marlon Brando. Which of course, led me to think, surely they are other reasons to get antsy every year about the middle of March. Sure enough, there are plenty of other, some would argue more sensible reasons to fear March 15th. 


Thanks, carnage and turmoil of world history. You never disappoint. 

5 ( Other) Reasons to Beware the Ides of March. 

If you're Great Britain in the late 18th century, then the 15th is the date that South Carolina became the first American colony to declare independence from Great Britain. In its place, its own government was installed, and later, that whole American Revolution thing went down.


If you are against wild displays of the monarchy's misleading hyperbole, then on this day in 1672, Charles II of England issues the Royal Declaration of Indulgence, which, unfortunately, is in actuality nowhere as awesome as it sounds. 


If you're a big fan of the Electoral College voting system in the United States, then on this day in 1767 Andrew Jackson was born. Jackson was a famous opponent of the system, calling for its abolition  repeatedly by constitutional amendment. 


If you generally support positive depictions of multi-dimensional women and female friendships in popular culture, then Eva Longoria, of Desperate Housewives fame, was born on this day in 1975. 


If you've come to detest the inexplicable alternative realities and lame dance numbers of modern musicals, then on this day in 1956,  the Lerner and Loewe musical "My Fair Lady" opened on Broadway.

Thanks Ringo!

by Jillian Leigh, Ampersandology

In honor of the yearly occasion of my birth, a friend reunited the Beatles briefly to wish me the happiest of days. It was so sweet, and I just don't know how they managed it! Technology these days, huh? What a wondrous world we live in.



Is it just me, or has Ringo lost weight? He looks terrific.

This Day in History: Charlie Chaplin is born.

This Day in History

April 16th, 1889: Charlie Chaplin is Born.

Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. was born on this day in 1889 in East Street, London, to an alcoholic father and unstable mother. Both parents worked as entertainers in the musical hall tradition, his father being a singer and his mother working as an actress. But the only enduring parent in his life would be his mother, as his parents separated when little Charlie was three.

Chaplin's mother, Lilly, had always been unstable, but saw a rapid series of downturns in her life that cracked her already fragile mental landscape. Her voice gave out around 1894, and, facing a crowd of violent booing crowds, a panicked Lilly fled the stage, leaving five year old Charlie to soothe the crowd with popular songs.

In and out of asylums, mother Lilly was finally admitted to the Cane Hill Asylum, leaving her two boys (Charles had a half-brother, Sydney) to the workhouses of South London. The Chaplin boys, staying together so they wouldn't fall apart, found themselves drawn to the music halls at a young age. Chaplin eventually emigrated to America, first travelling with Fred Karno's slapstick troupe and then falling into the burgeoning film industry in still-untamed badlands of California.

The debut of Charlie Chaplin as modern audiences know him was in 1914, in Chaplin's second film, Kid Auto Races at Venice. This was the debut of his Little Tramp costume, but this signature look seems like more of a divine accident than any great artistic statement. At least at first: the costume was pieced together in the initial days of shooting from the leftovers in wardrobe. But Chaplin definitely emerged with the Tramp intact as a character; he said of the outfit he "wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large."

From the word go, you can see the influence of Chaplin's youthful poverty in his films in the walking contradiction of the Tramp persona: a vagrant with dignity, a street urchin with a keener sense of refinement than the rich men who laughed at him. It was a sly dig then, but today we can see the Tramp as a clear neon sign: Chaplin was suggesting the richest members of our society weren't necessarily always the ones who pockets were stuffed.

Many Chaplin biographies delve into the rich tangle of Charlie Chaplin better than I could in this limited space (among them adorably designed Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey, by Simon Louvish and AJ Marriot's Chaplin Stage By Stage). But I will say this. To watch Chaplin is to observe a living social equation in his prime. He brought depth and pathos to slapstick comedy. 

This IS Charlie Chaplin: 

Robert Flaherty used to tell the story of one of these times: 'It was a
rainy winter night. Charlie, who was about eleven, had no place to sleep and was
sheltering under an overhanging roof. A solid-looking man came by, took a look
at the boy, and asked him what he was doing there.

Charlie told his story.

The man stroked his chin for a moment and said, "Well, I've a bit to eat at
my place. I've only one room, but you're welcome to stay the night if you don't
mind sleeping on the floor." They went to the man's furnished room, where
Charlie slept on a pallet at the foot of his host's bed.

Next morning when he woke, the man had gone, but Charlie found a note
saying, "If you've no place to sleep tonight, come here." Charlie had to avail
himself of his friend's help for many nights, but always in the morning the man
had gone to his work.

Charlie became curious about what that work might be. One morning he
managed to wake early. The man was taking out of the closet and measuring in his
hands a long, strong rope with a noose at the end of it.

He was the common hangman.'

Out of such experiences came the greatest comedian in the world.

-From Griffith and Mayers' The Movies. Reprinted from Self-Styled Siren.  

But in the interest of full disclosure: I've always preferred Buster Keaton.

With a middle name like Proteus, being awesome comes naturally.

This Day in History: January 29th, 1895. 

So I was reading up on Charles P. Steinmetz (the P stands for Proteus; no, I'm serious), whose patent for what would become the modern electrical power grid on this day in 1895. Other than a sincerely fantastic name (he was born Carl August Rudolph Steinmetz which, while a solid effort, still does not contain the word 'Proteus'), the whole story's pretty standard until I see this: 

Steinmetz retired from GE for a faculty position at Union College in Schenectady, but GE still called him back now and then as a consultant to solve difficult problems. Once, while troubleshooting a malfunctioning apparatus, Steinmetz painstakingly traced the problem to the element that wasn't working, and then marked it with chalk. When he submitted a bill for $10,000 (more than $100,000 in today's money), GE asked him to itemize the charges.

He sent them this invoice:

Making chalk mark: $1 
Knowing where to place it: $9,999

Do you know what this means? It means BAD NEWS BEAR ALERT, that's what it means. That is the bitchest I've ever seen a scientist get about electrical currents (and let me tell you, I've been visited by the ghost of Nikolai Tesla and even he showed more restraint). Oh, these are the days I wait for: while not the founding father of Bad News Quests, Charles Proteus Steinmetz was servin' it up Victorian-style for all the haters and squares way before whatshisface . Outstanding stuff, Chuck. Really outstanding. I'd said keep up the good work but, you know. You're dead. But good news! Still awesome. 

Jan. 29, 1895: Electrifying! @ Wired.com

This Day in History: November 6th, 1928

This Day in History 
November 6^th, 1928

The New York Times begins flashing headlines to pedestrians outside its offices at 1 Times Square, using an electronic news strip that wraps around the fourth floor of the building.

The Motograph News Bulletin  extended 380 feet around the Times Tower and, with a band 5-feet tall, the moving letters were visible from a distance of several city blocks.

When it comes to iconic New York images, you won’t get very far without this one in your vocabulary. The Motograph New Bulletin (‘zipper’ on the street) is one those brilliant signifiers for our modern age to which we, as a culture, probably don’t pay much attention. It’s faded now, like a memory you haven’t thought about in a while, smothered by brighter, louder cultural cues (I’m thinking the Hollywood sign, the rest of Times Square, or even the sneaking reality of Google as a verb).

But what it really did, to me, is provide a gorgeous little platform that news could be delved out to the passerby, keeping them tied to information in a time where you most likely had to seek it out. It’s easy to take it for granted, when our billboards have video and Times Square comes equipped with a massive television screen that packages our world into tidy, two and a half minute clips.

 That’s why it’s so charming, so communal, so enduring. Because chances are, no matter what you were reading, you weren’t the only one. My God, it was probably our first gasp of social media. Yeah, you heard me: Facebook owes a lot to the zipper. You can cull history from the headlines that have been announced here: the Stock Market Crash, the first man on the moon, Nixon’s resignation. How many, I wonder, found out about President Roosevelt’s death standing on Fifth Avenue surrounded by his fellow Americans?

 It’s been the lynchpin of so many cultural short-hands: the sight of the bigger than life text winding around 1 Times Square. I can’t even count how many of those adorable little headlines have shown up in movies, television, and print over the years, telegraphing a central plot point or another. My own favorite, of course, is the announcement of Gone With the Wind’s 1939 premiere, which I remember really well, for some reason…oh yeah. I’m a freak. 

Ladies and gentlemen: ORSON! WELLES!

This Day in History: October 30, 1938

 On Sunday, October 30, 1938, millions of radio listeners were shocked when radio news alerts announced the arrival of Martians. They panicked when they learned of the Martians' ferocious and seemingly unstoppable attack on Earth. Many ran out of their homes screaming while others packed up their cars and fled.

Though what the radio listeners heard was a portion of Orson Welles' adaptation of the well-known book, War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, many of the listeners believed what they heard on the radio was real. 

Source: Enclyclo

Despite whatever the man got up to in his old age (and, by my present tally, that is limited to “drinking” and “being drunk”), Orson Welles in his youth was the original gangbuster. Srsly. Orson Welles was a bad news bear and a first-class cad, and it’s about time everyone knew it.

 You ask for PROOF? Look no further than the notorious, much mythologized account of Welles’ 1938 broadcast of H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds. 

Orson Welles: Bad Ass?
A Case Study

 Though recent studies place the hysteria that resulted from the broadcast somewhere between “exaggerated” and “fictional,” what I take out of the story of the 1938 broadcast isn’t the widespread panic that Welles may or may not have caused—it’s that you know that’s exactly what he set out to do.

 His Mercury Theatre on the Air troupe was going up against the Chase and Sanborn Hour, the most popular radio show of time. From what I understand, it was a variety hour with a dummy and nowhere near as awesome as Welles doing just about anything, but I guess that’s where 1938 and I will have to agree to disagree (…again). Also, a ventriloquist on a radio show? How does that work, exactly? Anyway, Welles had to cook up something really hot in hopes of luring the audience to his dinky little broadcast. So what does he decide to do to endear himself to the nation? 

That’s right. Terrify the living food stamps out of everyone. Rock. On. Brother.

 He and Howard Koch took the original War of the Worlds and adapted it for the radio: obviously, changes would be made to accommodate the medium. But did he have to make it sound so real? Well, either way, it really did, peppered with the little touches that would give even a skeptic pause: official sounding weather reports, news interviews and a “secretary of the Interior” whose voice bore a suspicious resemblance to FDR. You almost can’t blame anyone for who may have thought it was real—which, after all that, was probably no one: the media ran for the hills with this story like that stupid kid in the Spielberg film version (seriously, what was the point of that again? Lame, Steven. Lame.).

 The format the broadcast adopted wasn’t new but certainly wasn’t common: Fr. Ronald Knox had done it in 1926 with a faked London riot for the BBC, and Archibald MacLeish’s radio shows (which I think Welles actually worked on) were filled with the same kind of real-world news reports. But Orson, with typical wunkerkind trickery, took what had been done and injected it with steroids, and then injected the steroids with crack, bloating the formula to chew up an entire programming block. Practical? Well-meaning? These aren’t words in Orson Welles’ vocabulary. Bigger? Better? Cruelly brilliant? Now you’re getting warm.

 Oh, he can cry artistic license all he wants, but Orson, darling? I know the truth. This isn’t 1963 and you ain’t Federico Fellini. Metafiction was but a twinkle in Charlie Kaufman’s eye…you know, if he, um, had been born. You knew what you were up to, you DOG you. Case in point:

 Welles's greatest performance that evening wasn't in the studio; it was in a hallway, at the improvised news conference, when he feigned a stunned, apologetic demeanor. In reality, as Paul Heyer notes in The Medium and the Magician, Welles carefully concealed his satisfaction with the hysteria while expressing concern over the rumors of deaths attributed to the program. The threats of investigation coming from the Federal Communications Commission bothered Welles, too, but they were primarily CBS's problem.

Source: The Chronicle.

 That is so badass I can’t even handle it. Orson, baby: there’s no judgment here. This is a safe space, so let it all out: are you a big time faker, yes or no? I have my own answer prepared (yes).

Oh, I can just see it: Orson standing up for the reporters, hands clasped behind his back and collar open just so, saying all the right words to express his regret. BUT ORSON REGRETS NOTHING. He’s got that contrite but faintly smug look on his face: that’s his default expression, I suspect, and not unlike a joy-riding kid who just crashed your car but had a great time doing it. Ladies and gentlemen: ORSON! WELLES!

Check and mate, my friend. You know, some days? I think Orson Welles is the greatest person who has ever lived in the world. Ever. After all, homeboy married Rita Hayworth, so you know he was doing something right.