1886 Dinner jacket worn to a ball in Tuxedo Park, NY becomes known as a tuxedo. Tuxedo Park was and is an enclave of the rich on the Hudson River. Pictured is one such estate.
1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in Great Britain.
1957 U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower invited Ghanaian foreign minister to dinner at a public restaurant in Washington D.C. to apologise after he was refused service in Dover Delaware.
1970 La crise d’octobre a commencé au Québec. The Federal Government declared a state of siege and put the army on the streets of Ottawa, Quebec Cité, and Montréal.
2013 Canadian Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She wrote mostly short stories, a lot of them, and won all the literary prizes there are in Canada. The mint struck a commemorative coin on the occasion.
9 October had its moments.
768 Charlemagne crowned himself King of the Franks. He went on to unite most of Western Europe for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. He came to be called the Father of Europe because of that.
1000 Leif Ericson landed in Vinland in North America, perhaps I’Anse aux meadows in Newfoundland. Been there.
1635 Massachusetts Bay Colony expelled Roger Williams because he had opposed punishing religious dissension and confiscating Indian land. He went on to found Rhode Island as a haven for religious freedom. Ironic, isn’t it that those seeking religious freedom in the new world defined that as the freedom to punish others on religious grounds and to steal. Never been to Rhode Island.
1779 Ned Luddite led riots against spinning cotton machines in Manchester. His relatives today eschew ATMs, the Opal Card, and self-check with lame excuses. Drove through Manchester once.
1874 The General Postal Union Treaty was signed by twenty-two nations, agreeing to deliver each others’ mail. It became the Universal Postal Union. Have licked many stamps but no more.
Psst. 8 October has a past.
314 Emperor Constantine became Great by defeating his rival. Big Connie moved to Byzantium to consolidate this victory. We have been there and saw lots of images of the big guy. The city on the Bosphorus became known as Constantinople for the next two millennia, though it was never officially so named.
1840 An Hawaiian constitution was declared in Honolulu. Been there (often, but not often enough). It was done to show the British that Hawaii could govern itself and to lure investment from the United States.
1873 O’Leary’s cow got blamed for the Great Chicago Fire. Who spoke for the cow? Not Elsie. The fire burned for three days in wooden Chicago, killing at least 200 people, and it consumed Abraham Lincoln’s hand written copy of the Emancipation Proclamation which had been on display along with other Lincoln memorabilia.
1897 Franz Jospeh I named Gustav Mahler director of the Vienna Court Opera. The appointment was bold because of the toxic anti-semitism of Vienna. In fact, the position made Mahler a target for the venom.
1956 Don Larson. That is all that needs to be said to a baseball fan. The journeyman Larson reached a pinnacle that no one had done before that day and which no one else has done since. He pitched a perfect game in the World Series. It remains a unique achievement. I watched on television with my dad.
7 October has a long history.
1806 Ralph Wedgwood patented carbon paper in London. Carbon paper? We pay deference to it every time we use the CC address line in an email.
1913 The Highland park Ford factory started the first assembly line on a conveyor belt carrying the automobile chassis past work stations.
1959 The Soviet spaceship Luna transmitted the first pictures of the far side of the Moon. No doubt there are pinheads who deny the reality of either the pictures or the far side, or both.
1999 Prime Minister Jean Chrétien appointed Adrienne Clarkson Governor General of Canada. All previous GGs had political or military careers. She was a journalist. All previous GGs were white-bread. She was Chinese. I met her once at a political science conference in TO. Her husband was on a panel with me. He probably didn’t think of it that way. Snob. This posed picture came from the Canadian Nation Library web site.
2003 The Terminator became the governator: Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California. After the comic opera of the Gray Years in California I welcomed the coming of the Terminator, much to the muffled irritation of Bubbles and Curly in the outer office. I hope that they now know better.
6 October’s yesterdays
A dose of history, right here.
1781 Siege of Yorktown began in a joint Franco-American operation. This led to the final American victory over the British. It was a combined land and sea operation with a French fleet and Alexander Hamilton’s artillery.
1847 ‘Jane Eyre’ was published by Currer Bell. Huh? Yes, Charlotte Brontë used a masculine pseudonym so that snowflake he-men would not melt.
1876 American Library Association was founded in Philadelphia, a fount of learning since Benjamin Franklin set the precedent. The ALA raised and spent money on books for public libraries, and lobbied Andrew Carnegie for more.
1903 Australian High Court convened for first time in Melbourne. It required a great deal of nit-unpicking to free it from the London Privy Council.
1973 Yom Kippur War started. It brought the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation that derailed President Richard Nixon’s long and carefully contrived policy of Detente.
‘The Great Martian War: 1913-1917’ (December 2013)
IMDb meta-data runtime 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 7.0 by 35 cinemtizens.
Genre: fictional docudrama. (You read it here first.)
Verdict: Unique but unavailable.
As Europe teetered on the brink of a great war, a large flaming object struck a forest in Bohemia. Investigators disappear. More are sent in. More disappear. The attack began. In no time Germany disappeared into the rubble. Then the giant and impregnable Martian war machines turn west. The Great Martian War was on!
The film uses archival footage (some of which was staged for propaganda films at the time) from World War I and integrates strategies and events from the Great War and its aftermath into this story of a Martian invasion that united humankind (except for Faux News viewers). It includes retrospective interviews with survivors and historians chewing it over in the 1970s and later in French, English, and German. There are also re-enactments contrived to look like original film from World War I. It is parsed like a typical documentary but with the fictional elements blended it nicely.
Just when things seemed hopeless, the remnant of the German army using the Schlieffen Plan with Kaiser Bill in the lead reinforces the French line in the North. While President Woodrow Wilson counted the votes, former president Teddy Roosevelt raised a volunteer force to pitch in. Wilson kept counting as long as no Martians landed on his voters.
There is no effort at communication by either Martians or us. Nor is there any praying.
European High Command’s efforts to fight the Martians were counterproductive. The frontal attacks, the massed artillery barrages, the tank support, these all exhausted and depleted humanity while feeding the Martian’s war machines, most of which were made on Earth out of the ordinance fired at them. Irony is inter-planetary.
There is a sting in this tail right at the end, but no spoiler on that here, but it winds its way back to the beginning.
Watch the sky! Indeed.
It borrows from H. G. Wells’s oft recycled ‘War of the Worlds’ in large and small ways, but offers a fresh and distinctive take on it. Chapeaux! It can also be viewed as satire on the stupidity of World War I and all others.
The History Channel (Europe and Canada) produced it. The You Tube version is hard to watch because it has reversed images, helium voices, and uses only one-third of the screen. This sort of thing is done to avoid copyright claims. The irony here is that the film is NOT available on DVD, Amazon Prime, iTunes, or any other provider within my ken. I did track down a better version on the internet.
Predictably the pygmies attack it for being — wait for it — unrealistic. Perhaps that is why it is called fiction.
A subsequent television series, one presumes, gave it the Hollywood treatment: trivial, inconsistent, derivative, puerile, hysterical, and inaccurate. Wait, that could be ABC news, too.
5 October in history.
1582 Gregorian calendar standardised in Catholic Europe. It’s on the wall. We have been leaping every four years since. It replaced the Julian calendar which had to be reset every ten years. For calendar fun see my previous post on the French Revolutionary Calendar. Tuesday will never seem the same again.
1789 Women from Paris marched on Versailles (been there) to demand bread. And Marie said….
1880 Alonzo Cross patented the first ball-point pen. Used (more than) one.
1947 First televised US presidential speech by Harry Truman. It was about food conservation and the Marshall Plan. He asked for meatless Tuesday and poultry-free Thursdays and one less slice of bread a day. I know we complied. It was a bipartisan appeal. Former President Herbert Hoover joined it.
1984 Mark Garneau became the first Canadian in space (since Jean Drapeau landed). Monsieur Garneau crewed on a Challenger space shuttle flight.
4 October in history.
History is just one thing after another.
1537 William Tyndale published an edition of the New Testament Bible. It was the first English translation based on early Greek and Hebrew texts and the first English translation to be mass produced.
1797 The first Spanish merino sheep’s back arrived in Sydney. They came from Escorial. (Been there.) The MacArthur’s developed Elizabeth Farm. Been there.
1883 The Orient Express started. Been to the places named on the poster and once rode on a leg of the Orient Express from Munich to Vienna. Not the grand train of legend but the everyday service from one end of the line to the other.
1927 Work began on Mount Rushmore monument. Been there. The Crazy Horse monument will look like the image in white in the foreground. Expect a Trump Tower to blot the landscape all too soon.
1957 Sputnik launched. I heard its beep beep in the junior high school auditorium where we were gathered to hear Walter Cronkite put on a brave face this accomplishment for (Red) mankind. No I cannot link sound recordings to these entries, though I have tried. It can be found on You Tube.
3 October in history.
1863 U.S. President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the fourth Thursday in November to be a national day for Thanksgiving. He was prompted by the Union victory at Gettysburg. It has remained thus since. The previous practice of Thanksgiving had been ad hoc and on various dates across jurisdictions, and not a national holiday.
1906 An international conference on telegraphy in Berlin established SOS as the signal of distress. Three dots three dashes three dots, ergo: …—… It does not stand for anything, but was chosen because it was distinctive.
1927 A trans-Atlantic telephone call between Canadian Prime minister McKenzie King and British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin occurred.
1935 Tasteless egg whites were dubbed Pavlova after Anna.
1952 The British explode an Atomic bomb on Monte Bello Island in North West Australia. Britain is still paying compensation to the aboriginal people who were there exposed to radiation.
‘Mars in the Movies: A History’ (2016) by Thomas Miller.
GoodReads meta-data is 292 pages, rated 3.7 by a paltry 9 litizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction
Verdict: All hail, Nerdboy!
The title says it all. Thomas Miller has compiled, annotated, watched, summarised, and commented on every movie (in the English-speaking world and more) that features Mars and some that do not and others that should. He includes cartoons, animations, documentaries, shorts, serials, and features. Did I say comprehensive? Comprehensive.
Miller’s telling is personal and there are asides and tangents but they, too, add to the overall impression of our fascination with Mars and the way it is manifested in art and life, including his own life. He climbed trees as a boy, looked at the stars, marvelled at stories of spaceflight, and became determined to work for NASA, and did. However, on with the show….
I was surprised at the long list of movies included. Many of the feature length fictions were familiar, but there were surprises even so. There is a chronological list at the end. The chapters are thematic: voyages to Mars, invasions from Mars, life and living on Mars…… But strangely nothing on Mars Bars.
It was a shock to find out how many versions there have been of H. G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds’ after the 1953 inaugural. I have lost count but typing that title in the IMDb will yield quite a harvest of literal remakes, and then there are those with slightly altered titles, and still others with different titles but the same storyline.
Just as B movies used to be turned out in ten days or less to capitalise on the success of A movies, so today made for television, steaming, or DVD movies are produced as clones. And just as some B movies are far better for being simpler and more direct than the bloated A movies they imitate so some of the straight to DVD movies are better than the big ego productions of Hollywood.
Consciously the author’s scope seems mainly the USA. There are few references to England, apart from H. G. Wells as above, and less still to films originating in other parts of the world. There is no mention of the Mars mission portrayed in ‘Murder in Space’ (1985) from Canada. It may be that the paucity represents reality and if so, that itself might have borne comment. Why are Americans more fascinated with Mars than others.
Miller ridicules many critics who pan movies. His suspicion is that many critics have to earn their spurs by being negative, and so will deride a movie on flimsy ground. And once a major critic does this, the herd follows in the tracks of the bigger beast. Really? Would self-respecting professional film critics for such prestigious mastheads as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Colliers, and so on be that lazy, arrogant, and stupid. Really!
Can there be evidence for such cartels? Miller lists in chronological order nearly word-for-word repetitions in reviews from dozens of critics, one repeating the other, it would seem, unless there is a mighty busy god of serendipity. He even shows how mistakes in the first major review, say a typo in a character name, are reiterated in the flock that follows. Amen, Brother Thomas, lay on the wood.
What is surprising are the times – two are documented in these pages – when a producer dams his own film as it goes on release. This damnation may be explicit or implicit, and perhaps represents some corporate pathology being played out in public. Yes, dear viewer, even the snow white Disney Corporation has been known to denigrate its own product.
Less informative is Miller’s fascination with the opening credits of movies. He cannot fathom why critics do not comment on the scene-setting effect of opening credits, citing some examples of very effective opening credits, like those of the 1953 ‘War of the Worlds’ and some very ineffective ones. Point taken. He then repeats the exercise. He then refers to it again, and again. And reverts to it at the end. I believe him when he says he sometimes puts in a DVD and watches only the opening credits before moving on to something else. I also believe him when he says his wife finds that annoying.
Did I say Nerdboy above, or what.
Another of his pet peeves which gets ground into the eyeballs by repetition is the lag in communication back and forth between Mars and Earth. He nails this of course, but then pounds it in and in and in. Yet at the same time he waxes lyrical about a completely inaccurate and anti-scientific account of Mars, including sunbathing, of ‘Robinson Crusoe on Mars’ (1964), discussed elsewhere on this blog. Instantaneous interplanetary communication will condemn a movie to the sin bin in his eyes, but sunbathing on Mars with a monkey will not. Go figure.