1675 German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz demonstrated integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of y = f(x) function. The foundation calculus as some know it today, but not me.
1880 Irish tenants and harvest workers employed in Ballinrobe by land agent Charles Boycott ostracised him, leading to the term ‘boycott.’ Boycott was refused service in shops, drapers, livery stables, saloons, and people crossed the street rather than pass him by. It was a giant cause célèbre at the time and led to army intervention to force labor. While Boycott worked for Lord Erne who owned vast acreage, it was Boycott himself who was target because he was regarded as arrogant, oppressive, and brutal. He became, briefly, a hero in England and wasshowered with honours for taking the whip to those primitive Irish.
1918 The armistice to end The Great War came into effect. Amen. The front page of the Sydney Morning Herald for this date is behind a paywall so I used the freely available one from the New York Times. During the war it was called The Great War. Afterward the Department of Defense asked U.S. President Woodrow Wilson about filing the mountain of paperwork generated for the war, he said call it ‘The World War’ because it involved action around the world. On how it all started there is no better source that Barbara Tuchman, ‘The Guns of August’ (1962). This book influenced the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1933 One of the worst windstorms of the Dust Bowl blew from South Dakota to Kansas and on to Texas. and lasted more than a week. In one year an estimated 850 million tons of top soil disappeared in the wind, some of falling as far away as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia. First came insects, then drought, and then wind. Then the cycle repeated itself until there was nothing but dust left over a five-year period. The times they were apocalyptic.
1975 Australian Governor-General John Kerr dismissed the elected government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The history wars over this event continue. I was listening to the radio at home when the news came. The exercise of the powers of the Governor-General were destroyed in their exercise may be the judgement of history. Nicholas Hasluck’s novel ‘The Dismissal’ (2011) is a long cool worm’s eye view of this totemic event when the goal posts moved.
10 November has a history.
When What
1871 At Ujiji near Unyanyembe in Africa Henry Morton Stanley said, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” David Livingstone was one of many who sought the origin of the Nile River. Below is a map of his treks.
1903 Mary Anderson patented a “window cleaning device for electric cars and other vehicles to remove snow, ice, or sleet from the window.” She got the idea riding electric street cars in rain. It became standard equipment on automobiles by 1913.
1911 The Andrew Carnegie Foundation took legal form. One of its major efforts was to build free public libraries like the one in which I learned to read and read. The Carnegie Foundation built the building ain 1903 before the Foundation was incorporated and the local community paid for its collection, staff, and upkeep. Been unable to shake the habit ever since.
1928 The first installment of ‘Im Westen nichts Neues’ by Erich Maria Remarque was published. He had been in the western trenches at 18, wounded five times: gassed, shot, bayoneted, hit by shrapnel, and shot again. In 1933 the book was burned and he fled to Switzerland. In 1938, his German citizenship was revoked on the grounds that he had NOT done war service, making him a stateless person. In 1943 his sister was judicially murdered for his crimes. Her surviving sister was charged 495.80 Reichsmark for the murder. Sounds like something Faux News would make-up, but all too true, unlike Faux News.
1969 Sesame Street debuted on PBS television. It was conceived and promoted by Joan Cooney, a former documentary producer for public television. Muppet characters, created by Jim Henson, are as varied as the human cast, like the crew of the Enterprise in 1966. Imagine how many of the original cast today would be excised by President Tiny Twit.
‘Los autómatas de la muerte’ (or ‘Neutron the Atomic Superman vs. the Death Robots’) (1962)
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour 20 minutes, rated 4.4 by 95 cinematiziens.
Genre: Sy Fy, Mexican
Verdict: Lucha libre!
While auditioning for Eggheads, Dr Caronte keeps three dead brains in his cupboard. They are hungry little grey cells and he sends a horde of bearded zombies in boiler suits to the Red Cross to take, not give, blood for these critters. Musical interludes punctuate the pace.
To confuse matters Caronte often wears white, while the bare chested, tireless battler for truth, justice, and the tamale-way, Neutron, wears black. Got it so far?
Neutron has a way of appearing and disappearing. Whoosh. There he goes again, or here he is again: Whoosh.
The action takes place in a darkened Mexico City alley, and in the director’s home, and on a sound stage nightclub. Many expenses were spared. The dubbing is terrible, befitting the picture. Still all and all, it is better than some early Roger Corman efforts and less predictable than anything on broadcast television.
Neutron does the lucha libre with the zombies, who are directed by a dwarf who can barely lift a revolver and runs like…..a dwarf, and not a CGI.
It seems Neutron and Caronte have a history in a series of the movies, four or five, but who’s counting.
Wolf Ruvinskis stars as the man without a shirt but with a mask and a Whoosh. He was a Lativian Jew whose family fled the Naziis. In the new world, as a teenager, he became a lucha libre champion and that took him to the heart of the sport, Mexico City, where he stayed. One thing led to another and when the falls got too hard to fake, he kept the mask to extend his career as Neutron. (Pretty sure that the physiotherapist I go to learned the trade at lucha libre.)
Amazon Prime tempted me with this offering, and it seemed better than some of the alternatives from Hollywood of late. At least it was not pretentious, did not present fiction as fact, or have Jack Black in it. Three pluses right there. Though admittedly the part of the dwarf would fit Tom Cruise.
9 November had its moments.
1925 Robert Millikan presented evidence of cosmic rays to the National Academy of Sciences at Madison, Wisconsin. A graduate of Oberlin College where the sky did not fall when women were admitted, he showed the extraterritorial origins of the energies he and others had recorded. Many other kinds of energies from space have since been identified. He got a Nobel Prize. We have been bombarded with such cosmic rays.
1961 The Professional Golfers Association (USA) ended the caucasians only rule (reaffirmed in 1960) in a year when a darling of the South African apartheid regime, Gary Player won the open. It was the last major sports organisation to end this explicit racism and did so with reluctance only after repeated litigation by individuals, clubs, and associations. It was finally coerced into it by Stanley Mosk, Attorney General of the State of California, who had threatened to disrupt a scheduled tour with court orders, subpoenas, and writs. Speaks for itself.
1972 Discoveries of bones in Tanzania by the Mary and Louis Leakey caused the origins of humanity to be revised backward by one million years. These two were inveterate diggers, shifters, analysers who spent most of their lives in tents in Kenya and Tanzania. EVeryone’s family tree got longer as a result.
1980 Iraq and Iran War started and continued until 1988. After half a million deaths, it ended at the status quo ante without any change of borders or attitudes. It was largely trench warfare, featuring poison gas, child soldiers, human wave attacks, prisoners used as human shields with dissent groups from each country siding with the other to add to the mayhem. Within each country it was also the excuse for ethnic cleansing.
1989 The Berlin Wall opened for the first time since 1961. It was about 150 kilometres in all, and about 140 people were killed trying to cross it, including two just a fortnight before it crumbled. Amazed me at the time, like the Cold War, the Berlin Wall seemed immutable and eternal, and then it fell over. Been there and seen Checkpoint Charlie and more, a couple of times.
‘Eyes in the Night’ (1942)
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 20 minutes, rated 6.8 by 992 cinemtizens.
Genre: Mystery, Canine.
Verdict: A fast start and and fast finish, but in between time passed very slowly.
Veteran supporting actor Edward Arnold plays the lead as a blind detective in the first of a short-lived series of B pictures. He is ably supported by an excellent cast and it starts well.
Eddie has his Alsatian, Friday, to look after him and Allen Jenkins to do the heavy lifting in-between pratfalls, while Mantan Moreland opens and closes doors and his bug eyes. These latter two share the comic distress duties.
An old (girl) friend (hereinafter designated OGF) comes to ask for his help, because her step-daughter Donna Reed (sigh…, went the fraternity brothers) is in love with a gigolo twice her age. What Eddie and company can do about this domestic tangle is anyone’s guess. He tells her to have it out with Gigolo.
OGF takes his advice. (What a sucker, cried the fraternity brothers.) She finds Gigolo cold and dead on the bear rug in front of the fireplace in his bachelor pad. Gulp! She goes back to Eddie, who sets out with Friday and Jenkins for reasons unknown, but a private dick has to do what a private dick has to do, per the script.
OGF’s husband is the incredibly dignified Reginald Denny, a scientist working on a TOP SECRET project that he keeps in his clothes closet at home. Security or what? Or what. He is away being important leaving OGF and Donna at home to tear strips off of each other with a houseful of recently employed servants with foreign accents. Will the clothes closet b safe? The tension did not mount.
So far it has some pace and mystery, but about now occurs a hissing sound that is the air leaving the balloon.
All of the many servants at the house are Nazi spies so incompetent they have not yet found the closet and purloined Reggie’s secret. Donna’s friends who encourage her to antagonise her step-mother, i.e., OGF, are also Nazis. They are everywhere. Friday even looks under the bed for more. The top Nasty is Katherine Emery who gives a masterful performance as a black widow.
Once Eddie is ensconced in the house, the action freezes. He carries on as best he can with the screenplay but really…. He plays the organ; he paces in garden; he listens at doors; he plays the organ some more; he paces in the garden; he listens at doors. Then for a change he repeats the sequence. It was a very long night. And so on.
[It is no surprise to any observer of the absurdity of life, that some IMDb reviewers think the interminable scenes at the house with Eddie playing the uncle are great. Me, watching paint dry would be better.]
The Nasties take him for a fool, underestimating him because he is blind. That is a neat idea but it just does not gel in this rendering. He has some nice lines like this one: ‘Turn out the lights, I am going to read.’ Did he have a Kindle, too? No, he had Braille.
There is a superb confrontation in a darkened cellar where the blind man has the edge, and it is staged and directed with real suspense. Fortunately for the Eddie the Nasties have been knocking each other off to reduce the budget so he does not have to deal all of them at once. Meanwhile Friday shows off his canine athletic ability racing here and there, completing a crossword puzzle on the run. It all comes good in The End.
A second was made but it, too, had a cool reception, perhaps there were too many blind men coming home for the war for it to be diverting. There is a large ensemble cast on show here and many went on to bigger and better things, including Rosemary de Camp, John Emery, Ann Harding, Steven Geray, Stephen McNally, and Barry Nelson in addition to those named above.
But the biggest name is director Fred Zinnemann whose list of subsequent credits runs to: ’Member of the Wedding’ (1952), ‘High Noon’ (1952), ‘From Here to Eternity’ (1953), ‘A Hatful of Rain’ (1957), ‘Behold a Pale Horse’ (1964), ‘A Man for All Seasons’ (1966), and more.
8 November, the old news is best.
392 Emperor Theodosius of Rome banned all pagan worship in the empire in favour of Christianity. Christians celebrated by murdering pagans.
1519 Henán Cortés met Aztec emperor Montezuma in Mexico City. It turned sour soon enough, chocolate or no chocolate. We have been there and hope to see Montezuma’s feather cape in Vienna sometime.
1602 The Bodleian Library at Oxford University opened. Thomas Bodley, a graduate of Merton College, had married a wealthy woman and when she died, he offered to rebuild the library at Oxford University which had suffered during the English Civil War. Both the collection and the building had been sacked by soldiers of the battling armies of Christians. There was a time when readers had to purchase a copy of the catalogue to use the library. Been there.
1895 In Wurzburg Germany, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen observed X-rays which made the invisible visible. X-Rays were used within two years to locate bullets for surgeons. The ‘X’ meant the source of the radiation was unknown at the time. Had a few.
1946 Nova Scotia, Viola Desmond refused to leave a whites-only area in a movie theatre. She was jailed, convicted, and fined. Unlike Rosa Parks, Desmond had no organised support and went it alone. Her likeness now graces the $C 10 bill. Nova Scotia had been a terminus for the underground railroad that transported runaway slaves north.
7 November
1512 In a regime change Niccolò Machiavelli was dismissed from the Republican chancellory by the acolytes of the de’ Medici family. Most of the conventional wisdom, some propounded by the man himself, about Machia is erroneous. See below for details.
1916 Jeannette Rankin from Montana became the first woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. A lifelong pacifist she was the only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. That ended her political career. She was crucified by the press apart from stalwart William Allan White of the ‘Emporia Gazette’ who recognised her moral courage to stand by her convictions even in these circumstances. She had likewise voted against the declaration of World War I in 1917 along with a hundred others, all men.
1929 The Museum of Modern Art opened in NYC in the building pictured. Rockefeller money made it happen. Been there.
1990 Máire Bean Mhic Róibín became the first woman elected President of the Republic of Ireland, that is Mary Robinson. She started out in the Dublin city council in 1979 and kept going. Saw her give a keynote address at a conference in D.C. once upon a time.
2012 Voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington approved measures for same-sex marriage. Hey, what happened in Minnesota?
‘X the Unknown’ (1956)
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 24 minutes, rated 6.2 by 2,242 cinematizens
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: A known unknown, to quote Donald Rumsfeld. with whom I once crossed a street in D.C.
A British Army unit practices detecting and securing radium watches on a mired, desolate beach. These are national servicemen who are none too keen on this damp, wet, and muddy duty so they slack off. Then one of them gets burned to a crisp. Now that might stimulate some attention, but no they continue to smoke, rest, and generally act by film extras. More crispy critters are on the menu.
Turns out the practice radium has lured a radium eating blob from deep within the screen writer’s imagination to the surface.
Officialdom reacts according to the McKinsey management manual by denying reality, by blaming the victim(s), by minimising the loss, by claiming pilot error, by blaming Hillary and so on. But the plot must thicken to make a movie. Nearby is a nuclear research centre and also a nuclear power station, plus all those radium dials on watches that were fashionable at the time. In short, it is a picnic ground for the blob from the deep whose appetite has been stimulated.
A couple of adventuresome boys are toasted and the parents blame science, not stupidity. Got it.
Rumpole arrives to investigate and seeks out Baldy, who gets all serious. Baldy is the American import straight from Jefferson High School where he used to supervise Mr Novak. Baldy and Rumpole team up and tame the blob with some mumbo-jumbo, aka science. Blob retreats but will it come again, and what was it anyway? X as above.
The pace is snappy. The atmosphere is effective. The blob is largely unseen and all the more menacing for that. Baldy is authoritative without being arrogant. Rumpole is persistent without being obnoxious, contrary to the current rule of Hollywood.
The tagline on the poster above is ‘It can kill but cannot be killed.’ Why did I think of McKinsey management training sessions? Is this another unknown? Dunno.
Steve McQueen must have gotten a few tips from this picture when he encountered his own blob.
The screenplay was originally intended to continue Hammer Films run of success with Professor Quatermass. However, Nigel Kneale, who owned the copyright to Quatermass, would not relinquish it, i.e., not enough dosh was on offer, and so Baldy was re-named.
As is sometimes the case, there is more drama behind the camera than in front of it. Hammer had hired Jospeh Losey to direct.
He went on to do many superb films like ‘The Servant’ (1963), ‘The Go Between (1971), ‘Mr Klein’ (1976), and many more.
However, Baldy refused to work with Losey. Losey had escaped the monster that roamed 1950s Hollywood, HUAC, while Baldy was a 100% Moron who would have nothing to do with this pinko. Either he goes or I go, he is supposed to have said. The producers made the wrong call and kept Baldy.
They got lucky though because Leslie Norman did a fine job of filling in as director at short notice. He went on to be a regular with ‘The Avengers.’ The screenplay by Jimmy Sangster is low-key and lets the action carry the story. There is no exposition. No effort to make anyone sympathetic with a boring backstory. He cranked out many a story for Hammer over the years.
5 November has quite a history.
1605 The Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes failed. The plot was to displace King James I with a Catholic and annihilate protestants. He had twenty barrels of gun powder in the cellars under parliament where the king was scheduled to appear.
1872 Susan B Anthony was arrested in Rochester, New York for voting for U S Grant in a presidential election. She refused to pay a fine and the court declined to take any further action. She was a tireless campaigner for womens suffrage.
1893 Twenty-year-old Willa Cather began publishing a column called ‘As you like it,’ in the Nebraska State Journal of Lincoln. She loved the Great Plains and its peoples, new and old, and more.
We have made pilgrimage to Red Cloud more than once.
1935 Parker Brothers company launched Monopoly, a game of real estate and capitalism at the height of the Great Depression. Played many a game of that.
1956 The ABC’s first television broadcast. JD was still reading the news to me in 1974.
6 November has some old news.
1572 A supernova (SN1572) was observed in the constellation now known as Cassiopeia. Many observed it including Tycho Brahe in Denmark. He was not the first to see it but his measurements and analysis were the most precise and comprehensive. We went to a planetarium named for him in Copenhagen and saw his observation tower in Prague, too.
1917 The Bolshevik launched a coup d’etat against the Kerensky government in the Winter Palace, now know as the Hermitage. They entered the white dining room at 2:10 AM to arrest the remnant of the provisional government cabinet. Kerensky had left to mobilise loyal troops and kept going. I heard him give a talk as an undergraduate. We have shuffled through this room and down the stairs the Bolsheviks came up.
1867 The Canadian House of Commons met for the first time with Conservative John A MacDonald as Prime Minister.
1870 Louisa Ann Swain in Laramie Wyoming became the first woman to cast a vote in a federal election. In 2008 Congress designated 6 November as Louisa Swain Day. We have been to Laramie but in our ignorance we did not see this statue in front of the Women’s History House.
1962 UN General Assembly voted to condemn South African apartheid and called on member states to boycott it.
1999 Australians voted against becoming a republic in a national referendum. Only in the Never-Never Land of the ACT did the republic secure a majority. It was a dreary campaign in which the self-styled Republicans vied with each other for the spoils of the victory they assumed, rather than working for it. That is, individuals modestly put themselves forward as the president of a future republic, including some known to me personally. Yuck.
