February 29, 2004
For such a beastly month
Today 12-year-old Brian Ash of Zeeland, Michigan, is celebrating his third birthday. Brian Ash is a person of a certain distinction; leap day babies are few and far between, a list of celebrities born on leap day demonstrates. Dennis Farina is a character fine actor, and Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld a fine book, but those are pretty slim pickings. All other things being equal, children have roughly a 1 in 1461 chance of being born on Leap Day; I was always faintly disappointed that my father missed by a day (leaving alone that he wasn't born during a leap year). February has been stretched every four years since Roman times, other pieces of calendar reform notwithstanding, but throughout history very little seems to have happened on Leap Day. The Revolutionary calendar proposed by the French in 1793 would fixed this problem by alloting five or six leap days a year, but we all know how that turned out. So Leap Day has its one great champion, an orphan pirate apprentice named Frederic. Being an apprentice, even to those softthearted pirates of Penzance, was no joke; it the primary means by which information about a craft was transmitted. Being an apprentice was an in-between state; neither unskilled nor a master of your trade, at work but not your own man. No wonder apprentices occasionally dabbled in activites to bring "Rabelaisian laughter": pranks, japery, and the Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin. Frederic seems like a good boy, and he was raised by pirates who, with all their faults, loved their queen. Hopefully he never got up to such mischief. Happy thirty-seventh birthday.
February 24, 2004
Crying all the while, Carnival, Carnival, Carnival
Juan Carnaval is about to die. The kings and queens of the San Pedro Carnival have written his will; tomorrow San Pedro will hold a wake, and his brides will weep behind their fishnet veils before removing their widow's weeds and revealing themselves to be men. His will will be read, and he will be burnt, and Carnival will be over until next year. Four hundred years ago, a Flemish painter named Pieter Bruegel, in one of his most Boschian works, celebrated a different sort of celebration of the same holiday and called it The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (larger view). Over a hundred peasants gather around two figures: the hatchet-faced Lent, drawn by a nun and priest and wielding a scourge, and Carnival, fat as a lord and brandishing a roast pig as his weapon. The duel is about to commence.
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February 18, 2004
Premillenial tensions
Upstate New York in the nineteenth century was an unsettled place. The opening of the Erie Canal had brought an economic boom, but also unsettling changes, as the Canal unlocked the west and brought about the first major population migration in the United States towards the wilds of the Northwest Territories. There were other influences keeping things roiling as well; the Erie area was known as "the burnt district" for the number of revivals that took place there during the Second Great Awakening. John Humphrey Noyes founded Oneida, a Christian utopian commune in which the men and women were all considered married to one another. The hints of sexual license around Matthias the Prophet's Mount Zion community had become a major scandal. And just outside Palmyra, New York, Joseph Smith received his first angelic visitations that would eventually lead him to form the Mormon church. Against this backdrop, the religious proclomations of a farmer named William Miller might not have seemed all that noteworthy, were it not for one thing: William Miller had been told by God that the world was in its end days, and he was willing to say exactly when we would all be summoned home.
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February 14, 2004
In a heart-shaped box
In 1477, a Norfolk woman named Margery Brews wrote her fiancé, John Paston, a letter. As the BBC explains it it:
In it, she tells John she has asked her mother to put pressure on her father to increase her dowry, while at the same time saying that, if he loves her, he should be prepared to marry her anyway. It is thought the couple did eventually tie the knot and had two children.
The letter is noteworthy for two reasons. It shows that the concerns of five hundred years ago are in many ways instantly recognizable to modern eyes, and Brews used a particular salutation to address her beloved: "Unto my right well-beloved Valentine." The letter puts to rest any thought that Valentine's Day, like Santa Claus, was a modern creation, something dreamed up by Hallmark to prompt sales. The Romans celebrated springtime's return in early February, and mid-February marked the festival of Lupercalia, in which young men ran the hills of Rome beating women with the strips of goatskin called februa that gave the month its name. (The festival was possibly named after the god Lupercus, but was more likely named after the Lupercal, the cave where tradition said that Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf before founding the Roman state.) The numerous Saints Valentine had absolutely nothing to do with the modern practice of Valentine's Day; tales of him secretely wedding young lovers are a sort of folk etymology. Instead, the date of his feast day (now, like Saint Christopher's, removed from the universal calendar) happened to fall near the old date of Lupercalia. The association with springtime fertility and mid-February continued long after the fall of Rome; Chaucer records in "The Parliament of Fowls" that the parliament "was on seynt Valentynes day, / Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make." By the early nineteenth century, however, celebration of the holiday as a time for human sweethearts had been formalized and commercialized, with pre-made valentines becoming more and more elaborate over the next hundred years. In 1912, Whitman's introduced the Whitman's Sampler (with real crosstitch), and St. Valentine met the chocolate market. Still, for a sense of Valentine's Day's past and present, you could do worse than look at NECCO's candy hearts, still made with the same process used in 1866 (and until recently, made on a factory line that opened in 1927). Back in the day, hearts read "Be Mine", "Kiss Me", "Sweet Talk". Today, those saying are still around, but NECCO has added eternal romantic classics like "Pen Pal" and "Fax Me". Should you want something a bit more ringing, NECCO makes custom runs (if you'll buy a ton and a half of candy hearts), or you can turn to the ACME Heartmaker if your desires are a bit more specialized.
February 11, 2004
Chile in a bowl with burgers and fries
I put on about ten pounds my freshman year of college, and a lot of that was thanks to my regular lunch at Louis' Restaurant (and, in particular, their eggplant parmesian sub with a small fries), a greasy spoon favorite for generations of students. Louis' was then still run by the gnomic perpetually irritated Louis Gianfrancesco, who started it with his brother in the late '40s. That was the heyday of the American diner, before a Mixmaster salesman named Ray Kroc came calling at a hamburger joint in San Bernandino, California, to find out why they were buying so many milkshake machines. The McDonald brothers, Dick and Maurice, told him it was because they sold so many milkshakes and simply wore out the Mixmasters. Kroc listened and got an idea, one which would eventually lead to a grease-powered empire of vast global reach.
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February 05, 2004
Interactive fictions
In the dawn of Internet time, a spelunker and computer programmer named William Crowther was looking for something to do to take his mind off his pending divorce. An avid Dungeons and Dragons fan, Crowther decided to put together a computer game he thought his daughters might enjoy, a fantastic crawl through an underground world loosely based on Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. He wrote a program that accepted commands in broken English -- "GO NORTH", "GET LANTERN" -- and called it Adventure. Adventure, also known as Colossal Cave, was a success with his children; it was also a success with the (then quite small) Internet community. Passed from user to user and computer to computer, it eventually reached Stanford's not-yet-storied SAIL system. In 1976, a SAIL user and game fanatic named Don Woods fell in love, got in touch with Crowther (through the simple and then tolerable expedient of mailing the "crowther" account on every machine on the Internet), and rewrote the game in C. A year later, a handful of MIT Adventure fans wrote a substantially upgraded homage called Zork; when they founded a company named Infocom a few years later and were looking for a product, they reached back to Zork, and the text adventure game was born.
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February 02, 2004
The world's mightiest mortal
Once upon a time, there was a plucky boy reporter for WHIZ radio named Billy Batson. Led by a mysterious dark figure down the abandoned subway tunnel at Slumm Street and Ninth, past grotesques of the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man, to a mysterious cave where the ancient Egyption wizard Shazam awaited him. Sitting on his throne, beneath a stone block hung by a thread, the wizard tells Billy to speak his name and be transformed into Captain Marvel, the world's mightiest mortal! From 1940 until 1953, hundreds of thousands of children enjoyed the wonderfully ridiculous adventures of the "Big Red Cheese", Captain Marvel. A pulp writer of no particular distinction named Otto Binder hit his stride. As Binder took over the writing, things got weirder and weirder. Captain Marvel already had an arch-nemesis, the cackling, bald-pated mad scientist Dr. Sivana (whose appearance was based on a pharmacist in chief artist C.C. Beck's neighborhood), a romantic interest (Sivana's daughter, Beautia, a Betty Grable lookalike) and a similarly superpowered sister, Mary Marvel (who Beck apparently decided to transform into Judy Garland). Binder took things further. Tawky Tawny, the celebrated talking tiger, appeared as a major character; the sports-coated feline was a good friend of Billy's. Black Adam, Captain Marvel's evil counterpart, was the first person given the gift of Shazam, but went evil, as if his name didn't suggest it. (Billy's invocation of Shazam's name gave him the wisdom of Solomon, strength of Hercules, stamina of Atlas, power of Zeus, courage of Achilles, and speed of Mercury; Black Adam relied on distinctly dodgier notables like Shu and Zehoti.) An epic, two-year storyline (in 25 parts!) led Captain Marvel against the sinister Mister Mind, who was in the end revealed to be a superintelligent talking worm. (I can only assume that Stanley Kiesel remembered this when he wrote one of my favorite childhood books.) Beck modelled him on My Three Sons star Fred MacMurray. Although Beck came to have mixed feelings about his most recognized character and denigrated his contributions to the character, the clean, cartoonish feel he mastered made the book instantly recognizable. Captain Marvel's wholesome yet bizarre world was immensely popular, and that led to the downfall that Sivana could never cause.
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