There is a famous Israeli singer called Shlomi Shabat. I have jocularly named him for years Placido Domingo since [Shlomi] means peaceful (from shalom, ‘peace’) and [shabat] is Sabbath (the Jews’ Sunday). Placido Domingo is Spanish for ‘peaceful Sunday.’
— Ghil’ad Zuckermann, in Word Ways 32:1, February 1999
In 1978, two luminaries of South Korean cinema were abducted by Kim Jong-Il and forced to make films in North Korea in an outlandish plan to improve his country’s fortunes. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of Choi Eun-Hee and Shin Sang-Ok and their dramatic efforts to escape their captors.
We’ll also examine Napoleon’s wallpaper and puzzle over an abandoned construction.
In John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33”, the performer is instructed not to play his instrument.
American music critic Kyle Gann discovered this 1932 cartoon in The Etude, a magazine for pianists.
The cartoonist’s name, remarkably, is Hy Cage.
One last Wizard of Oz anecdote: Buddy Ebsen was originally cast as the Tin Man, but nine days into production he was in Good Samaritan Hospital with blue skin and labored breathing. He’d spent four weeks in rehearsal, where, after many makeup tests, they had powdered aluminum dust onto his face and head. “One night, after dinner, I took a breath and nothing happened. They got an ambulance and had me down to Good Samaritan for a couple of weeks. My lungs were coated with that aluminum dust they had been powdering on my face.” Apparently it had caused an allergic reaction.
After two weeks of waiting, producer Mervyn LeRoy replaced Ebsen with Jack Haley, who was not told what had happened, though the makeup was adapted to a paste. Haley wasn’t even asked if he wanted to play the part — 20th Century Fox simply loaned him to MGM. “The type of contract I had, I had to respond to their commands. I had no choice. I was under contract, and they could lend me to any studio. It was the most awful work, the most horrendous job in the world with those cumbersome uniforms and the hours of makeup, but I had no choice.”
(From Aljean Harmetz, The Making of The Wizard of Oz, 1977.)
Margaret Hamilton on the Wicked Witch of the West:
[There was] a feeling inside that you get. One word: skulduggery. She enjoyed every single minute of whatever she was doing, whether she was screaming or yelling about the fact that Dorothy had those slippers, or sending the monkeys after them all. And the other thing was her utter and complete frustration. She never got what she wanted. She didn’t want Dorothy and she didn’t want any of those other characters. She just wanted those slippers. And today, according to law, she probably would have had them. They were her sister’s, and she would have been in line to inherit them. But she didn’t get there fast enough.
(From Aljean Harmetz, The Making of The Wizard of Oz, 1977.)
belute
v. to cover with mud or dirt
lutose
adj. covered with mud
squage
v. to dirty with handling
Every regulation major league baseball, roughly 240,000 per season, is rubbed with “magic mud” from a single source, a tributary of the Delaware River. It’s harvested by a single man, 62-year-old Jim Bintliff, who keeps the precise location secret even from Major League Baseball.
“I know the mud,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I’m the only one on the planet who does.”
(Thanks, Peter.)
Japanese racehorse Haru Urara became “the shining star of losers everywhere” when she racked up a record of 0 wins and 113 losses in the early 2000s. In the face of a national recession, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said, “The horse is a good example of not giving up in the face of defeat.” For the horse’s 106th race, Japan’s premier jockey, Yutaka Take, was brought in to ride her. She placed 10th out of 11.
British Thoroughbred Quixall Crossett ran to 103 consecutive defeats in the 1990s. Assistant trainer Geoff Sanderson said, “He got the most tremendous cheer you’ve ever heard on a race course. … The horse doesn’t know he gets beat because he gets a bigger cheer than the winner.”
American Thoroughbred Zippy Chippy retired in 2010 with a lifetime record of 0 wins in 100 starts, though he did once outrun a minor league baseball player. Racing historian Tom Gilcoyne said the horse “hasn’t done anything to harm the sport. But it’s a little bit like looking at the recorded performances of all horse races through the wrong end of the telescope.”
I find this hard to believe. In Creature From the Black Lagoon, there’s a scene in which the creature attacks Whit Bissell and he hits it with a lantern. Wreathed in flames, it dives into the water. Ben Chapman, who played the creature, says that he was never set afire for the scene: “It was just going through the motions where he hits me and I start patting myself like I’m on fire and dive off. Then they bring a stunt double in. He would watch the film and the way I’m moving. When he did it he had an asbestos suit on. When it was time, they lit [the suit] and he went through the motions putting out the flames and dive off. They took that and superimposed it over me.”
John Johnson confirms this in Cheap Tricks and Class Acts, his history of the special effects of 1950s monster movies: “Chapman was never actually set on fire … either onboard the ship or as he jumped into the water. What the effects team did was to superimpose footage of Al Wyatt, a specialist in fire stunts, directly over Chapman. Wyatt, wearing an asbestos suit, roughly imitated the movements of Chapman. Only the fire on Wyatt’s suit was superimposed over the Chapman footage.”
Chapman says, “Next time you watch the movie, when you get to that scene, hit the remote button to make it slow, you can see that the flames are superimposed on top of me. The burning comes from inside out. When it is superimposed they lay it on top of you and if you look very closely you can see I’m not on fire and that it’s superimposed. Rock Hudson’s double did that because Rock and I were good friends. As a matter of fact, Rock and I were the same identical size.”
Johnson calls this “[p]erhaps the most undetectable example of superimposure seen during the fifties monster craze.”
On Aug. 7, 1905, magician David Devant premiered an effect that had occurred to him in a dream: A woman appears to vanish instantaneously from a bare stage.
Devant left behind a description of only 310 words explaining how he’d accomplished the illusion. He called it “the best I have ever done.” The lady descends into the floor, leaving behind the dress, supported by a tube covered with black velvet. The dress is pumped full of oil fog, and at the critical instant it’s whisked down through the tube, leaving (apparently) nothing but smoke hanging in the air.
The brief, blurry advertisement above, for Doug Henning’s 1983 Broadway musical Merlin, appears to be the only video online of this illusion. That’s a shame; it would be wonderful to see it more clearly. Devant’s partner John Nevil Maskelyne called it the “trickiest trick he had ever seen.”
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