“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” — Thomas Edison
Ouch
From Hand Shadows to Be Thrown Upon the Wall, by Henry Bursill (1859).
“I Am Alone Without You”
A letter written by physicist Richard Feynman to his dead wife, Arline, Oct. 17, 1946:
D’Arline,
I adore you, sweetheart … It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you – almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and what I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you.
I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead – but I still want to comfort and take care of you – and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you – I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together – or learn Chinese – or getting a movie projector.
Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures. When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried.
Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true – you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else – but I want to stand there.
I’ll bet that you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I – I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls … and I don’t want to remain alone – but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.
My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead,
Rich.
At the end he wrote, “PS Please excuse my not mailing this – but I don’t know your new address.”
In a Word
mumpsimus
n. a view stubbornly held even when shown to be wrong
Screen Gems
Great reviews of bad movies:
- Freddy Got Fingered (2001): “This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels. … The day may come when Freddy Got Fingered is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny.”
- Frogs for Snakes (1999): “I was reminded of Mad Dog Time (1996), another movie in which well-known actors engaged in laughable dialogue while shooting one another. Of that one, I wrote: ‘Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.’ Now comes Frogs for Snakes, the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of Mad Dog Time.”
- Batman & Robin (1997): “For those of you who were scared away by the abysmal reviews of Batman & Robin, let me lay to rest some of the prejudices you might have about the film. It’s not the worst movie ever. No, indeed. It’s the worst thing ever. Yes, it’s the single worst thing that we as human beings have ever produced in recorded history.”
Of North (1994), Roger Ebert wrote: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it … one of the worst movies ever made.”
Bit Players
Short actors:
- Sylvester Stallone: 5’7″
- Tom Cruise: 5’7″
- Al Pacino: 5’7″
- Richard Dreyfus: 5’5″
- Dustin Hoffman: 5’5″
- Danny DeVito: 5’0″
- Linda Hunt: 4’9″
Stature doesn’t equal talent. Asked for advice on acting, John Wayne (6’4″) said, “Talk low, talk slow, and don’t talk too much.”
Project Habbakuk
During World War II, Lord Mountbatten and Geoffrey Pyke approached Winston Churchill with a novel plan to reach German U-boats in the mid-Atlantic, where land-based planes couldn’t reach them. They wanted to build an aircraft carrier out of solid ice.
It sounds crazy today, but if they’d gone through with it Project Habbakuk might well have lived up to its biblical billing (“be utterly amazed, for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told”). Mountbatten and Pike planned to assemble 280,000 blocks of ice into a ship 600 meters long, with a displacement of 2 million tons (today’s Nimitz-class carriers are 333 meters long and displace 100,000 tons). It would carry electric motors, anti-aircraft guns, an airstrip, and a refrigeration unit to keep everything from melting.
Pro: It would be practically unsinkable.
Con: It would take 8,000 people eight months to build it, at a cost of $70 million.
In the end they made a little prototype in Alberta, but the project never got any further. Still, it’s a credit to Churchill that he even considered such an outlandish idea. “Personally I’m always ready to learn,” he once said, “although I do not always like being taught.”
A Player to Be Named Later
Some of the busiest people in show business don’t exist:
- The name George Spelvin is traditionally used in American theater programs when an actor’s name would otherwise appear twice.
- In the London theater, Walter Plinge gets the credit when a part has not been cast.
- On BBC television dramas in the 1970s, David Agnew was credited when contractual reasons prevented a writer’s name from being used.
- When a Hollywood director no longer wants credit for a film, the name Alan Smithee is used.
That last one is such an open secret — “Smithee” even directed a Whitney Houston video — that the Directors Guild finally abandoned it in favor of random pseudonyms, starting with the 2000 James Spader bomb Supernova, directed by “Thomas Lee” (Walter Hill).
Screaming at the Ants
Euphemisms for vomiting:
- Un-eating
- Number three
- Vector-spewing
- Launching lunch
- Jackson Pollock
- Eating backwards
- Parking the tiger
- Making a crustless pizza
- Bringing it up for a vote
- Cooking up a pavement pizza
- Driving the Buick to Europe
- Alan’s psychedelic breakfast
- Yawning for the hearing impaired
- Yodelling to the porcelain megaphone
- Talking to God on the big white telephone
- Paying homage to the Irishman Huey O’Rourke
- Calling Huey (or Ralph) on the commode-a-phone
Also: horking, yakking, yarfing, yorxing. “Grasp the subject,” wrote Cato, “the words will follow.”
Sand Castle
One by one, the simple amusements of my youth are being co-opted by geeks and refined into punishing sciences.
Only purists, for example, still build sand castles with shovels and hand packing. The vanguard have recruited all the tools of modern engineering, including building forms and heavy machinery.
Guinness started recording the world’s longest sand sculptures in 1987, and that spawned even greater creativity — and competitiveness. In 1998 Dave Henderson built a 33-foot castle at the New York State Fairgrounds that weighed 412 tons. Not to be outdone, other artists started turning out likenesses of Einstein, life-size pickup trucks, and a rather creditable Eeyore.
Today, at a championship competition, you might find works inspired by Picasso and dream imagery.
Where will it end? With a giant bucket and enough water, we could build a giant ziggurat in the Sahara. And there’s no danger from high tide …