I wonder why it took so long to announce when he Wint.
I recently found out that the word tuition also means the information being taught in a class. I was surprised to see the word being used this way in a book I was reading.
Apparently this is the original meaning of the word. When you took a class to learn its tuition, you had to pay the tuition fees. And over time the phrase tuition fees got shortened to just tuition and word acquired its new meaning.
I’m reading a book about a large colony of illustrators, cartoonists, and comic book artists who lived and worked in Fairfield County, CT in the mid-20th Century. Many were alumni of the Art Student League in Manhattan. The first class a budding cartoonist would seek out was anatomical drawing and that class was taught by one George Bridgman.
Bridgman had studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris in the 1880s. Gérôme had been trained by Paul Delaroche, who had been trained by Antoine-Jean Baron Gros, who had been trained by Jacques-Louis David, who had been trained by François Boucher, who had been trained by François Le Moyne— the author’s father, cartoonist John Cullen Murphy (Big Ben Bolt, Prince Valiant) claimed he could likely have pushed that pedigree back to Raphael and Fra Angelico.
By 1960, Bridgman only had one really famous student among the giants of 20th Century Fine Art; Mark Rothko, who isn’t exactly remembered for his depictions of the human body. However, the next step in that pedigree was to be found in the work of Norman Rockwell and a sizable chunk of the funny pages.
I was amazed and amused when I learned a few years ago that in the play for which the music was originally written, “Morning Mood” is not a peaceful meadow scene. It accompanies a scene that finds "Peer Gynt stranded in the Moroccan desert after his companions took his yacht and abandoned him there while he slept. The scene begins with the following description: “Dawn. Acacias and palm trees. Peer [Gynt] is sitting in his tree using a wrenched-off branch to defend himself against a group of monkeys.”
When it was first used in the circus it was ironically. You’d hear the music and expect a bunch of bad ass soldiers marching in synch and then the clowns would all come in acting goofy. Now it’s associated with clowns in our mind and comes across as a silly song.
A jazz piece that was used in a few Warner Bros cartoons as a background to industrial processes is the middle section of Powerhouse by Raymond Scott:
Raymond Scott - Powerhouse [mp3]
Starts at about 1:24
Ha! Of all unlikely places, I discovered that in the mid-1990s on the old “Talk Soup” when they aired a clip of Australian yodeling chanteuse extraordinaire Mary Schneider, who is still alive at 92!
Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, was buried under an apple tree. A couple centuries later, they dug up his grave to move him. He wasn’t there any more. In his place there was a tree root following the alignment of Roger’s body. It bifurcated and both roots turned up at the end. Like legs and feet. The tree ATE Roger Williams. That root is kept in the basement of the Rhode Island Historical Society, but they hate if you ask about it.
I hope the apples from that tree tasted good!
They keep old Rog right next to the TV.
They not only reported on this at the Roadside America website, they made the Williams-devouring tree root into a sort of mascot
(Note picture at bottom of the above webpage)
The “human” resemblance reminds me of the folklore about mandrake roots.
I just learned today that the word “companion” comes from roots meaning “ones who break bread together”. Which should have been obvious; the word roots are right there, but I never noticed it before.
Of all places, I learned that in an episode of the 1960s “Dragnet.”
From Bill Gannon?
Yep. Often in the introductory scene there would be some light-hearted, sometimes bordering on comical, banter from Gannon to Friday.
I remember. I just found two episode starting at 14:30 on fetv.
When my dad wanted to ‘comment’ that someone was in trouble, he’d say, ‘Dum-de-DUM-dummm.’
The title for the Dragnet theme is “Danger Ahead,” composed by Walter Schumann, derived from Miklós Rózsa’s score for 1946 film The Killers.
Or as an early issue of MAD magazine had it:
