Minus the odd cache that was buried for safety and never dug up.
Sorry if I’m repeating - During the gold rush, Stockton (CA) used to be one of the places that prospectors and panners would visit to buy supplies and do some drinking. Some would bury their small sacks of gold nuggets and flakes before coming into town.
I’m trying to remember which decade it was that the folks digging to install a sewer or storm drain line unearthed an old cache next to Mormon Slough. It was spread around before it was noticed. Half the town came out to try their luck at panning gold out of the slough. According to the newspapers, folks who had no gold pans made do. Bedpans and parts of clothes washers were mentioned. People going past by railroad would crowd the windows to see the sight.
One or more boys decided to make things more exciting. They got some brass turnings from a bicycle shop and seeded them up and down the slough. Proof that trolls are not a new thing.
IIRC my reading of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Court of the Red Tsar, Stalin’s inner circle had a nickname for Malenkov (who was briefly in the top leadership after Stalin’s death). They called him Melania.
I was just looking at a timezone map and discovered that Australia is a strange place indeed. The 4 eastern states are on GMT+10, which also includes Papua New Guinea, some smaller islands and part of Russia, including Vladivostok. The 2 central states, though, are on GMT+9:30, for reasons I cannot immediately suss. Western Australia is 90 minutes earlier, on GMT+8 – except for a small sliver down south, in the Nullabor area, which is GMT+8:45.
Is your puzzlement over why the central zone is 30’ out instead of an hour? That’s because almost all the population there is at the very eastern edge of the central state South Australia. It also covers the NSW town of Broken Hill, because is is much closer to the SA capital Adelaide than to Sydney.
That’s the tiny town of Eucla, which is near the WA/SA border and so a LONG way from either Adelaide or Perth.
China is even weirder in the opposite way - the whole country is (officially) on the same timezone, despite being roughly as wide as the US or Australia.
True, but the western half of China is very sparsely populated:
The government probably considers it more practical to just brush off the needs of the annexed minority in the west. The eastern half probably should be two time zones, but the government must feel that would be too complicated.
I once taught a class in China, and was talking to some locals about it. They said that people in the eastern provinces didn’t like the sun rising at 11am, although I don’t quite understand why. It’s just a number on the clock.
Time zones were developed in order to keep the trains running smoothly. Railroads originally were each on their own clock, usually based on the time at HQ, which made coördinating various carriers so as to avoid collisions particularly difficult. Creating fixed time zones reduced these problems considerably.
Right. Sure, some people will start their days with sunrise at 0600, others at 1100, and others at 1600, but so what? And what’s the definition of noon anyway? If it’s meant to represent when the sun is at the highest point in the sky, it very rarely represents that anyway.
TIL about the decades-long feud between cartoonist Ham Fisher (Joe Palooka) and Al Capp (Li’lAbner).
Capp got his start ghosting for Fisher on Joe Palooka in the 1930s. Capp claimed one storyline he created for the strip was a big dumb hillbilly named Big Leviticus. When Capp finally moved on and created Li’l Abner strip in 1934, Fisher claimed Capp had stolen his idea. As Capp’s strip eclipsed Fisher’s in popularity, he became more obsessed with the perceived injustice. In reprisal(besides badmouthing Capp to any cartoonist who could bare to listen) Fisher started to feature his hillbilly characters as the “Original Hillbillies” with warnings not to be “fooled by imitators”. Fisher also poached three of Capp’s assistants.
Capp retaliated with jabs at Fisher in his own strip like when he named a race horse “Ham’s Nose Bob” after Fisher had undergone rhinoplasty. Then, in 1950 things got really personal when Capp penned an article for The Atlantic called “I Remember Monster” about an unnamed tyrant he once worked for. “From my study of this one li’l man,” Capp wrote, “I have been able to create an entire gallery of horrors. For instance, when I must create a character who is the ultimate in cheapness, I don’t, like less fortunate cartoonists, have to rack my brain wondering what real, bottom-of-the-barrel cheapness is like.”
Everybody in the small world of cartooning knew he was writing about Fisher. Infuriated, Fisher anonymously sent cropped (“out of context”) and (some say) doctored Li’l Abner strips implying pornographic innuendo to one of the government commissions investigating any connections between comics and juvenile delinquency. Like the Atlantic article, nobody in the cartooning world had any doubt who the anonymous person was.
In 1954 when Capp was applying for a license from broadcasting a TV version of his strip, the FCC received a package containing more supposedly pornographic Li’l Abner panels. The cartoonist community had had enough and convened the National Cartoonist Society (a group Fisher co-founded) to begin ethics hearings. Fisher was expelled from the NCS for “conduct unbecoming a cartoonist”.
Shortly after, Fisher committed suicide.
Al Capp would routinely cite the suicide as one of his proudest accomplishments.
Suicide is Painless was the theme song for the movie and television series. There are three versions. The theme to the movie, a version with different lyrics in the movie itself and an instrumental version for the TV series.
Robert Altman’s son made more money from Mash than Altman did from directing it. His son wrote the movie lyrics and got residuals from the TV show, even though the theme was an instrumental.
Today I learned purple isn’t a “real” color: it is a combination of red and blue, which are on the opposite ends of the EM visible spectrum. By contrast, violet is a “real” color, since it is defined at a particular wavelength.
(I put “real” in quotes since it may or may not be “real” depending on your definition of the word.)
