The Big Carnival (Ace In The Hole)
Mark Evanier's News">http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2007_01_21.html#012795">News From ME points us to Wednesday's TCM broadcast of Billy Wilder's The Big Carnival. Why should you care? It's about as cynical a meditation on media manipulation as you're likely to see—and it is rarely shown. Paramount hated it (and its floppo status) so much that it deducted its Big Carnival losses from Wilder's Stalag 17 profits.
The Biggest Man on the Field
Thomas E. Witte tells the story of an amazing photograph—and an even more amazing athlete.
The Biggest Thing in Physics
The race to discover the Higgs boson. What's that you say? "It is what determines if a particle can glide along effortlessly like a photon or if it must trudge like a hefty proton."
The Biology of B-Movie Monsters
Being big isn't simple. "Absolute size cannot be treated in isolation; size per se affects almost every aspect of an organism's biology. Indeed, the effects of size on biology are sufficiently pervasive and the study of these effects sufficiently rich in biological insight that the field has earned a name of its own: 'scaling.'"
The Biology of B-Movie Monsters
It really wasn't the planes that killed him, you know.
The Birth of the Album Cover
In the dawn of the record era, album covers were based on the covers of photographic albums. Then Alex Steinweiss proposed to Columbia that it "embellish the 78 RPM record albums (covers) with original artwork (drawings and paintings)." An art form—and an industry—was born.
The Blimp, The Blimp!
I'm fascinated by blimps. I've also always wondered why they weren't used more for hauling cargo, especially stuff that didn't fit neatly into road-width containers. National Geographic says I'm not the only one.
The Book on the Peloponnesian War You'll Want to Read
If you're like me, it might seem in retrospect that you spent longer laboring over Thucydides than it took Athens and Sparta to fight the dang thing.
The Box That Changed the World
You're thinking television, right? Nope, it's the shipping container.
The Boy Who Cried Freebird
Mitch Myers' book, The Boy Who Cried Freebird:
Rock and Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling, is a lovely thing. He mixes essays, short stories, tall tales, and interviews about rock to get to the core of what it is to be a music geek. "Don't compare me to that guy in High Fidelity," he says. "That dude wasted all his time organizing his collection in some kind of chronological order—everybody knows that you should file your albums by genre."
Rock and Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling, is a lovely thing. He mixes essays, short stories, tall tales, and interviews about rock to get to the core of what it is to be a music geek. "Don't compare me to that guy in High Fidelity," he says. "That dude wasted all his time organizing his collection in some kind of chronological order—everybody knows that you should file your albums by genre."