Month: October 2016

After finding success with their marshmallow-infused Lucky Charms in the late 1960s, the cereal think tank at General Mills believed they had discovered the next great evolution in processed breakfast: Something so rich in chocolate flavor that it would turn a bowl of milk into mud.

The as-yet-unnamed cereal was developed at the same time as a similar marshmallow and grain concept that used a strawberry flavor. The company wanted to debut them at the same time and asked their advertising agency, Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, to come up with a commercial campaign that would personify the products in the same way Tony the Tiger and the Rice Krispies trio had become grocery aisle celebrities.

“My boss, Tony Jaffe, gave me the assignment,” Laura Levine, a former copywriter for the agency, tells mental_floss. “At the time, Cap’n Crunch was very popular, and Tony wanted something funny.”

It was 1969, and Levine had just been hired by Jaffe. Because there wasn’t yet a free office, she worked at a desk in the secretary’s area, coming up with—and often crossing out—a list of possible duos that could represent both cereals while playing off one another in commercial spots.

Levine doesn’t remember what suggestions she gave Jaffe other than the two he focused on: parodies of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, which Levine had dubbed Count Chocula and Franken Berry, respectively.

“The whole concept was monsters, but monsters who were scaredy cats,” she says. “They’d act tough, and then they’d be terrified by the sight of a little kitten.”

Jaffe brought the concept to General Mills, which had an enthusiastic response. Since late movies had started appearing on television, the Universal horror film monsters had become familiar to a new generation of fans, who embraced merchandise like Aurora model kits and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

Levine, illustrator George Cern, and animators Bill Tollis and Bill Melendez defanged them further, making them look and sound kid friendly. Still, Levine recalls that General Mills took nearly two years to refine her scripts, deliberating on wording and design before the cereals made their debut in March of 1971.

The products were an immediate hit: General Mills added Fruity Yummy Mummy, Boo Berry, and Fruit Brute in short order. But the “Monster Cereals,” as they came to be called, had more problems than their questionable nutrition.

In 1972, the press delighted in reporting some gastronomic difficulties suffered by children who ingested the red dye used in Franken Berry. While harmless, it had a tendency to turn their stool pink or red, leading anxious parents to believe their child might be suffering internal bleeding.

In 1972, the journal Pediatrics published a case study that dubbed the condition “Franken Berry stool.” After being hospitalized for four days with suspected rectal hemorrhaging, a boy was found to have been enjoying the cereal in the days prior. Physicians realized it was the culprit.

In 1987, with everyone’s bowels in order, the company came under fire once again when a commemorative cereal box featuring actor Bela Legosi as Dracula was perceived by some to feature the Star of David. Jewish groups protested, offended that a piece of religious iconography was adorning a vampire. General Mills apologized but didn’t recall the 4 million boxes that had been shipped.

 
Despite the occasional misstep—fans also cried foul when the company briefly made Chocula a live-action character in a vaguely disturbing ad—the cereals have become special attractions for Halloween. Since 2010, a rotation of horror mascots are distributed to stores in the fall, feeding the demand of nostalgic fans. Some even hoard boxes to resell on eBay; a man in Fort Collins, Colorado who made an unauthorized Chocula craft beer nearly emptied out his town’s supply.

Although Levine had moved on to another agency just before the cereals hit shelves, she’s happy to be the originator of a character that has been a beloved cereal mascot for 45 years—and she’s not the only one. “It comes up often,” she says. “I do the New York Times crossword every day and remember being very excited when Count Chocula was one of the answers.”

But with the cereals both a regional and seasonal affair, she doesn’t often come across them at home. “In Los Angeles, I don’t ever see them.”

During last night’s debate, in an exchange on the topic of immigration, Donald Trump said, “We have some bad hombres here and we need to get them out.” The phrase bad hombres immediately became a hashtag on Twitter and the source of jokes all over the internet.

But there was some confusion about the word hombre, as shown by the report of a spike in lookups of the word ombre. Hombre is the Spanish word for “man,” and according to Merriam-Webster, has been used in English in the phrase bad hombre since the 19th century. Ombre, from the French for “shaded” (and related to the words umbrella and umbrage), is a term for a shading of colors from light into dark, currently popular for a type of shaded dye hairstyle.

As Merriam-Webster editor Kory Stamper explains in the Washington Post, “we seek out words that catch us by the ears.” Hombre is an unusual and noticeable word to use in a presidential debate, and people were drawn to find out more about it. But that silent h makes it harder to look up if you’ve never seen it before. Hopefully everyone eventually found what they were looking for. Or perhaps they simply agreed that we need to get out the bad ombres, as shown in this tweet from Andrés Almeida:

Bad ombres pic.twitter.com/1iiHOtg8yi

— Andrés Almeida (@andresdavid) October 20, 2016

Today self-proclaimed psychics tend to get a bad rap, but during the late 19th and early 20th centuries they enjoyed celebrity status. Whether the medium performed at home or on stage, the chance to see them summon disembodied hands, decipher otherworldly messages, and belch up ectoplasm was considered quality entertainment back in the day. These so-called communions with the dead have since generally been debunked as clever parlor tricks (thanks to skeptics like Harry Houdini). But knowing the behind-the-scenes secrets of séances doesn’t make them sound any less entertaining.

1. SPIRIT RAPPING

The famous Fox sisters had spirit rapping to thank for their careers. After their mother heard mysterious knocks coming from the walls and furniture of their home, she concluded the noise was metaphysical in nature. The Fox girls were indeed responsible for the rapping, but the source was actually apples they had tied with string and bounced against the floor of their bedroom.

The sisters used this concept as the basis for their medium act. During séances, they would recite the alphabet and pretend to wait for spirits to slowly spell out messages. The “ghosts” they corresponded with weren’t really ghosts at all, nor were they apples. Rather, the girls produced the sounds themselves by manipulating the joints in their knuckles and toes.

After relying on the trick for decades, one of the sisters decided to reveal her fraud to a live audience by banging her bare toe against a wooden stool to show them how it was done. The New York Herald wrote, “There stood a black-robed, sharp-faced widow working her big toe and solemnly declaring that it was in this way she created the excitement that has driven so many persons to suicide or insanity. One moment it was ludicrous, the next it was weird.”

2. MANIFESTATION CABINETS

After first appearing on the séance scene in the 1850s, manifestation cabinets, or spirit cabinets, soon became a staple of the genre. Mediums would enter the cabinets (often curtained-off sections of stage) with their hands bound to prevent them from faking any paranormal activity. To gain the full trust of the audience, they sometimes invited spectators to come on stage and tie the ropes to their liking. Once the curtains were drawn and the lights were extinguished, all sorts of spooky mayhem took place. Hands poked out from between the drapes, ghostly figures materialized, and instruments left on the floor of the cabinet started to play themselves. At the end of the scene the curtains parted to reveal the medium tied up just as they were left.

This was a convincing trick in its time, and all it required was a little escape artistry to pull off. The medium would slip their bonds as soon as they were out of sight, freeing their hands to stand in for the rambunctious spirits. Meanwhile, accomplices would wait for the lights to go out to slip in through trap doors elsewhere on stage. As long as the ropes were refastened before the trick’s conclusion, the audience was never the wiser.

3. SPIRIT SLATES

As an alternative to the tedious task of spelling out messages one letter at a time via ouija board, mediums often used slates that spirits could supposedly write on themselves. Séance participants were given a pair of black slates and told to jot down their messages to the deceased on a slip of paper that was then sandwiched between the boards. Once the slabs were bound together, the medium would hold them to the sitter’s head, shoulder, or perhaps hang them from the chandelier for a few moments while waiting for the spirit convey their thoughts. After finally separating the slates, a mystical message would be revealed inside.

There were a few ways for mediums to pull off this sham, one of which involved a strategically placed square of cardboard. A black sheet cut to the exact size and shape of the slate would be laid inside the frame, hiding the pre-written message beneath it. When it came time to take apart the two slates the medium lifted up the prepared cardboard off the top and left the flap to cover the blank slate on the bottom. The extra slate was quickly brushed away, with the note from the great beyond providing a convenient distraction.

4. ECTOPLASM

On occasion, lucky séance participants were treated to the sight of ectoplasm oozing from their mediums. The gauzy substance was said to be part of the supernatural veil separating the spiritual realm from the physical one. The trick required near-darkness or else, according to mediums, the ectoplasm would disintegrate. Once the conduit reached a trance-like state, various orifices would secrete the material, signaling a breach between worlds.

One of the mediums best known for this phenomenon was Marthe Beraud (also known as Eva C. and Eva Carrière). Instead of extruding ghostly goo through her mouth, nose, and ears, she stuffed them with muslin or a similar fabric. She sometimes added photos clipped out from newspapers to give the ectoplasm a bit of personality. This signature touch ended up being her downfall: The faces she used (which included those of actress Mona Delza, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, and Woodrow Wilson) were eventually recognized, exposing her deception.

5. SPIRIT TRUMPETS

One of the most unusual accessories to come out of the spiritualism craze was the spirit trumpet. Without context, the instrument more closely resembles a cheap telescope than a tool for communicating with the dead. Such contraptions were believed to amplify the whispers of spirits and could produce sounds when the medium was nowhere near it. Of course the medium was behind every murmur: A rubber hose connecting the trumpet on stage to a manifestation cabinet could be threaded beneath the carpet, allowing the out-of-sight psychic to provide the vocals. More outrageous accounts of trumpets floating “around the room in a bright light, tapping the sitters on the head, talking and going through a whole lot of strange maneuvers without any assistance from mortals,” have been spread in the past. In the 1903 book Mysteries of the Séance and Tricks and Traps of Bogus Mediums, the author advises readers who’ve heard of such scenes to “sprinkle a little salt on the tale before you swallow it.”

6. FIRE TESTS

Mediums would sometimes subject themselves to a series of trials to prove their connection to their spiritual realm. One especially convincing trick was the fire test: The mediums in question boasted that a special power given to them by the spirits made them impervious to heat. They backed up this claim by holding hot coals, waving their hands through flames, and performing other feats of pain endurance. The reason they were able to pull this off without screaming in agony boils down to chemistry. A mixture of a few basic components—namely camphor gum, whiskey, quicksilver, and liquid storax—could be used to create a fireproof glove of sorts. But no matter how desperate you are to take your séance to the next level, this is one trick we don’t recommend trying at home.

 
Look up late tonight, October 20, and you will be treated to a veritable fusillade of meteors hurled by the phantom limbs of Halley’s comet. The Orionid meteor shower has been active in the night sky for the past couple of days, and it will continue blasting streaks of light for a few days yet. Tonight, however, is the big night, when the shower peaks and thus puts on the best show. If the sky is clear and the light pollution in your area low, you might catch up to 20 meteors per hour. These numbers might have been better if not for some particularly bright moonlight—the very same moonlight that made last weekend’s super hunter’s moon so spectacular.

If you don’t want to stay up all night, another way to see the best of the Orionid meteor shower is to wake before dawn tomorrow, October 21, when the Earth is still bundled in the blanket of night and the waking world has yet to stir. It’s just you, a dark sky, and the serene thrill of the shooting star.

MYSTERIOUS HALLEY

 
The Orionids are a parting gift from the comet Halley, which visits the Earth every 75 to 76 years. As the comet goes about its orbit, it leaves behind a trail of dust- and sand-sized particles. When the Earth passes through that debris field, those particles slam into our atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles per hour, generating terrific streaks of light as they burn away. So it is with every meteor shower, regardless of origin.

Halley’s Comet might be the most famous object of its kind, and remains one of the best studied. On its last visit, in 1986, nations of the world even sent spacecraft to observe it up close. Though NASA opted to sit that one out, Bob Farquhar, one of the agency’s mission designers, committed a kind of act of space piracy when he sent the ISEE-3 space weather satellite—which had been launched for an entirely different mission—on a wildly complicated trajectory that not only allowed the U.S. to encounter the comet, but to make first contact. When a comet inspires spacecraft theft, you know it’s important.

And yet for all the centuries that we’ve been studying it, the finer points of comet Halley’s orbit remain shrouded in mystery. The problem of calculating its precise orbit is that its internal processes, coupled with the influence of planets and smaller celestial bodies, throw the math off very quickly. The upshot is that the timescale over which the comet’s orbit can be predicted accurately is extremely short.

Earlier this year, however, astronomers from the Netherlands and Scotland conducted the most comprehensive set of calculations ever attempted of comet Halley, and managed to stretch things out a bit, bringing the predictability of the comet to about 300 years. They determined also that the comet’s orbit was most disturbed of late not by Jupiter (whose dominance in the solar system has long made it the most obvious candidate), but rather, by Venus. Don’t cry for Jupiter, however. The solar system’s largest planet will have its way in the 6th millennium CE, when comet Halley will pass extremely close by, and Jupiter’s influence will seize dominance.

WHAT IF IT’S RAINY?

If you want to see the Orionids but live in an area of extreme light pollution, or if the weather overhead is simply not cooperative, you have at least one option. Slooh will be broadcasting the event all through the night on October 20 through the early hours of October 21. If you are fortunate, however, and the sky is clear and the light on the ground dim to nonexistent, find a nice patch of ground before dawn on the 21st, lay out a blanket, let your eyes adjust to the darkness, and wait. No telescopes or binoculars are needed. You’ll have a front row view of the sky as it falls.