Month: December 2016

Last night, New York City’s Metropolitan Opera premiered an opera composed by a woman. The last time that happened, it was 1903. Here’s the story of the feisty (and eccentric) composer-turned-suffragist who broke that musical glass ceiling 113 years ago.

Hundreds of women were walking by twos and threes down London’s main thoroughfares when the riot erupted on March 1, 1912. At precisely 5:30 p.m., the line of ladies stopped along Westminster’s busiest roads—from Piccadilly to Regent Street—pulled hammers and rocks out of their handbags, and began smashing the windows of shops, department stores, and political offices that opposed a woman’s right to vote. The mass riot, coordinated by the militant suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, had begun.

“Never since plate glass was invented has there been such a smashing and shattering of it as was witnessed this evening when the suffragettes went out on a window-breaking raid in the West End of London,” The New York Times reported the following day. By night’s end, 148 women had been arrested.

Ethel Smyth was one of them. She was jailed for hurling a rock through the window of Lewis Harcourt’s home—Harcourt was an avowed anti-suffragist and the Secretary of the State for the Colonies. When Smyth’s friend, the musician Thomas Beecham, visited her at Holloway Prison, he stumbled upon a remarkable scene: Dozens of suffragettes had rallied together in the prison yard to sing.

Long, long—we in the past / Cowered in dread from the light of heaven / Strong, strong—stand we at last / Fearless in faith and with sight new given. / Strength with its beauty, Life with its duty / (Hear the voice, oh hear and obey!) / These, these—beckon us on! / Open your eyes to the blaze of day.

Above the courtyard, Smyth stood in her jail cell and proudly listened to the women below. They were singing “The March of Women,” a piece she had composed two years earlier as the anthem for the Women’s Social and Political Union. Smyth grabbed a toothbrush, reached her arms beyond the bars of her prison window, and conducted the chorus below.

Few moments define Ethel Smyth better. She was a feisty, and sometimes radical, activist for equality, whether it was in the voting booth or in the male-dominated world of classical music. She was a talented, and fiercely independent, musician—one of England’s most successful turn-of-the-century composers. Not only did she break the glass windows surrounding anti-suffragist politicians, she also cracked the glass ceiling of one of America’s most illustrious concert halls: The Metropolitan Opera.

Ethel Smyth always had a defiant streak. Born in 1858, Smyth grew up in Kent, England, where she hunted, hiked, and mountain climbed. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, she also enjoyed “unladylike” activities such as tennis, golf, and bicycling. (A lot of people freaked out about women riding bicycles back then. Consider this gem from an 1891 Sunday Herald: “I think the most vicious thing I ever saw in all my life is a woman on a bicycle … I had thought that cigarette smoking was the worst thing a woman could do, but I changed my mind.”) The adult Smyth must have been a double whammy: she bicycled and smoked cigars.

However, little is audacious about her musical upbringing. At age 10, she started composing hymns and chants and learned how to play the piano. Her keyboard studies were short-lived. Two years later, she accidentally injured her left hand with a knife, ending her piano career. But it didn’t matter. She was hooked on music. She studied composition throughout her teens and, ignoring the demands of her father, a stern military general, she left home in 1877 for Leipzig, German to study music at the conservatory.

That was short-lived too. Smyth found conservatory life dreary. After one year of school, she left to study privately with the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg. Through that relationship, she met and studied with Johannes Brahms—who for some reason nicknamed her “The Oboe”—and met musical luminaries such as Pytor Tchaikovsky, Edvard Grieg, Antonin Dvořák, and Clara Schumann.

For the next decade, Smyth slowly carved a name for herself in Leipzig by writing lieder (German lyrical poems meant for a solo voice and piano), piano music, and short violin sonatas. In the 1890s, she returned to England and composed what many consider her orchestral masterpiece: “Mass in D.” The playwright Bernard Shaw was fascinated by the piece, later calling it an antidote for sexism. “It was your music that cured me for ever of the old delusion that women could not do man’s work in art and all other things,” he said.

With that, Smyth’s friends begged her to take the next step. She needed to write an opera.

Classical music today has a reputation for being homogenous. The repertoire is rife with white European men, most of them dead. Contemporary composers—both men and women—must compete for space in every program against a centuries-old lineup of deceased, crowd-pleasing masters. It’s not much better on the podium. Only about 11 percent of America’s major symphony conductors are women. And in the opera world, the 50 most performed works? All by men. More than 500 operas by women exist today, but it’s hard to find a major opera house that will produce any of them.

It wasn’t always this way. One of the first operas ever written, the comical The Liberation of Ruggiero, was composed by a woman, Francesca Caccini, in 1625. As Elizabeth Davis explains on Classic FM, Caccini was one of the best paid musicians in all of Tuscany. A century later, Italy’s Maria Teresa Agnesi, who composed six operas, was one of the most popular musicians in the country. During the 19th century, Princess Amalie of Saxony was among the most prolific opera composers in Europe, writing 14. Countless more talented women filled salons and concert halls with their music.

That may be because, for about two centuries, concert halls featured works by living composers. But as the 19th century wrapped up, that changed: A canon of male operatic “geniuses” formed, including Scarlatti, Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, Wagner. As opera houses resurrected the works of dead composers, living writers were pushed to the fringes. The problem was especially severe for women.

None of that deterred Smyth. It motivated her. Between 1899 and 1901, she began work on her second opera, Der Wald, and she was hell-bent on getting it produced—if not for her sake, for the women who followed her. “I feel I must fight for Der Wald,” she wrote in a letter in 1902, “because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs, not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea.”

A one-act, 75-minute German-language opera, Der Wald is set in a tranquil forest of cypress trees during the Middle Ages. The woods are full of nymphs and woodland-living spirits who sing about the insignificance of humanity in the face nature. The show includes witches and a woodcutter and a man with a pet bear, and like all good operas, somebody dies at the end.

Der Wald premiered in Berlin on April 9, 1902 and received some hisses from the crowd. But in London, it broke attendance records. Across the pond in New York City, the Metropolitan Opera agreed to give Smyth a shot.

The first performance in New York was a hit, financially speaking. The show earned the Met $10,390.60, making it highest grossing production all year. The New York World said the performance “stirred the blood with clangor of brass, the shrieks of strings, the plaint of wood winds…” When the curtain fell, the audience roared their unyielding approval for 10 to 15 minutes. Smyth took seven curtain calls and left the stage, The New York Times noted, with “flowers by the cartload.”

Most critics gave it a thumbs down anyway. They griped that the music was too beefy for a woman composer. It was like Wagner took HGH injections. “This little woman writes music with a masculine hand and has a sound and logical brain, such as is supposed to the especial gift of the rougher sex. There is not a weak or effeminate note in Der Wald, nor an unstable sentiment,” The Telegraph said. The New York World concurred: “Her work is utterly unfeminine. It lacks sweetness and grace of phrase.” The New-York Commercial Advertiser complained that Smyth had tried too hard “to take the sex element out of her work” and, by compensating, had surpassed “in masculinity anything that a man might do.” The New York Times simply called it, “a disappointing novelty,” lamenting that, “it is difficult to find much import in this sophisticated Grimm’s fairy tale.”

Smyth was undaunted. She continued writing operas and found a cause in the women’s suffrage movement. She composed a satirical choral work called 1910, which her obituary called a “grotesque symphony of suffragettes, anti-suffragettes, and the hullabaloo of a Parliament Square riot.” She also wrote the aforementioned “The March of Women,” which became the rallying cry for the suffragette cause. She befriended the activist Emmeline Pankhurst—who encouraged fellow feminists to fend off police with jiu jitsu—and spent the next few years protesting, and getting arrested, by her side. (She’d spend two months in prison for chucking that rock through Lewis Harcourt’s window.)

The March of the Women (Shoulder to Shoulder) from Wild Love Music on Vimeo.

Smyth may have been Beethoven reincarnate, too. During her activist years, her hearing deteriorated. (She coped with the oncoming deafness by visiting Egypt, playing a lot of golf, and writing a comic opera called The Boatswain’s Mate.) During World War I, she worked as an X-ray nurse in a military hospital. And yet, despite losing her hearing, she continued conducting and writing music. And memoirs. She defied taboos and wrote openly and earnestly about her attraction to women, while late in life she scribbled a play about her close friend (and crush) Virginia Woolf. Woolf was amazed by Smyth’s talents, remarking, “How you do it, God knows.”

In 1922, Smyth was honored with the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. All the while, she continued to not give a hoot about what anybody thought of her. Her eccentric wardrobe mirrored the official colors of the Women’s Social and Political Union: “She would don a tie of the brightest purple, white and green, or some hideous purple cotton jacket,” Pankhurst recalled. Put lightly, Smyth stuck out in a crowd.

In 1934, a special concert of Smyth’s music was played at Royal Albert Hall in London. The Queen attended and led the applause. Sadly, Smyth was so deaf that she couldn’t hear the music or the ovation. By her death at the age of 86 in 1944, Dame Ethel Smyth had written 10 books, a concerto, countless orchestral works, and six operas.

In the United States, Ethel Smyth continues to stand out in musical circles for Der Wald, though not necessarily for the best reasons. Not only was she the first woman to have an opera produced at the Met, she was also the last. Until now.

Yesterday, on December 1, 2016, the drought ended. After a 113 year dry spell, the Metropolitan Opera produced its second opera by a woman: L’Amour de Loin, by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. The work, which first premiered in Salzburg, Austria, in 2000 has been praised by The Guardian as “luminous but inescapably dramatic.” (The Met’s staging, a dazzling sea of 28,000 LED lights, looks equally dramatic.) The performance is being conducted by Susanna Malkki, just the fourth woman to command the Met orchestra in the organization’s 136 year history.

“It just shows how slowly these things evolve,” Saariaho recently told The New York Times, remarking on the gap. “But they are evolving—in all fields and also in music.” It’s true. The United States alone is now home to a growing Mount Rushmore of incredible female classical music composers: Jennifer Higdon, Julia Wolfe, and Ellen Zwilich have all won the Pulitzer Prize for music. Joan Tower, a giant in the profession, has earned three Grammys.

As for the current production of L’Amour de Loin, there will be seven more performances this December. If you pass through New York, treat yourself with a ticket. After all, Ethel Smyth didn’t go around smashing those glass windows and ceilings for nothing.

At the peak of the last Ice Age (around 25,000 years ago), woolly mammoths lumbered across Michigan’s grassy fields and forested valleys. In October 2015, a local man stumbled upon one of the massive creatures’ skeletons while digging a gas line on a farm in Washtenaw County. Similar bones had been found in the region before, but this was one of the more complete sets, with 30 to 40 percent of the skeleton uncovered. Now, Nova Next reports, experts think the serendipitous find may yield new, early evidence of human activity in the Americas.

Michigan Farmer Finds Wooly Mammoth – See full image at https://t.co/wwXRNRHS8k pic.twitter.com/EKJSpnZPK0

— DailyDerpz (@dailyderpz) November 8, 2015

Daniel Fisher—a University of Michigan paleontologist who studies the extinction of mastodons and mammoths—led the excavation. He also spent the past year studying the skeleton, named the “Bristle mammoth” after its finder, James Bristle. The oldest documented evidence of humans arriving in Michigan is around 13,000 years ago, but Fisher believes he’s found evidence that the Bristle mammoth was butchered around 15,000 years ago.

Fisher estimated the skeleton’s age using preliminary radiocarbon dating, and he also noted that many of the bones illustrate “intentional breakage, targeted toward removal of nutritious tissues that humans might wish to harvest” (as quoted by PBS).

Plus, at the archaeological site, the mammoth bones were found embedded in pond sediments. Near the skeleton, excavators found three boulders that likely wouldn’t have been deposited there naturally. Fisher thinks that early hunters used the boulders as weights, and tied mammoth meat to them with ropes to store them in a cool body of water (an early refrigeration technique). Portions of the skeleton also appear to have been set in piles, suggesting that hunters arranged them that way for storage purposes.

If hunters did indeed kill it, the find could prove that Michigan was home to humans long before the Clovis—a Paleo-Indian culture that hunted large mammals with spears—arrived on the scene. According to Phys.org, only a few pre-Clovis archaeological sites have been documented in the Americas, including in Texas, the Pacific Northwest, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and South America.

Fisher and his team plan to return to James Bristle’s farm to excavate the site more extensively (they only had a day to remove the bones before construction on the gas line resumed), find more evidence, and conduct more tests on both the skeleton and its environment. Soon, they hope to submit their fleshed-out findings to a scientific journal.

As for now, the Bristle mammoth is on temporary display at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Natural History until January 2018, when it will move to a more permanent location in the university’s new Biological Science building.

[h/t Nova Next]

If you’ve been thinking about leaving tangled wires behind and upgrading to Bluetooth headphones, Friday’s Amazon Deal of the Day is one you should jump on. The world’s biggest store is deeply discounting a handful of popular, strongly reviewed SoundPEATS Bluetooth headphones on a one-day sale. The headliners are the SoundPEATS QY7 4.1 Wireless Noise-Cancelling Sport In-Ear Headphones with Mic in seven different color combinations for just $17.99, a sharp discount from the normal $45.99 list price. These headphones have racked up a four-star average across 14,275 Amazon customer reviews, and this price is a steal for Bluetooth earbuds with a six-hour run time. 

If you’re a fan of the security of ear hooks, Amazon is also knocking the price of the SoundPEATS Q9A down to $18.99 from the usual list price of $43.99. The Q9A model has a similarly stellar 4.2-star review average, so you can’t go wrong either way. 

Buy at Amazon: SoundPEATS QY7 Bluetooth 4.1 Wireless 6 Hours Play-time Noise Cancelling Sport In-Ear Stereo Earphones with Mic (Multiple color combinations available) for $17.99 (list price $45.99)

Buy at Amazon: SoundPEATS Bluetooth Headphones Sport Wireless Earbuds Stereo Earphones with Mic (Bluetooth 4.1, aptx, Secure Ear Hooks Design, 6 Hours Play Time, Upgraded Version) – Q9A + for $18.99 (list price $43.99)

With the Thanksgiving leftovers long gone and holiday cards starting to roll in, now is the perfect time to pop some popcorn, pour some eggnog, and park yourself in front of the tube for … a nearly 14-minute music video starring dancing zombies and a teen werewolf? Believe it or not, Michael Jackson’s landmark “Thriller” video premiered on December 2, 1983—weeks after the holiday it’s now synonymous with.

How could Jackson not have unleashed “Thriller” on Halloween? The explanation for this apparent monster of a marketing fail seems to lie in the project’s timeline. The idea for the video wasn’t spawned until the summer of 1983. By this time MJ’s Thriller album—out since the previous November—had already sold roughly 10 million copies and sat atop the Billboard 200 album chart for 17 straight weeks (February 26 to June 18, 1983). Any normal pop star would’ve been cool with seeing it slip to No. 2, but as Jackson would say in the “Thriller” video, he was “not like other guys.”

He wanted badly to reclaim the No. 1 spot, and his bosses at Epic Records knew that neither of Thriller’s final two scheduled singles, “Human Nature” or “P.Y.T.,” would get him there. They also knew his previous hits “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” had gotten nice little boosts from their memorable music videos. (Shout-out to light-up sidewalks and dancing gangsters.) Epic’s head of promotions, Frank DiLeo, suggested Jackson shoot another promo clip—this time for the album’s title track. “It’s simple,” DiLeo recalled telling Jackson in a Vanity Fair interview. “All you’ve got to do is dance, sing, and make it scary.”

But it wasn’t quite so simple. In August of 1983, Jackson phoned up John Landis, the director behind 1978’s Animal House, 1980’s The Blues Brothers, and 1983’s Trading Places. Landis had also helmed An American Werewolf in London, a 1981 horror-comedy Jackson had seen, loved, and recognized as a good template for “Thriller.” Approached with the idea of shooting the video, Landis suggested they do something more ambitious and make a short film worthy of theatrical release. They’d get Hollywood makeup and costumes and shoot on 35mm—the whole bit. Jackson was thrilled.

The trouble was, someone had to pay for it. Landis’s original budget was $900,000—far more than Epic was willing to shell out for the seventh single on an album that was nearing its one-year anniversary. Landis and his team next approached MTV, but execs there balked, fearing it would set a dangerous precedent to pay for something they’d always gotten for free.

Jackson nearly put the money up himself, but then his lawyer, John Branca, and Landis’s production partner, George Folsey Jr., came up with a brilliant idea: If they shot both a “Thriller” video and a making-of documentary, they’d have an hour’s worth of fresh content featuring one of the world’s hottest entertainers. Surely, networks would be willing to pay for that, right?

Indeed they would. MTV dropped $250,000 to air the vid and doc exclusively for a week, and Showtime coughed up $300,000. It was now nearly September, and Landis and Jackson had their financing. The next step was figuring out what, exactly, they were going to shoot.

In the six weeks leading up to October 11, when filming began in Los Angeles, Jackson’s team scurried to complete pre-production on the most ambitious music video the world had ever seen. Landis co-wrote the story with Jackson and hired his costume designer wife, Deborah Nadoolman Landis (who’d dressed Harrison Ford for Raiders of the Lost Ark and made John Belushi’s “College” sweatshirt happen) to handle costumes. He also re-enlisted “Beat It” choreographer Michael Peters, who began dreaming up dances the undead might do.

Principal photography took place throughout October, and given the scope of what they were creating, a Halloween premiere probably never would have been possible. It certainly would’ve suited the material, though. As just about everyone on the planet knows, “Thriller” features Jackson transforming into two creatures: a werewolf (or, technically, a “werecat”) in the film-within-a-film opening segment, then a surprisingly nimble zombie in the oft-reenacted second half. Joining Jackson in both sequences is actress Ola Ray, a former Playboy playmate (who has admitted to some on-set smooching with her co-star).

But while Jackson was game to share the screen with a Playboy model, the video’s supernatural themes didn’t square with his Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. At one point, weeks before the premiere date, Jackson called Branca and asked him to destroy the negatives. The church had learned of the video and threatened to excommunicate him. Branca saved the day by suggesting they slap on the now-famous disclaimer: “Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.”

MJ’s warning gave the video an extra level of intrigue—like the images to follow were really going to mess you up. Final frame notwithstanding, “Thriller” is actually pretty tame, but it sank its fangs into the world’s imagination. Aided by constant MTV airplay, the video transformed Jackson into a new kind of celebrity and, yes, shocked Thriller back to life. The album reclaimed the No. 1 position on December 24 and stayed there through April of 1984 for a total of 37 weeks at the top. By the end of that year, it had sold 33 million copies.

Over the years, “Thriller” has sold more than 9 million home video copies (a Guinness World Record) and topped numerous lists of the greatest and most influential music videos. In 2009, it was selected for the National Film Registry, and this past Halloween, Barack and Michelle Obama did the zombie dance at the White House.

Simply put: “Thriller” devoured pop culture. But just think of how much bigger it would’ve been had it dropped on Halloween.

A charming spoof, Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights introduced the world to Dave Chappelle and extolled the virtues of form-fitting legwear. Here’s everything you need to know about the arrow-slinging 1993 comedy.

1. MEL BROOKS HAD PREVIOUSLY WORKED ON A COMEDIC ROBIN HOOD TV SERIES.

In 1974, Mel Brooks’ smash-hit genre parodies Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein became two of the highest grossing movies of the year—with Blazing Saddles beating out The Towering Inferno and The Godfather: Part II for the top spot. Having secured a lasting career for himself in Hollywood, Brooks took a break from cinema so he could pursue a new TV project. The comic joined forces with Norman Stiles and John Boni to co-create ABC’s When Things Were Rotten, a fast-paced, gag-driven sitcom that put a satirical spin on Robin Hood. Starring Get Smart alum Dick Gautier in the lead role, the show relied heavily on anachronistic pop culture references; in one episode, for example, a character named Lord McDonald of the Golden Archers dons a T-shirt reading “Over 1,000,000 Dispatched.”

When Things Were Rotten premiered on September 10, 1975. After three months of lackluster ratings and mixed reviews, the show was canceled just 13 episodes into its run. Brooks would, of course, take another stab at the legendary hero of Sherwood Forest when Robin Hood: Men in Tights was released 18 years later. Incidentally, that 1993 comedy starred a familiar face: Dick Van Patten, who plays an abbot in the film, had portrayed Friar Tuck in When Things Were Rotten.

2. A DENTIST’S KID INSPIRED THE MOVIE.

Despite its impressive showing at the box office, Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) didn’t win universal praise. Many took issue with the movie’s inconsistent tone and Costner’s half-baked attempt at an English accent. When 11-year-old Jordi Chandler saw it, he told his father, Evan, that the flick deserved to be parodied. As it happened, Evan Chandler was a Beverly Hills dentist whose clientele included Hollywood screenwriter J. David Shapiro. During an appointment, the DDS pitched the idea of a Robin Hood spoof movie to Shapiro, who loved the concept. Together, they put together a screenplay that was later sold to—and heavily revised by—Brooks.

3. MADELINE KAHN MIGHT’VE PLAYED LATRINE.

Madeline Kahn made a name for herself by starring in several of Brooks’s comedies, including Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, and History of the World, Part 1. Kahn’s family has stated that she was offered the part of Latrine—Prince John’s manic soothsayer—in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, but turned the role down over salary concerns. On the other hand, Brooks himself says he didn’t cast Kahn because the character wouldn’t receive much screen time. Regardless, Tracey Ullman ended up landing the part.

4. SEAN CONNERY WANTED TO PORTRAY KING RICHARD—IN WOMEN’S CLOTHING.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves had an all-star cast that boasted Costner, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Rickman. Sean Connery also made a brief appearance as King Richard, a part he reportedly wanted to reprise in Men in Tights. According to James Robert Parish’s It’s Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks, Connery told the director “that he would repeat his role of the monarch—but this time in drag. However, intriguing as this comic prospect was, he wanted a $1 million salary, which he planned to donate to Scottish charities.” Unable to afford this king’s ransom, Brooks cast Patrick Stewart instead. For better or for worse, the cross-dressing angle was scrapped entirely.

5. BROOKS WROTE THE LYRICS TO ALL OF THE ORIGINAL SONGS.

From The Producers‘s “Springtime for Hitler” to a Sinatra-esque lounge number in High Anxiety, Brooks’s comedies are loaded with songs that the filmmaker either wrote or co-wrote himself. Robin Hood: Men in Tights continued this musical tradition. The legendary director penned the lyrics for Maid Marian’s song, the titular “Men in Tights” number, and both versions of the “Sherwood Forest Rap.” Meanwhile, their melodies were provided by composer Hummie Mann. However, neither man can take any credit for “The Night is Young and You’re So Beautiful,” which Robin (Cary Elwes) belts out during a romantic scene with Marian (Amy Yasbeck). Famously covered by Dean Martin, that amorous ballad was written way back in 1937 by Dana Suesse, Billy Rose, and Irving Kahal.

6. WHEN BROOKS FIRST REACHED OUT TO CARY ELWES ABOUT PLAYING ROBIN HOOD, THE ACTOR ASSUMED HE WAS BEING PRANKED.

Early on in the Men in Tights casting process, Brooks called Elwes at his home to discuss the project. “He actually called me at home and I thought someone was pulling my leg so I hung up on him,” Elwes told Den of Geek in 2014. “He called back and he said ‘don’t hang up, it’s really me!’ I apologized, but I couldn’t believe he was calling me.” In short order, Elwes was cast as the film’s hero. Once he came aboard, Elwes helped Brooks choose an actor to play Ahchoo, Robin’s sidekick. In the end, the part went to an unknown 19-year-old comedian named Dave Chappelle. “We actually cast [him] together,” Elwes recalled. “We saw a lot of actors and when Dave came in, he was just so amazing and we knew right then and there [that] this guy was a star.”

7. IT SHARED A FILMING LOCATION WITH TWO OTHER WELL-KNOWN ROBIN HOOD MOVIES.

A body of water in Southern California’s Santa Monica mountains that was formerly known as Lake Canterbury was renamed Lake Sherwood in 1921, when a Robin Hood movie starring Douglas Fairbanks shot a few scenes on its shores. Subsequently, this same lake was utilized as a backdrop for certain outdoor sequences in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights did some filming there as well.

8. THE ACTORS ATTENDED A SWORDPLAY BOOT CAMP.

“If you put the name Robin Hood on a marquee, then it’s incumbent upon you—nay, it behooves you—to have horses and sword fighting,” Brooks declared in the HBO making-of documentary Robin Hood: Men in Tights: The Legend Had it Coming. “The actors came in every weekend and they worked Saturdays and Sundays just on their sword fights,” Brooks said. These sessions were overseen by fencing coordinator Victor Paul, who also did stunt work on big-budget action films like Die Hard and Armageddon. The bladed weapon specialist found that Elwes was particularly easy to train because The Princess Bride star already had plenty of fencing experience under his belt. “All I had to do was teach him the routines, he knew how to fence,” Paul said in the documentary.

However, Elwes wasn’t quite as adept at archery. Right before the training montage, we see Robin hit a bull’s-eye from a few yards away while his merry men look on. At the 2013 Motor City Comic Con, Elwes shed some light on the scene—which turned out to be a rather triumphant moment for him. “I was quite proud of the fact that I got a bull’s-eye shooting the bow and arrow because there was a lot of pressure from Mel to get that in a few takes. He said ‘Okay, you’ve got three takes. Get a bull’s-eye, let’s go!,'” Elwes shared during a Q&A session. “And I’m like ‘Really, Mel? I’ve only got three? Really?’ And I got it on the third one, thank god.”

9. LATE IN THE SHOOT, RICHARD LEWIS CAME DOWN WITH A 106-DEGREE FEVER.

Richard Lewis, who played the neurotic Prince John, opened up about his experiences on the set in a 2013 PBS documentary titled Mel Brooks: Make a Noise. Apparently, as production came to a close, Lewis’s health took a sharp turn for the worse. “I was almost done with the film, I had one scene left, [and then] I got Hepatitis A,” the actor recalled. Stricken with a 106-degree fever, Lewis was hospitalized. Amazingly though, this development didn’t stop Brooks from trying to complete his villain’s final scene on schedule.

Completely undeterred, the director called Lewis’s hospital room and announced an elaborate plan to lay Lewis in a stretcher, drive him to the set, and prop the immobilized performer up against some wood so that he could deliver a pair of lines. “You’ll do your two lines, we’ll carry you right back into the stretch, you’ll be back [at the hospital] in 20 minutes,” Brooks told him. “Mel,” a weary Lewis responded, “I’m dying. I think I’m dying. I have a 106 fever. I’m jaundiced.” He then hung up on Brooks, who proceeded to call him back “about 15 times with the same riff” in Lewis’s estimation.

10. THE MOVIE MADE GENE SISKEL’S “WORST OF ’93” LIST.

When it came to the film critics, “most of them reamed it,” according to Lewis. “It was disappointing.” Leading the chorus of derision was Gene Siskel, who counted Robin Hood: Men in Tights among his worst films of 1993. “Movie comedy, I think, is threatening to pass Mel Brooks by,” the late critic opined. “When comedies don’t work and everybody in the audience knows it, that is about as low as it gets … [Brooks] has clearly lost his way.”

Still, like many of Brooks’s later pictures, Robin Hood: Men in Tights has slowly developed a cult following over the years. It has even received some faint praise from a more contemporary Robin Hood: In 2016, Russell Crowe called Men in Tights “the most entertaining version” of the heroic character’s timeless story.

11. JACK BLACK ONCE SERENADED BROOKS WITH A RENDITION OF THE FILM’S THEME SONG.

Along with Bruce Springsteen, Dave Brubeck, Robert De Niro, and opera singer Grace Bumby, Brooks was named one of the 2009 Kennedy Center honorees. When asked to comment on this development, Brooks told The Washington Post, “I hope you never find my award on eBay, because you never know … You run out of cash and wherewithal.” Seated near President Barack Obama and the First Lady, Brooks was presented with a medley of his unforgettable songs. Among other acts, this star-studded revue featured Martin Short’s take on the Blazing Saddles theme while Richard Kind led a jazzy rendition of the Spanish Inquisition number from History of The World, Part 1. Jack Black also took the stage in full Robin Hood regalia to lead a chorus in singing “Men in Tights.” All the while, a gleeful Brooks could be seen mouthing the lyrics to every song from the audience.

MAN MISTAKES JELLYFISH FOR BREAST IMPLANT

An unnamed man at the beach in Maroochydore, Queensland, Australia, found a suspicious gelatinous object in the water. He thought it was a breast implant. He took it to the local police station and handed it over, telling them it may be evidence of a homicide. A short investigation revealed that the object was actually a dead jellyfish, most likely a common blubber jellyfish, that had lost its tentacles. The investigation was closed.

FISH FROZEN INTO SKATING RINK

A theme park in Japan had a creative idea: they installed an ice skating rink with 5,000 fish embedded in the ice! There were also crabs and shellfish in the ice. The idea was to give skaters the illusion of skating on the sea, but the stunt backfired when advertisements sparked complaints on social media. Space World manager Toshimi Takeda was shocked at the backlash. 

Takeda told CNN the park would unfreeze the skate rink to remove the fish, hold an “appropriate religious service” and then reuse them as fertilizer.

He added the fish were purchased at a local fish market, and were dead before they were frozen.

BOY GETS TO BLOW STUFF UP

A 12-year-old cancer patient in Sydney, Australia, named Declan was approached by the Make-A-Wish Foundation and asked about his dearest wish. The boy replied that he wanted to “blow stuff up.” And so you shall.

The Australian Federal Police organized a training day for Declan with their Specialist Response Group. The family traveled to the squad’s Majura headquarters in Canberra, where Declan was put into various police scenarios where he saved the day by detonating explosives. He also learned about bomb demolition and police procedures. A good time was had by all.

CAT FENCE ERECTED AROUND VOLCANO

The nation’s longest cat-proof fence has been unveiled in Hawaii. The five-mile fence around the Mauna Loa volcano is six feet tall and took three years to build. The fence is not to protect cats from volcanic activity, though. It’s to protect the endangered Hawaiian petrel from the cats.

Mauna Loa’s lava-covered slopes make for some seriously forbidding landscape, but that hasn’t deterred cats, which have adapted to the Hawaiian islands just fine since arriving on explorers’ ships. So fine, in fact, that the little invasive predators are now a mortal threat to the endangered Hawaiian petrel, a seabird that breeds on Mauna Loa. Several thousand of the birds live in Hawaii, but only about 75 breeding pairs are on the Big Island.

The fence features an outward curve at the top, which should deter any but the most determined feral cats.  

WOMAN RUNS TRIATHLON, BREAKS BONES, DELIVERS BABY, AND SERVES THANKSGIVING DINNER

On Thanksgiving Day, Rhonda DiCostanzo of Tacoma, Washington, woke up early and put the turkey in the oven. Then she went out to participate in the YMCA triathlon. Crossing the finish line, she fell and broke two fingers. At the emergency room, she saw a woman in active labor. Since DiCostanzo is a certified midwife, she volunteered to deliver the baby, since the maternity staff would take too long to arrive on a holiday. As if that wasn’t enough activity for the day, DiCostanzo made it home in time to serve Thanksgiving dinner to 16 people. And how was your holiday?

Not everyone has the money—or the energy—to dress up and go out to enjoy a night of classical music at the symphony. If you want to listen to a live orchestra without changing out of your pajamas, just order a Groupmuse instead. As WIRED reports, the startup organizes 25- to 60-minute instrumental programs in your living room for a suggested price of $10 per spectator.

Founder Sam Bodkin was inspired to start the company after falling in love with classical music in college. He want to share the experience of listening to it live with people his own age, but realized that coercing them into a symphony hall for a performance would be an uphill battle.

So he decided to bring the music to them. Since it was founded in 2013, Groupmuse has given more than 1200 conservatory students and professional musicians the opportunity to play intimate concerts in someone’s home. Performers interested in signing up send samples of their work to Groupmuse for approval. If the company likes what they hear, they match the musicians with a place that hosts them (soloists play in spaces for 10 people, quartets for up to 50). The first of the two sessions always consists of classical music, and the second is player’s choice. Anything from Guns N’ Roses to Brazilian choro music could be on the set list.

Bodkin’s plan to turn younger audiences on to live orchestral music seems to be effective: Of the 20 Groupmuse concerts hosted across the country every week, 70 percent of attendants were born in the 1980s and ’90s. If you’re looking for some live entertainment to spice up your holiday party, you can sign up to host a performance here. Spectators who don’t mind leaving home to listen to music can RSVP to one of the Groupmuse concerts happening in their neighborhood (which for now, means Boston, New York City, Seattle, and California’s Bay Area.)

[h/t WIRED]

If the name Jack London rings any bells at all, it likely brings to mind vague images of huskies and sleighs. The author’s most enduring novel, 1903’s The Call of the Wild, remains a staple for grade school reading across the U.S. But because his legacy has been so closely bound up with childhood reading, London’s adventurous and sometimes sordid life is much less familiar. When he died on November 22, 1916, at only 40 years old, he had lived more than most.

The Call of the Wild indeed captivated the country with its fascinating portrayal of the perilous Klondike gold rush. The story propelled London to celebrity status as a pioneer of American magazine fiction. Telling the tale of a heroic dog named Buck, the novel is a landmark in America’s long love affair with nature writing. By writing the experience of man’s best friend, the author managed to include many of the complex moral and social questions he grappled with. “The proper function of man,” he said, “is to live, not to exist.” A fascination with surviving and thriving runs through The Call of the Wild and the bulk of all London’s writing. So who was the literary genius behind this enduring classic, and what kind of life bred such nuanced ideas about human nature?

Born in San Francisco in 1876, London described his early years in terms of struggle, the theme that dominates his fiction and colored his strong convictions. In a body of work spanning adventure, memoir, and science fiction, he returned again and again to situations which tried the human (as well as canine) spirit.

London’s own life was a yarn for the ages as well. Revisiting a bit of the author’s wild ride can help us appreciate his uncanny insight into the world, and humanity’s never-ending search for a place in it.

1. BEFORE BECOMING A SUCCESSFUL WRITER, HIS OCCUPATIONS INCLUDED BOTH OYSTER PIRATE AND DRIFTER.

Jack London’s life was anything but conventional. Never a stranger to hard work, he started earning wages for his family at a very young age. As a teenager, resenting a soul-crushing job on a cannery assembly line, London turned to sketchier means of making a living. Borrowing $300 from his boyhood nurse, he purchased a small boat to poach oysters in the privately controlled beds of San Francisco Bay.

A few years later, once more dodging the grueling manual labor of the unregulated industrial revolution, London took to the train tracks with a group of so called “road-kids.” “I am a fluid sort of an organism,” he wrote, “with sufficient kinship with life to fit myself in ’most anywhere.” His drifting took him across the country and even landed him in a brief stint in prison. At 19, London wised up and went to high school.

2. THOUGH HE FAILED AS A GOLD PROSPECTOR, THE KLONDIKE GAVE HIM MATERIAL FOR HIS BEST WORK.

The discovery of gold in the Yukon lured London with the promise of quick riches. Outfitted by his brother-in-law, he joined the rush in 1897 but proved an unlucky prospector. “I brought nothing back from the Klondike but my scurvy,” the writer later declared after wringing just a few dollars’ worth of gold dust from gold fields. However, he did manage to extract something precious from his experience: larger than life characters and a fascination with survival in nature’s extremes. These are the hallmarks of his writing which fueled his rise to fame.

3. MUCH OF HIS WORK SHOWS THE INFLUENCE OF DARWIN’S “SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.”‘

When London tells of “an old song, old as the breed itself” that stirred his hero Buck, London conjures the idea of a collective unconscious that “harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.”

When London sailed for Alaska en route to the Yukon, he brought with him books by Charles Darwin. The ruthless nature implied by Darwin’s theory of natural selection—survival of the fittest—abounds in London’s work. The Klondike of The Call of the Wild is quite literally a dog-eat-dog world, in which London lauds resourcefulness and strength of will above all else.

4. HIS RICH BUT PLAIN DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE FORESHADOWED THE SUCCESS OF MODERNISTS LIKE HEMINGWAY.

Much of London’s success was garnered through magazine publishing; he gained celebrity and fortune from his writing alone as mass-scale printing became cheaper and more people became literate. It’s just one parallel to Ernest Hemingway, who followed in London’s footsteps. The two also share stylistic preferences for plain-spoken portrayals of nature and an economy of words—traits Hemingway is often given credit for popularizing despite coming after London. Indeed, certain passages of London’s finest prose, like his short story “To Build a Fire,” could easily be mistaken for Hemingway’s.

5. HE WAS AN OUTSPOKEN SOCIALIST WHO ADVOCATED FOR THE RIGHTS OF THE DISADVANTAGED.

The writer’s unconventional formative years left a lasting impression on his worldview. Upon his return from the Klondike, London became involved in San Francisco’s burgeoning socialist political scene. He was apparently so fervent in his political beliefs, when London met and courted Russian-born socialist student Anna Strunsky in 1899, she likened meeting him to meeting a young Karl Marx.

Perhaps in spite of his sober realism towards the tough nature of life, or perhaps because of it, he wrote extensively on the need to protect the dignity of workers and the disadvantaged. It’s just part of the legacy left by one of America’s masters of popular fiction—an American pioneer in more senses than one.