fact
10 of History’s Most Lavish Parties
These 10 parties have gone down in history for their decadence in everything from venue to menu.
In an effort to give the U.S.’s growing elderly population a boost, a California-based smart clothing company called Superflex is working on a new robotic exoskeleton designed to increase mobility.
According to The Verge, the lightweight wearable is meant to be worn under clothing and features a number of computer-controlled sensors which track the wearer’s posture and movement, which are all readable via a companion mobile app. Data is then sent to the suit’s motors, which can offer assistance sitting up, standing upright, and raising one’s arms.
Research company SRI International initially developed the technology for the military as a way to help soldiers avoid injury while carrying heavy loads in the field. Recognizing the suit’s commercial potential, they formed Superflex, a new company focused on making the technology accessible to aging consumers. (As The Verge points out, the population of Americans over 65 years old is expected to almost double in the next 30 years.) Although designed with seniors in mind, the exoskeleton could also be used by athletes, construction workers, and people with physical disabilities.
“Our origins are in robotics, our future is as an apparel company,” Superflex co-founder and CEO Rich Mahoney said in a statement. “Our powered clothing will give people the ability to move more freely, to gain strength and confidence, to be more injury-free in the workplace, to achieve higher levels of wellness and social engagement, and to stay in the home longer.”
Still in the early stages of development, the Superflex smart suit should be ready to ship to consumers in 2018.
[h/t The Verge]
January 3, 2017 – 10:30am
It may not have been a huge box office success, but Tim Burton’s Ed Wood did win two Academy Awards and a chorus of rave reviews following its release in 1994. Pretty impressive for a biopic about a man who has largely been labeled “the worst director of all time.” Throw on an angora sweater and let’s take a look.
In 1981, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski—both freshmen at the USC School of Cinema-Television—met each other in a cafeteria line, hit it off immediately, and arranged to become roommates. During their senior year, the duo began joining forces on an assortment of screenwriting projects, kicking off a partnership that continues to this day. Together, they have co-written Problem Child (1990), The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), Man on the Moon (1999), and Big Eyes (2014). On the small screen, they also developed the hit FX series American Crime Story, which recently completed its first season with The People v. O. J. Simpson.
Before graduating from USC in 1985, Alexander and Karaszewski briefly considered making a documentary on history’s most enigmatic director, Edward D. Wood, Jr. Although this project went unrealized, they eventually returned to the subject. In 1992, author Rudolph Grey published Ed Wood: Nightmare of Ecstasy (The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr.), a thoroughly researched oral biography of Wood and his work. The book inspired Alexander and Karaszewski to pen a 10-page story treatment for a new biopic about the eccentric, cross-dressing auteur.
Karaszewski said that, at the onset, he and Alexander “envisioned Ed Wood as more of an indie style picture.” Obviously, it would need a director, so the scribes presented their treatment to their former USC classmate Michael Lehmann, who’s best known for directing the low-budget cult comedy Heathers (1988). Lehmann loved the concept and agreed to sit in the director’s chair. Then the scriptwriters contacted Tim Burton.
“We weren’t even asking Tim to work on Ed Wood, just to put his name to it,” Alexander recalled. “We said, ‘Would you mind coming on as a producer or a presenter, just to help us raise our financing?’ This was so we could say ‘Tim Burton Presents [Ed Wood].’” Having grown up with Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), Burton was a lifelong Ed Wood fan. Excited by the treatment, he told Alexander and Karaszewski that he’d like to direct the film.
Not only did the material seem tailor-made for Burton’s unique style but, as Karaszewski pointed out, everyone involved knew that, “The film would have a much better chance of being made if Tim agreed to direct.” Even Lehmann was excited about the possibility and agreed to “step aside” should Burton choose to assume directing duty. (Lehmann later became one of Ed Wood’s producers.)
There was just one problem: Tri-Star had already asked Burton to helm Mary Reilly, an upcoming drama about Dr. Jekyll’s housekeeper. In order to secure his services, Alexander and Karaszewski knew they’d need to give him a full-length script—and fast!
“Tim had six weeks to decide whether he was going to make Mary Reilly or not,” Karaszewski explained, “… so Scott and I locked ourselves in a room and quickly did a first draft, which ended up too long at about 140 pages. We got it to Tim on a Friday and then we got a call [that] Sunday saying Tim had dropped out of the other movie and was going our movie. Tim had no notes at all, and his intention was to simply shoot our first draft, which is exactly what he did. We were very lucky. Not much got changed.”
One month before production began, Ed Wood hit a snag. Burton was fortunate enough to hire his first choice for the role of Bela Lugosi, actor Martin Landau, and makeup artist Rick Baker made Landau look uncannily similar to the Hungarian movie star. Nevertheless, after watching the first color tests, something felt a bit off. That’s when everyone realized that they’d only ever seen black-and-white photographs of Lugosi. Immediately, Burton decided that Ed Wood couldn’t be filmed in color.
The movie was being developed by Columbia Pictures, whose higher-ups disagreed with Burton’s decision to shoot in black and white. “They were saying, ‘Look, we can’t get our cable money, we can’t get our foreign video money, we won’t be able to exploit the movie in a lot of markets if it’s in black-and-white,” Alexander recalled. Still, Burton held firm. Realizing he wouldn’t budge, Columbia abandoned the picture. Fortunately, Disney was there to pick it up—and allowed Burton to follow his creative instincts.
In order to imitate Lugosi’s voice and mannerisms, Landau watched some 35 Lugosi movies and purchased Hungarian language tapes. With the latter, he would “literally practice the language and see where the tongue would go.” Doing his homework really paid off, as the performance earned Landau an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1995. When Hungarian-born director Peter Medak saw Ed Wood, he called Landau to praise him; Medak said that Landau’s accent sounded spot-on because, “You are not an actor trying to do a Hungarian accent, you’re a character trying not to do [one].”
Following the release of his 1953 mega-hit House of Wax, Vincent Price became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. And Tim Burton, who grew up watching and rewatching the actor’s acclaimed Edgar Allan Poe films, was one of Price’s biggest fans.
“There was an energy he had; it was evident in everything.” Burton said. “I liked believing Vincent Price, I believed him.” In 1982, Burton gave Price’s career a boost by casting him as the narrator of Vincent, a short film. The two became friends and worked together again on Edward Scissorhands (1990), as well as a Price-centered documentary called Conversations With Vincent.
When Burton read Alexander and Karaszewski’s script for Ed Wood, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. “There was an aspect of Wood’s relationship with Bela Lugosi that I liked,” Burton said. “He befriended him at the end of his life, and … I connected with it on the level that I did with Vincent Price, in terms of how I felt about him. Meeting Vincent had an incredible impact on me, the same impact Ed must have felt meeting and working with his idol.”
In interviews, Johnny Depp has said that to capture the voice of Wood, he tried to merge Ronald Reagan’s “blind optimism” with the “vocal attack” of Casey Kasem, the long-serving disc jockey who voiced Shaggy on the original Scooby-Doo cartoon series. Further inspiration was drawn from Jack Haley’s performance as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Actor and drag queen John Campbell “Bunny” Breckinridge was a major player in Plan 9 From Outer Space. Despite this, the original Ed Wood script gave the character very little dialogue. But when Bill Murray signed on to play the part, Alexander and Karaszewski decided to beef up the role. “When Bill got cast, it didn’t make sense to just have him standing in the background!” Karaszewski said.
The movie shows Wood stealing a motorized giant octopus from Paramount so that he can shoot the climactic scene for Bride of the Monster (1955). However, the jury’s still out on whether this actually happened or not. Many years after the fact, Wood himself boasted that he illegally lifted the prop and Dolores Fuller later said as much in a conversation with film historian Tom Weaver. Yet Alex Gordon, the movie’s screenwriter, claimed it was rented.
Although he appeared in more than 30 movies and worked with visionaries like Steven Spielberg and John Ford, Gregory Walcott is chiefly remembered for playing the main character in Plan 9 From Outer Space. “It’s enough to drive a puritan to drink!” Walcott vented in 1998. Regardless, when Tim Burton’s Ed Wood came around, he made a quick cameo as a prospective investor in one scene. The film marked Walcott’s final film appearance; the actor passed away in 2015.
“I learned too much about women’s clothing,” Depp said of Ed Wood, while promoting the movie in an MTV interview. “The first thing I learned is that angora feels amazing on someone else, [but] not on you.” Alas, the fuzzy material does have an annoying habit of shedding profusely; Depp joked that in certain scenes, he may have “inhaled more angora than oxygen.”
Burton and Danny Elfman first collaborated on Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), which marked Burton’s feature directorial debut and Elfman’s first major movie score. It was a match made in heaven. Following Pee-wee, Elfman provided the music for Burton’s next four pictures: Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Batman Returns (1992). But due to a temporary falling out between the two artists, Elfman did not lend his talents to Ed Wood, which was scored by Howard Shore instead. The dynamic duo would later bury the hatchet after filming began on Mars Attacks! (1996).
Although Ed Wood was showered with positive reviews after its release, the picture didn’t win everybody over. Bela Lugosi Jr., for one, was outraged by the film’s “distorted” portrayal of his late father’s drug rehabilitation process. “The truth, in this case, is actually more dramatic than fiction, but it doesn’t star Ed Wood,” the younger Lugosi told the Los Angeles Times. “My dad, who had a medically induced addiction to morphine, turned himself in—with no Mr. Wood accompanying him, contrary to what the film shows—to Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk.”
Furthermore, Lugosi Jr. says that his father never would have made “certain references to Vampira’s anatomy or … scatological remarks regarding Boris Karloff.” (In fact, Lugosi Sr. greatly respected Karloff, and vice versa.)
Overall, Wood’s longtime girlfriend enjoyed the movie. Before her death in 2011, Fuller called Landau’s performance “magnificent” and said that Depp did a “beautiful” job in the lead role. “Eddy wasn’t always that up, he had his heartbreaks too,” Fuller allowed, “… but oh what a great actor [Depp] is and I just loved the portrayal.” But she didn’t feel that the film treated her fairly.
“That was the only thing I didn’t like about the movie,” Fuller said. “Sarah Jessica Parker smoked all the time and I would never smoke. And she didn’t contact me. Here she’s playing my life and she didn’t bother to do any research.” Also, she pointed out that her relationship with Wood was a lot warmer than the movie might have you believe. “They portrayed me as an actress out to get all I can get, but I contributed.” Indeed, she did: Among many other things, Fuller (willingly) provided Wood with a number of costumes that were used in his films. She’d also help her then-boyfriend entertain Bela Lugosi during the Dracula star’s regular visits to their home.
A professional wrestler himself, George Steele looks like Tor Johnson—who appeared in several of Wood’s movies—reincarnated. Noting their physical similarities, Burton asked Steele to submit an audition tape and cast him as Johnson shortly thereafter. In Steele’s autobiography, he reveals that he “knew nothing about” Wood before Burton contacted him. “While I had never seen Plan 9 From Outer Space,” Steele wrote, “people had told me that they’d seen me in this monster movie. I had no clue at the time what they were talking about. Later on, I learned it was an Ed Wood movie featuring Tor Johnson. Apparently, Tim Burton was not the only one who saw some resemblance between me and ol’ Tor.”
January 3, 2017 – 10:00am
“Secure the shadow, ere the substance fades.” That very early photographers’ slogan—introduced not long after Louis Daguerre announced his daguerreotype process in 1839—may seem ominous, but it reflects the reality of Victorian life. In an age before antibiotics, when infant mortality soared and the Civil War raged, death was a constant presence in the United States. And one prominent part of the process of memorializing the dead was taking a postmortem photo.
Postmortem photography evolved out of posthumous portraiture, a mode of painting in which wealthy Europeans (and eventually Americans) memorialized dead family members by depicting them alongside a slew of symbols, colors, and gestures associated with death. While the people—usually children—in these images might look reasonably healthy, the presence of a dead bird, a cut cord, drooping flowers, or a three-fingered grip (a reference to the holy trinity) often signaled that the subject was deceased. These types of images, popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries, served as cherished reminders of loved ones long gone.
By the 1840s, however, the production of memorial images started moving from the artist’s studio to the photography studio—and democratized in the process. No longer were the wealthy the only ones who could afford images of loved ones, in life or death. Photography studios spread throughout the country in the 1850s, and postmortem photography reached its height a few decades later. And whereas paintings might have cost large sums, and daguerreotypes were often luxuries, the ambrotypes and tintypes that followed sometimes went for just a few cents.
For the Victorians, the postmortem photo was just one aspect of an elaborate mourning ritual that often involved covering the house and body in as much black crepe as one could afford, as well as more intimate acts like washing the corpse, watching over it, and accompanying it to the gravesite. Early photos were sometimes referred to as “mirrors with memories,” and the Victorians saw photographing the dead as one way of preserving the memory of a family member. Photos of the dead were kept as keepsakes, displayed in homes, sent to friends and relatives, worn inside lockets, or even carried as pocket mirrors.
Photographing the dead, however, was a tricky business, and required careful manipulation of the body, props, and equipment, either at the photographer’s studio or at the home of the deceased. Though the majority of postmortem images depict the dead laid out in a bed or coffin, dead children were not infrequently placed in a mother’s lap to keep them upright (echoing the Victorian fashion for “hidden mother” portraits, in which a parent or assistant was draped in fabric as a backdrop with varying degrees of success). Adults were also most frequently shown in coffins, but occasionally photographed in chairs, sometimes holding a book or other props. After the photo session, photographers manipulated the negative, too—to make the dead person’s stare look less blank, or sometimes to paint pupils over closed eyelids.
Some sense of the difficulties of postmortem photography can be gleaned from remarks by leading daguerrotype photographer Albert Southworth printed in an 1873 edition of the Philadelphia Photographer: “If a person has died, and the friends are afraid that there will be a liquid ejected from the mouth, you can carefully turn them over just as though they were under the operation of an emetic. You can do that in less than a single minute, and every single thing will pass out, and you can wipe out the mouth and wash off the face, and handle them just as well as if they were well persons.”
Today, a lot of myths about postmortem photos circulate on the internet and among the general public. One of the biggest falsehoods, says Mike Zohn, co-owner of New York’s Obscura Oddities and Antiques and a long-time postmortem photography collector and dealer, is that the world’s photo albums are filled with lively looking photos of dead people.
The Victorians “had no issue showing dead people as being dead,” Zohn tells mental_floss. “They did not try to make them look alive, that is a modern myth.” He cautions that Pinterest and other websites are full of images of living people who have been labeled as dead, sometimes with elaborate (but incorrect) explanations of the types of tools that have been used to keep them propped up. “The Victorians also did not use strings, wires, armatures, or anything else to pose the dead,” Zohn adds. “They weren’t meat puppets that were strung up and treated like meat. They were respectful and treated the dead with dignity.”
Part of the problem, writes noted postmortem photography collector and scholar Stanley Burns in Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography, American & European Traditions, is that the dead of the 19th century often looked better than the dead of today. We tend to prolong life with measures that weren’t available for the Victorians, but the epidemics of the 19th century killed quickly. “Except for children who died from dehydration or from viruses that left conspicuous skin rashes, or adults who succumbed to cancer or extreme old age,” Burns writes, “the dead would often appear to be quite healthy.”
Zohn particularly cautions against the idea that Victorians used posing stands to create upright post-mortems. “The posing stand is similar in design and strength to a modern day microphone stand,” he says. “There is no way it could possibly hold up the weight of a dead body. If you see a photo with a person and a stand behind them, it’s a guarantee that the person is alive.”
Jack Mord, who runs the postmortem-focused Thanatos Archive, agrees about the posing stands. “People see the base of these stands in photos and assume it’s there to stand a dead person up … but that was never, ever the case,” Mord says. “Basically, if you see the base of a posing stand in a photo, that’s an immediate sign that the person in the photo was alive, not dead.”
Both Zohn and Mord also point out that many people have a misperception about how expensive photography was during the 19th century. Zohn says, “You could easily get a tintype taken for less than five cents—in some cases as low as one or two cents. It was well within the reach of almost all but the very poor, yet some falsely believe it was so expensive that they could only afford to have one image taken and it would have been a post mortem.” While that might have been true when the photography was first introduced—and it’s true that postmortems might have been the only photo ever made of an infant—it wasn’t a general rule.
Some books on postmortem photography mention checking the hands for signs the subject is dead, noting that swelling or discoloration can be a sign of death. But Zohn says it’s easy to misread this clue: “I’ve seen many images of clearly dead people with light-colored hands as well as clearly live people with dark hands. It’s usually caused by lighting and exposure, but could also be something such as suntanned hands that will appear darker.” A better clue, Zohn says, is the symbolism—flowers, folded hands, closed eyes. An adult lying stretched out on a bed with his or her shoes off can be a sign of a postmortem, since shoes can be hard to put on a corpse. And of course, if someone’s lying in a coffin, there’s a good chance they’re dead.
Postmortem photography more or less ended as a common practice by the 1930s in the United States, as social mores shifted away from prolonged public mourning, death became medicalized, and infant mortality rates improved. But “postmortems never truly ever ended,” Zohn says. Today, several companies specialize in taking photos of stillborn infants or newborns, and the practice of postmortem photography continues as a regular event in other parts of the world.
Today, most Americans have decided that our final image is the one we least want remembered. It’s easy for us to shut death out of our minds, and we don’t necessarily want reminders in our homes. But for the Victorians, death wasn’t weird—it was ordinary and ever-present. Burns writes that postmortems “were taken with the same lack of self-consciousness with which today’s photographer might document a party or a prom.”
Haral & Ferol Tromley, who died at home in Fremont Township, Michigan, of acute nephritis and edema of the lungs, October 1990.
“May Snyder, mother of Estell Snyder”, circa 1898. Notice the photographer’s reflection in the mirror.
Cabinet card; location unknown.
All photos via the Thanatos Archive, used with permission. Identifying information provided where known.
January 3, 2017 – 9:00am
On his second day in office, President Jimmy Carter pardoned all evaders of the Vietnam War drafts. 10
In response to Britain sending their convicts to America in the 1700s, Benjamin Franklin suggested sending back shiploads of rattlesnakes to return the favor. 10
1816 was called “The Year Without a Summer” after the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Crop failure forced Joseph Smith to leave Vermont, and his journeys resulted in “The Book of Mormon,” the dreary rain in Switzerland drove Mary Shelley to stay indoors, where she wrote “Frankenstein.” 10
If you were born in 1992, you’re in good company! Here’s our annual list celebrating 25 things (people, companies, movies, books, etc.) turning 25 this year.
On February 14, Wayne’s World graduated from Saturday Night Live sketch to feature film. No way?! Way!! Featuring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey and directed by Penelope Spheeris, it was a landmark comedy that both reflected and affected ’90s pop culture. It single-handedly revived Queen’s song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” introduced the world to the intellectualism of Alice Cooper, and convinced teens that public-access TV was worthwhile after all. As a pair of wise men once said: “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!”
On December 3, 1992, 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth sent the first text message over a cellular network. He used a computer connected to the Vodafone GSM network to send the message to Vodafone director Richard Jarvis’s Orbitel 901 mobile phone (which was gigantic, but technically “mobile” by 1992 standards). The message read: “Merry Christmas.” Why the early Christmas greeting? Jarvis was at a Christmas party at the time.
To the immense frustration of adults and delight of toddlers, the purple dinosaur Barney appeared on PBS on April 6. Barney & Friends was initially envisioned four years earlier as a direct-to-video series called Barney & The Backyard Gang created by Sheryl Leach, a Dallas elementary school teacher who wanted to create toddler-appropriate programming for her kids. (She noted that most programming for kids assumed too long an attention span, which led to the simplistic bits featured on Barney.)
If you missed this moment in television history, let’s catch you up. Barney is a giant purple Tyrannosaurus rex made of cloth, who likes to sing and dance. He is utterly non-threatening, essentially a scaled-up version of a plush dinosaur toy. When a People Magazine article called the lyrics to Barney’s songs “stupid,” an era of Barney-bashing began. Toddlers didn’t care one bit, and clamored for Barney merchandise, as an actor in a six-foot tall Barney costume embarked on a mall tour in December.
On August 11, the Mall of America—the largest mall in the United States—opened in Bloomington, Minnesota. This was just one of many projects enacted by Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich, who created a World Trade Center in St. Paul, received a visit from Mikhail Gorbachev, and brought the Super Bowl to the Twin Cities in 1992.
The Mall of America was indeed the largest in the U.S., covering approximately 2.7 million square feet, though it was actually smaller than the Edmonton Mall in Canada. U.S. visitors didn’t mind, as Minnesota’s Mall contained, as the Los Angeles Times reported:
… the nation’s largest indoor amusement park, the world’s largest parking ramp, the world’s largest indoor planting of live shrubs, the world’s largest indoor miniature golf course, and arguably the world’s largest concentration of Tivoli lights.
Asked about the Mall, humorist Garrison Keillor joked:
“Minnesota is where the shopping mall was invented, so it’s natural that the biggest one should be there … but some people disappear in them and never come out, thousands in Minnesota alone, and the Mall of America is going to triple the toll.
… Fifteen thousand shoppers will vanish in the next year, never to bring their purchases home, and the terrible tragedy is that they will not be particularly missed. Their families will simply order duplicate credit cards and go on without them.”
The Mall eventually included 400 stores, 14 movie theaters, seven restaurants, five nightclubs, and 31,000 live trees and shrubs.
On October 1, the first 24-hour channel devoted to cartoons debuted, courtesy of the Turner Broadcasting System. The channel was based in part on TBS’s purchase of Hanna-Barbera and its back catalog, which contained roughly 1500 hours of animated content spread across 350 TV series and movies.
Jeffry Scott of the Cox News Service reported:
In a private ceremony Thursday, [Ted] Turner himself will launch the channel with a push of an Acme dynamite plunger on the front lawn of Turner Broadcasting System Inc.’s facility on Techwood Drive [in Atlanta].
The plunger will spark a fuse, which will explode a barrel of colored chicken feathers and confetti. Then, on a huge TV screen will pop the picture: a cartoon character named Droopy Dog introducing the world to Turner’s new “cartoon universe.”
On May 5, the landmark game Wolfenstein 3D brought stunning first-person shooter graphics to DOS PCs. Developed by id Software, the game had a WWII theme, and you played as Allied spy B.J. Blazkowicz on a series of anti-Nazi missions. It was violent, it was technologically advanced, and it was a massive hit.
Considered the “grandfather of 3D shooters,” Wolfenstein 3D was followed up quickly by Doom, which led to an explosion of first-person shooter games. Wolfenstein 3D was also hugely influential in proving the viability of shareware publishing, as the best-selling shareware of 1992.
You can play Wolfenstein 3D online for free using most modern desktop browsers.
From July 25 to August 9, the 1992 Summer Olympic Games were held in Barcelona. They’re best known—to American audiences, anyway—for the performance of the U.S. men’s basketball team, which was the first to include current NBA players. We called it the “Dream Team.”
The Dream Team featured an all-star lineup of 11 NBA players: Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Patrick Ewing, David Robinson, Clyde Drexler, Scottie Pippen, Chris Mullin. There was also a twelfth member, college player Christian Laettner (who would go on to the NBA). Their goal was to bring home a Gold Medal, and they crushed it.
They won all eight of their Barcelona games, with an average lead of 44 points. Interestingly, although the Dream Team did a great job, the 1956 U.S. team exceeded their performance, with an average of +56 points per game. Still, the Dream Team is often considered the best team ever assembled in any sport.
Dr. Dre released his first solo album on December 15. It was a masterpiece of hip-hop production, and it was Dre’s first appearance outside of N.W.A. The Chronic included tons of appearances by Snoop Dogg, kickstarting his career.
1992 was a huge year for ex-N.W.A. members releasing solo albums. In that same year, Ice Cube released The Predator, Eazy-E released 5150: Home 4 tha Sick, and MC Ren released Kizz My Black Azz. (D.O.C. was also involved with The Chronic.)
The USDA released its first Food Guide Pyramid in 1992. This guide was just the latest in a long series of food guidance offered by the USDA [PDF], but it was the first to take a pyramid shape. (The USDA based its design initially on Sweden’s food pyramid, though the contents differed.)
Based on a broad platform of “Bread, Cereal, Rice & Pasta,” the guide’s visual design was informed by consumer research [PDF], which compared (among other things) a “bowl” shape divided into segments versus the pyramid design. The research read, in part:
… the differences between the pyramid and the bowl in communicating the proportionality and moderation concepts were large and highly significant (p<.001). Higher scores for the pyramid were consistent across all the subpopulations examined, including those for whom concern was greatest—children and individuals on food assistance programs.
In 2005, the USDA switched to what it called “MyPyramid,” and in 2011 ditched the whole pyramid thing in favor of “MyPlate.” The Food Pyramid’s guidance remains controversial.
On April 12, Euro Disney opened in Paris. French citizens weren’t too enthused, seeing it as an invasion of American commercialism. (Disney CEO Michael Eisner was hit with eggs and presented with “Mickey, Go Home!” protest signs when he appeared at the Paris stock exchange.) Americans weren’t particularly keen either, already having world-class Disney parks at home. Visitors couldn’t even drink wine in the park when it first opened. French commentators called it a “cultural Chernobyl.”
The park was eventually renamed Disneyland Paris, and became the most-visited tourist attraction in Europe. In 2015 it attracted more visitors than the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower combined. Unfortunately, this visitor traffic has not led to profit, and the park has faced financial troubles over the decades.
Super Mario Kart started the Mario Kart racing game franchise on August 27, when it debuted in Japan. (It was released on September 1 in the U.S.) It boasted a multiplayer split-screen mode as well as excellent graphics (at least for a Super Nintendo game). Super Mario Kart went on to sell more than eight million cartridges and spawned many sequels.
IBM debuted its first ThinkPad laptop on October 5, 1992. Its name was inspired by an old line of IBM paper notepads that bore the slogan “Think.” Although IBM introduced three sleek black ThinkPad models, the ThinkPad 700c was the star. It featured a 10.4-inch color screen, integrated TrackPoint pointing device (that little red nubbin in the middle of the keyboard), and a beefy 486 CPU. It was truly a powerful computer for its era, and at just 7.6 pounds, it was considered very portable. Of course, its $4350 price tag was a problem, but there were cheaper options (with monochrome displays) in the lineup.
Today the ThinkPad is manufactured by Lenovo, but its design and build quality are still reminiscent of that original 700C—minus most of the weight.
In 1982, researchers began working on a computer file format that would store photographic data. The goal was to compress images so that photographs would be small, making them easy to download over low-bandwidth connections, and easy to store on small storage devices. The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) formed in 1986 to develop the compression standard.
On September 18, the first JPEG standard was published, and the rest is computer history. The JPEG’s ability to handle photographs (and other kinds of detailed imagery) while tossing out extraneous data makes it similar to the MP3 format for sound. Throughout the 1990s, JPEG joined file formats like GIF as the basis for web pages, and you’re still looking at JPEGs on this website today!
In 1992, the first prescription nicotine patch reached the market—four years later, it became available over-the-counter. The patch was developed by Dr. Murray E. Jarvik, a UCLA pharmacologist (and nonsmoker) who figured that delivering nicotine to smokers via a skin patch could curb their cravings, helping them to quit smoking.
Jarvik had a long history working with nicotine; in the 1960s he taught monkeys to smoke cigarettes and established that nicotine was the addictive ingredient. That discovery led to nicotine gum and eventually the transdermal patch.
Starting on April 13, pre-addressed ballots appeared at post offices around the U.S. They allowed the public to vote on two proposed designs for a stamp bearing the image of Elvis Presley. The key question: Should we show young Elvis or old Elvis? (Ahem, “mature” Elvis, with sequined white jumpsuit.) People Magazine ran a full-page ad asking the public to “Decide which Elvis is King.” The vote ended on April 24, so there was a frenzy to acquire these ballots and make votes in the minimal time they were available.
The vote was a matter of public debate, with designs created by artists Mark Stutzman and John Berkey. (These were the finalists after eight artists submitted 60 sketches to the U.S. Postal Service.) More than 1.2 million ballots were cast, with roughly 75 percent of them selecting Stutzman’s “young Elvis” painting.
The Elvis stamp itself was released on January 8, 1993—on what would have been Elvis’s 58th birthday.
The Muppet Christmas Carol sleighed into theaters on December 11, 1992. An adaptation of Charles Dickens’s classic, the film starred Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge, along with the classic Muppet characters. (Kermit played Bob Cratchit and Gonzo played Charles Dickens himself, as the narrator.) It was the first Muppet movie made without Jim Henson.
The film was directed by Brian Henson, Jim’s son. Jim had died on May 16, 1990, so Kermit was played by Steve Whitmire. Longtime Muppet puppeteer Richard Hunt died on January 7, 1992 before production began, and his characters (including Statler, Beaker, and Janice) were handled by other performers. The film was dedicated to the memory of the two men.
Freddie Mercury died on November 24, 1991, aged 45. He was the first rock star to die from AIDS complications, and the remaining members of the band Queen organized a concert to promote AIDS awareness.
The tribute concert was held at London’s Wembley Stadium on April 20, 1992. It featured a star-studded lineup including David Bowie, George Michael, Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, Elton John, Metallica, Annie Lennox, Guns N’ Roses, Seal, and U2. It was broadcast live to an international TV audience.
If you haven’t seen the concert, head over to YouTube. It’s fantastic. (The entire three-hour concert is also available for rent on various online services.)
“November Rain” is one of Guns N’ Roses’s longest songs, clocking in just shy of nine minutes. A lot of that is extended guitar solos and orchestral segments. To go with the song, the band put together an epic music video which, somehow, has more than 700 million views on YouTube.
Directed by Andy Morahan (who also directed such masterpieces as George Michael’s “Faith”), the video featured model Stephanie Seymour—then Axl Rose’s girlfriend—as his wife. The video cost more than $1.5 million to make (at the time, the highest-budget music video ever). A big chunk of that budget was devoted to building a chapel in the desert so Slash could wail in front of it while a helicopter zoomed by.
The video is famously complex, so much so that in 2014 Slash admitted that he had “no idea” what it meant. He commented, in part, “I knew there was a wedding in there somewhere and I was not into the concept of the wedding.”
On November 25, The Bodyguard—starring Kevin Costner as the titular bodyguard and Whitney Houston as the pop star he’s protecting—graced theaters. It was Houston’s first film role, and it was a massive box office hit.
But more important than the movie was its soundtrack: Houston’s iconic cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” was the standout hit, and the soundtrack was a blockbuster, currently ranked the 16th bestselling record of all time, and it is the number one bestselling soundtrack.
At one point in 1993, the soundtrack held five simultaneous number one positions on the Billboard charts. Now that’s a hit record.
On May 22, 1992, Johnny Carson finished his run as host of The Tonight Show on NBC. On May 25, Jay Leno became the new host, and Billy Crystal was his first guest. Branford Marsalis led The Tonight Show band, and Ed Hall was the new announcer. After Billy Crystal on that first episode, the guests were performer Shanice Wilson and Robert Krulwich (later co-host of Radiolab).
Leno was the fourth host of the show. Steve Allen was first, followed by Jack Paar, then Johnny Carson’s incredible three-decade run. Leno hosted from 1992-2014 (with a brief interruption where Conan O’Brien had the gig from 2009-2010). After Leno’s retirement in 2014, Jimmy Fallon took the hosting job and remains there today.
In a surprising turn, Star Wars: The Force Awakens costars John Boyega and Daisy Ridley were both born in 1992. The Force is strong with this year. Here’s a rundown of some famous birth dates:
Taylor Lautner – February 11
John Boyega – March 17
Daisy Ridley – April 10
Kate Upton – June 10
Selena Gomez – July 22
Demi Lovato – August 20
Nick Jonas – September 16
Miley Cyrus – November 23
In 1992, lawyers Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck founded The Innocence Project. The organization’s mission is to exonerate wrongfully convicted (innocent) people and reform the criminal justice system that convicted them in the first place. One of their key tools is DNA analysis, which sometimes was not available at the time of conviction.
To date, The Innocence Project has been involved with hundreds of exonerations, including cases in which they have helped find the actual perpetrator.
1992 was an incredible year for alternative and hip-hop bands. Here’s a partial list of bands formed that year:
Blink-182 (initially as “Blink”)
Built to Spill
Bush
Collective Soul
Digable Planets
Elastica
Tha Dogg Pound
Hanson (initially as “The Hanson Brothers”)
Harvey Danger
Jamiroquai
Less Than Jake
Nada Surf
Porno for Pyros
Seven Mary Three
Silverchair
Soul Coughing
Sunny Day Real Estate
Weezer
Wu-Tang Clan
In 1992, brothers Dane and Travis Boersma opened the first Dutch Bros. Coffee location in Grants Pass, Oregon. The brothers were of Dutch descent, hence the company’s name. They were former dairy farmers, trying their hand at a new business. They proceeded immediately on their mission of “Roastin’ and Rockin’,” then proceeded to spread across the country to more than 260 locations that continue “spreading the Dutch Luv” [sic].
On February 1, U.S. President George H.W. Bush met with Russian President Boris Yeltsin at Camp David. The two issued a join declaration formally ending the Cold War, and declaring a new era of “friendship and partnership” between the two nations.
At the announcement, Yeltsin said, in part:
“Today one might say that there has been written and drawn a new line, and crossed out all of the things that have been associated with the Cold War.
From now on we do not consider ourselves to be potential enemies, as it had been previously in our military doctrine. This is the historic value of this meeting. And another very important factor in our relationship, right away today, it’s already been pointed out that in the future there’ll be full frankness, full openness, full honesty in our relationship.”
The Joint Declaration promised all sorts of great stuff, including reducing strategic arsenals, promoting free trade, and promoting “respect for human rights.” You can read the whole declaration for a taste of what the future looked like in 1992.
January 3, 2017 – 8:00am
| Questions: | 5 |
| Available: | Always |
| Pass rate: | 75 % |
| Backwards navigation: | Forbidden |
Still Celebrating 20″17″
Monday, January 2, 2017 – 08:54