Month: January 2017

Plenty of people love The Smiths, the 1980s English rock band (led by Morrissey) behind songs such as “This Charming Man,” “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out,” and “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.” But in 1987, one teenage fan in Denver, Colorado took his love for the band too far. According to an urban legend, the 18-year-old supposedly drove to his local radio station and held the DJs hostage at gunpoint, forcing them to play songs by The Smiths on repeat.

The story makes the crazy antics of obsessed Beliebers look tame by comparison, but did it actually happen? Different accounts of the incident appeared in The Denver Post, Denver’s weekly newspaper; Westword; Details Magazine; a Morrissey biography; and inconsistent recollections from the radio station’s employees. In 2013, Westword got to the bottom of the urban legend, exploring the differing versions of the story and separating fact from fiction.

According to Westword, The Denver Post gave the first account of the incident. The brief report stated that a “last minute change of heart apparently averted the hijacking of a Lakewood radio station but left an Arvada teenage in jail Wednesday.” The write-up describes the wannabe hijacker as an 18-year-old—later identified as James Kiss—who said he was planning to take over the Top 40 radio station KRXY (Y-108). According to the police spokesman, Kiss surrendered his rifle to one of the station’s employees and asked the employee to call the police. The teen was then arrested in the station’s parking lot for attempted kidnapping and extortion.

The week after the incident, a column in Westword stated that Kiss, who was carrying a rifle, seven cassettes, and an album by The Smiths, was arrested after he entered the station. Seven years later, an April 1994 interview with Morrissey in Details Magazine referred to the incident, saying that Kiss held the radio station at gunpoint for four hours, “demanding that they play only Smiths’ songs.” Morrissey was surprised that the interviewer had even asked him about the incident because most people hadn’t heard about it. “’If it was any other artist, it would have been world news. But because it was poor old tatty Smiths it was of no consequence whatsoever,” he said.

A decade later, in the 2004 biography Saint Morrissey: A Portrait of This Charming Man by an Alarming Fan, writer Mark Simpson gave his own account of the event, writing that the radio station was coerced to play songs by The Smiths for four hours. Simpson added that almost none of the radio station’s listeners had heard of The Smiths, and the police surrounded the station until Kiss surrendered.

To figure out which version of the story is accurate, Westword interviewed former KRXY employees. A sales manager recalled seeing the young man’s single-shot, bolt-action 22 rifle, but another employee thought that Kiss may have not even had a weapon. The station’s production director told the police that as he walked to his car after work, a young man in a station wagon called him over, told him to tell the radio station employees to call the police, and pointed his rifle at him before handing it over.

“This is one of those legends that bloats with time,” said broadcaster Dom Testa. “It’s morphed from ‘detained in the parking lot’ to ‘held hostage for four hours at gunpoint.'” The police officer’s version of events corroborates Testa’s take; according to the police report, Kiss brought a Remington .22 caliber Apache 77 rifle, a cartridge with .22 caliber rounds, a pellet gun, a magazine clip, and several Smiths cassettes. He confessed that he planned to take hostages at the radio station, forcing the DJs to play The Smiths because the Top 40 station had tons of listeners and was, in his mind, shallow. Kiss was cooperative with police, telling them that he had come to the station before to act on his plan but hadn’t been able to work up the courage. The police report noted that Kiss had a button with Morrissey’s photo on it in his shirt pocket.

The police later found Kiss’s letters and poems, in which he expressed his despondency, explained his motives, and conveyed his hope that his parents would forgive him. “I don’t feel right here,” he wrote. “I feel as if I’m out of place. My spirit is lost and my body is pollution filled … I guess what I’m doing is a protest about life. The world’s dying and most don’t care … in a way the Smiths and Morrissey are one reason I’m doing this.”

The district attorney decided not to prosecute Kiss because he turned himself in and didn’t commit a crime. Despite his callow transgression, Kiss eventually went to college, overcame his depression, and now works helping young people. “I can see it when kids start to paint themselves into corners, and I try to get them to work their way out of that,” he told Westword in 2013. Explaining his depression—he had recently graduated from high school, couldn’t work due to a hip injury, and had no future plans—Kiss said that his thinking was clouded. “My intention was to throw my life away,” he said. Kiss also shared that he had decided not to go through with his plan because he realized that he didn’t want to hurt or scare the radio station employees.

The incident allegedly inspired the plot of the 1994 film Airheads, and it’s getting the big screen treatment in the near future. With Morrissey’s blessing, Joe Manganiello will produce and star in a movie called Shoplifters of the World. Based on the incident, the film will include songs by, of course, The Smiths.

“I’m a huge The Smiths fan,” Manganiello told Collider. “It’s just really great to be afforded the opportunity to go out and tell stories that I’m really excited and passionate about.”

Less than 3 percent of the U.S. population is blind, which means many of our perceptions about the community are informed by movies and TV. The mental_floss List Show’s Josh Sundquist is here to dispel some of the more pervasive myths about blindness once and for all. No, not all blind people read braille (the books are much heavier and more expensive than a Kindle), and not everyone who’s visually impaired uses a cane (many prefer to rely on service animals, sighted guides, or their own limited vision when out and about). To hear more misconceptions get debunked, check out the video above.

In just over two and a half minutes, editor Bora Barroso shows us Disney feature film animation, starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and ending with Zootopia (2016). It’s fun to watch the stylistic changes. To me, there are three major changes after the original cel animation starts mixing with computers:

1. THE NINETIES. As soon as we hit 1990, there is a clear influence of computer graphics (in Beauty and the Beast there is CGI imagery in backgrounds), but the primary animation is still hand-drawn.

2. THE YEAR 2000. Suddenly we’re in full computer graphics mode, but it looks oddly dated. The cel-style animation in this period looks great, but almost too clean.

3. THE YEAR 2010. Oh wow, the computer animation looks great now!

I presume that in another few years, the animation of the 2010s will look dated as well, but for now…let’s just enjoy some art.

THE EVOLUTION OF DISNEY ANIMATION (1937-2016) from Bora Barroso on Vimeo.

While there are plenty of museums devoted to everyday items and objects, this has got to be one of the strangest: In San Antonio, Texas, a retired master plumber has created a bizarre roadside attraction known as Barney Smith’s Toilet Seat Art Museum.

As BoingBoing reports, director Wes Plate made a short film about the museum, which opened in 1992 and showcases more than 1200 toilet seats-turned-pieces of art. The toilet seats serve as the canvas for Smith’s work, which focuses on important historical and sporting events, notable celebrity tributes, general pop culture, and American patriotism. The 95-year-old Texan has been an artist for most of his life, but fell into the family business of plumbing as a full-time career. It was during one fateful trip to a local plumbing supplier that Smith found the inspiration for what would become his artistic obsession.

“I went to a plumbing supply house one time, and they had about 50 toilet seats out on the dock that they were going to throw away,” Smith told Roadside America. “And I said [to the guy] ‘What are you going to do with those toilet seats. I would like to have some of these toilet seats to do some art on.’ I’d been going down to the River Walk and doing a little art on canvas. He said, ‘Well, you can’t have ’em, unless you take the hinge off, and throw away half of ’em while you’re here.’ I threw the rim away and kept the lid.”

Barney Smith’s Toilet Seat Art Museum is located at 239 Abiso Avenue in San Antonio, Texas. It’s open to the public, and if you donate your own toilet seat, Smith will engrave your name on it as part of his artwork. (Just make sure the toilet seat is clean before you hand it over!)

You can watch Plate’s film below.

[h/t BoingBoing]

Since Sherlock made its premiere in 2010, fans of the BBC series have repeatedly claimed that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes is the role that Oscar-nominated actor Benedict Cumberbatch was born to play. Turns out, they might be right.

According to the Independent, researchers at Ancestry.com recently made a fascinating discovery: Cumberbatch and Sherlock Holmes creator Doyle are sixteenth cousins, twice removed. The ancestral link between the two is former Duke of Lancaster John of Gaunt, who was Doyle’s 15th great-grandfather and Cumberbatch’s 17th great-grandfather.

Amazingly, this isn’t the first time Cumberbatch’s ancestry has been linked to one of his characters. In 2014, the same team of researchers determined that Cumberbatch was the 17th cousin of Alan Turing, the computer scientist/codebreaker he played in Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game (2014)—a role that earned Cumberbatch an Oscar nomination in 2015. Not so elementary after all.

[h/t: Independent]

In 1793, the French switched to French Revolutionary Time, creating a decimal system of time. A day had 10 hours, 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute. The system was elegant, doing away with the complex math required for time calculations under a 24 hour/60 minute/60 second system. But it also brought huge headaches.

French Revolutionary Time came alongside the French Republican Calendar, a further attempt to rationalize time. Months were divided into three 10-day weeks, and there were 12 months. The leftover days needed to add up to 365 or 366 for the year were tacked onto the end of the year as holidays. This was a bit inelegant (days and years being hard to divide cleanly by 10), but at least it was less confusing than trying to sort out what time “noon” was (it was 5 o’clock).

French Revolutionary Time only lasted 17 months. By April 7, 1795 (in the Gregorian calendar), the time system became optional. Decimal clocks and decimal/standard hybrid clocks continued to be used for years, but for practicality, France returned to the same system of time as its neighbors.

The French Republican Calendar lasted far longer. It began in late 1793 and ran all the way through the end of 1805 (again in the Gregorian reckoning). On December 31, 1805, the French government chucked the system—in the year XIV, by Republican reckoning. This was due, of course, to the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte as Emperor. (Incidentally, his coronation occurred on 11 Frimaire, Year XIII of the French Republican Calendar—also known as 2 December, 1804. It took him more than a year to roll back the revolutionary calendar.) In any case, January 1, 1806 rolled around using the Gregorian calendar and the rest is history.

Of course, all this calendar-nerd stuff leads to the fact that you could still choose to use the French Republican Calendar. Indeed, Wikipedia will tell you the current day and year using the system, although you’ll want to read up on the exquisite problems related to leap years (also helpfully detailed on Wikipedia).

For a bit more on decimal time (including several modern variants), check out our article Decimal Time: How the French Made a 10-Hour Day.

While 1960’s Spartacus was the subject of plenty of behind-the-scenes drama, including a script by then-blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, it should not be forgotten that the movie featured an embarrassment of riches on the screen, including legendary actors like Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, Charles Laughton, Tony Curtis, and Kirk Douglas as the title character, an illiterate slave who leads a revolt against the Roman Empire in 73 B.C. Here are some facts about director Stanley Kubrick’s historical epic.

1. YUL BRYNNER TRIED TO MAKE HIS OWN SPARTACUS MOVIE FIRST.

A Spartacus film starring Brynner and Anthony Quinn was on the slate for United Artists, with the titles Spartacus and The Gladiators already trademarked. UA even paid for a full-page ad to be published in Variety in February 1958 for The Gladiators. However, Douglas and his film company owned the movie rights to Howard Fast’s novel, Spartacus, and when Universal Pictures backed Douglas—along with Ustinov, Olivier, and Laughton all preferring Trumbo’s script over the script for Brynner’s project—Douglas had won. Brynner’s film was never made.

2. HOWARD FAST WAS THE FIRST ONE TO TRY WRITING THE SCRIPT.

Universal gave Douglas four weeks to come up with a script if he wanted their backing. Unfortunately, Douglas considered Fast’s attempt at adapting his own book to be a “disaster.” Douglas turned to Trumbo to save the project, with Trumbo writing it under the alias “Sam Jackson“—he had won a writing Oscar years earlier for The Brave One (1956) under the pseudonym “Robert Rich.”

Fast would later, according to him, be begged by Douglas to go out to Hollywood during filming to work with Kubrick to help. “They had started shooting the movie from Dalton Trumbo’s script and they had about an hour and forty minutes of disconnected and chaotic film,” Fast said in an interview. “While they had all this film, they had no ‘movie’ and no story — just pieces of film really.” By Fast’s estimation, he wrote 27 scenes to connect the footage that had already been shot into a cohesive picture.

3. STANLEY KUBRICK WAS NOT THE FIRST DIRECTOR.

David Lean (1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai) turned down an offer to direct, and Laurence Olivier was asked but declined because he thought both acting and directing would be too much. Douglas believed that the original director, Anthony Mann, was scared of the large scope of the movie, and he also didn’t like how close he was to the British actors, so he fired him after two weeks of filming. Douglas turned to Kubrick, his director on Paths of Glory (1957), who agreed for a salary of $150,000.

4. JEAN SIMMONS WAS NOT THE ORIGINAL VARINIA.

Douglas wanted actress Jeanne Moreau (1959’s Les Liaisons dangereuses) for the part, but she didn’t want to leave her boyfriend in France. German actress Sabina Bethmann was then cast as Varinia, but once things got rolling with Kubrick, it was decided she wasn’t right for the role, so she was paid $3,000 to go home. Then Douglas called Jean Simmons at her ranch in Arizona. “Kirk told me to get my ass on out to Los Angeles,” Simmons said. “I did. Pronto.” For what it’s worth, Fast believed Ingrid Bergman should have gotten the gig all along.

5. PETER USTINOV WASN’T FORMALLY INTRODUCED TO DOUGLAS.

Ustinov (Batiatus) first met Douglas shooting the scene when his slave trader character discovers Spartacus chained to a rock. Because Douglas was so ragged looking, he didn’t recognize the man.

6. CHARLES LAUGHTON AND LAURENCE OLIVIER DID NOT GET ALONG.

According to Ustinov, he had to act as a buffer between the thespians Laughton (Gracchus) and Olivier (Crassus). “For some reason—like animals—they just didn’t like each other,” Ustinov remembered. “When you get two dogs that growl at each other, you don’t really ask why, you just accept it. But Olivier knew that Laughton was going to appear at Stratford in England as King Lear and tried to make up for this atmosphere by giving Laughton a little diagram with crosses on it and saying [mimicking Olivier], ‘Dear boy, I’ve marked here the areas on the stage from where you can’t be heard.’ And Laughton was delighted. [mimicking Laughton] ‘Thank you so much, Larry. I shan’t forget that. Oh, you are kind.’ And as soon as Olivier was out of earshot Laughton turned to me and said, ‘I’m sure those are the very areas from which you can be heard.'”

7. OLIVIER WORE A FAKE NOSE.

It was fairly similar to his actual snout. Ustinov said on the DVD commentary he thought that the fake nose helped Olivier “feel safe.”

8. KUBRICK TOLD THE HIRED CINEMATOGRAPHER TO TAKE A SEAT.

Because Kubrick was a cinematographer himself and very exacting in what he wanted, he eventually told Russell Metty, the man hired by Anthony Mann, to do nothing and let Kubrick do all the work for him. Metty would win his first and only Oscar for Best Cinematography for “his” work on Spartacus.

9. MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL ATTENDEES PROVIDED THE SHOUTING.

The 76,000 football fans at the October 17, 1959 showdown between Notre Dame and Michigan State were asked to scream “Hail, Crassus,” “On to Rome,” “Spartacus, Spartacus,” and of course “I am Spartacus!” They were also tasked to make “shouts and noises of an army in combat,” and told by actor John Gavin (Julius Caesar) to make sure not to scream any modern sayings like “yippee” or “yay” or “Charge!” Douglas later wrote in his autobiography, “It’s only natural for Spartacus to go to the Spartans for help.” Michigan State won that day 19-0.

10. THERE WERE INJURIES ON SET, AND EVEN A DEATH.

Douglas stopped production for 10 days when he came down with the flu. Tony Curtis (Antoninus) had to be “worked around” for five weeks after he split his Achilles tendon playing tennis with Douglas at Douglas’s home. Art director Eric Orbom had a fatal heart attack during production; he would later win a posthumous Oscar for Best Art Direction in the movie.

11. KIRK DOUGLAS WAS LEFT HANGING ONE DAY.

“I remember a long, long day of filming and it took forever to get Kirk Douglas up on his cross,” Jean Simmons once recalled. “When he was safely installed, the assistant director called lunch and left him up there. You have to have a sense of humour in this industry.”

12. THERE WAS SOME CENSORSHIP.

The “snails and oysters” scene, where Olivier’s character attempted to seduce Tony Curtis’s character in a Roman bathhouse, only made it to two test screenings before the New York Legion of Decency demanded it be excised from the movie because it was considered obscene. Censors suggested changing snails and oysters to “artichokes and truffles,” but Douglas and Kubrick opted to take the whole four-minute scene out instead. Curtis remembered that the studio wasn’t a fan of the scene to begin with, to the objections of himself and Olivier. When it was only shot once, Curtis said, “We knew there was trouble right there.” He added, “Stanley [Kubrick] and I were perhaps a little more progressive in our thinking than Kirk [Douglas] and all those other guys who were making the movie. Sure, let’s talk about everything but let’s not talk about homosexuality. That’s a no-no. Especially at Universal Pictures.”

13. ANTHONY HOPKINS WAS BROUGHT IN TO VOICE THE DECEASED OLIVIER IN A CONTROVERSIAL SCENE.

A 1991 restoration pieced together long-lost footage discovered in studio vaults and saved by collectors to restore its original cut of 197 minutes, including the parts censored out. The sound of the “oysters and snails” scene had to be re-dubbed, so Curtis re-recorded his part, and from the suggestion of Olivier’s widow, Anthony Hopkins voiced Crassus, in his best Olivier impersonation. Kubrick faxed instructions on how to play the scene.

14. IT TOOK 167 DAYS TO FILM AND ABOUT 10,500 PEOPLE TO MAKE.

Twelve million dollars was spent on Spartacus, a record for the most expensive movie made (primarily) in Hollywood at the time. Its budget ended up exceeding the total worth of Universal, which was sold to MCA for $11,250,000 during filming. Universal employees spent an estimated 250,000 man-hours working on everything. Italian museums and costume houses supplied 5000 uniforms and seven tons of armor, and 8800 Spanish army troops were captured on film for the battle scenes (the final battle was shot in Madrid). Overall about 50,000 extras were involved. All 187 stuntmen were “trained in the gladiatorial rituals of combat to the death.”

15. DOUGLAS AND JFK HELPED END THE BLACKLIST.

Kubrick suggested using his own name as the writer of the film, even though Dalton Trumbo wrote the majority of the screenplay. This offended Douglas, who opted to just use Trumbo’s real name as the credited screenwriter, despite the predictable opposition from the American Legion because of Trumbo’s refusal to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The American Legion protested, but after President John F. Kennedy saw it and said he enjoyed the feature, blacklisting was all but over. Douglas said in 2010 that as far as he was concerned, “the most important by-product of Spartacus is that we broke the blacklist.”

16. STANLEY KUBRICK LATER DISOWNED IT.

He demanded that three of his movies, including Spartacus, not be included in the home video Stanley Kubrick Collection in 1999. It wasn’t a surprise. In 1968 he said, “Then I did Spartacus, which was the only film that I did not have control over, and which I feel was not enhanced by that fact. It all really just came down to the fact that there are thousands of decisions that have to be made, and that if you don’t make them yourself, and if you’re not on the same wavelength as the people who are making them, it becomes a very painful experience, which it was.” He added that the movie “had everything but a good story.”

Erik Sass is covering the events of the war exactly 100 years after they happened. This is the 261st installment in the series.

DECEMBER 29-30, 1916: RASPUTIN MURDERED

One of the most hated men in Russia, the malign holy man Rasputin met a grisly end on the evening of December 29-30, 1916, when he was murdered by aristocratic courtiers, including one of Tsar Nicholas II’s own nephews, in a desperate bid to save the monarchy. But it was too little, too late: popular support for the regime had already crumbled, and its foundations would soon give way before the tide of revolution.

Rumors of plots to assassinate Rasputin had been circulating for years, but the idea gained traction as Russia’s losses on the Eastern Front mounted and the tsarist autocracy looked more and more vulnerable at home. Some pundits even called for his murder publicly, albeit in veiled references. For example the liberal Russian newspaper New Times hinted at extreme measures in early 1916:

How has an abject adventurer like this been able to mock Russia for so long? Is it not astounding that the Church, the Holy Synod, the aristocracy, ministers, the Senate, and many members of the State Council and Duma have degraded themselves before this low hound? The Rasputin scandals seemed perfectly natural [before but] today Russia means to put an end to all this. 

For the time being, however, no one dared to defy Rasputin’s powerful patroness and protector, the Tsarina Alexandra, who used her influence over her weak-willed husband to help her beloved holy man insinuate himself into all aspects of government. One by one, Rasputin’s staunchest opponents fell to court intrigue, including War Minister Polivanov and Foreign Minister Sazonov, while Rasputin maneuvered his own favorites into top positions, including Alexander Protopopov as Interior Minister.

Meanwhile the success of the Russian Brusilov Offensive did nothing to defuse the increasingly revolutionary situation brewing in the big cities (in fact, the massive casualties incurred during the offensive, totaling 1.4 million, probably contributed to the widespread disaffection). As one of the coldest winters on records descended on Europe in late 1916, growing shortages of food and fuel across Russia reached crisis proportions—a fact made abundantly clear by wave after wave of strikes, which often turned into bloody riots. When ordinary soldiers refused to fire on strikers, turning their guns on the police instead, informed observers realized it was only a matter of time.

As 1916 drew to a close, the Russian political establishment—long subservient to the all-powerful monarch—was finally moved to open defiance out of sheer desperation. In December the Russian Duma, or Parliament, demanded more control of the war effort and more details about the country’s war aims, including the age-old dream of conquering Constantinople—as distant as ever following the failure of the Gallipoli campaign.

The appointment in mid-December of Mikhail Beliaev, the hated chief of the general staff and another Rapustin favorite, as War Minister, was hardly an encouraging sign. On December 20, 1916, the Russian Assembly of Notables, representing the aristocracy, issued a statement openly condemning Rasputin’s influence on the government, followed by the Union of Zemstvos and Union of Towns, representing local governments, which warned on December 29:

When power becomes an obstacle in the road to victory, the whole land must shoulder the responsibility for the fate of Russia. The Government, which has become the tool of occult forces, is leading Russia to her ruin and shaking the imperial throne. We must create a government worthy of a great people at one of the gravest moments of its history. In the critical struggle upon which it has entered, may the Duma come up to what the country expects of it! There is not a day to lose!

But even at this late date the royal couple were hardly prepared to compromise, judging by Alexandra’s advice to Nicholas in a letter written December 13, urging him to crush the mounting opposition without fear of consequences, because “Russia loves to feel the whip!”

With Russia in an uproar, the coup de grace was finally delivered by a cabal of aristocrats and high officials, including the young Prince Felix Yusupov, a nephew of Tsar Nicholas II by marriage; the tsar’s cousin, Grand Duke Dmitri; a reactionary politician, Vladimir Purishkevich; Sergei Mikhailovich Sukhotin, an officer from the elite Preobrazhensky Regiment; and Dr. Stanislaus de Lazovert, a Polish doctor and colonel. But the conspirators didn’t suspect just how difficult it would be to kill the hardy Siberian peasant mystic.

According to various accounts, Yusupov gained Rasputin’s confidence by asking him to treat a minor illness, then invited the holy man to Yusupov’s palace on the Moika River on an unknown pretext in the late evening of December 29, 1916. After bringing him to a room in the basement of the palace (see photo above), Yusupov plied Rasputin with tea, red wine, and cakes laced with cyanide. When this seemed to have no effect, Yusupov then shot him twice in the back and side, penetrating his stomach, liver, and kidneys.

As Rasputin lay bleeding on the floor, Yusupov hurried upstairs to tell the other plotters the deed was done—but during that time Rasputin, still alive, managed to flee the building into the snow-covered courtyard, where he again collapsed. Alarmed he might escape, Yusupov shot Rasputin once more in the back, and the conspirators hauled him inside, where Yusupov shot him yet again, this time in the forehead.

Believing Rasputin dead, the plotters wrapped his body in a cheap blanket, secured with chains for good measure, and took him to a bridge over a branch of the Neva River, where they dumped the body into a hole in the ice. Incredibly, Rasputin was apparently still alive at this point, and with almost supernatural strength managed to undo some of the heavy chains enclosing him in the blanket before he finally drowned beneath the ice—a fact only uncovered when his body was recovered two days later.

On hearing news of the murder, the Tsarina Alexandra and her courtiers, all fervent believers in his mystical powers, were inconsolable and outraged—but the general reaction was rather different, to say the least. Maurice Paleologue, the French ambassador to Petrograd, wrote in his diary on January 2, 1917:

There was great rejoicing among the public when it heard of the death of Rasputin the day before yesterday. People kissed each other in the streets and many went to burn candles in Our Lady of Kazan … The murder of Grigori is the sole topic of conversation among the unending queues of women who wait in the snow and wind at the doors of the butchers and grocers to secure their share of meat, tea, sugar, etc. They are saying that Rasputin was thrown into the Nevka alive, and approvingly quoting the proverb: Sabâkyé, sabâtchya smerte! “A dog’s death for a dog!”

By the same token, Rasputin’s death only served to confirm the empress in her increasingly paranoid and reactionary attitudes, further stoking the flames of revolution. In his diary entry on January 4, 1917, Sir John Hanbury-Williams, chief of the British military mission in Russia, recounted a meeting with a worried courtier:

He was naturally full of the Rasputin episode, and anxious as to its results. The question is: What will be done with the officers who took part in it? If they suffer in any way there will be trouble … The difficulty would be specially with the Empress, being as she is a firm believer in the good faith of Rasputin. And her influence reacts on the Emperor. I confess that even with the disappearance of the most important factor in the drama I see no light ahead yet, and the situation may develop into anything.

The final drama of the doomed Romanov dynasty was about to unfold.

See the previous installment or all entries.

Some of our favorite historical figures were born in the first month of the year. We couldn’t possibly name them all, so here are just a handful of lives we’ll be celebrating.

1. JOAN OF ARC: JANUARY 6, CIRCA 1412

Joan d’Arc, who lived just 19 years, packed a lot into her short life. When she was 13, Joan began to have visions of herself leading France to victory over England—and though she was just a peasant girl who couldn’t read or write, she had complete faith in her visions. At 16, Joan rejected an arranged marriage to carry out her mission to depose the English King Henry VI and install the French prince Charles as its rightful king. She gathered followers, cut her hair, put on warrior’s armor, and led several successful assaults against the English in 1429. (Though she was in charge of troops and strategy, she didn’t actively participate in combat.) Joan became a hero, Charles took the crown, and her forces grew. But she was captured by Anglo-Burgundians in 1430 and charged with 70 crimes, including witchcraft and cross-dressing. She was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431. On July 6, 1456, Joan d’Arc was declared innocent of heresy, and more than 460 years later, she was declared a saint.

2. ZORA NEALE HURSTON: JANUARY 7, 1891

Evidence points to Zora Neale Hurston being born in 1891, but she lied about her age in order to get an education after having to work for years. She stuck to her story of being 10 years younger the rest of her life. Hurston became one of the literary stars of the Harlem Renaissance, even as she refused to imbue her works with political goals. She produced novels, nonfiction, and stage plays, usually with great reception and meager profits. Hurston died broke in 1960. Hurston, who had once written to activist W.E.B. Du Bois proposing the creation of “a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead,” was buried in an unmarked grave in Florida. But in 1973, Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, put a marker on Hurston’s grave that read “Zora Neale Hurston, A Genius of the South. Novelist, folklorist, anthropologist.”

3. DAVID BOWIE: JANUARY 8, 1947

Born David Robert Jones, the performer known as David Bowie started playing saxophone at age 13. He assumed his stage name in 1966 and released his first album the next year. He continued to be a trend-setting presence in music and fashion until his death last year at the age of 69, two days after the release of his final album, Blackstar.

4. ELVIS PRESLEY: JANUARY 8, 1935

Before he became a worldwide superstar in the 1950s, Elvis—who was born in 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi—was a shy teenager trying to find his place. At his senior prom in Memphis, he told his date he couldn’t dance. He got over that shyness, and danced his way through two episodes of The Milton Berle Show in 1956 with moves that scandalized some viewers.

5. SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR: JANUARY 9, 1908

As a child, the French writer and existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir attended school at a convent and wanted to become a nun. But at 14, she renounced religion and became an atheist; in 1926, she headed to the Sorbonne to study philosophy. In 1929, she became the ninth woman to take the agrégation in philosophy, a competitive exam that landed those who passed coveted teaching jobs. She came in second to her future partner, John-Paul Sartre—who was taking the test for a second time after failing the first—and, at 21, was the youngest person to pass the exam.

Over the course of her lifetime, De Beauvoir published works of fiction, did some travel writing, authored autobiographies, and penned pieces about ethics and politics. And in her most famous work, The Second Sex (1949), she tackled the patriarchy and the female’s place in society. “She is nothing other than what man decides; she is thus called ‘the sex,’ meaning that the male sees her essentially as a sexed being; for him she is sex, so she is it in the absolute,” De Beauvoir wrote. “She determines and differentiates herself in relation to man, and he does not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.”

6. ALEXANDER HAMILTON: JANUARY 11, 1755

Alexander Hamilton was a Revolutionary War hero, wrote many of the Federalist Papers, founded the Bank of New York, created the federal banking system, became the first Secretary of the Treasury, and founded the U.S. Mint. He was famously shot and killed by Vice President Aaron Burr during a duel in 1804. Today, Hamilton is still on the $10 bill and is the subject of today’s hottest Broadway musical.

7. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: JANUARY 15, 1929

On August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed “I Have A Dream” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Standing guard was George Raveling, a former basketball player who had been asked to provide extra security at the event. Raveling watched King fold up the speech and, as the Civil Rights leader stepped down from the podium, asked if he could have it. Not realizing how historic the document was, Raveling stashed the pages in a Truman biography for two decades. (It has since been professionally framed and placed in a bank vault.)

8. MUHAMMAD ALI: JANUARY 17, 1942

Born Cassius Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, Muhammad Ali took the name we know when he converted to Islam. The Olympic gold medalist and World Heavyweight Champion’s career encompassed a wide range of activities outside of boxing, including exhibition matches with wrestlers and recording albums that taught kids to prevent tooth decay.

9. VIRGINIA WOOLF: JANUARY 25, 1882

The very quotable British author Virginia Woolf was educated at home with her sisters, and as a child created a newspaper to write about the antics of the eight children in her family. Later, she became involved in the Bloomsbury Group, through which she met her husband, essayist Leonard Woolf. The circle of friends were great pranksters. In 1910, Woolf and two others dressed in turbans and caftans and identified themselves to officers of the Royal Navy as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his entourage. They asked for a tour of the HMS Dreadnought—and they got away with it. When the story made the papers, the two men were sentenced to caning, but Virginia was spared punishment.

10. BESSIE COLEMAN: JANUARY 26, 1892

One of 13 children born to two Texas sharecroppers, Bessie Coleman had a long way to go to become an aviator, but she worked hard to fulfill her dream. When no one in the U.S. would teach a black woman to fly, she learned French and trained at the Somme in 1920. She was not only the first black American woman and the first Native American woman to earn a pilot’s license, she was also the first person of African American descent or Native American descent to hold an international pilot’s license. With further training, she became a barnstormer and gained stardom, all to fuel her dream of opening an aviation school. Sadly, she died when an engine problem in her plane caused her to fall to her death in 1926.

I do a lot of counting on my fingers. The only problem with this is that I only get up to 10. After that I use a (very faulty) mental counter to track the number of tens I have counted. This often fails.

In this TED-Ed video, we see a bunch of strategies for finger-counting that range from simple to utterly impractical (but mathematically interesting). The most intriguing thing about this video is that there is a very easy method to count up to 48 using your fingers (or 24 using just one hand). It involves counting the segments of each digit (and the joints between them), using the thumb as a pointer to track your place.

The video then proceeds to detail methods that go well over 500 (and then over 1,000 using binary, and into the tens of thousands using base 3), but my ability to keep track of those systems becomes foggy pretty fast.

So if you’re curious how to count to 48 (or potentially a lot more) using your fingers, tune in:

There’s a bit more information on this TED-Ed page. Wikipedia also has a pretty good text-only discussion of finger-counting.