Those of us who were really hip in the ’90s got online, usually via a dialup modem (or your college’s awesome network…if you could afford a network card). There were distinct sounds associated with computers of that time that we don’t think about today, but they’re lodged deep in our memories. Let’s go back to some computer sounds you probably haven’t heard in decades.
1. 56K MODEM CONNECTING
Modem connection sounds varied based on speed, modem brand, the quality of the connection, and so on. But today, the 56k modem (the pinnacle of modem technology in the ’90s) is the best-remembered “modem screech.” My friend’s mom called this sound “wirescream,” which sounds accurate to me. So here’s a 56k modem dialing and connecting (illustrated with a little guy acting as the modem):
2. 3.5″ FLOPPY DRIVE SOUND
If you ever installed software or copied a lot of files, you heard this.
If you had a Mac in the ’90s, you’d hear a startup chime, and hopefully you didn’t hear the crash sound too often (we used to call it “MacDeath” at my high school). It’s surprising how different the startup sounds were, especially the AV model Macs (which had special audio/video hardware, hence the fancy sound):
This is smooth, but I still prefer the Windows 95 startup sound. It’s just a classic.
9. QSOUND DEMO
QSound was a 3D-like effect that was used in games and sound production in tons of ’90s stuff (for instance, Madonna’s Immaculate Collection was “mixed in QSound”). Here’s a demo video showing various places QSound showed up—it sounds best with headphones.
10. THE HAMPSTER DANCE [SIC]
This is best experienced on an archive of the original Hampster Dance website. But if your browser doesn’t like that site, the video below is a loose approximation of the late-’90s phenomenon known as Hampster Dance. Let the gates of memory open.
(And yes, the spelling “Hampster” is intentionally incorrect.)
11. DOT MATRIX PRINTER
If you had a hand-me-down printer in the 90s (or you needed a receipt printed on carbon paper), this is what it sounded like…if you were lucky! My family’s original dot matrix printer sounded like a malfunctioning robot on a murder spree.
12. A 1993 PC AND INKJET PRINTER STARTING UP
I’ve reported on this before. Listen for the POST (Power On Self Test) beep, the chittering of the hard drive, then the horrific clunking noises of the Epson Stylus 440. If you’re wondering how a 1993 computer is running Windows 95, it’s because this computer is still running today!
After Dark offered some of the best screensavers around. “Flying Toasters” was my favorite, and it had an optional score, complete with lyrics at the bottom.
In Sling Blade, a mentally challenged man—described by writer-director-star Billy Bob Thornton as a cross between Frankenstein’s monster and Boo Radley—named Karl Childers is released from a psychiatric hospital 25 years after committing a murder, befriends a mother and her young son, and is gradually tasked to help save them. Thornton would become a household name following his Oscar-nominated performance in the film, and for winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. In honor of its 20th anniversary, here are some facts about the movie that pair well with French fried potaters.
1. KARL WAS BORN FROM BILLY BOB THORNTON’S FRUSTRATION WITH A MADE-FOR-CABLE MOVIE.
Daniel Mann, Thornton’s director on 1987’s The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains, insisted he “overact” for all five of his lines. Back in his trailer during lunch, Thornton looked in the mirror, which is where he imagined Karl’s visage for the first time. He also came up with the character’s distinctive manner of speaking right then and there. Thornton developed the character of Karl Childers further via a one-man show titled Swine Before Pearls.
2. BEFORE THE FEATURE, THERE WAS A SHORT FILM TITLED SOME FOLKS CALL IT A SLING BLADE FEATURING MOLLY RINGWALD.
The 29-minute movie was released in 1994, written by Thornton and directed by George Hickenlooper. Molly Ringwald portrayed the newspaper reporter in Hickenlooper’s version; she was replaced by Sarah Boss in the feature. Thornton did not mention the short during the Sling Blade Oscar press tour because he had a falling out with Hickenlooper, who was claiming the movie was based on the short, while Thornton said it was based on his one-man show. At the time, Thornton said he “would have been glad to have talked about the short if George hadn’t bad-mouthed me all over town. This whole thing is based on the character, and I created that before I ever knew George Hickenlooper existed.”
3. THORNTON WROTE THE SCRIPT IN LONGHAND, MOSTLY ON THE SET OF A SITCOM.
The show was titled Hearts Afire, which Thornton starred in alongside Sling Blade co-star John Ritter. Thornton finished the script on a Christmas Day on his mother’s dining room table.
4. VAUGHAN WAS BASED ON A CHOIR LEADER IN AN ARKANSAS CHURCH.
Thornton also wrote the character with his friend Ritter in mind, knowing he could handle the rhythm of Vaughan’s words.
5. RITTER GAVE VAUGHAN THE LAST NAME “CUNNINGHAM” AS A REFERENCE TO HAPPY DAYS.
The former Three’s Company star revealed as much on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 1997. As an in-joke to some of his friends who were on the cast of Happy Days, Ritter made his character a Cunningham to open up the possibility that Vaughan was actually Chuck, Richie and Joanie’s older brother from season one of Happy Days, who was written out of the show and never spoken of by any of the characters again after he disappeared. In Ritter’s mind, Chuck had a “different alternative lifestyle” that he was too ashamed to reveal to his parents. Thornton had no idea this was the reasoning behind the surname choice.
7. CHARLES BUSHMAN’S CHAIR DRAG WAS THOUGHT UP THAT DAY BY THORNTON.
Thornton explained: “I was trying to think of a beginning. You always want that first image to hook you, and if J.T. (Walsh) had just walked over and fucked with the other patients on the way, and then sat down, that would have been too normal.”
8. FRANK DIDN’T HEAR KARL’S VOICE UNTIL HE HAD HIS FIRST SCENE.
Jarmusch played Gene, the Frostee Cream employee. The director agreed to take the rare acting role because he knew Thornton, and thought it might be fun.
10. EACH SCENE WAS SHOT IN TWO TAKES.
A rare third take was used if there was a lighting or a technical issue. Robert Duvall (Karl’s father), when referring to Thornton as the “Hillbilly Orson Welles,” explained that Thornton believes that two takes and no rehearsals are best, because you can “catch the freshness.”
11. “NERVOUS HOSPITAL” WAS A SAYING FROM THORNTON’S GRANDMOTHER.
She said it to avoid the terms “nut house” or “asylum.”
13. HARVEY WEINSTEIN PAID $10 MILLION FOR THE DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS AFTER WATCHING THE FIRST 30 MINUTES.
The head of Miramax initially agreed to give Thornton the final say on editing. Weinstein then saw the rest of the movie and wanted Thornton to cut 20 minutes. Martin Scorsese told Thornton not to change his edit, before Weinstein went ahead and edited it without Thornton’s knowledge. For what it’s worth, Sling Blade producer Larry Meistrich later admitted that Weinstein’s edit was better than Thornton’s.
14. MIRAMAX ALSO SUGGESTED A DIFFERENT TITLE.
They asked Thornton if he would change Sling Blade to The Reckoning. He got his say on that one.
Millions of people around the world have forms of progressive retinal degeneration: These conditions cause blindness, slowly but surely. But a research team from the University of Pisa, Italy, just found a method to help adults retrain their brains to see again. Overturning old attitudes about the brain’s plasticity, their groundbreaking research, just published in the journal PLOS One, suggests that new visual prostheses can help these people restore visual signals to their brain.
The researchers Elisa Castaldi and Maria Concetta Morrone implanted the Argus II retinal prosthesis system in seven patients with retinitis pigmentosa, one of many retinal degenerative conditions that lead to blindness. The system sends small light pulses to the retina’s remaining cells, bypassing damaged photoreceptors, and stimulating the few remaining retinal cells. These cells then transmit this visual information along the optic nerve to the brain, allowing the person to perceive light patterns, and eventually see again. Before the surgery, all of the patients had been blind for 20 years. At the most, they had bare light perception.
“We tested the ability of our patients to detect big and high contrast shapes presented very briefly,” Elisa Castaldi, lead study author, and a post-doc in the Department of Translational Research on New Technologies in Medicine and Surgery at the University of Pisa, tells mental_floss. The subjects were asked to specify in which of two intervals—marked by two noises—there was a stationary, large, high-contrast visual stimulus. Then they had to verbally report whether it appeared in the first or second interval. “When using the prosthetic implant, they reached up to 90 percent accuracy in this task,” Castaldi says—a huge change from their normal vision.
The subjects were also hooked up to fMRI imaging that measured their brain activity by monitoring changes in their blood oxygen levels as their neurons fired, Castaldi explains. After implanting the system, the scientists found an increase of signals in a subcortical structure of the brain known as the lateral geniculate nucleus—the first relay station of visual information along the visual pathway before reaching the cortex.
Their remarkable results, however, were not immediate. The researchers found that the more time the patients spent training with the implant, the better their performance increased. In fact, most of these patients trained with their implant for months with a vision therapist at home, both to help them “localize” their physical world—interpreting the visual signals as doors, windows, and walls—as well as sitting in front of a computer and practicing recognizing “big, high-contrast shapes.”
“We observed that the recovery of vision depended on the amount of time and practice the subject experienced with the implant,” Castaldi says. Prior literature had shown that after many years of blindness, the brain reorganizes itself, and “the areas that were once used to process visual information are recruited for another purpose, like touch or hearing.” This study demonstrated that, in fact, the adult brain has greater “plastic potential” than research had previously shown, allowing people who had spent years without vision to learn to see using artificial visual input.
The results of this study, Castaldi says, are important “because it is often thought that the ability of our brain to reorganize itself and adapt to a new condition—a property called plasticity—is confined mainly to childhood.”
Now, combined with breakthroughs in visual prosthetics, research may be able to make significant strides to retrain adult brains to see again.
Ohio State vs. Michigan is one of the best rivalries in sports. But two centuries ago, Ohio and Michigan were ready to go to war for real.
The story of The Toledo War begins in 1787, when the U.S. government enacted the Northwest Ordinance. The Ordinance described the border between Ohio and Michigan as “an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan.” Congress used the best map available at the time, The Mitchell Map (below), to create this east-west line, putting most of the west shoreline of Lake Erie within Ohio’s borders. This would include Maumee Bay, where the Maumee River and Lake Erie meet, giving Ohio a significant economic advantage for shipping.
However, it was discovered in 1803 that The Mitchell Map was incorrect—the tip of Lake Michigan was actually farther south. A straight line from the correct southern point would have cost Ohio almost all of Lake Erie. Hoping to avoid this loss, Ohio changed the description of the border so that it now ran northeast from the tip of Lake Michigan to Maumee Bay. This new description wasn’t an issue until 1833, when Michigan asked for statehood. Michigan kept the old Northwest Ordinance line description, but drew it from the correct tip of Lake Michigan. The overlap between Ohio and Michigan’s descriptions created the “Toledo Strip,” a ribbon of land five to eight miles wide, encompassing present-day Toledo.
In an effort to make Michigan concede the Strip, Ohio’s governor, Robert Lucas, used his political connections to convince Congress to deny Michigan statehood. Upset by Lucas’ scheme, Michigan governor Stevens Mason enacted the Pains and Penalties Act in February 1835. This law said that anyone caught in the Strip supporting the state of Ohio could be jailed for up to five years and fined $1,000 (roughly $25,000 today). To enforce his act, Mason raised a militia of 1,000 men and stationed them inside Toledo. In response, Governor Lucas sent 600 men. It was a fight just waiting to happen.
Feeling Stabby
For the next five months, a series of skirmishes, arrests, lawsuits, and general chest thumping occurred in the Toledo Strip. But no one was killed or seriously injured until July, when Michigan sheriff Joseph Wood attempted to arrest Major Benjamin Stickney for voting in an Ohio election. Stickney and his sons, named—I kid you not—One Stickney and Two Stickney, resisted. In the melee, Two stabbed Sheriff Wood with a pocketknife.
Though the sheriff’s wound was not life threatening, this scuffle was enough to instigate peace talks, and troops were withdrawn. Still, the political dispute raged on until December 1836 when Congress offered Michigan a compromise—give up the Toledo Strip, but gain statehood and a large portion of the Upper Peninsula instead. Michigan had spent so much maintaining the militia’s presence in the Strip that they were quickly running out of money. They weren’t happy about it, but they had no choice but to accept the compromise.
Even after the deal, legal battles between the states occurred periodically until 1973, when it took a Supreme Court ruling to resolve claims to the waters of Lake Erie. Now Ohio and Michigan citizens channel their border war tensions onto the college football gridiron.
MTV Unplugged is a long-running show that showcases musical acts performing with stripped-down arrangements they’re not usually associated with, offering new, sometimes revealing takes on popular songs. It was a phenomenon for both the cable network and the music industry, particularly in the early- to mid-’90s, even though the show’s origins are murky, and the title is a misnomer—at the very least, the microphones are plugged into something. Here are some facts about the series in honor of its 27th anniversary.
1. MULTIPLE PEOPLE CLAIM TO BE THE FATHER OF THE SHOW.
The singer/songwriter Jules Shear (Cyndi Lauper’s “All Through the Night,” The Bangles’ “If She Knew What She Wants”) has said he came up with the concept for MTV Unplugged to promote his acoustic album The Third Party. TheNew York Timeswrote in 1992 that Shear was inspired by Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora’s two-song acoustic set at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards.
That’s all well and good, but producers Jim Burns and Bob Small claim they got the idea for MTV Unplugged after Bruce Springsteen treated the two, and the thousands of other fans at one of his concerts, to a final encore featuring just himself and his acoustic guitar. (Springsteen would find his way onto Unplugged in 1992.)
Executive producer Joel Gallen has referred to Unplugged as his “baby” as well, and, also like Shear, was inspired by Bon Jovi and Sambora’s VMA set and called it the “jumping off point”. Small was quoted in I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolutionas saying: “Please do not credit Bon Jovi for creating Unplugged. Jon Bon Jovi thinks he was the inspiration for it. He wouldn’t even do the fu*king show until almost twenty years later.”
2. BOTH HBO AND PBS SAID NO.
HBO passed on it when Shear proposed the concept to the pay channel. Burns and Small pitched the series to PBS after MTV initially said no. PBS simply echoed MTV and HBO. It was only when Burns and Small ally Judy McGrath got a promotion at MTV that a pilot was green-lit.
3. IT WAS A CHEAP PILOT TO SHOOT.
Bob Small claimed he only had four hours to set up the pilot, with another four hours to film it, and for only $18,000. “I couldn’t get money to hire a director,” Small said. “They said, ‘You direct it.'”
4. THERE WAS A HOST FOR THE FIRST 13 EPISODES.
None other than Jules Shear was the undisputed master of ceremonies for the first season. He also joined in on some songs.
5. THE FIRST GUESTS DIDN’T GRASP THE CONCEPT OF UNPLUGGED.
Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford from Squeeze were the stars of the first episode, which aired on November 26, 1989. But they were unprepared. “Chris and Glenn showed up for rehearsal with electric guitars,” Alex Coletti, who would end up producing the show through 2001, recalled. “I said: ‘Very funny, guys. Where are the acoustics? It’s Unplugged.’ They looked at each other and went, ‘Riiight… Make a phone call, quick!'”
6. PRODUCERS SCRAMBLED TO GIVE JOE WALSH ACTUAL FRIENDS.
“The fifth episode was billed as Joe Walsh and Friends, and Joe showed up with only one friend—Ricky, his bass player,” Coletti remembered. “We thought it meant his famous friends, but apparently that got lost in translation.” Walsh had been a member of The Eagles, who infamously had a long falling-out, but his claim of buddies gave MTV employees false hope. Producer Bruce Leddy found Dr. John who was at a neighboring studio and convinced him to come on with Walsh and be his “friend”.
7. DON HENLEY WAS NOT HAPPY WITH WALSH PLAYING “DESPERADO.”
Walsh’s former Eagles bandmate wrote “Desperado,” as well as a three-page fax explaining to MTV that he didn’t want Walsh to play it and he was refusing permission to air the performance. It was after the fax that the network invited Henley to come on the show himself to perform it. Henley was the first artist to get an entire half-hour on his own as the only artist, which quickly became the status quo for Unplugged. In 1994, when The Eagles reunited, they appeared on an MTV Unplugged special.
8. LL COOL J HAD NEVER WORKED WITH A LIVE BAND BEFORE.
The first Unplugged featuring rap artists took place in 1991. Pop’s Cool Love backed LL Cool J, MC Lyte, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest. “[It’s like] you drink milk for 10 years and then [you have to] drink fruit punch,” Quest’s Q-Tip said about performing with the band. “It’s not that the fruit is bad, but you have to get used to it.”
But the future NCIS: LA star seemed to adjust faster. “We rehearsed the night before and LL Cool J had never worked with a live band,” said Coletti. “Before long, he was calling the shots like he’d been doing it his whole life.”
9. LL COOL J KNOWS YOU SAW HIS DEODORANT.
“People have teased me about the deodorant for years, but I love it,” he said. “It was raw! It was nasty! At least you know I wasn’t stinking.”
10. PAUL MCCARTNEY WAS THE FIRST ARTIST TO OFFICIALLY RELEASE HIS UNPLUGGED SET.
Before McCartney, nobody had thought to release their set as an album. But after he performed in 1991, the former Beatle was worried about it getting out to the masses illegally. “I figured that as Unplugged would be screened around the world there was every chance that some bright spark would tape the show and turn it into a bootleg, so we decided to bootleg the show ourselves,” he admitted. “We heard the tapes in the car driving back. By the time we got home, we’d decided we’d got an album – albeit one of the fastest I’ve ever made.” He even titled the live performance collection Unplugged (The Official Bootleg).
11. ERIC CLAPTON WAS HESITANT TO RELEASE HIS SHOW AS AN ALBUM.
“Slowhand” performed to acclaim in 1992, but he initially didn’t think it was good enough to be released officially as a CD. So naturally, his live album Unplugged won the Grammy for Album of the Year. The “Tears in Heaven” performance in particular won Song and Record of the Year. Two years later, Tony Bennett followed suit, winning the 1994 Album of the Year prize for his time on the show.
12. NEIL YOUNG WALKED OUT ON HIMSELF.
Young’s Unplugged was supposed to have been taped at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York on December 12, 1992. Instead on that night, at that venue, the audience saw something they would probably never forget: Neil Young walking out the door after numerous mistakes. The “stunned” crew members managed to get him to come back to try again that night. Young opted to junk the performance entirely, and tried again—this time with a band, and with much more success—two months later.
13. SO DID TORI AMOS.
Amos was thrown off and “couldn’t harness the energy.” But unlike Young, she was able to walk back onstage, perform, and not have to try again with another set on a different night. As the singer/songwriter remembered it, she and her manager paced “beneath the MTV thing” backstage thinking about the problem. “Then my L.D. (lighting director) came down and said, ‘Something just doesn’t feel right. I can’t put my finger on it,'” Amos told Worstgig.com. “For 700 shows over the five years (prior to that), I’d played with the lights down. So all the lights were up to catch the audience and I felt like somebody was watching me take a shower. So they dimmed the lights, I felt better. By that point because I’d made the choice to stop it and make some changes, I felt like I began again. And I turned the whole show around.”
14. COLETTI ‘FOUGHT HARD’ TO CUT “THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD” FROM NIRVANA’S EPISODE.
“Maybe I shouldn’t give this secret away, but I built a fake box out in front of the amp to make it look like a monitor wedge,” Coletti admitted to Guitar World in 1995. “It’s an acoustic guitar, but he’s obviously going through an amp,” he added, talking about the now iconic David Bowie cover. “I actually fought pretty hard to leave that song out [of the final edit of the show], because I felt it wasn’t as genuine as the rest of the songs. But I’m a huge Bowie fan, so I couldn’t fight too hard against the song.”
15. DAVE GROHL WAS ALMOST UNINVITED TO NIRVANA’S SHOW.
The Nirvana drummer remembered that it was a minor miracle that the band’s Unplugged performance went so well. “That show was supposed to be a disaster,” he said. “We hadn’t rehearsed. We weren’t used to playing acoustic. We did a few rehearsals and they were terrible. Everyone thought it was horrible. Even the people from MTV thought it was horrible. Then we sat down and the cameras started rolling and something clicked. It became one of the band’s most memorable performances.”
As Coletti told it, Kurt Cobain was thinking of just replacing Grohl behind the kit, or maybe not using a drummer at all. “What I didn’t know was up until the day [of the Unplugged performance], there was talk of Dave [Grohl] not playing at all in the show,” the producer revealed in 2014. “Kurt wasn’t happy with the way rehearsals were going; he didn’t like the way Dave sounded playing drums with sticks.”
But Grohl turned up the day of filming, and Coletti gifted him some brushes and sizzle sticks to give his drumming a softer sound. “I was afraid Dave would just roll his eyes, like, ‘Oh great, the a**hole from MTV is trying to be my friend.'” the producer remembered thinking. “But instead he opened the package and said, ‘Cool, I’ve never had brushes before. I’ve never even tried using them.'” The album Unplugged in New York won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album in 1996. It was the band’s lone Grammy win.
16. YES, THEY TRIED TO GET ROBERT PLANT AND JIMMY PAGE TO PLAY “STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN.”
The Led Zeppelin bandmates reunited in 1994 for the Unplugged special: No Quarter: Robert Plant and Jimmy Page Unledded, which at the time was the highest-rated episode of the series ever. MTV suggested they film it in Queens, New York. Plant suggested Morocco and Wales because it was where he wrote “Kashmir” and “Down by the Seaside,” respectively. Network executives explicitly requested “Stairway” but were shot down. “I think we’re in a disposable world and ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is one of the things that hasn’t quite been thrown away yet,” Plant said in 1994. “I think radio stations should be asked not to play it for 10 years, just to leave it alone for a bit so we can tell whether it’s any good or not.”
17. LIAM GALLAGHER HECKLED HIS OASIS BANDMATES.
Lead vocalist Liam backed out of the Royal Festival Hall gig in London due to a “sore throat” at the last second, so songwriter/guitarist/brother Noel took over the vocal duties. Noel would later disclose that Liam in fact appeared an hour before showtime “sh*tfaced,” and when he tried to sing it sounded “fu*king dreadful.” Liam watched the performance from the balcony and at times jeered them. Noel told him to shut up. Coletti thought it was all for the best. “There’s something when the songwriter himself sings it. Maybe he’s a little more connected to the song.”
As a recurring feature, our team combs the Web and shares some amazing Amazon deals we’ve turned up. Here’s what caught our eye today, November 26.
Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers, including Amazon, and may receive a small percentage of any sale. But we only get commission on items you buy and don’t return, so we’re only happy if you’re happy. Good luck deal hunting!
This appliquéd quilt featuring Zelda and Link was made by sewing each individual piece onto a fabric background. CandySnow sold this quilt through her Etsy shop and then had to suspend sales because the buzz surrounding the Zelda quilt caused her to get behind in orders. You can see more pictures of it in this gallery.
2. GAME OF THRONES
Felice Regina made a Game of Thrones quilt for her husband Seth depicting the animals from the various house sigils on the show. By using a combination of patchwork, appliqué, and embroidery, Regina made each animal visible in negative on the reverse side. Regina posted a tutorial in case you want to recreate the quilt yourself.
3. TRACER FROM OVERWATCH
Erica Price made this huge quilt depicting Tracer from the game Overwatch. It’s 7 feet wide and 7.5 feet long, made of over 3700 individual patchwork pieces. Price is planning to sell it. You can see more pictures in this album.
Asmotron received this Darth Vader quilt from his mother. She took the patchwork pattern from a much smaller bead pattern, then thought the “blocky style” might not be right. But she unknowingly made it cooler by giving it an 8-bit pixelated style, which her son loved. The reverse side sports a Vader-printed fabric that glows in the dark. The computerized quilting pattern depicts different Star Wars characters and spaceships. Best mom ever! You can see all the quilt’s features in this imgur gallery.
Xarddrax was proud and a bit envious that his wife made an 8-bit Mega Man quilt for their 14-year-old son last Christmas. She designed the pixelated images of the game’s various bosses on graph paper and took original pictures to match colors when she bought the fabric. It’s really big, too, at 7 feet, 3 inches square.
7. DOCTOR WHO
Beth and Sara are the Crafty Geeks. They made this quilt featuring minimalist but very recognizable characters and icons from the British TV series Doctor Who. They’ve used the same style for quilts featuring superheroes, Star Trek characters, and various other science fiction and fantasy worlds. Look for them displaying their creations at a fan convention near you, and right now at Instagram.
This is only the second quilt Shannonagannery ever made, and she didn’t even use a pattern! She estimates that the tied patchwork quilt with Pac-Man and ghost appliqués took 75 hours to complete. “I was very ready to be done by the end and will be taking a sewing hiatus,” she wrote on Reddit. “Baby quilts only from now on!”
Redditor bottledgoose made this quilt in the shape of the TNT used in Minecraft as a gift for her stepson. All those diamond shapes were sewn together by hand! Yeah, the stepson liked it. You can see a gallery of images from the quilting process here.
10. THE WALKING DEAD
Rick Grimes of The Walking Dead is shown in silhouette in this appliquéd art quilt. Jenna Clements titled her quilt “What Lies Ahead” for quilt shows, but otherwise calls it “The Rick Quilt” because everyone knows what that means. The organizers of the 2016 Exeter Spring Quilt Festival selected it to be shown at their other quilt shows, so Clements let her creation go on tour. But she was glad to have it back at her shop later.
If you’re not intimately familiar with England’s geography, you may not be entirely sure of where your favorite British shows are set—unless they happen to be set in London. But a print from Chicago-based graphic designer Tim Ritz, spotted by CityLab, will show you exactly where shows like Downton Abbey, Peaky Blinders, and The Office take place.
The poster even zooms in to map London-specific shows on the city level, and tells you not only where shows are set, but where they’re actually shot and which channel they air on. The Great British Bake Off’s latest series was filmed in Welford Park, just west of London. The UK version of The Office is set in the same county, in Slough, about 20 miles from London. The teen drama Skins is set in Bristol, another one of those towns many Americans have heard of but may have no idea how to find on a map. (It’s in South West England.)
In addition to series shot in England, the UK map features shows set in Scotland (like Outlander), Northern Ireland (like The Fall), and Wales (there’s one: Doctor Who), as well as Ireland.
Whether or not you’ve ever wondered exactly where Downton Abbey is located, the map can give TV fans greater context about the shows they watch, especially period pieces like Outlander or Pride and Prejudice, in which characters travel across the UK without the luxury of 21st-century transportation systems.
On November 26, 1948, Edwin Land debuted his first “Land Camera,” dubbed the Model 95A. This was the first “Polaroid camera,” as we’d popularly know it—though camera nerds like me still talk about Land Cameras. Anyway, the 95A went on sale at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston for $89.75. (That would be just over $900 in today’s money.)
Land had been inspired to create an instant-results photography system by his daughter, who asked him why she couldn’t see the picture he had just taken of her. In those days, you had to develop the film using many steps (and plenty of chemicals), print it, and then your kid got to see the picture. It took Land and his team years to develop the instant self-developing film and cameras to go with it, but the system became a huge hit.
My favorite video about Polaroid cameras is this 10-minute documentary-slash-ad by Charles and Ray Eames. It focuses on the SX-70 model, introduced in 1972. Enjoy:
For more on the history of Polaroid and Edwin Land, check out this Boston.com slideshow. Polaroid did a lot of cool stuff before making cameras! Also interesting is this timeline (PDF link) of Polaroid inventions.
Besides writing The Scarlet Letter (1850) and other famous works, Nathaniel Hawthorne is best known for studying transcendentalism and hanging out with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and 14th President Franklin Pierce. But his daughter, Rose Hawthorne, had an arguably even more compelling life than her father. Although she belonged to a wealthy Protestant family and had connections to the literary and political elite, she switched careers from writing to nursing at 45 years old. While caring for poor terminal cancer patients in New York City tenements, she became a Catholic nun, founded a religious order, and took a new name. Today, she’s on her way to becoming a saint.
On May 20, 1851, Nathaniel wife’s Sophia gave birth to Rose, the couple’s third child, in Massachusetts. Two years later, the Hawthorne family moved to Britain so Nathaniel could work as the American consul in Liverpool. As a child, Rose lived and traveled throughout England, France, and Italy. Though Protestant, she spent time at the Vatican Museum, listened to the chanting of Italian friars, and even saw Pope Pius IX on his balcony. These early experiences likely contributed to her later conversion to Catholicism.
By 1860, the Hawthorne family was back in Concord, Massachusetts. But Nathaniel died four years later after a mysterious illness, and in 1868, Sophia and her children moved to Dresden, Germany for its lower cost of living. When the Franco-Prussian War hit, they escaped to England in 1870, where Sophia died of typhoid the next year.
Less than a year after her mother’s death, Hawthorne married George Lathrop, an American writer she had met in Dresden. The couple moved to New York and then Cambridge, where Hawthorne wrote short stories and poetry and Lathrop worked as an assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. In 1876, their son Francis was born, but he died of diphtheria in 1881. The couple’s relationship was stormy, and Hawthorne struggled with Lathrop’s alcoholism as well as the death of their son. At the end of the 1880s, they moved to Connecticut and got involved with the Catholic community there, eventually converting to Catholicism together.
In 1895, Hawthorne got permission from the Catholic Church to separate from her alcoholic husband (he died a few years later of cirrhosis). Now single and in her mid-40s, she decided to make a major life change. Inspired partly by hearing a sad story about a seamstress with cancer who died alone in an almshouse, Hawthorne trained to become a nurse and decided to devote the rest of her life to caring for poor, terminally ill patients. “A fire was then lighted in my heart … I set my whole being to endeavor to bring consolation to the cancerous poor,” she wrote.
Hawthorne moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, renting rooms in tenements there. She spent her days caring for ill patients, helping sick mothers feed their children, and attending Mass daily. To get donations and support, she also wrote articles and newsletters about her mission. Although most of her contemporaries thought cancer was contagious, Hawthorne didn’t treat her patients as pariahs. Instead, she aimed to fulfill what she thought of as God’s will by alleviating their suffering and giving them dignity before they died.
In 1897, Alice Huber, an artist who read about Hawthorne’s work, joined her as a volunteer, eventually working full-time with her to care for the sick. Two year later, Hawthorne and Huber raised money from New Yorkers to open a house in lower Manhattan, which they called St. Rose’s Free Home for Incurable Cancer, after Saint Rose of Lima. In 1900, after a Dominican friar vouched for them, the New York Archbishop approved Hawthorne and Huber to take their vows, wear Dominican habits, and become nuns. Hawthorne, who took the name Mother Mary Alphonsa, founded a religious order, The Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, later called the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.
Mother Alphonsa also started a magazine called Christ’s Poor to publicize and raise money for her charitable work. The project was successful—writer Mark Twain made regular donations. Until her death in 1926, Mother Alphonsa continued her mission to care for impoverished people with terminal cancer.
In 2003, the Archdiocese of New York commissioned a tribunal to study her life and deeds, as well as her writings. A decade later, the Vatican received documents in favor of her canonization. Although it could take years for the Pope to decide if Mother Alphonsa will become a saint—among other hurdles, there must be proof she committed two miracles—her legacy of selflessness, generosity, and courage continues. Today, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne operate three homes—Rosary Hill, Sacred Heart, and Our Lady of Perpetual Help—in New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, respectively. These homes offer free palliative nursing care for patients with incurable cancer, continuing the work that Mother Alphonsa began over a century ago.
