RIP Daniel Ellsberg

From the NPR obit:

Ellsberg never ran for office and only occasionally appeared on TV. But he altered the course of U.S. history in a way few private citizens ever have.

From a piece that Ellsberg wrote in 2014, recollecting a particularly odd moment during his trial:

[W]hen I finally heard my lawyer ask the prearranged question in direct examination – Why did you copy the Pentagon Papers? – I was silenced before I could begin to answer. The government prosecutor objected – irrelevant – and the judge sustained. My lawyer, exasperated, said he “had never heard of a case where a defendant was not permitted to tell the jury why he did what he did.” The judge responded: well, you're hearing one now.

From The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers: “We were the wrong side”

The Story of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’

A splendid 22 minute Vice documentary.

Link to video

RIP Mikhail Gorbachev

To quote from an insightful piece about his landmark Pizza Hut commercial:

In a lot of ways, it’s a beautiful short film and a very weird advertisement: Who would have thought that a bunch of Muscovites bickering about the end of communism would be a natural pitch for pizza?

For the people who created the ad—the executives, the agents, the creatives—it was a professional landmark. But for Gorbachev himself, the story of the ad is a tragedy: one man’s attempt to find—and to fund—a place in a country that wanted nothing more to do with him.

History, not for the squeamish

A new spot for the National Museum, Prague takes a bewildering approach to promote visiting it.

Link to video

Digestive Woes of 14th Century Monks

Excerpts from a report in The Guardian:

Research by English Heritage sheds light on the day-to-day lives and digestive troubles of monks at Muchelney Abbey in Somerset – in particular the consequence of a change in papal law, in 1336, which permitted the twice-weekly consumption of meat from four-legged animals.

The monks already had, by modern standards, an unbalanced and calorie-rich diet. Adding meat as a luxury meant constipation and diarrhoea soon became a major problem, said the English Heritage historian Michael Carter.

Carter has been interested in monks and their digestion since visiting Kirkstall Abbey on the outskirts of Leeds and seeing the surviving latrines. “I remember being fascinated by the idea of it being a 900-year-old monastic toilet block,” he said.

Was he an odd child? “There wasn’t an awful lot to do on Sunday afternoons in the 1970s.”

His research has led to new interpretation at the abbey which is interesting on a wider level.

“I do think there is something about monastic latrines,” he said. “People have this idea of people in the middle ages being filthy and not caring about human waste, but when you look in to it you discover that is far from the case. They developed sophisticated architecture and plumbing. It is fascinating stuff.”

RIP John McAfee

Going by reports, John McAfee died last week in a Spanish prison.  If it sounds as if I’m not convinced, that’s because there’s a lot about the man that is shrouded in mystery, and hard to know for sure.  By his own admission, he once faked a heart attack to escape deportation.

Scanning the obituaries that have followed, I noticed a certain pattern.  While they have a mention of his more substantive accomplishments from long ago, they are dominated by the news-making events of the past 10 years or so: from his extreme lifestyle choices to his crypto currency entanglements, from being a fugitive from justice to running for the US presidency, to falling foul of the law again.  That may seem to be a comment on the media’s priorities.  But the bigger truth is that it stems from the narrative that McAfee himself sought to present, and thus reflects how influential he was in doing so. 

Many remember him for this bizarre message video that he put out in 2013.  On the face of it, it appears to tie in with his projected, and perceived image of a fun-loving, eccentric innovator and businessman.  Yet I suspect that it was, in no small measure, an attempt to play down/ deflect attention from the murder charges against him from a year earlier. 

For anyone seeking a less-biased perspective of the man, I recommend the 2016 documentary, Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee, along with a conversation with the director.  For those who prefer something to read, I recommend a 2013 piece, Dancing with a Madman.

The Great Toilet Paper Scare

This is a 10 minute short film, that premiered on The Atlantic Selects, an online showcase of short documentary films, curated by The Atlantic. 

From the accompanying report:

Some experts regard the toilet-paper shortage of ’73 as a case study in the mechanics of the rumor mill. Earlier that year, the stock market had crashed, losing more than 45 percent of its value—one of the worst declines in history. To make matters worse, an oil embargo caused gas prices to spike dramatically. Fear and uncertainty were in the air. The climate was ripe for the spread of misinformation.

As Steuart Henderson Britt, the late Northwestern University marketing professor, put it at the time: “One person says there could be a problem. The next person says there probably is a problem. The next person says there is a problem.”

You don’t have to look far to find parallels between 1973 and today. Just days after the first case of the coronavirus was identified stateside, Americans started stockpiling toilet paper, despite the fact that most stores had it in stock.

While on the subject, according to a separate report from the BBC:

Toilet roll panic buying is leading to blocked sewers as people with no loo paper are forced to use alternatives, a water company has warned.

The Evolution of Red Lipstick

This 2 minute animated short from CNN tells the rather interesting (colourful?) history of red lipstick.

The Future of Film Enhancement?

A digitally enhanced version of a 124-year old film clip, recently uploaded on YouTube, has been generating a lot of buzz.  By most measures, it is quite an accomplishment, all the more so because it uses publicly available technology.

Here’s a link that helps compare the original with the enhanced version. 

Here’s a link to a piece that explains in some detail the technology that was used.

To Catch A Serial Killer

If you’ve seen ITV’s recent, superb real-life crime drama, A Confession, you would certainly know who Steve Fulcher is. For those who don’t, he was a Detective Superintendent of Police in Wiltshire county, in England, who was in the spotlight in a missing girl’s investigation in 2011, and the subsequent trial.  Without giving away too much, that investigation threw up uneasy questions about what should be the boundaries of ‘due process’ in the arrest and questioning of a suspect, and how much flexibility is it fair to accord to an investigating officer.  To be clear, I’m not alluding to torture- just plain questioning.

It’s a thought provoking case.  For those who are interested, especially those who can’t see A Confession anytime soon, or are simply short on time, I recommend a 2018 ITV documentary, To Catch A Serial Killer (not to be confused with the very different, CNN documentary of the same name).  In some ways, it’s a better introduction to the case than A Confession.

Alternative link

The Small Escape

This 4 minute video from BMW recreates a bit of Cold War history- how the tiny, two-seater BMW Isetta became an unlikely vehicle for smuggling people across the Berlin wall.

Here’s a link to the full story.

Vintage Mobile Phones

If you search on Google Images for vintage mobile phones, you’ll find a surfeit of images that, depending on your age, might take you down memory lane, or make you aware of the existence of so-called ‘brick phones’.  If you want something more structured, here’s a website that looks at the history of mobile phones in UK (pre-2000).

Oh, and if you’re holding on to vintage mobile phones, here’s something worth checking out.

A History of the Kashmir Conflict

I have no real opinion on the so-called ‘Kashmir conflict’ other than that I regard what has happened over my adult lifetime to be messy, and a colossal tragedy.  I have no idea on how to apportion blame and no sense of how the recent developments will help or hinder matters.  But I have been keen to understand how this mess came about.  Unfortunately, whatever stuff I have thus far read or watched, has been a bit too dense for me. 

Early this week, someone shared a link to a documentary made by Times Now last year, Kashmir: The Story.  It tells the history of Jammu & Kashmir, and offers some historical context on the crisis, with a bit of commentary.  Frankly, I didn’t expect Times Now (or any Indian news channel, for that matter) to present a reasonably unbiased narrative.  Still, I must admit that, compared to anything else that I have read or watched, this gave me a clearer (and hopefully accurate) picture of the key events that have led to the present situation.

Bobby Fischer’s Detention in Japan

Last week, I came across a piece on Bobby Fischer and it set me on a path to revisit what I remembered about him, and fill in any gaps.  Of course, a large part of his life was out of the public gaze and I wasn’t expecting to gain any insights on that.  It turned out that my memory was especially fuzzy about his detention in Japan over 2004-05.  It’s an important and thought provoking episode in which the actions of the US and Japanese governments don’t stand up well to scrutiny.  Unfortunately, most of the mainstream media coverage was lacklustre.  Thankfully, I could latch on to stuff that shone some light on what happened.  

• Bobby Fischer's strangest endgame, Salon, July 2004
• The Fischer defence, The Telegraph, August 2004

But both of these pale in comparison to the incredibly detailed and sustained coverage on ChessBase.

In addition, I was able to locate a collection of footage bundled together as part of a documentary, Me and Bobby Fischer.  It is told from the point of view of Saemundur Palsson, who was Fischer’s bodyguard during the 1972 title championship, and with whom Fischer struck up a friendship.  While Fischer was apparently unhappy over how the documentary was put together, it needs to be seen for its astonishing footage of the team that worked on Fischer’s release.

PS: Unrelated to the above, I chanced upon this beautiful clip of Garry Kasparov’s visit to Fischer’s grave on what would have been Fischer’s 71st birthday.