Granny vs. Nixon
June Foray was the voice of Granny (the owner of Tweety Bird) in the Looney Tunes cartoons, Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Magica De Spell in Duck Tales. And she was also on Richard Nixon’s Enemies List.
Category: Arts & recreation
Clown college
Tuition was free but entry was difficult. Buster Keaton and Bugs Bunny were on the curriculum. You graduated with a wig, giant shoes, and full makeup. Welcome to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College.
Monolith of bodies
When the City of Oslo demolished Gustav Vigeland’s house, they offered him a new one. In exchange, he promised all of his future artwork to the city. For the next twenty years he created 212 remarkable sculptures.
The ancients and the moderns
Is modern thought more advanced than the Greeks and Romans? Most people fall on the side of “duh, of course,” but in 16th century France the debate between the Ancients and the Moderns was fierce.
Music at the end of time
Olivier Messiaen was one of the most prominent classical composers of the 20th century, and his most famous work – the Quartet for the End of Time – was first performed in a POW camp in Germany.
King of the London wigmakers
From 1878 through to his death in 1934, Willy Clarkson was king of the wigmakers of London. He provided disguises to Scotland Yard (and was rumoured to have supplied Jack the Ripper also), theatre actors, and Virginia Woolf.
Oldest art
In 1939, a geologist dug up mammoth-ivory fragments inside a cave in Germany. Two weeks later, World War II began and they were forgotten. The fragments were reconstructed later, and turned out to be the earliest art in the world.
The first iron bridge
It’s a bad idea to make a bridge out of cast iron – it’s brittle and doesn’t handle tension well – but the very first major bridge of this type opened to traffic in 1781 and still stands today.
Renaissance fart jokes
Poggio Bracciolini was a key instigator of the Italian Renaissance: he recovered or rediscovered many of the Latin texts that would inspire that storied revival. Also, he loved a good fart joke.
Highest heels
Venice, 15th century. It’s a gorgeous city, but has a tendency to get a bit waterlogged, so you wear clogs to keep your clothes out of the mud. Next thing you know, you’re half a metre off the ground.
Chaucer’s astrolabe
Geoffrey Chaucer is best known as the author of The Canterbury Tales, one of the most important works of early English literature. I guess that didn’t pay the bills, because he also wrote one of the first English technical manuals.
Recursive art
The Droste effect describes art that contains itself. The name comes from a brand of Dutch cocoa – the label contained a picture of the tin and the label (which contained a picture of the tin) – but the effect dates back much further.
Comic syntax
Comic books have their own structure, conventions, and language. In a seminal 1988 essay, two cartoonists broke down elements of this syntax using a single Nancy comic strip.
The disappearance of Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is perhaps the most famous mystery and crime writer of the 20th century. In 1923 she started a real-life mystery of her own that has persisted to this day: she disappeared.
Power of Women
The Power of Women is a topos (“topic”) of medieval and Renaissance Western art that inverted traditional gender roles. While most male painters saw this as comedy, prominent Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi turned it on its head and used her art to portray “courageous, rebellious, and powerful” women.
The sewing machine dream
Elias Howe Jr. patented the modern sewing machine in 1846. Its innovative “lockstitch” mechanism was revolutionary. And, apparently, it came to Howe in a dream.
The Generalist Academy 