In The Movies, The Silent Movies, The Lion Roars with Sound.

You know those advertising things that cause you to associate something with a product? Like how I now associate The Beach Boys with cheap electronics. Well. When you hear (in your head) me say "MGM", what do you see? I'm going to say that you will see one of two things, you either see a casino or a lion.

Who cares about Casinos?

I care about Lions. Lions are cool.

On this day on 1928, Leo the MGM Lion roared for the first time. Well, Roared with sound.
 

http://ipods.techfresh.net/mgm-movies-on-itunes-store/

The MGM logo had included a Lion since 1917, but in 1928 a new lion came along named Jackie whose roaring visage was recorded for the new 'soundie' logo which was premiered on the 31st of July at the opening of the film White Shadows in the South Seas.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwy2blClU11qhspbko1_1280.jpg

White Shadows in the South Seas is a special movie in film history. It was the first silent film to use a pre-recorded soundtrack in the place of the old live piano number. The soundtrack consisted of a romantic score and some atmospheric wind noises. Apparently the word "hello" is also in there.

So Happy MGM Lion Day!!! Now go and watch some good film and television.

Happy Birthday Mozart!

No, the other one.

Maria Anna Mozart was the elder sister of the better known Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In her childhood she was tutored by her father as a musician, much the same way that Wolfgang was. In fact, in her youth she was a proficient harpsichordist and on tours with her brother she sometimes received top billing. 

But why then do we never hear of Maria as a musician? I hear you asking. Well, due to the social conventions of the time, when girls reached a marriageable age they were to focus on the marrying thing, rather than showcase their incredible talent and become famous.

There is some evidence (in letters from her brother) that she was a composer (although no manuscripts have survived) and that she maintained a close relationship with her brother throughout their adults lives (although some historians beg to differ). What historians don't differ on is that Wolfgang and Maria where extremely close as children, even creating their own language and imagining a kingdom which they ruled together (it's a sibling thing).

Maria ended up marrying a fellow by the name of Johann Baptist Franz von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg (say that three times fast, I dare you), who already had something like five kids from previous marriages. Maria bore him three of her own, although one of them (the eldest, a kid named Leopold after her father) was actually raised by her father. We have no idea why Leopold Jr was raised by Leopold Sr, some theories are to do with the child's health, Maria's submissiveness to her father and that it was possible that Maria was just too busy caring for so many other children that she couldn't look after a new born herself. Whatever the reason, Leopold Jr was raised by Grandad until Grandad died.

So sing a little ditty and wish a very happy birthday to the slightly lesser known of the Mozarts.

Today is a good day to think about cats.

Big ones with massive canines to be more specific.

Today is international Tiger Day. The day that we think about tigers to raise awareness for all the efforts that go towards saving one of the most fantastically adapted cats from extinction.

International Tiger Day was only created in 2010, so it's a pretty new thing, but Tigers and the impending doom of the species is not a new thing.

Tigers are special. It's pretty amazing how an animal that is mostly orange and black and stripy can camouflage itself so well in a green and brown environment. But that's Nature for you, shes one tricky lady.

Happy Anniversary Henry VIII!

Happy 472nd Anniversary Henry VIII and Catherine Howard.

On this day, the 28th of July in the year 1540 at Oatlands Palace, King Henry VIII married his 5th wife, the oh-so-very-young Catherine Howard. Their marriage took place just three weeks after Henry annulled his marriage to Anne of Cleves and apparently, Henry showered his young wife with gifts an riches (probably to make him considerably more attractive than he was at this point in his life. At this point he was somewhere around 140kg and has an ulcer on his leg that needed to be drained daily).

For a little while, all went well. That is until Catherine started finding the company of other, younger, more attractive much better than that of her husband. The most notable suitor of Catherine's was Thomas Culpeper who ended up being beheaded. The result was her being tried for treason and then beheaded just two years after she became queen. Another part of the treason that should be noted was that she had a romantic history from before her marriage that was unknown to the King.

And so, poor young Catherine became the second wife of Henry VIII to die at his hand. But in order to become a wife, you have to get married first. Which is what they did on the 28th of July.

Happy Anniversary!!!

Photo of the day.

Imagine for a moment, the sea.
It is a strange thing full of majesty. It can be calm and soothing and deadly and fearful. It gave all life. It takes it too. Its water stretches from the deepest crevasse to the highest atmosphere.

This is a photo of the atmospheric bit.

Happy Birthday MacGyver In Space!!!

15 years ago today, something awesome happened.

15 years ago today, MacGyver got a haircut and went into space. 15 years ago today, James Spader got kicked out of the James Spader Club for being less like James Spader than Michael Shanks. 15 years ago today, Amanda Tapping decided it was time to prove to the world that she holds a PhD in Kick-Ass-Babery. 15 years ago today, being a huge, impassive, slightly gold guy became the most awesome thing you can be. 15 years ago today, we were introduced to Hammond of Texas, the man with treacle voice.

Stargate SG-1 premiered on the 27^th of July 1997 on Showcase and it was amazing, despite having one of the longest opening credit sequences I have seen (although not as long as Twin Peaks. Twin Peakswins at that game).

I remember it well, being seven years old and watching Stargate. Truth be told all I can actually remember is sitting on our really weird brown rug in the family room watching the opening credits. It was many years later that I started to watch it again from the beginning and proudly declared myself a Stargate nerd.

Stargate SG-1 was the continuation of the 1994 film, but with changes. O’Neil (otherwise known as Colonel Grumpy Pants) was changed toO’Neill (2 Ls), who you may remember from such productions as MacGyver and…MacGyver. James Spader (as I have already mentioned) was out-Spadered by Michael Shanks and his 90s hair and new characters were added to fill the spaceof favourite alien (T’ealc), ridiculously smart and beautiful babe (CaptainCarter) and The Good King (General Hammond, he of the treacle voice and the remarkablebrow ridge).

It was a show of good ol’fashioned family sci-fi goodness. All the wholesome with just the right amount of snark, but with the true freedom that is only found in sci-fi that enables us wee humans to explore justwhat it means to be a member of our own special species.

After 10 seasons, 3ish plot arcs, 2 movies, 2 spin-offs (I’m counting Universe) and some videogames it was time to let it go in 2007. And although I hate getting past Hammond leaving (because I love Don S Davis) and O'Neill leaving (because life is nothing without hearing “for crying out loud”said with mild despair) in my re-watching and re-watching, it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing because I can go back and watch it all again, and pick up on the bits that I missed the last time (like how many Jaffa are wearing watches).

As much I hate people who say things life “it shaped me as a person” (and I may have to throw something at myself as a result), I’m going to say it. Stargate changed my perspective on a lot of things, it opened my mind and made me the out and proud nerd I am today. I am now an appreciator of a type of media I never would have liked without it and I now know a whole lot more about space because I’m curious and go and research things I see on TV (Nerd, I told you).

So if you haven’t found the joy and wonder of Stargate, go and watch a few episodes. If you don’t like it for the story, no matter, there’s always the eye candy and a game of Spot-the-DeLuise to keep you entertained.

Thanks Startgate.

Happy favourite weather god day!

No, not Thor. Thor is not your favourite.

Your favourite is Illyap'a the Incan god of weather. Today is Illyap'a day!

Illyap'a was said to have kept the Milky Way in a jar and he used into make rain.

To look at he was shinier than Mathew Bomber and carried a sling and a war club, I presume it was to beat something into making thunderous noises.

And the Birthday of the Day goes to:

Today’s Birthday of the day (chosen by picking the first name I recognized) goes to this lovely lady.

Don’t know who she is?

Shame on you and your cat.

It’s Amelia Earhart, you know, the lady pilot what went missing that time?

Amelia was a pretty accomplished person. She started flying early  and ended up being the first person of the female persuasion to fly solo across the Atlantic and the first to successfully fly from Honolulu to Oakland (apparently this flight went so well she listened to the opera once she was in range of the radio).

She made 2 attempts at flying around the world; the first did not go well. The plane decided that It wanted to stay home and made this known my breaking down.

Attempt number 2  went somewhat better. Earhart and her managed to get through 35000km of their 46000km journey. The last 11000km was all going to be over the pacific (which as we know from every movie we have ever watched, does not bode well).

Earhart and Co-pilot Fred Noonan departed from Lae on July 2 1937 heading for a tiny weensy little Island known as Howland. They never got there.

Exactly what happed we will never know, but it is thought that problems with radio navigation were the cause of everything going wrong.

One hour after Earhart’s last message the search for the missing plane and pilots began. The official search lasted for 17 days and in that time no sign of the plane or its occupants was seen.

There are so many theories floating around as to what happened to Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. One is the known as the Crash and Sink theory, the name pretty much speaks for itself. The plane ran out of fuel, crashed and sunk to the bottom of the ocean, where it still lies yet unfound.

Another is that they somehow managed to land on Gardner Island. There is… or was some physical evidence to support this theory, the most notable of which is a skeleton found in 1940, possibly belonging to a tallish woman of European decent. The bones were lost and haven’t been seen since. Other evidence found on the Island includes pieces of aluminium which could conceivably come from the type of plane Earhart was flying at the time, a piece of plexiglass which also fits the window of the type of plane and a shoe dating from the 30s, similar to the style that Amelia Earhart wore. In 2007 more bone fragments were found, but testing in 2010 was inconclusive as to whether or not they were human.

The other theories are somewhat more romantic. They were spies, thy wr captured and executed in Saipan, she turned back mid-light and ended up in New Britain, the somehow survived and Earhart ended up in New Jersey living under an assumed name. The lady whose name the theorists chose sued them by the way and was clearly not Amelia Earhart.

The list goes on.

Happy 115^th Birthday Amelia, wherever you may be.

Today is a good day to be down by the seaside.

Why?

Because it's Neptunalia! The festival of the Roman god Neptune.

Neptune is the god of waters and horses. He is the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Poseidon, a name you might remember form such movies as Poseidon and The Poseidon Adventure, neither of which had anything to do with the mythology.

In Ancient Rome, Neptunalia was a two day festival celebrating our favourite sea god. The people would sit in shelters made of tree branches and get merry on water and wine.

Neptune is also a planet in our every own solar system. Since the death of Pluto (who was the god of death), Neptune has inherited the title of being the last planet in the system. He is a whopping 17 times the mass Earth. That makes him the third largest (going by mass) in the solar system.

Not quite solid and not quite a gas giant, Neptune and his bro Uranus get called ice giants. The name fits quite well considering that Neptune is blue to the naked eye, like really thick ice.

Happy Ratcatcher's Day! Wait... What?

Every profession has a day and it's only fair that people who catch rats for a living should get theirs.

Ratcatcher's Day originates from the myth of the Pied Piper. You all know the story. Plague of rats, piper comes in and played his pipe, leading all of the rats into the river where they drowned (in the style of most Grimm's faerie tales, it all ends in death).

The Grimm brothers used the town of Hamelin as the setting for their version of The Pied Piper and their story also says it was the 26th of June that the rats left the town in the company of our favourite minstrel. The reason that we celebrate Ratcatcher's Day on the 22nd of July as well is because of a poem by a fella named Robert Browning. In his poem he says that the piper led the rats to their doom on the 22nd if July 1376. The Grimm Brothers say it was the 26th of June 1284, just under a century earlier.

In the end it doesn't really matter. But today (or the 22nd of last month if you have a time machine) is the day to remember and say "Thanks Mate" to your local Ratcatcher.



Have a good one.

Happy Picard Day!

Today is the day we celebrate the birthday of one Jean Picard. No, not Jean-Luc Picard, the real one.

http://www.cnes-jeunes.fr/web/CNES-Jeunes-fr/8064-picard-le-soleil-et-nous.php

Jean-Félix Picard was a 17th century french astronomer and priest. He is most famous for measuring the size of the earth to with a reasonable margin of error (0.44% less than the measurement we go off today) and pioneering the method of measuring the right ascension of a celestial object.

Weirdly enough, Star Trek's Jean-Luc Picard was not named after our Jean-Felix, but for 20th century Swiss Scientists Jean Felix and Auguste Piccard. 

Happy 392nd Birthday Jean-Félix Picard!

Bourjois Foundations are the Win.

I Love Bourjois, and not just because their advertising is so pretty.

If you are pale (like me) and too poor to justify buying a house brand foundation (like me) you might come to love Bourjois too.

Many drug-store brands are starting to cater towards the super-pale complexions now. But in the past I found it incredibly hard to find a foundation that wasn’t prone to being too yellow or just too plain dark (thanks Revlon). Then, several years ago I was having a wander through Target and saw the prettiness of the Bourjois display.

Bright pink, beautifully designed and (for once) logical in its layout, it was suddenly super easy to find the thing I was looking for. Now, at the time I think there were only two foundations, one liquid (10 Hour Sleep Effect) and one powder compact (which I paid no attention to whatsoever). So I picked up the aforementioned liquid and started to have a play with the tester. For the fist time in my life I had the experience of a foundation melting into my skin, adequately toning down my epic rosy cheeks while being indistinguishable from my own texture. Needless to say I bought it. I used it for about a year and then they introduced the Healthy Mix foundation, which is my new favourite.

10 Hour Sleep is a great light, quite sheer, vitamin enriched foundation with a dewy natural finish. On good skin days when I don’t have too many blemishes or excessive discolouration it is perfect. Whack it on with your fingers and you are good to go. It comes in a pump-pack which is nice, but it is very runny so beware using too much. It is buildable if you wanted a little more coverage but its not very good at doubling as a concealer. The smell is quite pleasant and although it is very runny its very easy to work with.

Be warned, it contains no sunscreen. I wear sunscreen underneath when I’m outside. I wear shade 71, which is the lightest one, and it happily wears on me for somewhere around the 8-9 hour mark with finishing powder and 3-4 hours without.

Almost Empty. Swatches: Shade 51 on the left, 52 on the right.

Healthy Mix foundation is the darling of the current Bourjois foundation range. Even people like Lisa Eldridge like it. It is my favourite because it provides more coverage than the 10 Hour Sleep Effect but still conforms to your own skin texture, leaving you with a nice natural, clean and even finish. Again, no sunscreen, which is a bit of a downer, but it makes up for it by being so awesome.

I double the foundation as a concealer by getting the tiniest amount possible and tapping it on the problem. Bourjois do make a matching concealer but I have never really seen the point of buying two products when one will do. Its also buildable if you need more than medium coverage.

Healthy Mix boasts a 16 hour wear time, but when it comes down to it, no foundation is going to last perfectly on your skin for that long no matter what they say. Having said that Healthy Mix has been one of the best lasting foundations I have ever tried. Whack it on (fingers again- sorry Michelle Phan) light dusting of your favourite powder and BAM. Lasts me a good 10 hours before starting to degrade. The fantastic thing about it is that if you match your skin tone (which you should be doing anyway) the degradation is hardly noticeable. Win.

In this one, I am somewhere between shades 51 and 52 so I do have both. I don’t usually mix them, I just choose the colour based on what I look like. If I look alive when I get up I will go for 51, if I need extra help I will go 52. There is almost no discernable difference between the two colours, but it does make a difference when you need more colour. The trick is to stick extremely close to your own tone, don’t go a whole shade darker or lighter. 

In the above photo I am wearing both shades. I used 51 on picture's right and 52 on the picture's left. As you can see, almost no difference.

I think regardless of what other foundations I try, these two will always be in my collection.

Happy Alexandria Day!

Today is the birthday of one of Histories biggest Narcissists: Alexander The Great.

Admittedly, he was pretty great at a couple of things (conquering, for example) and the stories tell us that he was a loyal kind of dude and an excellent leader. Unfortunately, he wasn't really creative when it came to naming things.

Over the period of his unfortunately short life he founded something like 20 cities. He named them all Alexandria (or variations thereon). All of them.

It is said that Alexander solved the Gordian Knot. The history of the knot goes something like this:
When the Phrygians were without a king on of their oracles had a vision. The vision said that the next man to come into the city of Telmissus with an ox-cart would be king. The dude with the ox-cart was a farmer by the name of Gordias. Gordias's son was Midas (there's a name you should vaguely recognize from year 8 history) and he dedicated the ox-cart his father had been carrying to a god (Sabazios) and either tied it to a post with a really complicated knot. *

So Alexander comes along, can't figure it out and come up with what we now know as the Alexandrian Solution... which was to cut it in half with his sword. Knot: 0 Alexander: 1.

Happy Birthday Alexander III The Great!

* other versions of the story say that it was Midas who became king, or that Gordias tied the knot. There is no way of knowing. What we do know is that a knot was tied, it is associated with Midas, it was named The Gordian Knot and it was cut by Alexander The Great.

Creepy of the day.

Surprise! 

 It's me... and a galaxy light.
Sleep tight.

1948 years ago... someone could smell something burning.

1948 years ago today, a fire started. That fire was in Rome.

http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/sheet-music/46#i2283

According to the history of a fella named Tacticus, the waged its war on the city for 6 days and 7 nights. The fire managed to completely obliterate 3 and severely damage 7 of the 14 districts of the city.

So how did the fire start? well, actual details are not known but here are a few tasty opins from the menu of history.

1: Nero did it.
Emperor Nero was not a nice man. According to one of the whole two historical reports which mention the fire in any detail, Nero wanted to build another palace, so he burned rome to the ground to make room. Now this is actually highly unlikely. Tacticus says that Nero wasn't in town at the time, which is pretty likely.

http://www.preteristarchive.com/Rome/images/nero/nero1.jpg

There is a legend that says that Nero played the Fiddle as Rome burned. Now, there were no fiddles in the 1st Century, so if he did it was probably a lyre and more than likely the story was made up by a liar (excuse the pun) in order to make Nero look even worse than he actually was.

2. The Christians did it.
Nero didn't like Christians. He did horrible things to them (such as burning them alive for light at his parties) and one of these horrible things was framing them for starting the fire. After the fire, Nero did go on to build himself a nice big house and that caused the people of Rome to start thinking that the rumors about him being the one who started the fire were true. So, to diffuse the blame he pointed the finger at the Christians. Nice.

Apparently, some Christians admitted it. Although, it was never clear if they admitted to the fire because they did it or because they were being tortured, if they admitted to starting the fire at all. There is some speculation that they only admitted to being Christians (which got the same punishment- horrible, horrible death).

3. It was all a terrible accident.
The most likely of the three options I'm giving you. This was neither the first nor the last time that Rome burned. Due to the geography of the city, the fact that most of it was made of excellent fuel and the fact that it was summer, it is far more likely that the fire was accidental and got out of hand really, really fast. Winds fanned the lames, spreading the fire throughout the city. The combination of the heat, wind and fuel kept the fire burning for a week, somewhat like some of the big bush-fires we see today.

So Happy Great Fire of Rome Day! and remember your fire safety.