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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Dec. 21, 1937)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered on December 21, 1937. Industry insiders had been calling it "Disney's Folly." Disney's wife Lillian and his brother and business partner Roy tried to talk him out of it. Disney had to morgage his house to finance the $1,488,422 feature--the first animated feature film in history. Lillian remarked, "No one's going to pay a dime to see a dwarf movie."

It opened to rave reviews. During the run of its original release, it grossed approximately $8,000,000 (that includes international box office revenues) and was the highest-grossing film of all time until Gone With The Wind displaced it in 1941. 

Its lifetime gross was reported in 2008 as $184,925,486.

(Image: from the original 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs theatrical trailer.)

Dec. 18, 1865 - Ratification of the Constitutional Amendment Abolishing Slavery

Proclamation of the Secretary of State announcing the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, December 18, 1865

Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, the 13th amendment abolished slavery in the United States and provides that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Secretary of State William H. Seward issued this Proclamation announcing the ratification on December 18, 1865.

via todaysdocument.tumblr.com

Old London Street Scenes (1903)

Mesmerically delightful. The moment at 3m53s is rather profound when one considers the implications.

The horse-drawn public transportation wagon are called omnibuses.

 

This footage shows a number of scenes shot around central London, taking in locations such as Hyde Park Corner, Parliament Square and Charing Cross Station. We see crowds of people disembarking from a pleasure steamer at Victoria Embankment, pedestrians dodging horse-drawn carriages in Pall Mall, and heavy traffic trotting down the Strand..... The dense traffic...is highly reminiscent of today's London rush hour, whilst advertising on public transport is clearly no new phenomenon - in one scene, an advert for Nestlé's Milk seems to be plastered on every other vehicle. (Alex Davidson)

CREW's list of 2011's 11 most corrupt Congress Members

Here they are....

Every Tree in Town (photo series)

Every Tree in Town is a series that documents every spruce tree in the old mill town of Willimantic, Connecticut. The series of 1,017 photographs was created as Matthew Jensen systematically walked the 89 miles of streets within the city limits and documented some 2,187 trees. The trees in the series are cultural artifacts from the town's industrial past and the Victorian-era immigrant population who came from Northern Europe, where the trees are native. Today, Willimantic's population is a third of what it was in its heyday, and the pervasive trees remain as the last living link to the past.

View the photographs in this series, which was featured on the front of the Hartford Courant and was curated by the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art for an exhibition in Ridgefield, CT.

Set of thirty 10" x 14" photographs. Also available in sets of three and six. It's free to register on artspace.com to make your purchase and participate in future sales on ArtSpace.com.

Priorities, Values: Plastic Surgery Is More Popular Than Ever - The Daily Beast

Between 2009 and 2010 the average US income fell 0.6% to $62,481, and Americans spent:

1.4% less on clothes
3.8% less on food
2.0% less on housing
7.0% less on entertainment, but
1.3% more on breast augmentation
5.1% more on lipo
8.1% more on eyelid surgery
24.4% more on butt lifts (yes, you read that percentage correctly).

Those increases are because the rich are spending, right? Yes they are, but not in the realm of cosmetic surgery like you might assume they do.... Of cosmetic-surgery patients, 33% make less than $30,000 a year and c. 70% make less than $60,000, according to a 2009 study.

via www.thedailybeast.com

(Image: Oscar-winner Jim Broadbent (as Dr. Jaffe) goes to work on Katherine Helmond (as Mrs. Ida Lowry) in Terry Gilliam's 1985 film, Brazil.)

The Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941

On December 12, 1941, Adolf Hitler held a meeting in the Reich Chancellery during which he spoke to approximately 50 high-level Nazi party leaders about the destruction of the Jews. However, the importance of this meeting in the history of the holocaust and the Second World War was brought to light not until 1997, when on December 13, 1997 the German center-left daily Berliner Zeitung published an article by then 34-year-old German historian Götz Aly.

Alan Cowell wrote in The New York Times on January 21, 1998:

For decades, it has been the ultimate enigma among historians of what the Nazis called the final solution: how can it be proved empirically that Hitler ordered the annihilation of Europe's Jews, and when did he do so? Despite a half-century of research, no single document has provided evidence that the Nazi leader gave a written order for the Holocaust.

The December 12, 1941 meeting--five days after the Japanese empire attacked the U. S. naval base at Pearl Harbor--was likely a crucial step towards setting in motion a systematic and state-sponsored program of industrial-scale atrocities against and murder of a Jewish minority--a grotesque act of massive, paranoia-fuelled genocidal scapegoating that would claim the lives of 6,000,000 Jews.

The December 12 meeting is less well known than the January 20, 1942, Wannsee Conference at which the methods of the holocaust's implementation were announced to and discussed among various Nazi departmental heads.

The Wannsee Conference was dramatized in the 2001 BBC/HBO film Conspiracy (photo above) featuring Kenneth Branagh as Lieutenant-General (Obergruppenführer) Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Reich-Protector (Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor) of Bohemia and Moravia, who chaired the infamous meeting, as well as Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann, Ian McNeice, and Ben Daniels.

Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Rememberance Day, will be on April 19 in 2012.

MIT Report: How to Keep from Getting the Flu | Big Think

When MIT researchers set out to find inexpensive and household methods to slow the spread of a potential flu pandemic, they were simultaneously finding ways to stop the seasonal flu. After reviewing 40 studies of the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical solutions, they recommend washing hands with soap and water for 20-30 seconds, wearing a mask if you have a virus, installing air filters, keeping temperatures and humidity levels high and installing an ultraviolet light (because UV light is antimicrobial).

At the start of their research, the MIT scientists imagined an H5N1 bird flu pandemic, perhaps on the scale of the influenza epidemic that swept the globe between 1918 and 1920, killing 50 to 100 million people. Were the bird flu to mutate and become communicable between humans, vaccines might help stop its spread, but it is possible that their production would be too slow to have much effect. The hygiene methods highlighted above are sufficient for slowing the spread of influenza among members of the same household.

via bigthink.com

Image by Karsten Schneider/Science Photo Library. (Click to enlarge.) "Spreading potentially lethal pathogens, influenza virus particles (brown) invade cilia (blue) in the airways of the human lung."

Unflinching Portraits of Pearl Harbor Survivors | Smithsonian Magazine

Just before 8 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, sailors stationed at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu were starting to stir—dressing for church, swabbing the deck, or already sunning themselves at local beaches on their day off—when the first of two waves of Japanese fighter planes attacked the base.

At 8:10 a.m., Japanese bombers dropped a 1,760-pound torpedo on the USS Arizona, and within nine minutes the battleship sank with 1,177 men onboard. In just two hours, the death toll from the attack on the harbor climbed to about 2,400, with nearly 1,200 wounded. “A date which will live in infamy,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it, before declaring war on Japan and entering the United States in World War II.

Seventy years later, only about 3,000 of the 60,000 military personnel estimated to have been at Pearl Harbor that day survive (including William Temple, above). “We are losing this ‘greatest generation’ faster than we can imagine,” says Marco Garcia, a Honolulu-based photographer who has made it his mission to photograph survivors before it is too late.

via www.smithsonianmag.com

Henrietta Leavitt: Beyond Parallax, Before Hubble

Henrietta Leavitt is a relatively unsung hero of astronomy. A graduate of Radcliffe College, she went to work--at first as a volunteer--at the Harvard College Observatory in 1893 examining photographic plates of images of the night sky. 

In Leavitt's day, a star's distance from us was determined in part through a method known as parallax. No, a parallax is not two hammocks side-by-side or a semi-laxative. It's a process that is difficult to explain briefly in writing (for me), but it is summarized on Wikipedia, (see parallax), including this possibly helpful example from the entry:

A simple everyday example of parallax can be seen in the dashboard of motor vehicles that use an older-style "needle" speedometer gauge. When viewed from directly in front, the speed may show exactly 60; but when viewed from the passenger seat the needle may appear to show a slightly different speed, due to the angle of viewing.

Anyway, parallax as a method for measuring a star's distance only works with stars relatively close to us. Leavitt noted that stars with variable brightness (that is, they pulsate), known as Cephalids, exhibit a direct relationship between how bright they are and how long they're bright for. Her work used this finding to pushed out farther, beyond the parallax method, the maximum distance at which we can measure a star's proximity to us.

In the early 1900's, scientific opinion was divided as to whether or not all stars were contained within our galaxy. The famous astronomer Edwin Hubble would in the 1920's conclusively prove that some stars visible to us were outside of our galaxy--that is, really, really far away--which would more or less also confirm that our galaxy was just one of many, many galaxies. 

He accomplished this in part through the benefit of Leavitt's preceeding work.

Before Hubble's discovery, astronomers were seeing other galaxies in their telescopes all of the time, but it wasn't a certainty what they were. They looked most or less like what one might call smudge-stars; they seemed to have shape and structure, but what the heck were they, really? Some scientists speculated that they were other galaxies, but, as I wrote above, there wasn't conclusive proof. Hubble provided that proof doing what scientists do: "building on" (including correcting, improving, refining, integrating, or simply using) the work of other scientists--some of them maybe long dead!) who built on the work of other scientists who built on the work of other scientists, and so on..... You get the idea. I hope. Hubble