Note: This has been kind of debunked — or at least 25 percent debunked đ As a number of people pointed out on Mastodon, it seems there is no real place (in terms of being listed on a map) that is called Torpenhow Hill, as noted here, so that might be an embellishemnt just to make the whole story even more absurd sounding. Tom Scott also notes that in his video debunking on YouTube — however, he does mention that there is clearly a small rise near Torpenhow (which he walks up) and this could be considered a hill. So there.
On January 24th in 1985, a little company called Apple launched a revolution in personal computing with the first Macintosh computer — a chunky-looking desktop with an equally clunky-looking mouse and a washed-out screen, which cost $2,495Â US (the equivalent of about $7,000 today). It’s difficult to see this as revolutionary now, but in the mid-1980s it absolutely was. The only computers most people — including me — were familiar with were room-sized corporate servers with tape drives. The Mac made computers human-sized, and its graphical user interface with the trash can icon and file folders, and the mouse to navigate among them (both of which Steve Jobs borrowed from the Xerox PARC research lab) were unlike anything else on the market. No more typing DOS commands in green text on a black background!
I didn’t get one when they first came out — instead, I asked a friend who knew about such things what I should buy, and knowing of my interest in both drawing and music, he suggested the Atari 1040ST, because it had a better colour screen and a MIDI interface (which I never used). But I admired the Mac, and every Apple computer that came after it — especially the candy-coloured iMacs and the all-in-one desktops that succeeded them. I could never afford to actually buy one; I almost always wound up with some PC knockoff, which I liked in part because they were easier to take apart so you could upgrade the RAM, graphics card, etc. Also, PCs were better for playing games like Doom. But there’s no question Jobs and Apple were masters of marketing, especially the original Mac “1984” ad, which was created by Ridley Scott.
“As blockbuster storylines go, The Empire Strikes Back is a bit of an outlier. Our big hero Luke fails physically, spiritually, and psychologically in his training with Yoda. All of his friends get captured by the Empire. His dad chops off his hand. The âhappy endingâ is just that he and his rebel buddies live to fight another day. This is not exactly a recipe for shifting action figures, lunch boxes, and pajamas. So how did such a dark and psychologically rich sequel to one of the most profitable, kid-friendly movies of all time get made? Why would a Hollywood studio green light this?
The answer is that they wouldnât. No studio agreed to make The Empire Strikes Back as George Lucas had envisioned it, so Lucas bet on himself, kept the merchandising rights, and financed the entire thing on his own. The result? The Empire Strikes Back was the highest grossing film of 1980, earning over $400 million worldwide. It won Oscars and Grammys, and is now considered the prime example of a sequel that surpassed its predecessor. Not only has it come to be regarded as the best film in the entire Star Wars series, itâs often included in round-ups of the greatest films ever made.”
Sam Kriss has a great newsletter called Numb At The Lodge, and in a recent edition he wrote about Santa Claus â but also so much more:
“There are two named individuals known to live at the North Pole. The first is Baxbakwalanuxsiwae, He-Who-First-Ate-Man-At-The-North-End-Of-The-World. In the mythology of the Kwakiutl people of whatâs now British Colombia, Baxbakwalanuxsiwae is a primordial cannibal. His skin is grey, and every inch of it is covered in ravenous, gnashing, blood-stained mouths with razor-sharp yellow teeth. When those mouths arenât crushing human bones or tearing human flesh, they cry hÄp! hÄp! hÄp! which means eat! eat! eat! He goes naked in the snow. He lives in a lodge at the furthest northern edge of the world, with blood-red smoke rising from its chimney. He shares this lodge with his wife, Qominaga, who dresses in strips of red-and-white cedar bark; the two of them sometimes take the form of monstrous black birds and fly south to steal people away and eat them.
The second inhabitant of the Pole is called Santa Claus. According to the conventional account, Santa Claus descends from a (probably) real historical person: Saint Nicholas, Defender of Orthodoxy, Wonderworker, Holy Hierarch, and Bishop of Myra, who (probably) lived in Asia Minor in the third and fourth centuries AD. Somethingâs off about this story. The Santa Claus weâve ended up with is a weird guy, and there are a lot of things about him that seem to have no obvious precedent in the Anglo-Dutch tradition. For instance: his practice of going into houses via the chimney. Why? Or his team of flying reindeer. Or Mrs Claus, who is not the sort of companion a Catholic bishop should have. Also, Santa lives at the North Pole. A barren, freezing wilderness, where Santaâs only neighbour is Baxbakwalanuxsiwae of the chomping mouths.”
