Category: Misc

Cars in winter wonderland pic.twitter.com/D12gSl4bRY

— humans without context (@HumansNoContext) January 21, 2024

From the great Why Is This Interesting newsletter comes this item from Elliot Aronow, editor of the minor genius substack:

“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 “happy ending” 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 wouldn’t. 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, it’s 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 — 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 what’s 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 aren’t crushing human bones or tearing human flesh, they cry hāp! hāp! hāp! 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. Something’s off about this story. The Santa Claus we’ve 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 Santa’s only neighbour is Baxbakwalanuxsiwae of the chomping mouths.”

The German magazine Der Spiegel spoke with Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, the Danish chemist whose research laid the foundation for the creation of semaglutide, the diabetes and weight loss medication sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, which has generated billions of dollars in revenue for Novo Nordisk (so much revenue that the company is now worth more than the entire Danish economy). Knudsen has no share in either the stock of Novo Nordisk or the intellectual property behind the drugs, and has never even asked for a raise in her 34 years working at the pharmaceutical giant. “I don’t care that much about money, I’m a socialist!” she says (via The Browser)

Trung Phan has a great newsletter, and one of the topics he wrote about recently was how Disney loves — but also hates — the idea of copyrighted work losing its protection and winding up in public domain. Here’s an excerpt:

“January 1st is Public Domain Day, when works lose their copyright protection. The 2024 batch was highly highly anticipated. Why? Because Disney lost the copyright on Mickey Mouse (specifically, the version that was in the 1928 “Steamboat Willie” short film). And people care about Disney because the entertainment conglomerate has a very contradictory relationship to copyright.

On the one hand, the number of Disney films that are sniped from Public Domain is astounding. There are at least 50 of them. Just 8 of these sources — including Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book), Hans Christian Andersen (The Little Sea Maid), Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland) and some little-known writer named Shakespeare — have accounted for more than $16B at the box office:

But when it comes to Disney’s own content, it’s a very different story. Why? In 1927, Walt and his chief animator created a popular cartoon character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The character blew up and then the chief animator took his team to Universal and basically jacked Oswald. In response, Walt was determined to never let someone else control the fate of his animations. This has manifested in US copyright laws conveniently being extended every single time Disney’s works are about to enter the public domain:

From the Everything Is Amazing newsletter comes this gem, about what is involved in trying to join the legendary tribe of Brits who drive traditional London black cabs:

“Everton Thomas, a 33-year-old bus driver from Woolwich in southeast London, is sitting in a cramped, ugly office decorated with maps of the city. There are maps on the walls, maps on shelves, and a big paper map spread out on the angled desk opposite him. But if Everton sneaks a look at any of these maps, he goes back to being a bus driver – a job he’s desperate to leave. He’s hoping a better life awaits him and his family if he can keep his eyes fixed straight ahead, and not let his nervousness cloud his brain. He really, really needs to think clearly right now. In a sense, this is a job interview – but it’s also one of the hardest memory tests in the world.

The examiner says: “Everton, where’s the London Edition Hotel?”

This question, and the following ones like it, requires him to remember specific locations from London’s roughly 100,000 landmarks. He has to know where these places are – and he has to know how to get there from anywhere else. The exam is called The Knowledge – and these days, Everton teaches it, in the school he set up after he successfully passed it in 2017. Most students take four or five years of study to get to the required level – or they drop out, or get disqualified (there’s a 70% fail rate). But the ones that succeed will earn anything from £15,000 to £30,000 more per year than any of London’s bus drivers.”