[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

Lyndon B. Johnson

 

You can have it all. You just can't have it all at once.

Oprah Winfrey 

 

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority
myself.

Albert Einstein

 

All television is children's television.

Richard P. Adler

 

There comes a time in every man's life and I've had many of them.

Casey Stengel

 

GNOME, n. In North-European mythology, a dwarfish imp inhabiting the
interior parts of the earth and having special custody of mineral treasures.
Bjorsen, who died in 1765, says gnomes were common enough in the southern
parts of Sweden in his boyhood, and he frequently saw them scampering on the
hills in the evening twilight. Ludwig Binkerhoof saw three as recently as
1792, in the Black Forest, and Sneddeker avers that in 1803 they drove a
party of miners out of a Silesian mine. Basing our computations upon data
supplied by these statements, we find that the gnomes were probably extinct
as early as 1764.

Ambrose Bierce

 

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Watershed

 

Watershed first turns up in English near the beginning of the nineteenth
century. It was then purely a scientific term for an imaginary line that
separates two river systems. Think of it as the ridge of a roof: which river
system rainwater flows into is determined by the side of the line the rain
is deposited on. This is the same idea as the German Wasserscheide from
which English borrowed the word (what linguists call a calque or loan
translation).

 

In English, the noun shed is the English equivalent of the German scheide,
both of which have come down to us from the same Old German root. The
English noun derives from the verb to shed. It's an old word for a division,
split or separation - a shed could be a hair parting, for example, and could
also be used for a ridge of land separating two areas of lower country, a
divide. (These days a shed is usually a simple building for shelter or
storage; this is an altered form of shade, and so has no link to this other
sense of the word.)

 

In North America, the word watershed often means not the dividing line, but
the river catchment areas on either side of the ridge, the whole land area
that drains into a particular river. How the sense shifted isn't clear. It
came into use only around the 1870s, and may have been a misunderstanding.

 

The difference in sense explains why Americans don't use the figurative
sense of the word as much as the rest of us do. That refers to an important
point of division or transition, as in this sentence from the Daily
Telegraph in June 1999: "The Balkans conflict is at a watershed between a
diplomatic settlement and the prospect of a ground war". This figurative
usage only makes sense if you use watershed in its original meaning of a
dividing line.

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Gremlin

 

A gremlin is an imaginary mischievous sprite. Not just any sprite, but one
that you feel must be responsible for that unexplained fault you have just
experienced with some device, especially a mechanical or electronic one. If
the car won't start, or the computer is acting up, one may blame gremlins.

 

The word looks so much like the name of some immemorial archetypal being
that it comes as a surprise to discover that it is not known before the
early years of the last century and was in its heyday among RAF pilots in
World War Two. By 1942, news of their coming had reached Newsday in the USA,
which described them, one hopes tongue in cheek, as "exasperating pixies,
often clad in caps, ruffled collars, tight breeches and spats, who delight
in raising hell in Allied planes". Gremlins, another report says, were "fond
of drinking petrol, distracting the pilot, interfering with radio
communications, and even causing the pattern of stars to distort, thereby
making accurate navigation impossible".

 

Roald Dahl's first children's book, published in 1943, was called The
Gremlins: A Royal Air Force Story and he did claim to have invented the
name. However, there is a lot of evidence that it was around earlier. Some
trace it back to the Royal Flying Corps in World War One, others to RAF
operations in India and the Middle East in the 1920s. In those days, the
most common beer available in the mess was brewed by Fremlin; it is
plausibly said that the name comes from a blend of this name with goblin, so
a gremlin was a creature that was first viewed, you might say, through the
bottom of a bottle. It explains a lot, especially those spats.

 

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Frankenstein trivia

 

Q: Who brought The Monster "to life" in 3D?

A: Well, there are two answers to this question. View-Master did in 1976
with a series of three reels. More famously, Andy Warhol did in his
three-dimensional feature film, Flesh for Frankenstein. 

Q: How is The Monster related to another towering menace, Darth Vader?

A: David Prowse, the British weightlifter who was the man inside the Darth
Vader suit in the original Star Wars film trilogy, also portrayed The
Monster in three films, including 1967's Casino Royale.

Q: In what year was the feature film Frankenstein 1970 released?

A: 1958, of course.

Q: And in what year was the feature film Frankenstein '80 released?

A: 1972, naturally.

Q: Finally, in what year was the feature film Frankenstein '90 released?

A: 1984. Duh.

Q: Who portrayed The Monster on film, and went on to pose nude for Playgirl?

A: Gary Conway. His first film role was as The Monster in 1957's I Was a
Teenage Frankenstein. (He lied, he was 21.) He became a well-known TV star,
appearing on Burke's Law and Land of the Giants in the 1960s, and then went
nude before the camera as the centerfold in a 1973 issue of Playgirl.

Q: There was Blacula. why wasn't there Blackenstein?

A: Actually, there was. The 1973 film told an updated version of the tale,
featuring a paraplegic Vietnam vet who was reconstructed into The Monster.