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THIS WEEK IN RETRO - Gaming News for March 1st 2016
Wednesday, 2 March 2016
THIS WEEK IN RETRO - Gaming News for March 1st 2016
THIS WEEK IN RETRO - Gaming News for March 1st 2016
Dr. Gustav Zander's Victorian-Era Exercise Machines Made the Bowflex Look Like Child's Play
No doubt some of you are among the many hardened souls intent upon making this year the year you finally get in shape. And as you resolve to hit the gym, I’d like to shift your attention momentarily to something most of us don’t ponder—the history of the humble exercise machine.
Perhaps you’d be forgiven for never wondering about the history of gym machines, should you be drowning out the brutal task of half an hour on the recumbent bike with distracting upbeat music and trashy magazines. But the most mundane and rote habits of our daily life can belie a fascinating and not regularly considered antecedent.
Such is the case of the Swedish physician Dr. Gustav Zander, who helped pioneer “mechanotherapy,” or the promotion of health and healing through the use the exercise apparatus. Zander was likely not the first to see positivity in using machines to aid in health, but his connection of regular exertion using machines to honor health and well being was certainly a novel idea in an age when blood-letting and noxious humors were still pretty standard.
Movement as a therapeutic agent did already have its proponents—Zander was a follower of the movement cure promoted by an earlier pioneer of exercise Per Henrik Ling.
Portrait of Dr. G. Zander from Dr. G. Zander’s medico-mechanische Gymnastik by Alfred Levertin (Stockholm: 1892
(Smithsonian Libraries)
Incorporating machinery allowed for less exertion, opening up therapeutic movement to those with injuries, deformities,and those just not in good enough shape for calisthenics.
Born in Stockholm in 1835, Dr. Zander would explore the connection between mechanics of the body and muscle building while in medical school in Sweden in the early 1860s. He quickly established the Therapeutic Zander Institute in Stockholm, a state-supported institute using his machines to help workers correct physical impairments.
He would further develop these devices, going on to win a gold medal at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia for his exercise machines. By the time the edition of his book, Dr. G. Zander’s medico-mechanische Gymnastik was published in 1892, he was well on his way to establishing Zander Institutes across the globe.
Dr. Zander’s contributions to this perennial gym craze began in the midst of heavy industrialization in the latter part of the 19th century. For the first time, a sizable chunk of society was now working in offices and “laboring” without physical exertion.
At the same time, industrialization brought with it rapid mechanization. It’s no wonder that his show at the Centennial Exhibition would help ignite a craze in the United States for his machines. By the turn of the century, his machines were in health spas across the country, emblematic of an upscale clientele looking for status symbols to reflect their leisurely lifestyles and exemption from physical labor.
While the Smithsonian Libraries’ German version of Dr. G. Zander’s medico-mechanische Gymnastik might present a language barrier, the illustrations are worthy of a perusal for the curious sartorial choices the Victorians made for their exercise wear.
For the start of 2016, should you feel the urge to head to the gym, may we suggest a new trend? Suit yourself up in your Victorian-era duds. Instagram it and please tag us here at SILibraries.
And remember to give an extra rep for Dr. Gustav Zander, who perhaps more than anyone else helped establish gym culture as we know it today.
This article originally appeared at the Smithsonian Libraries’ blog, “Unbound.” For further reading, librarian Richard Naples recommends: The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American by Carolyn de la Peña and de la Peña’s article “The Origins of Cybex Space” featured in Cabinet Magazine.
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Dr. Gustav Zander's Victorian-Era Exercise Machines Made the Bowflex Look Like Child's Play
The Iceman's Stomach Bugs Offer Clues to Ancient Human Migration
It turns out Ötzi the legendary “Iceman” wasn’t alone when he was mummified on a glacier 5,300 years ago. With him were gut microbes known to cause some serious tummy trouble.
These bacteria, Helicobacter pylori, are providing fresh evidence about Ötzi’s diet and poor health in the days leading up to his murder. Intriguingly, they could also help scientists better understand who his people were and how they came to live in the region.
“When we looked at the genome of the Iceman’s H. pylori bacteria, we found that it’s quite a virulent strain, and we know that in modern patients it can cause stomach ulcers, gastric carcinoma and some pretty severe stomach diseases,” says Albert Zink of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC) in Italy.
“We also found proteins that are very specific and only released if you have an inflammatory response, so we can say that he most probably had a quite severe H. pylori infection in his stomach,” Zink adds. “However, we simply don’t have enough of the stomach structure, the stomach walls, to determine the extent to which the disease impacted his stomach or how much he really suffered.”
Discovered in the 1990s, Ötzi lived in what are today the Eastern Italian Alps, where he was naturally mummified by ice after his violent death. The body is astonishingly well preserved and has provided scientists with a wealth of information about the Iceman’s life and death during the Copper Age.
For instance, various examinations have revealed his age, how he died, what he wore and what he ate. We know he suffered from heart and gum disease, gallbladder stones and parasites. His genome has been studied, relatives have been found and his 61 tattoos have been mapped.
The latest discovery not only adds to the Iceman’s health woes, it offers hints of human migration patterns into Europe. While not everyone has H. pylori in their guts, the bacteria are so frequently found in human stomachs that their evolution into different strains can be used to help reconstruct migrations going back about 100,000 years.
Global patterns of H. pylori variants have already been found to match existing evidence of prehistoric human migrations. Bacterial analysis related to the peopling of the Pacific, for example, mirrors language distribution of migrants across this vast region. And movements of people known from the historical record, such as the transatlantic slave trade, have been found to match the bacteria’s genetic variance.
This graphic shows an X-ray of the Iceman’s gut, as well as the associated Helicobacter pylori concentrations in his stomach and intestine.
(Südtiroler Archäologiemuseum/EURAC/Marco Samadelli-Gregor Staschitz-Central Hospital Bolzano)
To study the Iceman’s gut bugs, Zink and colleagues completely thawed the mummy and used an existing incision from previous research to take 12 biopsies from the corpse, including the last foods he ate and parts of his stomach and intestines.
What they found was a surprisingly pure strain of the stomach bug that’s closely related to the version found in modern Asian populations. By contrast, the modern European strain of H. pylori seems to be a mix of Asian and African ancestral strains. This provides evidence that pure African populations of the bacteria arrived in Europe only within the past few thousand years.
“Based on what we knew before, it was believed that the mixture of the ancestral African and Asian strains had already occurred maybe 10,000 years ago or even earlier,” Zink says. “But the very small part of African ancestry in the bacteria genome from the Iceman tells us that the migrations into Europe aren’t such an easy story.”
The iceman’s unmixed stomach bacteria are “in line with recent archaeological and ancient DNA studies that suggest dramatic demographic changes shortly after the Iceman’s time, including massive migration waves and significant demographic growth,” co-author Yoshan Moodley of the University of Venda, South Africa, told assembled press during a briefing on Wednesday.
“These and later migration waves were definitely accompanied with newly arriving H. pylori strains that recombined with already present strains to become the modern European population.”
A reconstruction of the Iceman by Adrie and Alfons Kennis.
(South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Foto Ochsenreiter)
More than a decade ago, Daniel Falush of Swansea University and his colleagues published a study suggesting that H. pylori has ancestral populations that arose separately in Africa, Central Asia and East Asia, and that modern strains were created by when these populations mixed via human migrations around the globe.
“Back in 2003 we made this sort of wild claim that European H. pylori were a hybrid, mixed from one Asian source and one African source. That was thought to be quite a funny thing for bacteria at the time,” Falush notes.
“But now they’ve gone back more than 5,000 years in time and found that Ötzi had bacteria that’s nearly purely representative of that Central Asian strain. So it seems that the prediction we made entirely by a statistical algorithm, that later bacteria were mixed, seems to be proven correct now that we have an ancient source.”
The question now is how the ancestral African strain arrived in Europe, Falush adds. “We originally guessed it was during the Neolithic migration [around 9,000 years ago], but it appears that was wrong, because this genome says it probably happened within the past 5,000 years.”
Once it arrived, the African strain must have been particularly successful, since it spread right through Europe, he adds. “But it’s far from obvious why an African bacterium would spread this way. Why was it successful, and what were the patterns of contact between people?”
These are exactly the kinds of mysteries future studies of the Iceman, and his gut bacteria, might help solve.
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The Iceman's Stomach Bugs Offer Clues to Ancient Human Migration
Chauvet Cave Paintings Could Depict a 37,000-Year-Old Volcanic Eruption
The Chauvet-Pont D’Arc cave is one of the most famous underground caverns in the world, housing one of the oldest and best-preserved collections of prehistoric cave paintings ever discovered. Now, researchers believe that some of the most mysterious, abstract designs found in the cave may be among the earliest paintings of volcanic eruptions.
While most of the drawings in the Chauvet cave depict animals like wooly rhinoceroses, bears, and cave lions, a few drawings deep within the interior have puzzled archaeologists since the cave was discovered in 1994. The red-and-white paintings appear to be shaped like something spraying out of a nozzle, and in some cases were covered up by later drawings, Ewen Callaway writes for Nature. But according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One, researchers believe the images could depict volcanic eruptions nearly 37,000 years ago.
“It is very likely that humans living in the Ardèche river area witnessed one or several eruptions,” the team led by Jean-Michel Geneste, writes in the study. “We propose that the spray-shape signs found in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave could be the oldest known depiction of a volcanic eruption.”
Previously, the oldest-known recording of a volcanic eruption was a Neolithic mural discovered in the ruins of Çatalhöyük, an ancient city in southwestern Turkey. Researchers believe that painting shows a 7,500 BC eruption by Mount Hasan, an inactive volcano nearby the city. If the Chauvet cave paintings do depict volcanic eruptions, they would be by far the oldest yet discovered, Sanskrity Sinha reports for International Business Times.
Example of a spray-shape sign from Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave (figure B) compared to the oldest known depictions of volcanic eruptions (figure E).
(D. Genty/V. Feruglio/D. Baffier)
The closest volcano to the Chauvet cave that was active around the time the paintings were made would have been about 22 miles northwest of the caverns, in the Bas-Viverais region, John Lichfield writes for The Independent. While volcanic eruptions can take many different forms, geologists believe that the Bas-Viverais range may had “strombolian” eruptions, which look similar to the firework-like spray depicted on Chauvet’s walls.
Even so, prior to this study, researchers had only discovered evidence for eruptions in the region that long predated the arrival of our ancient ancestors on the scene. So geoscientist Sebastien Nomade gathered rock samples from three of the region’s volcanoes. By measuring the levels of radioactive isotopes of argon gas, which is released during volcanic eruptions, Nomade and his team discovered that the Bas-Viverais range had experienced several dramatic eruptions between 19,000 and 43,000 years ago.
The area around the Chauvet cave was likely populated around this time and far enough away that any inhabitants would have been safe from the eruptions but still have a good view of the action, Callaway writes. “You just have to climb the small hill on top of Chauvet, and looking north you see the volcanoes. During the night you could see them glowing and you could hear the sound of the volcanic eruption,” Nomade tells Callaway.
Without being able to interview the artists themselves, researchers will never know for sure if the mysterious drawings were inspired by a nearby volcanic eruption. For now, though, it’s a promising idea, Oxford University archaeologist Michael Petraglia, who was not involved in the study, tells Callaway.
“I think they make a pretty good case that it’s potentially a depiction of the kind of volcano that one sees on the landscape,” Petraglia tells Callaway. “Maybe there’s more of this out there than we have realized.”
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Chauvet Cave Paintings Could Depict a 37,000-Year-Old Volcanic Eruption
There Are Still Thousands of Tons of Unexploded Bombs in Germany, Left Over From World War II
Shortly before 11 a.m. on March 15, 1945, the first of 36 B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 493rd Bombardment Group of the U.S. Eighth Air Force thundered down the concrete runway of Little Walden airfield in Essex, England, and rose slowly into the air. They headed east, gradually gaining altitude until, assembled in tight box formations at the head of a stream of more than 1,300 heavy bombers, they crossed the Channel coast north of Amsterdam at an altitude of almost five miles. Inside the unpressurized aluminum fuselage of each aircraft, the temperature fell to 40 degrees below zero, the air too thin to breathe. They flew on into Germany, passing Hanover and Magdeburg, the exhaust of each B-17’s four engines condensing into the white contrails every crewman hated for betraying their position to defenders below. But the Luftwaffe was on its knees; no enemy aircraft engaged the bombers of the 493rd.
Around 2:40 p.m., some ten miles northwest of Berlin, the city of Oranienburg appeared beneath them, shrouded in a mist along the lazy curves of Havel River, and the sky blossomed with puffs of jet-black smoke from anti-aircraft fire. Sitting in the nose in the lead plane, the bombardier stared through his bombsight into the haze far below. As his B-17 approached the Oder-Havel Canal, he watched as the needles of the automatic release mechanism converged. Five bombs tumbled away into the icy sky.
**********
Between 1940 and 1945, U.S. and British air forces dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe, half of that amount on Germany. By the time the Nazi government surrendered, in May 1945, the industrial infrastructure of the Third Reich—railheads, arms factories and oil refineries—had been crippled, and dozens of cities across Germany had been reduced to moonscapes of cinder and ash.
Under Allied occupation, reconstruction began almost immediately. Yet as many as 10 percent of the bombs dropped by Allied aircraft had failed to explode, and as East and West Germany rose from the ruins of the Reich, thousands of tons of unexploded airborne ordnance lay beneath them. In both East and West, responsibility for defusing these bombs—along with removing the innumerable hand grenades, bullets and mortar and artillery shells left behind at the end of the war—fell to police bomb-disposal technicians and firefighters, the Kampfmittelbeseitigungsdienst, or KMBD.
Even now, 70 years later, more than 2,000 tons of unexploded munitions are uncovered on German soil every year. Before any construction project begins in Germany, from the extension of a home to track-laying by the national railroad authority, the ground must be certified as cleared of unexploded ordnance. Still, last May, some 20,000 people were cleared from an area of Cologne while authorities removed a one-ton bomb that had been discovered during construction work. In November 2013, another 20,000 people in Dortmund were evacuated while experts defused a 4,000-pound “Blockbuster” bomb that could destroy most of a city block. In 2011, 45,000 people—the largest evacuation in Germany since World War II—were forced to leave their homes when a drought revealed a similar device lying on the bed of the Rhine in the middle of Koblenz. Although the country has been at peace for three generations, German bomb-disposal squads are among the busiest in the world. Eleven bomb technicians have been killed in Germany since 2000, including three who died in a single explosion while trying to defuse a 1,000-pound bomb on the site of a popular flea market in Göttingen in 2010.
Early one recent winter morning, Horst Reinhardt, chief of the Brandenburg state KMBD, told me that when he started in bomb disposal in 1986, he never believed he would still be at it almost 30 years later. Yet his men discover more than 500 tons of unexploded munitions every year and defuse an aerial bomb every two weeks or so. “People simply don’t know that there’s still that many bombs under the ground,” he said.
And in one city in his district, the events of 70 years ago have ensured that unexploded bombs remain a daily menace. The place looks ordinary enough: a drab main street, pastel-painted apartment houses, an orderly railway station and a McDonald’s with a tubular thicket of bicycles parked outside. Yet, according to Reinhardt, Oranienburg is the most dangerous city in Germany.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult,” says bomb-squad leader Horst Reinhardt.
(Timothy Fadek / Redux Pictures)
**********
Between 2:51 and 3:36 p.m. on March 15, 1945, more than 600 aircraft of the Eighth Air Force dropped 1,500 tons of high explosives over Oranienburg, a cluster of strategic targets including rail yards that were a hub for troops headed to the Eastern Front, a Heinkel aircraft plant and, straddling the rail yards, two factories run by the chemical conglomerate Auergesellschaft. Allied target lists had described one of those facilities as a gas-mask factory, but by early 1945 U.S. intelligence had learned that Auergesellschaft had begun processing enriched uranium, the raw material for the atomic bomb, in Oranienburg.
Although the March 15 attack was ostensibly aimed at the rail yards, it had been personally requested by the director of the Manhattan Project, Gen. Leslie Groves, who was determined to keep Nazi nuclear research out of the hands of rapidly advancing Russian troops. Of the 13 Allied air attacks eventually launched on the city, this one, the fourth within a year, was by far the heaviest and most destructive.
As one squadron of B-17s followed another into its run, almost five thousand 500- and 1,000-pound bombs and more than 700 incendiaries fell across the rail yards, the chemical factory and into the residential streets nearby. The first explosions started fires around the railroad station; by the time the final B-17s began their attack, smoke from the burning city was so heavy the bombardiers had difficulty seeing where their bombs were falling. But where it cleared, the men of the First Air Division watched three concentrations of high explosives fall into houses near the road over the Lehnitzstrasse canal bridge, around a mile southeast of the rail station and a few hundred yards from one of the chemical factories.
These bomb loads were unlike almost any others the Eighth Air Force dropped over Germany during the war. The majority of the bombs were armed not with percussion fuses, which explode on impact, but with time-delay fuses, which both sides used throughout the war in order to extend the terror and chaos caused by aerial attacks. The sophisticated, chemical-based fuses—designated M124 and M125, depending on the weight of the bomb—were intended to be used sparingly; U.S. Army Air Force guidelines recommended fitting them in no more than 10 percent of bombs in any given attack. But for reasons that have never become clear, almost every bomb dropped during the March 15 raid on Oranienburg was armed with one.
Screwed into a bomb’s tail beneath its stabilizing fins, the fuse contained a small glass capsule of corrosive acetone mounted above a stack of paper-thin celluloid disks less than half an inch in diameter. The disks held back a spring-loaded firing pin, cocked behind a detonator. As the bomb fell, it tilted nose-down, and a windmill in the tail stabilizer began spinning in the slipstream, turning a crank that broke the glass capsule. The bomb was designed to hit the ground nose-down, so the acetone would drip toward the disks and begin eating through them. This could take minutes or days, depending on the concentration of acetone and the number of disks the armorers had fitted into the fuse. When the last disk weakened and snapped, the spring was released, the firing pin struck the priming charge and—finally, unexpectedly—the bomb exploded.
Oranienburg in 1945
(Luftbilddatenbank)
Around three o’clock that afternoon, a B-17 from the Eighth Air Force released a 1,000-pound bomb some 20,000 feet above the rail yards. Quickly reaching terminal velocity, it fell toward the southwest, missing the yards and the chemical plants. It fell instead toward the canal and the two bridges connecting Oranienburg and the suburb of Lehnitz, closing on a wedge of low-lying land framed by the embankments of Lehnitzstrasse and the railroad line. Before the war this had been a quiet spot beside the water, leading to four villas among the trees, parallel to a canal on Baumschulenweg. But now it was occupied by anti-aircraft guns and a pair of narrow, wooden, single-story barracks built by the Wehrmacht. This was where the bomb finally found the earth—just missing the more westerly of the two barracks and plunging into the sandy soil at more than 150 miles per hour. It bored down at an oblique angle before the violence of its passage tore the stabilizing fins away from the tail, when it abruptly angled upward until, its kinetic energy finally spent, the bomb and its M125 fuse came to rest: nose-up but still deep underground.
By four o’clock, the skies over Oranienburg had fallen silent. The city center was ablaze, the first of the delayed explosions had started: The Auergesellschaft plant would soon be destroyed and the rail yards tangled with wreckage. But the bomb beside the canal lay undisturbed. As the shadows of the trees on Lehnitzstrasse lengthened in the low winter sun, acetone dripped slowly from the shattered glass capsule within the bomb’s fuse. Taken by gravity, it trickled harmlessly downward, away from the celluloid disks it was supposed to weaken.
Less than two months later, Nazi leaders capitulated. As much as ten square miles of Berlin had been reduced to rubble. In the months following V-E Day that May, a woman who had been bombed out of her home there found her way, with her young son, out to Oranienburg, where she had a boyfriend. The town was a constellation of yawning craters and gutted factories, but beside Lehnitzstrasse and not far from the canal, she found a small wooden barracks empty and intact. She moved in with her boyfriend and her son.
**********
Abandoned ammunition and unexploded bombs claimed their first postwar victims almost as soon as the last guns fell silent. In June 1945, a cache of German anti-tank weapons exploded in Bremen, killing 35 and injuring 50; three months later in Hamburg, a buried American 500-pound bomb with a time-delay fuse took the lives of the four technicians working to disarm it. Clearing unexploded munitions became the task of the German states’ KMBD. It was dangerous work done at close quarters, removing fuses with wrenches and hammers. “You need a clear head. And calm hands,” Horst Reinhardt told me. He said he never felt fear during the defusing process. “If you’re afraid, you can’t do it. For us, it’s a completely normal job. In the same way that a baker bakes bread, we defuse bombs.”
In the decades after the war, bombs, mines, grenades and artillery shells killed dozens of KMBD technicians and hundreds of civilians. Thousands of unexploded Allied bombs were excavated and defused. But many had been buried in rubble or simply entombed in concrete during wartime remediation and forgotten. In the postwar rush for reconstruction, nobody kept consistent information about where unexploded bombs had been made safe and removed. A systematic approach to finding them was officially regarded as impossible. When Reinhardt started work with the East German KMBD in 1986, both he and his counterparts in the West usually found bombs the same way: one at a time, often during construction work.
But the government of Hamburg had recently brokered an agreement to allow the states of West Germany access to the 5.5 million aerial photographs in the declassified wartime archives of the Allied Central Interpretation Unit, held in Keele in England. Between 1940 and 1945, ACIU pilots flew thousands of reconnaissance missions before and after every raid by Allied bombers, taking millions of stereoscopic photographs that revealed both where the attacks could be directed and then how successful they had proved. Those images held clues to where bombs had landed but never detonated—a small, circular hole, for example, in an otherwise consistent line of ragged craters.
Around the same time, Hans-Georg Carls, a geographer working on a municipal project using aerial photography to map trees in Würzburg, in southern Germany, stumbled on another trove of ACIU images. Stored in a teacher’s cellar in Mainz, they had been ordered from the archives of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency by an enterprising American intelligence officer based in Germany, who had hoped to sell them privately to the German government for his own profit. When he failed, he sold 60,000 of them to the teacher for a few pfennigs each. Carls, sensing a business opportunity, snapped them up for a deutsche mark apiece.
Photo analyst Hans-Georg Carls
(Timothy Fadek / Redux Pictures)
When he compared what he’d bought with what the German government had copied from the British, he realized he had images the British didn’t. Convinced there must be more, held somewhere in the United States, Carls established a company, Luftbilddatenbank. With the help of archivists in Britain and the States, he brought to light hundreds of cans of aerial reconnaissance film that had gone unexamined for decades. Crucially, Carls also found the maps made by the pilots who shot the film—“sortie plots” showing exactly where each run of pictures had been taken—which had often been archived elsewhere, and without which the images would be meaningless.
Supplementing the photographs and the sortie plots with local histories and police records, contemporary eyewitness testimony and the detailed records of bombing missions held at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, Carls was able to build a chronology of everything that had happened to a given patch of land between 1939 and 1945. Examining the photographs using a stereoscope, which makes the images appear in 3-D, Carls could see where bombs had fallen, where they had exploded and where they may not have. From that data he could compile an Ergebniskarte—a “result map”—for clients ranging from international consortiums to homeowners, with high-risk areas crosshatched in red. “He was the pioneer,” said Allan Williams, curator of Britain’s National Collection of Aerial Photography, which now includes the pictures once held in Keele.
Carls, now nearing 68 and semi-retired, employs a staff of more than 20, with offices occupying the top three floors of his large house in a suburb of Würzburg. Image analysis is now a central component of bomb disposal in each of Germany’s 16 states, and Carls has provided many of the photographs they use, including all of those used by Reinhardt and the Brandenburg KMBD.
One day in the Luftbilddatenbank office, Johannes Kroeckel, 37, one of Carls’ senior photo-interpreters, called up a Google Earth satellite image of the area north of Berlin on one of two giant computer monitors on his desk. He closed in on an L-shaped cul-de-sac in Oranienburg, in the area between Lehnitzstrasse and the canal. On the other monitor, he used the geolocation data of the address to summon a list of more than 200 aerial photographs of the area shot by Allied reconnaissance pilots and scrolled through them until he found the ones he needed. A week after the March 15 raid, photographs 4113 and 4114 were taken from 27,000 feet over Oranienburg, a fraction of a second apart. They showed the scene near the canal in sharp monochromatic detail, the curve of the Lehnitzstrasse bridge and the bare branches of the trees on Baumschulenweg tracing fine shadows on the water and the pale ground beyond. Then Kroeckel used Photoshop to tint one picture in cyan and the other in magenta, and combined them into a single image. I put on a pair of cardboard 3-D glasses, and the landscape rose toward me: upended matchbox shapes of roofless houses; a chunk of earth bitten out of the Lehnitzstrasse embankment; a giant, perfectly circular crater in the middle of Baumschulenweg.
Yet we could see no sign of a dormant 1,000-bomb concealed in the ruins of the neighborhood, where, soon after the photograph was taken, a woman would find a home for herself and her family. Kroeckel explained that even an image as stark as this one could not reveal everything about the landscape below. “Maybe you have shadows of trees or houses,” he said, pointing to a crisp quadrilateral of late-winter shade cast by one of the villas a few hundred yards from the canal. “You can’t see every unexploded bomb with the aerials.” But there was more than enough evidence to mark an Ergebniskarte in ominous red ink.
**********
Paule Dietrich bought the house on the cul-de-sac in Oranienburg in 1993. He and the German Democratic Republic had been born on the same day, October 7, 1949, and for a while the coincidence seemed auspicious. When he turned 10, he and a dozen or so other children who shared the birthday were taken to tea with President Wilhelm Pieck, who gave them each passbooks to savings accounts containing 15 Ostmarks. At 20, he and the others were guests at the opening of the Berlin TV tower, the tallest building in all of Germany. Over the next 20 years, the Republic was good to Dietrich. He drove buses and subway trains for the Berlin transit authority. He was given an apartment in the city, and he became a taxi driver. He added to the savings the president had given him, and on an abandoned piece of land in Falkensee, in the countryside outside the city, he built a summer bungalow.
But in 1989, Dietrich turned 40, the Berlin Wall fell and his Ostmarks became worthless overnight. Three years later, the rightful owners of the land in Falkensee returned from the West to reclaim it.
In nearby Oranienburg, where his mother had lived since the 1960s, Dietrich met an elderly lady who was trying to sell a small wooden house down by the canal—an old Wehrmacht barracks she’d lived in since the war. It needed a lot of work, but it was right by the water. Dietrich sold his car and mobile home to buy it and began working on it whenever he could. His girlfriend and Willi, their only son, joined him, and slowly the house came together. By 2005, it was finished—plastered, weatherproofed and insulated, with a garage, a new bathroom and a brick fireplace. Dietrich began living there full-time from May to December and planned to move in permanently when he retired.
Like everyone else in Oranienburg, he knew the city had been bombed during the war, but so had a lot of places in Germany. And parts of Oranienburg were evacuated so frequently that it was easy to believe there couldn’t be many bombs left. Buried bombs had apparently gone off on their own a few times—once, just around the corner from Dietrich’s house, one exploded under the sidewalk where a man was walking his dog. But nobody, not even the dog and its walker, had been seriously injured. Most people simply preferred not to think about it.
The state of Brandenburg, however, knew Oranienburg presented a unique problem. Between 1996 and 2007, the local government spent €45 million on bomb disposal—more than any other town in Germany, and more than a third of total statewide expenses for unexploded ordnance during that time. In 2006, the state Ministry of the Interior commissioned Wolfgang Spyra of the Brandenburg University of Technology to determine how many unexploded bombs might remain in the city and where they might be. Two years later, Spyra delivered a 250-page report revealing not only the huge number of time bombs dropped on the city on March 15, 1945, but also the unusually high proportion of them that had failed to go off. That was a function of local geology and the angle at which some bombs hit the ground: Hundreds of them had plunged nose-first into the sandy soil but then had come to rest nose-up, disabling their chemical fuses. Spyra calculated that 326 bombs—or 57 tons of high-explosive ordnance—remained hidden beneath the city’s streets and yards.
And the celluloid disks in the bombs’ timing mechanisms had become brittle with age and acutely sensitive to vibration and shock. So bombs had begun to go off spontaneously. A decayed fuse of this type was responsible for the deaths of the three KMBD technicians in Göttingen in 2010. They had dug out the bomb, but weren’t touching it when it went off.
**********
In January 2013, Paule Dietrich read in the newspaper that the city of Oranienburg was going to start looking for bombs in his neighborhood. He had to fill out some forms, and in July, city contractors arrived. They drilled 38 holes in his yard, each more than 30 feet deep, and dropped a magnetometer into every one. It took two weeks. A month later, they drilled more holes in back of the house. They were zeroing in on something, but didn’t say what.
It was nine in the morning on October 7, 2013—the day Dietrich turned 64—when a delegation of city officials arrived at his front gate. “I thought they were here for my birthday,” he said when I met him recently. But that wasn’t it at all. “There’s something here,” the officials told him. “We need to get at it.” They said that it was ein Verdachtspunkt—a point of suspicion. Nobody used the word “bomb.”
They marked the spot beside the house with an orange traffic cone and prepared to pump out groundwater from around it. When Dietrich’s friends turned up that afternoon to celebrate his birthday, they took pictures of the cone. Throughout October, the contractors had pumps running round the clock. They started digging at seven every morning and stayed until eight every night. Each morning they drank coffee in Dietrich’s carport. “Paule,” they said, “this will be no problem.”
It took them another month to uncover the bomb, more than 12 feet down: 1,000 pounds, big as a man, rusted, its tail stabilizer gone. They shored up the hole with steel plates and chained the bomb so it couldn’t move. Every night, Dietrich stayed in the house with his German shepherd, Rocky. They slept with their heads just a few feet from the hole. “I thought everything was going to be fine,” he said.
On November 19, the contractors were drinking coffee as usual when their boss arrived. “Paule, you need to take your dog and get off the property immediately,” he said. “We have to create an exclusion zone right now, all the way from here to the street.”
Dietrich took his TV set and his dog and drove over to his girlfriend’s house, in Lehnitz. On the radio, he heard that the city had stopped the trains running over the canal. The KMBD was defusing a bomb. The streets around the house were sealed off. Two days later, on Saturday morning, he heard on the news that the KMBD said the bomb couldn’t be defused; it would have to be detonated. He was walking with Rocky in the forest a mile away when he heard the explosion.
Two hours later, when the all-clear siren sounded, Dietrich drove over to his place with a friend and his son. He could barely speak. Where his house had once stood was a crater more than 60 feet across, filled with water and scorched debris. The straw the KMBD had used to contain bomb splinters was scattered everywhere—on the roof of his shed, across his neighbor’s yard. The wreckage of Dietrich’s front porch leaned precariously at the edge of the crater. The mayor, a TV crew and Horst Reinhardt of the KMBD were there. Dietrich wiped away tears. He was less than a year from retirement.
Paule Dietrich had spent more than ten years renovating his house.
(Courtesy Paule Dietrich)
**********
Early one morning at the headquarters of the Brandenburg KMBD in Zossen, Reinhardt swept his hand slowly across a display case in his spartan, linoleum-floored office. “These are all American fuses. These are Russian ones, these are English ones. These are German ones,” he said, pausing among the dozens of metal cylinders that filled the case, some topped with small propellers, others cut away to reveal the mechanisms inside. “These are bomb fuses. These are mine fuses. That’s just a tiny fingernail of what’s out there.”
At 63, Reinhardt was in the last few days of his career in bomb disposal and looking forward to gardening, collecting stamps and playing with his grandchildren. He recalled the bomb in Paule Dietrich’s yard, and said his men had had no alternative but to blow it up. Sallow and world-weary, he said it was impossible to tell how long it would take to clear Germany of unexploded ordnance. “There will still be bombs 200 years from now,” he told me. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult. At this point, we’ve dealt with all the open spaces. But now it’s the houses, the factories. We have to look directly underneath the houses.”
Late the following day, as the wet wind slapped viciously at the plastic roof overhead, I sat with Paule Dietrich in what had been his carport. A few feet of grass separated it from the spot where his house once stood. The bomb crater had been filled in, and Dietrich was living there in a mobile home. He kept the carport for entertaining, and had equipped it with a fridge, a shower and furniture donated by friends and supporters from Oranienburg, where he has become a minor celebrity.
Dietrich now uses his former carport to entertain visitors.
(Timothy Fadek / Redux Pictures)
Sitting at a small table, Dietrich chain-smoked Chesterfields and drank instant coffee. He produced an orange binder filled with photographs of his former home: as it was when he bought it; when he and his colleagues were decorating it; and, finally, as it was after the bomb had reached the end of its 70-year fuse. Dietrich said he realized that he and his family had been lucky: Every summer, his grandchildren had played in a plastic pool near where the bomb had been lying; at night, they slept in a mobile home beside the pool. “Directly on the bomb,” he said.
By the time we met, Dietrich had been offered scant financial compensation by the authorities—technically, the federal government was required to pay only for damage caused by German-made munitions. But among a pile of documents and newspaper clippings he had in the binder was a rendering of the new home he wanted to build on the site. It had once been the best prefabricated bungalow available in East Germany, he said, and a contractor in Falkensee had given him all the components of one, except for the roof. Even so, more than a year after the explosion, he hadn’t started work on it.
Outside, in the afternoon gloaming, he showed me why. In the grass at the bottom of the embankment of Lehnitzstrasse was a patch of sandy ground. Men from the city had recently marked it with two painted stakes. They had told him only that it was a “double anomaly,” but he knew precisely what they meant. Paule Dietrich had two more unexploded American bombs at the end of his yard.
There Are Still Thousands of Tons of Unexploded Bombs in Germany, Left Over From World War II
10 Gruesome Acts Of Revenge
Creepy
9 A Spree Killer Attacks Morgantown
No matter how you slice it, the revenge impulse is deep in the fabric of the human heart. When we are scorned, trampled upon, or disrespected, all of us probably feel a twinge of righteous anger. Sometimes, rational thinking triumphs. Other times, red-hot rage wins out. In the worst cases, the desire to right perceived wrongs goes nuclear and proves to be fatal.
10 A Spree Killer Attacks Morgantown
Shayne Riggleman (who was this author’s classmate in high school) was a quiet kid who mostly kept to himself. He did not have a reputation for getting into trouble, but somewhere along the line, things started going south. Prior to committing murder, Riggleman served 14 months in jail for armed robbery.
After his release, he began to develop a split personality. On the one hand, Riggleman enjoyed visiting nursing homes to cheer up those inside. On the other hand, his close friends claimed that he was consumed with jealousy over a romantic breakup during the months leading up to his rampage.
Riggleman’s Facebook page also displayed an angry loner who frequently complained about his life, including his inability to join the armed forces due to his criminal record. More chillingly, near the end of his life, he began posting cryptic comments about revenge, oppression, and anger.
On Monday, September 5, 2011, Riggleman, who was 22 years old at the time, used a high-powered rifle to attack an isolated house on Sugar Grove Road in Morgantown, West Virginia.
There, Riggleman shot and killed 49-year-old Charles Richardson III, 50-year-old Karin Richardson, and their children, 22-year-old Katrina Hudson and 17-year-old Kevin Hudson. Also killed were Katrina’s fiance, 30-year-old Robert Raber Jr., and the couple’s unborn child.
After leaving Sugar Grove Road, Riggleman drove to the border town of Fairchance, Pennsylvania, where he tried to persuade an ex-girlfriend to flee with him. She refused and alerted the police, but Riggleman continued on.
He drove to Roane County, West Virginia, where he shot a 57-year-old gas station attendant named Donnie Nichols in the neck during an attempted carjacking. Fortunately, Nichols survived.
As for Riggleman, he ultimately killed himself after sheriff’s deputies in Kentucky pulled him over for erratic driving. Despite the ferocious nature of his crimes, his only link to the victims was Katrina Hudson, who was a relative of one of Riggleman’s ex-girlfriends.
9 A Spree Killer Attacks Morgantown
Part Two
Like Riggleman, Jody Lee Hunt was angry and depressed. He was also particularly aggravated by an ex-lover. In Hunt’s case, the lover in question, 39-year-old Sharon Kay Berkshire, had once filed a domestic violence complaint against him.
Filled with anger toward both personal and business rivals, the ex-convict Hunt, who owned a towing company in Morgantown, decided to get his revenge on December 1, 2014.
On that Monday morning, Hunt first drove to Doug’s Towing, a rival company that Hunt had previously accused of “poaching” jobs from his own company. At Doug’s Towing, Hunt shot owner Doug Brady twice in the head.
Next, Hunt drove to Berkshire’s home, where she lived with her 28-year-old boyfriend, Michael David Frum. Inside, Hunt shot and killed Frum, who had occasionally taunted Hunt via text. Then Hunt shot Berkshire twice as she tried to escape.
The final victim, Jody Taylor, was Hunt’s cousin, business partner, and possibly one of the men who had slept with Berkshire while she and Hunt were dating.
These four murders set off a 12-hour manhunt that had police looking everywhere for Hunt’s black 2011 Ford F-150. Finally, at 7:00 PM, the ordeal came to a close when Hunt parked his truck in a wooded area in Monongalia County and killed himself.
8 A Deadly Grudge
Charles Severance was known locally as a kook and a history buff by the residents of Alexandria, Virginia. What the people of that affluent DC suburb did not know was how deeply Severance, who had run for mayor twice, loathed the better-off members of his community.
Blaming Alexandria’s wealth for his failure to win the full custody of his son, Severance, who may be schizophrenic, decided to vent his anger by randomly killing three people.
His first victim was real estate agent Nancy Dunning, who was murdered in December 2003. Next, Severance killed a transportation planner named Roland Kirby in November 2013. The final victim was Ruthanne Lodato, a music teacher, who died in February 2014.
None of the victims personally knew Severance, who killed all three during daring daylight attacks on their homes. Severance, the son of a retired navy admiral, was finally brought to justice thanks to an eyewitness who was shot during the attack that killed Lodato.
In November 2015, after a wild trial that was punctuated by frequent outbursts from the defendant, Severance was convicted of 10 counts of capital murder, malicious wounding, first-degree murder, possession of a firearm by a felon, and more. As a result, he received three life sentences.
7 The Intruder
In 1987, the residents of the small town of Townsend, Massachusetts, learned that there was a killer in their midst. On December 1, a young lawyer named Andrew Gustafson came home to a nightmare. Inside his dark, quiet house, Andrew found the lifeless bodies of his 33-year-old wife, Priscilla, and his children, seven-year-old Abigail and five-year-old William.
Priscilla was found facedown on her bed with two bullet holes in the pillow above her head. Her killer had placed the pillow over her head when he pumped two fatal rounds into her brain. Priscilla had also been raped. As for the children, the killer had drowned them in separate bathtubs.
Outside the Gustafson house, police found a footprint and a T-shirt wrapped around the family’s house sign. This evidence pointed to a local weirdo named Danny LaPlante, an 18-year-old kid who had earlier gained infamy for committing a truly bizarre crime.
A year earlier, in December 1986, LaPlante had been charged with armed assault and kidnapping in the town of Pepperell, Massachusetts. There, he had held members of the Andrews family hostage inside their home.
LaPlante, armed with a hatchet and wearing ghastly face paint, had surprised the family members after leaping out from a closet. After forcing the Andrews family to flee through a bedroom window, LaPlante retreated to a hidden crawl space in the house. When police found him two days later, they discovered that he had been living in the house for some time.
As presented on the television show Your Worst Nightmare, LaPlante’s sinister occupation of the Andrews home was his way of getting back at the older Andrews sister, who had refused to go on a second date with him. According to the Andrews family, LaPlante’s ability to move around in their house’s walls had led them to think that their house was haunted.
Now serving a life sentence behind bars, LaPlante made the news again in 2013 when he claimed that his religious rights were being violated. Specifically, LaPlante, a practicing Wiccan, claimed that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and MCI-Norfolk had not provided him with ritual oils, herbs, and other items.
6 46 Hours
Denis Czajkowski was convinced that there was a conspiracy against him. It was one of those paranoid fantasies that people like Czajkowski, a recreational drug user with a history of erratic behavior, tend to develop. The fact that he worked as a nurse at Norristown State Hospital, a psychiatric institution, probably helped his persecution complex to grow.
As it turned out, there really was a plot against Czajkowski but a perfectly reasonable one. Due to his chronic poor performance as well as accusations that he had been using drugs on the job, Czajkowski’s superiors had started the process of terminating his employment. In late spring 1999, he was fired.
The mentally disturbed former nurse did not take this news well. On June 16, 1999, armed with a replica 1851 Colt .44-caliber cap-and-ball revolver, Czajkowksi took two hostages—Maria Jordan and Carol Kepner.
He shot Jordan four times at close range, but she survived. Czajkowski then forced the severely wounded Jordan to clean up her own blood while he taunted her. When he decided to get some sleep, Czajkowski handcuffed Jordan, who had been shot once in the wrist, to Kepner.
Amazingly, this situation lasted for 46 hours as Czajkowski engaged in a standoff with the police. For almost two days, he kept a close watch on the women, even forcing them to go to the bathroom in plastic bags under his supervision. Finally, after police decided to storm the hospital, Czajkowski shot Kepner in the head. She died instantly.
Three years after the standoff, he was charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder, aggravated assault, kidnapping, and other crimes. A Pennsylvania judge gave him a life sentence.
5 Sins Of The Father
The issue of rape in India has garnered worldwide attention due to several high-profile cases. Believing that Indian women can no longer rely on the police, the Indian Ordnance Factory, a gun manufacturer, created a lightweight .32-caliber revolver specifically designed for women to use in self-defense. Called the Nirbheek, the gun was named after Nirbhaya, the victim of a well-publicized gang rape and murder in December 2012.
Despite the best efforts of the manufacturer, not every Indian woman carries or can carry the Nirbheek. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they are incapable of harming their attackers.
In October 2015, a 13-year-old rape victim sought to punish her rapist, Rinku, by going after something he truly cherished. She lured Amit, Rinku’s five-year-old son, into a quiet area. Then the young girl killed Amit and tried to burn his body.
Police discovered the partially burned remains in a plastic bag after local dogs had dragged them into the street. Following the discovery of the body, authorities in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh charged the young woman with murder and sent her to live in a juvenile home.
4 Baby Booby Trap
The current war in Iraq has created a culture of tit-for-tat revenge. ISIS, which is particularly adept at violence, has led the pack in meting out atrocities. Besides their genocidal strikes against the Kurdish Yezidi, ISIS has butchered countless Iraqi Christians, Shiite Muslims, and those Sunnis unwilling to subscribe to the ISIS brand of barbarism.
From 2014 until early 2015, when ISIS ruled the battlefield, only the most courageous Iraqi citizens took the law into their own hands and fought the black-flagged bandits.
In July 2015, a civilian in the northern province of Salahuddin did the unthinkable: He killed several ISIS fighters. At least, that’s what ISIS authorities said.
Their vengeance was swift and hellish. After abducting the accused man’s baby, ISIS strapped a booby trap to the child’s body near one of their training grounds and blew it up. According to reports, this sick demonstration was done in front of a sizable crowd of ISIS fighters.
3 Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman Scorned
“Scorned” is an appropriate word for Janepsy Carballo, the former wife of an alleged drug dealer in Miami. In April 2008, Orlando Mesa, Carballo’s husband, was gunned down in front of the family’s home. One of the bullets grazed the couple’s 20-month-old son.
Surveillance footage from the shooting showed that the killers were two black males with dreadlocks. Despite the evidence, Mesa’s murder remains unsolved.
Although the cops were clueless about the crime, Carballo was certain that she knew who had ordered the hit: Ilan Nisim. Mesa and Nisim had been partners until they had a falling-out over $180,000 that was missing from a real estate deal.
The consensus was that the money had been stolen, which is a death sentence in the underworld. To avenge her husband, Carballo enticed Nisim to her house and then shot the crook six times in the back.
At her trial, Carballo claimed that she had shot Nisim in self-defense after he lunged at her. The Florida jury did not buy it and convicted Carballo of first-degree murder.
2 Old Country Way
For over 10 years, El Salvador was engulfed in a spectacularly brutal civil war. Characterized by assassinations, terrorism, and the use of child soldiers, the civil war deeply scarred the landscape with everyday acts of violence.
Even though peace was declared, El Salvador has remained a battlefield controlled by vicious gangs that bequeath to the nation one of the world’s highest murder rates. To grow up in El Salvador is to be born old and grizzled.
Saul Castillo was one such youth. In the 1980s, Castillo’s father was murdered. Carrying this with him to the US, Castillo waited for years to avenge his father. On Father’s Day 2013, Castillo confronted Silverio Acosta in front of his family in Tadmore Park in Gainesville, Georgia.
At the time, Acosta, who was also from El Salvador, was watching a soccer match between a Salvadoran team and a Mexican team. Castillo accused Acosta of murdering his father in El Salvador. He had come for his revenge, he told Acosta.
Then Castillo fired five rounds at Acosta, hitting him in the chest, head, and hand. The 46-year-old Acosta died at the scene. The 41-year-old Castillo tried to run but was quickly apprehended by two Hall County police officers.
He was charged with murder and had his immigration status placed on hold. At the time of the crime, Castillo had residency status in the US. Ultimately, Castillo was convicted of the slaying and received life in prison.
1 Murder City
Detroit is a byword for urban rot. Once a proud city with plenty of blue-collar jobs in the automotive industry, Detroit is now a shell of its former self. Throughout the US, Detroit is known for its high rate of gun violence and murder.
Things have become so bad that the city’s police department has essentially called the city a war zone. Furthermore, they have admitted that they cannot guarantee the safety of visitors.
The story of Kenneth French, his two-year-old daughter, KaMiya Gross, and his 12-year-old cousin, Chelsea Lancaster, is tragic but all too common in Detroit. On July 1, 2014, French, KaMiya, and Chelsea were hanging out on the front porch of a family residence on Carlyle Street.
All seemed quiet and normal until a car pulled up. Inside the vehicle were Raymone Jackson, Raphael Hearn, and Marcus Brown. Agitated, Jackson and Hearn left the car and began firing at the trio on the porch. Chelsea was hit in the chest, legs, and arms. KaMiya died immediately when a bullet struck her in the eye.
Before being sentenced to life in prison, both Jackson and Hearn admitted that the shooting was an act of revenge for an earlier shooting. Apparently, Jackson and Hearn were angry that French had not retaliated against the person who shot Hearn during the previous shooting. As a result, Jackson and Hearn’s plan was to target the baby to punish French before they finished him off.
Benjamin Welton is a freelance writer based in Boston. His work has appeared in The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic, Listverse, and other publications. He currently blogs at literarytrebuchet.blogspot.com.
Tuesday, 1 March 2016
POP CULTURE วันที่ 28 ก.พ. 59 (1/3) โครงการสร้างคนดี ให้มีคุณธรรม
POP CULTURE ร่วมส่งเสริมทุกความงามแห่งวัฒนศิลป์ สัมผัสสุนทรียภาพแห่งงานศิล…
POP CULTURE วันที่ 28 ก.พ. 59 (1/3) โครงการสร้างคนดี ให้มีคุณธรรม
POP CULTURE วันที่ 28 ก.พ. 59 (2/3) สืบสานตำนานไหม ณ หมู่บ้านผลิตใยไหม
POP CULTURE ร่วมส่งเสริมทุกความงามแห่งวัฒนศิลป์ สัมผัสสุนทรียภาพแห่งงานศิล…
POP CULTURE วันที่ 28 ก.พ. 59 (2/3) สืบสานตำนานไหม ณ หมู่บ้านผลิตใยไหม
Ghari Chamkaur Naal Glla ਗੜੀ ਚਮਕੌਰ | Poem _ Gatka (Sikh Martial Arts) Championship Ishar Nagar LDH
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Ghari Chamkaur Naal Glla ਗੜੀ ਚਮਕੌਰ | Poem _ Gatka (Sikh Martial Arts) Championship Ishar Nagar LDH
McDonald's Is Now Making a VR Headset - GS News Update
Fast food chain McDonald’s has announced “Happy Goggles,” a virtual reality headset made out of a Happy Meal box. Really. Subscribe to us on YouTube …
McDonald's Is Now Making a VR Headset - GS News Update
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Watch Sacha Baron Cohen Pull Off Ali G Oscars Prank
It’s tradition for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to announce The Academy Awards presenters in the days and weeks leading up to the big show. Sacha Baron Cohen was one of those presenters, who, along with Olivia Wilde, presented a highlight reel for one of this year’s Best Picture nominees, Room. The actor appeared in a traditional tuxedo during the red carpet coverage, but when it came time to present, Olivia Wilde was joined by none other than Ali G, one of Sacha Baron Cohen’s beloved characters from Da Ali G Show. On Monday, the actor appeared on the U.K. talk show Good Morning Britain, where he revealed he was explicitly told not to present in character.
“The truth is we actually had to sneak it in, because the Oscars sat me down before and said they didn’t want me to do anything out of order, they wanted me to actually just present it as myself. But luckily my wife put on the Ali G beard in the disabled toilets, and I managed to get away with it.”
The actor’s wife, Isla Fisher, revealed they had to lock themselves in the bathroom for 40 minutes to put on the beard, and that they told others trying to get into the bathroom that Sacha Baron Cohen had food poisoning. Deadline actually obtained video from the bathroom, which shows Isla Fisher applying the fake goatee onto her husband. While we aren’t sure who actually shot the video, it was apparently made with the actor’s consent.
No one, including the Oscar producers and his co-presenter, Olivia Wilde, knew that he was going to come on stage as Ali G. The actor did reveal that he got the thumbs up for this bit from host Chris Rock. Here’s what the actor had to say, admitting that he was nervous about how the crowd would react, but he went on with the bit after getting Chris Rock‘s approval.
“I mean, there were a few moments I was a bit worried how they’d react to the first gag. But I bumped into Chris Rock actually on the way on and pitched him the gag, and he gave me the thumbs up, so I went for it.”
This isn’t the first time the actor has courted controversy at the Oscars. In 2012, Sacha Baron Cohen caused quite a stir appearing on the Oscar red carpet dressed as his character from the comedy The Dictator, General Alladeen. He even dumped what he claimed were an urn filled with dictator Kim Jong-il’s ashes on Ryan Seacrest. Click on the image to view the video from the Oscar bathroom, and, in case you missed it on Oscar Sunday, you can check out the video from the awards ceremony below.
Watch Sacha Baron Cohen Pull Off Ali G Oscars Prank
Street Fighter V All Critical Arts
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What's It Like Living Where 'The Walking Dead' Shoots?
AMC’s The Walking Dead has become much more than just a hit TV show, it’s a cultural phenomenon. It has spawned not only its own hit after-show, Talking Dead, but a successful spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, the web series Fear the Walking Dead: Flight 462, and a number of successful video games during its six-season run. The show has always filmed in Georgia, kicking off production on the pilot in the Atlanta area. The bulk of the production since Season 3 has taken place in a town called Senoia, Georgia. Cracked recently spoke with a resident of this formerly sleepy town, who reveals how life has changed since The Walking Dead started filming there.
Last season, Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his crew discovered the Alexandria Safe-Zone, where they currently make their home. Alexandria is shot in a gated community sub-division known as the Gin Property, and when the show started filming there, residents had to agree to a certain set of conditions while filming was under way. Here’s what the Senoia resident, only known as “Brittany,” had to say below.
“They had to agree to things like specific exit/entry times at their own homes to work around filming, and allowing bright lights and loud noises at three in the morning. I believe they are legally obligated to wait until the crew okays their leaving so that they don’t mess up a scene. Notice the security booth that is manned 24/7. Nobody gets in or out without stating their business. Tourists not welcome. The road sign reads, ‘Road closed to thru traffic. No pedestrians allowed.’ The yellow sign is a note from the show, with information like the crew will not stop in the road for pictures and autographs. You would never know by the show how nice the road leading up to the gate of Alexandra is.”
Brittany added that some residents of Gin Property ended up moving out of the gated community due to the inconveniences of filming there. But even Brittany, who doesn’t live in Gin Property, described one bizarre incident where she wasn’t even allowed on her own front lawn. Here’s what she had to say about the incident, which took place while the show was filming at the Alexandria wall.
“At one point during filming, I was actually told by a cop directing traffic that I wasn’t allowed to be out on my own lawn. When they were filming at the wall of Alexandria, we were really close to where they were shooting. Security had to make sure that nobody walked past the blocked portions of the road, so when we walked out into the yard to see what was up, a security officer told us we couldn’t be out there unless we were trying to leave. At least, I think he was a security guard … There is pretty much 24/7 police presence here. They’re on the lookout for anyone trying to mess with the Alexandria wall / leftover props, or anyone who is going to disturb residents living in the homes that appear in the show, so they watch us closely when we’re walking our dogs down the street or pulling into our own driveways. A couple of my neighbors got really mad … They complained, but I don’t think anything was ever done.”
One of the other iconic locations shot in Senoia was Woodbury, run by The Governor (David Morrissey). In the show, Woodbury was a Georgia community while the Alexandria Safe-Zone is in Virginia, near Washington D.C., but in reality, both Woodbury and Alexandria sets are just blocks apart. Ironically, there is a real town of Woodbury, Georgia, but the Woodbury set is just a stone’s throw away from the Alexandria set in Seonia. Here’s what Brittany had to say below.
“My home was right in between ‘Woodbury’ and ‘Alexandria.’ Even fans who know that ‘Alexandria’ is located in Georgia don’t realize that it is actually the next street down from Woodbury.”
Brittany also added that, since The Walking Dead started shooting, the town has caught “zombie fever,” so to speak. There are a number of zombie-themed shops, such as The Woodbury Shoppe, and local stores selling items such as “zombie milk,” “zombie butter” and even “zombie jerky.” The show has revitalized the town’s economy, with Brittany adding that the town’s main street used to only have six shops, and now there are nearly 50. However, the town is often left “trashed,” littered with props and other debris while filming is going on. The town has also seen an influx in fans and tour groups coming to catch a glimpse of the show. While Brittany did say she is a fan of the show, she thinks she’d be an even bigger fan if she didn’t live in the town it was filmed in. Here’s what she had to say, while revealing how a certain aspect of the show was spoiled for her, by a talkative fan.
“I am a fan of the show, but not as big a fan as I think I would be had I lived outside of town. I think I watch the show differently because I lived in town during its filming. I’m always paying attention to the landscape, trying to figure out where exactly things are. Keeping nosy people from spreading spoilers is a concern, particularly while filming around Main Street, because of all of the buildings and high windows. You can find plenty of spoilers from the comics online if you look for them, but that’s your choice. I don’t really get a choice, because tourists are constantly out and about talking about what they saw or heard. Here’s one example: I’m not a comic person, so I didn’t know what was up with the big wall they were constructing. That one was spoiled for me, though, by a guy sitting across from me at a restaurant here. ‘That’s the Alexandria Safe-Zone that they’ll end up at because they find out there’s nothing in Washington!’ Thanks, guy.”
During last week’s episode, we got our first look at the Hilltop Colony, but we don’t know for sure if different areas of Senoia were used for this location. Would you like to live in the town that The Walking Dead is shot in? Chime in with your thoughts, and stay tuned for more on The Walking Dead, which returns Sunday night at 9 PM ET on AMC.
What's It Like Living Where 'The Walking Dead' Shoots?
Jesse Eisenberg Still Wants to Do 'Zombieland 2'
Back in 2009, when Zombieland hit theaters, it served as a breakout hit for not only rising star Jesse Eisenberg, but also for director Ruben Fleischer and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. The movie earned over $102 million worldwide, from a $23 million budget, and there was talk of Zombieland 2 shortly thereafter. During a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Jesse Eisenberg teases that he’d love to do the sequel, although it isn’t known when it may move forward.
“Yeah, it’d be wonderful to do. I know they’ve been trying to do it for a while, and I know they’re trying to figure out exactly what will occur in it. But it’s a kind of movie that, as soon as it came out, seemed appropriate to generate a sequel. It takes place in this odd, created world and features an ensemble of interesting characters that it’d be curious to see more of. I would hope that it happens, and I’m sure everybody would be happy to do it if it happens and it’s good. It’s also a strangely beloved movie, so it’s a thing you have to get right. Some sequels you don’t have to get exactly right, but this is the kind of movie you have to get right because people like it for personal reasons, even though it’s a zombie comedy.”
Last week, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who went on to write the script for the massive blockbuster Deadpool, revealed that the project is still very much in development, with the writers now serving as executive producers. Before that, the last update we had on the sequel was back in September 2014, when it was revealed that Ruben Fleischer would come back to direct, with Dave Callaham (Godzilla, The Expendables 3) coming aboard to write the script. It isn’t known if that writer is still involved, or if Ruben Fleischer is still planning on directing.
Jesse Eisenberg‘s career certainly skyrocketed after the original Zombieland hit theaters in 2009. The next year he portrayed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the critically-acclaimed drama The Social Network, which earned him his first Oscar nomination. Next month, he will take on the iconic role of Lex Luthor in the long-awaited superhero adventure Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
It isn’t clear if the rest of the Zombieland stars, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, would return to reprise their roles in the sequel, but given their increasingly busy schedules, it may be difficult to bring them all together to fight zombies once again. Are you still holding out hope that Zombieland 2 will still hit theaters some day? Given the recent success of everyone involved in the original movie, hopefully the sequel will eventually go into production, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Zombieland 2 is in development .
Jesse Eisenberg Still Wants to Do 'Zombieland 2'
Public Enemy Hates That Oscars 2016 Used 'Fight the Power'
When the 88th Annual Academy Awards kicked off from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on Sunday night, host Chris Rock came out to the iconic rap group Public Enemy’s hit 1990 song “Fight the Power.” The song was also used to close out the ceremony, where Chris Rock mentioned the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Yesterday, Public Enemy’s Professor Griff spoke out against the awards ceremony’s use of the song in a statement to TMZ.
“The show can’t claim the blackness of Public Enemy’s message.”
TMZ revealed that the group doesn’t own the rights to license the song to the awards ceremony, with the rights belonging to Universal Music Group. Public Enemy front man Chuck D. later took to his Twitter page to discuss the use of the song, and the Oscars diversity issue. He says the song is “beyond” the group itself, although his statement wasn’t quite as pointed as Professor Griff’s. Here’s what he had to say in a series of tweets below.
“The song FightThe Power is beyond me & the crew. The point of the song is a call to making change eventually not just applauding the thought. Art speaking. Fight The Power. Make change. Demand respect. Do your own awards RIGHT & give indie artists & actors a chance to make a LIVING.”
Entertainment Weekly also spoke to the show’s music supervisor, Byron Phillips, who defended the use of the song. While there were other songs in consideration, like Isaac Hayes‘ iconic Shaft theme song, they wanted to go with something more contemporary. Here’s what the music supervisor had to say below.
“[We wanted to] really set the tone for what the night was going to be and do something that was representative of Chris, and who Chris was, and the vibe and tone Chris wanted to set for the evening. There was obviously nothing more perfect than ‘Fight the Power’ for that. [‘Fight the Power’ is] such an anthem for our generation that it made more sense to, first of all, have a contemporary feel, and just [for] the association with what you think of when you think of Chris. I really had a debate whether or not Chris wanted to come out that aggressively with it. [Rock] was like, ‘Nuh-uh, I want to do ‘Fight the Power.’ There was no hesitation.”
While the host’s opening monologue was widely discussed on social media, especially his take on the Academy’s diversity issues, it didn’t necessarily help boost viewership. The ceremony’s ratings dropped to an eight-year low, with 34.3 million viewers tuning in, down from last year’s 37.3 million viewers. What do you think about Public Enemy speaking out over the use of “Fight the Power” at the Oscars? Take a look at Chuck D.‘s tweets below, and in case you missed it, check out Chris Rock’s opening monologue below.
I dont wanna hear about Oscars being white. Oscar been white. We have need black communities to support our ARTS as much as we do sports IMO
— Chuck D (@MrChuckD) February 29, 2016
The song FightThe Power is beyond me & the crew.The point of the song is a call to making change eventually not just applauding the thought
— Chuck D (@MrChuckD) February 29, 2016
Art speaking. Fight The Power. Make change.Demand respect. Do your own awards RIGHT & give indie artists & actors a chance to make a LIVING
— Chuck D (@MrChuckD) February 29, 2016
Public Enemy Hates That Oscars 2016 Used 'Fight the Power'
'The Dark Tower' Is Shooting Soon with Idris Elba & Matthew McConaughey
After months of speculation, The Dark Tower has officially locked in Idris Elba to play the Gunlinger, Roland Deschain, with Matthew McConaughey portraying the villainous Man in Black. Author Stephen King confirmed the news through his Twitter page today, including the very first line from his first book in The Dark Tower novel series, “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.” Entertainment Weekly also spoke with the author, and The Dark Tower director Nikolaj Arcel, who confirmed that pre-production is under way, and principal photography will begin in seven weeks, with the January 13, 2017 release date still in place. Here’s what the author had to say about this story’s long journey from the page to the silver screen.
“The thing is, it’s been a looong trip from the books to the film. When you think about it, I started these stories as a senior in college, sitting in a little sh-tty cabin beside the river in Maine, and finally this thing is actually in pre-production now. I’m delighted, and I’m a little bit surprised.”
The Dark Tower movie adaptation has seen its fair share of adversity. The Dark Tower was initially set up at Universal in 2011, when Ron Howard was set to direct a trilogy of movies. The studio was also setting up two limited-run TV series set to air on NBC in between the films, before the project became too costly and was ultimately dropped. Warner Bros. was then eyeing the project, but they eventually passed, and the project appeared to be dead, when Sony Pictures picked up the rights last April. Sony will be teaming with Media Rights Capital to co-finance the movies, with a “complimentary” TV series also being planned.
Nikolaj Arcel is now directing from a script he co-wrote with Anders Thomas Jensen, Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Pinkner. Ron Howard is still attached to produce with his Imagine Entertainment partners Brian Grazer and Erica Huggins, with Jeff Pinkner serving as executive producer. Stephen King also confirmed that the movie will start out with the first novel’s opening line, adding that he’s been “pretty insistent about that.” However, the movie will actually then shift to the middle of the story.
“”[The movie] starts in media res, in the middle of the story instead of at the beginning, which may upset some of the fans a little bit, but they’ll get behind it, because it is the story.”
The Dark Tower adaptation will bring Stephen King’s series of seven novels to life, which follows Roland Deschain, a.k.a. The Gunslinger, who sets off on a journey to find The Dark Tower, rumored to be a portal to other worlds. Roland will be chased by the Man in Black, a.k.a. Walter Padick, described as an “ageless deceiver and sorcerer,” who is also trying to find The Dark Tower to rule over all of its kingdoms. Along his journey, Roland will seek help from a junkie named Eddie, an amputee named Susannah and a young boy named Jake, to be part of his team known as a “ka-tet.”
It was originally believed that The Dark Tower will be adapted from the first book, The Gunslinger, but both Stephen King and Nikolaj Arcel wouldn’t confirm which books this first movie will be drawn from. The site speculates that the movie may be based on the third book in the series, 1993’s The Waste Lands, where much of The Dark Tower mythology was laid out. The plot follows the ka-tet’s efforts to reach out to Jake, who is from a different place, New York City, and time, which in the book was 1977 but it may be changed to modern-day. While those details haven’t been confirmed, Nikolaj Arcel did speak about casting Idris Elba as Roland Deschain, who is described as a blue-eyed white man in the books.
“For me, it just clicked. He’s such a formidable man. I had to go to Idris and tell him my vision for the entire journey with Roland and the ka-tet. We discussed, who is this character? What’s he about? What’s his quest? What’s his psychology? We tried to figure out if we saw the same guy. And we absolutely had all the same ideas and thoughts. He had a unique vision for who Roland would be.”
Stephen King added that he supported the casting, but he admitted that when he first started writing the books 46 years ago, he had envisioned Clint Eastwood as the Gunslinger. He added that over the years, he stopped seeing Clint Eastwood as Roland, and now it makes no difference whether the character is black or white. Director Nikolaj Arcel also added how this will change the dynamic of racial tension between Roland and Susannah, a black amputee, revealing that everything will be made clear eventually.
“Some fans are asking, understandably, ‘What about the racial tension?’ But as the story progresses that will be made clear, how we’ll deal with all those things.”
The original plan for the franchise was to create a trilogy of movies, with a TV series that aired in between movie. When Sony picked up the sprawling adaptation, the studio teamed up with Media Rights Capital to finance the TV series, but we haven’t heard any updates about the series yet. Stephen King teased that a successful first movie could ignite talks for the series again, but it seems nothing is set in stone quite yet. Stephen King also dismissed the notion that he would appear as himself in later movies, stating he’s “too old.” While we wait for more details about this highly-anticipated adaptation, take a look at the tweets from Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey and Stephen King below.
It’s official: The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed. #DarkTowerMovie@McConaughey@IdrisElba
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 1, 2016
.@McConaughey you have one new follower. #DarkTowerMoviehttps://t.co/5fSKF02C7I
— Idris Elba (@idriselba) March 1, 2016
.@idriselba come and get me, I look forward to it. #DarkTowerMoviehttps://t.co/4gxqm2GPo3
— Matthew McConaughey (@McConaughey) March 1, 2016
The Dark Tower comes to theaters January 13th, 2017.
'The Dark Tower' Is Shooting Soon with Idris Elba & Matthew McConaughey
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