In terms of sales, Green Eggs and Ham, published in 1960, was the most successful book that Dr. Seuss ever published—it checks as the #4 best-selling children’s book of all time. Famously, the book was limited to a set of fifty words, Dr. Theodore Geisel (Seuss’ real name) having taken up a challenge thrown down by Random House publisher Bennett Cerf after The Cat in the Hat had used 225 words. The fifty words are: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, and you.
Recently the University of California has started a series of videos called “Fig. 1” intended to present the new research coming out of the University of California system. So far the videos have covered climate change, mountain biking, gold, and cancer.
One of the videos offers a fascinating look at the Dr. Seuss Collection, including drafts of the book Green Eggs and Ham. My favorite bit is the instruction to later colorists “White inside the hambone, always.” The video’s only shortcoming is that, at 84 seconds, it’s far too short! Can we have a version that lasts maybe 15 minutes?
via BOOOOOOOM
This 45-minute video is a fun behind-the-scenes look at how sound designers created Godzilla's blood-curdling roars, and other terrible noises emitted by the monsters in Gareth Edwards's movie. They ran their fingers over a squeaky red balloon, raked a plastic comb's teeth over a tire's tread, rubbed a sneaker sole against a drumhead, opened a creaky ironing board, and manipulated other ordinary objects, and then ran the recordings through software to create the ghastly sound effects.
From the mid-1960s through the early '70s, Clyde Stubblefield and John "Jabo" Starks created the grooves on many of James Brown's biggest hits, and laid the foundation for modern funk drumming in the process.
The two first met in 1965, at James Brown gig in Augusta, Ga. Stubblefield was there to audition, even though Starks had just been hired two weeks earlier – and was already one of a handful of drummers on the band's roster.
"I went on stage and there was five drum sets up there," Stubblefield recalls. "And I'm going, 'Wow, what do you need me for?'"
Starks says the overstuffed lineup was a strategy Brown had adopted after an earlier conflict with his band had led to a standoff.
"The saying was, when Clayton Fillyau was the drummer with James, he had just one drummer, one guitar player, one bass player," Starks says. "They was about to not play; they were rebelling against James for something ... so he had to agree with them. And they said he made a statement after then: 'I'll never be caught without two of everything.' So I guess that's where it started. But when Clyde and I joined the group, we jelled together. And then he started letting the other drummers go."
Essentially competitors for the same seat, Stubblefield and Starks could easily have ended up as rivals. Starks says one reason they didn't was that their skills weren't redundant: Each brought something unique to the group.
"You have to understand this: We're two different drummers," he says. "Clyde plays the way that Clyde plays, which, nobody's gonna play like Clyde. I play like I play. We can play the same tune, but different ways. You never played together on James' shows, but when he wanted to hear something different from Clyde, he'd point to me."
Both drummers say working with Brown could be tough. Musicians were pretty much at his beck and call — and he would even fine them when he felt they'd made a mistake.
"Sometimes you don't have to make a mistake," says Stubblefield, who says he had to pay Brown more than once. "You just do a little something different and he'd call that a fine, he'd fine you."
Remarkably, neither Stubblefield nor Starks ever took drum lessons. Stubblefield says he got his sense of rhythm by listening to the clatter of machinery emanating from the factories in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tenn. Starks grew up in the church in Mobile, Ala., and says he couldn't help but move to the music he'd hear at services.
"You couldn't even sit down. You couldn't stop. You had to get up to do something with it," he says.
The grooves the two drummers created have inspired generations of artists — not just in funk, but in hip-hop, where their steady but intricate patterns make natural material for sampling. Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," the bracing theme music from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, is based around a snippet of Stubblefield's playing on "Funky Drummer" (to which rapper Chuck D makes a sly reference in his opening lines).
But more often than not, the artists who have used Stubblefield and Starks' beats in their own music have failed to give them credit. That, on top of the bad times with James Brown, would leave anyone a little bitter. But when they speak to each other, the love and respect are unmistakable.
"We're brothers," Starks says. "That's the way that I look at it. It's a brotherly love."
Stubblefield concurs. "Actually," he says, "we've never had an argument."
The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. Its three one-hour parts consist mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis's narration. The series was first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and has subsequently been broadcast in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.
The films compare the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and claiming similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.
The Power of Nightmares has been praised by film critics in both Britain and the United States. Its message and content have also been the subject of various critiques and criticisms from conservatives and progressives.
Greed is good. War is inevitable. Whether in political theory or popular culture, human nature is often portrayed as selfish and power hungry. UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner challenges this notion of human nature and seeks to better understand why we evolved pro-social emotions like empathy, compassion and gratitude.
We've all heard the phrase 'survival of the fittest', born from the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Keltner adds nuance to this concept by delving deeper into Darwin's idea that sympathy is one of the strongest human instincts — sometimes stronger than self-interest.
FEATURING: Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology and founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley
Berkeley Social Interaction Lab: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~keltner/
Greater Good Science Center: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/
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