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Chris Knight's avatar
Jerry Lewis, The Day the Clown Cried, Holocaust, movies, 1972
Jerry’s Kids, circa 1972:
You won’t hear “You’ll Never Walk Alone” the same way again…

It might be the cinematic coup of the decade: a seven minutes-long clip of behind-the-scenes footage from The Day the Clown Cried has been posted to YouTube.

Perhaps the most infamous movie never released, The Day the Clown Cried is the 1972 film directed, co-written and starring Jerry Lewis which ended up in a legal mess about ownership rights which kept it from being finished and distributed.  That was more than forty years ago.  Maybe it was for the best.

What was The Day the Clown Cried about?  Here’s the synopsis as I first heard it: “Jerry Lewis is a clown in a Nazi concentration camp”.  Lewis was playing a washed-up German clown named Helmut Dork (?!) who gets drunk one night and bad-mouths Hitler in earshot of some Nazi officers.  Dork gets sent to ...

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Old historical photos hold a special fascination for me.  So I find this next couple of items positively amazing…

Peter Mackintosh
Photo Credit: Joseph Bauman

On the right is a picture of Peter Mackintosh, taken sometime after the early 1840s.  Mackintosh was 16 years old and an apprentice blacksmith in Boston when he watched as a gang of young men barged into his shop, smeared ashes from the hearth all over their faces, and then just as quickly stormed out of the place.  Mackintosh later discovered that they were part of a mob on their way to Griffin’s Wharf to throw boxes and barrels of British-taxed tea into Boston Harbor.

That was on December 16th, 1773.  And the teenaged Peter Mackintosh had witnessed the first moments of the Boston Tea Party.

Later on Mackintosh served in the Continental Army, shoeing horses and repairing cannons.

Mackintosh lived long enough for ...

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Adrian Carton de Wiart
Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart
having a jolly good time!

Twitter user Matthew Barrett found what must be “the best opening paragraph of any Wikipedia biography ever”.  It’s the entry for Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, an officer in the British Army who served in three wars.

From the Wikipedia entry…

Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880 – 5 June 1963), was a British Army officer of Belgian and Irish descent. He fought in the Boer War, World War I, and World War II, was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip and ear, survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp, and bit off his own fingers when a doctor wouldn’t amputate them. He later said “frankly I had enjoyed the war.”

This guy was in the Boer War, World War I and World ...

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I can no longer, in good conscience and in keeping to my faith in God, recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America.

This is a choice which I have abided for nearly a year.  At various times I have felt led to articulate my reasons for doing so.  Indeed, this past fall a friend helped me to record a video about my decision to never again say the Pledge of Allegiance (we filmed it at Guilford Courthouse Battleground, in front of the statue of General Nathaniel Greene, for what it’s worth).

Recent events have brought me to a place where at last I am compelled to write about why I’m not only refraining from the Pledge of Allegiance, but have come to see it as representing too much of what is wrong with America, and even in dire opposition to the vision of ...

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Unless you’re reading this on a mobile device (and even that owes a lot to him) you’re enjoying this blog and practically everything else on the Internet because of this man: Douglas Engelbart.

Douglas Engelbart, computers, mouse, technology, Internet

While working at SRI in the 1960s, Engelbart was struck with the idea of humans interacting with computers by manipulating on the screen with an intuitive interface.  He called his invention the “x-y position indicator”.  The first model was carved from a block of wood with wheels, a push-button and a connecting cord.

Douglas Engelbart had created the mouse.  And he didn’t stop there.  By the time he left SRI in 1977, he had helped develop such now-common technologies as “display editing, online processing, linking and in-file object
addressing, use of multiple windows, hypermedia, and context-sensitive
help”.

The sad word is coming out of Atherton, California tonight that Douglas Engelbart – pioneering engineer and visionary whose ...

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On July 1st, 1863, what is considered the greatest and most decisive battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere began on the outskirts of the sleepy little college town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania…

Battle of Gettysburg, Civil War, 1863

Entire volumes of books have been written about this engagement (some devoted solely to Day 2).  Even now, historians discuss and debate the tactical decisions made at Gettysburg, along with its impact.

I have respect for the soldiers and officers of each side.  Without regard to their earthy perspectives, those men were only fighting for what they believed was right according to their conscience before God.  It is our limited understanding which leads to things like war… but I have to think that in the eyes of the Almighty, any sincere seeking after His will is going to be a credit to those striving to follow Him.

In honor of those men, be they Confederate or Union, this ...

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The tornado which touched down in El Reno, Oklahoma this past Friday is now in the books as the biggest ever documented.  At its maximum, the tornado was a staggering 2.6 miles in diameter…

tornado, El Reno, Oklahoma, weather
El Reno, Oklahoma tornado, May 31st 2013.  Photo Credit: WHOTV.com

Nineteen people perished from this storm, including three veteran tornado chasers.  The tornado carved a path more than sixteen miles long and has been categorized as an EF-5: the most powerful possible.

Thoughts and prayers going out to the people of Oklahoma....

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It’s stuff like this that reminds me of something: we’re not all that different from people a century ago.  Far longer than that even.  We laugh at this sort of thing today, but a hundred years from now our great-grandchildren will be looking at our ads for vacuum cleaners and light beer and wonder: “What the hell were they thinking??“

I don’t think geography has anything to do with it: humanity tends to do wacky things in the pursuit of profit no matter where it’s at.  So it was with our Russian friends in the years leading up to the October Revolution and then the early Soviet era.  And now io9 has compiled a collection of “The Oddest Soviet Ads From The Late 19th And Early 20th Century”.  There are many ads for cigarettes (see image) and other tobacco products,  but also for wine, gunpowder and soap.  ...

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Nothing of man lasts forever.  In the end, all crumbles to dust.

But some things sure do give us haunting beauty during the course of their long toil to entropy.

BuzzFeed has compiled photos of 33 places build by man throughout the world, left to ruin but gorgeous to behold.  There is quite a poignancy in these images.  I thought the one on the left – of the remains of the bobsled track from the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo (at the time in the now-disbanded country of Yugoslavia) – was especially moving.

That was one of the most well-remembered Olympiads of the past half-century.  And now, look at what remains  A long concrete chute, left to decay amid the foliage.  A few years after those games, Yugoslavia disintegrated into ethnic warfare and religious strife which cost the lives of countless thousands.

“All is vanity”, as the Preacher at ...

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Before I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater (yeah I was that young: it was a weird weird childhood) and got hooked on archaeology, the Shroud of Turin had grasped my fascination.  All I knew at the time was that it might have been the cloth that Jesus was wrapped in after His death and that somehow, His picture got transferred into the material.  I’ve been reading every serious article and journal paper about the Shroud for most of my life and my curiosity about it has grown more and more.  Especially at this time of year.

What do I think of the Shroud of Turin?  Well, despite many attempts to reproduce it, those have always failed.  And then there is the forensic analysis: just this week scientists announced that the Shroud is almost certainly a product of the First Century.  When you figure in that ...

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