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“I will give you my word.”
I need a $ 3000 loan.
I tried many banks but do not get the loan because i have very bad credit.
But I will give you my word I will repay you back.
I will pay you $ 50 dollars extra when I pay it back.
Thanks.
In the insanity of Hurricane Sandy, I never ran a post about the recent passing of Letitia Baldrige, one of the grand dames of American manners. If you think people are rude today, you should have seen things before Baldrige. She was the one who convinced everybody that when they had violent diarrhea they needed to say “excuse me” before heading to the can to let it rip. Prior to that, people would just run out of the room clutching their fiery anuses while screaming at Jesus. And she strongly suggested you wash after you were done fingering yourself, even if you weren’t going to shake hands with anyone for a couple of hours.
I am a horrible man. Seriously, Baldrige was a lovely person who did her best to make us less cretinous. I personally have a complicated relationship with manners: I think we should behave well but not repress our true emotions. It’s a difficult balance. From her New York Times obituary, written by Anita Gates:
“In the 1970s she established herself as an authority on contemporary etiquette, writing a syndicated newspaper column on the subject and updating Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette in 1978, less than four years after Ms. Vanderbilt’s death. Ms. Baldrige’s face soon appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which hailed her as the nation’s social arbiter.
After that, her own name was enough to attract readers, and in 1985 she published Letitia Baldrige’s Complete Guide to Executive Manners, which dealt with behavior in the workplace and outside it. In that book, she declared it acceptable to cut salad with a knife. She recommended that whoever reaches the door first — either man or woman — open it. And she suggested infrequent shampooing when staying on a yacht, to be considerate about conserving water.”
Tags: Anita Gates, Letitia Baldrige
Like most remaining travel agencies and record stores, erstwhile video-rental giant Blockbuster is a (barely) existing ode to obsolescence in an age of constant connectivity and digital downloads. It’s gotten sad. For some reason, an employee at one of the remaining stores subjected herself to an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few passages follow.
__________________________________
Question:
Marcello Mastroianni was a sensitive, befuddled male icon of screen in the second half of the 20th century, often crumbling under the modern world and its changing mores. At the end of 8 1/2, in one of cinema’s greatest scenes, he walks away from all that he’s built, realizing the folly of constructing on a shifting landscape. In real life, the Italian actor was none too fond of the era’s feminist movement, never quite grasping that an unequal society is a sick one for masters and servants alike. Though, yeah, the masters have it way better. An excerpt from a 1965 Playboy interview with Mastroianni during the early days of the cultural revolution:
“PLAYBOY:
All the films you’ve made, in one way or another, are about weak men—psychologically, socially and often sexually impotent. Is that you?
MASTROIANNI:
Yes and no. It’s part of me; and I think it’s part of many other men today. Modern man is not as virile as he used to be. Instead of making things happen, he waits for things to happen to him. He goes with the current. Something in our society has led him to stop fighting, to cease swimming upstream.
PLAYBOY:
What is that something?
MASTROIANNI:
Doubt, for one thing. Doubt about his place in society, his purpose in life. In my country, for example, I was brought up with the thought of man as the padrone, the pillar of the family. I wanted to be a loving, caring, protective man. But now I feel lost; the sensitive man everywhere feels lost. He is no longer padrone—either of his own world or of his women.
PLAYBOY:
Why not?
MASTROIANNI:
Because women are changing into men, and men are becoming women. At least, men are getting weaker all the time. But much of this is man’s own fault. We shouted, “Women are equal to men; long live the Constitution!” But look what happened. The working woman emerged—angry, aggressive, uncertain of her femininity. And she multiplied—almost by herself. Matriarchy, in the home and in the factory and in business, has made women into sexless monsters and piled them up on psychiatric couches. Instead of finding themselves, they lost what they had. But some see this now and are trying to change back. Women in England, for example, who were the first to raise the standard of equality, are today in retreat.
PLAYBOY:
How about American women
MASTROIANNI:
They should retreat, but they don’t. I’ve never seen so many unhappy, melancholy women. They have liberty—but they are desperate. Poor darlings, they’re so hungry for romance that two little words in their ears are enough to crumble them before your eyes. American women are beautiful, but a little cold and too perfect—too well brought up, with the perfume and the hair always just so and the rose-colored skin. What perfection—and what a bore! Believe me, it makes you want to have a girl with a mustache, cross-eyes and runs in her stockings. I got to know a few of them when I was there, but I swear it was like knowing only one woman. Geraldine Page was the only exception—and an exciting one.” (Thanks Cinema Archive.)
Tags: Marcello Mastroianni
In the future, endings will not only be happy but also brutally efficient. Presenting the high-speed bot hand from the Ishikawa Komuro Lab.
The opening of “The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years,” Antonio Regalado’s MIT’s Technology Review article about the advent of limitless admissions:
“If you were asked to name the most important innovation in transportation over the last 200 years, you might say the combustion engine, air travel, Henry Ford’s Model-T production line, or even the bicycle. The list goes on.
Now answer this one: what’s been the single biggest innovation in education?
Don’t worry if you come up blank. You’re supposed to. The question is a gambit used by Anant Agarwal, the computer scientist named this year to head edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to stream a college education over the Web, free, to anyone who wants one. His point: it’s rare to see major technological advances in how people learn.
Agarwal believes that education is about to change dramatically. The reason is the power of the Web and its associated data-crunching technologies. Thanks to these changes, it’s now possible to stream video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. The technology is powerful, fairly cheap, and global in its reach. EdX has said it hopes to teach a billion students.”
Tags: Antonio Regalado
“Let me know.”
From a particularly prescient 1993 memo by Microsoft’s Nathan Myhrvold about the tech revolution that was about to rework information distribution in a truly profound way:
“Gutenberg Reprised
If you grant that the world writes and makes decisions with PCs, what is next? The real answer is long and complex, but three of the key components are to read, communicate and beentertained. An even simpler way to describe this is to say that computing technology will become central to distributing information.
As a rule, distribution has much more pervasive effects than authoring. Improving life for the author of a document does not materially effect the size or nature of the audience that she can address, but changes in distribution have a dramatic effect. The clearest precedent is the invention of the printing press. Great works of science and literature – Euclid’s geometry, Plato and Horace, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Iliad and Icelandic Sagas, all- existed long before the printing press, so humans clearly were able to conceive them, but they had a very limited customer base. Monks and scribes spent lifetimes copying books by hand, while bards and minstrels memorized and orally repeated tales to spread and preserve them. No matter how cheaply one values their time, it was still a very expensive proposition which was the primary limiting factor in broadening the number of customers. If we could use a time machine to supply all those monks with PCs and Word for Windows, but limited the rate at which they could print to the same level of time and expense, it would make little difference – except perhaps for letting the monks channel their energies toward other fields.
When Gutenberg did change the economics of distribution, the world changed in a fundamental way. It is estimated that Europe had on the order of ten thousand books just prior to Johan’s invention – within fifty years it would have over eight million. Literacy became a key skill. The advent of mass media – through printed handbills – revolutionized politics, religion, science and literature and most other factes of intellectual life.
I believe that we are on the brink of a revolution of similar magnitude. This will be driven by two technologies – computing and digital networking. We’ve already discussed the change in computing technology, and that is certainly dramatic, but it is communications which really enables distribution.”
Tags: Nathan Myhrvold
Being buried alive is a primordial fear, but it may not be a baseless one. It’s not as easy to tell if someone’s dead as you might think. There have been different rules through the ages and new technologies cause a continued reassessment of those rules. Dick Teresi has written a book on the subject and now Peter Rothman has a smart piece at h+ on the ever-changing nature of life’s terminus. The opening:
“Black or white. Alive or dead. Right?
In reality death is not well defined and the definition of death has changed substantially over time.
H.P Lovecraft famously wrote, ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie. Yet with strange aeons even death may die.‘ This amounts to a pretty good summary of our current philosophical understanding of death. Death is simply the condition wherein you can not be brought back to life. If you can be brought back, then you weren’t really dead.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides us a few examples of more nuanced definitions, for example one might suggest that death is ‘the irreversible cessation of organismic functioning’ or the ‘irreversible loss of personhood.’ These amount to circular definitions that really don’t tell us anything specific about how to decide when someone is dead. What is ‘organismic functioning’ and how do we know when it is happening? Personhood is of course mostly a legal definition pertaining to rights which are terminated upon death. But if you are brought back to life, you weren’t really dead.
And we’ve been burying people alive for a long time.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Dick Teresi, Peter Rothman
From the July 26, 1866 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Michigan–We are indebted to Dr. William Elliott of this place, for a description of a double child, born in this village, having one head with two faces, two noses, four eyes, two mouths and two chins. The faces are right opposite each other. Among the many freaks of nature on record, we believe this is the most wonderful known. The fetus has been carefully preserved and will, we understand, be deposited in the museum of the medical department of the University of Michigan.”
Tags: Dr. William Elliott
From the July 5 1899 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“The indelicacy of the police of the Fulton Street station in interfering with the morning ablutions of a woman made Mary Sheridan much more indignant than she was over the simple fact that she had been placed under arrest and hauled before Magistrate Brenner in the Adams Street court this morning. The fact that the ablutions in question had been daily made by Mary at the horse trough on Washington Street, near the bridge, had suggested to the police the necessity of doing something about her case. They had tried to drive her away, for she seemed to be otherwise a very harmless person. She never got tipsy and her inherent cleanliness under other conditions would be commendable. Mary would not be driven away. The habit of washing at the horse trough had become too strong and there was nothing to do about it after a while but to arrest her as a vagrant.”
Tags: Magistrate Brenner, Mary Sheridan
From Timothy Taylor’s analysis of driverless cars at the Conversable Economist, a passage about the way the function (and meaning) of automobiles may change:
“Driverless cars might be faster, but in addition, they open up the possibility of using travel time for work or relaxation. Your car could become a rolling office, or a place for watching movies, or a place for a nap. ‘An automated transportation system could not only eliminate most urban congestion, but it would also allow travelers to make productive use of travel time. In 2010, an estimated 86.3 percent of all workers 16 years of age and older commuted to work in a car, truck, or van, and 88.8 percent of those drove alone … The average commute time in the United States is about 25 minutes.
Thus, on average, approximately 80 percent of the U.S. workforce loses 50 minutes of potential productivity every workday. With convergence, all or part of this time is recoverable. Self-driving vehicles may be customized to serve the needs of the traveler, for example as mobile offices, sleep pods, or entertainment centers.’ I find myself imagining the overnight road-trip, where instead of driving all day, you sleep in the car and awake at your destination.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Timothy Taylor
“Percussion.”
those of you needing a physical: college adult checking airway breathing, circulation, your genitals, body, anus, prostate, percussion, palpitation and auscultation. can give you that full physical if interested. to make sure everything is working properly and fine there.
Owsley Stanley at his arraignment, 1967.
From Erik Davis’ Aeon essay about renewed research into psychodelic drugs, a passage about the way we tend to characterize drugs based on our own fears and desires:
“When the legendary acid chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III was pressing his famously pure LSD into pills for people such as Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the 1960s, he dyed the batches different colours. The colours led to various brand names — Purple Haze, Blue Cheer — which in turn were linked, experientially, to different sorts of effects, even though the quality and amount of acid was effectively the same. Something similar is happening to cannabis today, at least in an increasingly deregulated America, where the red-hot market for ‘medical’ marijuana products has led to a complex and overhyped mythology of targeted effects.
Of course, some of the most powerful stories about psychoactives are told by the state, even if those stories are frequently garbled and contradictory. In the US, for example, the pleasant Polynesian rootkava-kava is available on the herbal shelves, while the pleasant Yemeni stimulant khat is controlled. In the UK, the reverse is true. Of course, the stories told about psychedelics like LSD were more demonising, and in 1967 the US government classified it as a highly controlled substance, a year after it became illegal in California. This regulatory act — a new story, if you will — thrust the compound even deeper into the underground, where its meanings proliferated along a myriad of spiritual, artistic, musical, sexual and social vectors that continue to morph their way through society and culture to this day. However, by definitively transforming LSD into an ‘illegal drug’, the state’s story also brought to a halt a wide range of legitimate, board-certified psychological and pharmacological studies that, in their time, might have reframed Hofmann’s molecule into narratives not so heavily freighted with the baggage of countercultural values.
Today, the meaning of LSD and other psychedelics is once again up for grabs.”
Tags: Erik Davis, Owsley Stanley
“I.D.”
Im in need of money and willing to sell my kidney-$6500 (non smoker and non drinker) or i.d-$2500 (social security card and birth certificate).
“Kidney.”
At some point in the future, humans will think of us and our way of life as “backwards,” and they will be right. But some things will be particularly difficult to comprehend.
The technology for driverless cars has been achieved, so the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is preparing to lay down federal guidelines for these vehicles. From George Kennedy at Autoblog:
“According to the report NHSTA administrator David Sctrickland says the technology could possibly save ‘thousands of lives.’ It was also reported that NHTSA has been in talks with a number of companies, including Google, regarding the implementation and development of this technology. Google has been testing its own fleet of driverless cars, logging over 300,000 miles on American roads. The tech company says autonomous vehicles could be made available to the public in the next ten years.
The technology has profound implications on the automotive industry and car culture. Strickland calls it a “game changer” and could make it possible for blind drivers or senior citizens who would otherwise have their licenses revoked, the ability to get around town. The savings from cutting down on congestion could result in as much as $100 billion in fuel savings.”
Tags: David Sctrickland, George Kennedy
From the April 5, 1885 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Philadelphia–A subject, apparently a young girl of 15, appeared for a clinical operation at Jefferson Medical College a short time ago. The patient wore short dresses, looked like a young school miss, and had the manners of a girl. The trouble with the patient was an inability to retain secretions of the kidneys. Dr. W.H. Pancoast made an examination and discovered two exceedingly interesting facts: First, that his subject was not, as the parents had always supposed, a girl, but a boy, and that he had been born minus a bladder. The doctor then proceeded to supply an artificial bladder, a surgical feat first accomplished by his father many years ago and now not an uncommon operation. But the parents refused to credit the facts recited by the doctor and would not keep the subject in boy’s attire, dressed in which the professor had returned him to them. A further operation was made at the request of the parents. That was done last week, and so fully developed the other organs that doubt was no longer possible. The lad has been given a boy’s name in exchange for the female one with which he was christened.”
Tags: Dr. W.H. Pancoast
Modern India is the uneasy mix of two countries: the emerging global superpower and the corrupt slum. Can advances in high-tech also advance the majority of people, or is it a nation destined to be a robust body held back by a long tail of neglect and abuse? From Erich Follath at Spiegel:
“Almost no other country has as many cell phone users; almost nowhere is the communications industry growing faster. Today, Indians can choose from among more than 400 private television channels. The subcontinent is also making great strides in renewable energy. Indeed, Suzlon, the world’s fifth-largest wind turbine manufacturer, headquartered in the western city of Pune, recently enlarged its ownership stake in the German wind turbine company REPower and now plans to create more than 100 new jobs in Germany.
India is now the world’s largest weapons importer. It has become a self-confident player among leading nations and is now aggressively seeking a seat on the United Nations Security Council. It’s also a nuclear power that has expanded its arsenal of warheads and has no intention of signing the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. The Indians sent satellites into space some time ago, and only last week did they announce plans for a mission to Mars. Prime Minister Singh described it as ‘a giant step for us in the field of science and technology.’
That’s the one India, the high-tech powerhouse of a rising global power, backed up by numbers and proof of its prowess. But then there is the other India: where one in three of the world’s malnourished children lives; where two-thirds of the population lives on less than $2 a day; where half the population has no access to toilets and 25 percent still cannot read and write. It’s also a country where the power supply is so scandalously unreliable that, in late July, almost 700 million people were without lights and electricity for two days, the railroads stopped running, factories stood idle and some hospitals were crippled.
Is India on the road to becoming a superpower? Or is it condemned to forever remain a developing-world power, on the outside looking in?” (Thanks Next Big Future.)
Tags: Erich Follath
Someday we will be able to choose our looks and abilities, we will engineer our dreams on scientific terms, and even that will just change and not end our competition for an elusive ideal. But for now, people go to extremes to find the future, to locate the fountain of youth. Case in point: the “pretties” of Thailand. From Jonah Fisher at the BBC:
“They’re beautiful, well dressed and for the right price will promote anything from washing powder to luxury cars.
But working as a product promoter or ‘pretty’ in Thailand is an occupation where image counts for everything.
At 32, Athitiya Eiamyai had reached the age when most ‘pretties’ start to find demand for their services falling.
For a decade she had batted her eyelashes and flashed a ready smile to promote everything from luxury cars to new mobile phones.
But for Athitiya, or Kratae as everyone knew her, retiring gracefully from this $100-a-day job was not an option. She had parents and siblings who depended on the money she earned and she told her friends she was determined to fight ageing every step of the way.
In the last five years of her life, she had invested thousands of dollars into altering the way she looked. Her skin had been lightened and she’d had several rounds of surgery to change her nose, narrow her jaw and augment her breasts.
But according to her best friend and fellow pretty Pim Saisanard, she still wasn’t happy.
‘Kratae used to say if you want to be a beautiful woman you must put up with pain,’ she said. ‘She wanted bigger hips to match her bigger breasts. And she said that would make her perfect.'”
Tags: Jonah Fisher
A Smithsonian blog post by Rose Eveleth suggests a list of the ten oddest Wikipedia entries. The hands-down winner is the one about Robert Shields, who wrote in his diary every five minutes for decades, detailing, in Seinfeld-ian terms, the most excruciating minutiae imaginable. He essentially live-blogged his life before there were blogs. An excerpt from his Wiki page:
“Believing that discontinuing his diary would be like ‘turning off my life,’ he spent four hours a day in the office on his back porch, in his underwear, recording his body temperature, blood pressure, medications, describing his urination and bowel movements, and slept for only two hours at a time so he could describe his dreams. It is believed that Shields suffered from hypergraphia, an overwhelming urge to write. He once said ‘Maybe by looking into someone’s life at that depth, every minute of every day, they will find out something about all people.’ He also left behind samples of his nose hair for future study.
Shields’s self-described ‘uninhibited,’ ‘spontaneous’ work was astonishing in its mundaneness, and now fills 94 cartons in the collections of Washington State University, to whom he donated the work in 1999. In a May 2000 interview he said ‘I’ve written 1200 poems and at least five of ’em are good.’ He also claimed to have written the story base for Elvis Presley’s film Love Me Tender based on the Reno Gang of Seymour, Indiana where Robert William Shields was born. Copies of the manuscript are at the Kansas State Historical Society, E P Lamborn collection. Shields based his manuscript on John Reno’s 1879 autobiography.
Excerpts:
Under the terms of the donation of his diary to Washington State University, the diary may not be read or subjected to an exact word count for 50 years from his death. However, many excerpts have appeared, including the following:
July 25, 1993:
7 am: I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin.
7.05 am: Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used five sheets of paper.
April 18, 1994:
6:30-6:35: I put in the oven two Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese at 350°.
6:35-6:50: I was at the keyboard of the IBM Wheelwriter making entries for the diary.
6.50-7.30: I ate the Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese and Cornelia ate the other one. Grace decided she didn’t want one.
7.30-7.35: We changed the light over the back stoop since the bulb had burnt out.
August 13, 1995:
8.45 am: I shaved twice with the Gillette Sensor blade [and] shaved my neck behind both ears, and crossways of my cheeks, too.”
Tags: Robert Shields, Rose Eveleth
Remember album cover art, that thing that was important before we could fit record stores in our pockets? The most famous example of the form–and perhaps the best–was Peter Blake’s design for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band theme album, which was a collage of famous, disparate figures–Lenny Bruce, Sonny Liston, Oscar Wilde, etc.– that disappeared the line between high and low art. In a Financial Times piece by Peter Aspden, the now 80-year-old artist reflects on his career (though not much on his most famous work): An excerpt:
“There is a tall, forbidding figure tucked inside the entrance of Peter Blake’s west London studio. It’s a waxwork model of Sonny Liston, the heavyweight boxer whose fights with Muhammad Ali in the early 1960s made him one of that decade’s most controversial sporting celebrities. The look on his face is distant, and a little scary. It is impossible not to think of him as a bouncer, guarding the treasure trove of artistic wonders that lie behind him. To anyone familiar with the iconography of popular music, he is also a recognisable figure. The model of Liston is present in Blake’s most renowned work, and one of the most famous pop images in history, standing solemnly among the motley collection of celebrities on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
For many people, Blake’s inspired collage summed up the frenetic times. Its improbable placings of modern history’s cultural icons – Lenny Bruce next to Karlheinz Stockhausen; Fred Astaire rubbed up against Edgar Allan Poe – could not help but make you smile. It was a playful fantasy, a light-touched piece of artistic mischief that could not hide its disregard for the pomposity of postwar ‘adult’ Britain. Very 1960s; very Peter Blake.
Blake today does not much care to talk about Sgt. Pepper, not necessarily because of his feelings towards the meagre reward he received for his art work (said to be about £200) but because he finds it a little boring and tires of strangers walking up to him, asking him to sign half-a-dozen copies, and instantly putting them on eBay. But the spirit of that irreverent cover is still vividly alive in the artist.”
Tags: Peter Aspden, Peter Blake
“The man daily sells wild beasts as placidly as if he sold tea and sugar.”
Private zoos of more than a century ago existed on both sides of the Atlantic, though the ones in the UK seem to have been the wildest. A report of these unregulated menageries from the London Daily Mail that was republished in the November 17, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“‘Can I sell you a nice little armadillo, sir? They’re great favorites now, and the price of that armor-plated beauty is only £2. Or if you prefer something larger for your money here is a striped hyena. We call him Dan Leno. Ten pounds is the price. Listen to him laugh. It’s quite catching, isn’t it?’
And the man who daily sells wild and fearsome beasts as placidly as if he sold tea and sugar, chuckled in sympathy with the snarling, gibbering brute that showed its teeth between the bars of the cage. The Daily Mail representative was not buying hyenas that morning.
The attempted ‘deal’ took place at one of four private zoos in London, where the animal lover may purchase as a domestic pet almost anything that crawls, creeps or flies. For £25 down and the balance on delivery he can have a full-fledged rhinoceros capable of demolishing a fairly sized jerry-built villa, or he can stock the fountain basin on his lawn with young alligators, which at £15 each are regarded as extremely cheap today.
“It was a common sight to see ladies leading little lemurs or baby pumas along the streets in the same way that they lead pet dogs.”
The man who dislikes his next-door neighbor can derive satisfaction and amusement by allowing a few Indian pythons to roam about promiscuously. Six feet of python are obtainable for £2. In the capacity of peacemaker and healer of neighborly differences the python should be invaluable in the suburbs.
Then there is the gentleman in the Highbury District who keeps four or five different kinds of lemurs, while until recently a young man who occupied a flat in another suburb kept a leopard, which used to run about the rooms and curl itself up on his knees like an overgrown cat. That leopard is now no more. It was accidentally suffocated, but the residents of the flat now breathe with more freedom than they did before. Pumas are the favorite pets of a Kensington lady, whose name and address are withheld at the request of the dealer who supplies the animal.
With the spread of the taste for strange and curious pets has come a corresponding diversity in the character of the four-footed passengers in London streets. Last summer it was a common sight to see in the West End ladies leading little lemurs or baby pumas along the streets in the same way that they lead pet dogs. This summer it is probable that the spectacle will become still more common, judging from the number of orders received at the various depots for baby pets of this description. Full grown animals of a dangerous type have not yet obtained the liberty of the footpath, but perhaps they will do so some day, and London will, in one respect at least, be reminiscent of primitive times.”
“My husband is clean of all infection.”
hi my name is emy. im looking for a female that would like to carry a baby from my husband. i cant have no baby and i would like to make my life happy by letting my husband have one baby.
must live with us through the whole 9 months.
my husband is clean of all infection. he was tested. please help us have one baby. he deserves it. he’s a great man.
Tags: Emy
The Landlord’s Game, patent, 1904.
The origin story of the board game Monopoly from a Christopher Ketcham article in Harper’s:
“The game’s true origins, however, go unmentioned in the official literature. Three decades before [Charles] Darrow’s patent, in 1903, a Maryland actress named Lizzie Magie created a proto-Monopoly as a tool for teaching the philosophy of Henry George, a nineteenth-century writer who had popularized the notion that no single person could claim to ‘own’ land. In his book Progress and Poverty (1879), George called private land ownership an ‘erroneous and destructive principle’ and argued that land should be held in common, with members of society acting collectively as ‘the general landlord.’
Magie called her invention The Landlord’s Game, and when it was released in 1906 it looked remarkably similar to what we know today as Monopoly. It featured a continuous track along each side of a square board; the track was divided into blocks, each marked with the name of a property, its purchase price, and its rental value. The game was played with dice and scrip cash, and players moved pawns around the track. It had railroads and public utilities—the Soakum Lighting System, the Slambang Trolley—and a ‘luxury tax’ of $75. It also had Chance cards with quotes attributed to Thomas Jefferson (‘The earth belongs in usufruct to the living’), John Ruskin (‘It begins to be asked on many sides how the possessors of the land became possessed of it’), and Andrew Carnegie (‘The greatest astonishment of my life was the discovery that the man who does the work is not the man who gets rich’). The game’s most expensive properties to buy, and those most remunerative to own, were New York City’s Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and Wall Street. In place of Monopoly’s ‘Go!’ was a box marked ‘Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.’ The Landlord Game’s chief entertainment was the same as in Monopoly: competitors were to be saddled with debt and ultimately reduced to financial ruin, and only one person, the supermonopolist, would stand tall in the end. The players could, however, vote to do something not officially allowed in Monopoly: cooperate. Under this alternative rule set, they would pay land rent not to a property’s title holder but into a common pot—the rent effectively socialized so that, as Magie later wrote, ‘Prosperity is achieved.’
For close to thirty years after Magie fashioned her first board on an old piece of pressed wood, The Landlord’s Game was played in various forms and under different names—’Monopoly,’ ‘Finance,’ ‘Auction.’ It was especially popular among Quaker communities in Atlantic City and Philadelphia, as well as among economics professors and university students who’d taken an interest in socialism. Shared freely as an invention in the public domain, as much a part of the cultural commons as chess or checkers, The Landlord’s Game was, in effect, the property of anyone who learned how to play it.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Charles Darrow, Christopher Ketcham, Henry George, Lizzie Magie