Diamond Rings and Other Conspiracies

Here's something crazy I just read on mental_floss about the true origin of diamond rings:

Prior to the 20th century, engagement rings were strictly luxury items, and they rarely contained diamonds. But in 1939, the De Beers diamond company changed all of that when it hired ad agency N.W. Ayer & Son.

The industry had taken a nosedive in the 1870s, after massive diamond deposits were discovered in South Africa. But the ad agency came to the rescue by introducing the diamond engagement ring and quietly spreading the trend through fashion magazines.

The rings didn’t become de rigueur for marriage proposals until 1948, when the company launched the crafty “A Diamond is Forever” campaign. By sentimentalizing the gems, De Beers ensured that people wouldn’t resell them, allowing the company to retain control of the market.

In 1999, De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer confessed, “Diamonds are intrinsically worthless, except for the deep psychological need they fill."

In addition to diamond engagement rings, De Beers also promoted surprise proposals. The company learned that when women were involved in the selection process, they picked cheaper rings. By encouraging surprise proposals, De Beers shifted the purchasing power to men, the less-cautious spenders.

The blog post also explains how Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, green-bean casserole, Valentine's Day candy, and wedding registries were all traditions created just to make you buy stuff.

Abbrs.

A good number of us know or at least have heard of what some common abbreviations stand for.  Perhaps you know that a SCUBA is a 'self-contained underwater breathing apparatus,' that MSG is 'monosodium glutamate,' that AIDS is 'acquired immune deficiency syndrome,' or maybe even that a laser is nothing more than 'light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation.'

But some exhaustive searching through through the internet revealed some interesting abbreviations I either hadn't seen, hadn't ever taken the time to think about, or just thought were plain cool.  If you already know these... good for you!

• BMW = Bayerische Motoren Werke (Bavarian Motor Works)
• DSL = Digital Subscriber Line/Loop (not as exciting as I expected...)
• EPCOT = Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow
  
• GOP = Grand Old Party
• IBM = International Business Machines
• JPEG = Joint Photographic Experts Group
  
• Konami = Kozuki, Nakama, Matsuda, & Ishihara (the company's founders)
• NASCAR = National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing
• NASDAQ = National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations
• PDA = Personal Digital Assistant (so that's what the A stands for!)
• RSS = Really Simple Syndication
• SWAT = Special Weapons And Tactics
• URL = Uniform Resource Locator
• USA PATRIOT Act = Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (wow...)

There must be some cool ones I'm missing...

And here's an odd tidbit... the longest abbreviation, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is Нииомтплабопармбетзелбетрабсбомонимонконотдтехстромонт.  The 54-letter Cyrillic abbreviation stands for "The laboratory for shuttering, reinforcement, concrete and ferroconcrete operations for composite-monolithic and monolithic constructions of the Department of the Technology of Building-assembly operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for building mechanization and technical aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

Title Sequences

I noted an interesting passage from Woody Allen on Woody Allen, which consists of an interview of the director about his work.

I had done some fancy titles on Bananas and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex..., and then I thought to myself, 'It's silly to spend money on titles! It's a very American stupid habit. I'm going to get the cheapest titles I can, just a plain announcement.' And I picked the typeface that I liked, and I never changed it after that. Because, what do titles mean? It's just simple information... Now they've been on fifteen films, or something. And I think it's just fine. It costs no money at all. It really got out of hand in the United States. There was a time during the sixties, when the titles got to be like The Pink Panther. The producers would put aside $250,000 for the title sequence. It would be one of the main things in the movie.

Indeed, the title sequences on many of Woody Allen's movies starting from Annie Hall in 1977 are nothing more than plain text.  But this passage got me thinking about what purpose title sequences really serve - whether or not they are really only giving 'simple information.'  There are many impressive title sequences in movies today, but is it really worth all the time and money put into it?

The first thing to think about is whether title sequences are regarded as entirely separate from the movie they are in, or whether they can work to actually enhance the movie.  Fortunately for my research, I ran across the website The Art of the Title and the YouTube Channel MovieTitleSequences, which are big repositories of title sequences for movies and TV shows.

After watching handfuls of title sequences, I've come to believe that in most cases, title sequences - even Woody Allen's simple ones - enhance the movie in some way.  To what extent the movie is enhanced is widely variable, and there are definitely some cases in which the amount of money spent on making a title sequence is questionable.

Many movies nowadays dive right into the action and just show the opening credits over the film itself, without a title sequence.  But a title sequence can be used to set the tone of the film before the action starts.  Let's take a look at some title sequences to show you what I mean.

Raging Bull's title sequence is much like those of Woody Allen and is pretty representative of what title sequences as a whole do.  In addition to displaying the opening credits, it serves as kind of an overture to the movie.  We see this sequence before getting into the film's plot, so we know that the movie is in black-and-white and is about boxing.  In a way, the title sequence lets the audience get relaxed and into the movie groove, much like an overture of a musical would.

Sweeney Todd's intricate title sequence does a good job at setting the tone for the movie, and a lot of time and money must have been spent making this.

But does this title sequence set the tone for Sweeney Todd better than this simpler sequence introduces Tim Burton's earlier movies Edward Scissorhands and Batman?

It isn't always the case that the title sequence comes right at the beginning of the movie.  The James Bond series, for example, is infamous for starting with an elaborate action sequence that is oftentimes only marginally related to the plot, then making a segue into the title sequence.  Here is an example of one such title sequence, from Goldfinger (though most of the Bond movies have very similar such sequences).

Now in the case of James Bond movies and many other movies that have a title sequence inserted after an opening scene, I've personally found myself kind of bored by the title sequences.  Unless the title sequences are in themselves entertaining, I get a little annoyed that the action was interrupted.  In fact, when watching Bond movies on my own, I tend to fast-forward through the opening credits.

This leads me to the case in which a title sequence is nice enough to be a work of art on its own.  This is the kind of title sequence that I wouldn't really ever mind, whether it is at the beginning of the movie or after an opening sequence.  It should still be kept in mind, though, how much these sequences are actually worth it from a perspective of how much time and money is put into it.  Here is a recent example, from Spiderman 2.

And another one from Catch Me If You Can.

I don't know though.  These kinds of title sequences have always struck me as kind of gimmicky.  Neither of them (visually) really says anything about the movie, other than the fact that both movies have exorbitant budgets.  I guess using simpler title sequences wouldn't have worked here only (and I hate to say this) because they wouldn't have been 'Hollywood' enough.

A very elaborate title sequence that does work really well, however, is the opening to Se7en.

It is visually stunning and is effective at setting the tone of the movie.  Sadly, its effectiveness also means that it has basically been copied to death since the movie came out in 1995.

So there are some of my thoughts on opening title sequences, and all the research on this has been really interesting.  I'll definitely pay more attention to these sequences in the future.

Celebration!

The Patriots-Cardinals game on Sunday was kind of pathetic, but this snow angel touchdown celebration by Wes Welker was one of the high points.  Gotta love the commentating.

And here is an interesting article I found on the name "Jesus"

On Thursday, Christians will celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Was the Christian Messiah the first to have that name, or were there a lot of Jesuses running around back then?

Many people shared the name. Christ's given name, commonly Romanized as Yeshua, was quite common in first-century Galilee. (Jesus comes from the transliteration of Yeshua into Greek and then English.) Archaeologists have unearthed the tombs of 71 Yeshuas from the period of Jesus' death. The name also appears 30 times in the Old Testament in reference to four separate characters—including a descendent of Aaron who helped to distribute offerings of grain (2 Chronicles 31:15) and a man who accompanied former captives of Nebuchadnezzar back to Jerusalem (Ezra 2:2).

The long version of the name, Yehoshua, appears another few hundred times, referring most notably to the legendary conqueror of Jericho (and the second most famous bearer of the name). So why do we call the Hebrew hero of Jericho Joshua and the Christian Messiah Jesus? Because the New Testament was originally written in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic. Greeks did not use the sound sh, so the evangelists substituted an S sound. Then, to make it a masculine name, they added another S sound at the end. The earliest written version of the name Jesus is Romanized today as Iesous. (Thus the crucifix inscription INRI: "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum," or "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.")

The initial J didn't come until much later. That sound was foreign to Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Not even English distinguished J from I until the mid-17th century. Thus, the 1611 King James Bible refers to Jesus as "Iesus" and his father as "Ioseph." The current spelling likely came from Switzerland, where J sounds more like the English Y. When English Protestants fled to Switzerland during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I, they drafted the Geneva Bible and used the Swiss spelling. Translators in England adopted the Geneva spelling by 1769.

In contrast, the Old Testament was translated directly from the original Hebrew into English, rather than via Greek. So anyone named Yehoshua or Yeshua in the Old Testament became Joshua in English. Meanwhile, the holy book of the Syrian Orthodox church, known as the Syriac Bible, is written in Aramaic. While its Gospels were translated from the original Greek, the early scribes recognized that Iesous was a corruption of the original Aramaic. Thus, the Syriac text refers to Yeshua.

Bonus Explainer: What was Jesus' last name? It wasn't Christ. Contemporaries would have called him Yeshua Bar Yehosef or Yeshua Nasraya. (That's "Jesus, son of Joseph" or "Jesus of Nazareth.") Galileans distinguished themselves from others with the same first name by adding either "son of" and their father's name, or their birthplace. People who knew Jesus would not have called him Christ, which is the translation of a Greek word meaning "anointed one."

Merry Christmas!

Ulysses

This has got to be one of the most unique and awesome pieces of writing in existence.  It is from James Joyce's Ulysses, within a chapter that is told entirely in the form of questions and responses, and is about two guys urinating next to each other.

Were they indefinitely inactive?

At Stephen's suggestion, at Bloom's instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom's, then Stephen's, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.

Similarly?

The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom's longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter, who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen's higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.

So Basically...

After much pain and suffering, I've at last found a username that nobody's yet taken.  Victorious!  But now comes the tough part - making a blog that is both interesting and original.  Where do we start?

Mainly, I will be posting things that I find cool or interesting.  There is no need to bore the reader with uncool or uninteresting updates on my essentially trivial and mundane personal life, and I apologize in advance if this approach results in a flavorless, monotonous blog, but I swear that I'll try to maintain an eclectic spicegroove over here.

Anyway, the start of winter is finally official!  To ring in the new season (and the coming year), here is a pleasant little video of Borski:

One more (not Borski):