by Bill McLain
During the photo session, if a model is accidentally moved, it could mean that the entire scene, consisting of thousands of photos, would have to be redone. To avoid this problem, the camera, set, and models are usually clamped down except when shooting. During the making of King Kong, the miniature foliage was made of metal so it couldn’t easily be moved by accident.
A major problem with stop-action filming is that there are no “blurs.” If you film a man running down the street, there will be a slight blur on each frame. Although not noticed by the audience, the blur helps make the running motion smooth and realistic. In stop-action films, a running creature or person always seems to have jerky movements. This problem has been solved with computer animation, which can be used to blur frames to produce realistic movement.
In one scene of King Kong, a live primrose plant was used in a jungle scene. No one noticed that the plant was blooming. When the film was reviewed, a white primrose opened up in time-lapsed fashion. An entire day’s work had to be scrapped.
DID YOU KNOW?
Stagecoach wheels may go forward or backward, but one stagecoach turned Hollywood completely around: the 1939 film, Stagecoach.
Prior to that time, countless Westerns had been churned out by cheap studios, and no one in Hollywood took Westerns seriously. In 1939, director John Ford proved that a Western could be intelligent, entertaining, and profitable. The film started the era of quality Western films and launched the career of a young actor who had his first starring role in Stagecoach. The actor’s name was John Wayne.
Stagecoach is considered by many to be one of the top 50 films of all time. In 1939 it was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture, best actor, and best director. Since 1939 is usually considered to be the best year in film history, at least 15 of the films eventually became all-time classics. A few of the films released in 1939 included Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Of Mice and Men, Gunga Din, Beau Geste, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Although Stagecoach only won Oscars for best supporting actor and best score, it’s well worth the effort to rent the video and relish this classic movie.
More questions? Try these Web sites.
SHOOTING MARBLES
http://www.marbles.net/
If you scroll down and click on “Links,” you’ll find places to buy both homemade and machine-made marbles, links to sites devoted entirely to marble collecting, places to buy display cases for your marbles, tournament rules, and a list of more marble links if you click on “Friends places.” There are even links to sites for kids.
HOW STUFF WORKS
http://www.howstuffworks.com/index.htm
Have you ever wondered how a jet engine, a refrigerator, a thermos, or a cell phone works? If so, you’ll find the answer on this site. Just click on any one of the 25 categories to see numerous explanations of how things work.
DISCOVERY CHANNEL
http://www.discovery.com/
This is the official Web site of television’s Discovery Channel. Descriptions and video clips of Discovery Channel programs, science news, and fun and games for children are just a few of the many features on this site.
NOVA
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
This site features NOVA, a science and adventure program broadcast on public television stations (PBS) throughout the country. In addition to featuring programs already broadcast, it has a list of programs, television schedules, and a station finder to tell you where NOVA is shown in your area.
NIKOLA TESLA
http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless/tesla/tesla.html
Nikola Tesla was a genius who gave us alternating current, the fluorescent bulb, and neon lights. Tesla also demonstrated radio principles 10 years before Marconi, and gave us many other innovations. Although considered a genius by many, he was thought to be crazy by others.
In spite of his scientific contributions, Tesla said he had communicated with Mars, talked about death rays with a range of 250 miles, supposedly caused an earthquake for blocks around his laboratory, and created the largest ever man-made lightning bolt.
Today, Tesla is becoming recognized for the genius he was. This site is a “must read” if you’re interested in science. If you want even more information about Tesla and his inventions, go to:
http://inventors.about.com/science/inventors/library/bl/bl1_3t.htm. Scroll down and click on “Nikola Tesla.”
12
Sports and Games
How did they pick the name Yahtzee for the dice game? (You don’t need a yacht to play.)
It all started in the 1950s when a wealthy couple from Canada invented a game they could play aboard their yacht. Whenever the couple entertained guests on their yacht they taught them how to play the “yacht game.”
In 1956 the Canadian couple asked Edwin S. Lowe to make some samples of the game to be given as gifts. Lowe had amassed a fortune selling bingo games 30 years before.
Lowe liked the game so much that he offered to buy the rights. The originators of the game sold him the rights in return for 1,000 games they wanted to give to their friends. He eventually changed the name from the “Yacht game” to “Yahtzee.”
Initial sales of the game were very slow. It was difficult to try and explain Yahtzee in an advertisement. You almost had to play the game to understand its appeal. That gave Lowe a brilliant idea. He starting having Yahtzee parties, and word of mouth eventually led to substantial sales of the game. Today, more than 50 million Yahtzee games are sold each year.
Many variations have sprung up over the years such as Triple Yahtzee, which is similar to playing three Yahtzee games simultaneously, Painted Yahtzee, which is a colored version of the game, and Battle Yahtzee, which lets you earn a chance to throw your dice at your opponent’s combinations (this could easily start a battle).
You don’t have to own a yacht to have fun playing the “yacht game.”
FACTOIDS
An estimated 100 million people play Yahtzee every year.
One of the earliest board games was shaturanga, which was invented in the 6th century by an Indian philosopher. Many authorities believe it was the predecessor of chess.
The odds of rolling Yahtzee in one roll are 280,000 to 1.
Backgammon was played by Egyptians, who called it the game of 30 squares. The rules they played by are not known today. The ancient Romans called it the game of 12 lines. A variation of the game was played in Asia before A.D. 800.
DID YOU KNOW?
Edwin Lowe not only made Yahtzee popular but was responsible for one of the most popular games in the country today, bingo.
The game of bingo evolved from an Italian lottery game created in 1530, called Le Lotto. By 1700 the game had migrated to France and became an educational tool in Germany in the 1800s. It was used to teach children multiplication tables.
The American form of bingo has been called keno, kino, pokeno, beano, screeno, lucky, and fortune.
In 1929 people were playing beano at a carnival in Georgia. Each player had a piece of cardboard with numbers on it and placed a bean on the number if it was called out. The first player to fill a line on his card would yell “beano!”
Lowe had watched people playing beano and introduced the game to some of his friends. One of his players filled a line and was so excited that he yelled “Bingo!” instead of “Beano.” Lowe decided to call the game bingo and competitors paid him one dollar per year for rights to use the name.
A year later Lowe hired a Columbia University mathematics professor to find out if he could increase the quantity of number combinations. The elderly professor created 6,000 bingo cards with nonrepeating groups of numbers. He then went insane!
A Catholic priest asked Lowe to set up a game for him for a church function because by now Lowe was producing bingo cards day and night. Within a few years bingo had spread along the eastern seaboard and started moving west. By 1934 over 10,000 bingo games were played a week and by 1995
players spent a total of $88 million a year on bingo. It is estimated that in a single year players shouted “Bingo!” 1.2 billion times in the United States alone.
Whether bingo is played in a church hall, a lodge hall, or a Las Vegas casino, it looks as if it is here to stay.
Why do golf balls have dimples? (It’s a real drag.)
If you were going to design an object with a wonderful aerodynamic shape, you would never design a ball. Because a ball is round, air will flow smoothly around the front half of the ball when it’s in flight. However, as the air flows behind the ball it causes turbulence, which causes drag and slows the ball down. A slower ball means a shorter flight.
To be just a bit more scientific, when the air pressure in front of the ball is significantly higher than the air pressure behind the ball, drag occurs. A solution to the problems of an aerodynamic ball would be to somehow increase the pressure behind the ball so it approximates the pressure in front of the ball. Because of the dimples in a golf ball, air flowing around the ball is less turbulent, because each dimple creates a smaller area for the turbulence and there is much less drag.
To put it simply, dimples in a golf ball greatly reduce drag and the ball flies farther. In fact in some studies, a dimpled ball flew four times as far as a smooth ball.
If you’d like to prove this theory to yourself, it’s quite simple. Take a golf ball and sand it down until it’s perfectly smooth. Then tee off and see how far the ball travels. Then tee off again with a regular ball and see how much farther it goes.
FACTOIDS
The first recorded hole-in-one was hit by Tom Morris, Jr., in the 1868 Open Championship. The oldest golfer to score a hole-in-one was Otto Bucher. In 1985 he hit a hole-in-one at the La Manga golf course in Spain. He was 99 years old.
In 19th-century England, a line was scratched in the dirt as the starting line for race horses. A scratch line was also used in other races. Some competitors started at the line or “started from scratch,” while others were given a handicap and could start ahead of the scratch line. That’s the origin of the term “scratch,” meaning a zero handicap in golf.
The term “golf link” comes from an Old English word hlinc, meaning gently undulating land often next to the seashore. The Saint Andrews, Scotland, golf course originally had 22 holes but was later modified to have 18. Because the course ran along the shore, golfers would play nine holes in one direction (called “in”) and then play the remaining nine holes (called “out”) in the opposite direction. That’s where the terms “front nine” and “back nine” came from.
It’s interesting that golf spelled backward is flog. For some beginning golfers, flogging might seem better than the humiliation of not being able to hit the ball more than a few yards.
DID YOU KNOW?
Many golfers today become frustrated when they don’t hit the ball far enough. If that bothers them, it’s a good thing they don’t have to play with some of the earlier golf balls.
The very first golf ball was made of wood. It was soon replaced with the “feathery,” a ball made by tightly packing goose feathers into a sphere of horse or cow hide. Around 150 years ago, the feathery was replaced by the gutta-percha ball, or “guttie” for short. This ball was made from the rubber-like sap of various tropical trees. The problem was that it was very smooth and didn’t travel as far as the rough-surfaced feathery. Strangely enough, the ball seemed to improve with age as it became nicked through constant use.
Realizing the advantage of nicking, manufacturers began putting patterns into the ball such as the “bramble” pattern, which consisted of raised spherical bumps (remember, rough balls travel farther than smooth balls).
Around the turn of the century, a new ball took over the game. It had a one-piece rubber core wrapped in rubber thread and then covered with a gutta sphere. During this time people experimented with different patterns, and someone came up with the dimpled pattern that is still used today.
Manufacturers continued to experiment with new types of balls, using metal, cork, mercury, and other materials for the core. One such experiment used a compressed air core. It sounded good in theory, but there was a minor problem. If the temperature got too hot, the heat expanded the air core, and the ball exploded. As if golfers didn’t have enough to worry about.
Why do they pitch baseball overhand and softball underhand? (What about sideways?)
Softball was invented as a way for professional baseball players to practice during the winter. Because they couldn’t practice in ice and snow, they decided to play the game indoors. To accommodate the smaller playing area, they used a larger ball and put more players in the outfield.
Because they played indoors, there was no pitching mound. Had they used a mound and pitched in the normal way, the speed of the ball over such a short distance could hurt them. If they didn’t use a mound, they would get into bad habits so they would not do as well when playing on a regular playing field. Therefore, it became common for a manager or the coach to simply lob the ball underhand to the batter to get the game started. Eventually the team’s pitcher started throwing the ball underhand.
When softball gained popularity in the early 1930s, it became a summer sport as well and was moved outdoors. Because of the smaller field, a mound would have given the pitcher an advantage, so it wasn’t used. Pitchers were not allowed to use a windup and had to pitch underhand. In later years, the game of fast-pitch softball became popular and various methods of delivering the ball were invented such as the “windmill” and “slingshot” deliveries.
In professional baseball, much of the speed and control of the ball is determined by the power gained from a combination of the windup, the overhand throw, the movement off the mound, and the follow-through. The same amount of power typically cannot be generated by throwing the ball underhand.
Many people think that a professional pitcher must throw overhand. That’s not true. There is no rule that says the pitcher must throw overhand. Although not common, there have been major-league pitchers who threw both sidearm and underhand (called a “submarine” pitch). Juan Marichal, who played for the San Francisco Giants, threw overhand, sidearm, and underhand. In six seasons he won 20 games or more.
The difference between softball and hardball is not just the ball itself. Softball players come in all ages. Unlike baseball, which usually depends on raw strength and athletic ability, softball is more dependent on thinking about what to do and when to do it.
If you’re too young, or too old, or too much of a klutz to play hardball, you can probably find a softball game somewhere with teams made up of players who are too young, too old, and too klutzy.
FACTOIDS
Although the first women’s softball team was formed in 1895 in Chicago, Illinois, it wasn’t until 1996, just over 100 years later, that women’s fast-pitch softball debuted in the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia.
The great baseball player Ty Cobb never wore a number on his uniform. Ty Cobb retired from baseball before the custom of putting numbers on uniforms became a common practice in the late 1920s.
The first major-league baseball player to sign a million-dollar contract was Nolan Ryan in 1979. He signed a four-year contract with the Houston Astros for $4.5 million.
In 1938, Johnny Vander Meer, who played for the Cincinnati Reds, became the first and only pitcher to throw two consecutive no-hit games.
DID YOU KNOW?
There are countless stories about great and near-great baseball players, all usually focusing on their prowess as athletes. Yet there is one great ballplayer few people today have heard of, a player who was not only a tremendous athlete, but who had to overcome adversity that few of us face. His name was William Hoy, but he was known as “Dummy” Hoy.
William Hoy lost his hearing as a young child. In spite of his deafness he became a major-league baseball player, the first deaf player in the game’s history. He was small in size, only 5 feet 4 inches, but large in heart. He was a great fielder, and in one
game he threw out three base runners at home plate, a feat that has rarely been duplicated.
Because he could not hear the umpire call out balls and strikes, pitchers took advantage of him. So he asked his third-base coach to raise his left arm if the pitch was a ball and his right arm if it was a strike. That’s how Hoy knew what had been pitched to him. He also devised the “out” and “safe” signals. All of these signals are still used by umpires in today’s games.
In his rookie year, Hoy led the National League in stolen bases. In 1888, he set a fielding record that has not been broken yet. He also hit the first grand slam in the history of the American League.
The next time you watch a baseball game and see an umpire give a hand signal for a ball or strike, or for an out or safe, pause a moment and thank the little man with the big heart for adding so much to the game of baseball.
What are the meanings behind the rings on the Olympic flag … both number and colors? (A symbol of unity around the world.)
The Olympic rings, the official emblem of the Olympic Games, are five interlaced rings of blue, yellow, black, green, and red on a white background. The flag was designed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin in 1913. The Olympic rings represent five continents (Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe) and are interlaced to represent the union of these continents. At least one of the five colors is found in the flag of every nation in the world.
