February 6, 2024: Answers
Hey, everyone.
Here’s the key for yesterday’s list.
1. Derived from a Latin word meaning ‘to trust, believe, and confide in,’ ‘Fido’ has, for the last 150 years, been a name synonymous with dogs because of its association with what iconic 19th century president, who was often accompanied by his yellow, floppy-eared, nationally beloved mixed-breed dog of the same name during his well-publicized campaign for the office in 1860?
· Abraham Lincoln – Fido was a minor celebrity in Springfield for more than a decade, beginning in the early 1850s, when the Lincoln’s first adopted him. Abe was known to bring him along when he ran errands around town, and while he was at the courthouse or the store or the barbershop or whatever, Fido would patiently wait outside the front door, and excitedly play with the people – particularly the young kids – and other dogs who passed by until they were ready for their next adventure.
While his relationship with Lincoln was certainly played up by the campaign team to cultivate the ‘common man’ image that still sticks to him today, Fido really was a beloved member of the family, not just a prop or mascot. Even still, he never lived at the White House. Despite his love for people, he was very apparently uncomfortable around all the rowdy crowds at campaign events, so for his own sake, the family decided it was best that he stay behind in the small, friendly confines of Springfield with a friend and caretaker.
He never lived with the Lincolns again, but in his own time and now, he’s nevertheless considered to be an official presidential pet. He even had an official photo taken. Once it ran - along with a short profile - in national magazines and newspapers leading up to Lincoln’s 1865 funeral, the name started to catch on around the country.
It’s specifically derived from the Latin word ‘Fidelis,’ which also features in the Marine Corps’ familiar motto ‘Semper Fidelis,’ meaning ‘Always Faithful.’
2. Home to a combined ~5.5 million people, the national capital cities of Austria, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia are all directly situated along the path of what second longest European River, known as Donau, Duna, Dunav, and Dunaj, respectively, in the official languages of those countries?
· Danube River – It begins in the Bavarian Black Forest in southwest Germany, then flows southeast through the Balkan Peninsula, and fittingly empties - around 1700 miles later - into the Black Sea.
The capital cities along its path:
Vienna, Austria
Budapest, Hungary
Belgrade, Serbia
Bratislava, Slovakia
There are also five others near or adjacent to the river’s basin:
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Zagreb, Croatia
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Sofia, Bulgaria
Bucharest, Romania
3. Formerly known as Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web, the multi-billion dollar web services provider Yahoo! ultimately takes its familiar name from that of an ‘insolent, abject, and cruel’ race of primitive humans in what eponymous Jonathan Swift satire, originally published in 1726?
· Gulliver’s Travels – It was coined at the beginning of Gulliver’s fourth voyage, shortly after arriving on the home island of a sentient species of graceful and intelligent horses known as Houyhnhnms. They share the land with the Yahoos, who Swift describes as ‘detestable creatures… an abominable animal, a perfect human figure… savages.’
Gulliver first comes upon them:
‘…after my landing, feeding upon roots, and the flesh of some animals, which I afterwards found to be that of asses and dogs, and now and then a cow, dead by accident or disease. They were all tied by the neck with strong withes fastened to a beam; they held their food between the claws of their fore feet, and tore it with their teeth.’
Because Gulliver too is a human, the Houyhnhnms originally mistake him for one of their unpleasant neighbors:
‘[The Houyhnhnms’ leader] was convinced (as he afterwards told me) that I must be a YAHOO; but my teachableness, civility, and cleanliness, astonished him; which were qualities altogether opposite to those animals. He was most perplexed about my clothes, reasoning sometimes with himself, whether they were a part of my body: for I never pulled them off till the family were asleep, and got them on before they waked in the morning… He was extremely curious to know "from what part of the country I came, and how I was taught to imitate a rational creature; because the YAHOOS (whom he saw I exactly resembled in my head, hands, and face, that were only visible), with some appearance of cunning, and the strongest disposition to mischief, were observed to be the most unteachable of all brutes.’
Likewise, the OED now defines a yahoo as: ‘A rude, noisy, or violent person.’ The company’s name doesn’t really have any real connection to that meaning, though. Instead, it’s an acronym for ‘Yet Another Hierarchically Officious Oracle,’ with ‘Hierarchical’ representing the site’s original subcategory-heavy layout, ‘Officious’ representing the fact that most of their early users who were cubicled office workers, and ‘Oracle’ like the ancient Greek seer Pythia, who provided her visitors with prophecies and the wisdom of the Olympian god Apollo.
The name was officially changed from ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the Internet’ to Yahoo in April of 1994, three months after it was originally founded on the campus of Stanford University, where its creators Jerry Yang and David Filo were studying at the time.
4. In January of 1972, nearly six years after Marvel debuted Black Panther, the first ever black comic book superhero, rival industry giant DC Comics introduced their first black hero in the second volume of the 87th issue named for what colorful order of superheroes, each of whose members get their powers from a magic ring?
· Green Lantern (Corps) – The first Green Lantern, Alan Scott, made his debut all the way back in 1940, in the opening feature of All Americans #16.* The character was reimagined nearly two decades later as Hal Jordan, perhaps the most recognizable of the thousands of Green Lanterns in the Green Lantern Corps (introduced in 1959), at least until head-strong Detroit native John Stewart was recruited by Jordan himself in the first of three features in Green Lantern #87.
Another character has a claim to the distinction of being DC Comics’ first black superhero, however: the young amateur boxer Malcolm Duncan, who made his first appearance just about a year before Stewart in 1970’s Teen Titans #26. He saves the title heroes (who, for one reason or another, have temporarily become pacifists) from a street gang called the Hell Hawks by beating their leader in a boxing match, subsequently earning him an invitation to join the team. Because he doesn’t actually get any special abilities of his own until 1976, when he takes up the mantle of ‘The Guardian’ and his special ‘exosuit,’ Stewart is generally considered to be the DC’s first black Superhero.
Neither Duncan nor Stewart has ever been portrayed in a live action movie to date, although the latter has featured into quite a few animated series of the last two decades, most notably Cartoon Network’s Justice League (2001-2004) and Justice League Unlimited (2004-2006), where he was voiced by Roger Cross.
*‘The Origin of Green Lantern,’ the first feature in All Americans #16, was written by Bill Finger, co-creator of Batman.
5. Made up of three chasing arrows in the shape of a Möbius strip, the now ubiquitous ‘Universal Recycling Symbol’ was originally created, in 1970, as an entry for an inaugural Earth Day design competition by Gary Anderson, a then 23-year-old architecture student at what prestigious American university?
· University of Southern California – The Container Corporation of America created the contest in the runup to the very first Earth Day, set to be held in April of 1970. Anderson’s iconic design was chosen from a group of more than 500 submissions nationwide, all created and sent in by high school and college kids. He told the story in a 2012 retrospective in The Financial Times:
‘I got my bachelor’s degree in 1971 and stayed on to do a master’s. It was around that time that I saw a poster advertising a design competition being run by the Container Corporation of America. The idea was to create a symbol to represent recycled paper – one of my college requirements had been a graphic design course so I thought I’d give it a go.
It didn’t take me long to come up with my design: a day or two. I almost hate to admit that now. But I’d already done a presentation on recycling waste water and I’d come up with a graphic that described the flow of water: from reservoirs through to consumption, so I already had arrows and arcs and angles in my mind. The problem with my earlier design was that it seemed flat, two-dimensional. When I sat down to enter the competition, I thought back to a field trip in elementary school to a newspaper office where we’d seen how paper was fed over rollers as it was printed. I drew on that image – the three arrows in my final sketch look like strips of folded-over paper. I drew them in pencil, and then traced over everything in black ink.
I think I found out I won the competition in a letter. Was I excited? Well, yes of course – but not that excited. I guess at that point in life I had an inflated sense of self-importance. It just seemed like, of course I would win! There was a monetary prize, though for the life of me I can’t remember how much it was…about $2,000?
Six or seven years after graduating, I was living in Saudi Arabia. I’d got bored and responded on a lark to a teaching job I saw advertised in The New York Times. One summer, I flew to Amsterdam for a holiday. I’ll never forget: when I walked off the plane, I saw my symbol. It was on a big, igloo-shaped recycling bin. And it was bigger than a beach ball! I was really struck. I hadn’t thought about that symbol for years and here it was hitting me in the face.
Neither Anderson nor the Container Corporation of America own the rights to the symbol – it’s been in the public domain ever since it was announced as the contest’s winner at the 1970 International Design Conference at Aspen in Colorado.
6. Though he himself didn’t invent the move, Michael Jackson debuted his signature ‘moonwalk’ dance toward the end* of a 1983 performance – during a TV special that would later earn an Emmy nomination - of what chart-topping, Diamond certified single, ranked 44th on Rolling Stone’s 2021 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time?
· ‘Billy Jean’ – Despite quite a few sensational claims and even some circumstantial evidence to the contrary, ‘Billie Jean’ wasn’t inspired by anything that personally happened to Michael Jackson himself. At least that’s what he always said when he was asked about it. In his 1988 autobiography Moonwalk, he wrote:
‘There never was a real Billie Jean. The girl in the song is a composite of people my brothers have been plagued with over the years. I could never understand how these girls could say they were carrying someone’s child when it wasn’t true.’ *
As for the Moonwalk dance – it made its mainstream debut on Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, a prerecorded NBC TV special that first aired on May 16, 1983. Around four minutes into the song, dressed in his signature black pants, black sequined jacket, silver shirt, and rhinestone white glove, he premiered his new take on what was then colloquially known as the ‘backslide,’ a move that had been performed in all sorts of variations for decades up to that point by everyone from jazz legend Cab Calloway, to Judy Garland (Meet Me in St. Louis), to Dick Van Dyke (Pat Boone Show), to the iconic French mime Marcel Marceau. Their spins on it nevertheless lacked what made Jackson’s the only one that’s endured into our era – style, and ease.
Exactly where he originally learned the backslide and who he learned it from remains a matter of debate, but some of his rumored teachers include New Edition’s Bobby Brown, Shalamar’s Jeffery Daniel, and professional dancer Geron ‘Cazper’ Canidate, who gave him a series of private lessons in 1981. In any case, none of the three have ever disputed that the dance - and the name, which he coined just after the Motown Show aired – were entirely unique to Jackson.
It was the only new song performed during what was essentially a greatest hits tribute show, which ended up going on to win the 1983 Emmy for Outstanding Variety, Music, or Comedy Program.
*In an interview with MTV eight years later, he went on: ‘They would hang around backstage doors, and any band that would come to town they would have a relationship with, and I think I wrote this out of experience with my brothers when I was little. There were a lot of Billie Jeans out there. Every girl claimed that their son was related to one of my brothers.’
Have a great rest of your week, everybody.
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