March 5, 2024: Answers
Hey, everyone.
Here’s the key to yesterday’s list.
1. ‘I will call one of them Tina White and the other Sandra Irving,’ said author Stephen King when describing - in his bestselling memoir On Writing - the two often-bullied elementary school classmates he used as the basis for the iconic title character of what debut novel, originally released in 1974?
· Carrie – The full quote:
‘POW! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea … Before I had completed two pages, ghosts of my own began to intrude; the ghosts of two girls, both dead, who eventually combined to become Carrie White. I will call one of them Tina White and the other Sandra Irving.’
‘Tina went to Durham Elementary School with me. There is a goat in every class, the kid who is always left without a chair in musical chairs, the one who winds up wearing the KICK ME HARD sign, the one who stands at the end of the pecking order. This was Tina. Not because she was stupid (she wasn't), and not because her family was peculiar (it was) but because she wore the same clothes to school every day.’
‘Sandra Irving lived about a mile-and-a-half from the house where I grew up. Mrs. Irving hired me one day to help her move some furniture … I was struck by the crucifix hanging in the living room, over the Irving couch. If such a gigantic icon had fallen when the two of them were watching TV, the person it fell on would almost certainly have been killed.’
The whole section was excerpted in The Guardian back in 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/04/stephen-king-how-i-wrote-carrie-horror
It was originally just meant to be a short story for Cavalier, a now very Playboy-ish men’s magazine he was a frequent contributor to in the 1970s, before he made it big. However, by the time he was satisfied with the ending, it rounded out to nearly 100 pages, and shortening it, in his mind, would compromise the plot. So, instead, he decided to convert it into a novel, and tack on another 100 or so pages. It was published in that form by Doubleday on April 5, 1974, and never ran in Cavalier.
2. Historically used by NASA as a training ground for its Mars rovers, the driest place on earth – with an average of just .03 inches of rainfall per year – is located near the small city of Arica in the Chilean portion of what ~41,000 square mile hot desert?
· Atacama Desert – Even still, its average temperature is a lot lower than that most other hot deserts, given its altitude. The coastal regions sit at about 5,000 above sea level, with some of its inland peaks reaching as high as 6,500 feet. Its average year-round temperature pretty consistently hangs around the 60-degree Fahrenheit mark, with temperatures during the summer months (January-March) peaking at around 85 F.
It’s also not particularly large compared to its contemporaries either - ~41,000 sq. miles is only good for about 25th overall. The biggest of the group, the Sahara, is 3.6 million square miles total, while the second largest, the Great Australian, is ~1.1. The Arabian Desert is a close third at ~900,000.
Its rocky terrain – which is also reddish, coincidentally - was what originally made the area appealing to NASA back in the early 1990s, but in our era, the desert is primarily used as a test site for instruments designed to analyze rock samples on the surface of Mars, since their geologies are similar.
3. In every single game he played over the course of his 15-year professional career, basketball legend Michael Jordan wore, underneath his team-issued NBA shorts – during his time with both the Chicago Bulls and Washington Wizards - his ‘lucky’ practice shorts from what alma mater, with whom he won the 1982 NCAA Championship?
· University of North Carolina – To keep them hidden, he was forced to wear much longer and baggier shorts than were standard issue at the time, and before long, many of his teammates were doing the same. Once the Bulls had become a dynasty in the mid 90s, most players around the league had copied their style, and the rest is history. Nobody wears short shorts anymore.
Nostalgically wearing some college equipment under your pro uniform, on the other hand, hasn’t become commonplace in the years since, but former Carolina Panthers and New England Patriots receiver Brandon LaFell (2010-2018), former Tampa Bay Buccaneers running back Leonard Fournette, and current Bucs middle linebacker Devin White, each of whom are LSU alums, all openly wore – and still wear, in White’s case - their purple, yellow, and gold college pads under their jerseys.
4. Originally given the working title Hunter, what 1987 Oscar-nominated sci-fi action hit was, until the story was debunked in the early 2000s, popularly believed to have been inspired by a joke that the next logical step for the Rocky Balboa franchise to take after the boxer’s win over Soviet champion Ivan Drago in series’ fourth installment, would be to match him up against an alien?
· Predator - The joke’s exact origin point is lost to history, but the most reputable mention came in the 25th chapter of the 2005 biography of Predator’s eventual star called Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In any case, the whole thing has since been debunked many times over, including by Predator’s writers, brothers Jim and John Thomas, who claim they finished the script they originally titled ‘Hunter’ in 1984 – a year before Rocky IV hit theaters. The script was optioned in early 1985, and shooting began in 1986. So, the timeline doesn’t quite add up.
The brothers went through their actual inspiration in a 2011 interview with entertainment news site Gamesradar:
‘We had an idea about doing a story about a brotherhood of hunters who came from another planet to hunt all kinds of things…’ but eventually, they ‘picked one hunter who was going to hunt the most dangerous species – man.’
‘Obviously, he wasn’t a game hunter. He was in this for trophies. It has the same implications for his kind and his society as it does on our world. We were trying to convey that it had high meaning for him.’
‘We’ve always had an interest in mythology… There’ve always been creatures like the Predator. There’s the Cyclops, the Minotaur, Goliath, the Grendel in Beowulf. They always represent the darkness.’
As for the Predator’s iconic appearance, that has no direct comparison. The elaborate costume was an original design of special effects artist Stan Winston, who’d just come off working on the designs for the title monsters in James Cameron’s Aliens. Famed Belgian martial artist and actor Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varenberg, or Jean Claude Van Damme, was originally chosen wear the suit, but after having some creative differences with director Joel Silver, he later left the project, and was ultimately replaced by 7’2 professional mime Kevin Peter Hall.
5. Founded in Metzingen, Germany in 1923, what eponymous luxury fashion house – both of whose primary brands are named after its controversial founder - issued, in September 2011, a long-awaited apology for the company’s use of slave labor to manufacture uniforms for the Nazi Wehrmacht and SS in the 1930s and 40s?
· Hugo Boss - Boss opened his first clothing company in the small Swabian city of Metzingen in 1923, this one specializing in men’s shirts, sportswear, and jackets. His namesake company, which he founded a year later, got the contract to produce uniforms for the infamous Brownshirt paramilitary group (SA), the Schutzstaffel (SS), and the Hitler Youth in 1928, three years before he personally became a card-carrying member of the Party. They remained one of the country’s leading clothing manufactures for the duration of the war, and only stopped producing uniforms for the Wehrmacht and SS once the Allies invaded in 1945.
After the war, Boss was branded a collaborator by a German court, and judged to have been both a ‘supporter and beneficiary of National Socialism.’ He was subsequently stripped of his right to vote in German elections, personally fined 100,000 Reichsmarks, and barred from running or in any way managing his namesake company. Naturally he appealed the decision, but that only managed to bump down the tag placed on his name from ‘activist,’ to merely ‘follower.’ He was forced to hand over control of the company to his son-in-law Eugene Holy, who ultimately led their transformation from a military/work uniform producer to a luxury clothing brand, beginning in the 1950s, when they introduced their first line of men’s suits. Boss didn’t live to see any of that, though. He died in 1948.
When exactly the company became fully aware of the depth of his involvement with the regime can’t ever been known for sure, but they finally started to at least try to make amends for it in the late 1990s, when they paid into a state-sponsored reparations fund for war-era forced laborers and their families. The statement they put out in 2011, along with an independent report on the company’s history, was less an apology for its former contributions to the Nazi war machine, but rather a statement of ‘profound regret to those who suffered harm or hardship at the factory run by Hugo Boss under National Socialist rule.’
6. The exact origin of the nickname now lost to history, the so-called ‘funny bone’ is not actually a bone at all, but rather a nerve that shares part of its name with what smallest of the three primary arm bones?
· Ulna - The Ulnar Nerve, its called. It starts up in the armpit and extends all the way down to the tips of the pinky and ring fingers, but the only place it’s meaningfully exposed is the elbow, where the ulna and radius meet. It's one of three primary nerves in the arm, along with the radial - which also shares its name with an arm bone (radius) – and median nerve.
Again, exactly how and why it got its colloquial name is lost to history, but, it runs alongside the humerus (shoulder to the elbow), and you get the impulse to laugh when you bang it right on the sweet spot. It was probably inevitable that somebody would come up with a name like that.
Have a great rest of your week, everybody.
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