Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

July 1936: The U.S. is sweltering. The July 1936 heat wave was one of the most intense and deadly heat waves in US history, particularly impacting the Midwest and Great Lakes regions. It was a period of extreme high temperatures and drought conditions, contributing to the Dust Bowl era.

The heat wave of 1936 that broke all records in 15 states during July and August was the final blow to many midwestern farmers who had fought against economic hardship and hellfire heat and drought.

Central Park in New York City hit 106°F on July 9. New York City, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia declared public beaches open all night for the duration, promising not to arrest anyone. City swimming pools lengthened their hours.

Nationally, an estimated 5,000 people died from the heat, or U.S. Department of Commerce lists 4,678 deaths attributed to excessive heat, or the international disasters database EM-DAT lists 1,693 deaths for US & Canada. Nobody really knows other than a lot of people died due to excessive heat. The heat was accentuated due to a prolonged drought that was affecting the region, and poor farming methods which left little vegetation to help mitigate the hot temperatures. In Illinois, many locations saw peak temperatures in excess of 110 degrees at the height of the heat wave, and 121 degrees as far north as Steele, North Dakota with all-time high temperature records established during this period.


July and August 1936, as chronicled in detail by extreme weather historian Christopher Burt in a 2018 write-up at Weather Underground.

As Burt put it:

"All in all, nothing comparable to the heat wave(s) of the summer of 1936 has before or since occurred in the contiguous U.S. It is hard to imagine how people fared without home air conditioning, although there were some rudimentary forms available, such as swamp coolers. Movie theaters were one of the few places where air conditioning provided at least some temporary relief."

Note: swamp coolers only work where the humidity is very low. Although it's better than nothing. Very few had the luxury of air conditioning.

In 2015, researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia determined that the 1936 heat wave was born of the ocean: specifically, high surface sea temperatures. Areas of the Pacific from the Gulf of Alaska to Los Angeles had warmed in tandem with the Bay of Fundy between Maine and Nova Scotia.
“Together they reduced spring rainfall and created perfect conditions for scorching hot temperatures to develop in the heart of the U.S.,” noted Markus Donat of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.


July 9, 1955: Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets became the 1st rock ‘n’ roll single to reach #1 on the US Billboard chart. It’s credited with bringing rock ‘n’ roll into mainstream culture around the world.





In the mid-1950s, Northrop developed the concept for a nuclear-powered supersonic seaplane, Convair Model 23B. The long fuselage was designed to separate the crew from the reactor in the rear, minimizing exposure to radiation. ADM Arleigh Burke was a proponent of nuclear seaplanes but they never got beyond the concept phase. The Navy gave up on nuclear-powered aircraft in December 1959.




UK #1 on this day in 1964: The Animals - House Of The Rising Sun




July 9, 1982: TRON was released. A groundbreaking blend of concept and digital effects, and a film that launched the career of actor Jeff Bridges, the story of how it came to be is as thrilling as a Light Cycle...


In 1976, animator Steven Lisberger came across the now-classic Atari video game Pong, and couldn’t stop playing it. Fascinated by the idea of computer-generated graphics, he had the idea for a movie set entirely within a digital-based world. Lisberger Studios created a 30-second showreel animation of a character called Tron and, after having a hit with animation Animalympics, Lisberger used the profits to develop Tron into an idea for a full-blown animated movie with co-producer Donald Kushner.

Development of Tron was mentioned in Variety, catching the attention of computer scientist Alan Kay. He got in touch with Lisberger and Kushner, offered his services as consultant, and convinced the two men to use real CGI instead of hand-drawn animations.

Lisberg and Kushner pitched their groundbreaking idea round Hollywood and, after being turned down by MGM and Columbia, Disney invested in a test reel. Impressed with what they saw, Disney greenlit Tron with Lisberger as director and a $17m budget.

Computer programmer Bonnie MacBird worked at Lisberger Studios and had experience in film, having worked as a story executive at Universal Pictures. As such, Lisberger hired her to pen the screenplay for Tron. She wrote a few drafts, and it was finished by Lisberger.

MacBird did make some major contributions, like fleshing out the title character and introducing religious themes. And she went on to marry Alan Kay, after they met on the film. MacBird’s first choice for the lead, video game developer Kevin Flynn, was Robin Williams. Lisberger felt him too comedic and instead cast Thunderbolt and Lightfoot star Jeff Bridges in the role.

Acting legend Peter O’Toole was approached to play ENCOM VP Dillnger/Sark, but insisted he wanted to play Tron. In a meeting with Lisberger, O’Toole reportedly stood on a chair and shouted "I can do this!" He said he wanted Tron on his tombstone next to Lawrence of Arabia. Instead, Lisberger turned to RSC-trained David Warner to play the part of Dillinger/Sark, and Bruce Boxleitner (best known for TV hit How The West was won) as Tron/Alan Bradley.

In casting the main female role of Dr Lora Baines/Yori, many actresses auditioned. The most well-known was Blondie singer Debbie Harry, but young American actress Cindy Morgan was hired, being cast just days before production began.

TRON is a debugging command in old dialects of the BASIC programming language. It is an abbreviation of TRace ON. This lead to speculation that is where the title of the film came from. Lisberger said that wasn’t the case, it was merely a shortening of "electronic." Despite its futuristic theme, Lisberger also took inspiration from classic literature. He based some of the narrative beats on Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland.

The character name Alan Bradley was based on real life. Allen-Bradley was a company that created factory automation equipment founded in 1903. It was purchased by Rockwell Automation after the film came out.

The cyberspace scenes were filmed in black and white, and the colour manually composited on top afterwards using rotoscoping. Due to the darkened set, Bridges set he felt "bombarded by color" every time he left the soundstage. The actors’ costumes were completely white with black lines drawn on them. This was done to allow the colour to be manually rotoscoped (drawn) on them afterwards.

Almost every shot in the film where we see an actor against a CGI background is static. This is because the technology did not yet exist to adapt the background’s perspective while the camera moved. Often the tripods were nailed to the floor. To make up for this, Lisberger and Director of Photography Bruce Logan made sure to have a lot of animation in the shots that were all CGI. Lisberger called it "a cornucopia of camera movement."

Lisberger wanted British rock group Supertramp to work on the score, but they were unavailable. Instead, Wendy Carlos (famous for her synthesised scores on Stanley Kubrick films) was brought in. Carlos' music was recorded using the Moog modular synthesizer. This was the same instrument she used on her groundbreaking Switched-On Bach album from 1968, and her score for A Clockwork Orange.

Sound designer Frank Serafine processed noises through a Fairlight digital synthesizer to make electronic sounds. The Master Control Program rumble came from Lisberger’s cat purring. And screeching monkeys were used for the noise of the Identity Discs.

When Disney first greenlit the film, many of their in-house animators refused to work on it, fearing that computers would eventually put them out of work. That wasn’t the case entirely, but CGI certainly reduced the number of hand animators employed by Hollywood. Instead of animators, Lisberger had to find other means to design the film. He brought in famed concept artist Syd Mead and French artist Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud to work on costumes, storyboards, and other design work.

Moebius moved to L.A. for three months to work on the film and was mostly given free design reign. He designed Yori’s head cover and, though it gave Cindy Morgan blisters, she said “who's going to question Moebius?”



The famous glow of the costumes was achieved through backlight animation. The shot was photographed normally, then the black lines made transparent. Finally, a light source was shone through the transparent elements, creating the effect.

Four animation studios worked on the film: Magi Synthavision, Digital Effects Inc., Information International, Inc., and Robert Abel and Associates. A TV monitor was set up with a telephone wire, meaning Lisberger could see what they produced – and give feedback – in minutes.

The technology was state-of-the-art for the time. To put it in perspective though, the main computer used for rendering the movie’s digital effects had 2MB of memory and 330MB of storage. Roughly 75,000 frames were used in the animation/compositing process, an astronomical number back then. In the end, there were 1100 special effects shots in the film, 900 involving actors interacting with the digital environment.

One of the famous visuals is the flicker we sometimes see, making it look like the world is glitching. This wasn’t intentional, it was caused by film speeds being used inconsistently. Lisberger ended up adding more to make it seem like it was done on purpose.

In the first act, we see Flynn playing the game he invented – Space Paranoids. The game looks very much like games generated by 3-D graphics engines, even though these wouldn’t be invented for another 10 years.

The programmers' cubicles at ENCOM were filmed with the programmers’ cubicles in the Walt Disney Technology Group. A matte painting was added to make the area look a lot bigger than it actually was.

The moment after RAM’s death, Tron appears from between two walls covered in circuitry. Ather than creating circuits, the walls were covered in the Allies’ World War II reconnaissance shots of Dresden, Germany.

Lisberger didn’t want the film to include violent imagery, which is why characters throw flying discs at one another. The discs were actually frisbees, which animators rotoscoped. And Lisberger hired Frisbee champion Sam Schatz to train the actors.

The light cycles were mostly computer-generated elements. The back of each bike is noticeably less curved than the front. This is because it reduced the power needed to render them. Because the technology of the time could only generate static images, the light cycles had to be moved for each individual frame by entering coordinates. 600 coordinates were needed for 4 seconds of film. This had to be done by hand.

The security door where Flynn, Alan, and Lora sneak into ENCOM is a real radiation door at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. When carrying out research for the film, Lisberger toured the laboratory and, when he saw the door, wrote it into the film. The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory housed the largest laser in the world at the time, and the laser sequences for the film were all shot there. According to reports, no other movie has been allowed to film there since.

At the time Tron was released, Head of Advertising at Disney was Cardon Walker. He apparently (and bizarrely) didn’t believe in marketing. Where Universal pumped $10m into marketing for E.T. the same year, Tron was given a very small $500,000 budget. As a result, the film underperformed at the box office. On its initial run in 1982, Tron took under $50m at the box office, and some of its $17m budget was written off. Disney released the film again in 1983, and it again under-performed.

The film seemed like a surefire winner for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars, but was disqualified from being nominated. Instead, E.T. won the statue, and Lisberger later said "The Academy thought we cheated by using computers."

Finally… Disney weren’t bowled over by the box office response, but video games based on Tron fared better. Tomy released a handheld arcade game called Space Turbo in 1985. It was inspired by Tron’s light cycles, and was a huge hit at the time.



July 9, 1999: the cracker-jack thriller ARLINGTON ROAD keeps that alarmist spirit alive, is released.




July 7-10, 2000: South Minneapolis, Minnesota and the surrounding Twin Cities metropolitan area experiences significant flooding. This event is remembered as one of Minnesota's most extreme flash floods in the past 200 years.


Torrential Rains Douse South Metro


Mr. Intellectual...



To be fair to Charles this was a lot of money in the late 1960s when he was probably earning around $150/day to help the CIA and ARPA strategize how to eliminate troublesome Thai citizens. Take note of the "C. A. Murray" at the bottom of the AIR Advisory Panel in the second screenshot below.

AIR is an acronym for the American Institutes for Research, a CIA contractor in that period. They published a white paper in 1967 in which they argued the U.S. must "interdict the flow of competing inputs," aka "assassinating key spokesmen."


American Institute for Research - Thailand Controversy

First two text screenshots are pages 100-101 from Eric Wakin's "Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand" (1998)


Thought this was a sacrifice to the gods, but they were able to retrieve the body. She was likely taking a selfie.


Autopsy reveals cause of death for Brazilian tourist who fell into volcano


Welcome to America. A Briton's perspective of "middle-class" American camping lifestyle...


LOL. When I was doing the RV thing with my kids in the southwest at some of the RV parks I'd pull into I'd swear most of them (Not retirees) were super multi-millionaires. I must be in the wrong racket.

Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron.

Terence McKenna