Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality. -Nicolas de Chamfort, writer (6 Apr 1741-1794)
Good Morning Kitchen Tong Woman! I'll speak to your Grandfather about switching water feeds. Perhaps on Tuesday as today is pretty tight although I'll see what his schedule is like this morning. Must away as I'm hoping to take the first run at our income tax returns.
Hi again, Tinsel Town! Just had a long Skype session with Nadia in Zurich! Unfortunately Nana had just gone for a walk but Crusty was here to say hello. Off to shower. Cheers, Stinky Man!
I’m not going to be away Friday so will be here to welcome you when you come for the Storage Wars. Are you overnighting with us? If so, you’d of course be welcome. Cheers, Peter
From Bold: In 1888, George Eastman and his Eastman Kodak Company made his newly-invented camera available to the public and in so doing made photography "as convenient as a pencil:
"Instead, he got obsessed with chemistry. Back then photography was a
'wet' art, but Eastman, who craved a more portable process, read about
gelatin emulsions capable of remaining light-sensitive after drying.
Working at night, in his mother's kitchen, he began
to experiment with his own varieties. A natural-born tinkerer, Eastman
took less than two years to invent both a dry plate formula and a
machine that fabricated dry plates. The Eastman Dry Plate Company was
born. "More tinkering followed.
In 1884, Eastman invented roll film; four years later he came up with a
camera capable of taking advantage of that roll. In 1888, that camera
became commercially available, later marketed
under the slogan 'You press the button, we do the rest.'
The Eastman
Dry Plate Company had become the Eastman Company, but that name wasn't
quite catchy enough. Eastman wanted something stickier, something that
people would remember and talk about. One of
his favorite letters was K. In 1892, the Eastman Kodak Company was
born.
"In those early years, if
you would have asked George Eastman about Kodak's business model, he
would have said the company was somewhere between a chemical supply
house and a dry goods purveyor (if dry plates can
be considered dry goods). But that changed quickly. 'The idea gradually
dawned on me,' Eastman said, 'that what we were doing was not merely
making dry plates, but that we started out to make photography an
everyday affair.'
Or, as Eastman later rephrased
it, he wanted to make photography 'as convenient as a pencil' "And for the next hundred years, Eastman Kodak did just that."
Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Simon & Schuster, 2015
From A Curious Mind: "The first book of Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known
to us as Dr. Seuss, was rejected by twenty-seven publishers before it
was finally accepted by
Vanguard Press: "Being determined in the
face of obstacles is vital. Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss, is a great
example of that himself. Many of his forty-four books remain wild
bestsellers.
In 2013,
Green Eggs and Ham sold more than 700,000 copies in the United States (more than
Goodnight Moon); The Cat in the Hat sold more than 500,000 copies, as did
Oh, the Places You'll Go! and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.
And five more Dr. Seuss books each sold more than 250,000 copies.
That's eight books, with total sales of more than 3.5 million copies, in
one year (another eight Seuss titles
sold 100,000 copies or more). Theodor Geisel is selling 11,000 Dr.
Seuss books every day of the year, in the United States alone,
twenty-four years after he died. He has sold 600 million books worldwide
since his first book,
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was published in 1937. And as inevitable as Dr. Seuss's appeal seems now,
Mulberry Street was rejected by twenty-seven publishers before being accepted by Vanguard Press. ...
"The story of Geisel being
rejected twenty-seven times before his first book was published is often
repeated, but the details are worth relating. Geisel says he was
walking home, stinging from the book's twenty-seventh
rejection, with the manuscript and drawings for Mulberry Street
under his arm, when an acquaintance from his student days at Dartmouth
College bumped into him on the sidewalk on Madison Avenue in New York
City. Mike McClintock asked what Geisel was
carrying. 'That's a book no one will publish,' said Geisel. 'I'm
lugging it home to burn.' McClintock had just that morning been made
editor of children's books at Vanguard; he invited Geisel up to his
office, and McClintock and his publisher bought
Mulberry Street that day.
When the book came out, the legendary book reviewer for the
New Yorker, Clifton Fadiman, captured it in a single sentence:
'They say it's for children, but better get a copy for yourself and
marvel at the good Dr. Seuss's impossible pictures and the moral tale of
the little boy who exaggerated not wisely but
too well.' Geisel would later say of meeting McClintock on the street,
'[I]f I'd been going down the other side of Madison Avenue, I'd be in
the dry-cleaning business today. ...' A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life, Brian Grazer, Simon & Schuster, 2015
From
My Lobotomy by Howard Dully. Lobotomy, a procedure whereby a
sharp instrument such as an icepick was inserted through holes that were
drilled in the skull or through the eyesocket above the eye to sever
the connections between the frontal lobe and
the rest of the brain. Though thoroughly discredited by the 1970s, in
the late 1930s through the 1950s lobotomies became an increasingly
common treatment in America for mental illness: "Doctors at the time were
using many strange methods to treat patients who were depressed or
mentally ill. Psychiatrists used electrotherapy, where they ran varying
amounts of electricity through people's brains
and bodies. They used hydrotherapy, where they gave their patients
baths, douches, wet packs, steam, spritzers, and shots from hoses. ... A
German psychiatrist developed something called the 'electric shower.'
The patient was fitted into a helmet that gave
his brain a 'shower' of electricity. ...
"These doctors weren't just
doing experiments in dark basements somewhere, hidden from the American
Medical Association, or from the public eye. They were the subjects of
articles in magazines and newspapers that
applauded their efforts [including] Time, Newsweek, Scientific American,
Science Digest, and Reader's Digest. ...
"In 1935, visiting London, Dr. Walter Freeman witnessed a presentation
on chimpanzees whose frontal lobes had been operated on. No one knew why
exactly, but the monkeys all became passive and subdued after the
operation.
Another doctor attending the presentation was a Portuguese neurologist
named Egas Moniz. He returned to Lisbon and in late 1935 began
performing similar frontal lobe experiments on human beings. Moniz
called the process 'psychosurgery' [it later became known
as 'lobotomy.']
 |
| Walter Freeman performs a lobotomy |
"Encouraged [by early
experiments in this area] Freeman ... conducted many more prefrontal
lobotomies. In that early period, Freeman's statistics said that out of
his first 623 surgeries, 52 percent of the patients received 'good'
results, 32 percent received
'fair' results, and 13 percent received 'poor' results. The remaining 3
percent died, but they weren't included in the 'poor' results category.
Freeman would later get closer to the truth when he admitted that his
fatality rate was almost 15 percent. ...
"Many of Freeman's patients
were so damaged by the surgery that they needed to be taught how to eat
and use the bathroom again. Some never recovered. One of Freeman's most
famous patients was Rosemary Kennedy, sister
of future president John F. Kennedy. Rosemary was born slightly
retarded, but she lived an almost normal life until she was
twenty-three. Then Freeman went to work on her. He performed a
prefrontal lobotomy in 1941. Rosemary wound up in a Wisconsin mental
hospital, where she stayed until her death, more than sixty years
later. ...
"The news coverage was universally positive. ...
The New York Times ran a story applauding Freeman's success
rate, which their reporter put at 65 percent. ... Freeman's lobotomy
might have gotten popular without the support of the press. America's
hospitals were flooded with mental patients. By the
late 1940s, there were more than a million mental cases in hospitals or
asylums. More than 55 percent of all patients in American hospitals
were mental cases. One study reported that the population of mental
patients in American hospitals was growing by 80
percent a year.
"There was no real
treatment for these people. They were often drugged, shackled, kept in
straitjackets or locked in rubber rooms. Doctors were able to keep them
from harming themselves or others, but they had a
cure rate of about zero. Besides, keeping them in hospitals was
expensive. Freeman offered a solution. His motto was, 'Lobotomy gets
them home!' Directors of mental institutions heard that loud and clear.
One of Freeman's colleagues said that a procedure that
would send 10 percent of mental patients home would save the American
taxpayer $1 million a day. Freeman claimed a success rate well above 10
percent. Most hospitals and institutions welcomed him and his lobotomy." My Lobotomy, Howard Dully, Broadway Books, 2007
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