Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

September 24, 1896: F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. During his lifetime he published 4 novels, including The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, and Tender is The Night, four story collections, and 164 short stories. But he only received wide critical acclaim after his death.

[Fitzgerald's] "talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."
—Ernest Hemingway on Fitzgerald's loss of talent in A Moveable Feast (1964)


Fitzgerald's stories and novels have been adapted into a variety of media formats. His earliest short stories were cinematically adapted as flapper comedies such as The Husband Hunter (1920), The Chorus Girl's Romance (1920), and The Off-Shore Pirate (1921). Other Fitzgerald short stories have been adapted into episodes of anthology television series, as well as the 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Nearly every novel by Fitzgerald has been adapted for the screen. His second novel The Beautiful and Damned was filmed in 1922 and 2010. His third novel The Great Gatsby has been adapted numerous times for both film and television, most notably in 1926, 1949, 1958, 1974, 2000, and 2013. His fourth novel Tender Is the Night was made into a 1955 CBS television episode, an eponymous 1962 film, and a BBC television miniseries in 1985. The Last Tycoon has been adapted into a 1976 film, and a 2016 Amazon Prime TV miniseries.

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948) was an American novelist, painter, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise.

Zelda became known in the national press as the first American flapper.

Flappers were a subculture of young Western women prominent after the First World War and through the 1920s who wore short skirts (knee height was considered short during that period), bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for prevailing codes of decent behavior. Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes in public, driving automobiles, treating sex in a casual manner, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.

Flappers were icons of the Roaring Twenties, a period of postwar social and political turbulence and increased transatlantic cultural exchange, as well as of the export of American jazz culture to Europe.


Zelda had suicidal and homicidal tendencies and was institutionalized at Johns Hopkins Hospital in her later life, considered a schizophreniac, though it was posthumously posited she had a bipolar disorder. She had endured over ten years of electroshock therapy and insulin shock treatments, and suffered from severe memory loss. In March 1948, while sedated and locked in a room on the fifth floor of Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, she died in a fire. Her body was identified by her dental records and one of her slippers. A follow-up investigation raised the possibility that the fire had been a work of arson by a disgruntled or mentally disturbed hospital employee. Damn, how sad!

On October 26, 1921, she gave birth to her only child, Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald. Frances became a writer & journalist, and worked for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and other publications. She became a prominent member of the Democratic Party. She died from throat cancer at her Montgomery, Alabama home in June 18, 1986.

The Daughter of… The Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald Lanaham Smith Papers


I thought I had it bad with miles of CAT5 cable.


Before computers, businesses uses punch card accounting machines for inventory, payroll, etc. It used electro-mechanical counters, relays, and lots of wiring. The IBM 405 accounting machine was introduced in 1934.

The IBM 405 was IBM's first "Alphabetic Accounting Machine," able to print text as well as numbers. It had more complexity than you might expect from the 1930s, able to generate three levels of subtotals, intermediate totals, and grand totals. It could process up to 150 cards per minute; that's remarkably fast for an electromechanical system, reading and summing more than 2 cards per second. The 405 was IBM's flagship product for many years, with IBM manufacturing 1500 of them per year. Like most IBM machines, the 405 was usually rented rather than purchased; it cost over $1000 a month (equivalent to about $15,000 per month in 2017 dollars). Renting out these machines (and selling the punch cards) was highly profitable for IBM, with the IBM 405 accounting machine called "the most lucrative of all IBM's mechanical glories".

Identifying the "Early IBM Computer" in a Twitter photo

“They said Mozart was mad
They said Puccini was mad
They said Louis was mad
Who's Louis? My uncle, he was mad!”
- Jimmy Durante.


He often referred to his nose as the schnozzola and the word became his nickname.


Jimmy Durante sings September Song (1963) in 1972




September 24, 1979: CompuServe launched the world's first consumer internet service, featuring the first public electronic mail. The first print newspaper to publish online was The Columbus Dispatch (founded in 1871) on July 1, 1980 via CompuServe.


45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web


"I made some mistakes."


FROM 1987: BIDEN WITHDRAWS BID FOR PRESIDENT IN WAKE OF FUROR


French nuclear policy/history is a fun, bizarre rabbit hole.


The meme itself is in reference to The Radiance of France by Gabrielle Hecht (1998; 2009). How it happened that technological prowess and national glory (or “radiance,” which also means “radiation” in French) became synonymous in France as nowhere else. Free PDF book download.



On the ancient symbolic date of 9/11 in 1966, French President Charles de Gaulle observed the 120-kt Bételguese nuclear test at Mururoa Atoll. Due to de Gaulle’s reported impatience, the test proceeded despite warnings of adverse winds, showering Western Samoa, Fiji, and the Cook Islands with radioactive rain.


No worries, the American military industrial complex did far, far worse.


Sept 24, 1995: "Space: Above and Beyond" premiered. The show ran for 23 episodes. The series only lasted one season. Fox Mulder was only in one episode.




Forget all yer sorrows and have some nepenthe.



Nepenthes is a genus of carnivorous plants, also known as tropical pitcher plants, or monkey cups, in the monotypic family Nepenthaceae.

The genus name Nepenthes was first published in 1737 in Carl Linnaeus's Hortus Cliffortianus. It references a passage in Homer's Odyssey (Book 4, lines 219-233), in which the potion "Nepenthes pharmakon" is given to Helen of Troy by Polydamna, the wife of the noble Egyptian Thon. It may of actually been opium. "Nepenthes" (Ancient Greek) literally means "without grief" (νη nē = "not", penthos = "grief") and, in Greek mythology, is a drug that quells all sorrows with forgetfulness.