Featured on the ever-excellent Boing Boing, writer Glenn Fleishman explores the fascinating and unexpected struggle over copyrights, ownership and lapsed licenses through the lens of the infamous and unnaturally long-lived legal wrangling of the Sisters Hill and the Happy Birthday song.
Perpetuated by the descendants in hopes of securing royalties for each instance that the song appears in television or film—for which it’s conspicuously absent and usually replaced with a rousing and somewhat incongruous chorus of “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” the unsettled lawsuits have really overshadowed the professional lives and scholarship of the pioneering Patty and Mildred Hill, who were respectively, at a time when most women did not have vocations, an early childhood educational theorist and an ethnomusicologist. Patty even worked with German pedagogue Friedrich Frรถbel, whose wooden unit blocks (Frรถbelgaben) we all know, and helped to introduce the concept of these educational toys to the States. For a white girl, Mildred really had some soul and championed so called black music as a national treasure to be cherished. Later the sisters collaborated on musical compositions for school children, eventually producing the celebratory tune. No one is trying to rob their children and grandchildren of a birthright but this singular case (another type of block or brick, Lego, is maybe something comparable) illustrates a lot of the tricks behind creative-controls and the integrity of invention.
Saturday 8 August 2015
© and so say we all
catagories: ๐, ๐ถ, holidays and observances, Thรผringen, Wikipedia
Friday 7 August 2015
5x5
ration card: the wartime UK version of Monopoly had to make concessions to the fighting effort
pet sounds: Cornell University digitised their huge library of animal calls and bird-song
sakoku or ttp: nineteenth century Japanese woodcuts of exotic, visiting Americans after America insisted on diplomatic ties
isobar: Stockholm airport invites passengers to experience the weather at their destination before departing
catagories: ๐ซ๐ฎ, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฏ๐ต, ๐, environment, foreign policy, language, transportation
pequod
5x5
a gossip of mermaids: a delightful compilation of supernatural, ghoulish collective nouns, via the Wunderkammer that is Nag on the Lake
bling: uncompromisingly luxurious wrist watch that has an iWatch on the underside
plastic arts: prototype demonstration of a motorized sculpting glove
ennuigi: arcade game betrays Mario’s brother’s existential woes, world-weariness
catagories: ๐ญ, ๐, ๐ญ, ๐, myth and monsters, networking and blogging, Star Wars
psychobabble
catagories: ๐ง , food and drink, language
Wednesday 5 August 2015
spoilers ahoy or mise-en-scรจne
Via Dangerous Minds’ Dangerous Finds, comes this brilliant cinematic critique of the current trend in Hollywood blockbusters’ expositions that have become impenetrably complex, byzantine and shamelessly porous. Rather than a simple, straightforward—however unlikely—plot that can be pitched in a few word, like if the secretary fails to type under forty words per minute with fewer than two typographical errors, the bomb hidden in the office will explode, which will then be buoyed up by a series of stunts and explosive precursors or with the sponsorship of a can of Mister Pibb consumed conspicuously. Cut and scene.
catagories: ๐ฌ, myth and monsters