Today marks the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere and the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere. Winter will arrive at 5:44 a.m. EST (the time zone in which I am shivering).
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The New York World newspaper published a “Word-Cross Puzzle” created by Arthur Wynne on this date in 1913. It is credited as the first crossword puzzle. (The puzzle is seen at the top of this post.)
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It’s a Wonderful Life, a film directed by Frank Capra and starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, opened in theaters on this date in 1946. Most reviewers labeled it as overly sentimental (although Time magazine loved it) and it fared poorly at the box office.
It was an expensive film to make, as Capra ordered a small-town set that was the size of a small town: three full-size city blocks, with 75 storefronts, some of which opened to stores which had shelves which were fully stocked with real products, and indoor snow machines for the snowy outdoors scenes.
The studio that produced it, RKO, filed it as a budget loss. The film went down in history as a flop.
By the early 1970s, the film had been a holiday staple on local television stations across the U.S. during the holidays for years; this was because It’s a Wonderful Life was such a flop that the rights to broadcast it were inexpensive for those local stations that could not afford pricier holiday fare.
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It is said that Albert Einstein once asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what are we to think of an empty desk?” While not famous for his quips—although E=mc2 is the soul of wit in its brevity—this neatly captures the perspective of a person who kept his desk almost confrontationally cluttered.
The human mind is an organizer, the greatest one we happen to know, the one that all of our tools and machines are built in an attempt to replicate its principles and imagined actions. Nature itself does not organize. Every organizing structure we come up with is an imposition on nature and is thus radically random, at least as far as nature is concerned: No method of organizing is more “correct” than any other.
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