Today in History: Dec. 20

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

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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Relax. Everything’s Fine

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

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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Today in History: Dec. 19

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.—the opening paragraph of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas, a novel by Charles Dickens, was published on this date in 1843 by Chapman & Hall. It has never gone out of print. (A photograph of a reprint of the first edition is seen at top.)
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