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History Unwrapped – April 2005

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Congress proclaimed days of fasting and thanksgiving annually throughout the Revolutionary War. On May 17, 1776, Congress called for a “day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer” throughout the colonies. Congress urged its fellow citizens to “confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions, and by a sincere repentance and amendment of life, appease [God’s] righteous displeasure, and through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain his pardon and forgiveness.” Massachusetts ordered that a “suitable Number” of these proclamations be printed so “that each of the religious Assemblies in this Colony, may be furnished with a Copy of the same” and added the motto “God Save This People” as a substitute for the usual “God Save the King.”

Congress set December 18, 1777, as a day of thanksgiving on which the American people “may express the grateful feelings of their hearts and consecrate themselves to the service of their divine benefactor” and on which they might “join the penitent confession of their manifold sins . . . that it may please God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance.” Congress also recommended that Americans petition God “to prosper the means of religion for the promotion and enlargement of that kingdom which consisteth in righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”

April 28, 2005 – The Calendar from Hell!

The French thought they had stumbled onto something when they attempted to remake the calendar basing everything on the number ten—ten days to make a week, three ten-day weeks to make a month, and ten thirty-day months to make a year. There was a day of rest built into the new ten-day week (décade), but you had to work nine days before you could enjoy it. Some had proposed a ten-hour day, but it did not catch on. As long as you lived in France, the calendar could be followed, but doing business with other nations was a nightmare. The French had to create conversion calendars to match it with the Gregorian Calendar that the rest of the world follows. The calendar was finally abandoned in 1806.

April 27, 2005 – Colonial Colleges

Christians were as keen on education as they were on revival. Colonial America saw the development of educational institutions to carry on the work of the gospel. The colonists came to America to “advance the kingdom of God.” If this goal was to be realized, they knew that the next generation needed to be trained to carry on the work already started. Harvard and Yale began the good work of training ministers and offering a general education to train cultural leaders to extend the benefits of the Christian message into all spheres of life. As the revival waves crashed along America’s shores, religious organizations established a number of new colleges that are still influential today. In addition to William Tennant’s Log College, which later developed into what we know today as Princeton, there were Brown University, founded by Baptists in 1760; Queens College (later named Rutgers), a Dutch Reformed institution established in 1764; King’s College in New York, later named Columbia; and Dartmouth College, founded by a congregationalist pastor, Eleazar Wheelock (1711–1779) in 1769. In fact, with the exception of the University of Pennsylvania, every colonial college had some religious affiliation. Today, while in most cases these colleges retain the name of their founding, nearly all of them have given up the evangelical witness of their origin.

April 26, 2005 – Phonier than a $1 Bill

No one could have guessed that mild-mannered Edward Mueller was a counterfeiter. But for ten years he eluded government authorities while he printed and spent fake $1 bills in his New York neighborhood. The funny thing is, Mueller was not very good at his craft. He used regular paper and spelled the name of the first president "Washsington." Although a crook, Mueller was not greedy. He spent no more than two dollars in a day, never passed his bogus bucks to the same person twice, and used the fraudulent currency only for the bare necessities of life. The grandfatherly Mueller was eventually caught and sentenced to a year and a day in prison. He was also fined one non-counterfeit dollar.

April 25, 2005 – The Moon-Landing Hoax

The Central and Union Pacific Railroads joined their construction efforts on May 10, 1869 in Promontory, Utah, with the ceremonial driving of the Golden Spike into the track that joined East and West. One hundred years later, on July 20, 1969, two Americans landed on the moon. While railroads transformed commerce, communication, and travel in the United States, Moon landings abruptly stopped with no commercial benefits after six missions. Bill Kaysing thinks he knows why.

Kaysing claims in his book We Never Went to the Moon1 that the missions were a scam. After a number of technological mishaps, NASA realized it did not have the expertise to make President Kennedy’s dream of putting a man on the Moon before the close of the decade a reality. To avoid shutting down NASA, losing funding, and giving the Soviet Union a reason to believe that America was behind them in missile design, an elaborate hoax was supposedly concocted to fool the world. Taking a page from Hollywood, Kaysing claims that an elaborate Moon-set was constructed somewhere in the Southwest region of the United States. What we saw on television during those eventful days was special effects, “a near seamless piece of performance art.” The only real things the public saw were an empty Saturn V rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral and the return of the astronauts in a sealed “dummy space capsule that was dropped from a C5-A transport plane.”

Nearly everyone was in on the hoax, even Walter Cronkite! Anyone who tried to blow the lid off the planned ruse would pay the ultimate price. As a warning, so Kaysing theorizes, three astronauts were killed in a launchpad “accident” on January 27, 1967, mostly to keep Gus Grissom quiet. Grissom had been complaining about safety issues and threatened to go public. Again, this is according to Kaysing.

If any of this story sounds familiar, you might remember the 1978 movie Capricorn One, starring O.J. Simpson, Telly Savalas, Elliot Gould, and James Brolin.2 The movie was about a faked mission to Mars. The only difference is that these astronauts had a conscience and wanted to get the true story out to the world.

There are millions of people who believe Kaysing is on to something. Mistrust of the government runs deep. But if it’s all true, why have so many people been able to keep the secret for so long?

3 This is where all conspiracy theories break down. Too many people have to keep too many secrets for too long.

1 Bill Kaysing, We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle! (Soquel, CA: Holy Terra Books, 1991).

2 Here’s a bit of movie trivia. Elliot Gould was married to Barbra Streisand, and James Brolin is presently married to Streisand.

3 For a summary of Kaysing’s evidence, see www.carpenoctem.tv/cons/moon.html

April 22, 2005 – Thomas Jefferson—Patron Saint of Secularists

What role did Thomas Jefferson play in the founding of America? True, he did have a hand in drafting the Declaration of Independence, but his text was edited. It was the delegates who added the phrases “the Supreme Judge of the world” and a “firm reliance on the protection of divine providence” to the Declaration. Jefferson was not present at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. He did not have a hand in drafting the Constitution. The phrase “separation of church and state” was not coined by Jefferson. The phrase has a long history. Martin Luther (1483–1546), John Calvin (1509–1564), and John Hooker (1554–1600) used the phrase long before Jefferson did. The original meaning of the phrase has been turned on its head by modern church-state separationists. “Separation of church and state” is not found in the Constitution. Jefferson did not use the phrase until 1802, and only in a letter to a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut. The phrase was not cited in a court case until 1897 in Reynolds v. United States. The court ruled, in a non-Jeffersonian fashion, that “[Polygamy] is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and of the civilization which Christianity had produced in the Western world.” Polygamy was outlawed in Utah because Christianity said so. This line of argument would not be accepted by the courts today.

April 21, 2005 – The Papacy and the Antichrist

There has been a 500 year-old debate between Catholics and Protestants over the papacy. “For Martin Luther, the Catholic Church was nothing more or less than Babylon–‘it would be no wonder,’ he wrote in 1520, ‘if God would rain fire and brimstone from heaven and sink Rome into the abyss, as He did Sodom and Gomorrah of old’—and the pope the Antichrist. ‘If he is not,’ Luther exclaimed, ‘then somebody tell me who is!’”1 Five-hundred years of Protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric could fill a small library.

For centuries the papacy was the unanimous antichrist candidate.2 The papal system was identified as “both the ‘man of sin’ and the Babylonian whore of which Scripture speaks (2 Thess. 2; Rev. 19). In the conviction of the sixteenth-century Protestants, Rome was the great anti-Christ, and so firmly did this belief become established that it was not until the nineteenth century that it was seriously questioned by evangelicals.”3

Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Melanchton, Knox, Zwingli, Tyndale, Bradford, Hooper, Latimer, Cranmer, Wesley, Bengel, and nearly all Protestant denominations tagged the papacy as the antichrist, the Man of Sin, and the Beast of Revelation 13. Chapter 25, section 6, of the Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, concluded in its original formulation that “There is no other Head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ, nor can the Pope of Rome, in any sense, be head thereof, but is that antichrist, the man of sin, and Son of Perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church, against Christ and all that is called God.” Similar wording can be found in The Savoy Declaration of the Congregational Church, the Baptist Confession of 1689, and in the Philadelphia Confession of Faith.

While some today still hold this view, most evangelical Protestants no longer consider the papacy to be the biblical antichrist. The biblical definition of antichrist—someone who denies that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh and denies the Father and the Son (2 John 7; 1 John 2:22)—does not fit the papacy. Does this mean that all Roman Catholic doctrine is without error? Not at all. There is a great deal of Roman Catholic dogma that cannot be supported from a study of Scripture: veneration of Mary, the sinless nature of Mary, praying to saints, purgatory, transubstantiation, a New Testament priesthood, the papacy itself, clergy that do not marry, the last rights, confession to a priest, salvation through the institution of the church, baptismal regeneration, to name a few. The New Testament antichrist was mostly likely Jews who rejected Jesus as the Messiah incarnate.

1 Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 19.

2 Samuel J. Cassels, Christ and Antichrist or Jesus of Nazareth Proved to be the Messiah and the Papacy Proved to be the Antichrist (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1846) and Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 1–40.

3 Iain Murray, The Puritan Hope: Revival and the Interpretation of Prophecy (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1971), 41.

April 20 – The Weird History of Comics

Dr. Fredric Wertham, a prominent psychiatrist, made his mark in cultural history when he decided to take on the comic book industry in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He claimed there was a direct link between reading “crime comics” and juvenile delinquency. A number of magazines—Reader’s Digest and Scouting—published articles by Wertham and other comic critics warning parents of the dangers of the pulp stories. In the September 1954 issue of Scouting, the official publication of the Boy Scouts, Wertham stated his thesis: “The keynote of crime-comic books is violence and sadism. This is featured in the illustrations and in the text. In one typical crime comic . . . one story alone has ten pictures of girls getting smacked in the face, beaten with a whip, strangled, choked by hand, choked with a scarf. In addition, two men are killed and one man is crippled” (3).

While these articles caught the notice of parents, it was an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Wertham in the November 1953 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal that put the comic book industry on notice that things were about to change. Early in 1954, he followed up the article with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, a book-length indictment of the industry. In addition to his attacks on crime and horror comics, Wertham even claimed that Batman and Robin were having a homosexual relationship and Wonder Woman was a lesbian role model!

There was such a hue and cry against these graphic comics that Congress got into the act. Hearings were called by the Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency to look into the matter. Publishers were in a panic. Some comic book publishing houses went out of business. Those that remained joined forces and created the Comics Code Authority1 that served as a self-censoring agency within the industry. Nearly every book written on the history of comics mentions Frederick Wertham. He was the devil incarnate, the Joe McCarthy of the comic industry.

William M. Gaines, publisher of The Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Haunt of Fear, Weird Fantasy, and a humorous comic titled Mad, refused to capitulate to the strong-arm tactics of Wertham and the Senate. Even so, enough bad publicity had been generated that Gaines had to suspend publication of his horror and suspense titles. A late addition to his comic library of titles was Mad. Because it was not singled out by Wertham and the Senate committee, Mad slipped under the radar. Gaines did an end-run around the Comics Code by turning Mad into a magazine. The newly formatted comic became known as Mad Magazine.

There’s one more twist to this story. William Gaines inherited the comic business from his father Max Gaines who died in a tragic boating accident. The elder Gaines drafted a set of guidelines for artists and writers, something his son avoided like the plague and denounced when the Comics Code Authority was established:

“Never show anybody stabbed or shot.”

“Show no torture scenes.”

“Never show a hypodermic needle.”

“Never show a coffin, especially with anybody in it.”

Max Gaines also published Picture Stories from the Bible, Picture Stories from Science, Picture Stories from American History, and Picture Stories from World History.

Most comic book publishers have dropped the Comics Code, and the comics that William Gaines published are now worth a lot of money. I guess he’s having the last laugh on poor Dr. Wertham.

1 www.comics.dm.net/codetext.htm

April 19, 2005 – Heron of Alexandria—Inventor Extraordinaire

Evolutionists try to parlay the belief that ancient man was intellectually inferior to modern-man. The theory does not fit the facts. While there are numerous theories on how structures like the pyramids were built, no one has been able to duplicate the results using what is known of ancient technology. Some have been so perplexed by this historical enigma that they have postulated that alien technology1 or even fallen angels—the Nephilim2—had made these advancements possible. But there is a better and more reasonable explanation. The intellectual capacity of ancient man is no different from modern man because God created us in His image. We should expect to find evidence of that creative capacity soon after creation. And we do.

Consider the work of Heron (or Hero) of Alexandria who lived in the first-century A.D., probably from A.D. 10 to 75. He was a mathematician and practical inventor. He invented a sacrificial vessel where water flows only when money is dropped in a slot. Heron also constructed a small temple so that when a fire was lit, the doors opened spontaneously and shut again when the fire was extinguished. These devices were designed, most probably at the behest of the king, to make people believe that the gods were real and near. Heron also developed elaborate entertainment devices that set wooden actors and props in motion without any of the pulleys and weights visible to the audience. He is most famous for inventing the aeolipile, the precursor to the steam engine.3

Many people who read Revelation 13:15 assume that this verse must be describing a modern-day demonic miracle where an inanimate object comes to life. Given what we know about the ancients, especially the work of Heron, there is nothing implausible about believing, if we pursue a strict literal rendering, that an image could be made to “speak” during Nero’s day. All the technology was available, and since Heron lived during the generation preceding the destruction of the temple in A.D., the timing is also right.

1 www.outerworlds.com/likeness/aliens/aliens.html and www.csicop.org/si/9909/fox.html

2 “Were Biblical Giants Half-Breed Demons?” (February 1, 2005): www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42637

3 For a list and description of more than 75 of Heron’s illustrated mechanical devices, see The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria: www.history.rochester.edu/steam/hero/index.html

April 18, 2005 – American-Made Terrorism

On May 4, 1886, during a labor rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, anarchists had thrown a bomb into police ranks, killing 7 policemen and injuring 70 more. The gathering had been organized to protest the killing of six striking workers at the McCormick harvester plant.

At the trial for the anarchists, the following treatise, written by Johann Most, a leading American terrorist, was entered into evidence: Science of Revolutionary War—Manual for Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitro-Glycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, and so forth.1 The guide consisted of information Most gathered from his experience at an explosives factory in Jersey City. “With a certain zest he contemplated using ‘hand grenades and blasting cartridges—the proletariat’s substitute for artillery.’ Larger bombs were even more promising: ‘That which reduces what had been solid rocks into splinters may not have a bad effect in a court or a monopolist’s ballroom.’”2

Like all romantic revolutionaries, Most believed that humanity could be saved only “with blood and iron, poison and dynamite!”3 As one would expect, “the Haymarket incident hurt the labor movement by associating it in public opinion with violence and revolution.”4 The parallels to the Oklahoma City bombing and the exploits of Eric Rudolf are obvious.

1 James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 437.

2 Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 437.

3 Quoted in Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 437.

4 ”Haymarket Riot,” NSA Family Encyclopedia, a special edition of New Standard Encyclopedia (Chicago, IL: Standard Educational Corp., 1991), 7:95.

April 15 – A Million Myths, Maybe More

After Marco Polo returned home from his extensive tour of the East, he enlisted in the Venetian army in Venice’s battle against Genoa in 1298. During a sea battle, he was captured and imprisoned in Genoa, Italy. While Marco was serving time, he did not waste time. Instead, he collaborated with another prisoner, a scribe named Rusticiano of Pisa, to write the story of his travels in the East. The book was an immediate hit, but it was also discredited by some who claimed that it was full of lies. Marco Polo had written a million tall tales, they said, and that is how the book became known in Italian as Il Milione (“The Million”). Despite the outlandish descriptions of his adventures, later travelers confirmed many of Polo's stories about a "salt-water lake" (the Caspian Sea), strange fat-tailed sheep, the Order of Assassins in Persia, the burning of "black stones" (coal), tattooing, the rhinoceros, and the crocodile. It is surprising that Marco Polo did not mention the Great Wall of China, but China's a large country.

April 14, 2005 – Mysterious Penman of the Constitution

Thirty-seven-year-old Jacob Shallus had been assistant clerk for the Pennsylvania legislature and recorded minutes for the state’s general assembly. Shallus participated in the War for  Independence, was a skilled calligrapher and a father struggling to support a family of ten. Though Shallus’ fine hand penned the original parchment of the U.S. Constitution, he rates only a one-line credit on its display case. He is so obscure a figure in history that there is no known portrait of him, and historians have difficulty naming him. On Saturday evening, September 15, 1787, the delegates, according to George Washington’s journal, “adjourned until Monday that the Constitution which it was proposed to offer to the people might be engrossed, and a number of copies struck off.” Stopping only to eat and sleep, Shallus “engrossed” (penned) the document with goose quill and iron-gall ink to meet the deadline on Monday. The Constitutional Convention paid Shallus thirty dollars for his efforts. He was arrested only five months later for a debt of twelve pounds and a few shillings. Shallus died in 1793 and probably never realized the importance of his contribution on that September weekend in Philadelphia.

April 13, 2005 – A Great Fake Quotation

Periodically someone sends me the following quotation by Alexander Tytler. Sometimes the name is spelled “Tyler.” The quotation is all over the internet. I first saw an abbreviated version of it in Our Ageless Constitution.1 The full quotation reads as follows:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

“The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

“From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.”

There was an Alexander Fraser Tytler, also known as Lord Woodhouselee. Tytler (1747–1813) was Professor of History in the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is best known for his 1801 Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern. The above quotation is said to come from Tytler’s The Fall of the Athenian Republic or The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic; it’s cited both ways. There is no such book in the records of the Library of Congress. While this does not mean that the book does not exist, it’s unlikely after so many years of this quotation floating around that no one has been able to establish its source. Over the years, it has been attributed to other famous writers beside Tytler.2

Even though the quotation is a fake in terms of Tytler being the author, the quotation itself is not a fake. Somebody wrote it, and what it states is certainly true.

1 W. David Stedman and LaVaughn Lewis, Our Ageless Constitution (Asheboro, NC: W. David Stedman Associates, 1987), 263.

2 The best analysis of the quotation is by Loren Collins, “The Truth About Tytler” at www.geocities.com/nerolsnilloc/library/tytler.html

April 12, 2005 – Inventing the Modern World

The first working telephone was invented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. The cumbersome device had no delivery structure, wires, phones, or switching system. Who would you call? And yet today, we carry phones in our pockets and purses that are smaller than a deck of cards, need no wires or operator, and can communicate with people around the world.

A fully functioning light bulb was developed in 1879 by Thomas Edison. Like Bell, Edison had a similar delivery problem. There were no power stations, and homes were still lit by gas. Pressure came from the gas industry to keep Edison's new invention off the market. Edison had to build a power station, string electrical wiring, wire homes, and produce lighting fixtures and bulbs. The marvel of Edison's invention is everywhere.

The first airplane, built my two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, flew in 1903. There are people alive today who were alive when the Wright Brothers went to Kill Devil Hill in Kitty Hawke, North Carolina, to fly their first plane. Sixty-six years later, we landed a man on the moon.

The first computer filled an 1800-square-foot room and weighed thirty tons. The ENIAC was built in 1947 for $500,000. It contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. When turned on, its power consumption caused the city of Philadelphia to experience brownouts. Today, more computing power than the first room-size computer can be held in the palm of your hand.

Can you imagine what it would take to invent these devices today? Impact and environmental studies would have to be developed and approved by local, county, state, and federal agencies. Special interest groups, mostly made up of union members, would fight every technological advance. Their jobs would be jeopardized by the new industries.

April 11, 2005 – God and the Constitution

The claim is often made that the Constitution does not make reference to God. Unlike the state constitutions, the United States Constitution does not mention God in the Preamble or allow for a “religious test . . . as a qualification to any Office or public trust under the United States” (Art VI, 3). Even so, there are some interesting religious references in the body of the Constitution. Sunday is set aside as a day of rest for the President (Art. I, sec. 7). The Constitution closes with these words: “DONE in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven. . . .”? “Our Lord” is a reference to Jesus Christ. This phrase appears just above the signature of George Washington, the same George Washington who took the presidential oath of office with his hand on an open Bible, the same George Washington who was called upon by Congress, after the drafting of the First Amendment, to proclaim a national day of prayer and thanksgiving. The resolution read as follows: “That a joint committee of both Houses be directed to wait upon the President of the United States to request that he would recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a constitution for their safety and happiness.”

It’s hard to imagine that the constitutional framers purposely kept God out of the Constitution and then thanked Him for giving them the opportunity to establish it.

April 8, 2005 – Pop Culture Proficiency and Constitutional Ignorance

Pop culture trivia is a lot of fun. Who played Ryan O'Neal’s father in Love Story (1970)? It was Ray Milland, winner of the Best Actor Award for Lost Weekend (1945), whose career degenerated to making movies like The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1972), literally playing opposite Rosey Grier. Knowing all the pop-culture players and events can help you through small talk at parties, knowing the foundation of our culture is much more important. Consider some of the following in a 1998 survey of teenagers (most of whom would not know about Ray Milland, Rosey Grier, and Love Story):

• More teenagers could identify David Letterman as the comedian/talkshow host who has a Top Ten List every night, than knew that the Bill of Rights refers to the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

• Three times as many students could name the city which has a zip code of 90210 (Beverly Hills) because of a popular TV show than could identify where the U.S. Constitution was written (Philadelphia).

• More students could name one of the Three Stooges as could identify what the three branches of the federal government are.

• Less than two percent of teenagers knew that James Madison was the Father of the U.S. Constitution, but more than half could identify Bill Gates as the father of the computer company Microsoft.1

Ignorance of the Constitution and its foundational principles allows politicians to rule in terms of what the majority of citizens want, even if it means taking from some and giving to others.

1 National Constitution Center, “National Constitution Center’s 1998 Knowledge Poll: Teens’ Knowledge of Constitution v. Teens’ Knowledge of Pop Culture.” Quoted in Erich Pratt, The Constitutional Recipe for Freedom: Twelve Principles of Liberty Today’s Politicians Don’t Want You to Know (2005) 222.

April 7, 2005 – The Worst Movie of All Time

In 1980, Harry and Michael Medved (yes, that Michael Medved) wrote The Golden Turkey Awards. From “The Most Embarrassing Movie Debut of All Time” (Paul Newman in The Silver Chalice) to “The Worst Actor of All Time” (Richard Burton), the Medved brothers survey some of the worst films, actors, and dialogue ever put up on screen. There are categories for “The Worst Two-Headed Transplant Movie,” “The Worst Rodent Movie,” and my personal favorite, “The Worst Vegetable Movie of All Time.” If you think it was Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978), you would be wrong. It was Attack of the Mushroom People (1963). The problem is, mushrooms are a fungus, but when a movie is this bad, why quibble over what’s growing in your garden. The Medveds save their most cherished award, “The Worst Film of All Time,” for Edward D. Wood’s (1924–1978) Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959). After the publication of The Golden Turkey Awards, Plan 9 took on a cult status. The movie was so bad that people had to see it. Tim Burton immortalized Plan 9, the bizarre life of Wood, and all his bad movies with the production of Ed Wood (1994) starring Johnny Depp, Sarah Jessica Parker, Bill Murray, and Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi. Landau received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Lugosi. To add insult to injury, Wood also received the award for Worst Director. You have to see this movie to really understand why it’s so bad. Pay close attention to the flying saucers.

April 6, 2005 – A Warning to Modern-Day Pharaohs

Late on the afternoon of July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to “to bring in a device for a seal for the United States of America.” To help them convey their vision for a seal, they asked Pierre Eugène Du Simitière to work with them. He had already designed the state seals of Delaware and Virginia. Here was Franklin’s proposal:

“Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity.

“Motto, Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

Jefferson suggested a depiction of the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. It took two more committees to decide on the design of an eagle with thirteen stars above its head representing the thirteen states. It was adopted as the official seal June 20, 1782.

The state motto of Virginia reflects something of Franklin and Jefferson’s desire for a motto with some teeth in it: Sic Semper Tyrannis—“Thus Always to Tyrants.”

April 5, 2005 – Shakespeare, the Psalms, and the End of America in 2007

Some people believe that the translators of the King James Bible asked William Shakespeare (1564–1616) to help them put at least some of the Psalms into English verse. There does not seem to be hard empirical evidence to support the theory, but staunch believers think that Shakespeare left a hidden clue, a signature of sorts, in Psalm 46. Look at a KJV version of the psalm. Count 46 words from the beginning. Then count 46 words from the end. (Do not count the “Selahs.”) What do you come up with? “Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof” (46:3). . . . He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire” (46:9). Did you know that in 1611, the year the King James Bible was completed, Shakespeare would have been 46 years old? This brings us to the latest end-time prophecy, this time by an Islamic scholar who claims that America will be destroyed by a tsunami in 2007. By counting verses in the Koran, he contends that America has a lifespan of only 231 years. “Silwadi said that by combing a number of suras hinting at US sins he reached the numbers 1776 (the year the US achieved independence) and 231. He added the two numbers and the result was 2007, the year when the US is expected to disappear.”1 I suspect that with enough imagination the Bible can be made to say anything, and the Koran too. If William Shakespeare can be found in a Psalm, then maybe an American Armageddon can be found in a sura.

1 Khaled Abu Toameh, “Koran scholar: US will cease to exist in 2007,” The Jerusalem Post (March 29, 2005): www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1111980180248&apage=2

April 4, 2005 – Botched Bibles

Several English Bibles published in the seventeenth century get their nicknames because of typographic errors. The so-called Murderer’s Bible misprints “murderers” instead of the correct word “murmurers” in Jude 16. Mark 7:27 was made to read: “Let the children first be killed” (instead of “filled”). The Wife-Hater Bible tells a man to hate his own wife: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father . . . yea, and his own wife also.” Of course, “wife” should read “life.” The first edition of the King James Bible correctly has Matthew 26:36 stating, “Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane…” The second printing reads, “Then cometh Judas with them unto a place called Gethsemane.” The Adulterer’s or Wicked Bible, a 1631 King James Version, leaves out an essential “not” and commands “Thou shalt commit adultery.” King Charles fined the printer Robert Barker the enormous sum of £300 and took away his license to print Bibles. An Oxford edition of 1717 was known as the Vinegar Bible because the chapter heading to Luke 20 had “Vinegar” for “Vineyard” in the title “The Parable of the Vineyard.” A 1716 KJV Bible made a common typographical mistake by transposing letters.  Instead of John 8:11 reading, “Go, and sin no more,” it read, “Go and sin on more.” The Printer’s Bible laments that “printers” (not “princes”) “have persecuted me without cause” (Ps. 119:161). Considering how these botched Bibles got their name, the Psalm might not be too far off.

April 1, 2005 – Daylight Saving Time

Each and every year we spring forward moving our clocks ahead an hour in the Spring and fall back moving our clocks back and hour in the Fall. Not every state complies with these yearly rituals. Daylight Saving Time is not observed in most of the Eastern Time Zone portion of Indiana and the states of Arizona and Hawaii. Making appointments in Indiana can be very confusing since some of the state observes it and other parts don’t. Before we go any further, it’s Daylight Saving (singular) Time and not Daylight Savings (plural)Time. If you put money in a bank, you open a “savings account.” The main purpose of Daylight Saving Time is to extend the period of daylight by moving an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening, thus, saving daylight. One of its goals is to save energy, cut down on traffic accidents, and give people more daylight in the evenings for outside work and recreation. Benjamin Franklin seems to be the inspiration behind the practice, although cutting down on automobile traffic deaths was not in his purview, but I guess nighttime carriage deaths were an issue. His rationale appeared in a 1784 article with the title An Economical Project. The idea took some time to catch on. The plan was finally adopted in the United States in 1918. During WW II, the clocks were messed with again, but only temporarily. During the energy crisis of 1973, because of an oil embargo by OPEC, President Nixon signed the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act into law. Clocks were set ahead for one hour and left that way for fifteen months through April 27, 1975. I believe we should pass a law that moves the clock ahead by 30 minutes and leaves it there.