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Stranger Than Fiction

One of my favorite films is the 1984 “mockumentary” This Is Spinal Tap, which follows a failing English rock band on their final American tour.

But while the band is fictitious, many of the scenes in the film are said to be based on real-life events. The scene in which the band gets lost between their dressing rooms and the stage was based on something that allegedly happened to Yes (or, some say, Bob Dylan). Like Spinal Tap, Uriah Heep once played a gig on an air force base. The in-studio fight between Nigel and David was said to be inspired by an argument between members of The Troggs (hear the real-life, NSFW, argument on YouTube here).

One of the funniest moments in the film is the famous “Stonehenge scene”, in which Nigel (Christopher Guest) makes a sketch of a Stonehenge-inspired prop he wants to use on stage. Only thing is, he accidentally gives measurements in inches instead of feet. So when the prop appears on stage, it’s far less impressive than the band intended:

Spinal Tap Stonehenge

This was based on something that allegedly happened to Black Sabbath. So the story goes, the band’s manager, Don Arden, wanted similar Stonehenge-inspired props for the band’s stage show. There are two versions of what happened next: one is that he accidentally marked the measurements in meters instead of feet. The other is that he didn’t specify the units, and the contract was given to a French company that assumed the units were in meters. Either way, instead of a 15 foot tall replica of Stonehenge, the band ended up with a 15 meter tall replica –  around 45 feet – which was waaaayyyy too tall for most venues!

Similar confusion has happened elsewhere. Just ask the people of Wichita Falls, Texas.

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A huge oil reservoir was discovered in Wichita County back in 1912. Up to 20,000 people rushed to the boomtown, and many locals became rich, some almost overnight. The previously unremarkable town was hit with a severe shortage of office space, and many deals took place on city streets. What the town needed was a place for all this business to happen.

Enter a man named J.D. McMahon. Here’s a photo of him:

Lyle Lanley

McMahon came to town and promised the people of Wichita Falls a beautiful new skyscraper that would rival anything in New York or Chicago. Naive investors lined up, and within a couple of weeks McMahon had collected $200,000 ($2.7m in 2014 dollars).

Construction soon began on this majestic building:

Newby McMahon Building
(click to embiggen)

As you can see, it’s not quite something that would rival the Empire State Building or Willis Tower. It is, in fact, considerably shorter than Wichita Falls residents had expected. Investors filed suit against McMahon before construction had even finished.

The judge sided with McMahon, and here’s why: McMahon had never told anyone out loud how tall the building would be, and the blueprints every investor reviewed and approved clearly stated that the building was to be 480″ (inches) tall. Either no one noticed that, or folks simply assumed it was a typo and the actual building would be 480′ (feet) tall. Regardless, according to the judge a deal was a deal, and this one was legally binding.

Investors were able to get some of their money back from the elevator company. They explained the scam to the vendor, and the company backed out of the deal and refunded their money. This left a bit of a problem, though: because the building was supposed to have elevators, architects didn’t bother putting in stairs. For a while, ladders were used to go from floor to floor… although this actually wasn’t much of an issue: the building was such an embarrassment to locals that no one wanted to rent there. Throughout most of the 1920s only two firms rented space there. The Great Texas Oil Boom ended only a few years later, and the Great Depression came soon after. In 1931, the inside of the building was gutted by a fire. Retail shops came and went with alarming regularity, and the building itself changed hands several times.

A funny thing happened, though. Although some residents held the building in scorn and contempt for the rest of their lives, some took a shine to it. Back in the 20s, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! had called it “the World’s Littlest Skyscraper”, and the name stuck. Although slated for demolition several times, Wichita Falls residents protested, and eventually the property was given to the city. In 1986, the city gave it to the Wichita County Heritage Society, hoping they could restore the then-crumbling building. But the building was just too far gone for the WCHS’s meager budget. Again there was talk of demolition, but this time two local businesses got together and convinced the city to sell it to them for a mere $3,748. A storm damaged the building in 2003; the damage was repaired quickly, but a full restoration wasn’t done until 2005. The building is now an official  Texas Historic Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

As far as I can tell from a quick Google search, McMahon was never seen in north Texas again, and no one knows what happened to him. Presumably he lived the high life, at least for a time, with the town’s money.

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Quote of the Day

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

– H.L. Mencken

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Baseball Stories

Baseball might be my fourth favorite sport, but with the playoffs in full swing (hah!), I thought I’d post a few baseball stories I’ve been saving up.

Check out this picture:

baseball
(photo via National Park Service)

After the War of 1812 – when the British notoriously burned Washington DC – President Madison had a fit of “closing the barn door after the cow escaped” and decided it might be a good idea to build a system of defensive forts on the east coast. Construction on several forts started, including, in 1829, a fort on Cockspur Island, Georgia, between Savannah and Tybee Island.

Major General Babcock was put in charge of the project, but was later replaced by second lieutenant Robert E. Lee. (yes, THAT Robert E. Lee).  By 1833, the fort was far enough along to get a name: Fort Pulaski, in honor of Kazimierz Pulaski, a Polish soldier who fought alongside George Washington in the American Revolution.

The fort was finally completed in 1847, after 18 long years of construction. It took such a long time partly because that’s how long it took to build a fort in a swamp in the 19th century. It also took so long because the fort was made out of brick –  like, a lot of bricks,  like, 25,000,000 bricks – and Savannah just didn’t have the infrastructure to quickly make so many damn bricks.

Then, of course, the Civil War broke out. Georgia governor Joseph Brown ordered the state militia to seize the fort, which became a Confederate stronghold. Meanwhile, Confederate military leaders thought nearby Tybee Island was too remote to be useful for anything, so troops were withdrawn from there. And thus, Union troops moved in.

One of the reasons American sharpshooters were so successful in the Revolutionary War was that they used rifles, not muskets. At their most basic, both guns are metal tubes that one packs with explosives and a projectile, like a bullet or musket ball. You aim the tube at an enemy and set off the explosives. This causes the projectile to travel down the tube at a high rate of speed and (hopefully) hit the enemy.

But rifles were far more accurate than muskets, and that’s because of curved ridges carved into the inner barrel of the gun. Those ridges are called rifling, and that’s why they’re called rifles. The grooves cause the projectile to spin, which greatly increases accuracy. It’s the same reason a quarterback wants to throw a football in a tight spiral rather than just heaving it down the field. Muskets, on the other hand, lack such grooves inside the barrels, which is why they’re sometimes called smooth-bore weapons. That’s also why muskets were inaccurate, like a quarterback under pressure just tossing the football away.

Although the benefits of rifled vs. smooth-bore guns were known to American military personnel as far back as the 1780s, no one had ever thought to build a cannon with a rifled barrel. Until the Civil War. Union soldiers now stationed on Tybee Island were equipped with a brand-new weapon called the James Rifled Cannon. And they unleashed it for the first time ever on Fort Pulaski.

Continue reading “Baseball Stories”

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Why US Networks Remake Foreign Shows

If there’s one thing I see over and over again in TV message boards, it’s this: “why does [US network] have to remake [some foreign show]? Why can’t they just air the original??”

The answer to that question is the answer to almost every question: money.

As you may know, viewership of the Big Four broadcast networks is down. Waaaay down. Part of this is due to the exploding number of TV channels. Where ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC once had viewers all to themselves, they now have to compete with USA, FX, AMC and others. Another part of it is DVRs: Neilsen counts people who watch shows within three days of it airing (called “Live Plus 3”, or L3) and those who watch it within seven days (called “Live Plus 7”, or L7). But networks only care about the L3 ratings, so if you DVR a show on Monday but watch it on Friday, you may as well not watch it at all… from a ratings perspective. And, of course, you have the younger generation, who are more likely to pass the time watching YouTube videos over network TV.

Point is, the days of the Big Four networks having a captive audience of 300 million people are long over. Networks need as many eyeballs as possible, and foreign shows don’t help. A certain percentage of Americans simply won’t watch a show where people have foreign accents, no matter how great the show might be. I don’t know what that percentage is, but even if it’s a little as 10%, that’d cripple a show out of the gate. It’s like… atheist politicians. In several surveys, 53% of Americans have said that they would have “major reservations” about voting for an atheist presidential candidate. So, a hypothetical  atheist candidate would have to win almost 100% of the remaining 47% of the vote, which is almost impossible. So you don’t see foreign shows on US networks for the same reason you don’t see a lot of atheist presidential candidates: they’re set up to lose.

Then there are cultural issues. Perhaps African-American and Hispanic viewers think a show like Downton Abbey isn’t relevant to them. But if you were to take almost exactly the same scripts, but set it in a rich American’s house… then maybe that’s something they’d watch.

And all of us, even those of us who like foreign shows, have almost certainly come across references and jokes in foreign shows that go over our heads… kind of like the Grey Poupon joke in Wayne’s World.

There were a series of commercials for Grey Poupon mustard in the 80s where a rich man in a Rolls-Royce would be eating in the back of his car, and another rich guy would pull up at a light and ask if he had any Grey Poupon, ‘cos I guess Grey Poupon is mustard for rich people:

In Wayne’s World, Wayne and his gang pull up to a stoplight in their piece of crap car next to a Rolls-Royce and ask for Grey Poupon:

Thing is, those commercials never aired in France, so when Wayne’s World was dubbed into French, Wayne says “you… you would look good in a Fiat Uno”, parodying a then-popular series of French ads for an inexpensive car.

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But when I said it all comes down to money, I really mean it all comes down to money.

If NBC had chosen to buy the rights to the original British version of The Office, the only money NBC could have earned would be from running commercials during the show.

If, however, NBC chose to buy the rights to remake the original (which is much cheaper than buying the rights to the finished product, by the way), then NBC could elect to have its own production company – Universal – to make the show. In this way, NBC would make money from:

– Selling commercials that run during the show.
– Off-network syndication sales.
– Foreign sales.
– Licensing to airlines and cruise ships.
– Licensing to cable companies for OnDemand viewing.
– Licensing to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.
– Selling commercials for NBC.com streaming.
– Home video sales (DVD\Blu-Ray).
– Merchandise sales.
– (Possible) licensing for spin-offs and movies.

For NBC, the difference between airing the original Office and making their own was literally a billion dollars. Plus, most British shows only have 6-8 episodes per season. Americans are used to much more than that. Despite its legendary status in the comedy world, there were only 12 episodes of the original Office (plus two specials). That’s less than single US season! When the US version turned out to be a hit, NBC was able to make 201 episodes, something they wouldn’t be able to do with the original.

I agree that many of these remakes suck. Two of my favorite shows of the 2000s – the British Life on Mars and the Australian Rake – were dismal failures as American remakes. But I’m not sure how much of that was due just to them being remade, or to them being remade by broadcast networks. If you’ve ever seen the original Rake, you know there’s way too much sex and drugs and swearing for a US network. Had HBO or Showtime – or even FX – remade it, then it could have been much, much better. And while the British Life On Mars wasn’t afraid to show people smoking and drinking to excess… like people did back in the early 70s… the US network seemed to shy away from that, lending the whole thing an inauthentic, Disneyfied air.

But really, folks… it’s just TV. The reason I posted this today was because some folks on a message board were ranting about Gracepoint, the new Fox remake of the British show Broadchurch. Yes, Broadchurch is a really great show. But it’s not some priceless, immutable cultural icon. I’m sure the British version will go down in history as the better of the two… but there’s no need to get your panties in a wad about it.