HOME |
RSS | 
With two Snow White movies coming out in theaters next year, it seems like an appropriate time to explore the original story itself. As it turns out, there are two true inspirations for the tale, both covered in detail over on Mental Floss. A lot of the details you recognize are included, for example:
Born in 1729, Maria grew up in a castle in Lohr, Germany. The castle is a museum today, and if you visit, you’ll be able to look into a certain famous mirror. It’s believed that Maria’s father, Prince Philipp Christoph von Erthal, gave the looking glass to his second wife as a gift.
That’s right, the mirror, the dwarves and the poison (although not served in an apple) are all here in these two fascinating stories.
Comments Off
We all know the inspiring story of Charles Lindbergh being the first person to fly across the Atlantic, but as it turns out, he’s only the first person to do it by himself. In fact, eight years before he made the flight, two British men completed the same journey.
And that’s not the only incorrect first you were taught in school. Jackie Robinson wasn’t the first black man to play professional baseball and Copernicus wasn’t the first person to realize the earth revolved around the sun. Cracked has all the details.
What do Maurice Sendak, Dr. Seuss, and Shel Silverstein have in common? Yes, they all wrote bestselling children’s stories and they all have new books coming out soon, but the secret to their success is that their writing was once considered inappropriate for children!
Once upon a more staid time, the purpose of children’s books was to model good behavior. They were meant to edify and to encourage young readers to be what parents wanted them to be, and the children in their pages were well behaved, properly attired and devoid of tears. Children’s literature was not supposed to shine a light on the way children actually were, or delight in the slovenly, self-interested and disobedient side of their natures.
Seuss, Sendak and Silverstein ignored these rules. They brought a shock of subversion to the genre — defying the notion that children’s books shouldn’t be scary, silly or sophisticated. Rather than reprimand the wayward listener, their books encouraged bad (or perhaps just human) behavior. Not surprisingly, Silverstein and Sendak shared the same longtime editor, Ursula Nordstrom of Harper & Row, a woman who once declared it her mission to publish “good books for bad children.”
Read more about it at the New York Times. Link -via @Marilyn_Res
Sunday is the ten-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania. Since then, children have grown up, wars have been fought, and new buildings are rising in New York City. But we will never forget the victims. In 2005, the folks at StoryCorps began recording the stories of people affected by the events of September 11, 2001 for a project called the September 11th Initiative.
We’ve recorded over 1,100 September 11th Initiative interviews to-date. Inviting family members, friends, and coworkers to share and record memories of their loved ones offers a meaningful way to memorialize and celebrate the lives that were lost or impacted by the events of September 11th. In September 2008, we were invited to the Pentagon to collect over 30 stories in two days from office staff and family members of the victims of the Pentagon attack.
Three of these stories have been illustrated in video. Continue reading to see all of them.
more …
If you like the late, great author, then you’ll love this video. Make sure to watch him graph the third story to really enjoy his entertaining sense of humor.
It’s often hard to tell an interesting story in 140 characters or less, but when it comes to bad dates, that’s often all you need. BuzzFeed has a great collection of hilariously depressing bad date stories that might just make you feel better about your own sour relationships.
Whoever said video games have no real-world applications has obviously never heard about the little boy who saved his sister from a rampaging moose thanks to the skills he learned playing World of Warcraft:
When the beast went on the offensive, Hans knew the first thing he had to do was taunt it so that it would leave his sister alone and she could run to safety. “Taunting” is a move one uses in World of Warcraft to get monsters off of the less-well-armored team members.
Once he was a target, Hans remember another skill he’d picked up at level 30 in ‘World of Warcraft’ — he feigned death. The moose lost interest in the inanimate Hans and wandered off into the woods.
Oddee has two great lists each with ten video game incidents you won’t believe.
Just in time for Mothers Day, StoryCorps has a new animation. No More Questions! features feisty 87-year-old Kay Wang. This should inspire you to enjoy your mother as much as you can if you still have her. Link -thanks, Krisi Packer!
I’ve always enjoyed an occasional Sherlock Holmes story, but it wasn’t until I took a class on the subject that I learned just how strange many of the tales are. From crazed Mormons to ape men to vampires, Conan Doyle’s heroic detective encounters some seriously strange cases in his time. In celebration of 124 years of inspired mysteries, here are a few of his weirdest tales. There are spoilers here, so if you plan to read any of these stories, you may want to skip past this one.
The first Sherlock Holmes story may very well be one of the weirdest. It starts out with the apprehension of a double murder suspect in London. As he explains his motives for the killings, we are told about a man named John Ferrier and a young girl named Lucy, who are the sole survivors of a group of an ill-fated wagon train and are both dying of thirst. Fortunately, a band of Mormons led by Brigham Young comes by and offers to save them, as long as they agree to convert to Mormonism and come with the group to start a new “promised land.”
John adopts Lucy and while the two have happily converted to the Mormon way of life, he has secretly sworn to never let her marry a Mormon, where she will only be one of many wives. Years later, she falls in love with a traveling man named Jefferson Hope. The two are engaged and the wedding is planned to take place in three months, when Jefferson returns from a trip he must take for his job.
After Jefferson leaves, John is approached by Brigham Young who tells him Lucy must marry a Mormon. He says she can take a month to make her choice between two eligible men in the town. John sends for Jefferson to return and save Lucy. He arrives on the last day before she must make her choice and Lucy, John and Jefferson sneak away. While on the run, Jefferson leaves one day to hunt for food and returns to the camp to find John dead and Lucy missing. He returns to the town and discovers Lucy was forced to marry one of the two Mormon men. A month later, Lucy dies. Jefferson sneaks into the house the night before the funeral and removes her wedding ring. He then swears revenge, stalking the town and almost killing the two men many times.
SMITH Magazine has a site where people tell stories in exactly six words. One section is a collaboration with the organization Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) to share stories about coming home from the war. Link -via Breakfast Links
We all grew up with the beloved Disney versions of fairy tales and stories, which have wonderful "all’s well that ends well" happy endings. What you may not know is that Disney left out a few horrifying details from the original version in order to keep its customers happy.
Here’s a post about 10 original fairy tales in their full and gruesome glories. Take, for example, Snow White:
In the tale of snow white that we are all familiar with, the Queen asks a huntsman to kill her and bring her heart back as proof. Instead, the huntsman can’t bring himself to do it and returns with the heart of a boar.
Now, fortunately disney hasn’t done too much damage to this tale, but they did leave out one important original element: in the original tale, the Queen actually asks for Snow White’s liver and lungs – which are to be served for dinner that night!
Also in the original, Snow White wakes up when she is jostled by the prince’s horse as he carries her back to his castle – not from a magical kiss. What the prince wanted to do with a dead girl’s body I will leave to your imagination.
Oh – in the Grimm version, the tale ends with the Queen being forced to dance to death in red hot iron shoes!
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by coconutnut.
