Mickey’s turning 90 tomorrow, so what better way to celebrate…than to give his older brother some attention cause clearly no one else will
Oswald is one of my favorite cartoon characters, so I wanna take this moment to focus the spotlight on him for a bit.
Oswald is one year older than Mickey, making his debut in 1927 (he is not, however, Disney’s oldest reoccurring character, that title goes to Pete, surprisingly, who predates both Oswald and Mickey)
Oswald has made a handful of cameos since he appeared in the Epic Mickey Games. He pops up for a second in “Get a Horse!” and is the butt of a rather mean gag in the Mickey Mouse Short “Canned”
If you’re familiar with Epic Mickey, you know Oswald’s girl is Ortensia. However, this was not originally her name. Her name was Sadie, but the game developers wanted to give her an “O” name to match Oswald (like Mickey and Minnie, and Donald and Daisy) and it’s stuck ever since
Speaking of Oswald’s girlfriend, Ortensia was not his first. In the older Oswald shorts, he’s infatuated with a female rabbit named Fanny (I like to think Oswald had his 420 children with her, but when he hooked up with Ortensia, she adopted all of them)
Oh, Oswald has 420 Bunny children.
Charles Muntz, the antagonist of the Pixar film Up, isnamed after Charles Mintz, the person responsible for taking Oswald and several of Walt’s animators away after a contract dispute in 1928
Out of the 27 Oswald cartoons made by Disney and Iwerks, 13 are available in the Walt Disney Treasures collection, 2 are available in Walt Disney Signature Blu-rays as bonus features, 5 are found but are not currently available to the public, and 6 are still lost.
After Oswald went to Universal, he got several voice actors, including Mickey Rooney, June Foray, and Mel Blanc. Currently, he’s voiced by veteran voice actor Frank Welker (known for voicing Fred from Scooby Doo among others)
In order for Disney to get the rights to Oswald from Universal, the company traded a sportscaster from ABC
In the Disney Parks, Oswald has a service station on Buena Vista Street in California Adventure
And that’s all I got. I love this bunny, and I wish he got more credit for laying the groundwork for Mickey. Without him, I don’t think Mickey would be as popular as he is today.
TIL that a cat once co-authored a physics paper. In 1975, a physicist had just finished writing a paper and was ready to publish but realized that he had used ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ throughout, despite being the sole author. Not wanting to edit the paper, he listed his cat, Chester, as a co-author.
Ok but the best part is, physicists loved the joke. When people called the author’s university and he wasn’t available, they’d ask to speak with the co-author instead. The author issued a limited number of copies of the article signed by both authors. (Chester’s was obviously a pawprint.) And to this day, physics papers will often have F.D.C Willard (Felix Domesticus, Chester Williard [Willard was the author’s father’s name]) mentioned in the footnotes thanking his “useful contributions to the discussion”.
Maybe medieval people happened upon a T-Rex fossil and came to a relatively logical conclusion that dragons existed.
I’ve read a couple books on this actually, thats exactly what happened. Also cyclops are from looking at bones from a certain type of baby elephant. The giant note hole and tiny eyes made it look like a single eye.
Yep, can confirm! And what’s even funnier to me is that back in the dark ages, Greek people used to find a lot of prehistoric bear skeletons – and those look exactly like human skeletons, except they’re like eight feet tall or something – so they naturally assumed those were the heroes of legend, and made armour and clothes for them and reburied them with the most splendid and sacred religious ceremonies they could think of? Fast forward five centuries, Athens’ all modern and rational, philosophers and scientists aren’t taking any shit from anyone – but the problem is, people will randomly find graves containing giant-ass warriors, so that’s something that can’t be explained away and yeah, demigods were a thing and yeah, they used to be eight feet tall and sorry I don’t make the rules.
Pictured above is the Higdon family. This photograph was taken in the year 1898 in Britain. That is all we know about them.
Who were the Black Victorians? Mainstream history has virtually erased them from our minds and history books. We have been filled with images of slavery in America and across the world, but why is it that this chapter in black history was skipped? Why isn’t it equally common knowledge that in the midst of all of that darkness there was light, also.
Never before seen photos were uncovered, giving us over 200 images of glances into our past. Many of the photos did not include names or any details whatsoever, cloaking these people in mystery for all of time.
At one point in history, people of color were included in high society and walked the cobbled streets of Britain. The women wore intricate, voluminous gowns and wore their hair in curls and chignons. The men in suits and fair business. This may not have been the case for all black people in Britain, but for some it was.
The Victorian Era was ruled under Queen Victoria, an era that is described as an opulent culture, although there were underlying bouts of poverty and child labor. History would like you to believe that black people didn’t arrive in Britain until 1948 during “The Empire Windrush”, when many Jamaican descendants entered the country, but that is not so. There has been proof to suggest otherwise. There is documentation that proves that it wasn’t uncommon to see black faces at a Shakespeare show. We’ve been there all along, humming softly in the background.
These images prove that you can’t take mainstream history at face value. Take the time to look behind the curtain and uncover OUR history. It’s as if our ancestors are just waiting for us to seek them out.
Who were the Black Victorians?
To see more of these images check out this video reel.
A loaf of bread made in the first century AD, which was discovered at Pompeii, preserved for centuries in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius. The markings visible on the top are made from a Roman bread stamp, which bakeries were required to use in order to mark the source of the loaves, and to prevent fraud. (via Ridiculously Interesting)
(sigh) I’ve seen these before, but this one’s particularly beautiful.
I feel like I’m supposed to be marveling over the fact that this is a loaf of bread that’s been preserved for thousands of years, and don’t get me wrong, that’s hella cool. But honestly, I’m mostly struck by the unexpected news that “bread fraud” was apparently once a serious concern.
Bread Fraud was a huge thing, Bread was provided to the Roman people by the government – bakers were given grain to make the free bread, but some of them stole the government grain to use in other baked goods and would add various substitutes, like sawdust or even worse things, to the bread instead. So if people complained that their free bread was not proper bread, the stamp told them exactly whose bakery they ought to burn down.
Bread stamps continued to be used at least until the Medieval period in Europe. Any commercially sold bread had to be stamped with an official seal to identify the baker to show that it complied with all rules and regulations about size, price, and quality. This way, rotten or undersized loaves could be traced back to the baker. Bakers could be pilloried, sent down the streets in a hurdle cart with the offending loaf tied around their neck, fined, or forbidden to engage in baking commercially ever again in that city. There are records of a baker in London being sent on a hurdle cart because he used an iron rod to increase the weight of his loaves, and another who wrapped rotten dough with fresh who was pilloried. Any baker hurdled three times had to move to a new city if they wanted to continue baking.
If you have made bread, you are probably familiar with a molding board. It’s a flat board used to shape the bread. Clever fraudsters came up with a molding board that had a little hole drilled into it that wasn’t easily noticed. A customer would buy his dough by weight, and then the baker would force some of that dough through the hole, so they could sell and underweight loaf and use the stolen dough to bake new loafs to sell. Molding boards ended up being banned in London after nine different bakers were caught doing this. There were also instances of grain sellers withholding grain to create an artificial scarcity drive up the price of that, and things like bread.
Bread, being one of the main things that literally everyone ate in many parts of the world, ended up with a plethora of rules and regulations. Bakers were probably no more likely to commit fraud than anyone else, but there were so many of them, that we ended up with lots and lots of rules and records of people being shifty.
Check out Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony by Madeleine Pelner Cosman for a whole chapter on food laws as they existed in about 1400. Plus the color plates are fantastic.
ALL OF THIS IS SO COOL
I found something too awesome not share with you!
I’m completely fascinated by the history of food, could I choose a similar topic for my Third Year Dissertation? Who knows, but it is very interesting all the same!
Bread fraud us actually where the concept of a bakers dozen came from. Undersized rolls/loaves/whatever were added to the dozen purchased to ensure that the total weight evened out so the baker couldn’t be punished for shorting someone.
[wants to talk about bread fraud laws and punishments]
AngelMihe 