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[MIKA27]

The Weird History Of The Super NES CD-ROM, Nintendo's Most Notorious Vaporware

Nintendo never released a CD-ROM gaming system. But for a while in the early 1990s, it flirted with the idea. That protracted will-they-won’t-they romance produced pages of breathless gossip columns in video game magazines, a mountain of vaporware, some terrible Zelda games, and one priceless prototype.
The legacy of the Super NES CD-ROM is also one of historical misinformation, confusion, and outright myths.

In the early 1990s, few people owned CD-ROM hardware, but it looked as if CDs were going to rapidly become the future of video games. A large, expensive game cartridge of the time might hold 2 megabytes of memory, while a cheap CD-ROM could hold over 600. Developers could use that massive storage space for lengthy video sequences, high-quality audio tracks, or anything they could imagine. And for a while, it seemed like Nintendo was on board with that, too.

“It’s just around the corner!” read the April 1992 issue of Nintendo’s in-house magazine Nintendo Power, in a piece about the SNES CD-ROM drive. The 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System had just launched in the U.S. the previous September, and Nintendo was now promising that players would be able to update their cartridge-only system to a CD-capable one in January 1993 for $US200 ($280). And not a moment too soon, as rival NEC already had a CD drive for its Turbografx-16 system, and Sega was about to release one for the Genesis later in 1992.

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, released in 1991.

But Nintendo’s never materialised. To understand why, we should take a trip back in time to the origins of consumer CD-ROM hardware.

While we tend to think of CD-ROM as a totally 90s technology, the first CD-ROM readers rolled out in 1985. One major example was the Philips CM 100, which was about as big as a game console, cost $US1 ($1),500 ($2,098) (or about $US3,500 ($4,895) today), and was packed in with a Grolier’s encyclopedia disk—text only, no graphics. As you might imagine, it found a limited audience in the mid-1980s, when many home PCs didn’t even have hard disk drives. It seems to have mostly been adopted by libraries, corporations, and other organisations that needed to store a lot of data.

The first CD-ROM game machine — which was arguably the first CD-ROM device of any kind aimed at mainstream consumers — was the CD-ROM2, an add-on for the Japanese PC Engine console, known as the TurboGrafx-16 in America. Released in December 1988, it was quite ahead of its time and quite expensive at around $US600 ($839). The early games (like Fighting Street, a version of the original Street Fighter) were very similar to cartridge games, just using the CD’s extra space for better music and voice samples.

It still wasn’t quite clear how CD-ROMs could truly benefit video games. It was in this year, 1988, that a young engineer from Sony convinced Nintendo to let him put a CD-ROM drive into its next gaming console.

‘You Can Do Your CD-ROM Thing’

The SNES CD-ROM all started with Ken Kutaragi, a young engineer at Sony who’d later become known as the “father of the Playstation.” Kutaragi struck a deal with Nintendo to create the sound chip for the Super NES — a decision he apparently made without the knowledge of Sony’s board of directors. The project was a success—the SNES’s sound hardware is one of the most widely praised aspects of the machine’s design — and for the next step in what was looking like a fruitful partnership between Nintendo and Sony, Kutaragi proposed that Sony be allowed to create a Super Nintendo that had a CD-ROM drive built in. Nintendo agreed.

The behind-the-scenes of this deal are mostly shrouded in Japanese corporate secrecy, but in late 2016, we got some rare insight into how it all went down — from one perspective, that is.

Shigeo Maruyama, the former head of Sony Computer Entertainment, discussed it with the Japanese site Denfaminicogamer, translated by Nintendo Everything.

Kutaragi “was a strong advocate for pursuing CD-ROM support over cartridges,” Maruyama said. “But Nintendo wanted to stick to [cartridges] for games. CD-ROMs can take 10-15 seconds to load, after all. They probably didn’t think users would want to wait that long. But Kutaragi wouldn’t let up his arguments, so eventually Nintendo told him, ‘Alright. We don’t think it will be successful, but you can do your CD-ROM thing.’”

It was, by all accounts, Nintendo’s scepticism in the viability of CD-ROMs that caused it to give away too much in the contract it signed with Kutaragi. Sony got the rights to create and sell CD-ROM software that would run on the Super NES-compatible machine, which it called the “Play Station.” It wouldn’t have to pay Nintendo any royalties or get its approval for CD-ROM games. This meant that if developers and consumers did embrace CD-ROM gaming on the Super NES, Nintendo wouldn’t get a dime off any of those game sales — only the hardware sales.

The ‘Play Station’ prototype discovered in 2015 is the machine that Sony’s Ken Kutaragi created in 1991—a Super Nintendo with a CD-ROM drive attached to it.

Why would Nintendo allow this to happen? Maruyama said it was because Sony “explicitly told them we were going to focus on everything but video games.” In other words, Sony’s position was that it would make encyclopedias, home karaoke software, and other non-gaming applications using CD-ROMs, and leave all the gaming to Nintendo. But apparently this was not in the contract itself, and once the ink was on paper, Sony had carte blanche.

It’s also useful, to understand what was going on here, to look at how Sony was evolving in the late 1980s. As the decade dawned, Sony was an electronics maker with a life insurance business on the side. But in late 1987, it acquired CBS Records, home of Michael Jackson and Billy Joel. In 1989, it acquired Columbia Pictures. That same year, it founded Sony Imagesoft, a video game publisher. In the span of just two years, Sony had gone from a hardware-only company to a media juggernaut. This may have contributed to Nintendo’s mounting worries as the years went on and the launch of the Super NES came closer.

The Summer Screwjob

If you’ve heard any story about the Super NES CD-ROM, it’s probably this one: At the Summer 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, the entire world expected that Nintendo would stand up at its press conference and reaffirm that Sony would provide the CD-ROM drive for its upcoming Super Nintendo. Instead, Nintendo betrayed its partner and shocked the world by announcing that it had instead decided to partner with Philips for the SNES CD, delivering a stunning insult to Sony that caused the company to go it alone and develop what we now know today as the Playstation.

It’s a riveting story, but it’s not entirely true. What really happened is much more complicated.

It is true that, until very shortly before the Summer CES, the Nintendo-Sony joint venture was still on. A Nintendo Power article about Super NES in its June 1991 issue made reference to “the CD-ROM unit currently being developed jointly by Nintendo and Sony.” And it is also true that things fell apart rather quickly. But it was not, as the oft-told story goes, that Sony executives were sitting in the audience for Nintendo’s conference expecting to hear the word “Sony” and instead heard “Philips.”

Sony executives, wrote David Sheff in his 1993 book Game Over, “had learned about the pending press conference forty-eight hours earlier, and were… stunned.” Howard Lincoln, then a Nintendo of America exec, told Sheff that Sony had sprung into action when it heard the news, trying to put the kibosh on the whole thing. “There were tremendous efforts on a worldwide basis to keep that press conference from happening,” he said.

How did Sony’s spies find out that Nintendo was planning on announcing a partnership with Philips? Likely by the time-honored espionage technique of… reading the newspaper. “Nintendo, Philips Join In Games On CD,” read the headline of a Seattle Times story dated May 31, 1991, exactly two days prior to Nintendo’s June 2 event. “Japan’s Nintendo Co. Ltd. has agreed... with Dutch electronics maker Philips Electronics NV to put its popular video games on compact discs, a Nintendo spokesman said today,” the story read.

Philips’ CD-i unit, which was planned to be compatible with Nintendo’s SNES CD-ROM as part of the agreement between the two firms.

So a Nintendo spokesperson had already told the media that the company planned to go with Philips as its partner, notwithstanding the deal it already had in place with Sony. That meant that when Sony had its own press conference on June 1, 1991 and announced its “Play Station” device, it already knew what Nintendo planned to do the next day.

Perhaps that’s why the media came out of Sony’s conference with the impression that Sony was planning on using its contract with Nintendo to try to back-channel its way into game publishing.

“Sony, Nintendo’s Partner, Will Be a Rival, Too,” read the headline of a New York Times piece on June 1, following the conference. “While Sony and Nintendo have collaborated on the machine, Sony will clearly become a competitor of Nintendo,” read the piece. “Sony confirmed yesterday that it had retained all licensing rights for any compact disk game developed for the new system.”

“By that oversight, Sony ended up with a very important business advantage,” Larry Probst, then the CEO of Electronic Arts, remarked in the story. “I heard they gave the store away,” said one analyst. Sony made it clear that it planned to leverage its new holdings in the music and movie businesses, noting that it planned to release a game based on the movie Hook and floated the possibility of a Michael Jackson game as well.

So, while the shift from Sony to Philips did all happen in whirlwind fashion, the fact is that when Nintendo finally made it official on June 2, nobody was surprised. Once all the dust had settled, Sony still planned to release the Play Station, which was simply a Super Nintendo with a CD-ROM drive attached to it, and create CD-based game software for it. Separately, Nintendo and Philips would team up to create an add-on for the Super Nintendo that would add CD-ROM capability and be compatible with the standalone machine that Philips was going to release later that year, called the CD-i.

“Our engineers reached the conclusion that from a technical standpoint that it was better for Nintendo to work with Philips,” Howard Lincoln told the New York Times. “There is a dispute between Sony and Nintendo as to the terms of the agreement.” Meanwhile, the Super Nintendo itself had not even been released yet, and the Times correctly noted that all of the backstabbing had taken away attention from the actual, really cool, games that Nintendo was showing off at CES.

“It’s easy to say that Sony was 100% the victim, and Nintendo 100% the wrongdoer,” said former Sony Computer head Shigeo Maruyama in the 2016 Denfaminicogamer interview. “In fact, that’s the story the company gave all of us while I was working there.” But he wasn’t so sure that Sony had no culpability. “I get the feeling something was going on behind the scenes. After all, there had to be a reason Sony wasn’t able to go after them.”

Since it would clearly have no backing from Nintendo, Sony ultimately decided to not push forward with the original Play Station, and the device became the stuff of legends. In 2015, a prototype of the unit was discovered to be in the hands of a man who had bought the property of former Sony executive Olaf Olafsson at an auction. It is the last remnant of a history that never came to be, with its Sony logo sitting atop a Super Nintendo controller.

The Million-Dollar Guest

That was the end of the story of the “Play Station,” but the saga of the SNES CD-ROM continued on. In its April 1992 issue, Nintendo Power updated the Nintendo faithful on the progress of the SNES CD-ROM. While the details were still vague, it was clear that what Nintendo and Philips were planning was not like Kutaragi’s device, which was just a CD drive attached to a Super Nintendo. The new add-on would also enhance the computing abilities of the Super NES, adding eight megabits of RAM and the ability to display full-screen video.

While Nintendo took this opportunity to proclaim that the device was “just around the corner,” it didn’t announce any actual SNES CD-ROM games. Instead, the Nintendo Power piece mentioned some of the relatively few games that were available for PC CD-ROM systems of the time, implying (but never stating) that the games might come to its device. One game it mentioned was Cosmic Osmo by Cyan Worlds. Cyan had published the first PC CD-ROM game, The Manhole, and was a year away from launching CD’s first killer app: Myst.

The other game it mentioned was an in-development project that it simply called Guest, which turned out to be The 7th Guest, another breakout CD-ROM game that would release the next year. A puzzle game taking place in a haunted mansion created from pre-rendered 3D video sequences, 7th Guest was a whole bundle of clever technical tricks that added up to a very impressive-looking, but ultimately shallow game. But it was so good-looking that Nintendo wanted to secure it as an exclusive for its system.

The 7th Guest.

“We got a call one day from… Nintendo,” said a former Virgin Interactive employee in Steven Kent’s 2001 book The Ultimate History of Video Games. “They were trying to find games that would be appropriate for their CD-ROM drive that was eventually gaming to happen.” Virgin showed Nintendo The 7th Guest, and “within days” Nintendo was negotiating a deal to lock down the exclusive console rights to it. Nintendo ended up paying $US1 ($1) million for rights it never used, and The 7th Guest never came out on any consoles—except for Philips’ CD-i.

There was one notable Japanese developer that publicly planned to support Nintendo’s CD-ROM drive: Square, which was “busy designing the software that will become the next generation in gaming — CD-ROM.” This was according to the Spring 1992 issue of The Ogopogo Examiner, a newsletter that the RPG publisher mailed to its fans. “Characters in the games will actually speak to you as you play the game, and paper game manuals will become a thing of the past as these are placed right on the screen for easier access,” the story read. (Well, one out of two ain’t bad.)

Square’s newsletter did not mention any specific game titles, but we would later learn that its inaugural SNES CD-ROM game was meant to be Secret of Mana. As the release of the CD-ROM drive was pushed further and further back, the action RPG was moved from CD to cartridge, resulting in some cut content. “I think that when you play it you can get a sense of areas where it seems that something might be missing,” Square’s Ted Woolsey said of the game in a 1994 interview.

But Square still believed that the CD-ROM unit was coming out, so it made initial plans for another upcoming game, Chrono Trigger, to use the CD drive. That’s why the game revolved around time travel, one of its developers said: “We wanted to take full advantage of the space afforded by that media, and make a game where you visit multiple different worlds.” But Chrono Trigger, too, soon had to be converted into a cartridge game.

Sabotage At Sony

As 1992 drew to a close, there was still very little substantive information about the SNES CD-ROM, but there was one major behind-the-scenes development. On October 14, 1992 — the day before Sega released its much-hyped Sega CD in the States — Nintendo and Sony announced that they had mended fences, and that Sony would now be collaborating with Nintendo and Philips on the SNES CD-ROM add-on after all.

“Nintendo and Sony are teaming up on the next generation of video game technology,” read an Associated Press article. “The agreement also allows Nintendo and Sony to licence other companies to develop, manufacture and sell disk software, with all licensing activity going through Nintendo.” A little over a year after the dueling press conferences, Sony and Nintendo had apparently resolved the key issue—Nintendo would now make its money from the licensing fees, rather than Sony being able to do an end-run around them.

Nintendo Power’s April 1992 issue featured an extensive piece extolling the virtues of the SNES CD-ROM. 

So all was resolved, right? Well, obviously not, as we know now that Sony would release its standalone Playstation in 1994, launching an all-out attack on Nintendo. So what happened?

Ken Kutaragi, who as a young engineer didn’t hold much institutional power at Sony, still wanted the company to go its own way and create a video game console. He was opposed by the older, more conservative Sony board members, who had no interest in creating a console. But Kutaragi had his ace in the hole: He had the ear of Sony chairman Norio Ohga, who had backed up the young engineer when it was revealed that he had created the Super NES’ sound chip in secret. Kutaragi convinced Ohga that what Nintendo had done to Sony at the 1991 CES was an unforgivable slap in the face, and that Sony had to respond forcefully. Ohga let Kutaragi pursue the Playstation project.

Sony’s board would not take this lying down. In the book Console Wars, Blake Harris says that the announcement that Sony would rejoin the Nintendo project was an action of the “old guard,” a sign that they still wielded power within the company. It was also the smart conservative move. Nintendo was the 363kg gorilla of the game industry, and on the surface it made little sense for Sony, with no game experience, to attempt to defeat it. Better to work alongside Nintendo and collect royalties, went the thinking.

Nintendo’s Last Stand

The SNES CD-ROM project, though delayed, was still alive on February 1, 1993, when Nintendo held a technical conference to update developers on the latest specifications for the format. Documents from that session, recently obtained and scanned by my friend and gaming historian Steve Lin, give us a detailed glimpse into how the hardware would work.

By this point, Nintendo had made a major new addition to the CD-ROM hardware: a 32-bit coprocessor. This would make the CD-ROM sort of a combination of the Sega CD and the 32X, although one assumes it would have looked a bit more elegant than Sega’s unwieldy tower of add-ons. The SNES’s built-in 1 megabit of RAM would be supplemented by an additional 13 megabits, so a lot of data could be loaded off of the CD-ROM at once. At the center of all of this would be a chip called the Hyper Advanced Nintendo Data Transfer System, or HANDS. Clearly, Nintendo was going the extra mile to attempt to solve CD-ROM’s biggest problem, load times.

All of this extra hardware — the 32-bit processor, the RAM, the HANDS, and more — would not be located in the “ND Drive” unit that would sit below the Super Nintendo, but would actually be stored in a cartridge that would go into the SNES’s top slot, where games usually went. The ND Drive underneath would simply be the CD-ROM drive, and nothing else. However, it would still require its own AC adaptor.

There’s one other interesting wrinkle in these documents. A handwritten note next to the picture of the CD-ROM disc itself reads “cartridge or caddy.” Remember CD caddies? Early drives had you put the disc into a plastic case, then insert that case into the drive. This helped protect the disc from scratches, but Nintendo had another use in mind: It would put a security chip into the caddy as an anti-piracy measure, then seal the disc inside. So if the SNES CD-ROM had actually shipped, the games wouldn’t have been loose discs, but CDs in plastic cases with security chips inside.

Another handwritten note on the document suggested that Nintendo intended to ship the “Super NES CD-ROM System” in 1993 or 1994. But that was the last anyone heard of it. Nintendo never made any official reveal announcement for the SNES CD-ROM: it never showed off the final hardware, never announced any lineup of games, never committed to a date or a price. The device just quietly disappeared.

Part of the reason for its disappearance was surely the impending arrival of the next generation of hardware. In early 1993, Nintendo started working with the American company Silicon Graphics on what would become the Nintendo 64, announcing their partnership and the development of the new, 3D gaming platform later that year. And in early 1994, it made what the New York Times referred to as the “surprise announcement” that its new system, then known as “Project Reality,” would not use CD-ROMs, but instead use cartridges.

That’s not to say that no Nintendo games, in a sense, ever ended up on CD-ROM. As part of its partnership with Philips, Nintendo gave the Dutch hardware company the rights to create games using its characters for the CD-i platform. Philips took this golden opportunity and created the three worst Legend of Zelda games ever made, plus the barely passable Hotel Mario.

Meanwhile, Nintendo’s decision to avoid the CD-ROM format entirely turned out to be tantamount to opening up a golden door for Ken Kutaragi and Sony to waltz through, scooping up nearly all of Nintendo’s market share. The Playstation, an elegant system built around the CD-ROM, leveraged all of the benefits of the medium: It allowed developers to create massive games with lavish video sequences and orchestrated soundtracks, then let them spend much less money manufacturing the discs, freeing them from the stranglehold Nintendo had on the ROM chip market.

One such developer was Square, which felt so burned by Nintendo’s refusal to use discs that it defected entirely to Sony, taking other developers along with it. Square’s Final Fantasy VII, which shipped on three CD-ROMs, would become one of the most successful games of all time, helping ensure the Playstation’s dominance for years to come—and prove how CDs could let developers create truly unique games.

The SNES CD-ROM, and the way Nintendo talked about it for years, always had a whiff of vaporware to it—not just in the sense that it was never fully detailed and never shipped, but because it always seemed to be, in part, a make-believe product that was intended mostly to stop consumers from buying the actual CD-ROM drive that was being sold by Sega.

The discovery in 2015 of Sony’s “Play Station” prototype was an important moment for the history of the SNES CD-ROM. Now that hackers have been able to get into the system and understand how it all works, that means that if any game prototypes are ever discovered, they’ll be able to run in emulation or on the real device. (Who knows, maybe there’s an uncut Secret of Mana out there somewhere.)

But the real Holy Grail of SNES CD-ROM hunters has yet to be found: a prototype of the 32-bit add-on that Nintendo was planning to release. Should that, or games that run on it, ever be found, that would be a fascinating glimpse at a long-lost Nintendo game platform.

Assuming, that is, that it ever existed.

[MIKA27]

Olea Hotel

Recently opened, this brand new, all-suite hotel close to the beach in Zakynthos island, Greece, is an oasis of calm and truly mind-blowing. Set in a secluded hillside location, the Olea All Suite Hotel features 93 cubic villas arranged in one or two-storey whitewashed blocks, along with gardens and various carob tree-shaded lounges. Many have swim-up terraces overlooking the vast 4,000-square-meter communal pool, and some have their own infinity pools. Guests can swim right up to their private balconies, offering views of either the gardens or the bay below. The surrounding landscape, heavily influenced the aesthetic of the interiors, the walls are covered with sand-colored plaster, complimented by earthy-hued bed linen and light timber furnishings. 

[MIKA27]

LEXUS LY 650 LUXURY YACHT

Considered the brand's fourth flagship model, the Lexus LY 650 Luxury Yacht is the only one that goes on water. The 65-foot vessel exudes the brand's L-finesse design language, with clean exterior lines and high-end interior finishes. Built, sold, and serviced by WI-based Marquis-Larson Boat Group, the first example is expected to hit the water in 2019.

 

[MIKA27]

More Than 800 Egyptian Tombs Revealed in Ancient Burial Ground

Described for the first time, the 4,000-year-old "rabbit's warren" represents one of the largest groupings of Middle Kingdom burials.

For thousands of years, a necropolis has been lurking under the desert near the village of Lisht in Egypt, just south of Al Ayyat. Located at the edge of the Sahara, the ancient cemetery is no secret; today, a pair of pyramids rises above the landscape in the north and south of the burial grounds.

But many of the site's ancient tombs have long been concealed under feet of sand—until now.

In just a single field season, a joint expedition between the University of Alabama-Birmingham and the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities mapped out a whopping 802 tombs at Lisht. These newly described tombs date back roughly 4,000 years and were previously unknown to Egyptologists, according to an announcement from Khaled El-Enany, Minister of Antiquities, and Mostafa Waziry, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

“What we have at the site is one of the largest corpuses of Middle Kingdom tombs in the entire country of Egypt,” says archaeologist Sarah Parcak, a National Geographic Explorer and professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who co-led the expedition with Adel Okasha, Director of the Pyramids Region.

While the tombs were largely looted before the expedition started work, they still offer many insights into the lives of the people who once bustled in the ancient city nearby, believed to have been the Middle Kingdom capital of Itj-Tawy.

Middle Kingdom Riches

Spanning from roughly 2030 to 1650 B.C., the Middle Kingdom is a period marked by flourishing art and culture. “You see this blossoming during the Middle Kingdom,” Parcak says.

Much of what we know so far about Lisht during this period comes from extensive excavations conducted since the early 1900s by researchers with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Per museum policy, Met curator Adela Oppenheim declined to comment directly about the new research. But she notes that artifacts from this period seem to reflect a greater awareness of the human condition, which is part of what makes the Middle Kingdom so fascinating.

Met teams have primarily focused their efforts on documenting and mapping the two pyramids—built for the kings Amenemhat I and Senusret I—as well as the surrounding royal tombs. But there's still much more to learn from the rest of the site's resting places.

“From this area, there really aren't very many tombs that are known, except for the royal tombs there,” says Kathryn Bard, an archaeologist at Boston University who was not involved in the work. “That's why this cemetery is important.”

Underground Network

The latest work began in 2014 when Parcak and her colleagues noticed evidence of looting pits in high-resolution satellite images. From 2009 to 2013, the dark pockmarks multiplied in the images. But from the sky, Parcak notes, the team couldn't be sure where the holes led.

Since then, work on the ground that was partially funded by National Geographic revealed that most of these pits led to tombs. At each site, the team carefully documented features of the tombs, collecting images and GPS coordinates to assemble a database for the region.

Many shaft tombs had places for up to eight burials, which means the interlocking mortuary system likely housed at least 4,000 individuals in the afterlife.

“They used all the space they could get their hands on,” says Parcak, who compares the dense system of graves to the winding tunnels of a rabbit warren. “Many would have been reused by families or grandchildren, or great-grand children, or third cousins three times removed.”

Fragments of Information

By the time the researchers arrived on the scene, looters had emptied most of the tombs. Parcak's work previously suggested that looting intensified in Egypt during the economic instability that followed the 2009 recession and the 2011 revolution. Lisht seemed to be no exception.

But Bard and other Egyptologists believe that there's still information to glean.

“I think it was a good first step,” Mark Lehner, director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates, says of the mapping and documentation efforts. Pottery shards, fragments of wall murals, human remains, and even the tomb structures themselves can help researchers learn more about the health, economic status, and mortuary practices of the people who once lived in the capital.

“This is really, to me, where the value is of this work,” says Parcak. She adds that these latest finds are limited to the southern part of the site, and the team hopes to continue work in the northern regions next season.

“Like all these other sites in Egypt,” she says, “there’s a lot left to map and discover.”

[MIKA27]

Spice Up Your Old Fashioned with Smoky Mezcal and Dark Rum

The cold weather months are coming, which means stirred, boozy, and spirit-forward cocktails that warm the bones reign. You won’t be disappointed adding this particular recipe to your fall rotation. It's a simple cocktail, but it’s one that packs a solid punch. Built similarly to an Old Fashioned, it combines mezcal and rum together instead of whiskey. Mezcal adds a layer of earthiness and smoke, while dark rum helps smooth things out. 

Personally, I’m a fan of adding some type of liqueur in stirred cocktails to introduce different flavor profiles. Here, we use Drambuie, which is a liqueur made from scotch whisky, honey, herbs, and spices. Pretty perfect for the upcoming months, if you ask me. Aside from the taste, the other good thing about this cocktail is that it’s easily batched in large amounts to serve at a get together. I’m not saying you’ll be the star of the show, but I’m not not saying that.

Give it a go and see for yourself.

INGREDIENTS

1 oz. mezcal
1 oz. dark rum
1/4 oz. Drambuie
1/4 oz. Demerara syrup
dash Angostura bitters
dash orange bitters

DIRECTIONS

Combine all ingredients into a mixing glass. Add ice and stir the cocktail with a bar spoon to chill. Strain the cocktail into a rocks glass over ice. 
Garnish with an orange peel.

[MIKA27]

MERCEDES-BENZ VISION URBANETIC CONCEPT VAN

The Mercedes Sprinter has been delivering the goods for over 20 years. But the future looks more like Vision Urbanetic concept, an autonomous chassis that can accept a variety of pods for everything from cargo to people. The all-electric platform is designed as an all-in-one package for many markets. The cargo module can hold just over 350 cubic feet or 10 European-spec pallets. The passenger module can carry up to 12 people, and with everything contained in the chassis, modules can be swapped in a matter of minutes. Mercedes envisions each Urbanetic van linked to a network infrastructure that can identify where, when, and in what configuration each vehicle is needed — a real glimpse into the future of urban transportation.

[Fuzz]

6 hours ago, MIKA27 said:

Spice Up Your Old Fashioned with Smoky Mezcal and Dark Rum

The cold weather months are coming, which means stirred, boozy, and spirit-forward cocktails that warm the bones reign. You won’t be disappointed adding this particular recipe to your fall rotation. It's a simple cocktail, but it’s one that packs a solid punch. Built similarly to an Old Fashioned, it combines mezcal and rum together instead of whiskey. Mezcal adds a layer of earthiness and smoke, while dark rum helps smooth things out. 

Personally, I’m a fan of adding some type of liqueur in stirred cocktails to introduce different flavor profiles. Here, we use Drambuie, which is a liqueur made from scotch whisky, honey, herbs, and spices. Pretty perfect for the upcoming months, if you ask me. Aside from the taste, the other good thing about this cocktail is that it’s easily batched in large amounts to serve at a get together. I’m not saying you’ll be the star of the show, but I’m not not saying that.

Give it a go and see for yourself.

INGREDIENTS

1 oz. mezcal
1 oz. dark rum
1/4 oz. Drambuie
1/4 oz. Demerara syrup
dash Angostura bitters
dash orange bitters

DIRECTIONS

Combine all ingredients into a mixing glass. Add ice and stir the cocktail with a bar spoon to chill. Strain the cocktail into a rocks glass over ice. 
Garnish with an orange peel.

Hey @JohnS, something for you to try?

[JohnS]

Mezcal and demerara syrup? Sounds interesting!

[MIKA27]

The Captive State Trailer Reveals A Totalitarian World Run By Aliens

Films such as War of the Worlds and Independence Day looked at what would happen when aliens who were smarter, stronger and deadlier invaded Earth.

The first trailer for Captive State, the latest film from Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt, doesn’t bother with the fight. Instead, it asks: What would we do if the aliens won?

Captive State stars John Goodman and Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders as survivors of an alien invasion that took place years ago. We don’t ever see the extraterrestrials in the trailer, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t around. Humanity has become a conquered species, worshipping the “Legislature” as pockets of resistance continue to survive against the 10-year occupation.

Taking place in Chicago, the movie looks at both sides of the fight: People who are fighting back against the occupation of our planet, and those who are collaborating.

The trailer looks interesting, but I have to be honest and say I wasn’t too wowed. It reminds me a lot of The Purge, replacing the New Founding Fathers with an alien species. It serves roughly the same purpose, conveying a theme of modern totalitarianism in the United States. Mixed with a bit of A Quiet Place for good measure.

Captive State also stars Jonathan Majors, Colson Baker and Vera Farmiga. It’s set to arrive in the US on 29 March 2019. An Australian release date has not yet been confirmed.

[MIKA27]

10-Year-Old Boy Survives Wasp Attack That Ended With Meat Skewer In Skull

This weekend, a 10-year-old boy in Harrisonville, Missouri, fell from a tree house after he was attacked by a swarm of yellowjackets that were nesting in the structure — and that was just the beginning of the horror.

When Xavier Cunningham fell to the ground on Saturday, he landed face-first on a barbecue skewer that was sticking out of the grass. According to Cunningham’s father, the metal rod had been found in the yard earlier by Cunningham and his friends, who stuck it in the ground so that no one would step on it. Instead, the skewer pierced Cunningham’s cheek, punctured his skull, and went through his head.

“I heard screaming, and I went running down the stairs,” Cunningham’s mother, Gabrielle Miller, told The Kansas City Star. “He came in and he had this thing just sticking out.” The other end of the skewer extended about 15cm out from Cunningham’s face.

According to Miller, once they left for the hospital, the boy said, “I’m dying, mum.” Miraculously, he was wrong. A medical team was able to safely remove the skewer from his face.

“This thing had spared the eye, spared the brain, spared the spinal cord,” Koji Ebersole, director of endovascular neurosurgery at The University of Kansas Health System, told the Star. “But the major concern was the blood vessels in the neck.”

Scans showed that the spike had missed major vessels. “You couldn’t draw it up any better,” said Ebersole. “It was one in a million for it to pass 5 or 15cm through the front of the face to the back and not have hit these things.”

Here’s a video of Ebersole discussing the operation:

The surgery was further complicated by the square shape of the skewer, but the team was able to pull it out without causing any other damage.

Ebersole estimated about a hundred people were involved in saving Cunningham. He expects the boy will have a complete or near-complete recovery.

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Ancient Jar Of Roman Gold Coins Discovered Under Italian Theatre

Archaeologists unearthed a pot of gold coins dating back to the 5th century AD under an abandoned theatre near Milan, Italy.

The gold coins, about 300 of them, were found during archaeological excavations in the basement of the condemned Cressoni Theatre in Como, a town located 50km north of Milan. The theatre, opened in 1870 and shuttered in 1997, will be knocked down after archaeologists finalise their investigations, according to The Local.

Unearthed last week, the soapstone jar and its precious contents were sent to a facility in Milan operated by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. Archaeologists are meticulously working their way through the jar, with about 27 of the coins, each weighing about 4g, having been analysed so far. A gold bar was also discovered, along with two yet-to-be identified objects. The jar dates back to the late Roman Imperial Period, around 300 to 500 AD.

“We do not yet know in detail the historical and cultural significance of the find, but that area is proving to be a real treasure for our archaeology,” explained Alberto Bonisoli, Italian Minister of Cultural Heritage and Activities, in a statement. “A discovery that fills me with pride.”

Speaking at press conference yesterday, coin expert Maria Grazia Facchinetti said the owner of the jar likely “buried it in such a way that in case of danger they could go and retrieve it”.

She said the coins were “stacked in rolls similar to those seen in banks today”, and were engraved with the visages of emperors Honorius, Valentinian III, Leon I, Antonio and Libio Severo, which suggests the coins likely “don’t go beyond 474 AD”. Facchinetti suspects the coins didn’t belong to a private individual, but rather a bank or some other commercial enterprise.

As The History Blog points out, Facchinetti’s interpretation may very well be correct, but the “private individual” theory shouldn’t be ruled out:

Quote

The find site is just a few feet away from the forum of the Roman city where merchants, banks and temples would have done brisk cash business. It was also an elite residential neighbourhood, however, so it’s not out of the question that a private individual rolled up his own wealth.

The exact worth of the coins has yet to be determined, but Italian media is suggesting the stash is worth millions of euros.

There’s a fun and fascinating Reddit thread in which coin geeks and history buffs are speculating about the value of the coins at the time they were lost, with most agreeing it was a tremendous amount of money — somewhere between $1.1 million to $2.1 million.

These are just guesses and crude back-of-the-envelope calculations, but regardless, it would seem that someone lost a hell of a lot of money some 1500 years ago.

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PAPPY VAN WINKLE FAMILY RESERVE 23-YEAR NO. 10

Pappy Van Winkle makes some of the most desirable whiskey in the world. But it is also extremely rare and hard to get one’s hands on. Now, however, a bottle of one of their rarest bourbons ever — the Family Reserve 23-year — is headed to public auction.

Already remarkably limited, this bottle (serial number 10) is exceedingly special as it is the second-rarest still in existence that was available to the public, since bottles 1-5 are the property of the Van Winkle family and numbers 7, 8, and 9 have been consumed already. Distilled at the Old Rip Van Winkle’s distillery before they moved to Kentucky under the Buffalo Trace umbrella, this insanely rare spirit is expected to fetch at least $20,000 (its estimated value) when it hits the block at Kentucky’s Speed Art Museum during their Art of Bourbon event. $20K

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British Town Blames Spiders For Ghostly Sound Of Children Singing At Night

Can you think of anything creepier in the middle of the night than the distant, melancholy sounds of children singing? It’s pure nightmare fuel, but it was also the reality for a small family in eastern England, who for months reportedly had to endure a haunting rendition of “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring” from children who couldn’t be found.

As reported by the Ipswich Star, a mother and her two children were left terrified by the sounds they could hear from their home randomly in the night on countless occasions.

After it was apparent the singing wasn’t going to stop on its own, the mother reached out to her local town council. Eventually, early in the morning of September 12, she heard the familiar lyrics yet again and called the council’s rapid response team who joined her on a hunt for the source of the haunting.

To the relief of anyone who didn’t want this story to end inconclusively with a mysterious tale about kids being involved in a tragic accident 100 years ago, the music was traced to a nearby industrial building where it was actually playing from a loudspeaker.

The next day, a spokesperson for the industrial site reportedly confirmed the nursery rhyme was part of a security system and designed to act as a deterrent to trespassers in the middle of the night. The music was apparently triggered by over-sensitive, motion-detecting cameras reacting to the movement of spiders across the lenses. 

The sensitivity of the security system has reportedly since been tweaked, and the volume of the loudspeakers was turned down so as not to terrify local residents any more. But it’s unknown if any charges were pressed against the spiders for trespassing.

 

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The Strongest Storm Of The Year Shook Southeast Asia This Weekend

Tropical Storm Mangkhut was on the move Monday as it made its way through Southeast Asia. The former Super Typhoon, which at its peak became the strongest storm to form on Earth this year so far, has been pummelling Hong Kong, Macau and the Philippines all weekend.

Heavy rainfall from the storm has triggered landslides throughout northern regions of the Philippines where Mangkhut struck on Saturday, and the government is blaming the mining industry — namely, small-scale mines that operate illegally.

At least 34 miners who sought refuge in a bunker were discovered dead; another 30 are still missing, reports The Guardian. Now, President Rodrigo Duterte is calling for the halt of all mining activities, per Reuters.

In total, at least 64 people are dead in the Philippines, but Hurricane Maria in the US taught us that death tolls can increase dramatically weeks or even months after a storm passes through.

Mangkhut’s trail of destruction didn’t stop in the Philippines, however. The storm continued its way north, going on to strike Hong Kong and Macau on Sunday with 161km/h gusts. SBS News posted a video to Twitter on Sunday that shows the power of that wind: Construction cranes were falling from high-rise buildings in Hong Kong as entire buildings swayed.

For the rest of the week, the China Meteorological Administration is forecasting heavy rains along the storm’s projected path inland from the southeastern coast. Anywhere between 10 to 15cm is expected to pour onto southern Chinese regions as the storm deteriorates.

It’s too soon to know the direct role climate change has played in this disaster, but with warmer waters come stronger storms. Mangkhut passed over waters up to a 1.5C warmer than normal as it intensified. Recognising that link isn’t rocket science.

Workers dig to find those buried in mines in the Philippines.

Debris piled up on the waterfront in Hong Kong after the passage of Typhoon Mangkhut

A woman stands on her roof to stay out of the floodwaters in the northeastern Philippines.

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The New Halloween Almost Re-Filmed The Original's Ending

Until John Carpenter stepped in.

The new Halloween film, a rebooted sequel of the 1978 original horror film, premiered this weekend, and at the press junket Bloody Disgusting got some interesting details about the production from director David Gordon Green.

“Even in the script going into production, we were going to refilm the end of the original film from a different perspective,” Green told the publication. To that end, the production crew rebuilt sets from the original, cast body doubles and began working on CGI in order to reshoot the sequence from a new angle, using it as a refresher to bring audiences who might not be familiar with the original up to speed.

According to Green, that idea was about to go forward until John Carpenter himself intervened. “This was Carpenter actually calming me down on set,” Green said. “I’m like, ‘Nobody’s going to know what’s happening and where we’re coming from.’ He’s like, ‘Just trust ‘em and leave ‘em alone and let ‘em figure it out.’” 

Carpenter’s confidence was probably well placed, as the iconic film’s influence looms large, and hype for the new instalment in Michael Myers’s story has been substantial. That preparatory work did pay off, though, as those recreated sets were used as the backbone for Laurie Strode’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) new home in the original.

“We rebuilt the bedroom from the climax of the original film so we have the bones of this room,” Green said. “Budgets are getting tighter, schedule’s getting tighter. We’re trying to jam this movie and finish it up. Then we’re like, ‘Screw it. Let’d not do that. If we need it later, we can always rebuild it.’ So we turned the set of the house into Laurie’s bedroom. So the scene in the climax with all the mannequins is to the square inch a rebuild of that room. The closet’s in the same place, the balcony’s in the same place. All those things landed so it became, out of cost necessity, this incredible subconscious (because I don’t think anybody would pick that up) rebuild of an environment from the original film.”

Halloween opens in theatres October 18th.

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Toasting Hemingway’s Paris With a Jack Rose Cocktail

The classic and autumnal applejack drink is featured in ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and is quite tasty.

As the days grow colder and shorter, autumn is the perfect season to enjoy one of the all-time classics, the Jack Rose. The drink is made with the quintessential fall crop, the good old apple. Indeed, long before Americans were making corn into bourbon, farmers in the Thirteen Colonies were making applejack, the principal component of this drink.

And while I’m raising a glass to the autumnal equinox, I’ll also be rereading Ernest Hemingway’s classic Lost Generation novel, The Sun Also Rises. Not only was the book published in the fall of 1926 but features the Jack Rose.

The Jack Rose is a pre-Prohibition gem, a classic three-part “sour” cocktail made with apple brandy/applejack, lemon or lime juice and grenadine. In his 1948 book The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, David Embury deemed the Jack Rose to be one of the “Six Basic Cocktails,” along with the Martini, Manhattan, Sidecar, Daiquiri (another sour), and the Old Fashioned. Pretty esteemed company.

You’ll see the Jack Rose mentioned as early as 1899; an item in the Chicago Inter Ocean from May 14, 1899, titled “Drinks in New York,” tells us that “Perhaps the most popular drink of the day is the whisky daisy, though the jack-rose is the pet of many connoisseurs.” The earliest recipe I’m aware of is found in Jack’s Manual on the Production, Care and Handling of Wines and Liquors, Storing, Binning and Serving (1908), by Jack Grohusko.

Jack’s version is slightly more complicated; in addition to the apple brandy and lime juice, it’s sweetened with both sugar and raspberry syrup, and flavored with a few dashes of orange juice and lemon juice. It’s quite nice, but you probably don’t need the added sugar.

There are several theories on the origin of the drink’s name: that it was so named because it’s made with applejack and has a rosy hue (from the grenadine) or, in a similar vein, that the drink is “so called because of its pink color, the exact shade of a Jacqueminot rose, when properly concocted,” as the drink is described in Albert Stevens Crockett’s 1931 classic, The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book.

Another more colorful origin theory connects the drink to a notorious New York gambler Jacob Rosenzweig, who went by the nickname “Bald Jack Rose.” Rose was said to have been “such a Broadway personality that a cocktail was named after him,” according to the 2001 book Jazz Age Jews by Michael Alexander. Rose made headlines when he testified against a (presumably) crooked NYPD detective, Lieutenant Charles Becker, in the assassination of mob figure, Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal, in 1912. Becker was convicted and went to Sing Sing’s electric chair in 1915. However, I’m a bit dubious of the Bald Jack Rose theory. For starters, when the drink was first referenced in 1899, Jack was but 23 years old. He was probably still living in Norwich, Connecticut, and wasn’t yet the toast of Broadway, if he ever was.

But there was a connection between the gambler, roses and the drink, after all. Indeed, an item in the January 2, 1913, issue of the Des Moines Tribune, titled “Jack Rose Drink Fades From Bars,” bemoaned the fact that the murder trial’s notoriety had made it so that both florists and bartenders couldn’t sell roses and drinks bearing the rat’s, er, I mean star witness’s name. “The murder of Herman Rosenthal has affected the business of florists in Brooklyn. The Jack rose, a popular blossom, has been left on the hands of the Brooklyn florists, just because it bears the same name as the informant in the famous trial.” So, florists changed the name to the “New York rose.” As for the drink’s name, “There was a serious slump in cocktails which were known as Jack Roses. A Jack Rose is a cocktail which was guaranteed to cultivate a keen edge on one’s appetite. However, like the florists, the bartenders decided that perhaps under another name the Jack Rose cocktail might again become a good seller. Accordingly, they now call it a ‘royal smile.’”

As a caveat, note that the Royal Smile appeared in the 1911 book, Beverages de Luxe, by Washburne and Bronner, published one year before Beansie Rosenthal was gunned down and well before “Bald Jack” Rose was compelled to become an informer. Hmmm, these great cocktail stories often get ruined by pesky facts. So, it seems that bartenders simply took note of the two drinks’ similarity, and “adopted” the name of one drink as the “alias” of the other for a while, you know, until things cooled over. Kind of a cocktail witness protection program, I guess.

Somehow, the Jack Rose ultimately survived the murder trial’s stigma. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Royal Smile on anyone’s menu, although you will find a few references to it in cocktail books from the era, notably in Jacques Straub’s 1914 book Drinks, in Barflies and Cocktails from 1927, by Harry’s New York Bar owner Harry MacElhone and in Harry Craddock’s classic The Savoy Cocktail Book from 1930. (However, in the last two books, you’ll find both the Jack Rose and the Royal Smile, go figure?) In most of these books, the Royal Smile is more or less a Jack Rose with the addition of gin, dry vermouth and sometimes egg white.

Getting back to Hemingway, he saw fit to feature the drink twice within the pages of The Sun Also Rises. Both times the characters are drinking them at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris. In a celebrated scene, Jake Barnes is waiting in vain for his lover Brett Ashley; the previous evening, she’d agreed to meet Jake at the hotel, but was probably too drunk that night to remember their date the next day. (Frustration in their relationship is a theme that runs throughout the book; after all, Jake’s war wound rendered him unable to consummate his love for Brett.) Anyway, Jake as the narrator tells us that “Brett did not turn up, so about quarter to six I went down to the bar and had a Jack Rose with George the barman.”

In another scene from The Sun Also Rises, Jake’s friend Bill Gorton has apparently had a few Jack Roses, also made by George at the Crillon. Perhaps more than a few—Jake notes that Bill was “pie-eyed,” and quips that Bill was “about a hundred and forty-four” drinks ahead of him.  

George the barman and the Jack Rose were also mentioned in another novel from 1926, Mr. and Mrs. Haddock in Paris, France, by humorist Donald Ogden Stewart, who happened to know Hemingway. The book lampoons the typical, stodgy, stuffy Americans who ventured over to Europe to have a look around. It seems, however, that Mr. Haddock is more inclined to “live a little,” and “do as the Parisians do” than his wife, who’s a complete stick in the mud. One scene finds Mr. Haddock at the Ritz bar, “where he found a great many fine congenial Americans drinking and eating potato chips.”

One such Yank seemed to be especially friendly, and offered advice to Mr. Haddock. He claimed to have “‘seen everything – Luigi’s, Ciro’s, Zelli’s, New York bar, Crillon bar. Seen everything. The best place in Paris to get Jack Roses is at the Crillon,” he added. “Get George to mix them, do you know George?…The best bartender in Paris,” the young man assured Mr. Haddock.

While working on my new book, A Drinkable Feast: A Cocktail Companion to 1920s Paris, I got to thinking about the Jack Rose, wondering how it might have been made in 1920s Paris, how it might have tasted to Hemingway and Donald Ogden Stewart. Was it the same, simple three-part sour cocktail, made of applejack (or the local apple brandy Calvados), citrus and grenadine? Or did the bartenders of Paris offer their own creative interpretation? I found a number of more complicated Jack Rose recipes in cocktail books of the region. At Harry’s New York Bar, one of Hemingway’s favorite haunts, the drink was essentially a mashup of the Jack Rose with the Bronx, combining the former’s apple brandy, lime juice and grenadine with the latter’s sweet and dry vermouth, orange juice, and gin. And you know what? The damned thing tastes pretty good.

The aromatic quality of the vermouth reminds me of the Presidente, that famous rum cocktail of Cuba. The gin gives it backbone and dryness, and the orange juice balances out the tartness of the citrus. Just be careful with the grenadine–don’t make it too sweet.

So, I wonder if perhaps this version of the Jack Rose is what Jake Barnes was drinking while awaiting his star-crossed lover, Brett. A too-complicated drink for an inextricably-tangled relationship, seems quite fitting to me.

Jack Rose

INGREDIENTS:

1.5 oz Applejack or calvados (try Laird’s new Applejack 86, it’s lovely)
.75 oz Dry gin
.75 oz Orange juice
.75 oz Fresh lemon or lime juice
.33 oz French vermouth
.33 oz Italian vermouth
Grenadine to color (about .33 oz)
Glass: Cocktail
Garnish: Lime or lemon peel twist

DIRECTIONS:

Add all the ingredients to a shaker and fill with ice. Shake, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with twist of lime or lemon peel.

[MIKA27]

Meet the Real Lolita Who Inspired Nabokov’s Novel

The author made a reference in ‘Lolita’ to a child who was kidnapped in 1948 and held captive for 21 months. The parallels are unsettling. Nabokov, of course, denied them all.

Several years ago, I stumbled upon what happened to Sally Horner, the 11-year-old girl whose kidnapping helped inspire Vladimir Nabokov's classic and infamous 1955 novel Lolita, while looking for my next crime story idea. Sally's kidnapping, terrifying odyssey, and dramatic rescue caught my attention with particular urgency. Here was a young girl, victimized over a 21-month odyssey taking her from Camden, New Jersey to Atlantic City, then on to Baltimore, Dallas, and California, by an opportunistic child molester named Frank La Salle. Here was a girl who figured out a way to survive away from home against her will, who acted in ways that baffled her friends and relatives at the time.

Florence "Sally" Horner, 13, is shown before her disappearance 21 months ago, was found near an auto court near San Jose, Calif., March, 22, 1950. The girl from Camden, N.J., was taken into custody when she telephoned her sister in New Jersey, asking her to send the FBI. Frank LaSalle, 52-year-old unemployed mechanic whom Sally accused of forcing her to live with him in trailer camps for 21 months, faces a possible kidnapping charge in New Jersey. He was summoned before a U.S. commissioner in San Jose, Calif., March 23, for a hearing on a Mann Act charge.

Here was a girl who survived her ordeal when so many others, snatched away from their lives, do not. Then for her to die in a car accident just two and a half years after her rescue, her story then subsumed by a novel, one of the most iconic, important works of the 20th century, immortalized forever in the parenthetical “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”

Frank La Salle

No wonder Sally Horner got under my skin in a way that few stories ever have before or since. No wonder I spent months chasing down court documents, talking to family members, visiting some of the places she had lived—and some of the places where her abductor, La Salle, took her. And even after a Canadian online magazine published my article about Sally's life and its connections to Lolita in the fall of 2014, I knew I wasn't finished with Sally. Or, more accurately, she was not finished with me.

What drove me then and galls me now is that Sally’s abduction defined her entire short life. She never had a chance to grow up, pursue a career, marry, have children, grow old, be happy. She never got to build on the fierce intelligence so evident to her best friend that, nearly seven decades later, she spoke to me of Sally not as a peer, but as a mentor. After Sally died, her family rarely mentioned her or what had happened. They didn’t speak of her with awe, or pity, or scorn. She was only an absence.

For decades Sally’s claim to immortality was as an incidental reference in Lolita, one of the many utterances by the predatory, middle-aged narrator, Humbert Humbert, that allows him to control the narrative, and of course, to control 12-year-old Dolores Haze. Like Lolita, Sally Horner was no “little deadly demon among the wholesome children.” Both girls, fictional and real, were wholesome children. Contrary to Humbert Humbert’s assertions, Sally, like Lolita, was no seductress, “unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”

The fantastic power both girls possessed was the capacity to haunt.

I first read Lolita at 16, as a high school junior whose intellectual curiosity far exceeded her emotional maturity. I thought I could handle what transpired between Dolores Haze and Humbert Humbert. I thought I could appreciate the language and not be affected by the story. I pretended I was ready for Lolita, but I was nowhere close.

Those iconic opening lines: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta” sent a frisson down my adolescent spine. I didn’t like that feeling, but I wasn’t supposed to. I was soon in thrall to Humbert Humbert’s voice, the silken veneer barely concealing a loathsome predilection.

I kept reading, hoping there might be some salvation for Dolores, even though I should have known that it does not arrive for a long time. And when she finally escapes from Humbert’s clutches to embrace her own life, her own freedom is short-lived.

I realized, though I could not properly articulate it, that Vladimir Nabokov had pulled off something remarkable. Lolita was my first encounter with an unreliable narrator, one who must be regarded with suspicion. The whole book relies upon the mounting tension between what Humbert Humbert wants the reader to know and what the reader can discern. It is all too easy to be seduced by his sophisticated narration, his panoramic descriptions of America, circa 1947, and his observations of the girl he nicknames Lolita.

Those who love language and literature are rewarded richly, but also duped. It's all too easy to lose sight of the fact that Humbert raped a 12-year-old child repeatedly over the course of nearly two years, and got away with it.

Florence Sally Horner

Reading and writing about about Vladimir Nabokov was like coming up against an electrified fence designed to keep me away from the truth. Clues would present themselves and then evaporate. Letters and diary entries would hint at larger meanings without supporting evidence. My central quest with respect to Nabokov was to figure out what he knew about Sally Horner and when he knew it. Through a lifetime, and afterlife, of denials and omissions about the sources of his fiction, he made my pursuit as difficult as possible.

What helped me grapple with Nabokov's maddening elusiveness was to reread Lolita again and again. Sometimes like a potboiler, in a single gulp, and other times slowing down to cross-check each sentence. No one could get every reference and recursion on the first try; the novel rewards repeated reading. Once you grasp it, the contradictions of Lolita’s narrative and plot structure reveal a logic true to itself.

During one Lolita reread, I was reminded of the narrator of an earlier Nabokov story, “Spring in Fialta”: “Personally, I never could understand the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other… were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest to rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth.”

Nabokov himself never openly admitted to such an attitude. But the clues are all there in his work. Particularly so in Lolita, with its careful attention to popular culture, the habits of pre-adolescent girls, and the banalities of then-modern American life. Searching out these clues of real-life happenings was no easy task. I found myself probing absence as much as presence, relying on inference and informed speculation as much as fact.

Some cases drop all the direct evidence into your lap. Some cases are more circumstantial. The case for what Vladimir Nabokov knew of Sally Horner and when he knew it falls squarely into the latter category. Investigating it, and how he incorporated Sally’s story into Lolita, led me to uncover deeper ties between reality and fiction, and to the thematic compulsion Nabokov spent more than two decades exploring, in fits and starts, before finding full fruition in Lolita.

Lolita’s narrative, it turns out, depended more on a real-life crime than Nabokov would ever admit.

Over the four and a half years I spent working on The Real Lolita, I talked with a great many people about Lolita. For some it was their favorite novel, or one of their favorites. Others had never read the book but ventured an opinion nonetheless. Some loathed it, or the idea of it. No one was neutral. Considering the subject matter, this was not a surprise. Not a single person, when I quoted the passage about Sally Horner, remembered it.

I can’t say Nabokov designed Lolita to hide Sally Horner from the reader. But given that the narrative moves so swiftly, perhaps an homage to the highways Humbert and Dolores traverse over many thousands of miles in their cross-country odyssey, it’s easy to miss a lot as you go. Even casual readers of Lolita, who number in the tens of millions, plus the many more millions with some awareness of the novel, the two film versions, or its place in the culture these past six decades, should pay attention to the story of Sally Horner because it is the story of so many girls and women, not just in America, but everywhere. So many of these stories seem like everyday injustices—young women denied opportunity to advance, tethered to marriage and motherhood. Others are more horrific, girls and women abused, brutalized, kidnapped, or worse.

Yet Sally Horner’s plight is also uniquely American, unfolding in the shadows of the Second World War, after victory had created a solid, prosperous middle class that could not compensate for terrible future decline. Her abduction is woven into the fabric of her hometown of Camden, New Jersey, which at the time believed itself to be at the apex of the American Dream. Wandering its streets today, as I did on several occasions, was a stark reminder of how Camden has changed for the worse. Sally should have been able to travel America of her own volition, a culmination of the Dream. Instead she was taken against her will, and the road trip became a nightmare.

Florence "Sally" Horner 1950, 13, who was abducted nearly two years ago, is greeted by her mother, Mrs. Ella Horner of Camden, N.J., at Philadelphia International Airport, March 31, 1950. She was flown to Philadelphia from San Francisco, accompanied by Camden prosecutor Mitchell Cohen. Sally was found when she managed to call her home from San Jose, Calif. She said a 53-year-old man, Frank LaSalle, had made her stay with him for the last two years, during a trans-continental trek. LaSalle has been charged with kidnapping.

Sally’s life ended too soon. But her story helped inspire a novel people are still discussing and debating more than sixty years after its initial publication. Vladimir Nabokov, through his use of language and formal invention, gave fictional authority to a pedophile and charmed and revolted millions of readers in the process. By exploring the life of Sally Horner in The Real Lolita, I reveal the truth behind the curtain of fiction.

What Humbert Humbert did to Dolores Haze is, in fact, what Frank La Salle did to Sally Horner in 1948.

Excerpted and adapted from The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman (Ecco). Copyright 2018 by Sarah Weinman.

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FILM: THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN MOTORCYCLE HILL CLIMBING

This film is a little different to many that I’ve posted in the past, there’s no commentary or sound of any kind, just 17 (and a bit) minutes of people sending their motorcycles up a hillside somewhere in the USA in the 1930s.

The machines are mostly American V-twins from Harley-Davidson and Indian, but there are a number of British bikes in there as well. I know that many may not watch the film because it has no sound but if you have a few minutes to spare I’d encourage you to make a coffee (or open a beer depending on the time of day) hit play.

There’s something cathartic about silent films like this one, it shows countless people who may have only been captured on film once in their lives – forever immortalized as a motorcycle hillclimb racer.

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This Heartbreaking Anthony Bourdain Commercial Provided a Somber Moment During the Emmys

Before he died in June at the age of 61, Anthony Bourdain had been a spokesman for Balvenie since about 2015. Alongside the scotch brand, Bourdain had hosted a web short series called Raw Craft in which he traveled the world to interview artisans of all sorts.

During the Emmys on Monday night, Balvenie debuted a new commercial starring the late chef, host, and writer. In it, Bourdain speaks emotionally about being passionate about one's craft.

"If you feel in your heart, if you know, if you have reason to believe that you could be awesome at something—that you can do something unique that will shock and astound and terrify and bewitch people—do that," Bourdain says in the commercial.

Then text reads: "And so you did. We were proud to have shared the journey."

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AUDI PATRONE POLICE DRONE CONCEPT

While companies like Amazon and UPS are clamoring to get the rights to use flying drones for package delivery, there’s another application that seems a bit more practical and inevitable: law enforcement. Or at least that’s what designer Jin-jung Young envisions for the near future with his Audi Patrone concept.

The idea is actually quite brilliant — the VR-controlled drone would allow law enforcement to patrol cities without putting themselves or citizens in immediate danger. And it has the potential to give a larger and more accurate representation of civilian activities out in public. The prospect is only bolstered by the sound and beautiful design of this particular concept, with its sports car-inspired lines. We’re not sure the legal implications therein, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see this kind of tech deployed in the near future.

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CONOR MCGREGOR PROPER NO. TWELVE IRISH WHISKEY

UFC superstar “The Notorious” Conor McGregor is launching an Irish whiskey in partnership with the world’s oldest whiskey distillery, Eire Born Spirits, located in Ireland. Proper No. Twelve is a whiskey named after McGregor’s childhood home in Crumlin, Dublin 12 where he learned the art of throwing down.

Acting as founder, chairman, and majority owner of the company, McGregor also took a hand in developing the whiskey. According to McGregor, his team came up with nearly 100 blends before settling on the winner. Created in an area popular for its rich soil and pure spring water, the blend of golden grain and single malt is described to be a smooth liquor with hints of vanilla, honey, and toasted wood. Every 80-proof bottle contains the fighting Irish spirit of the UFC phenom and for every case sold, McGregor will donate $5 to local first responder organizations and charities. McGregor is looking for a knockout when Proper No. Twelve hit shelves in Ireland and the United States later this month.

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‘Museum of the Moon’ Is a Traveling Replica of the Moon

We might not all have the means to travel to the moon (yet!), but we’re willing to bet that many given the opportunity would quickly jump at the chance. Museum of the Moon is a touring sculpture from UK artist Luke Jerram that takes you one step closer to experiencing the true awe and grandeur of the lunar surface. It’s a 23-foot wide, helium-filled and internally lit globe that displays a 21-meter wide, high-resolution image that was created by the Astrogeology Science Centre in the USA using imagery taken by a NASA satellite in 2010. That boils down to a 120dpi image with an approximate scale of 1:500,000 where each centimeter represents 5km of the lunar surface. Museum of the Moon features several different sculptures touring simultaneously with different audio compositions, so you can catch it all of Europe, Australia, China and Canada at any given time. 

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2019 Audi E-Tron 

After months of teasers and leaked images, Audi have officially revealed the all-electric crossover. The 2019 Audi E-Tron is powered by two powerful electric motors that are locally CO2-neutral and virtually silent. The motors are powered by a 95 kWh battery pack, and can propel the car from zero to 60 in 5.5 seconds with a top speed of 124 mph. It has roughly 400 horsepower and 489 foot-pounds of torque, although Audi says the final US spec numbers aren´t available yet. The all-electric five-seater is the fastest charging electric vehicle on the market, accumulating an 80% charge in around 30 minutes. The Audi E-Tron is also extremely well connected, it is equipped with the high-end media center MMI navigation plus including LTE Advanced and a Wi-Fi hotspot as standard. 

 

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Yohann Macbook Stand 

From the creators of this beautiful iPad Stand, comes this stunning MacBook stand, that appears to float your laptop in the air. The Yohann Macbook Stand is precisely crafted from a single block of solid wood, and raises your laptop screen to your eye-level helping you maintain an upright posture, and reducing neck strain. Elevating the laptop in the air also keeps it cool and perfectly ventilated. Pair your laptop with an external keyboard and mouse for an ultimate Mac desktop setup. Available in a choice of walnut or oak. 

 

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Tom Hardy's Favourite Scenes From Venom Aren't In The Movie

Depending on how fans react to Venom when it hits cinemas this week, we may now have the quote to launch a million think pieces.

Speaking to ComicsExplained, the film’s star, Tom Hardy, said his favourite scenes in Venom didn’t actually end up in the final cut.

“There are, like, 30 to 40 minutes’ worth of scenes that aren’t in this movie,” Hardy said when asked what his favourite scenes to film were. “Mad puppeteering scenes, dark comedy scenes. You know what I mean? They just never made it in.”

Co-star Riz Ahmed, who was also being interviewed, then suggested there’s a difference between a scene an actor loved to film and a scene fitting in the movie, which lead to a bunch of joking. So it’s hard to decide just how serious Hardy is being. But, for the most part, he seems genuine. Decide for yourself. The question comes in at 4:40.

If Venom is as good as we’re all hoping, Hardy’s answer here will become nothing other than a frivolous quote from the press tour. If, however, it isn’t as good as we hope, there’s no doubt him saying his favourite half hour of the movie isn’t in the movie could be used as ammunition to explain why that may be.

The truth, however, is probably just what Ahmed said. You can easily imagine Hardy loving to film weird, creepy comedy scenes as Eddie Brock, which director Ruben Fleischer just felt didn’t fit in with the tone of the film.

Venom is in cinemas Thursday.