Signing Off

When CNN was launched in 1980, founder Ted Turner said, “Barring satellite problems, we won’t be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on, and we will cover it live, and that will be our last, last event. We’ll play the National Anthem only one time, on the first of June [1980], and when the end of the world comes, we’ll play ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ before we sign off.”

He wasn’t joking — Turner had ordered the creation of a video of the Christian hymn performed by members of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine bands. It was held in the network’s archives, marked HFR [Hold For Release] till end of the world confirmed. Michael Ballaban, who’d been an intern at the network’s launch, released the recording above in 2015.

Ballaban wrote, “That leaves open a whole host of unanswered questions. If this is the last CNN employee alive, in the last CNN bureau on Earth, who do they confirm it with? What does confirmation look like? Who can be the one to make that determination, to pronounce the universe itself dead? … And who would be around to watch it? We don’t know.”

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Making a Point

In another case of press repression which succeeded only in creating a martyr, the editor of the Swedish newspaper Stockholms Posten, Captain Anders Lindeberg, was convicted of treason in 1834 for implying that King Karl Johan should be deposed. He was sentenced to death by decapitation, under a medieval treason law. When the King mitigated the sentence to three years in prison, Lindeberg decided to highlight the King’s repressive press policy by insisting upon his right to be beheaded and refusing to take advantage of the government’s attempts to encourage him to escape. Finally, in desperation, the King issued a general amnesty to ‘all political prisoners awaiting execution’, which applied only to Lindeberg. When the editor stubbornly insisted upon his right to execution, the government solved the problem by locking him out of his cell while he was walking in the prison courtyard and then refusing him re-entry.

— Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Censorship of the Arts and the Press in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1989

(Thanks, Jason.)

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Officers

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Beauty_on_the_Shrub%27,_painting_by_Ma_Ch%27%C3%BCan.jpg

[T]o deprive the meanest insect of life, without a good reason for so doing, is certainly criminal. By such an act, a man destroys, what neither he, nor all the united powers of the world can ever repair; and it may be attended with worse consequences than he can imagine. If superior beings had the same power over us, that we have over brutes, what misery might not one of them occasion to a whole nation, by destroying such an insect as a minister of state may appear to be in his eyes? If a child dismembers a bee, or an ant, he may, for any thing we know to the contrary, distress a whole common-wealth.

— James Granger, An Apology for the Brute Creation, or Abuse of Animals Censured, 1772

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Wandering Minds

Here’s a macabre fad from Victorian Britain: headless portraits, in which sitters held their severed heads in their hands, on platters, or by the hair, occasionally even displaying the weapons by which they’d freed them.

Photographer Samuel Kay Balbirnie ran advertisements in the Brighton Daily News offering “HEADLESS PHOTOGRAPHS – Ladies and Gentlemen Taken Showing Their Heads Floating in the Air or in Their Laps.”

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Missing

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mid-nineteenth_century_reconstruction_of_Alexander%27s_catafalque_based_on_the_description_by_Diodorus.jpg

The location of Alexander the Great’s tomb is a mystery. After Alexander’s death in Babylon in 323 B.C., his body was taken first to Memphis and then to Alexandria, where Pompey, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Augustus, and Caligula all visited his tomb. But by the 4th century A.D. the tomb’s location was no longer known. Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities has now recognized more than 140 search attempts, but none has succeeded conclusively.

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Memorial

https://www.flickr.com/photos/socialcriteria/34748537233/
Images: Flickr, Wikimedia Commons

The gravestone of urban planner Ildefons Cerdà has a unique design: It commemorates the Eixample, the distinctive “extension” of Barcelona that Cerdà designed in the 19th century.

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The Nightingale Monument

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/mo2i8k/the_tomb_of_lady_elizabeth_nightingale_who_died/

Elizabeth Nightingale died of shock at a violent stroke of lightning following the premature birth of her daughter in 1731. In his will, her son ordered the erection of this monument, which was created by Louis Francois Roubiliac and stands in Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth is supported by her husband, who tries in horror to ward off the stroke of death. Washington Irving called it “among the most renowned achievements of modern art.”

The Abbey’s website says, “The idea for this image may have come from a dream that Elizabeth’s brother in law (the Earl of Huntingdon) had experienced when a skeleton had appeared at the foot of his bed, which then crept up under the bedclothes between husband and wife. … It is said that one night a robber broke into the Church but was so horrified at seeing the figure of Death in the moonlight that he dropped his crowbar and fled in terror. The crowbar was displayed for many years beside the monument but it no longer remains.”

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Remembering

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uhde_Abandoned.jpg

From a letter by Phillips Brooks to a friend on the death of his mother, Nov. 19, 1891:

May I try to tell you again where your only comfort lies? It is not in forgetting the happy past. People bring us well-meant but miserable consolations when they tell us what time will do to help our grief. We do not want to lose our grief, because our grief is bound up with our love and we could not cease to mourn without being robbed of our affections.

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Memorial

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Davis_Memorial_(Hiawatha_KS)_from_SE_1.JPG

When Sarah Davis of Hiawatha, Kansas, died in 1930, her husband John spent most of his wealth on her grave, including 11 life-size statues of Italian marble consorting under a canopy that weighs 50 tons.

The extravagance won John some criticism during the Depression, but today the monument brings a steady flow of tourists to the town.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Davis_Memorial_(Hiawatha_KS)_S_sculptures_1.JPG

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First Contact

Moving beyond attempts at merely contacting the dead, artist Attila von Szalay claimed to be the first researcher to actually record the discarnate voices of the spirit world. Von Szalay’s quest began in 1936, while he worked in his darkroom. He claimed to hear in this darkened chamber the voice of his deceased brother calling his name. A subsequent interest in Yoga, meditation, and Eastern philosophy made him better able to hear such voices, and in 1941 he attempted for the first time to record the spirits on a 78 rpm record (with disappointing results). It wasn’t until 1956 that von Szalay ‘successfully’ recorded such phenomena, this time using a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Perhaps unaware of their importance in the history of telecommunications, the first recorded spirit voices offered such banal messages as ‘This is G!,’ ‘Hot dog, Art!,’ and ‘Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.’ These pioneering sessions were reported by noted psychic researcher Raymond Baylass in a letter to the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1959.

— Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence From Telegraphy to Television, 2000

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