Category: Bazaar News

In 1967, prosecutor Jim Garrison accused Clay Shaw of conspiring with government agencies to assassinate President John F. Kennedy — but many believe it was all for media attention.

Less than a year after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, an official government investigation into his death found that Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone. That didn’t sit well with Jim Garrison, then the district attorney in New Orleans, Louisiana. He decided to open up an investigation of his own.

In 1967, Garrison publicly aired his doubts. He declared that the conclusions drawn by the government’s investigation, the Warren Commission, were “totally false” and called the commission itself “the official fiction.” Instead, Garrison alleged that the president had been killed by the CIA to prevent him from ending the war in Vietnam and making peace with the Soviet Union.

But though Garrison publicly accused several people of conspiring to kill the president, his investigation went nowhere. Many dismissed him as an attention seeker and a fraud. Yet Garrison unfailingly maintained that there was more to the Kennedy assassination than met the eye.

This is the story of Jim Garrison, the dogged district attorney from New Orleans featured in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK.

Jim Garrison’s Unlikely Rise To Power In New Orleans

Born on Nov. 20, 1921, Jim Garrison spent the first half of his life like many men from his generation. He enlisted in the Army shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and spent his young adulthood fighting in World War II.

That experience, which the Associated Press reports colored his thinking about “good wars” and “bad wars,” brought Garrison to Europe. He flew planes in France and Germany, and he passed through the Dachau concentration camp just one day after his fellow troops liberated it.

He returned home to New Orleans after the war, attended Tulane University Law School, and opened a law practice in the 1950s after a short stint as an FBI agent in Seattle, according to the Washington Post.

Though Garrison made little news during that period of time, The New York Times reports that he may have been privately struggling. When he started his crusade to find the truth about Kennedy’s assassination in the 1960s, newspapers reported that he suffered from “a severe and disabling psychoneurosis of long duration.” Garrison never commented on those reports.

Indeed, the 6’6″ Garrison seemed capable of doing whatever he put his mind to. According to The New York Times, he accused New Orleans Mayor Victor Schiro of being soft on crime in 1962 and unexpectedly ran against the incumbent district attorney. To the surprise of many, he won in an upset.

As district attorney, Garrison wielded the power of television. According to NOLA, he often raided bars in the French Quarter and arrested sex workers with cameras in tow. (Usually, NOLA reports, he’d release them the next day.)

But everything changed for Jim Garrison on Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was shockingly assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

Jim Garrison’s Investigation Into The JFK Assassination

Like many Americans, Jim Garrison had questions about the John F. Kennedy assassination. But though the conclusions of the Warren Commission may have reassured some, they didn’t satisfy him.

As the Associated Press reports, Garrison’s suspicions were first raised when he learned more about the president’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was born in New Orleans and had spent a great deal of time in the city. Oswald, Garrison found, had offices close to U.S. intelligence agencies.

“After I realized that something was seriously wrong, I had no alternative but to face the fact that Oswald had arrived in Dallas only a short time before the assassination and that prior to that time he had lived in New Orleans for over six months,” Garrison later told Playboy.

“I became curious about what this alleged assassin was doing while under my jurisdiction, and my staff began an investigation of Oswald’s activities and contacts in the New Orleans area,” Garrison explained. “We interviewed people the Warren Commission had never questioned, and a whole new world began opening up.”

His search for the truth, which Garrison aired publicly starting in 1967, took him on a deep dive into governmental conspiracy theories. As The New York Times reports, the district attorney even appeared on The Tonight Show wsith Johnny Carson in 1968 and discussed everything from guerillas to Texas millionaires to the involvement of the police, FBI, and CIA.

Garrison came to believe, according to The New York Times, that the president had been killed because intelligence agencies feared he would withdraw from Vietnam and try to make peace with the Soviet Union and Cuba. The Associated Press additionally reports that Garrison believed that at least 18 people were involved — and he tried to prosecute two of them.

The first was David Ferrie, an anti-communist and pilot who wasn’t shy about his anti-Kennedy, anti-Cuba views. Ferrie had even been questioned by police shortly after Kennedy’s death, though he’d denied his involvement.

“We discovered a whole mare’s-nest of underground activity involving the CIA, elements of the paramilitary right and militant anti-Castro exile groups,” Garrison told Playboy. “We discovered links between David Ferrie, Lee Oswald, and Jack Ruby [who shot and killed Oswald in 1963].”

But shortly before Garrison planned to go after Ferrie, Ferrie died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm at the age of 48.

Undeterred, Garrison next focused on a New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw. He tried to prosecute Shaw as a conspirator, but the 1969 trial was seen as a circus at best and homophobic at worst. Shaw was widely known to be homosexual, and NOLA reports that a great deal of his trial was focused on his tight-fitting pants. Indeed, Garrison had speculated early on that Kennedy’s death had been a “homosexual thrill killing.”

At that point, even Jim Garrison recognized that he’d hit a wall.

“We went about as far as we could go before our wings were clipped, in reaching a point, in ’69, where I couldn’t say anything without being pictured as a fool or a madman,” he told the Associated Press decades later.

The Murky Legacy Of Jim Garrison Today

Following Shaw’s trial, Jim Garrison’s reputation suffered. As The New York Times reports, he was indicted in 1973 for taking bribes to protect illegal pinball gambling. Though Garrison conducted his own defense and was acquitted, he was forced to scramble to put together a reelection campaign for his fourth term as district attorney, which he lost.

“They got me,” he told the Associated Press in 1989. “They sure got me. When they set that trial, that federal trial, for a few months before the election, they sure got me.”

Garrison landed on his feet, however. In 1978, he won a seat on Louisiana’s Court of Appeal for the Fourth Circuit. Garrison served as an appellate judge until the weeks before his death in 1992.

Shortly before he died, however, Jim Garrison’s story was revived in a surprising fashion. In 1991, Oliver Stone released his film JFK, which cast Garrison as a hero in search of the truth. Garrison served as an advisor on the film, and Stone drew heavily from Garrison’s book, On the Trail of Assassins, according to The New York Times.

To the end of his life, he maintained that there was more to John F. Kennedy’s death than the public knew. Speaking to the Associated Press, he suggested that people like Chief Justice Earl Warren and President Lyndon B. Johnson participated in the cover-up for the “good of the country.”

“I think that was the magic phrase from there on,” he said. “A lot of people who you would not call bad people and who were not villains responded, I think, with active participation in the cover-up as a consequence.”

Even during the interview in 1989, more than two decades after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Jim Garrison still became emotional while speaking about the president. Kennedy’s character, the Associated Press noted, had driven Garrison’s unfailing interest in the details of his death.

“He had ideals,” Garrison said. “He inspired dreams.”

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After reading about Jim Garrison, look through these haunting photos from the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Or, peruse these surprising facts about John F. Kennedy’s death.

After the 1872 gubernatorial election in Louisiana, KKK members and former Confederates stormed a courthouse occupied by Black militiamen — and killed as many as 150 of them.

In 1873, the losing side of the most recent Louisiana gubernatorial election took up arms and marched on a local seat of government. It ended in bloodshed.

The clash took place in the small town of Colfax, Louisiana. A white mob of Democrats that lost the election tried to seize control of a courthouse defended by Black Republicans. And the election dispute quickly turned into a massacre.

For decades, few outside of rural Louisiana remembered the Colfax Massacre. History textbooks brushed over the slaughter and even the marker in the town square blamed “carpetbag misrule” – code for Reconstruction-era policies that protected newly freed Black Americans – for the massacre.

What triggered the violent race massacre? And how did the Colfax Massacre help end Reconstruction and tip the balance toward segregation and Jim Crow rule?

The Louisiana Election Of 1872

An election triggered the Colfax Massacre. In 1872, Louisiana voters went to the polls to choose a new governor. But the Republican and Democratic candidates split the votes, leaving both contestants claiming victory.

Although the pro-Reconstruction Republicans had more votes, the Democrats formed a militia to seize power. President Ulysses S. Grant ordered federal troops to Louisiana to enforce order, Smithsonian reports. But before they broke up the militia, the tense situation erupted in Colfax.

A courthouse sat at the center of the small town of Colfax, Louisiana, the seat for Grant Parish county. The parish was divided, like many in the post-Civil War South. In the 1872 election, 4,600 Colfax voters cast ballots. Around 2,400 mostly Black voters supported the Republican candidate, while 2,200 mostly white voters pulled the level for the Democrats.

At the end of March 1873, white Democratic officials called for a militia to seize the Colfax courthouse and prevent Republicans – including Black elected officials – from taking office.

In response, a group of Black men surrounded the courthouse to prevent the white militia from seizing control of government.

On April 13, the white mob fought back, firing a cannon at the courthouse.

The Worst Explosion Of Racial Violence Since The Civil War

Easter Sunday fell on April 13, 1873. And on that day, the Colfax courthouse became the site of a race massacre.

Around 60 Black men surrounded the courthouse to stop the white mob from seizing political power illegitimately. More than 300 white men marched on the courthouse.

The white mob included members of the Ku Klux Klan and former Confederate soldiers.

James Hadnot led the white militia. And when one of his followers accidentally shot him, Hadnot’s militia began slaughtering their Black prisoners.

After seizing control of the courthouse, the white militia promised pardons to any Black residents who surrendered. Yet when dozens surrendered, the white mob executed them.

The massacre soon spread beyond the courthouse, with the mob killing recently freed enslaved people across Grant Parish.

At the end of the day, three white men died, while around 150 Black people were slaughtered – including at least 50 after the courthouse showdown ended.

The Reaction To The Colfax Massacre

Across the country, newspapers reported on the Colfax Massacre. However, many softened the impact by calling it a riot — and many blamed the Black victims for the massacre.

One Southern paper laid the blame at the feet of the “scalawags and carpetbaggers,” common terms for southern and northern Republicans who supported Reconstruction.

“The citizens who ‘cleaned them out’ acted by virtue of law and under orders of the sheriff,” the paper proclaimed, exonerating the white mob.

State and local authorities refused to prosecute the murderers. Federal authorities, meanwhile, stepped in and arrested 97 white members of the militia.

The perpetrators were charged under the new Ku Klux Klan Acts. But only a handful of defendants faced conviction, which the Supreme Court overturned in 1876. The high court ruled that the federal government could not charge individuals with denying Constitutional rights to Black people.

The Supreme Court ruling ended the federal government’s best tool to fight hate crimes against Black Americans. In the aftermath, hate groups like the KKK had little to fear when terrorizing their Black neighbors.

The Colfax Massacre In Hindsight

In the 1950s, as states once again fought over segregation, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights, the city of Colfax erected a historic marker to remember the massacre. Yet the marker celebrated the massacre, declaring that the slaughter “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.”

As the years passed, white southerners remembered the Colfax Massacre very differently than their Black neighbors.

Decades after the slaughter, eyewitness John I. McCain placed the blame squarely on “a mob of armed negroes” who “began to make open threats to the effect that they would kill all the white men and appropriate the women and girls to fiendish desires.”

A monument in the Colfax cemetery praised the three dead white men as “heroes” who “fell in the Colfax riot fighting for white supremacy.”

Even as late as the 2000s, white residents of Colfax remembered the massacre in racially loaded terms. One man told an Atlantic reporter that the Black mob tried to seize power rather than uphold the election results.

“You heard the expression ‘getting’ uppity’? Well, that’s what these people did – they got uppity, and decided they would run things, and of course they couldn’t.”

By placing the blame on the shoulders of Black Louisianans, generations of white Louisianans twisted the truth. After losing an election to a racially diverse party, white supremacists turned to violence. And in Colfax, more than 150 people lost their lives attempting to uphold a valid election.

The Colfax Massacre had wide-reaching consequences, even as the specific clash faded from the headlines. By undermining the Ku Klux Klan Acts, the Supreme Court closed the door on Reconstruction. Tragically, racial terrorism would dominate the former Confederacy for generations.

In 2021, Colfax finally removed the historic marker outside the courthouse.

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After the Colfax Massacre, the Jim Crow era saw several major race massacres. Next, learn about the tragic Tulsa Race Massacre that destroyed Black Wall Street, and then read about how the Elaine Massacre destroyed a Black labor movement.

Summer Myomick, 24, and her 1-year-old son, Clyde Ongtowasruk, were both killed by the bear in the remote town of Wales, Alaska.

Alaskan state troopers were dispatched to the remote village of Wales this week after reports of a vicious polar bear attack on a mother and her young child.

The woman, Summer Myomick, 24, and her one-year-old son, Clyde Ongtowasruk, were reported dead by authorities after they were attacked by a rampaging polar bear near the local school. The pair were reportedly just walking through the village when they were attacked.

The tiny village of Wales is home to fewer than 200 residents and sits at the western point of the Seward Peninsula. Its residents are primarily Inupiaq, an Indigenous group native to northwest Alaska. The Native Village of Wales Tribal Council describes the village as “one of the oldest communities in the Bering Strait region.”

It was late on the afternoon of Jan. 17, 2023, when troopers received the call regarding a polar bear on the loose. The report states that a “polar bear had entered the community and had chased multiple residents,” according to the Anchorage Daily News.

However, according to authorities, troopers were unable to enter the village until the next day due to poor weather conditions and a lack of runway lights along airstrips. The remote village of Wales is only accessible by plane and boat.

Community reports say that the polar bear entered the village and began attacking the two victims outside a local school. Susan Nedza, Chief School Administrator for the Bering Strait School District which includes the school in Wales, received a call from the school’s principal regarding the attack that was taking place just outside the entrance.

The school immediately went on lockdown and students were taken to a secure location inside the building. Several employees exited the building in an attempt to stop the attack.

“Some of them actually were outside at one point trying to hit the bear with shovels to get it to stop, and it wouldn’t,” Nedza reported. “It chased them, actually, and tried to come into the school when the principal let them in to keep them safe. So it tried to come in and they were able to close the door and keep it outside.”

According to Alaska News Source, a community member fatally shot the bear as the attack unfolded.

“It’s terrifying,” Nedza said, recalling the attack. “Not something you’re ever prepared for.”

Other polar bear attacks have occurred in the area. In 1990, the Anchorage Daily News reported that a polar bear killed a man in Point Lay, a village north of Wales. Biologists later reported that the animal showed signs of starvation.

Despite these attacks, fatal polar bear encounters remain very rare. A 2017 study published by the Wildlife Society concluded: “From 1870-2014, we documented 73 attacks by wild polar bears, distributed among the 5 polar bear Range States (Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, and United States), which resulted in 20 human fatalities and 63 human injuries.”

Polar bear encounters appear to be on the rise, however, as more bears are forced to look to human settlements for food due to the receding ice they call home.

According to an article by CNN, the town of Churchill, Manitoba, otherwise known as the “polar bear capital of the world,” has also experienced an increase in polar bear encounters.

Bear season in the area peaks in October and November as the bear population migrates further north toward the Hudson Bay. Residents of towns along their migration path have reported longer bear seasons as the ice melts faster, forcing the bears to remain on land and near human settlements for longer periods of time.

The same 2017 study by the Wildlife Society warns that polar bear attacks may only get worse as polar bears become more “nutritionally stressed.”

The village of Wales has organized patrols for when the bears are expected to be in town, usually from December to May, said Geoff York, the senior director of conservation at Polar Bear International.

“Polar bears are at the top of the food chain, and see humans as a food source,” York said. Fatal polar bear encounters usually occur among young, male bears looking for food, or older bears who may be too old or sick to hunt for food.

“Both of those bear types are more likely to take risks, like we saw here in Wales,” York added.

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After reading about this polar bear attack, dive into the story of a miner’s week-long struggle against a grizzly bear in Alaska. Then, learn the disturbing truth about why polar bears are sometimes resorting to cannibalism.

When it comes to shopping on Amazon, Prime members get all the best perks. Prime members not only get free two-day shipping (and sometimes even free one- or same-day shipping) on just about everything from the retail giant, but they can also get discounts at Whole Foods Market, access to Prime Video for movies and TV shows, use Prime Gaming for cloud gaming, and a whole lot more.

But there is one benefit that even the savviest shoppers might not know about: the site’s exclusive Just for Prime deals page. From silk pillowcases to portable Bluetooth speakers and automatic pet feeders, this hidden section on Amazon’s website is devoted to discounts that are only available to Prime members. In fact, it isn’t even listed on the homepage—you actually have to type “Just for Prime” in Amazon’s search bar to find it, which speaks to how under-the-radar it actually is.

There are thousands upon thousands of fun, everyday items to choose from in the secret spot. Prime members can peruse deep discounts on home and kitchen goods (like this top-rated milk frother and this cordless power scrubber), as well as office supplies, car gadgets, clothing and accessories, tools, and other categories. It’s also a good page to discover bargains on pet supplies, including no-pull dog harnesses and chew toys.

The shopping possibilities are just about endless. To figure out what your Prime membership markdown would be on a given item, all you have to do is navigate to the product’s landing page, then look just below where the price details would ordinarily be. If you’re not yet signed up for the service, you should see a field that says, “Join Prime to buy this item at… ,” and the deal price should be right there. If you are a member and you’re signed into the site, you’ll see that Prime member rate automatically, and the field below the price will say, “Exclusive Prime price,” so you know you’re getting a good value.

To discover more exclusive deals on top-rated products, check out the Just for Prime hub on Amazon. And if you’re not already an Amazon Prime member, you can sign up for a one-week trial for $2 to take advantage of all the savings. Once those seven days are up, you can either cancel the membership outright or decide to keep it for $15 per month or $139 for the entire year (which breaks down to about $12 per month). If you’re interested in learning more about other great Amazon shopping pages for bargain hunters, be sure to check out our story here.

Anyone even vaguely tuned into pop music probably knows all too well that there’s a Taylor Swift song for every phase of a relationship—including the end of one. This Valentine’s Day season, as Food & Wine reports, you can bask in her many break-up anthems at Chicago’s new pop-up: “Bad Blood: a Taylor-Themed Break-Up Bar.”

Swifties will no doubt be quick to point out that “Bad Blood,” a single off the 2014 album 1989, isn’t actually about a romantic separation; Swift has confirmed that it was inspired by a feud with a fellow female pop star, who, though unnamed, is almost definitely Katy Perry. (The two have since reconciled.) That said, friend break-ups can cut every bit as deep as romantic ones, and there’s no rule that says you can’t belt out “Karma” or “I Forgot That You Existed” over the loss of a duplicitous former bestie this Valentine’s Day.

The pop-up bar, hosted by Bucket Listers, will open at Electric Garden on January 27 and run through February 26. Tickets are $22 each, which grants you 90 minutes of admission and one free drink. The drink menu hasn’t been announced, but rest assured that it’ll be on theme: There’s even a “Shake It Off Wheel of Cocktails” that you get to spin. Activities include photo ops and tarot card readers who can hopefully shed light on where your future love story will fall on the “Picture to Burn” to “Paper Rings” spectrum.

Patrons must be at least 21 years old, and you have to book a specific 90-minute time slot when you purchase your tickets. Don’t expect a cameo from the cardigan queen herself: Bucket Listers makes it clear that the event “is not affiliated with, endorsed by, authorized by, sponsored by, or in any way officially connected with Taylor Swift” or her businesses.

You can learn more about the pop-up and book tickets here.

[h/t Food & Wine]

Experts say that the 2,000-year-old artifact is the oldest datable runestone in the world and may provide researchers with valuable knowledge about the early days of runic writing.

Runes, the characters that make up several early Germanic alphabets, were used in Northern Europe from the beginning of the Common Era until the adoption of the Latin alphabet at the end of the Viking Age. Researchers are still piecing together their mysteries to this day — but they may have come a little closer after the discovery of what might be the oldest runestone in the world.

According to the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, archaeologists in Norway found a 2,000-year-old slab in late 2021 that’s believed to be the oldest datable runestone in the world.

As The Guardian reports, archaeologists uncovered the stone while excavating a gravesite in the town of Tyrifjord, Norway. It was found in the cremation pit among other items like charcoal and burned bones.

Radiocarbon dating of the bones and charcoal indicates that the runestone was likely inscribed sometime between 1 C.E. and 250 C.E., according to the museum.

Carved in flat, brown sandstone, the runestone dates back to the earliest days of runic writing. Scholars have dubbed it “Svingerudsteinen” or “Svingerud stone” after the location where it was found.

“This may be one of the first attempts to use runes in Norway and Scandinavia on stone,” explained Kristel Zilmer, Professor of Written Culture and Iconography at the University of Oslo. Zilmer has spent the past year extensively researching the runestone’s inscriptions.

The discovery of the stone, which Zilmer called “the most sensational thing” that she’s ever experienced as an academic, may provide historians and archaeologists alike with important information about the earliest use of runes in the region.

Experts have uncovered even older runes in the past, with the earliest example inscribed on a bone comb found in Denmark, but these are the oldest runes ever found carved into stone.

Measuring 12.2 inches by 12.6 inches (31 centimeters by 32 centimeters), the runestone features multiple inscriptions. Eight runes on one side of the stone form the word “idiberug.” According to the museum, the word may refer to an individual or a family. It may even be the name of the person in whose grave the runestone was discovered.

“The text may refer to a woman called Idibera and the inscription could mean ‘For Idibera.’ Other possibilities are that idiberug is the rendering of a name such as Idibergu, or perhaps the kin name Idiberung. And there are other possible interpretations — as common with early runic inscriptions,” stated Zilmer.

Determining the true meaning of the inscription poses several challenges for researchers. There may have been multiple variations of runes, and the language changed over time. What’s more, the runes on the stone don’t all make sense linguistically.

Some of them form patterns across the rock, like zig-zags and grids. “Not all inscriptions have a linguistic meaning,” Zilmer said. “It’s possible that someone has imitated, explored or played with the writing. Maybe someone was learning how to carve runes.”

There is still plenty of research left to be done on the runestone, but experts are confident that it will illuminate valuable information about the early history of runic writing. Steinar Solheim, an archaeologist and excavation manager at the Museum of Cultural History, told CNN, “This [discovery] means that the runestone tradition is older, maybe even by a few hundred years, than we have previously assumed.”

He continued, “But this also makes us wonder what else we may not have known about regarding the use of runic writing in the early Iron Age Scandinavian society.”

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After peeling back the mysteries behind Scandinavian runestones, go inside the discovery of ancient reindeer hunting tools in Norway. Then, read about other record-breaking archaeological finds around the world, including the oldest piece of cheese ever found.

Almonds and peaches are two great things that go great together. In fact, we feel hungry just thinking about it (with some vanilla ice cream, perhaps). Anyway, it turns out that they’re not just tasty together, but almonds and peaches are related.

How are almonds and peaches related?

Almonds belong to the family Rosaceae, and the genus Prunus, which also includes other stone fruits such as plums, apricots, cherries, and nectarines. Peaches also belong to the family Rosaceae and the genus Prunus, but they are in a different subgenus and species.

The Rosaceae family is a large and diverse group of plants that includes many economically important fruit trees and shrubs. The family is characterized by having flowers with five petals, sepals, and numerous stamens.

So, almonds and peaches are related in the sense that they are both in the same family (Rosaceae). To top it off, they also belong to the same genus (Prunus).

Genetic relatives

While they are both healthy and delicious, the similarities between the two foods seem to end there. They certainly don’t look alike and one is classified as bitter while the other is sweet.

But according to CRAG News (cited below), which comes from the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics:

“The comparison of the genome of the ‘Texas’ almond tree variety…and the peach tree genome places the divergence of both species six million years ago. The results are consistent with the existing hypothesis that places the existence of a common ancestor of these Prunus species in the center of Asia and the subsequent separation of two populations that was brought about when the Himalayas massif was lifted. This geological phenomenon would have left both populations of Prunus exposed to totally different climates in which both species would evolve: the almond tree in the arid steppe of the center and west of Asia and the peach tree in the subtropical climates of the East, in the area that is now South China.”

In other words, these trees are now much more distinct from one another because they adapted to different climates. The genes that changed places on their chromosomes are known as “transposons.” They move around in order to help organisms adapt better to their environments (among other things).

— WTF fun facts

Source: “The sequence of the almond tree and peach tree genomes makes it possible to understand the differences of the fruits and seeds of these closely related species” — CRAG News

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Like so many other horror films, it has taken decades for The Slumber Party Massacre to get its due. When the movie first hit theaters in 1982, it was largely panned by critics and accused of misogyny despite its feminist bona fides: It was based on an original screenplay by Rubyfruit Jungle author Rita Mae Brown, directed by Amy Holden Jones, and depicted most of its male characters as either murderously deranged or ultimately ineffectual, while its female characters were smart, heroic, and capable.

The ensuing 40 years have been much kinder to the movie. Thanks to a devoted cult following and a gradual critical reevaluation, The Slumber Party Massacre is now recognized as a touchstone of feminist horror and a shrewd satire that skewered horror movie tropes 14 years before Wes Anderson and Kevin Williamson did it with Scream. The Museum of Modern Art has lauded it as “genuinely scary and certainly underappreciated,” rightly calling it “a benchmark for women making horror their own.”

Here are a few things you should know about Jones’s groundbreaking horror-comedy. 

Flush with cash from the surprise success of her debut novel, Rubyfruit Jungle, Brown moved to Los Angeles in 1973, where she connected with Frances Doel, a story editor for legendary producer Roger Corman. Doel, whom Brown has called “the Mother Teresa of fledgling screenwriters,” taught Brown the basics of screenwriting and convinced Corman to hire her (as long as she agreed to work for scale). Sometime around 1978, Brown wrote a script titled Don’t Open the Door, about an escaped murderer who stalks members of a girls’ basketball team during a slumber party. The script was a sendup of early slasher films, combining gory set pieces with liberal doses of humor and satire. It sat on the shelf at Corman’s New World Pictures for several years before an aspiring young filmmaker dusted it off and shot it—or the first eight pages, at least. 

Jones was an editor and documentary filmmaker who had gotten her first taste of feature film production in 1975 when she worked as an assistant to Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver. When Corman contacted Scorsese to ask if he could recommend “a talented, inexpensive young film editor,” Scorsese urged him to hire Jones. After editing a couple of films for Corman, Jones impressed Steven Spielberg enough that he hired her to edit his upcoming sci-fi film, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

But what Jones really wanted to do was direct, and she needed to prove to Corman that she was up to the task. Rummaging through Corman’s library of unproduced screenplays, Jones found a script called Don’t Open the Door. The first eight pages had all the elements she thought she needed for a strong test reel: dialogue, action, and suspense. She rounded up a tiny crew and a handful of drama students and shot the prologue over the course of a weekend. Corman liked what he saw and immediately hired Jones to make the entire film. She called Spielberg and told him about Corman’s offer, and Spielberg released her from her contract. Jones was replaced by Carol Littleton, whose work on E.T. earned her an Oscar nomination.

The test reel Jones shot has long been lost, and that’s a shame—it was lensed by her husband, acclaimed cinematographer Michael Chapman. Chapman, who passed away in 2020, had been a camera operator on Jaws and The Godfather and director of photography on Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, which earned him a well-deserved Academy Award nomination. He would go on to shoot more than 40 movies over the course of his career, including The Lost Boys, Scrooged, and The Fugitive (which scored him another Oscar nomination). Jones and Chapman shot the reel in a house they were renting in Venice, California, with Jones editing the footage on Howling director Joe Dante’s flatbed editor. Since the reel featured non-union actors, none of the footage could be used in the final film. 

When Corman saw Jones’s test reel and learned she had made it for about $1000, he immediately hired her to make the entire film. But Jones’s elation at landing her first feature directing gig was quickly tempered when she read the rest of the script, which she has described as “a complete mess.” The 27-year-old Jones was so intimidated by the prospect of getting the script into shape that she got drunk for the first time in her life, convinced that “disaster and public humiliation loomed.” She spent the next four weeks rewriting the script, though she has credited Brown with doing “the hard work,” including hammering out the film’s three-act structure and developing its central theme, which Jones calls “fear of getting laid for the first time.” 

Humor is notoriously subjective, and Brown and Jones have each claimed that her version of the Slumber Party Massacre script is the one with the jokes. Brown has described the final product as “a straight slasher movie [with] no humor” and maintained that her original version was “pretty funny, on the page anyway.” Jones has the opposite take: “Someone had to restructure, add characters, [and] inject humor,” she wrote.

When it was time to assemble a cast and secure filming locations, Corman suggested that Jones slap “a classy title” on her film to avoid any stigma that might be attached to a slasher movie—so Don’t Open the Door became Sleepless Nights during production. Once it was finished, Corman changed the title once more, to The Slumber Party Massacre. 

According to Jason Paul Collum’s documentary Sleepless Nights, actor Michael Villella, who played the film’s deranged, drill-toting killer, refused to speak to the actresses who played his victims until their death scenes had been filmed. To make sure the performers looked properly terrified onscreen, Villella spent much of the film’s 20-day shoot lurking in bushes, “stalking” his costars on set, and dramatically slathering his drill bit with Vaseline. 

Moviegoers got their first look at The Slumber Party Massacre during a test screening at what Jones has described as “the tackiest theater on Hollywood Boulevard.” The packed auditorium of “half-drunk teenagers and homeless people who walked in off the street” quickly warmed to the film and got rowdier as the bodies piled up onscreen. As the audience cheered the bloody kills and a man seated behind Jones made drill noises throughout the screening, Jones found herself wondering what she had done. It was only when she found Corman beaming in the lobby that she got her answer: Her film had delivered on the promises of its lurid title, and she’d given Corman his best test screening in recent memory. 

While there had certainly been horror movies directed by women before 1981, The Slumber Party Massacre is widely considered the first female-helmed slasher film. Though it wasn’t a huge box office success, Jones’s movie did very well in the home video market; in her words, “Roger [Corman] made a fortune with Slumber Party Massacre.”

Corman, who was already known for his willingness to hire women to produce, direct, and edit his films—a rarity in Hollywood at the time—stuck with his winning formula and hired female filmmakers to write and direct 1987’s delirious, must-see rockabilly follow-up Slumber Party Massacre II (directed by Deborah Brock) and 1990’s considerably darker Slumber Party Massacre III (directed by Sally Mattison), making the trilogy the first-ever horror franchise written and directed by women. 

Imagine it’s the future, and you happen upon a vinyl record. For the purposes of this thought experiment, let’s pretend you know it harbors audio—but not only are there no longer record players in existence, nobody even remembers what one looks like or how it would work. In short, if you want to hear what’s on the record, you’ll have to come up with a whole new method of playing it.

For years, that was pretty much how things stood with Alexander Graham Bell’s early audio recordings.

In 1880, France gave Bell a cash prize for his telephone invention, and he used that money to establish the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C. There, Bell and his colleagues—including his cousin Chichester Bell and fellow inventor Charles Sumner Tainter—spent a large portion of time between 1880 and 1886 trying to figure out the best way to record sound. 

As Bell biographer Charlotte Gray wrote for Smithsonian back in 2013, they’d scratch the soundwaves into discs or cylinders made with various materials: everything from metal, glass, and wax, to foil, cardboard, and even plain old paper.

The discs and cylinders themselves survived; Bell donated a good 400 of them to the Smithsonian Institution. Unfortunately, whatever playback techniques he and his cohort employed are still a mystery. So while contemporary researchers—like the hypothetical future you from the introduction—knew they had sound on their hands, they couldn’t make it heard.

A promising development in the field of audio recovery occurred about 20 years ago, when physicist Carl Haber and others at California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory came up with a contactless system to restore old and fragile records without damaging them. Basically, they take extremely detailed scans of the grooves to create a digital map of the recording, and then apply software that can track the path of a stylus (like the needle of a record player) through that map. They named the technology IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase, Noise, Etc.) after their first test case: a 1950 recording of the Weavers’s “Goodnight Irene.”

In 2011, Haber and company began collaborating with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH) and the Library of Congress to decipher some of Bell’s enigmatic artifacts. Since then, IRENE has successfully recreated the audio from 20 of them, including a Hamlet speech, “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” a bunch of numbers, and—perhaps most exciting—Bell’s own voice. 

So what’s on all the other discs and cylinders? Hopefully, we’ll soon find out. This fall, as Smithsonian reports, the NMAH is launching a three-year-long endeavor to restore the rest of the Volta Laboratory’s extant recordings—roughly 300 or so. The project, titled “Hearing History: Recovering Sound from Alexander Graham Bell’s Experimental Records,” is being funded by a grant from the National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures program, as well as contributions from the Alexander and Mabel Bell Legacy Foundation; Curb Records founder Mike Curb and his wife Linda; and fashion software company SEDDI, Inc.

[h/t Smithsonian]

Have you ever fallen down the rabbit hole (no pun intended) of looking at cute animals on the internet or social media? It’s hard to look away!

Well, it turns out, looking at them could be good for you.

There is evidence to suggest that your cute cat meme fixation can boost both focus and concentration. Studies have also found that looking at pictures of baby animals can improve attention and task performance.

The benefits of looking at cute animals

There is some evidence to suggest that looking at cute animals can boost both focus and concentration.

Researchers published a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It found that looking at pictures of baby animals can improve attention and task performance. In fact, participants who viewed images of cute animals performed better on tasks requiring attention and fine motor skills. At least compared to those who viewed images of adult animals or inanimate objects.

Another study conducted by researchers at Hiroshima University in Japan found that looking at pictures of cute animals can increase activity in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for attention, problem-solving, and decision-making.

According to the Association for Psychological Science (cited below), “Led by researcher Hiroshi Nittono, the team conducted three experiments with 132 university students and concluded that cute images may facilitate improved performance on detail-oriented tasks that require concentration.”

We’ve long known that humans are attracted to looking at things that look juvenile. “Baby schema” includes things like a large head and protruding, large eyes – and they just seem “cuter” to us. Baby humans and baby animals often have these characteristics.

But now there’s proof that cute things might make our brains operate a bit better. Nittono and colleagues wrote in their paper:

“This study shows that viewing cute things improves subsequent performance in tasks that require behavioral carefulness, possibly by narrowing the breadth of attentional focus.”

Puppy power

Additionally, looking at cute animals can also release oxytocin, a hormone that is associated with feelings of love and bonding, which can lead to increased feelings of positive emotion and well-being.

It’s worth noting that these studies are still in the early stages, and more research is needed to understand the full extent of the effects of looking at cute animals on focus and concentration.

Of course, looking at cute animals is great and all, but is not a replacement for getting professional help if you have serious attention and focus issues.

— WTF fun facts

Source: “The Power of Puppies: Looking at Cute Images Can Improve Focus” — Association for Psychological Science

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Connie Converse wrote and performed trailblazing music in the 1950s, but one day in 1974, she drove off looking for a fresh start — and was never seen again.

Connie Converse never released a commercial album, yet nearly 50 years after she vanished from the face of the Earth, her music has gained more recognition and acclaim than ever before.

She was ahead of her time, a singer-songwriter whose music sounds surprisingly contemporary considering when it was made. Her lyrics are witty, solemn, and at times funny, but with an unspoken sense of longing, reveling in her isolation as much as she lamented it.

She was a female folk songwriter at a time when such a thing was largely unheard of — and no one knew her name.

It’s entirely possible her name would still be unknown, had her friend Gene Deitch not held onto tape recordings of Converse’s music for half a century — tapes that were recorded in a New York City apartment kitchen in 1954 and kept a secret from the world until 2009, when they were compiled into the album, How Sad, How Lovely.

But while her music has earned a cult following since its public release, the woman who wrote it never took her rightful place in the spotlight. In 1974, just after her 50th birthday, the downtrodden, depressed Converse sent letters to her family and friends saying she wanted a fresh start in life. She was never seen again.

This is her story.

Growing Up, Connie Converse Was A “Polymath” And A “Genius”

Elizabeth Eaton Converse was born on Aug. 3, 1924 in Laconia, New Hampshire to a minister and his wife, whose household was strictly Baptist. She had two brothers: Paul, who was three years older, and Philip, four years younger.

Per the BBC, Philip, who later became a political scientist, once described his sister Connie as both a “genius” and a “polymath” when she was young. “I do not use the terms lightly,” he said.

Converse excelled in her academic studies, and eventually earned a full scholarship to Mount Holyoke College, which both her grandmother and mother had attended.

But in a departure from tradition, Converse did not graduate from Mount Holyoke College. Instead, she dropped out after her second year and charted a course for New York City to pursue her passions for music and writing. In a further act of shunning tradition, she dropped the name Elizabeth and began to use the name Connie instead.

“Our parents were devastated,” Philip Converse would later tell The New Yorker.

And if that weren’t devastating enough for their parents, Connie Converse took up drinking and smoking, reveling in her independence and self-reinvention.

While in New York, Converse spent her time writing poetry, drawing, painting, and learning to play the guitar. She began publishing essays with The Far Eastern Survey and worked at a printing house in the Flatiron district. She had an apartment in Greenwich Village, and it was there that she wrote her music and performed it for her friends.

As chronicled in The New Yorker, Philip Converse did not follow his sister to New York. Instead, he moved to the Midwest, and the two kept in touch by exchanging letters.

In one of these letters, she wrote to him:

“Being a complex and inward personality, I have always found it difficult to make myself known. I generally conceal my own problems and listen attentively to those of others.”

Converse’s introspection reads like an unfortunate prediction. For one reason or another, she could never make herself known — and her recognition only came many years after she vanished.

The Stunningly Intimate Music Of Connie Converse — That No One Heard

When Connie Converse arrived at Gene Deitch’s apartment in 1954 to record her music, the animator and audio enthusiast nearly didn’t record the standoffish, plain woman. Converse was a friend of a friend, an atypical woman of the time who, one attendee said, looked “like she had just come in from milking the cows.”

But when she performed her intimate songs in Deitch’s kitchen that day before a small audience, she stunned everyone in the room. Her music was personal, eerie, folksy, and metaphorical in a way that had never been done before, though the echoes of it can now be heard in the music of modern singer-songwriters.

“The more I thought about it, the songs were all about herself,” Deitch later told the BBC. “I think that’s what makes the songs interesting. No matter what she was singing, it all had to do with sexual frustration and loneliness. There’s something about those songs that was extremely personal. In those days, this was something you never heard.”

Not long after the recordings at Deitch’s, Converse appeared on CBS’s “Morning Show” hosted by Walter Cronkite. But what should have been a moment that skyrocketed Converse’s career instead amounted to nothing. Despite the televised performance, there were no recording contracts, no tours, no marquis featuring her name.

Over the course of the next seven years, Converse’s style changed dramatically. She put down the guitar in exchange for the piano.

Her once short-form compositions became longer, more sophisticated, all culminating in a series of songs inspired by the myth of Cassandra, which tells of a woman who was given the gift of prophecy by the gods — and then cursed by Apollo so that no one would believe them.

Still, Converse struggled to find an audience for her music, and in 1961, she left New York for Ann Arbor. Once again, Converse was ready to start anew.

By 1963, according to The New York Times, Converse abandoned songwriting entirely.

She worked as a secretary, then as the managing editor for the University of Michigan’s Journal of Conflict Resolution. She began writing a novel and volunteered as a political activist while, back in New York, the folk revival was properly taking off without her as artists such as Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Woody Guthrie, and Leonard Cohen rose to stardom.

Converse’s friends and relatives, meanwhile, saw a woman who had become bored with her routine, increasingly disillusioned and depressed, drinking with an alarming frequency. Half a year in London did little to ease her sorrows, and a subsequent trip to Alaska seemingly made them worse.

Then, in 1974, she reportedly told her brother Philip, “Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it.” That same year, one week after her 50th birthday, she wrote a series of letters to her family and close friends saying she needed to make a fresh start somewhere else.

She loaded her things into the boot of her Volkswagen Beetle and left Ann Arbor. No one ever heard from her again.

Connie Converse Disappeared, But Her Music Lives On

In 2014, five years after the release of How Sad, How Lovely, filmmaker Andrea Kannes released We Lived Alone: The Connie Converse Documentary, which explored Converse’s life and music through Converse’s own home recordings, letters, and journals.

“It’s almost like she wanted it to be found and looked through,” Kannes told the BBC. “What I found most fascinating was how funny she was in her writing. Here was a person who struggled through her whole life to feel successful, and you can tell there’s a great sadness with a lot of the things she did and the way she lived her life, but she was also incredibly funny.”

“But there was still this wall between her and other people,” she added, “where it didn’t seem like she 100 percent connected with anybody.”

Perhaps the clearest insight into Converse’s mind, however, comes in the form of a letter she wrote to her brother Philip:

“I’ve watched the elegant, energetic people of Ann Arbor, those I know and those I don’t, going about their daily business on the streets and in the buildings, and I felt a detached admiration for their energy and elegance. If I ever was a member of this species perhaps it was a social accident that has now been canceled.”

“Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t,” she wrote in another letter. And while the truth of what happened to Converse is still a mystery, Philip Converse came to believe that his sister died by suicide, her dreams forever unfulfilled.

Today, though, Connie Converse’s legacy lives on in her music, and many credit her as history’s first modern singer-songwriter.

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Interested in other stories from music history? Read about famous songwriter Jeff Buckley, and his tragic death in the Mississippi River. Then, learn about the life of jazz legend Lee Morgan — and its sudden and tragic end at his wife’s hands.

If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or use their 24/7 Lifeline Crisis Chat.

Blinded as a 3-year-old boy, Louis Braille went on to become a renowned French educator in the 19th century, developing the famous Braille system that’s still used today.

Today, millions of people around the world use Braille to read and write. But before Braille, visually impaired people struggled to learn complicated systems that had major drawbacks. Until a 19th-century French teenager named Louis Braille changed everything.

Who was Louis Braille, the person who invented the Braille system?

Born with sight, Louis Braille became blind at 3 years old. And as a teenager, he created a revolutionary system of reading and writing for the visually impaired.

But Louis Braille’s battle didn’t end when he created Braille. First, he had to convince Paris’s Royal Institute for Blind Children to adopt his system.

Who Was Louis Braille?

Born in 1809 in a small village outside Paris, Louis Braille was named after the king of France. Braille’s mother and father, a saddle and harness maker, gave all four of their children royal names.

When he was 3 years old, an accident in the family workshop left young Louis blind. The boy had been playing with an awl, a tool to punch holes in leather, when he injured one eye. An infection spread to both eyes and took Braille’s sight.

At 10, Braille left home for the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. He received a scholarship to study at the school, where he learned Greek and Latin while working on his algebra skills.

The institute had few resources for its students. They learned the shape of letters using twigs, and some nights went to bed hungry.

Louis Braille thrived at the institute, however. He even joined the school orchestra, where he excelled playing the cello and organ.

His education there helped Braille invent a revolutionary communication system for the visually impaired.

Night Writing And Other Ways To Read By Touch

Braille wasn’t the first writing system for the blind. In fact, Louis Braille based his system on something called “night writing.”

Developed by Charles Barbier, night writing was meant to give France an edge in the Napoleonic Wars. Thanks to Barbier’s system of raised dots, officers could read messages on the front lines even at night.

Barbier’s system also had predecessors. As early as the 1600s, blind students learned their letters by touch. Educators carved the alphabet into wood and students learned to draw them. But the system did not help with reading.

In the 1760s, Melanie de Salignac learned to read by feeling pinpricks made in paper. She used a similar system to write. The Viennese pianist Maria Theresa von Paradis also read by touch. But costly pinprick methods were largely restricted to the wealthy.

Von Paradis inspired Valentin Haüy to open the first school for the blind in 1786. Haüy used an embossed alphabet to instruct students. But the breakthrough would come thanks to a young student at Haüy’s school: Louis Braille.

The Invention Of The Braille System

In 1821, Charles Barbier visited the Royal Institute for Blind Youth. He spoke to the students about night writing, which used 12 dots. And Louis Braille was in the audience.

After meeting Barbier, Braille decided to develop his own system.

First, the teenager identified a problem in Barbier’s system: It was too complex. Different combinations of dots represented sounds rather than letters, which required 36 unique shapes determined not by the position of dots but the number in each of two columns. It also did not have punctuation.

Even worse, the grid of 12 dots was too large to read with one finger.

Starting at 13 years old, Louis Braille created his own dot writing system. Instead of 12 dots, his would include six. Each six-dot cell contained two rows of three dots. Braille used different combinations to represent letters, numbers, and punctuation.

At 15 years old, Braille showed his system to Dr. Alexandre Pignier, the director of the institute.

Dr. Pignier became a key supporter, encouraging other students to adopt the new system.

Louis Braille graduated from the Institute and became a teacher in 1826. He devoted himself to Braille, publishing a book on the system in 1829. Titled Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them, the book included instructions for blind musicians.

Then, Pierre Foucault, another graduate from the Institute, invented the first typewriter for the blind in 1841.

The Braille system was popular with blind students, but many sighted educators questioned the system. When Dr. Pignier resigned, the next director banned Louis Braille’s system. He worried that if blind students could read with Braille, they wouldn’t need sighted teachers.

Louis Braille’s Death And Legacy

Louis Braille died before his system caught on. Tuberculosis claimed his life in January 1852.

But before his death, Braille saw the institute embrace his system, holding an 1844 demonstration. As a visitor read a poem aloud, a child transcribed it in Braille. Then a second child who had not heard the poem read the Braille version.

The demonstration proved the usefulness of the system — and in 1854, the institute officially adopted it.

Still, the system Louis Braille created spread slowly outside of Paris. Across the Atlantic, at the Perkins School for the Blind, students learned square-hand – a system of writing on grooved paper. But the students couldn’t read what they wrote.

Why did Braille catch on? Because blind students across the globe adopted it, eventually convincing educators that it was better than the alternatives.

Braille solved the problem of alternative reading and writing systems that were complicated or impossible for blind people to read. And thanks to Braille typewriters, it soon became easy and affordable to print in Braille.

Louis Braille saw a larger purpose to his invention. A tool to communicate like Braille would break a centuries-old cycle, he declared.

“We do not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded that we are vulnerable,” Louis Braille told his friend Foucault. “We must be treated as equals – and communication is the way we can bring this about.”

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Louis Braille created a communication system that transformed life for millions. Next, read about the invention of the telegraph, and then learn about Blind Tom Wiggins, the highest-paid musician in the 19th century.

For many, Robert Burns (also known as Rabbie Burns) is synonymous with Scotland: Not only is he considered the country’s national poet, but in a 2009 STV poll, he was even voted the greatest Scot over iconic warrior William Wallace.

Born in Alloway, Ayrshire, on January 25, 1759, Burns wrote poetry about his life as a peasant farmer and his love of women, among other topics. And though he was dubbed “the heaven-taught ploughman,” Burns was neither uneducated nor a ploughman. Here are nine facts about his short life and enduring poetry.

As might be expected of a teenager, Burns’s first composition was about a romantic crush. “Handsome Nell,” which Burns called his first “sin of rhyme” in a 1787 letter to Dr. John Moore, was penned in 1774 at Mount Oliphant farm, where the Burns family lived and worked as tenants. In 1783 he described the composition as “puerile and silly,” but was nonetheless “pleased with it, as it recalls to my mind those happy days when my heart was yet honest, and my tongue was sincere.”

Burns credited his initial interest in poetry to another woman, specifically “an old Maid of my Mother’s [Betty Davidson]” who told “tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery.” These stories, he said, “cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy.”

In 1781, at the age of 22, Burns joined the Masonic Lodge St. David, Tarbolton. He was a Freemason for the rest of his life, and in 1787, Francis Charteris, the Grand Master of Scotland, praised Brother Burns as “Caledonia’s bard.” (Caledonia is the Latin name for Scotland that was used by the Romans, which later took on poetic connotations.)

Burns struggled to make a living as a farmer, so in 1786, he decided to take a job as a bookkeeper at a sugar plantation in Jamaica that ran on the forced labor of enslaved people. He published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (now usually known as the Kilmarnock Edition) that year to raise money to fund the journey—but when the volume was an instant hit, he decided not to emigrate.

Burns was well aware that, had he gone to Jamaica, he would have been involved in the harsh realities of slavery; his willingness to work on a plantation stands in contradiction to the egalitarian beliefs he expressed in his poetry, most famously in “A Man’s a Man for A’ That.” To those who admire Burns, the dichotomy is troubling. “I like to think that had he ever gone, he would have turned straight back once he’d realized what it involved,” Jackie Kay, Scots Makar from 2016 to 2021, told the BBC. “I can’t reconcile my version of Burns in my head with a man that would have comfortably been an overseer.”

The BBC puts Burns’s total number of works at 716. The Scottish bard’s best-known composition is “Auld Lang Syne,” which has become the unofficial anthem of New Year’s Eve celebrations worldwide. Burns claimed that he merely “took it down from an old man,” but experts think that he added his own creative flair to the lyrics.

Burns wrote the majority of his works in a mixture of Scots and English. Some of his other famous poems include “Tam o’ Shanter,” “A Red, Red Rose,” “Scots Wha Hae,” “To a Mouse,” and “Ae Fond Kiss.”

Towards the end of his life, Burns was no longer making enough money from writing, so he took a job as an exciseman. When his support for the revolutionaries in the French Revolution and American Revolutionary War jeopardized his job, he joined the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, a military organization formed in case of invasion, to prove his national loyalty.

Burns was a womanizer, and several of his sexual exploits resulted in pregnancies. He had two illegitimate daughters named Elizabeth—one born to Elizabeth Paton in 1785 and the other to Ann Park in 1791—as well as an illegitimate son named Robert, born 1788, with Jenny Clow.

Burns also had nine children with Jean Armour, whom he married in 1788; only three of them survived childhood. His last child, Maxwell, was born on July 25, 1796—which happened to be the day of his father’s funeral. Maxwell lived just three years.

Incidentally, fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger is related to Burns—his aunt is the great-granddaughter of Burns’s younger brother Gilbert.

The poet was just 37 years old when he died. Though many have said that alcoholism led to his death, experts believe his symptoms indicate that he likely succumbed to heart failure brought on by rheumatism. Burns was buried in a modest grave in St. Michael’s Churchyard in Dumfries, but in 1813, his admirers—including writer Sir Walter Scott—began raising money to build a grand mausoleum in his honor. It was completed in 1817.

The first Burns Night supper was held on the fifth anniversary of Burns’s death and was attended by nine of his friends. They gathered at Burns’s birthplace in Alloway to eat haggis, recite his work, and toast their departed friend—a speech that would become known as the Immortal Memory. The celebration was then moved to his birthday and grew in popularity. Today, Burns Night is celebrated worldwide.

Proceedings kick off with the saying of the Selkirk Grace, which, according to The Scotsman, is “a short prayer, originally said in the Lallans dialect of lowland Scotland, which gives thanks to God for the meal about to be eaten.” The haggis is then brought out to the accompaniment of bagpipes, and Burns’s “Address to a Haggis” is recited. Once the haggis, neeps (mashed turnip), and tatties (mashed potato) have been eaten, the Immortal Memory is given, along with readings of his works. The event then finishes with everyone singing “Auld Lang Syne.”

Chinese New Year sometimes falls very close to Burns Night, which led to Vancouver-born Todd Wong combining the events into one celebratory dinner in 1998. He called it “Gung Haggis Fat Choy,” a combination of the New Year greeting in Cantonese—Gung hay fat choy, which means “wishing you great happiness and prosperity”—and haggis, the Scottish dish eaten on Burns Night.

The event started with just 16 of Wong’s friends, but now hundreds of people celebrate each year, tucking into a fusion of Scottish and Chinese food, like haggis and shrimp wontons. “Gung Haggis is not just a dinner, it’s a place for people born of multi-ethnicity and is inclusive so that people born outside of Scottish and Chinese cultures can still celebrate Canada’s pioneer history and culture,” Wong told Rice Paper magazine in 2021.