"A team of archaeologists confirmed Monday that ancient remains found under a parking lot belong to long-lost King Richard III..."

"The verification came after scientific tests were used to match DNA samples taken from Canadian-born Michael Ibsen, a direct descendent of Anne of York, Richard’s elder sister."

Richard III supporters such as Philippa Langley, a screenwriter and member of the Richard III Society, were driven to find the lost king’s remains by a desire to reopen the debate over his place in history....

“I think the discovery brought the real Richard into sharp focus,” Langley said. “People are realizing that a lot of what they thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building.”

Why does finding the body have anything to do with the historical project of finding out what really happened in the past? There's something in the human psyche that makes us care about an ancient controversy because we are confronted with the man's bones. But there is also some relevant evidence:

Trauma analysis of the skeleton found 10 battle wounds, eight on the skull and two on the body, which were inflicted around the time of death, according to Jo Appleby, project osteologist of the University of Leicester. Many of the wounds provided evidence of “post-mortem humiliation injuries,” exacted on Richard III after death by his adversaries.

It looked a little something like this:



Warning: That was propaganda. And Class A scenery chewing.

By the way: As I was setting up that clip for the embed, Meade came over and said: "From just the audio, I couldn't tell if that was Laurence Olivier or a Monty Python parody."

ADDED: There's a Richard III ward in the Hospital for Overacting:

Tony Curtis, RIP.

He was 85.

As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew first and foremost on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair, worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley, and plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and wide, full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early 1950s. A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot,” a slave who attracts the interest of a Roman senator (Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960), a man attracted to a mysterious blond (Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).

Tony Curtis was great. I recently watched the second-rate movie "Sex and the Single Girl" and noticed how funny Curtis made lines that were really not very good. But "Some Like It Hot" is as good as a movie can be and Tony Curtis is part of what makes it fabulous. Here's one of my favorites scenes, where Tony sets up an encounter with Marilyn in which he's not dressed in women's clothes, he's pretending to be a millionaire:

Poladroid... Polaroid...

Jen Bradford emails about Poladroid, freeware that turns a digital photo file into an image that resembles an SX-70 type Polaroid photograph.

Here, you can see Jen's adorable doggie, Louise. (Does she also have a dog named Thelma? Or perhaps George?)

Now, I watched the little video demonstration here. It's sort of charming the way the software gives the impression of the image coming out of an SX-70 type Polaroid and developing in stages, but I got annoyed by the simulated shaking of the photographs. I know the song. (It was "spazzy with electrifying multiplicity" -- 5 long years ago.) But you're not supposed to shake SX-70 Polaroid pictures:

"In fact, shaking or waving can actually damage the image. Rapid movement during development can cause portions of the film to separate prematurely, or can cause 'blobs' in the picture."...

Polaroid said its film should be laid on a flat surface and shielded from the wind, and that users should avoid bending or twisting their pictures. Of course, "lay it on a flat surface like a Polaroid picture," doesn't sound nearly as cool.

Before the SX-70, the rectangle that emerged from the camera was not a sealed packet containing the chemicals that developed the photograph. It looked like standard photographic paper, and you had to wipe a wet chemical across it to make it develop. [CORRECTION: The wiped-on chemical was the fixer.] People shook it to try to dry it off. But if it's an SX-70 photograph, there's nothing to dry. You look like an idiot shaking it. It's like drying off your hands after splashing around in Koi Pond.

I remember the original SX-70 commercials, with Laurence Olivier, acting like the new device was a landmark in the culture of the western world. I still have the SX-7o camera my parents bought. I haven't opened it up since long before Polaroid stopped making the film.

By the way, Polaroid filed for bankruptcy -- again -- yesterday.

And then there's this guy who started taking a Polaroid picture every day and kept going until the day he died:

Yesterday I came across a slightly mysterious website — a collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from. So, naturally, I started looking through the photos. I was stunned by what I found.In 1979 the photos start casually, with pictures of friends, picnics, dinners, and so on....

Here's the website with all the pictures. Random example:



There must be thousands of people these days who make a point of taking a photograph every day. I'll bet there are thousands of blogs that have a photo of the day -- even thousands that have a self-portrait of the day every day -- which would be especially easy using Photo Booth on a Macintosh.

But there was a time when the Polaroid camera was the epitome of easiness....