The Great Geek Manual

1845
The first voice synthesizer, later known as P.T. Barnum’s Euphonium, is demonstrated to the public.

1882
The first string of Christmas tree lights is created by Edward H. Johnson, an associate of Thomas Edison, to decorate his home Christmas tree. Traditionally, trees are traditionally decorated with wax candles. The first commercially produced Christmas tree lamps will be manufactured in strings of nine sockets by the Edison General Electric Co. of Harrison, New Jersey, and they will be advertised in the December 1901 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Each socket will take a miniature two candlepower carbon-filament lamp operating on thirty-two volts. Electric Christmas tree lights will quickly become popular among wealthy Americans, but the average citizen won’t use them until the twenties or later. Character light bulbs will become popular in the twenties, bubble lights will become popular in the forties, twinkle bulbs will become popular in the fifties, and plastic bulbs will become popular by 1955.

1932
Universal Pictures releases the horror film The Mummy, directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, and Edward van Sloan, to US theaters. In it, a field expedition in Egypt discovers the mummy of ancient Egyptian prince Im-Ho-Tep, who was condemned and buried alive for sacrilege. The Scroll of Thoth, which can bring the dead back to life, is also found in the tomb. One night a young member of the expedition reads the Scroll out loud, bring Im-Ho-Tep back to life. Ten years later, disguised as a modern Egyptian, the mummy attempts to reunite with his lost love, an ancient princess who has been reincarnated into a beautiful young woman. IMDB listing Running time: 1 hr 13 mins

1944
Universal Pictures releases the horror film The Mummy’s Curse, directed by Leslie Goodwins and starring Lon Chaney Jr., Peter Coe, and Virginia Christine, to US theaters. In it, an irrigation project in the rural bayous of Louisiana unearths Kharis the living mummy (Lon Chaney Jr.), who was buried in quicksand 25 years earlier. IMDB listing Running time: 1 hr 2 mins
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Art

• The Artwork of Alex Pardee has a gallery of Avatar movie poster parodies.
• Manofest has posted a gallery of 25 Hot Girls With Lightsabers.
• The Oatmeal explains Why it’s Better to Pretend you don’t know Anything about Computers. (Not that we didn’t know.)

Comics

• io9 looks back at The Most Important Events Of 2000-2009, Comic Style.

Film

• Interview: Don’t tell Avatar’s Stephen Lang he’s the bad guy: “I didn’t play a villain; I played a man doing his job.”
• Interview: James Cameron says Terminator has run its course.
• News: George Lucas loses court appeal over Star Wars costume copyright.
• News: Elliott, Pullman Say Religious Right Blocked Golden Compass Sequel.
• Amazon Video On Demand is currently offering a free seven day online rental of Plan 9 From Outer Space and Scrooge.
• SciFi Wire looks back at The decade’s 9 most influential sci-fi/fantasy movies.

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The beard! The mysterious packages! The infiltration of American homes! Clearly this guy is a terrorist.

This is the best Christmas video I’ve seen yet this year. It’s extremely well edited featuring footage from 24, in which Jack Bauer threatens to torture information out of Old St. Nick.

Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head.

- J. G. Ballard in an interview in Heavy Metal, April 1971.

Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don’t read Shakespeare. Read Webster’s revenge plays. Don’t read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he’s off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don’t read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn’t come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you’re here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.

- “The Wonderful Power of Storytelling” by Bruce Sterling, March 1991.

1879
Thomas Edison privately demonstrates his incandescent light bulb at Menlo Park, in New Jersey. He invented the lamp on October 21, 1879 after thirteen months of experimentation to discover a suitable material for the filament and discovery that carbonized cotton filaments could operate for forty hours in the vacuum of a glass bulb. The first public demonstration of the incandescent light bulb will be given at Menlo Park on December 31, 1879.

1907
Physicist Albert Michelson becomes the first US scientist to receive the Nobel Prize. He is awarded the prize “for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations.” Specifically, he designed the highly accurate Michelson interferometer and used it to accurately measure the speed of light, establishing the Michelson Effect, which states that the speed of light is a constant.

1909
Volta Picture Theatre, Ireland’s first cinema, opens in a disused Dublin warehouse at 45 Mary Street under the management of James Joyce. The opening night features an eclectic program that includes the comedy Devilled Crab, the mystery Bewitched Castle, La Pourponierre, The First Paris Orphanage, and The Tragedy of Beatrice Cency.
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Like the landscapes they negotiate, the subjectivities who operate within cyberspace also become patterns rather than physical entities. … The contrast between the body’s limitations and cyberspace’s power highlights the advantages of pattern over presence. As long as the pattern endures, one has attained a kind of immortality. Such views are authorized by cultural conditions that make physicality seem a better state to be from than to inhabit. In a world despoiled by overdeverlopment, overpopulation, and time-release environmental poisons, it is comforting to think that physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational patterns in a multidimensional computer space. A cyberspace body, like a cyberspace landscape, is immune to blight and corruption.

- “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers” by N. Katherine Hayles.

1871
Samuel Clemens, better known by the pen name Mark Twain, receives a patent for “An Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Garment Straps,” later known as suspenders. (US No.121,992)

1914
The Cel overlay animation process is patented by Earl Hurd of Kansas City, Missouri as “Process of and Apparatus for Producing Moving Pictures.” (US No. 1,143,542)

1923
Dr. Vladimir K. Zworykin patents the first all-electronic picture tube.

1930
At Pitcairn Field, in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, Amelia Earhart becomes the first autogyro pilot to carry a passenger. Flying a Pitcairn PCA-2 Autogyro, she makes trips carrying various passengers until dark. Just the previous day, December 18, 1930, Earhart made her first solo flight in the same autogyro, becoming the first female to make a solo flight. Two years earlier, on December 19, 1928, Harold F. Pitcairn made the first ever autogyro flight.

1958
The first known radio broadcast from outer space is transmitted from the SCORE (Signal Communications Orbit Relay Equipment) communication satellite, which was launched from Cape Canaveral the previous day. The voice of President Eisenhower issues a Christmas greeting from a pre-recorded tape recording aboard. The battery-operated 132MHz vacuum tube transmitter has an 8W output. His full message is, “This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you from a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one. Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind America’s wish for peace on earth and good will to men everywhere.”
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