Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist epic science-fiction film directed by Fritz Lang.  The film was written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou, and starred Brigitte Helm, Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel and Rudolf Klein-Rogge.  A silent film, it was produced in the Babelsberg Studios by UFA.  Metropolis is regarded as a pioneer work of science fiction movies, being the first feature length movie of the genre.  Made in Germany during the Weimar Period, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia, and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city's ruler, and Maria, whose background is not fully explained in the film, to overcome the vast gulf separating the classist nature of their city.  Metropolis was filmed in 1925, at a cost of approximately five million Reichsmarks.  Thus, it was the most expensive film ever released up to that point.  The film was met with a mixed response upon its initial release, with many critics praising its technical achievements and allegorical social metaphors with some deriding its "simplistic and naïve" presentation.  Due both to its long running-time and footage censors found questionable, Metropolis was cut substantially after its German premiere; large portions of the film were lost over the subsequent decades.  Numerous attempts have been made to restore the film since the 1970s-80s.  Giorgio Moroder, a music producer, released a version with a soundtrack by rock artists such as Freddie Mercury and Adam Ant in 1984.  A new reconstruction of Metropolis was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001, and the film was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in the same year, the first film thus distinguished.  In 2008, a print of Lang’s original cut of the film was found in a museum in Argentina.  After a long restoration process, the restored film was shown on large screens in Berlin and Frankfurt simultaneously on 12 February 2010.  Metropolis' original film score was composed for large orchestra by Gottfried Huppertz. Huppertz drew inspiration from Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, and combined a classical orchestral voice with mild modernist touches to portray the film's massive industrial city of workers.  Nestled within the original score were quotations of Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle's "La Marseillaise" and the traditional "Dies Irae," the latter of which was matched to the film's apocalyptic imagery.  The effects expert, Eugen Schüfftan, created pioneering visual effects for Metropolis.  Among the effects used are miniatures of the city, a camera on a swing, and most notably, the Schüfftan process,  in which mirrors are used to create the illusion that actors are occupying miniature sets.  This new technique was seen again just two years later in Alfred Hitchcock's film Blackmail (1929).  The Maschinenmensch — the robot built by Rotwang to resurrect his lost love Hel — was created by sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff.  A whole-body plaster cast was taken of actress Brigitte Helm, and the costume was then constructed around it.  A chance discovery of a sample of "plastic wood" (a pliable substance designed as wood-filler) allowed Schulze-Mittendorff to build a costume that would both appear metallic and allow a small amount of free movement.  The American copyright had lapsed in 1953, which eventually led to a proliferation of versions being released on video.  Along with other foreign-made works, the film's U.S. copyright was restored in 1998, but the constitutionality of this copyright extension was challenged in Golan v. Gonzales and as Golan v. Holder it was ruled that "In the United States, that body of law includes the bedrock principle that works in the public domain remain in the public domain.  Removing works from the public domain violated Plaintiffs' vested First Amendment interests."    This only applied to the rights of so-called reliance parties, i.e. parties who had previously relied on the public domain status of restored works.  The case was overturned on appeal to the Tenth Circuit and that decision was upheld by the US Supreme Court on January 18, 2012.  This had the effect of restoring the copyright in the work as of January 1, 1996.  Under current US copyright law, it remains copyrighted until January 1, 2023. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film) 

The science fiction film Metropolis is a melodrama that pictures a dystopian society.    

July 11, 2013  Chefs are serving up invasive species like knotweed and snakehead fish -- and diners are enjoying them.   Austin Murphy likes to hunt snakehead fish on the tidal waters of the Potomac River.  An avid fisherman and hunter, he's out for pleasure, but also to promote recreational snakehead hunting as a means to both help the environment and procure dinner.  Snakehead, he says, "is excellent table fare."  He filets them, seasons them with Old Bay, salt and pepper, then grills them right on the boat.  Or, he says, "If I'm making sandwiches, I'll make starches and vegetables ahead.  The fish is the star."  Do invasives taste good enough to earn a permanent spot on home and restaurant menus?  More and more people are trying hard to prove they do.  The Corvallis, Oregon-based Institute for Applied Ecology's (IAE) Eradication by Mastication program includes an annual invasive species cook-off and a published cookbook called The Joy of Cooking Invasives: A Culinary Guide to Biocontrol (kudzu quiche! nutria eggrolls!).  To celebrate Earth Day this year, the Texas Nature Conservancy held a "Malicious but Delicious," dinner, where Austin chefs Ned and Jodi Elliott classed up a bunch of invasives for a four-course menu of popovers with a salpicon of tiger prawns, bastard cabbage orecchiette, porchetta of feral hog, and lime and Himalayan blackberry tart.  Conservation biologist Joe Roman runs a website called Eat the Invaders, stocked with informative descriptions of a wide range of invasive species and recipes for preparing them.  Roman's personal favorites are green crabs in their soft shell stage sautéed and served with French bread, periwinkle fritters and garlic mustard, which he says "makes an excellent pesto."  Lionfish sushi, he adds, is "first-rate."  Roman notes that in England, cooks have targeted the highly invasive gray squirrel, which has become such a popular protein that "they're having a hard time keeping them on the menu."  The Daily Mail reports that the invading grays have a sparked a revival in the Victorian delicacy squirrel pie.  Nancy Matsumoto  Read much, much more at:  http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/have-you-ever-tried-to-eat-a-feral-pig/277666/ 

Spick and span origin  The oldest form seems to have been spann-nyr, which is Old Norse for a fresh chip of wood, one just carved from timber by the woodman’s axe, so the very epitome of something new.  (Nyr is our modern new, while spann is a chip, the source of our spoon, an implement that was originally always made from wood, so that wooden spoon is a retronym.)  By about 1300 the Old Norse phrase had started to appear in English in the form span-new, a form that lasted into the nineteenth century.  This evolved by the sixteenth century into an elaborated form similar to the modern one:  spick and span new, still with the old sense of something so new as to be pristine and unused.  Spick here is a nail or spike.  This form seems to have been inspired by a Dutch expression, spiksplinternieuw, which referred to a ship that was freshly built, so with all-new nails and timber.  It is first found in Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives in 1579, “They were all in goodly gilt armours, and brave purple cassocks apon [upon] them, spicke, and spanne newe.”  By the middle of the following century, it had been shortened to our modern spick and span.  It had also shifted sense to our current one, for something so neat and clean that it looks new and unused.  Samuel Pepys is the first recorded user, in his diary for 15 November 1665: “My Lady Batten walking through the dirty lane with new spicke and span white shoes.”  In modern times, it was borrowed in the United States by Procter and Gamble as a trademark for a household cleaning product, Spic and Span, whose spelling has led some people to wonder whether it might be a disguised racial slur, from the derogatory term Spic for a Hispanic person.  That’s certainly not true, but the trademark (and the slang term) have together encouraged an alternative spelling of spic in the phrase.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-spi5.htm 

Graham flour may be found in the specialty baking section at some health food stores or purchased online.  If it is unavailable, make an equivalent by substituting one cup of graham flour for 2/3 cup white flour, 1/3 cup wheat bran and 1 1/2 teaspoon of wheat germ.  Graham crackers, a naturally sweet snack in Reverend Sylvester Graham’s diet plan, are traditionally made with graham flour and sweetened with honey. The flat, crisp cookies were known as “Dr. Graham’s Honey Biskets.”  Modern and modified graham crackers have other ingredients, such as sugar and cinnamon.  Ekena B. Parkinson  http://clan-graham-society.org/files/grahamcrackers.pdf 

Trial work is theater.  When you're in court, you use whatever you have at your disposal.  Judges get a lot of practice hiding their feelings.  It would be fun to watch a group of them play poker.  Quotes from Criminal Intent by Sheldon Siegel   Sheldon Siegel (born 1958) is an American novelist and author best known for his works of modern legal drama.  He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an accounting major.  He graduated with a Juris Doctor from Boalt Hall at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983.  He has been in private practice in San Francisco, California for over twenty years and specializes in corporate and securities law. 

Ferdinand Schumacher was born in Germany in 1822.  In 1851, he immigrated to Akron, Ohio, where he established a small grocery store.  Schumacher favored selling simple and inexpensive items in his store.  One of these items was oats, but most Akron residents refused to buy this food product for themselves.  Most Ohioans who grew oats did so to feed livestock.  Over time, Schumacher began experimenting with new ways to package and prepare oats.  In 1854, he began to chop the oats into one-ounce square blocks.  By processing oats in this manner, Schumacher presented his fellow Ohioans with an easy way to eat and to utilize oats, causing a growing demand for the crop.  Demand for his product skyrocketed during the American Civil War, as the federal government purchased the oats to feed Union soldiers.  He continued to experiment with new ways to process oats, developing a way to pre-cook the oats and having them turn into flakes. Schumacher's flaked oats became an immediate best seller.  Hoping to reduce competition, the investors in the F. Schumacher Milling Company agreed to merge with several additional companies to create the American Cereal Company.  The company continued to manufacture oats, selling the product with the picture of a Quaker on the packaging.  In 1901, as the American Cereal Company began producing additional products, a parent company was formed, known as Quaker Oats.  Unfortunately for Schumacher, he was no longer part of the American Cereal Company when the Quaker Oats Company was created. http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Schumacher,_Ferdinand