Public Domain Day is Coming!

Next week is one of the best days of the year, “Public Domain Day”!  (Or, occasionally known as “New Year’s Day”.)

Every year on January 1, the copyrights expire on books published decades earlier, putting the works into public domain, meaning that anyone can re-publish the works without paying the author’s estate any royalties.  Hollywood can use an author’s work without permission, usually by taking a famous book and turning it to something that would have killed the author had he not already kicked the bucket seventy years earlier (the minimum length of time that it takes for an author’s copyright to expire).

Actually, the copyright law is a little confusing, but it goes something like this:  A copyright expires 70 years after an author’s death or 95 years after the original publication or 120 years from the date of creation.  This law is subject to change as needed, primarily because every few years Disney begins a cash-rich campaign to bribe politicians to protect the cash cow that surrounds all things Mickey Mouse.  We would all be better off if Congress were half as interested in protecting the Bill of Rights as they are in safe guarding the marketing rights of that obnoxious rodent.

How long to protect intellectual property rights has long been an issue.  Mark Twain was an early champion to extend the period of copyright protection.  So incensed at the large number of pirated copies of his work that he seriously considered giving up writing novels in favor of plays, he lobbied Congress to not only extend the period, but to strictly enforce the laws.  It was partly due to his lobbying that Congress passed laws to recognize international copyrights in 1891, but Twain was unsuccessful at obtaining the extension of copyright protection that he wanted—eternity.  

In 1906, Twain made a dramatic entrance before a Congressional Committee, sweeping away his long dark cloak to reveal his trademark white suit.  Twain stated that a copyright of eternity would be no hardship on the public, since less than a half dozen authors in each century produced works still being read a hundred years later.  Congress did not agree, limiting the period of copyright to 28 years with a single 28-year extension.  (As noted above, that period has since changed.)

Twain accepted the change with his usual humor, stating ““A day will come, when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life.”

For most of Twain’s works, anything published before 1923, the copyright has long since expired.  This means you are absolutely free to write a new novel featuring Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and seek a publisher.  If you were to write a new story featuring a four-fingered squeaky mouse, however, an army of rabid lawyers would chase you to the ends of the earth.

Note.  When Twain died in 1910, he left an astonishing 600 unpublished or unfinished manuscripts.   His will contained instructions that several of these manuscripts could only be published after a specified period of years.  For example, his recently published autobiography could only be published a century after his passing.  The last of these manuscripts cannot be published until 2310.  I can hardly wait.

In 2022, all the books published in 1926 or by authors who died in 1951 will be added to the list of public domain books.  These includes The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather, Soldier’s Pay by William Faulkner, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence.

Along with these books, tens of thousands of sound recordings will enter public domain—more musical recordings than the average person could listen to in the span of a normal life.  In movies, the copyright expires for Rudolph Valentino’s final film The Son of the Sheik and one of the very first movies with sound, Don Juan.

Almost daily, I receive emails trying to sell me cheap copies of wonderful books, the vast majority of which are works of great literature old enough to be in the public domain.  These vultures, masquerading as publishing houses, obtain a used copy of some author’s great work, cut the binding off, and feed the pages through a scanner, obtaining at almost no cost a “new” book to peddle to their unsuspecting customers, promising a digital copy of a ‘best seller’ for the incredibly low price of 99 cents.  They advertise through mass emails, selling no physical products whatsoever.  For all the consumer knows, the entire publishing company is a single obese nerd named Phil living in his grandmother’s basement.

It is rather obvious that I love books, particularly bound books.  But, I also love my Kindle and find it useful to keep reference copies of frequently used books on my Kindle.  So yes, I have copies of most of Twain’s works on my Kindle as well as the writing of Herodotus and the collected letters of Lincoln and so forth.  Instead of giving any of these vulture companies any money, however, I prefer to download my public domain works from Project Gutenberg, a non-profit organization that provides great out of print books free of charge.  If you have never searched through their collection, you can find them here.

Phil and his ilk are comfortably waiting in their basement, watching the calendar until they can swoop down on the literary carcasses of great work, snatching up marketable tidbits without any reward for either the author or the publisher of the editions they copy.  This is all perfectly legal, but it still stinks.  If you’ll pardon me while I switch metaphors, as we say in Texas, a skunk might have got an invite to the picnic, but he still wasn’t welcome when he showed up.

How can you, a casual reader, tell if a digital book is probably “borrowed” from an earlier edition?  If you find an error in a book, it can either be a mistake by the author or a mistake at the publishing house as they set the manuscript into text.  In the first Harry Potter book, J. K. Rowling’s list of necessary school supplies accidentally included “1 wand” twice—an example of an author’s mistake that was corrected in later editions.  

An example of a mistake at the publishing house would include the infamous 1631 ‘Wicked Bible’ where the typesetter accidentally changed Exodus 20 to read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”  (Obviously, that was not a mistake by the author).  Another example would be a recent pasta cookbook that inadvertently advised the reader to season their pasta with “freshly ground black people”.  I would be willing to bet that Autocorrect had something to do with that last example.

Errors are certainly understandable, but if a later edition includes the same typographical error as an earlier publication, that is proof that the publishing company is just stealing the work of someone else.  Even if the work is already in the public domain, that is still morally wrong.

I will make a prediction about the new batch of public domain books coming out soon:   I am willing to bet that by the end of January 2022, one of those fly-by-night basement publishing companies will offer to sell me a copy of Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  While the original volume was typographically flawless as far as I can tell, the most widely available recent edition contains a typo on page 261, where the name Ursula is spelled ‘Ursual’.  Since the earlier editions do not contain this error, it is obviously a typographical error at the publishing house.

How much do you want to bet the cheap e-text versions being peddled next month contain the typo, giving clear proof that Phil never left even bothered to leave the basement just scanned someone else’s work?

Rock Paper…What?

In recent weeks, having solved such weighty problems as Covid, politics, and the appropriate boarding weapon for pirates, it is time to discuss a topic with a little more gravitas.  I’m referring, of course, to the game of Rock Paper Scissors.

Having never met a person who does not know how to play the game, I’m not going to waste any time discussing the rules.  If you don’t know how to play, have the person who is helping you read the big words explain it to you.  

I will however, talk about the history of the game.   Quelle surprise!

Depending on where you live, the name of the game varies, as well as the three components used to determine the winner.  In the Western United States, the game is frequently called Rochambeau, after the Count who supposedly played the game during the Revolutionary War.  In reality, the Count never heard of the game, and no one knows exactly how the urban legend began.  

In Japan, the game is jan-ken-pon, which not surprisingly translates out to rock, paper, scissors.  The game is frequently used in soft-porn videos where the loser of each round has to remove an article of clothing.  In the Philippines it is called Jak En Poy and is so popular it is frequently the subject of televised game shows.  Indonesia has a version with slightly different hand signs that translates out as Bear, Hunter, Ninja.  

The earliest written description of the game is about 500 years old, in a Chinese book that dates the game back to 225 BCE.  From China, the game moved to Japan, that through contact with the West, spread the game to Europe, early in the Twentieth Century.  

English newspapers first reported in the 1920’s that the “Teutonic Game” was occasionally used to determine who went first in cricket matches when the referee could not locate a suitable coin to determine who played first.  Within a decade, the game had spread to the United States.

Interestingly, in America, players say that “rock smashes scissors”, while in England the phrase is “rock blunts scissors”.  I’ll leave it to the reader to determine if this indicates anything about the nature of either country.  (I wonder if, in France, the scissors surrender to rock.)

The most important thing to know about the game, however, is how to win.  What most people assume is a game of random chance is actually a game of psychology.  Like poker, it is a game where reading your opponent is the key to winning.  

Or maybe not.  There is a theory floating around that players subconsciously attempt to mimic the play of their opponent.  As the eye catches small movements of the muscles in their opponent’s hand, your brain automatically tries to play the same move—resulting in a tie.  Accordingly, some players suggest that the best strategy is to mimic Luke Skywalker practicing with his lightsaber and just use The Force by playing blindfolded.  Even if you don’t win, you will freak out your opponent.

Assuming that you are not Luke Skywalker, then, if you are playing against a man, you should consider playing paper, as most men choose rock as their first move (presumably because the rock is the most masculine, forceful play).  If you lose, you should remember that winners tend to play the same move twice, so your second play should be whatever would have defeated your opponent’s first move.  If your first move won, your second move should be whatever was not played in the first round.  Subsequent rounds should follow this same pattern.

If you go online, you will find programs that allow you to play against a computer.  The games that use simple programs relying on random choices are impossible to beat, as these programs do not use patterns to anticipate, which means, statistically, you will win roughly as many games as you lose in the long run.  If you play against one of the better programs (those that keep track of your moves and analyze them for patterns), you will lose far more games than you win over the long run, since the human brain is incapable of not establishing a pattern.  In fact, the longer you play against such a program, the more you will lose.

Since a third of the games played should end in a tie, several alternative versions of the rules have been suggested, the most common being the addition of more possible moves.  Sam Kass and Karen Bryla have suggested a version with five possible plays:  Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock.  This version was popularized by the television show The Big Bang Theory.  With five possible moves, only one game in five should end in a tie.  If you search long enough on the internet, you can find versions of the game that use up to 100 possible moves….and no one but a computer could possibly remember which move beats another.

Researchers in Japan have discovered that children can play the game about the time they reach the age of four.  That being the mental age of intelligent chimpanzees, the research project immediately switched its research subjects from children to apes, presumably because they were easier to work with and didn’t require payment.  

According to the latest report by the BBC, the scientists have been successful at getting the chimpanzees to play against a computer (although the computer had to use pictures of chimp hands for the subjects to respond).  Next, the researchers are going to attempt to see if the chimps will play the game with other chimps.

Assuming that the experiment will be successful, I have already written to the scientists with a suggestion on how to extend their experiment.  I think, if the scientists proceed cautiously, they might be able to teach the game to university administrators.

Lest you think all of this is just useless trivia, I would point out to you that the game has been used to settle tied elections, property divisions in divorces, and several civil lawsuits.  Perhaps the most interesting use involved selling the extensive impressionist art collection of Takashi Hashiyama, a wealthy Japanese industrialist.  Both Sotheby’s Holdings and Christie’s International presented impressive proposals to auction off the valuable collection of paintings by such artists as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso.  One of the Picasso paintings was ‘Boulevard de Clichy’ (left).

Unable to choose between the two houses, Hashiyama decided to choose an auction house by letting the two firms play a single round of Rock Paper Scissors.

With a week to select their move, Sotheby’s left the choice to management.  Christie’s, wisely turned to the twin eleven-year-old daughters of its international director.  With millions of dollars in commissions at stake, the girls suggested scissors because, as they said, “Everybody expects you to choose rock.”   

Christie’s won.  I wonder if the girls received a consulting fee.

Boarding Weapons

There is a long list of book subjects that I am hopelessly addicted to: Twain, post WW2 science fiction, late 19th century mysteries, and anything written by Lawrence Block, Rex Stout, or John D. MacDonald.   I compulsively read books about the Civil War, art crime, and almost anything written about naval warfare during the Napoleonic years.

Note.  The Doc, looking over my shoulder, just said that I was addicted to any book that had a cover or a page.  This is an obvious gross exaggeration as I own, and regularly use, three Kindles.

Now that finals are over, I am indulging in my usual end of semester reading binge, having recently devoted all of my reading time to the books required by my classes.  Bernard Cornwell just published a new volume in his superb Sharpe series, and it was first on my reading list.  In the novel, one of Cornwell’s characters is armed with a Nock Volley Gun, and that set me off thinking about some of the strange boarding weapons that were once used by navies and pirates.

For centuries before gunpowder, the main tactics used in naval warfare were ramming and boarding, or a combination of the two.  By the time gunpowder began being used at sea, the tactic of ramming began to wane, but navies still frequently engaged in seaborne artillery duels until one ship was damaged enough that its opponent could come alongside and board the ship, killing or subduing the crew and capturing the vessel.

During boarding, both the defenders and the attackers needed specialized weapons, designed to quickly incapacitate as many opponents as possible, but preferably small enough to be portable, while not setting fire to either ship.  Not surprisingly, most of the weapons used were fairly similar to those used on land—swords, muskets, pistols and the occasional boarding axe or pike.  A few of the weapons—and these are the ones I want to talk about today—were unique.

We can start with the Nock Volley Gun that Bernard Cornwell mentions in most of the Sharpe novels.  This was a massive 7-barrel flintlock musket that fired a volley of .46 caliber balls.  You’ll note from the picture that there is a single trigger and there are no sights.  To use, you pointed the monster in the general direction of the enemy and pulled the trigger, simultaneously firing all seven barrels.   The weapon was thunderously loud, produced a prodigious cloud of smoke, and kicked so hard that the unfortunate person using it probably wondered if he had put the wrong end up to his shoulder.

The British weapon was rejected by the Army, primarily because it broke the shoulder of a few of the men who tested it, but the Admiralty office thought it would make a wonderful boarding weapon, even suggesting that it might be used by sailors ‘in the tops’ to clear the decks of enemy ships.  In the tops meant the sailors precariously balanced on platforms on the mast.  The British Navy used them, but only for a short period, eventually rejecting them in favor of more swivel guns.  The Nock was only in use for about 20 years and fewer than 700 of them were manufactured, meaning that the strange musket was used more by Hollywood than by the British Navy (you can even see one in John Wayne’s version of The Alamo).

Since the Nock was replaced in favor of Swivel Gun, I guess I should explain those.  A naval swivel gun was simply a small cannon that was loaded with grapeshot (bags of musket balls) and was mounted on a swiveling stand.  Less than three feet long, the guns were highly portable and could be quickly moved wherever needed.  In boarding operations, they could be used to devastating effect by either attackers or defenders.  Since they are short-range weapons, you could think of them as very large shotguns.

So far, none of these weapons is truly portable.  A sailor boarding an enemy ship could easily find himself confronting several enemies at once, and it is only in the movies that a single man has a sword fight with four enemies at once.  (Well, almost only:  There is a well-documented account of Captain Edward Hamilton of the HMS Surprise.  During his successful recapture of the HMS Hermione, for what must have seemed like an eternity to him, he successfully battled four Spanish sailors on the Hermione’s quarterdeck until the second wave of his crew finally arrived.)

To fill the need, in the 18th and 19th century, several navies experimented with the ‘Duck Foot Pistol’.  These were multi-barreled black powder pistols that sported multiple barrels—usually three or four but up to six were not uncommon.   Like the Nock, you didn’t actually aim the weapon: you just stuck it out in front of you and pulled the trigger while trying to hang on to the thing long enough for it to fire, then, you dropped the pistol on the floor and drew your sword.  I am unable to find a single instance of anyone reloading and firing such a weapon twice in the same battle. 

Surprisingly, these things were actually fairly successful and were used all over the world until being replaced by more modern pistols such as Colt’s revolver.  Besides being used by boarding parties, they were also prized by prison guards and bank guards.  If you happened to be an innocent bank customer when one of these was used…. well, maybe that is why they developed bank by mail.

The chief problem with the duck foot (other than no one ever being able to hit anything he actually aimed at) was that after you fired it, you were left with a rock for defense until you were able to draw a sword.   In 1837, George Elwin successfully patented the first good answer to that age-old recurring problem of someone who’s brought a knife to a gun fight.  The Elgin Cutlass Pistol married a percussion pistol to a knife Elgin claimed was like the one Jim Bowie used at the Alamo.  The Bowie knife—already popular after the infamous Vidalia Sandbar Duel—was such a popular item that knives claiming to be the Bowie were being mass produced as far away as Sheffield, England.  Was the Elgin copy a true representation of what the actual Bowie knife looked like?  Nobody knows for sure—all we can really say for certain was that Bowie's knife was big. 

Elgin made these weapons in a variety of calibers and blade lengths.  When the U.S. Navy was looking to equip an expedition to explore islands in the southern Pacific, it purchased 150 .54 caliber weapons with  11-inch blades—the first time the American military ever purchased a firearm with the newly-invented percussion caps that replaced the earlier flintlock firing system.

The Elgin weapons actually proved fairly effective but they, like the duck foot pistols, were rendered obsolete by the Colt revolvers.  However, there are several reports of the weapons being used in the Civil War.  

Well, that’s enough of weird old weapons.  The concept of weird boarding weapons hasn’t gone away though, as evidenced by the U.S. Coast Guard using the Saiga-12, a Russian shotgun that basically takes the AK-47 and enlarges it to accept a 12-gauge shotgun shell with a twelve shot box magazine that…  But that is a story for another day.

Whose Turn Is It to Lead?

There is that great line about while Fred Astaire was a fantastic dancer, we should all remember that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, but backwards while wearing high heels.  

It’s a famous quote, but contrary to popular opinion, neither Astaire nor Rogers originated the line—that honor belongs to Bob Thaves, the artist of the 1982 Frank and Ernest comic strip.  In a later interview, Rogers even admitted that the quote belonged to Thaves.

Note.  To those readers born after the sixties, those white things on the top of Fred Astaire’s shoes are called ‘spats’, short for spatterdashes.  The sole purpose of these things was to make it look like you were AWOL from the French Army.

Fred and Ginger came to mind this week after I was channel hopping during the evening news.  The difference in how one story was reported (and misreported) by the various flavors of journalism would almost have you believe that the talking heads on television were reporting about completely different countries.  Of particular note were the stories that repeated every few years and how the two political parties reacted to them.  Within a very few years, both parties seem to completely reverse their reactions depending upon who occupies the White House.

Obviously, it is the other party’s time to lead and the other, other party’s time to wear high heels and dance backwards.

Here are a few examples:

Since it is that time of year, let’s start with the Christmas Trees.  Back in 2018, Melania Trump lined the White House Halls with 40 dark red Christmas Trees, which the Washington Post immediately labeled as hideous blood-red atrocities.  The Republican party, predictably, adored the decorations. This year, Jill Biden lined those halls with green trees heavily festooned with white decorations.  Immediately, the Washington Post praised Jill’s style while the Republicans called the decorations ugly.

Ignoring the fact that even during a pandemic with the worst inflation the country has seen in thirty years, the country can still focus on how a set of halls that almost none of us will actually see is still important enough to show up on the editorial pages of the most important newspapers in the country, actually the two sets of decorations had more commonalities than differences.  Something almost no one reported was that neither Melania’s red trees nor Jill’s green and white trees were what the official indoor Christmas tree actually looked like.  In both cases, their trees on the second floor, in the family’s residence were traditionally decorated, and Melania’s and Jill’s looked almost identical.  (For what it’s worth, I thought both decorations were okay.)

When Donald Trump was president, everything he did to lessen the impact of the Covid pandemic was deemed by his own party as inspired genius.  The Democrats, of course, viewed every action as pure evil.  As a candidate, Joe Biden promised swift, decisive action and tactical moves that would all but eliminate the pandemic from our shores, as opposed to the inaction of President Trump.

Now that Joe Biden is president, however, I’m hard pressed to think of anything he has done to fight Covid that is substantially different than what we were doing last year.  That, of course, hasn’t kept the Republican Party from denouncing everything Biden has done.  I’m not, mind you, saying that either is necessarily wrong—I can’t think of anything different to do, either.

When President Trump withdrew troops from Syria, candidate Biden was aghast.  How could America American abandon its allies?  Just twelve months later, former president Trump was horrified when Biden pulled our troops out of Afghanistan and protested vehemently.  Trump’s protests, however, never included the fact that he had been talked out of doing the same thing by his own military advisors.  

Inflation is caused by too many dollars chasing too few goods.  Our current inflation is caused by many factors: the government pumping out stimulus checks, the supply lines backing up because of Covid, the shortage of workers forcing employers to raise salary offerings…but it is easy to see that most of these factors started in early 2020.  If you listen to the two political parties, however…if you listen to either of the political parties…inflation was caused by the evil, intentional, and diabolical plot of the wicked opposition.  

On January 31, 2020, President Donald Trump issued a Level 4 travel ban on non-Americans coming into the country from China.  Almost immediately, several Democrats, including then-candidate Joe Biden, denounced the move as both xenophobic and racist.  Last week, when President Biden banned travel from Africa…well, the best part of it was watching Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, trying to explain the difference while she talked herself around three sides of the barn, looking for the horse whose reins were in her hand.  

All of us should be extremely angry at this performance.  The dancers are clumsy and out of step with the music.  The act is old and desperately needs to be brought in line with something the viewers could appreciate.  The chief problem with virtue signaling is that it doesn’t take long before the signaling is more important than the virtue.

Obviously, it doesn’t really matter who is leading and who is loudly denouncing each and every move: if we just wait a few years, the two dancers will switch places and do it all over again.  Backwards and in high heels.