Chaplin's Corpse, Murnau's Skull, and Einstein's Brain

On this day in 1978, Charlie Chaplin's coffin was stolen from his grave in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. And yes, with him in it. 

Police initially thought it was done by obsessive fans trying to fulfill his wish to be buried in England, but then two Eastern European immigrants who were desperate for money, demanded $600,000 for its return. (If you can believe it, others pretended to have his body and asked for money too, so the actual body snatchers had to provide a picture in order to prove their depravity.) Chaplin's wife Oona negotiated with them, but only to allow the police to trace their calls. They were arrested 76 days after their theft.

They had buried the coffin in a cornfield in the meantime, presumably because they didn't want to hang out with him in their living room. That gives me a movie idea, instead of Weekend At Bernie's, how about Months With Charlie? 

Guess what though, those knuckleheads forgot where exactly they buried him. Police eventually located the coffin with a metal detector. Good thing it had metal handles or they would have had to dig up the whole cornfield. The ring leader spent four and a half years in jail for extortion.

Oona said of the whole episode, “Charlie would have thought it rather ridiculous.”

Over the years people plotted to steal Abraham Lincoln's corpse, Elvis's, Eva Peron's. Nobody knows the whereabouts of Einstein's brain, or Kennedy's. James Dean's gravestone was stolen several times. In 2015, the director F.W. Murnau's skull was stolen from his grave by Satanists who are apparently still using it for only God knows what.

The director Errol Morris was obsessed with the infamous grave-robber Ed Gein for years, even moving to his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin to do research. He convinced Werner Herzog to come out too, and the two obsessively discussed whether or not Ed Gein dug up his own mother. Many of the graves Ed Gein robbed were circled around his mother's grave. The two decided there was only one way to find out!

Herzog came prepared with pickaxes and the whole business, but Morris chickened out.

(Morris and Herzog later had a falling out because Herzog filmed Stroszek in Plainfield, and Morris felt that he stole his landscape, haha.)

It's ridiculous how many of the great directors were in one way or another involved in some grave-robbing scheme. What does it mean? Damned if I know.

Here's a picture of Chaplin's grave during happier times. After they re-interted him, they put a slab of concrete on top. 

RIP Charlie Chaplin, hopefully.

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Elementary school humor at its finest. Gretel said that her class was walking down the stairs today when somebody left a fart. Everyone said it smelled like egg salad. Her teacher, Mr. Champion, said, "I like egg salad, but not like that."

That's good material. I might send him a message telling him that he earned his name. It was Culture Day today, and he was a genuine Champion.

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On the walk home from school today, Zuzu was pretty excited to decode a personalized license plate- "S8N."

March 2, 2023

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I juiced some oranges tonight and for a second it was 1983 and I was at Park City walking by that Orange Julius stand.

March 2, 2022

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Blows my mind. We can't articulate this, but somehow we all know.

“Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160908-the-language-rules-we-know-but-dont-know-we-know

March 2, 2022

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This is such a simple notion that it hardly seems worth mentioning, but someone who refuses to condemn the actions of their own party that are in violation of the Constitution have effectively placed their party above the country. This happens two ways and should always be condemned.

March 2, 2017

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In a dream last night I remembered a crazy fact about Donald Trump... that he financed a 1986 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie for 3 billion dollars. He can't be trusted.

March 2, 2016

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Emma- Baby girl #2 is on the way!

March 2, 2015

Ben- Only five more children after this and Emma and I will have one and a half dozen. (That's an Amish joke... one, and a half dozen, 1+6=7.)

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Oscar Thoughts 2014

Haha, I'm 7 for 7 so far with my Oscar guesses!

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Just two days before inauguration on this day in 1877, the U.S. Congress declared Rutherford B. Hayes the winner of the 1876 U.S. presidential election even though Samuel J. Tilden had won the popular vote.

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John Ford's Stagecoach was released on this day in 1939.

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Wilt Chamberlain set the single-game scoring record in the NBA on this day in 1962 by scoring 100 points.

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Notable birthdays- Dr. Seuss (1904), Jennifer Jones (1919), Tom Wolfe (1930), Mikhail Gorbachev (1931), Russ Feingold (1953), Jon Bon Jovi (1962)

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D. H. Lawrence left us on this day in 1930.

"Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life. Why pin ourselves down on a paradisal ideal? It is only ourselves we torture."

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Philip K. Dick left us on this day in 1982.

"In a society of criminals, the innocent man goes to jail."

He and his twin sister were born 6 weeks early, and she died 6 weeks later, when she should have been born. It affected his writing, the catalyst for his phantom twin motif. 

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Another notable deathday- Mercedes McCambridge (2004)

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IFLScience- Woman Investigates Unusual Birthmark, Discovers She Is Her Own Twin Sister

So if life begins at conception she has two souls?

And when she says, "My body reacts to my twin's DNA and cells as foreign matter, compromising my immune system to be much lower than an average person’s..." which twin is talking and which is she referring to?

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/woman-investigates-unusual-birthmark-discovers-she-is-her-own-twin-sister/

March 2, 2018

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Amy Hempel- "We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive."

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From Cutie and the Boxer- "'We've reached another morning full of hope. Let's have a productive day and follow our dreams.' A dumb friend of mine used to say that. Now he's dead."

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Bertrand Russell- "Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God, and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case."

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Adam Alter- “Sunshine dulls the mind to risk and thoughtfulness.”

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Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine:

I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants.

Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?

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Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism- "If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature."

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Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club- "I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off."

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David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest- "Why not? Why not? Why not not, then, if the best reasoning you can contrive is why not?"

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Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's- "Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll."

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Mitch Hedberg- "When I was on acid, I would see things, like beams of light. And I would hear sounds that sounded an awful lot like car horns."