Ykblog

 They say you used to be able to ski through the canals. I wasn’t alive then, granted. So I’ve never actually seen it. But all the old people say so. Things were different before they starting dredging. In 1842, in a country just a few years awayfrom declaring itself Canada, colonist David McCall received a Crown Patent for a small island in the middle of the St. Clair river, just a stone’s throw from the Michigan border. After arriving on North America’s shoresa few hundred years before, his people had spread unwanted across the back of the continent, upending any native groups rooted in their way.  At times they spread deliberately, at timesby accident, but no matter how they got there, their influence soon spanned coast to coast. McCall happened to be one of the ones that was spread deliberately. What was once a fertile deer hunting groundfor the local indigenous tribes would now be a farmstead for an ambitious British implant. A European seed in American soil. Through him,...

 Welcome to our Hammer Frankenstein Top Ten. A few years ago we released a two-part special charting the Hammer Frankenstein franchise and the history of the studio that made it, from inception ‘Where did it all begin?’ to demise... 'There's nothing more to see. It's all over now' This is a sort of companion piece looking at the best characters ‘Bit of a barney getting it out it was. Tricky thing a brain’ Moments... and scenes from across the series. And there’s only one place to start. ‘I am Baron Frankenstein’ Immediately distinguishing it from the Universal franchise, Hammer made their films all about the Baron himself rather than the creature. ‘You are a very clever man then Baron’ ‘Yes I am’ And their Baron Frankenstein was a very different character.  'There is nothing - do you hear me - nothing more important to me than the success of this experiment' As written by Jimmy Sangster, directed by Terence Fisher, and performed by Peter Cushing, Hammer’s Victor...

 It’s safe to say that I won’t live touse a time machine. And not because I didn’t attend Stephen Hawking’s time traveler party, I have bigger fish to fry than that. No, the reason I know I’ll never use a timemachine is because when I was thirteen years old I sent a letter professing my undyinglove to a girl in my class, only to then blame a friend the moment that she rejected me. And If I ever encountered a time machine,that would not be a memory that I still have.  But today’s episode is not about my failed love life. It's about giant letters in a hill. It’s about time. You can’t erase the past. It’s a lesson that's surprisingly hard to learn. They say those that don’t know history are doomed to repeat it but I’d argue that we're doomed to repeat it regardless. Few people really want to look back on history,because that’s where the lessons are, and almost none of us really want to learn a lesson. We’re kind of like Calvin on that camping trip with his father dreading what...

 So, I'll start with this: a coupleyears ago, an event planner called me because I was goingto do a speaking event. And she called, and she said, "I'm really struggling with howto write about you on the little flyer." And I thought,"Well, what's the struggle?" And she said, "Well, I saw you speak, and I'm going to call youa researcher, I think, but I'm afraid if I call youa researcher, no one will come, because they'll thinkyou're boring and irrelevant." (Laughter) And I was like, "Okay." And she said, "But the thingI liked about your talk is you're a storyteller. So I think what I'll dois just call you a storyteller." And of course, the academic,insecure part of me was like, "You're goingto call me a what?" And she said, "I'm goingto call you a storyteller." And I was like, "Why not 'magic pixie'?" (Laughter) I was like, "Let me thinkabout this for a...

 Joseph GeniReviewer: Morton Bast I have spent my entire life either at the schoolhouse,on the way to the schoolhouse, or talking about what happensin the schoolhouse. (Laughter) Both my parents were educators, my maternal grandparents were educators, and for the past 40 years,I've done the same thing. And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chanceto look at education reform from a lot of perspectives. Some of those reforms have been good. Some of them have been not so good. And we know why kids drop out. We know why kids don't learn. It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences... We know why. But one of the thingsthat we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importanceof human connection. Relationships. James Comer saysthat no significant learning can occur withouta significant relationship.  George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. Everyone in this room has been affectedby a teacher or an a...

 It’s perhaps the most effective shortcutin the world. Slicing through the dense jungles of CentralAmerica, the Panama Canal bisects the continent, carving an 80km path that joins the Atlanticto the Pacific. For ships that pass through its intricatesystem of locks, it can chop up to 12,500 km off their journey - a time saving thatputs even Egypt’s Suez Canal to shame. When construction was finally completed in1914, it was the most expensive infrastructure project ever undertaken, and is still oneof the engineering wonders of the modern world. Yet the tale of the Panama Canal is more thanjust the tale of a whole bunch of guys getting together to decide how to get boats from portA to port B in record time. It’s also a tale of a dream.  Of a dream so big - so unimaginably vast - thatit persisted for centuries; and of the nightmares that were unleashed in pursuit of that dream. In the video today, we take a look at theepic story that is the history of the Panama Canal, a story stu...

 In architecture, pyramids are famed for their sturdiness. They’ve lasted for thousands of years despite overgrown jungles and blasting desert sands ripping at their foundations. They’re about as indestructible as our buildings get. But as businesses? Not so much. A pyramid scheme beings to collapse the moment it's begun. Because it's not really a pyramid. The base is flipped. And if you invert a pyramid, you're left with a funnel. There’s not a lot of buildings that are shaped like a V.  In 1997, Albania learned a very hard lessonabout funnels. No matter how much water you pour into them,it doesn’t stop trickling halfway down. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Be it a beautiful woman looking to chat online,a company that says you can retire at thirty-five, or a politician saying that he’ll make yourcountry great again, they’re all selling a fantasy. The world is never so simple as jingoistswould have you believe. The whiff of money, power and fame ar...