Rock Explainer 3

This universe is very weird...so weird, in fact, that we often don’t question its weirdness even though it’s right in front of us...we’re completely caught up in it...

For example, when someone takes a group picture, there’s always that person that demands that everyone “say cheese”....that’s a way to get everyone to smile...you can’t help but smile when you say “cheese”. 

No one is really sure who was first to employ the “cheese” trick for photography... In the early days of the camera, it was considered undignified to be captured with any kind of grin...the command from the photographer used to be “say prunes”...that’s why so many old photos have people doing duck lips...

The earliest reference to “say cheese” comes from a Texas newspaper report in October 1943...Joseph E. Davies, a former ambassador to Moscow, was interviewed gave away his secret to look pleasant no matter what the circumstances... “just say ‘cheese’”, he advised...Davies wasn’t the inventor of the phrase, though...he says he learned it from some politician...

Let’s try something more current...when we enter the full address of a website in a browser, we go http://www. Whatever”...that’s a bit unwieldy...the story of the URL is very complicated, but it breaks down like this...

The “http” stands for “hypertext transfer protocol,” the set of rules that govern transferring files over the internet...the “www” is “world wide web,” which is where the url lives...but what’s with “//”?...that’s a holdover from the computer code that was written for the Apollo missions to the moon...

And by the way, the guy who first put all this together is Tim Berners-Lee back 1992...he’s really, really sorry for all the confusion and if he had it his way, he’d go back and come up with something better...

Since we’re on the topic of rockets, why is there a countdown to launch?...seems obvious, right?...tick down the seconds until the engines fire...but get this: nasa took this idea from a 1929 silent film called “frau im mond”—which translates as “women in the moon”...it’s considered to be one of the first serious sci-fi films...for its rocket launches, it features a countdown from “six”...6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, now!”

Again, this is stuff right in front of our faces that we’ve just accepted as part of life without ever really questioning what’s going on...now let’s extend this to the world of music...there are many strange things that we just accept as fact and protocol...but why?...let’s find out...

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