I recently read Merry White’s Coffee Life in Japan, a history of the west’s favorite beverage in the Land of the Rising Sun. As with so many cultural imports, the Japanese first entertained a fascination with coffee, then got more serious about drinking it, then made an official place for it in their society, then got even more serious about not just drinking it but artisanally preparing and serving it, winding up with an originally foreign but now unmistakably Japanese suite of products and associated experiences. Having spent a fair bit of time in Japanese cafés myself, I can tell you that the country has some damn fine coffee. But what about its cherry pie? Only one man could take that case: FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, the main character of David Lynch’s groundbreakingly strange ABC television drama Twin Peaks. A great many Japanese people love coffee, but no small number also love David Lynch. And so, when the opportunity arose to take simultaneous advantage of local enthusiasm for beverage and filmmaker alike, Georgia Coffee seized it, working in the robust tradition of Japanese advertisements starring American celebrities to reunite members of Twin Peaks‘ cast, reconstruct the fictional town of Twin Peaks itself, and have Lynch direct a new mini-mini-mini-season of the show, each episode a forty-second Georgia Coffee commercial. The first episode, "Mystery of G," finds Cooper in the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, enlisted in the search for a missing Japanese woman named Asami. He and Asami’s husband examine the first piece of evidence: an origami crane with a G on it. The second, "Lost," introduces two more inscrutable artifacts: a photo of Asami beside a rare roadster, and a mounted deer’s head. The latter leads him to Big Ed’s Gas Farm, where in the third episode, "Cherry Pie," he spots the car and, on its passenger seat, a mysterious wedge of red billiard balls (which, of course, reminds him of his favorite dessert). The fourth, "The Rescue," closes the case in the woods, where Cooper finds Asami, trapped and backwards-talking, in — where else? — the red-curtained room of the extra-dimensional Black Lodge. Every step of the solution to this mystery requires a cup of Georgia Coffee — or, rather, a can of Georgia Coffee, Georgia being one of the best-known varieties of that vending machine-ready category of beverage. The west may never have gone in for canned coffee, but Japan drinks it in enormous quantities. What better way to advertise a Japanese interpretation of coffee in the early 1990s, then, than with a Japanese interpretation of Twin Peaks? Alas, the higher-ups at Georgia Coffee didn’t ultimately think that way, giving the axe to the planned second series of Twin Peaks commercials. Maybe that’s for the best since, as for the actual taste of Georgia Coffee — well, I’ve had damn finer. Related Content: Japanese Movie Posters of 10 David Lynch Films Coffee is for People, Not Robots: The New Ad for David Lynch’s Line of Organic Coffee David Lynch’s Unlikely Commercial for a Home Pregnancy Test (1997) David Lynch’s Perfume Ads Based on the Works of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald & D.H. Lawrence Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. David Lynch Directs a Mini-Season of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japanese Coffee Commercials is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Friedrich Nietzsche first introduced the concept of the Übermensch — often translated in English as "The Superman" — in his influential philosophical work, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), writing: I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man? All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?… Lo, I teach you the Superman! The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman SHALL BE the meaning of the earth! I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them! Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth! As Eva Cybulska observes in an article on Philosophy Now, Nietzsche never quite spelled out what he meant by Übermensch/The Superman, leaving it to later interpreters to fill in the blanks. She notes: "RJ Hollingdale (in Nietzsche) saw in Übermensch a man who had organised the chaos within; [Walter] Kaufmann (Nietzsche) a symbol of a man that created his own values, and Carl Jung (Zarathustra’s Seminars) a new ‘God’. For Heidegger it represented humanity that surpassed itself, whilst for the Nazis it became an emblem of the master race." You can now add to the list of interpretations another by Alain de Botton’s School of Life. In a newly-released animated video, de Botton treats The Superman as the incarnation of human perfection. Embodying characteristics possessed by Goethe, Montaigne, Voltaire and Napoleon (people who came closest to achieving perfection in Nietzsche’s mind), the Übermenschen/Supermen will live by their own values (Pagan in nature); delight in their superiority and take pity on the weak; perhaps hurt people in the name of achieving great things; accept that suffering can be a necessary evil; use culture to raise the mentality of the society around them; and beyond. Whether you see The Superman differently is another question. You can download Thus Spake Zarathustra from our Digital Nietzsche collection and come up with your own take. And, tangentially, you can watch The Original 1940s Superman Cartoon Free Online. Related Content: Download 100 Free Philosophy Courses and Start Living the Examined Life Free Online Philosophy Courses 135 Free Philosophy eBooks The Digital Nietzsche: Download Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks Hear Classical Music Composed by Friedrich Nietzsche: 43 Original Tracks How Martin Luther King, Jr. Used Hegel, Kant & Nietzsche to Overturn Segregation in America Nietzsche’s Concept of Superman Explained with Monty Python-Style Animation is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

It may well be that the major pivot points of history are only visible to those around the bend. For those of us immersed in the present—for all of its deafening sirens of violent upheaval—the exact years future generations will use to mark our epoch remain unclear. But when we look back, certain years stand out above all others, those that historians use as arrestingly singular book titles: 1066: The Year of Conquest, 1492: The Year the World Began, 1776. The first such year in the 20th century gets a particularly grim subtitle in historian Paul Ham’s 1914: The Year the World Ended. It sounds like hyperbolic marketing, but that apocalyptic description of the effects of World War I comes from some of the most eloquent voices of the age, whether those of American expatriates like Gertrude Stein or T.S. Eliot, or of European soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. In France, the horrors of the war prompted its survivors to remember the years before it as La Belle Epoque, a phrase—wrote the BBC’s Hugh Schofield in centenary essay "La Belle Eqoque: Paris 1914,"—that appeared "much later in the century, when people who’d lived their gilded youths in the pre-war years started looking back and reminiscing." We’re used to seeing the period of 1914 in grainy, dreary black-and-white, and to seeing nostalgic celebrations of La Belle Epoque represented graphically by the lively full-color posters and advertisements one finds in décor stores. But thanks to the full color photos you see here, unearthed a few years ago by Retronaut, we can see photographs of World War I-era Paris in full and vibrant color—images of the city one-hundred years ago almost just as Parisians saw it at the time. Icons like the Moulin Rouge come to life in bright daylight, above, and lighting up the night, below. Early cinema Aubert Palace, below, in the Grands Boulevards, shimmers beautifully, as does the art-deco lighting of the Eiffel Tower, further down. Below, hot air balloons hover in the enormous Grand Palais, and further down, a photograph of Notre Dame on a hazy day almost looks like a watercolor. The photographs were made, writes Messy N Chic, "using Autochrome Lumière technology between 1914 and 1918 [a technique developed in 1903 by the Lumière brothers, credited as the first filmmakers]…. [T]here are around 72,000 Autochromes from the time period of places all over the world, including Paris in its true colors." Not all of the photographs are of famous architectural monuments or nightlife destinations. Very many show ordinary street scenes, like those above, one depicting a number of bored French soldiers, presumably awaiting deployment. The Paris of 1914 was a European capital in major transition, in more ways than one. "Modernity was the moving spirit," writes Schofield; "It was the time of the machine. The city’s last horse-drawn omnibus made its way from Saint-Sulpice to La Villette in January 1913." Schofield also points out that, like Gilded Age New York, "the public image of Paris was the creation of romantic capitalists. The reality for many was much more wretched… there were entire families living on the street, and decrepit, overcrowded housing with non-existent sanitation." Modernity was leaving many behind, class conflict loomed in France as it erupted in Russia, even as the global catastrophe of World War threatened French elites and proletariat alike, who both served and who both died at very high rates. You can see many more of these astonishingly beautiful full-color photographs of 1914 Paris—at the end of La Belle Epoque—at Flavorwire, Vintage Everyday, Faded & Blurred, and Messy N Chic. Related Content: Impressionist Painter Edgar Degas Takes a Stroll in Paris, 1915 Rare Film of Sculptor Auguste Rodin Working at His Studio in Paris (1915) Paris Through Pentax: Short Film Lets You See a Great City Through a Different Lens The First Color Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, and Other Amazing Color Photos of Czarist Russia (1908) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Beautiful, Color Photographs of Paris Taken 100 Years Ago—at the Beginning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Disco’s been dead for decades, yet disco bashing never seems to go out of style. The sleazy fashions, the soulless music, the lumpenproletariat streaming ‘cross bridge and tunnel to shake their sweaty, polyester-clad booties like cut rate Travoltas… it’s over, and yet it isn’t. But even the most savagely anti-disco rocker should allow that its lead practitioners were possessed of a certain glamour and grace, their highly refined dance moves executed with the precision of Fred Astaire. It’s a point a German film buff known on YouTube as "et7waage1" drives home by setting a mix of screen siren Rita Hayworth’s most memorable dance scenes from the ‘40s and ‘50s to one of disco’s best known anthems, ’ "Stayin’ Alive." It’s easy to imagine Rita and any of her co-stars (including Astaire) would have parted the crowds at Brooklyn’s legendary 2001 Odyssey, the scene of Saturday Night Fever’s famous lighted Plexiglass floor. Her celebrated stems are well suited to the demands of disco, even when her twirly skirt is traded in for pjs and fuzzy slippers or a dowdy turn-of-the-century swimming costume. Here, for comparison’s sake are the stars of Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gomey, cutting the rug, urm, flashing floor in 1977 to the Bee Gees’ much more sedate "More Than a Woman." Hayworth films featured in the disco-scored revamp are: "Down to Earth": 0:00 / 1:03 / 2:46 / 4:20 "You’ll Never Get Rich": 0:14 / 0:24 / 0:28 / 0:46 / 2:35 / 3:16 / 3:49 "Tonight and Every Night": 0:20 / 1:11 / 1:22 / 1:36 / 1:54 / 1:55 "Cover Girl": 0:34 / 0:38 / 1:13 / 1:48 / 2:13 / 3:07 / 3:29 / 3:31 / 3:54 / 4:06 / 4:31 "You Were Never Lovelier": 0:50 / 2:20 / 2:42 / 3:00 / 4:10 / 4:38 "Gilda": 1:17 / 2:04 "Miss Sadie Thompson": 1:38 / 1:46 / 4:28 "My Gal Sal": 1:42 / 3:23 / 3:35 "Pal Joey": 2:00 / 3:20 / 3:41 "Affair in Trinidad": 2:05 / 2:52 / 3:04 Related Content: Disco Saves Lives: Give CPR to the The Beat of Bee Gees "Stayin’ Alive" The Origins of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk: Vintage Footage of Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis Jr., Fred Astaire & More James Brown Gives You Dancing Lessons: From The Funky Chicken to The Boogaloo Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is now playing New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday Rita Hayworth, 1940s Hollywood Icon, Dances Disco to the Tune of The Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive: A Mashup is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

"The Depression was not fun," the late YouTube star, Clara Cannucciari, states in the very first episode of her Great Depression Cooking web series, above. Her first recipe—Pasta with Peas—would likely give your average urbane foodie hives, as would her knife skills, but Clara, who started making these videos when she was 93, takes obvious satisfaction in the outcome. Her filmmaker grandson Christopher Cannucciari wisely kept Clara in her own kitchen, rather than relocating her to a more sanitized kitchen set. Her plastic paper towel holder, linoleum lined cabinets, and teapot-shaped spoon rest kept things real for several years worth of step-by-step, low budget, mostly vegetarian recipes. Her fruit-and-gingham ceramic salt and pepper shakers remained consistent throughout. How many television chefs can you name who would allow the camera crew to film the stained tinfoil lining the bottom of their ovens? Nonagenarian Clara apparently had nothing to hide. Each episode includes a couple of anecdotes about life during the Great Depression, the period in which she learned to cook from her thrifty Italian mother. She initially disliked being filmed, agreeing to the first episode only because that was grandson Christopher’s price for shooting a pre-need funeral portrait she desired. She turned out to be a natural. Her celebrity eventually led to a cookbook (Clara’s Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression), as well as a video wherein she answered viewer questions with characteristic frankness. To what did she attribute her youthful appearance? Clean living and large quantities of olive oil (poured from a vessel the size and shape of a coffee pot). How to avoid another Great Depression? "At my age, I don’t really care," Clara admitted, "But for the younger generation it’s bad." In the worst case scenario, she counsels sticking together, and not wishing for too much. The Depression, as we’ve mentioned, was not fun, but she got through it, and so, she implies, would you. The series can be enjoyed on the strength of Clara’s personality alone, but Great Depression Cooking has a lot to offer college students, undiscovered artists, and other fledgling chefs. Her recipes may not be professionally styled, but they’re simple, nutritious, and undeniably cheap (especially Dandelion Salad). Homemade Pizza—Clara’s favorite—is the antithesis of a 99¢ slice. The tight belts of the Great Depression did not preclude the occasional treat like holiday biscotti or Italian Ice. Those on a lean Thanksgiving budget might consider making Clara’s Poor Man’s Feast: lentils and rice, thinly sliced fried steak, plain salad and bread. Right up until her final, touching appearance below at the age of 96, her hands were nimble enough to shell almonds, purchased that way to save money, though cracking also put her in a holiday mood. Foodies who shudder at Pasta with Peas should find no fault with her wholesome recipe for her mother’s homemade tomato sauce (and by extension, paste). You can watch all of Clara’s video’s on the Great Depression Cooking channel. Or find Seasons 1 and 2 below. Season 1: Season 2: via Kottke Related Content: The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Available Online: Japanese, Italian, Thai & Much More Science & Cooking: Harvard’s Free Course on Making Cakes, Paella & Other Delicious Food MIT Teaches You How to Speak Italian & Cook Italian Food All at Once (Free Online Course) Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She recently co-authored a comic about epilepsy with her 18-year-old daughter. Follow her @AyunHalliday Great Depression Cooking: Get Budget-Minded Meals from the Online Cooking Show Created by 93-Year-Old Clara Cannucciari is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Creative Commons image by Paul Boxley John Cleese, you say, a spokesman for the American Philosophical Association? Why would such a serious organization, whose stated mission is to foster the "broader presence of philosophy in public life," choose a British comedian famous for such characters as the overbearing Basil Fawlty and ridiculous Minister of Silly Walks as one of their public faces? http://puffin.creighton.edu/phil/audio/01.mp3 They chose him, I imagine, because in his various roles—as a onetime prep school teacher and student of law at Cambridge, as a comedy writer and Monty Python star, and as a post-Python comedian, author, public speaker, and visiting professor at Cornell—Cleese has done more than his part to spread philosophy in public life. Monty Python, you’ll remember, aired a number of absurd philosophy sketches, notable for being as smart as they are funny. Cleese has presented his personal philosophy of creativity at the World Creativity Forum; he’s explained a common cognitive bias to which media personalities and politicians seem particularly susceptible; and he had his own podcast in which, among other things, he explained (wink) how the human brain works. http://www.publicphilosophy.org/media/100YearsofPhilosophyInAmerica/09-MLK-Addams-DeBeauvoir.mp3 Given these credentials, and his ability to apply his intelligence, wit, and comic timing to subjects not often seen as particularly exciting by the general public, Cleese seems like the perfect person for the job, even if he isn’t an American philosopher. The APA, founded in 1900, has recently hosted conferences on religious tolerance and "Cultivating Citizenship." In 2000, as part of its centennial celebration, the organization had Cleese record 22 very short "Public Service Announcements" to introduce novices to the important work of philosophy. These range from the very general "What Philosophers Do" at the top of the post to the influence of philosophy on social and political reformers like Martin Luther King, Jr., Jane Addams, and Simone de Beauvoir (above), showing philosophy’s "bearing on the real world." http://www.publicphilosophy.org/media/100YearsofPhilosophyInAmerica/19-TwentyFirstCentury.mp3 In this PSA, Cleese makes the controversial claim that "the 21st century may belong far more to philosophy than to psychology or even traditional religion." "What a strange thought," he goes on, then explains that philosophy "works against confusion"—certainly a hallmark of our age. There’s not much here to argue with—Cleese isn’t formulating a position, but giving his listeners provocative little nuts to crack on their own, should they find his PSAs intriguing enough to draw them into further study. They might as well begin where most of us do, with Socrates, whom Cleese introduces below. http://www.publicphilosophy.org/media/100YearsofPhilosophyInAmerica/13-Socrates.mp3 Hear the rest of Cleese’s philosophy PSAs at the American Philosophical Association’s website, or click here to download a zipped file containing all of these audio clips. And should you wish to dig deeper, you’ll find an abundance of resources in our archives, which includes big lists of Free Online Philosophy Courses and Free Philosophy eBooks. Related Content: Monty Python’s Best Philosophy Sketches John Cleese Explains the Brain — and the Pleasures of DirecTV Learn The History of Philosophy in 197 Podcasts (With More to Come) Download 100 Free Philosophy Courses and Start Living the Examined Life Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness John Cleese Touts the Value of Philosophy in 22 Public Service Announcements for the American Philosophical Association is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Last year we featured artwork from the Dune movie that never was, a collaboration between Alejandro Jodorowsky, the mysticism-minded Chilean director of such oft-described-as-mind-blowing pictures as El Topo and The Holy Mountain, and the artist Jean Giraud, better known as Mœbius, creator of oft-described-as-mind-blowing comics as Arzach, Blueberry, and The Airtight Garage. If ever a meeting of two creative minds made more sense, I haven’t heard about it. Alas, Jodorowsky and Mœbius’ work didn’t lead to their own Dune movie, but it didn’t mark the end of their artistic partnership, as anyone who’s read The Incal knows full well. Telling a metaphysical, satirical, space-operatic story in the form of comic books originally published throughout the 1980s (with sequel and prequel series to come over the following 25 years), The Incal on the page became the fullest realization of Jodorowsky and Mœbius’ combined vision. Its success made it a logical candidate for film adaptation, and so director Pascal Blais brought together artists from Heavy Metal magazine (in which Mœbius first published some of his best known work) to make it happen. It resulted in nothing more than a trailer, but what a trailer; you can watch a recently revamped edition of the one Blais and his collaborators put together in the 1980s at the top of the post. Any Incal fan who watches this spruced-up trailer will immediately want nothing more in this life than to see a feature-film version of dissolute private investigator John DiFool, his concrete seagull Deepo, and the titular all-powerful crystal that sets the story in motion. And anyone not yet initiated into the science-fiction "Jodoverse" for which The Incal forms the basis will want to plunge into the comic books at the earliest opportunity. Perhaps Blais will one day fully revive the project; until then, we’ll have to content ourselves with Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (with its Mœbius-developed production design, similar enough to The Incal‘s to have sparked a lawsuit) and maybe, just maybe, a live-action adaptation from Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn. Related Content: Moebius’ Storyboards & Concept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune The Inscrutable Imagination of the Late Comic Artist Mœbius Moebius Gives 18 Wisdom-Filled Tips to Aspiring Artists (1996) French Student Sets Internet on Fire with Animation Inspired by Moebius, Syd Mead & Hayao Miyazaki Mœbius Illustrates Paulo Coelho’s Inspirational Novel The Alchemist (1998) Mœbius Illustrates Dante’s Paradiso Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Masterpiece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tantalizing Animation is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Formally Trained as an avant-garde, abstract expressionist painter, Stan Herd went on to become something a little different — an earthworks artist who takes fields where crops are grown and turns them into sprawling canvases on which he makes art of his own. It has been said about him: "Herd is an unusual artist. His medium is the earth itself; his palette consists of soil, wheat, sunflowers, and corn; his brush is a tractor; and his images can be seen only from an airplane." Image by The Minneapolis Institute of Art Many of his early creations can be revisited in his 1994 book Crop Art and Other Earthworks. To see his latest work, just click play on the video above. Commissioned by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, this earthwork features a rendering of an "Olive Tree" painting that Van Gogh completed as part of a larger series of Olive Tree paintings created while living in an asylum in Saint-Rémy in 1889. Mr. Herd started work on the project last spring, planting different crops in a field owned by Thomson Reuters. By fall, passengers flying into Minneapolis could catch a view of Herd’s Van Gogh-like the one you see above. via This is Colossal Related Content: Van Gogh’s 1888 Painting, "The Night Cafe," Animated with Oculus Virtual Reality Software The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" Download 35,000 Works of Art from the National Gallery, Including Masterpieces by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rembrandt & More Artist Turns a Crop Field Into a Van Gogh Painting, Seen Only From Airplanes is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet many incredible musicians in person, and I’ve always enjoyed watching them do something better than I ever could, whether it’s wailing away on the drums, guitar, keyboards, bass… whatever the instrument, it’s great fun to see a master in action. And I’ve met a few multitalented individuals who could do a little, or a lot, of everything. But I’ve never met anyone as talented as Jim, the musician in these videos, who goes by the name of Friday Night Lullaby, and who recreates nearly every note and nuance in classic rock songs from Yes, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, the Who, CSNY, and more. His one-man-band motto is "we are one person," and you can see why. With the benefit of recording technology, he can turn himself into an orchestra. At the top of the post, see a teaser video in which Jim gives us snippets of the 60 songs he’s remade. And above, see his version of Yes’s "Roundabout." Now you can argue that no matter how good he is, he could never reproduce the musical personalities of, say, Steve Howe or Jon Anderson, and that’s fair enough, but beside the point, really. The guy is good beyond belief, and I’m certainly in awe watching these videos of him at work in his home studio, playing all 43 tracks of "Roundabout." Or, if Yes isn’t your bag, let him wow you below with the vocal harmonies in CSNY’s "Carry On." Still not impressed? Check his version of Stairway to Heaven here, or alternatively A-Ha’s "Take On Me," below. It’s a departure from the classic rock material he’s clearly more comfortable with, and he handles it with the same deftness and skill, including that mid-song high note, showing off some pretty keen video editing skills to boot. For even more mind blowing covers, check out the Friday Night Lullaby Youtube channel. via Laughing Squid Related Content: Fourteen-Year-Old Girl’s Blistering Heavy Metal Performance of Vivaldi Dutchman Masters the Art of Singing Led Zeppelin’s "Stairway to Heaven" Backwards The 15 Worst Covers of Beatles Songs: William Shatner, Bill Cosby, Tiny Tim, Sean Connery & Your Excellent Picks Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness One Man-Band Plays Amazing Covers, Note-for-Note, of Yes, CSNY, Zeppelin & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Much has been made of Mark Twain’s financial problems—the imprudent investments and poor management skills that forced him to shutter his large Hartford estate and move his family to Europe in 1891. An early adopter of the typewriter and long an enthusiast of new science and technology, Twain lost the bulk of his fortune by investing huge sums—roughly eight million dollars total in today’s money—on a typesetting machine, buying the rights to the apparatus outright in 1889. The venture bankrupted him. The machine was overcomplicated and frequently broke down, and "before it could be made to work consistently," writes the University of Virginia’s Mark Twain library, "the Linotype machine swept the market [Twain] had hoped to corner." Twain’s seemingly blind enthusiasm for the ill-fated machine makes him seem like a bungler in practical matters. But that impression should be tempered by the acknowledgement that Twain was not only an enthusiast of technology, but also a canny inventor who patented a few technologies, one of which is still highly in use today and, indeed, shows no signs of going anywhere. I refer to the ubiquitous elastic hook clasp at the back of nearly every bra, an invention Twain patented in 1871 under his given name Samuel L. Clemens. (View the original patent here.) You can see the diagram for his invention above. Calling it an "Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments," Twain made no mention of ladies’ undergarments in his patent application, referring instead to "the vest, pantaloons, or other garment upon which my strap is to be used." The device, writes the US Patent and Trademark Office, "was not only used for shirts, but underpants and women’s corsets as well. His purpose was to do away with suspenders, which he considered uncomfortable." (At the time, belts served a mostly decorative function.) Twain’s inventions tended to solve problems he encountered in his daily life, and his next patent was for a hobbyist set of which he himself was a member. After the soon-to-be bra strap, Twain devised a method of improvement in scrapbooking, an avid pursuit of his, in 1873. Previously, scrapbooks were assembled by hand-gluing each item, which Twain seemed to consider an overly laborious and messy process. His invention—writes The Atlantic in part of a series they call "Patents of the Rich and Famous"—involved "two possible self-adhesive systems," similar to self-sealing envelopes, in which, as his patent states, "the surfaces of the leaves whereof are coated with a suitable adhesive substance covering the whole or parts of the entire surface." (See the less-than-clear diagram for the invention above.) The scrapbooking device proved "very popular," writes the US Patent Office, "and sold over 25,000 copies." Twain obtained his final patent in 1885 for a "Game Apparatus" that he called the "Memory-Builder" (see it above). The object of the game was primarily educational, helping, as he wrote, to "fill the children’s heads with dates without study." As we reported in a previous post, "Twain worked out a way to play it on a cribbage board converted into a historical timeline." Unlike his first two inventions, the game met with no commercial success. "Twain sent a few prototypes to toy stores in 1891," writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, "but there wasn’t very much interest, so the game never went into production." Nonetheless, we still have Twain to thank, or to damn, for the bra strap, an invention of no small importance. Twain himself seems to have had some contradictory attitudes about his role as an inventor, and of the singular recognition granted to individuals through patent law. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the US Patent Office claims that Twain "believed strongly in the value of the patent system" and cites a passage from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in support. But in a letter Twain wrote to Helen Keller in 1903, he expressed a very different view. "It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing," Twain wrote, "and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite—that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple." Related Content: Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter Play Mark Twain’s "Memory-Builder," His Game for Remembering Historical Facts & Dates Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Mark Twain’s Patented Inventions for Bra Straps and Other Everyday Items is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.