Smithsonian.com

Image: Glenn Brown

First, let’s establish the fact that there is something in the United States called the American Kitefliers Association. And there’s something called competitive stunt kiting.

Here’s what stunk kiting looks like:

Now, as you might expect, the people who compete in stunt kiting competitions are interesting folks. At Collectors Weekly, they’ve got a profile of Richard Dermer, pizza shop owner and kite-collector extraordinaire. The walls of Dermer’s pizza joint are covered in kites from all over the world, which is impressive enough. But it’s not his only accomplishment. Dermer worked at Hideaways, one of the first pizza places in Oklahoma in the late 1950s, when pizza was an exotic food. He bought the joint in 1960. He delivered pizzas in these weird Volkswagen Beetles painted like Herbie and lady bugs. Then, in 1970, his game-partner and manager at the Hideaway was the first to market the Japanese version of the game Go in the United States.

It was this game company that lead Dermer to kites, and from there he took off—eventually becoming president of the American Kitefliers Association.

Dermer now has a huge kite collection. He told Collectors Weekly:

“I was very much a novice, but I started learning. And the more we got into going to kite festivals and collecting kites, the more I discovered and the deeper the subject became. My kite-book library now runs over a hundred volumes. I learn stuff new every time I go to an event. And I think the kites out in the garage are multiplying when the lights are out.”

What Dermer’s collection and hobby brings to the United States is an international perspective and history on kite flying. In India, for example, kite flying is a fierce, sometimes violent sport. In Thailand, kite battles reflect the war of the sexes between men and women. Kites were used in World War II, to distract German planes and for target practice.

And when Dermer started stunt-kiting, it was pretty new. All the kits were triangular, they all looked about the same. But soon, Dermer told Collectors Weekly, that changed. “In the ’80s and ’90s, kites went through quite a developmental phase where they were getting better and better as new lighter, stronger materials were being developed. Tubular fiberglass became obsolete when tubular graphite came along.” Dermer, ever the innovator, set up the new rules for judging these stunt kite competitions, which take into account how much control the flier has, the difficulty of the moves, and the choreography. It’s a lot like ice skating or gymnastics, Dermer says.

Dermer’s next arena? Taking these stunt kites inside. He makes kites at schools, for kids and adults alike. He’s even made kites at weddings out of napkins. Really, Dermer sounds like the life of any party.

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Photo: Cheezburger

We’re guessing that most people have seen the original Star Wars and that, if not, you probably still know half of the quotable lines anyway. But have you seen the movie in your native tongue? If you speak English or French or Spanish or German or one of the other massive world languages, then you probably have. But what if you speak Diné bizaad, the traditional language of North America’s Navajo?

Until now, you’ve been out of luck. But the Daily Times from Farmington, New Mexico, says that the Navajo Nation is teaming up with Lucasfilm and a Hollywood production company to re-release A New Hope in Diné bizaad, a language spoken by around 210,000 people. PBS:

Of all the major tribes, the Navajo language seems to be the most robust. According to the U.S. Census, almost 70 percent of Navajos speak their tribal language in the home, and 25 per cent do not know English very well. For many Navajo, English has been a second language.

But, among younger generations, the traditional tongue is on its way out. Translating Star Wars could bring the tale to those who’ve yet to experience it, but also offer a fun way to get young people to dust off some potentially underused language skills. Star Wars, says the Daily Times, will be the first movie ever translated and re-cut in Diné.

The Dine version is scheduled to debut July 4 at the Navajo Nation Fair in Window Rock, and the tribe is hoping to show it in area theaters later in the year.

According to the Daily Times, the tribe said that they “could not release any of the translated script” before the showing. You wouldn’t want any spoilers.

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Photo: Francesco Carpi

If you’re a famous sports star, singer, dancer or actor, watch out. New research published in QJM: An International Journal of Medicine helps to confirm a long-held stereotype about fame, showing that the price for making it big in performance-related careers may be a shorter life.

To arrive at this morbid finding, researchers analyzed New York Times obituaries. Making it into the Times obits, they reasoned, indicates some degree of career success and celebrity. The researchers sampled 1,000 such consecutive notices published between 2009 to 2011 and documented each person’s gender, age, occupation and cause of death. The occupation categories were divided into four broad groups: performance and sports-related pursuits; non-performing creatives (such as writers and visual artists); business, military and political careers; and professional, academic and religious occupations.

Men dominated the obituary headlines, they found, by about a factor of four. Younger ages tended to be connected to performers, athletes and creatives, whereas older people usually fell into the professional or business categories.

Honing in on cause of death, the researchers found that early deaths were often caused by accidents, or illnesses such as HIV and some cancers. Specifically, lung cancer tended to kill people with performance-based careers about five times more frequently than those with professional or academic jobs. The authors think this probably points to a live-hard-die-young lifestyle of chronic smoking and other unhealthy choices.

In a statement about the study, co-author Richard Epstein summarized the significance of the findings:

A one-off retrospective analysis like this can’t prove anything, but it raises some interesting questions. First, if it is true that successful performers and sports players tend to enjoy shorter lives, does this imply that fame at younger ages predisposes to poor health behaviours in later life after success has faded? Or that psychological and family pressures favouring unusually high public achievement lead to self-destructive tendencies throughout life? Or that risk-taking personality traits maximise one’s chances of success, with the use of cigarettes, alcohol or illicit drugs improving one’s performance output in the short term? Any of these hypotheses could be viewed as a health warning to young people aspiring to become stars.

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Photo: Marion Doss

Lions, tigers, bears, elephants and other wild animals will not longer star in circus shows in the UK, the Guardian reports. Instead, only domesticated animals such as ponies horses will leap through hoops and perform other circus tricks. The government made the announcement after a lengthy campaign, the Guardian writes, and the ban will go into effect on December 1, 2015. 

The new rules won’t be enforced for another year and a half in order to give travelling circuses time to find homes for their animals and come up with new acts. The new ruling has been a long time coming, however.  

Politicians and animal welfare groups have repeatedly called for the measure and in June 2011 [members of the parliament] overwhelmingly supported a blanket ban, but ministers were initially reluctant to meet their demands due to fears over possible legal action from circus operators.

The new rule defines with animal as “any creature not normally domesticated in Great Britain.” The BBC expands upon this definition:

There are currently 20 licensed wild animals working in circuses.

These include camels, zebras and snakes, but not elephants, monkeys, gorillas, chimpanzees or big cats.

The UK’s governmental animal protection policy page includes a full copy of the new bill [pdf] as presented to parliament. Here, they justify the decision to give wild animals in circuses the ax:

The British circus industry has a rich heritage dating back over two centuries, and I hope it will
continue to thrive long into the future. For many years wild animals were an integral part of the
circus experience: the only chance that most people would have to glimpse exotic beasts from
distant lands.

Today, by contrast, we are fortunate to enjoy world-class zoos, a wide-reaching
education system, and internationally renowned wildlife documentaries, which together give
children and adults an appreciation and knowledge of wild animals and the environments they
come from.

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Image: Wladislaw Starewicz

Today, Slate told the story of Wladislaw Starewicz and his weird, animated, insect-puppet stop motion movies. Here’s his masterpiece, The Cameraman’s Revenge, made in 1912:

Starewicz wasn’t the first stop motion animator. The first place stop motion shows up is in 1898, in a movie called The Humpty Dumpty Circus, which has been lost to the world. The first example we can see is from 1902, called Fun in a Bakery Shop – a movie made by Edwin S. Porter and produced by the one and only Thomas A. Edison.

In 1905, the film El Hotel Electrico showcased more early stop motion animation, as bags zoom around the electric hotel seemingly by magic.

Then, in 1906 the world got the first direct manipulation animation – in which a segment of the image is moved or changed or erased in each frame. This film was also put out by Edison, and is called Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.

And Edison can also take credit for bringing the first claymation to the world, in this film Dream of a Rarebit Fiend.

Starewicz, who made the whimsical and wonderful bug animation, also made all sorts of other weird animations. Here is his short from 1922 called Frogland:

And since then, stop motion has grown and grown into things like Coraline and Fantastic Mister Fox, and many animators cite these early stop motion artists as inspiration. They also serve as a reminder that you don’t need Pixar’s budget to make something wonderful, just a few dead bugs and a camera.

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