Censorship

In 399 BC, Greek philosopher, Socrates, defied attempts by the Greek state to censor his philosophical teachings and was sentenced to death by drinking a poison, hemlock. Socrates' student, Plato, supposedly went on to advocate censorship.

Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parliament of England is a prose polemical tract by the English poet John Milton opposing licensing and censorship, which was published on November 23, 1644. Areopagitica is among history's most influential and impassioned philosophical defenses of the principle of a right to freedom of speech and expression.

Sweden was in 1766 the first country to introduce a constitutional law where censorship was abolished and the freedom of the press guaranteed.

In 1873 the US Congress enacted the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" books through the mail.

The first film to be censored in UK was Charles Urban's ninety second movie of a piece of Stilton cheese viewed from a microscope. Released in 1898 the image of active bacteria on a cheese created a storm of protest from British cheesemakers so it was quietly withdrawn from exhibition.

In 1907 Chicago became the first city to regulate and censor movies. The Chicago Tribune announced that the over 115 nickelodeons across the city had an “influence that is wholly vicious.”

The 1925 song “How Could Red Riding Hood (Have Been So Very Good)” by A.P. Randolph was the first tune to be banned from radio due to its sexual suggestiveness.

To avoid government censorship, Hollywood movie studios instituted their own set of industry censorship guidelines in 1930, popularly known as the Hays Code.

The Nazis banned and burned the book Bambi because it was by a Jewish author.

Georgia approved the first literature censorship board in the United States on February 19, 1953, when the General Assembly unanimously voted to establish the Georgia Literature Commission.

The Catholic Church abolished its list of Forbidden Books on June 14, 1966. It had existed since the sixteenth century and by 1948 over 4,000 titles had been censored including works by Erasmus, Defoe, Descartes and Immanuel Kant.

The FBI investigated the song “Louie Louie” because the agency thought the lyrics were dirty. After three months, the FBI abandoned the investigation because it couldn’t make out the words.

Because of TV censorship, actress Mariette Hartley was not allowed to show her belly button on Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek [episode #78 All Our Yesterdays in 1969] but later Roddenberry got even when he gave Hartley "two" belly buttons in the sci-fi movie Genesis II (1973).

Monty Python sued ABC over their censorship of season 4 of their show. ABC had cut punchlines and entire characters. The judge and jury watched two versions of a season 4 episode; a BBC one they laughed at, and an edited ABC one which no one laughed at. The judge ruled in ABC’s favor.

The People's Republic of China lifted a ban on works by Aristotle, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens in 1978.

When The Shining premiered, the MPAA wouldn’t allow blood to appear in any trailer "approved for all audiences," but Stanley Kubrick managed to get a trailer comprised solely of the elevator scene passed by convincing the board the tsunami of blood was rusty water.

In early 1980 South African school children, fed up with the inferior apartheid-era education system, started chanting the lyrics of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)." The song, with a memorable line stating "We don't need no education," had held the top spot on the local charts for almost three months.  By May 2, 1980, the South African government had issued a ban on "Another Brick in the Wall," creating international headlines.

Romanian translator and film critic Irina Margareta Nistor (born 26 March 1957) illegally dubbed over 3,000 banned foreign movies into Romanian is a Romanian translator during the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She was said to have the second most recognized voice in Romania, behind the dictator.

Tipper Gore,  the wife of Tennessee senator Al Gore, formed the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) with three other politically-connected women after listening to the Prince song "Darling Nikki." The group pressured the RIAA to establish a ratings system for albums and concerts, and also to keep offensive album covers out of view in record stores.
On September 19, 1985 various musicians, including Frank Zappa and John Denver, testified at congressional hearings regarding warning labels on albums deemed to contain explicit lyrics. The PMRC testified in favor of the labels, while the musicians argued that it was censorship. The result of the hearing was warning stickers on albums with offensive lyrics.

The first computer game to be certified by the British Board of Film Classification was an illustrated text adventure called Dracula, based on the Bram Stoker novel, published by CRL. The game received a 15 certificate in December 1986.

Paint Drying is a ten-hour British experimental protest film produced, directed and shot by Charlie Shackleton. He created the film as a form of protest against film censorship in the United Kingdom and the financial burden it places on independent filmmakers due to the classification obligations imposed by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). 

Paint Drying consists of 10 hours and 7 minutes of an unchanging view of white paint drying on a brick wall. The BBFC was forced to watch Paint Drying on January 25 and 26, 2016 before it could give it an age rating. The film was rated as a "U" (Universal) with "no material likely to offend or harm".

The Chinese government has censored the word "Censorship."

Belgium is the only country that has never imposed censorship for adult films. The Belgians have a strong tradition of freedom of expression. They believe that adults should be free to consume whatever type of media they choose, without government interference.

Here are some songs about censorship.

Cemetery

The difference between a graveyard and a cemetery is that graveyards are attached to churches while cemeteries stand alone.

When the atheistic Cult of Reason was sponsored by the French revolutionary government to replace Catholicism, cemetery gates in France had to bear the inscription "Death is an eternal sleep."

The most visited cemetery in the world is Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France. It is a major tourist attraction, renowned for its tombs of notable figures, including Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, and Marcel Proust. Père Lachaise Cemetery was opened in 1804 and is now home to over 70,000 tombs. It is one of the largest cemeteries in Paris and is also one of the most beautiful. The cemetery is a park-like setting with winding paths, trees, and flowers.

                                             Père Lachaise Cemetery Photo by Peter Poradisch

The London Necropolis Company opened a vast cemetery (at the time the largest in the world) at Brookwood, near Woking, Surrey in 1852. It had a private railway station, adjoining Waterloo, its own trains, and two stations (one for the Anglicans and one for non-Anglicans) in the cemetery itself, with the name Necropolis. 

On June 8, 1944, the U.S. First Army established in Normandy the first American cemetery on European soil in World War II. France later granted the US permanent, rent-free possession of the cemetery. It contains the remains of 9,387 fallen troops plus a memorial to 1,557 killed there whose remains were either not found or not identified.

The United Nations Memorial Cemetery located at Busan, South Korea, is a burial ground for United Nations Command (UNC) casualties of the Korean War. It contains 2,300 graves and is the only United Nations cemetery in the world. It was established on January 18, 1951.

In the 1950s, Temple University and the City of Philadelphia disinterred an entire cemetery to expand Temple's campus. The cemetery, known as Monument Cemetery, was home to the graves of over 28,000 people, including many prominent Philadelphians. The city condemned the cemetery in 1955, and the bodies were disinterred and moved to Lawnview Cemetery in Montgomery County. The headstones were dumped into the Delaware River, where many of them can still be seen today.

The most-visited presidential grave is John F. Kennedy's in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

The only other president buried in Arlington is William Howard Taft.

Bessie Smith (1894-1937) is regarded as the greatest female blues singer. After Smith's death, her grave was unmarked for 33 years because her husband, bootlegger Jack Gee, stole the headstone money.

Approximately 200 pets are buried a day in a pet cemetery.

The largest cemetery in the world is Wadi al-Salam, located in the city of Najaf, Iraq. It covers an area of 9.17 square kilometers (3.54 sq mi) and is thought to contain millions of sets of human remains, making it one of the largest human burial grounds on Earth. 

An aerial view of Wadi-al-Salam cemetery

Wadi al-Salam has been in continuous use since the seventh century and is considered to be a holy site by Shia Muslims. Many Shia Muslims believe that it is a blessing to be buried in Wadi al-Salam, as they believe that it is one of the places where the Day of Judgment will begin.

The cemetery is home to a variety of burial sites, including simple graves, elaborate mausoleums, and family plots. Some of the most notable figures buried in Wadi al-Salam include the first Shia Imam, Ali ibn Abi Talib, and the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Husayn ibn Ali.

The largest cemetery in the Western word is Calverton National Cemetery at Long Island, New York, It covers 1, 045 acres but was opened only in 1978 so hosts the remains of less than 300,000 people.

The second largest cemetery in terms of size is Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg, Germany. It covers an area of  990 acres, and has been in continuous use since 1877.

New York city's Washington Square Park used to be a graveyard. There are over 20,000 people buried there.

The town of Colma in California has 17 cemeteries, about 1.5 million graves but only 1600 living residents. Its motto is "It's great to be alive in Colma."

In New Orleans the tombs are located above the ground in cemeteries, given the high water table in the area.

The USA owns one acre of land in Mexico City that serves as a cemetery for soldiers killed in the Mexican-American War. 170 Years Later, 813 Americans are still buried there.

Cement

While the words concrete and cement are often used interchangeably, cement is actually a bonding agent added to concrete, and they are not the same thing.

Primitive people used clay as a cement to stop up holes in their sapling huts. The Assyrians and Babylonians had no better cement than this for their stone buildings.

Builders in Greek cities on the coast of Turkey (and in particular Pergamum) developed cement in about 200 BC as a structural material, in place of weaker mortars such as gypsum plaster (used in Egypt) or bitumen (in Mesopotamia).

The Romans made a cement of slaked lime and volcanic ash. This was called pozzolana after Pozzuoli, a town near Mount Vesuvius. Unlike mortar, pozzolana was a hydraulic cement, which meant it hardened under water. The Romans used it in foundations, aqueducts, and many buildings, some of which still stand.  It was the strongest mortar in history until the development of Portland cement.

The Aztec Indians in Central America used animal blood mixed with cement as a mortar for their buildings, many of which still remain standing today.

Knowledge of how to make hydraulic cement was lost during the Middle Ages. Lime mortar, however, was used in all parts of Europe.

John Smeaton (1724-1792), an English engineer, reinvented hydraulic cement in the 1750s. He had been commissioned to rebuild Eddystone lighthouse, which was subjected to wind and wave off the Cornwall coast. Smeaton made hydraulic cement of a limestone that contained considerable clay. Such a limestone is now called cement rock, and the cement made of it, natural cement. His technique became standard.

Joseph Aspdin (1779-1855) a Yorkshire bricklayer and inventor patented what he called Portland cement on October 21, 1824 by grinding and burning together a mixture of limestone and clay. He called it "portland" because concrete made from his cement looked like stone quarried on the Isle of Portland.

A pallet with Portland cement

Portland cement, is an artificial mineral substance used in building and engineering construction. This is made by heating clay and limestone in retorts to form a clinker which is then finely ground.

John Board was one of the first people to use concrete in a domestic setting when he built Castle House in 1851.

The United States imported its first European Portland cement in 1868. American manufacture of Portland cement began in the 1870s.

Putty is a cement compound of fine powdered chalk or oxide of lead mixed with linseed oil.

The Ailanthus altissima commonly known as the tree of heaven, is said to be the only tree that can grow in cement.

Cement is the most widely used material in existence and is the second most consumed resource on earth, behind water.

Each year there is one ton of cement poured for each man woman and child in the world.

China produces and consumes over 50 percent of the world's cement. In 2022, China produced 2.13 billion metric tons of cement, which accounted for 51.1 percent of global cement production.

China's high cement consumption is driven by its rapid urbanization and infrastructure development. In recent decades, China has built thousands of kilometers of roads and railways, as well as new cities and towns to house its growing population.

China produces and consumes about 60 percent of the world’s cement — the Three Gorges Dam alone required 16 million tonnes of it.

China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the US did in the entire 20th century.

Source Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc.

Celts

The Celts were Indo-European people that originated in Alpine Europe and spread to the Iberian peninsula and beyond.

The Celts' first known territory was in central Europe about 1200 BC, in the basin of the upper Danube, the Alps, and parts of France and southern Germany. In the 6th century BC they spread into Spain and Portugal. Over the next 300 years, they also spread into the British Isles, northern Italy, Greece, the Balkans, and parts of Asia Minor, although they never established a united empire.

Around 300BC, early Celtic language became Europe’s first lingua franca, making it the English of its day.

Celtic languages survive in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Brittany, and have been revived in Cornwall.

Bards were originally poets of the ancient Celts whose role it was to celebrate national events, especially heroic victories.

“Briton” comes from the Celtic word “Pretani”, a tribal name meaning “the painted ones” or “the tattooed people”

As the Saxon settlers swept across Britain, the Celts, perhaps inspired by the Druids, sang “The Battle Song of Bali Mawr” before a bloody encounter.

Encyclopedia of Trivia © RM 2014. Helicon Publishing is division of RM.

Cellophane

It was Swiss chemist Jacques Edwin Brandenberger who invented cellophane, back in 1908.

In 1940, cellophane polled as the third most beautiful word in the English language, behind mother and memory.

Physician Wilhelm Kolff constructed the first kidney dialysis machine in wartime Holland in 1943 and treated his first patient with it. The device was made of aluminium, wood, and wet cellophane, in the form of a rotating drum.

A variety of pasta is known as 'cellophane' because it becomes transparent when cooked.

Cellophane is not made of plastic. It is made from a plant fiber, cellulose, which has been shredded and aged and then shaped into thin, flat, transparent sheets. 

Cello

Its full name is the Italian violoncello, meaning little violin, but the abbreviation cello is more commonly used today.

Danny Chapman My Cello

The cello came into use in the 17th century. At that time there was a family of instruments called the viols. The invention of wire-wound strings around 1660 in Bologna, allowed for a finer bass sound than was possible with purely gut strings on such a short body. Bolognese makers exploited this new technology to create the cello.

Originally, cello strings were made out of sheep gut. Now, metal wiring has become predominant.

The cello has a range of well over four octaves, with its four strings being tuned in fifths at C2, G2, D3, and A3.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote six very famous suites for solo cello. One of the other best-known pieces for solo cello is ‘The Swan’ from Charles Saint-Saëns's Carnival of Animals (1887).

In the 1960s, artists such as the Beatles used the cello in popular music, in songs such as "Eleanor Rigby" and "Strawberry Fields Forever,". whilst Pink Floyd included a cello solo in their 1970 instrumental "Atom Heart Mother.”

In 1999, world renowned cellist Yo Yo Ma left his 266 year old cello, worth $2.5 million, in the back of a New York City taxi. It was returned to him in time for his evening concert.

There’s a group called the “Extreme Cellists” who played on the roofs of all 42 Anglican Cathedrals in England within two weeks.

In January 2020, Sheku Kanneh-Mason became the first ever cellist to reach the UK's Official Albums Chart Top 10 with his collection Elgar, which peaked at #8.

Encyclopedia of Trivia © RM 2014. Helicon Publishing is division of RM.

Cell

HISTORY

The cell was discovered by Robert Hooke in 1665, who named the biological unit for its resemblance to cells inhabited by Christian monks in a monastery.

Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman from Baltimore, who died on October 4, 1951 from a rare form of cancer. Her tumors and cells continued to live and grow after she passed away and the subsequent research resulted in the remarkably durable HeLa cell line, named for her first and last initials.

Henrietta Lscks Wikipedia Commons

HUMAN CELLS

There are more than 10 trillion living cells in the human body. Our cells are the basic building blocks of our bodies. They are responsible for carrying out all of the essential functions that keep us alive, such as respiration, digestion, and reproduction.

There are over 200 different types of cells in the human body, each with its own unique structure and function. 

The largest cell in the human body is the female ovum, or egg cell, which measures up to 160 microns (0.16 mm).

The smallest cell in the human body is the male sperm at 3 microns (0.003mm) (see below). It takes about 175,000 sperm cells to weigh as much as a single egg cell.

90% of the cells that make us up of aren't human but mostly fungi and bacteria.

Bacterial cells are so prolific in our bodies that they outnumber our human cells 10 to 1.

Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

The only cells that survive from the time you are born until death are in your eyes.

The average life span of a single red blood cell is 120 days.

It takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to circle the whole body.

25,000,000 of your cells died while you were reading this sentence.

We die because our cells die. Though they replace themselves over and over again for some 70-odd years, they can't do so forever.

A single human brain cell can generate more electrical impulses in one day than all the phones in the world. This is because the brain is constantly sending and receiving signals, even when we are asleep.

CELLS IN OTHER ORGANISMS

A shrimp has more than a hundred pair of chromosomes in each cell nucleus.

The biggest single cell in the world is the seagrass Caulerpa taxifolia, which can grow to be up to 6 feet long. Other large single cells include the alga Valonia ventricosa, which can reach 4 inches in diameter, and the bacterium Thiomargarita namibiensis, which can reach 0.75 millimeters in diameter.

A bean has more DNA per cell than a human cell.

There's enough water pressure in one onion cell to cause a steam engine to explode.

Source Greatfacts.com