The Origin of Black Friday

- Bianca Leave a comment

black-fridayAs Thanksgiving and the inevitable Black Friday shopping day nears, I found myself wondering how this shopping frenzy all began. I scoured the internet for as many sources as I could find that would tell me not only when Americans started shopping in masses the day after Thanksgiving, but why. Most importantly, how did that day get the name Black Friday? The answers to these questions are not so cut and dry as one might think.

We begin our journey during the Civil War on October 3rd, 1863. President Abraham Lincoln announces that the United States will officially celebrate Thanksgiving as a national holiday, and that this holiday will be held on the 4th Thursday of November each year. The first Thanksgiving was thus celebrated on November 26, 1863. As Thanksgiving falls on November 26th this year, we will be celebrating 152 years of tradition to the day.

By the early 1920’s, several retailers sponsored parades to celebrate this national holiday. In 1924 Macy’s held their first Thanksgiving Day Parade. At the end of each parade came Santa Claus and officially marked the beginning of the holiday season. It became wide practice that retailers would not advertise Christmas sales until after the conclusion of Thanksgiving. With such a hard fast unwritten rule in place, the day after Thanksgiving quickly became the day to shop for the holidays and be the first to see all the specials.

As time went on, shopping on the day after Thanksgiving increased in popularity. Many businesses treated the day after Thanksgiving as a holiday in itself. Even school was not held on this day. However there were some groups of workers that were forced into working the day after Thanksgiving each year. In as early as 1951, business owners were using the term ‘Black Friday’ to refer to the number of employees to call in sick the day after Thanksgiving.

Philadelphia is more widely credited with boosting the popularity of the phrase during the 1960’s. Things were particularly troublesome the day after Thanksgiving as police were forced into working twelve hour shifts and crowds filled the streets. According to snopes.com, “the term ‘Black Friday’ came out of the old Philadelphia Police Department’s traffic squad. The cops used it to describe the worst traffic jams which annually occurred in Center City on the Friday after Thanksgiving.” During the 1980’s, retailers began using the phrase in association with the big shopping day to signify when their red (negative or loss) accounting book entries turned to black (positive or profits). By the 90’s retailers were using the term in advertising for holiday specials and sales taking place the day after Thanksgiving.

In the early 2000’s retailers began opening their doors earlier and earlier. In 2011, several major retailers announced they would open doors at midnight. The next year, Walmart opened their doors at 8:00 PM Thanksgiving Day. Today stores are opening as early as 5 PM on Thanksgiving Day. With this new trend, I can’t help but wonder how long we will continue to call it Black Friday?

Will you be out shopping on Black Friday or clicking on computer keys enjoying cyber deals from the comfort of your own home? Perhaps you will be boycotting the holiday by remaining firmly on your couch digesting those delicious holiday foods. If you are one of the hard working Americans that will be taking up a post directing traffic or ringing up items, I thank you and wish you a happy day after the day after Thanksgiving.

The Water Diviner

- Stephanie Leave a comment

water divinerActors taking a turn behind the camera as directors or producers has become increasingly more common. Russell Crowe has joined the ranks of such actors with the 2014 film, The Water Diviner, in which he both stars and directs this Australian historical fictional war drama.

In The Water Diviner, Crowe stars as Australian farmer Joshua Connor, who lives in Australia on a working farm with his wife and their three sons. After the unexpected death of his wife, Connor heads to Turkey in 1919 after the Battle of Gallipoli in order to find his three missing and presumed dead sons in order to bring their bodies home to be buried next to their mother. Connor repeatedly finds obstacles thrown in his way that bar his ability to, at first, make it to Gallipoli and then to get the officials there to even help him find his son. Facing tension from the military and different governmental agencies while abroad, as well as discrimination in Turkey from the locals who see him as the reason why their family and friends didn’t come home from the war, Connor soon realizes that everyone and everything around him has drastically changed from the war and that he must find a way to survive.. Finding his sons becomes Connor’s driving force through life, leading him to discover things that he is not quite ready to know.

This movie is loosely based on the book The Water Diviner by Andrew Anastasios and Dr. Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios. Check out the following books to learn more about the Battle of Gallipoli.

the water diviner bookturning the tide of wargallipoliworld war 1the anzac girlseden to armageddon

 

 

Step Aside, Pops: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection by Kate Beaton

- Stephanie Leave a comment

step aside popsStep Aside, Pops: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection is Kate Beaton’s third published book of comics, but fourth overall. (Other ones by Beaton that the library owns are Hark! A Vagrant and The Princess and the Pony.) This new graphic novel is a collection of strips from her webcomic, Hark! A Vagrant. Webcomics are generally self-published online and are sometimes even published into books or as single strips in magazines or newspapers depending upon their popularity.

In Step Aside, Pops, Beaton takes a turn at digging into the lives of various literary, historical, and contemporary figures and characters. Think of this graphic novel as a collection of Beaton’s musings and ideas about different people throughout history. Her obvious love of all things literature, historical, and pop culture related flow through this graphic novel as she dissects the lives of Wonder Woman, what it was really like to be a peasant in a time of no medicine or deodorant, and how different famous Alexanders handled rough situations throughout time. Crack open this graphic novel and you’ll see how Beaton reimagines the lives of Achilles, the founding fathers when they find themselves in a shopping mall, and even how Cinderella would have played out if she had been a bodybuilder.

The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys by Gerard Way and Shaun Simon

- Stephanie Leave a comment

killjoysIn The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, Better Living Industries, a megacorporation with a ruthless and tyrannical leader, is working to take over more of the world and to cut off the freedoms and emotions of everyone living on the planet. This has been going on for years with revolutionaries and groups popping up every now and then trying to save what they can of the life they used to live and the people that they used to know. A group of four said revolutionaries became THE group of revolutionaries in this world with their likenesses splattered all over the news. Sadly over ten years ago, they were all killed while trying to save the life of a mysterious young girl that Better Living Industries, aka BLI, was trying to kill. This young girl becomes one of the main subject lines of The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. Follow along as the Girl works to figure out why BLI tried to kill her, what BLI is doing to all the defunct robots around the world, how these rogue groups are surviving and getting their news, and how the system BLI has set up is really affecting the civilized people in the world and how BLI is able to control the world and its employees.

The writers, Gerard Way and Shaun Simon, along with artist Becky Cloonan, have crafted a very strange, mysterious, and science fiction heavy graphic novel that is rich in details and colors that pop into your subconscious as you follow along with the characters. This graphic novel does not have a traditional linear structure, in the sense that readers will have to pay attention to context and art clues to figure out the difference between the past and the present, but the ideas presented are so intriguing and seemingly plausible that the quick transitions between past and present and also between different characters’ storylines only serve to add to the complex and supremely creative nature of this graphic novel. I highly recommend reading through this graphic novel more than once.

Pixels

- Rachel Leave a comment

pixels  I admit, after watching this movie, I do not know if anyone that was born after 1985 would enjoy this movie.  Maybe they would if they like to play old arcade games when they come across one.  But playing an arcade version of Pac Man at Happy Joes is nothing like going to an actual arcade and being surrounded by various games and players. But I digress.

If you do remember going to the arcade and playing games such as Donkey Kong you will find the movie Pixels enjoyable.  No, it will not win any Oscars but it is a fun movie to watch.  Starring Adam Sandler, Peter Dinklage, Kevin James and Josh Gad, this fearless foursome were the some of the top arcade game players back in the day.  The movie opens in 1982 with Brenner and Eddie facing off for the championship.  At the time, a time capsule is launched into space containing various things including video games.

Fast forward to the present year.  Aliens attack a U.S. military base in Guam.  The attack came from creatures that looked similarly to the old video game Galaga.  Cooper is the current President of the United States and he calls his old friend Brenner for help.  The aliens have sent messages to Earth. They received the time capusle from 1982 and they viewed it as a declaration of war.  The aliens have sent video games in the form of pixels to attack Earth.  In order to survive, Earth has to win three rounds of classic video game attacks.  A second attack happens at the Taj Mahal in India before the U.S. is able to react.

Brenner and Ludlow train a group of soldiers to fight the video games.  The key to defeating the game is knowing the pattern.  When a third attack happens in London, the soldiers, Brenner and Ludlow fight off the alien video game version of Centipede. Even the soldiers tried, it is Brenner and Ludlow that save the day.  The fourth game is in New York City and the game is Pac Man.  In order to defeat this game, they are going to need four ghosts.  This is where Peter Dinklage comes into the movie.  The fourth ghost is played by Pac Man creator Toru Iwatani.  Watching a giant Pac Man chomp down the streets of New York is a visual experience I never expected to see.  Eventually Pac Man is defeated until the aliens send a message that one of the ghosts cheated.

The next attack is in Washington, D.C.  And this time, it is not just one game.  It is ALL the video game characters attacking Earth.  For Earth to win, the game Donkey Kong has to be defeated.  Even President Cooper joins the action and fights the aliens.

Before you watch Pixels, you should watch the documentary, The King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters.  Unemployed school teacher Steve Wiebe has a Donkey Kong, Jr arcade game.  He spendkongs a lot of time playing it.  He looks up the high score for Donkey Kong, and thinks to himself that he can beat that score.  So Steve Wiebe goes after Billy Mitchell’s high score for Donkey Kong.  You may think that no movie about a Donkey Kong score could be interesting to watch.  But you would be wrong.  Apparently, those high scores still matter to a lot of people.  It is an intense experience watching Wiebe go after the high score.  I mention this documentary because you will quickly notice the similarities between these characters and the main characters in Pixels.

 

Tomorrowland

- Stephanie Leave a comment

tomorrowlandDisney never seems to disappoint when it comes to instilling a set of values and convictions into any movie and Tomorrowland, a film starring George Clooney as disheartened former boy genius Frank and Britt Robertson as optimistic reckless science-geek Casey, lives up to the Disney promise of hope by showing viewers that anything is possible as long as you can dream it.

In Tomorrowland, we’re introduced to Frank Walker, a young genius who brings his idea for a jet pack to the New York World’s Fair in the 1960s where he bumps into the mysterious Athena, a child seemingly monitoring the inventions table in the hall, who slips him a pin with the letter “T” on it that ends up changing Frank’s life forever. Flash forward to present day and we see Casey Newton, a teenage girl with a quick mind and a NASA engineer father who will be put out of a job if NASA succeeds in the demolition of the rocket launch platform in Cape Canaveral. Discovering a “T” pin of her own, Casey finds herself on a journey to figure out where exactly this pin is taking her and why she was given one. Join Casey and Frank as they rocket through space and are transported to a place called Tomorrowland, where letting your imagination loose is encouraged and where adventure awaits as long as you believe anything can happen.

Girl in Dior by Annie Goetzinger

- Stephanie Leave a comment

girl in diorI love reading fiction that I can tell has roots in nonfiction. Girl in Dior, a graphic novel by Annie Goetzinger, falls into this category. Girl in Dior tells the fictionalized story of Clara Nohant, a fashion-journalist-turned-model who ends up working and forming a friendship with Christian Dior in the last ten years of his life. In this graphic novel, readers get to see the stunning colors and designs that went into forming the House of Dior, as well as the behind the scenes work that Dior, his seamstresses, and models did in order to launch his New Look in 1947. By presenting this as a graphic novel, Goetzinger is able to showcase the different types of collections Dior put together, as well as the historical changes in fashion that the world was going through as Dior prepared to rock the world with his New Look.

Goetzinger takes great care to include the likenesses and back stories of influential people that would have been in the fashion and movie industry around the time when Dior was designing. She also includes back matter in the book along the lines of chronological reference points, a list of Christian Dior’s 22 collections, what the author calls “Christian Dior’s entourage”, as well as definitions of the different careers you can have in the fashion world and the different types of fabrics and accessories that were used. Goetzinger also includes a bibliography of works. The additional material she provided enhanced the book for me, giving me something to turn to besides an outside source when I wasn’t sure of what a certain term meant. Flip to this book if you’re interested in learning more about the creation of the Dior house, if you’re curious about how Clara went from a fashion chronicler to a model, or if you’re looking to learn more about how Christian Dior was able to change the world of fashion in the short ten years that he ran the house of Dior.

The Devil in the White City – Chicago at the Turn of the 19th Century

- Bianca Leave a comment

devil in the white cityA couple of months ago I heard on the radio that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio were going to collaborate yet again on what will most definitely be another blockbuster hit. The two have previously collaborated on The Aviator, Shutter Island, Gangs of New York, The Departed, and The Wolf of Wall Street. Each film was nominated by the Academy of Motion Pictures for Arts and Sciences (aka the best award in film you can attain) for Best Film and Directing with DiCaprio getting the Best Actor nomination for 3 out of the 5 films. Scorsese won the Oscar for Best Director and Best Film of the Year for The Departed. When these two get together, everyone turns out to see what they have created, especially me! This film is 2 years away from its release, and I am already gearing up for it.

This time they are bringing you a film based on the 2003 book The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. Erik Larson’s work is the story of the true events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. He tells this story in interweaving fashion, focusing on Architect Daniel Burnham and serial killer H.H. Holmes during the years leading up  to the World’s Fair. Both men shaped Chicago’s history in very different ways.

When I first heard about this novel, I wasn’t too excited to pick it up. My fear was that it would be too much about gruesome murders for me to enjoy. But it wasn’t. The book is about paramount history that happened just a few hours away from where we live. In fact, one of Holmes’ lovers and later victim was from Davenport, IA.

While there are a few murderous details, Holmes’ part of the book is more about how he was able to carry on his killings undetected for so long. Multiple accounts describe Holmes as an ideal individual that exuded charm and warmth. While I am eager to finish and read about Holmes’ inevitable demise, I have truly adored page after page of historical firsts. The World’s Fair was such a monumental occassion that everyone wanted to be part of it. Great inventions were first unveiled, historical figures rubbed elbows, heroes we have only read about preformed, and so..much..more.

I have no doubt that Scorsese will capture the essence of this time period and the innumerable historical particles sprinkled throughout the book. As for my all time favorite actor, Leonardo Dicaprio, I know he will deliver. It was a bit disheartening to learn that DiCaprio would encompass H. H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer, but then I realized one cannot always play the hero. And in fact, many actors do their best work when playing the villain. I wouldn’t be surprised if DiCaprio gives his best performance ever with this new film.

Photos from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

More about the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Storm: Make it Rain by Greg Pak

- Stephanie Leave a comment

stormStorm, aka Ororo Munroe, goes by many different names, but this X-Man has the ability to control the winds and the weather. In this first volume, Storm: Make it Rain, people not familiar with Storm are introduced in part to her origin story and how she got to where she is today. She’s the windrider, the Princess of N’Dare, the former Queen of Wakanda, and the headmistress of the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning, the place where she met Wolverine and the other X-Men, and the place where she is struggling to control, help instill, and foster a sense of belonging amongst the young mutants attending.

With the help of Henry McCoy, also known as the Beast, Storm is able to work to better the world around her and to keep both the mutants and humans around her safe from harm. Ororo finds herself helping a small village before a giant tsunami hits, chasing down missing young adults, and dealing with tyrants who are trying to control the world. This graphic novel doesn’t disappoint as we’re introduced to Storm’s connection to Wolverine, her former lovers as well as her nemesis, and to her origin story in general.

Storm is shown and drawn as a strong, independent hero who has matured from when she was a small child to a mutant who knows the limits that her body possesses and, most importantly, how to use those powers to help others. This graphic novel is a combination of Storm (2014) #1-5 with each issue bringing to light an extra layer of Storm and the reasons why she does what she does.

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