This is real footage from 127 years ago.
A family was performing their acrobatic act in Paris, in 1899, and someone was there to film it...
What you are watching was captured by the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, the two Frenchmen who pioneered cinema. Only a few years earlier, in December 1895, they had held the first public screening of projected film in history, using their invention, the Cinématographe.
Now they were pointing their camera at the world around them, recording ordinary life as almost no one ever had before: workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station, and this, a family of acrobats throwing their bodies through the air.
The performers were the Kremos, a celebrated troupe who had created their signature act just a few years before this film was made. They were what circus people call icarists, specialists in a breathtaking discipline where one performer lies on their back and launches another into the air with their feet, catching and re-launching them like a juggler using human beings instead of clubs.
The family kept the act alive for generations. Their descendants were still performing, on stages around the world, more than a century after this film was made...
This Day in Buster… July 2, 1922
The Democrat & Chronicle states of “My Wife’s Relations”—"It is said that the picture ends with an exciting acrobatic feat that has not been equaled in Buster’s previous 'stunts.'" However, the scene was missing in the version most know today.
I don't believe in omens but Ottawa's Canada Day celebrations had to be cancelled due to #extremeweather right after Carney declared it was not in the country's best interests to meet its emission targets. It's probably just a coincidence but then again...
https://t.co/jipZT2TJNe
On this day in 2007, the flagship Sam the Record Man store closed in Toronto.
The famous spinning record sings were restored and installed on top of a city-owned building at 277 Victoria Street two blocks from their original location.
📸 Michael Hudson
Celebrating the 100th Birthday of the iconic and brilliant Mel Brooks with one of the best videos you will ever see.
The time he and Anne Bancroft performed Sweet Georgia Brown on British TV.
In Polish. 😂
Ford and his Cabinet Ministers were caught speeding 23 times and fined $3,300.
So Ford banned speed cameras.
Now:
▶️ speeding is up 380%
▶️ 2 people have died in accidents where speed cameras used to be.
#ONpoli
https://t.co/ojquRmunxu
Reading Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's new book on Trump, there are times I wondered how the hell these two NYT scribes got such amazing blow-by-blow dish, unless they were hiding under the Resolute desk. Full take in FH:
https://t.co/SfGrwJvGwl
Remembering Billy Wilder (1906–2002) on his birthday.
One of the greatest writers and directors who ever lived, whose films remain as sharp, funny, and insightful today as when they were first released.
If I were a British politician the first thing I'd do is get one of those cars where the back seat is tinted off, so I don't get photographed like this.
Lewis: I found the PM's comments about the Iran war being worth it to be really disturbing, shocking as a Canadian. I want to know who the PM thinks it was worth it for. For thousands of civilians who were killed, for the 168 schoolgirls who were killed on the very first night ... Who was it worth it for?
Posted by former US Congressman @AdamKinzinger on Facebook. Beautifully written, in both form and substance:
Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news? I know I am.
We are told, over and over, that America has gone cold on the rest of the world. That we have decided the people on the other side of the ocean are a threat to be kept out. That the welcome mat got rolled up and put away for good.
Then a soccer team from the North African nation of Algeria showed up in Lawrence, Kansas, and within a week the whole town was wearing green.
For today's Good News Sunday, I want to tell you about one of the best things happening in this country right now. It is happening at a soccer tournament, and it has almost nothing to do with soccer.
The World Cup is here, 48 teams playing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Each team in the tournament picks a base camp, one town to live and train in between matches. Germany set up shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Spain is training in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And Algeria, playing two of its games up the road at Arrowhead, picked Lawrence and made it home for the summer.
What the people of Lawrence did with that is the part I can't stop thinking about.
It started small, with a whole town of people who had never given Algeria much thought deciding, more or less overnight, that this was their team now. Flags went up in shop windows. Folks pulled on the green jerseys. People drove over just to catch a glimpse of the players. And then a local news crew stopped an older gentleman on a Lawrence sidewalk, standing in front of a storefront draped in a whole row of Algerian flags he had clearly just gone out of his way to find.
They asked him what he actually knew about the country whose colors he was flying. He grinned, paused for a beat, and said something along the lines of: not much yet — but we want to welcome you here. There is no agenda in that man. Nothing performative. Just a neighbor, thrilled to his bones that these strangers chose his town, and perfectly at ease with the fact that he has a lot left to learn about them.
The welcome only got bigger from there.
The University of Kansas, the state's flagship school that calls Lawrence home, sent its marching band out to the training ground. They had spent the previous days learning Algeria's national anthem, note for note, and they played it as the players walked out for practice. Think about what that means for a moment.
These men are thousands of miles from their families, living out of a hotel in the American Midwest, preparing for the biggest sporting event of their professional lives. And the first thing they hear when they step onto the grass is the sound of their own country's song, played by a hundred American college kids in red and blue who learned it just for them. Several of the players stopped walking. A few of them looked like they weren't sure what to do with themselves.
Algeria did its part, too. The team opened a training session to the public and spent the afternoon out on the grass with neighborhood kids, walking them through drills, signing autographs, posing for pictures. There are children from small-town America who are going to be telling the story of the day they trained with a World Cup team for the rest of their lives. And the Algerians have spent the last week calling themselves honorary Kansans, falling hard for a corner of a state most of them could not have found on a map two months ago.
But it's not just Lawrence.
This is happening all over the country, in towns you would never expect.
The city of Alexandria, Virginia threw a street festival with an evening of Croatian food and music, and wrapped a city bus in the team's red and white. After crowds in Spokane, Washington flocked to watch Egyptian superstar Mohamed Salah, a brand-new Egyptian restaurant in town suddenly had locals lining up for food most of them had never tasted. All told, 19 American communities that are not hosting a single match still raised their hand to take in a national team and call them neighbors for a month.
There is a story we get told constantly about who we have become. That Americans have soured on outsiders. That we have decided the rest of the world is a threat. That we look at people who do not talk like us or pray like us or come from where we come from and see a problem instead of a person.
And then a college town in Kansas goes and learns every note of a North African country's national anthem, just so a group of strangers feel at home for a few weeks. An old local stands in front of a row of its flags and tells them, in so many words: we don't know much about you yet, but we are awfully glad you came.
That is who we actually are when nobody is telling us to be afraid. The band on the field, playing somebody else's song as if it were their own. The neighbor who knows next to nothing about you and waves you in anyway. We forget it sometimes. The good news is that it takes about one afternoon to remember.
That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.
— Adam