Chaplin lost, and found

For nearly a century "Zepped," a 6-minute 1916 film of mysterious pedigree starring Charlie Chaplin, was lost. Now it’s found.

Earlier this year, an Essex, England, film collector named Morace Park made a successful eBay bid of £3.20 (or $5.68 American) on a nitrate film canister containing unlabeled footage. The footage turned out to be the obscure Chaplin short, a World War I propaganda effort designed to buck up British morale, combining stop-motion animation and outtakes and unused alternate shots from films Chaplin made for both Keystone and Essanay studios

The hybrid, over which Chaplin apparently exercised no creative control, includes a shot or two from "His New Job," the short film Chaplin made for the Chicago-based Essanay during his 23-day residency here in late 1914 and early 1915.

"It’s very interesting stuff," said David Kiehn, manager and historian of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum of Fremont, Calif. Chaplin expert Kiehn saw portions of the film last week.

Park and business partner John Dyer went public with their discovery Nov. 1. The Chaplin short’s considerable historical interest will be the subject of a self-financed documentary.

"Zepped" begins with an animated version of Chaplin dreaming of leaving America to fight the Germans back home in England. In one animated segment the Kaiser emerges from a German sausage. In what appears to be newsreel-type footage, according to Kiehn, a genuine and eerily low-flying Zeppelin is seen hovering over London during a wartime attack.

The movie contrives to make Chaplin — under fire at the time for his lack of participation in the war effort — the hero of the hour. A 1916 Manchester newspaper account reported that the ending depicts "the Zeppelin in flames and the gallant Charlie running away."

Kiehn speculated that the cobbled-together Chaplin outtakes may have been assembled and augmented with animation in London under the supervision of Harry Spoor, who ran the London office of Chicago-based Essanay, co-founded by his brother, George K. Spoor. Other suggest that "Zepped" was put together in another country altogether, albeit one under British rule at the time: The surviving nitrate print of the film carries an Egyptian censors' certificate.

Even if "Zepped" turns out to be something less than "THE cinematic find of the last 100 years," as Park and company touted on their web site, it’s better off than was reported three years ago in a Russian film journal. "The film has not survived," the magazine stated.

The Little Tramp, as always, has gotten the last laugh.

Source

Google Gives Gift Of Free Wi-Fi in 47 Airports For the Holidays

By Stuart Fox

The end-of-the-year holidays are a time of tradition and ritual. The waiting on line at the airport. The flight getting delayed due to snow. And of course, the annual Thanksgiving vacation lost luggage.

To help alleviate that holiday travel-related stress, Google is giving a holiday present to every traveler who passes through 47 specially designated airports: free Wi-Fi.

From now through January 10th, Google will pay for the Internet access at a number of airports, including Las Vegas, San Jose, Boston, Baltimore, Burbank, Houston, Indianapolis, Seattle, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Louis and Charlotte (sorry, NYers, you're SOL).

More than just a company promotion, Google hopes this deal will begin to acclimate people to ubiquitous Wi-Fi, one of the long-term goals of the company. In fact, to help spread free Wi-Fi everywhere, Google will keep Internet access in the Seattle and Burbank airports free indefinitely.

So whether you need to write an apology email for drunken antics during the holiday Christmas party, buy last-minute Hanukkah gifts on Amazon, or find hangover cures on January 2nd, thank uncle Google for the free hookup.

Source

Laser-Enabled Wheelchair Autonomously Navigates City

By Stuart Fox

Developed at Lehigh University, the chair utilizes LIDAR, the visible-light equivalent of radar, to create a super-detailed image of the environment. A computer then compares that image to a database of stored maps. When the chair figures out where it is on the map, it can navigate from point A to point B.

The technology grew out of an earlier project to create an autonomously navigating car. Two years ago, the team that created the chair modified a Toyota Prius with a similar LIDAR and map system. That car became one of only six entrants, out of a field of 89, to finish a DARPA-sponsored 57-mile-long race. The same technology that guided the car to victory also allows the wheelchair to navigate.

And much like the car, this wheelchair represents yet another step in the further goal of LIDAR-assisted navigation. Not only does the Lehigh team want autonomous robots navigating the city as replacements for bike messengers, but they also hope to develop the LIDAR enough for use in unmapped spaces, like people's homes.

Source

Offering Hope in Haircuts for the Jobless

By SUSAN DOMINUS

It was clear that Sunday was shaping up to be a rare shot of Indian summer, the ideal day for wandering through a park or lazing around on stoops or eating outdoors. But Theresa Cheung, 27, a fashion designer, had somewhere to be at 9:45 a.m., and a warm, golden day would not deter her. Freakishly perfect days are hard to come by in November, but they’re probably not as hard to come by as a good, free haircut at a New York salon. They’re also not as useful on a job interview.

A few days earlier, Ms. Cheung was leafing through Time Out New York magazine when she noticed a write-up promising free haircuts at the Cristiano Cora studio in Greenwich Village to anyone who brought proof of unemployment, sort of a public service to style-conscious job seekers. Ms. Cheung researched the salon, which got strong reviews online, and where haircuts start at $100, and imagined there would be a mob scene — women with expensive handbags but telltale split ends, out-of-work designers she had run into on interviews, unemployed fashion editors, not to mention every diligent coupon-cutter in town. Instead, she was second in line, with only a few people behind her. By 10:10 a.m., Ms. Cheung was in a stylist’s chair, chatting about the plight of her career and her hair.

If only job hunting were this easy: Do your research, show up early, catch the worm. Ms. Cheung, who was a lingerie designer until she was laid off four months ago, has not found the search to be all that easy. She has cut back on all the nonessentials: the dinners out, the fancy bread, the $200 cut-wash-dry-hot oil treatments of yore (alas, color and other services beyond the scissors were not free at the salon). She had not had even a trim since March, and those wispy ends of her long, dark hair were starting to get on her nerves. They say you should never let them see you sweat — they should also never see you brushing hair out of your eyes.

For someone down on her luck, Ms. Cheung looked fairly radiant as a stylist showed her how her new bob could go from corporate to punky with a few strategic tousles. It was not just the good haircut that was improving Ms. Cheung’s mood. “It’s good to know you’re not alone — to be around people who understand your situation,” she said. And not just any people — people who looked, by the time the stylists were finished, like they had little to worry about except making sure no one messed with their hair.

Around the sleek, white room, the people who showed up for the event, held on Sunday and Monday, to have their hair done spoke of a common theme: change. “I’m trying to reinvent myself,” said Carmen Ramirez, 39, a former fashion buyer from Washington Heights who is going back to school to learn medical billing. She had not had her hair cut professionally for a year, and it had grown to her waist. “This is starting the change process — getting a new cut,” she said.

Cristiano Cora, who usually charges $300 a cut, was working on the long, dark locks of Hanan Zdeg, a painter and single mother who got by mostly on retail clothing sales until that work dried up. “I’m just hoping for a transformation,” Ms. Zdeg said. Into what, exactly? “A pretty woman with easy, manageable hair.”

“You’re already pretty,” Mr. Cora assured her, sounding surprisingly paternal for someone with avant-garde sideburns. “Tomorrow you’re going to go out and look for an interview and get a job.”

It’s the Lily Bart dilemma Edith Wharton spelled out in “The House of Mirth”: To gain access to wealth and fashion, one has to keep up appearances, but keeping up appearances can be impossible unless you’ve already got access to wealth and fashion. Mr. Cora and his staff, as well as some other stylists he had trained, were trying to help the clientele, many of whom worked in fashion or theater or marketing, sidestep this conundrum. Call it the good-hair school of economics. “We’re trying to prepare them so they can get working and feel good and come back into salons,” said Jeanise Aviles, a stylist working on Ms. Ramirez’s hair. “Our business has slowed down, too.”

For Andrea Friedland, an out-of-work marketing executive, a large part of the pleasure would come from telling her husband his cynicism was unjustified. “My husband said nothing is free in New York,” she said. “Now I can go home and say, ‘You’re wrong!’ ”

Her husband thought maybe his wife would arrive to find students cutting hair. But even if there had been, how bad could their work have been for zero dollars? After all, it’s only hair. It grows back. If only the job market would.

Source

Lover of Birds and Opera Leaves Millions to Both

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Mona Webster, a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who lived in Edinburgh and died in August at 96, had a love of birds, and warblers in particular — of the human kind. She demonstrated that affection by leaving most of her fortune to the Metropolitan Opera and a nature charity in Britain.

English and Scottish newspapers said Ms. Webster had bequeathed the Met $7.5 million. The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust received a similar amount. While the Met confirmed on Tuesday that Ms. Webster had long promised a big gift on her death, it said it was still waiting to find out the exact amount.

Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said Ms. Webster had fallen in love with the Met through its Saturday radio broadcasts. She was last at the house for a performance on opening night in 2000. “She said it was the most wonderful night of her life,” he said.

The Met’s fund-raising office had kept in touch with Ms. Webster since then. It sent her books about the birds of Central Park; a volume called “Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park”; and tomes about Met history, which appealed to her love of data, according to Gail Chesler, the Met’s director of planned and special gifts.

“She just thought they were the cat’s meow,” Ms. Chesler said. Ms. Chesler said the Met had also sent LP recordings of its operas because Ms. Webster did not own a CD or DVD player.

Ms. Webster was born on Jan. 13, 1913, on the Isle of Man, where her father kept the Douglas Head lighthouse, her obituaries said. She moved to Orkney in Scotland as a girl and discovered a love for birds. She joined the tax office as a clerk and lived in London during the blitz. She moved to Edinburgh and in 1942 married an investment manager, Ted Webster. He died in 1981. The couple had no children.

After Mr. Webster’s death, Ms. Webster traveled the world on bird-watching expeditions, recording more than 5,500 species. Her other love was opera, especially the Met Saturday afternoon broadcasts, which she heard hours later because of the time difference. “Saturday nights were sacred,” Ms. Chesler said, adding that Ms. Webster recalled a radio broadcast from as far back as 1939.

Ms. Webster died on Aug. 27, and details of her will were made public on Monday, the British reports said. Her fortune amounted to $16.3 million, much of it produced by shrewd investments in the stock market, according to HeraldScotland.com.

Surprisingly, Ms. Webster left only $167,000 to the Royal Opera Trust, which benefits the house in Covent Garden in London, much closer to home. Met officials said Ms. Webster had complained about the Royal Opera.

“She would tell me things that she didn’t like that Covent Garden was doing, and she just loved the Met,” Ms. Chesler said. “It was all over the place — casting, productions, management.”

Elizabeth Bell, a Royal Opera spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message that Ms. Webster last attended a performance there about seven years ago “and is remembered as a very interesting, proud lady and someone who was deeply interested in the music.” She said the Royal Opera was “most grateful for her very generous donation.”

Ms. Webster had attended the Met frequently before 2000, but usually came as part of an opera tour group and thus did not come onto the Met’s radar until 2000, when she made a large gift and was invited to opening night, Ms. Chesler said.

Ms. Chesler said she had been in regular correspondence with Ms. Webster and stopped by to visit while on vacation this summer just four days before she died.

“We talked about everything,” she said, describing Ms. Webster as mentally sharp to the end. “During that last visit she was also telling us about her investments. She had been telling me all along that the Met would be taken care of after she passed. She said that in every conversation. We knew it was going to be substantial. We assumed it would be a seven-figure gift, but we had no idea of the actual amount, and the truth is, we still don’t.”

The only less-than-cheery thought, Ms. Chesler said, was that the Met would have to pay taxes on the gift in Britain. “That’s 40 percent,” she said.

Source