Table of contents for Spring 2017 in Smith Journal

In the technological Dark Ages of the late ’90s, getting your hands on anything obscure was a difficult task. I spent months scouring the internet’s dark corners until I finally found what I was looking for hidden in some digital backwater: the 1966 horror movie Manos: The Hands of Fate. I pushed download, waited the requisite two weeks for the file to transfer, and watched as the first frames flickered across my monitor. Had Manos been produced by someone with a passing grasp on the principles of filmmaking, it would have been just another bad grindhouse film. But Manos was special. For starters, it wasn’t made by a filmmaker at all, but by an insurance salesman named Hal Warren. According to urban folklore, Warren had placed a bet with a…

What’s the go with Kink Studio? We’re a model-making company. There are just three of us here, and we make models and fabricate other objects for architects, artists and designers. How did you get into the model-making business? I studied architecture at university, and I was always very hands-on with everything I did. I skimped out on giving my floor plans to my tutor; I just wanted to jump straight to making the model. Still, I never thought I’d move into model-making as an occupation. The three of us saw an opportunity when we noticed the other university students wanted someone else to cut and make their projects for them, so we purchased our own laser cutter. Now we have a three-storey factory in Sydney full of computer-controlled machines and…

IF YOU LIVE LONG ENOUGH, YOU REALISE WE’RE ALL HEADED FOR SICKNESS AND DEATH. IT MIGHT SOUND BLEAK, BUT THAT KNOWLEDGE CAN ACTUALLY MAKE YOU HAPPIER. GET OLD BEFORE YOUR TIME Growing up I was always interested in writing, but I was from a working-class part of Chicago and didn’t have any role models. Luckily two high-school teachers talked an engineering college into giving me a chance, so I became an engineer. I wasn’t very good at it, but during my breaks I would sneak away to the library to read, and I felt myself coming alive. Still, I was a lunkhead; it didn’t occur to me writing might be my vocation. So I followed the engineering path and ended up working overseas with an oil exploration crew. One day…

For a start, it’s called a caduceus. Unless you’ve done Latin at university, you’re unlikely to know this means ‘herald’s staff’, a term that doesn’t appear to have much to do with healing. The imagery in it doesn’t seem particularly appropriate either. The scarily pointed stick. The entwined snakes facing off against each other. The pair of wings. As if that wasn’t enough, the adoption of the caduceus by the medical fraternity was based on woefully inadequate knowledge of classical myths. All in all, it’s a bit of an Edsel-sized disaster – though unlike Ford, the medicos decided to stick with their lemon. The caduceus was originally associated with Hermes, a Greek god with a patchy reputation. Known as the divine trickster, he served as a messenger between gods and…

What’s the go with AMS? We design soccer jerseys for under-resourced nations and disputed regions around the world. We supply the teams for free and sell the official jerseys to fans and collectors in exchange. For a new country, such as South Sudan, it can mean a lot to have a uniform that represents you. How’d it all start? When I was a kid I used to design AFL jumpers using Microsoft Paint, just for fun. Later I began importing soccer jerseys from China and selling them on eBay. I kept getting requests for obscure countries and clubs that didn’t have official suppliers, so I thought I’d start my own brand and supply the teams myself. The first year I started I couldn’t afford a designer, so all our jerseys…

THE ATARI 2600 WAS RELEASED IN 1977, AND IT LIVED A LONG, RICH LIFE. To put it in perspective, Sony has released a new iteration of its PlayStation roughly every six years since 1994. If that lifespan is analogous to 80 human years, the Atari 2600 was close to 200 years old when its life support was finally switched off in 1992. And yet while official support for the platform halted, it didn’t die. Right this moment you can acquire a shiny new box containing a cartridge for The Gizzle Wap and the Strange Red Tree, the Zelda-inspired Anguna: Warriors of Virtue, or any number of new titles developed for the Atari 2600 in the past few years. The world of ‘homebrew’ game development, as it is known by those…

A FEW YEARS AGO I DECIDED IT WAS TIME I LEARNED HOW TO TIE A BOWTIE. SO, ONE NIGHT, BEFORE A COMEDY SHOW IN PENNSYLVANIA, I SET MY PHONE AGAINST A MIRROR AND STARTED WATCHING YOUTUBE TUTORIAL VIDEOS. I TRIED AGAIN AND AGAIN, BUT SOMETHING WAS WRONG. I JUST COULDN’T GET IT. I WAS SO FRUSTRATED. Eventually, I had enough; I got the bowtie to a place where it looked okay, even though it wasn’t really correct. I felt I could get away with it. When the show finally started, I went to pick up a microphone backstage but realised that my hands were numb. It turned out that I had given myself a repetitive stress injury. I was wearing a jacket and, with my arms bent, I was cutting…

A FEW YEARS AGO I WAS IN CANADA, DRIVING AROUND THESE BIG GREEN HILLS AND FISHING VILLAGES IN NOVA SCOTIA. WHENEVER CARLY RAE JEPSEN’S ‘CALL ME MAYBE’ CAME ON THE RADIO MY SONS WOULD GROAN, BUT I WOULD CRANK IT, AND WE WOULD DRIVE DOWN THESE HILLS LISTENING TO IT. I JUST FUCKING LOVED THAT SONG, AND FOR ABOUT A MONTH, EVERY TIME IT CAME ON, I FELT GREAT. I actually don’t remember the first time I became aware of it; it’s one of those songs that you hear a few times and it’s just sort of background hubbub. But at a certain point you stop and it grabs you. That’s what a good song does: something about it infects you, it grabs you in some way and makes you…

IF YOU WANT A 1980S VERSION OF THE ICARUS STORY, HERE IT IS. We have a famed industrialist. A car with wings. A dream to sell. There’s new hope for a forgotten people. And a fictional flying time machine, too. The car and the man gain altitude fast, before both inevitably crash. And when they fall, they drag thousands down with them. This is the story of the DMC-12, the most fantastic and terrible sports car in history. And the man who made it happen: John Zachary DeLorean. DeLorean was a native of the Motor City, born in Detroit to immigrant parents. His mother worked in manufacturing; his deadbeat dad was a union organiser at Ford. After a deprived kind of childhood, their son earned some engineering degrees and fought…

BORN: April 5, 1839, Beaufort, South Carolina, U.S.A. DIED: February 22, 1915, Beaufort, South Carolina, U.S.A. THE LIST OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS ON ROBERT SMALLS’ OBITUARY IS LONG. A navy war hero who hobnobbed with President Abraham Lincoln, Smalls served five terms as a Republican congressman for South Carolina, helped establish one of the first black schools in his district, started his own newspaper, and financed an 18-mile horse-drawn railroad. But before he did all that, Smalls was something else entirely: a pirate. At the height of the American Civil War, Smalls stole a Confederate warship and, exhibiting a rare nerve, sailed his family and friends from slavery to freedom. No civilian had ever turned over a Rebel gunship to its enemy, and this unprecedented feat of daring through the heavily fortified…

DAVID HAHN’S 2007 MUG SHOT IS ALARMING. THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT THE 30-YEAR-OLD’S GAZE AND THE SET OF HIS CHIN THAT HINTS AT HIS MILITARY BACKGROUND – HE WAS IN THE U.S. NAVY AND MARINE CORPS FOR SEVERAL YEARS BEFORE HIS ARREST – BUT THE ALL-AMERICAN, CLEAN-CUT IMAGE IS CANCELLED OUT BY THE STATE OF HIS SKIN, WHICH IS COVERED IN ENORMOUS OPEN SORES. Hahn was taken into police custody after a maintenance worker at his apartment building in the Detroit suburb of Clinton Township saw him nicking a smoke detector from the block’s common area. In all, he was charged with stealing 16 of them. With anyone else, you’d wonder what the hell they’d want them for. But given Hahn, as a teenager, tried to build a nuclear reactor in…

FOR MOST OF ITS HISTORY, RYE WHISKY HAS BEEN THE CLOSEST THING AMERICA HAS HAD TO A NATIONAL DRINK. Dating back almost as far as the U.S. itself (George Washington’s estate cranked out 40,000 litres of the stuff every year), rye took root towards the end of the 18th century, and soon established itself as the newly independent nation’s liquor of choice. By the 20th century it was the liqua franca of the country’s new bohemianism; Manhattans and Old Fashioneds were both designed with rye in mind. However, Prohibition almost singlehandedly killed the drink as farmers turned their backs on the crop. And it’s taken the better part of a century for the subtle, spicy pleasures of rye whisky to be rediscovered. Tasmanian farmer Peter Bignell is one of those…

In the 1970s, an assistant at the George Eastman Museum in New York State came up with a novel way to pass the time: by writing to famous photographers and asking for their favourite recipes. The plan was to publish the recipes as a cookbook, along with food-related photography from each contributor, but the project was shelved when the assistant left the museum. Forty years later, The Photographer’s Cookbook is finally seeing the light of day. It’s a time capsule of ’70s photography and cuisine, and a tribute to the forgotten art of recipe writing. ANSEL ADAMS’S EGGS POACHED IN BEER ingredients 1/4 cup (60g) butter Mixed spices 1 dash sherry 1 bottle dark malt liquor or strong ale (ordinary beer is not strong enough) 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 eggs…

Years ago I was travelling through the Upper Hunter Valley in New South Wales, and I was blown away. An early explorer once described the region as the “Tuscany of the South”, but now the most common word you hear to describe it is “moonscape”. Thanks to the open-cut coal mines that dominate the region, the valley is filled with coal stations and trucks and these massive holes in the ground: voids filled with highly toxic and saline water. Afterwards I went back to work teaching environmental philosophy and ethics at the University of Newcastle. As it happened, people in the valley started contacting me to ask if there was anything I could do to help them fight these forces that were taking over the Hunter Valley. They were all…

IT ISN’T EXACTLY EASY TO MAKE A CARGO OF BEES LOOK INCONSPICUOUS ON A TRUCK OR UTE. IN MULVANY’S WORDS, “YOU’D STICK OUT LIKE DOGS’ BALLS.” THE PRESS RELEASES THAT VICTORIA POLICE SENDS TO JOURNALISTS USUALLY FOLLOW A PREDICTABLE TEMPLATE: IN A CLINICAL TONE THEY OUTLINE A CRIME, DESCRIBE THE VICTIMS AND PUT A CALL OUT FOR INFORMATION. On a Thursday in early March, however, someone at the force’s media office momentarily departed from this format. Instead, they decided to have a little fun. At around 5am in the morning, an email went out with the headline, “Wanna-bee apiarists set Coburg a-buzz.” What followed was, by any standards, a tour de force of heavy-duty punning. “Investigators have been told a beehive was removed from a Marks Street yard between 24…

I work as a clinical psychologist, with a focus on organisational (work-based) psychology. After a decade of reading business literature, I got tired of the endless success stories. We’re supposed to bow down and learn from business people who say, “Look at me! I’m an entrepreneur!” People assume if we just copy someone who is doing well, success will be easy. In business speak, this is called ‘best practice’. But it actually doesn’t work, because the circumstances around success are so unique. So I started looking at failures, and what they might be able to teach us. There is actually a lot of academic literature out there focused on failure, but it doesn’t reach most people. I was looking for a new way to convey these findings when I visited…

TALKING TO GEOFFREY WEST IS A BIT LIKE HAVING A FULL YEAR’S SCIENCE CURRICULUM RAPIDLY INSERTED INTO YOUR BRAIN. In an avuncular baritone, he whips through a helter-skelter tour of some of the universe’s most enduring mysteries, barely pausing to acknowledge his major discoveries that have contributed to solving many of them. By my count, the hour I spend chatting to West takes in string theory, particle physics, evolutionary biology and climate change. And that’s all before we get to the topic of urban dynamics, a field West is doing his best to refashion by deploying a mathematical model he claims can describe everything from traffic congestion to restaurant density to the width of sewer pipes. West is a man who has spent his life consumed with the simple rules…