Dr. Harriet Caligari the Spy

Public Domain Day 2025

this is real

Public Domain Day 2025 is coming!

There’s even an advent calendar for what will enter the public domain on January 1, 2025, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Next month, we get the works of Frida Kahlo, Matisse, Duke Ellington, and Georgette Heyer. Not to mention The Sound and the Fury, A Room of One's Own, and of course Popeye, which has led to multiple Popeye-themed horror movies already in the works for a 2025 release.

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“Life is a struggle and a good spy goes in there and fights.”

“I want to know everything, everything! Everything in the world, everything, everything. I will be a spy and know everything."

We even get both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Harriet the Spy - which means that in 2025, someone could (should they be so inclined) release a cut of Dr. Caligari combined with text from Harriet to tell a sincere, non-parodic story of their own

"It won't do you a bit of good to know everything if you don't do anything with it.”

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"and we will comfort each other in our terrible knowledge.”

“Little lies that make people feel better are not bad, like thanking someone for a meal they made even if you hated it, or telling a sick person they look better when they don’t, or someone with a hideous new hat that it’s lovely. But to yourself you must tell the truth.”

You could tell a whole story about the importance of telling the universe the truth about itself through Caligari+Harriet. Paramount could even approve it as a Star Trek story (with no pointy ears because who cares really).

Cthia is “the modern Vulcan word which we translate as 'logic'. But what it more correctly means is 'reality-truth'... [it] says that if we do not tell the universe the truth about itself, if we don't treat it and the people in it as what they are — real, and precious — it will turn against us, and none of our affairs will prosper.”

- Diane Duane, Spock’s World

“Does everybody look that way when they have lost something? I don’t mean like losing a flashlight. I mean do people look like that when they have lost?”

Two relevant short stories worth reading:

• Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson (on the dangers of indefinite copyright and society having too long a memory)

• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang (on the dance between memory and recorded ‘fact’, and forgiveness)

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today in why i love the internet

Just the briefest mention of the tongue-eating louse for now, so sorry (we’ll chat more about it eventually, for sure - I’m a big cymothoa fan too)

ask and the internet delivers

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bonus facts, just for funsies

• “Earth’s land masses move toward and away from each other at an average rate of about 1.5 centimeters (0.6 inches) a year. That’s about the rate that human toenails grow!” - National Ocean Service

• The wingspan of the plane used for Orville Wright's last flight (126 ft) was longer than the distance traversed by his first flight (120 ft) (Wikipedia)

• Xu Shoulan v. Peng Yu and its chilling effect on bystander intervention in the absence of good samaritan laws

• “Heart cockles have shells with built-in skylights to let in light for symbiotic algae” - To build better fiber optic cables, ask a clam

• According to legend, Sir John Harrington of Wraysholme shot the last wolf in England in order to inherit his father's estate. (You gotta wonder - did his father think there were any wolves left in all of England when devising this conditional bequest?)

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