A gift horse for cowboys
QUESTION What was the first film to feature a professional stuntman?
Despite being just 12 minutes long, edwin s. porter’s 1903 film the Great train Robbery kick-started the Western genre and featured the first movie stunt.
this was performed by Frank Hanaway, a former cavalryman who was billed as Man Who Falls Off A Horse.
From 1910, professional cowboys Art Acord, Hoot Gibson and tom Mix were paid $2.50 for performing stunts and training horses on film sets.
the 6 ft 1 in, 13 st 3 lb Acord came to motion pictures after working with the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West show. On the rodeo circuit, he won the 1912 world championship in bulldogging (steer wrestling).
His experience as a cowboy on ranches in his native Utah can be seen in his remarkable horsemanship in early films such as pride Of the Range, the two Brothers and the invaders.
in 1914’s the squaw Man, he took part in what is believed to be the first filmed saloon brawl.
Acord was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery while serving in the U.s. Army during World War i. He then became a leading man for Universal, always performing his own stunts.
His success did not carry over to the talkies due to his heavy drinking and brawling. He ended up as a mining prospector in Chihuahua, Mexico, where he died at the age of 40.
Hoot Gibson was Acord’s co- star in pride Of the Range and the two Brothers. in 1912, aged 20, he won the All-Around Champion Cowboy title at the pendleton (Oregon) Round-up. During the war he served in the U.s. Army tank Corps.
superstardom came with the John Ford Western film, Action, in 1921. Hoot costarred with Francis Ford and J. Farrell MacDonald as a trio of outlaws who have to look after a baby.
By 1925, he was earning the enormous sum of $14,500 a week and was spending it as fast as he was making it. Multiple failed marriages and hard living reduced him to having to work as a Las Vegas casino greeter and carnival performer.
tom Mix was one of the most famous screen cowboys. He starred in 291 films, many with his own steed, tony the Wonder Horse, who was a celebrity in his own right. Mix did his own stunts and was frequently injured.
the first female stuntwoman was Helen Gibson, Hoot’s first wife. she was a brilliant trick rider and rodeo performer with the 101 Ranch Wild West show.
in 1912, she made $15 a week for her first billed film role as Ruth Roland’s sister in Ranch Girls On A Rampage.
she also doubled for Helen Holmes in the Hazards Of Helen, a 119- episode adventure film series.
Gibson was famous for a spectacularly dangerous stunt: leaping from the roof of a station onto the top of a moving train.
Jack Rowland, Liverpool.
QUESTION Which is correct: bread and butter is my breakfast or bread and butter are my breakfast?
THE problem with this is that a singular noun ( breakfast) is being equated with a plural or multiple nouns (bread and butter).
Grammatically, ‘are’ would normally be correct for two nouns linked by ‘and’ (for example, bread and butter are healthy foods), but here the dominant idea is breakfast. putting it the other way round, you would properly say ‘My breakfast is bread and butter’, not ‘My breakfast are bread and butter’.
the choice of ‘is’ or ‘ are’ depends on which of the two elements comes first, though the general sense may reasonably over-ride strict grammatical protocol. Rod Taylor, Eynsham, Oxon.
QUESTION How many colours have been identified?
ENGLISH has 11 basic colour words that everyone knows: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, black, white and grey.
Red, yellow and blue are primary colours; secondary colours, such as orange, green and purple, are made by mixing two primaries.
intermediate colours, such as bluepurple, are combinations of primary and secondary colours.
A tertiary colour is a mix of two secondaries, such as orange-green.
Black, white and grey are not technically colours. According to the laws of physics, colour is a wavelength of visible light. White combines all waves of light, black is no light and grey is how we perceive objects in dim light.
Black, white and grey are not on a traditional colour wheel — an illustrative tool based on sir isaac newton’s experiments with light and prisms.
However, if we include in the definition of colour all the ways in which our eyes process light and the lack of it, these ‘non-colours’ earn their place.
Most of us could list more than 100 words to describe different colours, from turquoise, silver and amber to indigo, chartreuse and navy, but we have verbally identified only a tiny fraction of what we can distinguish.
A healthy human eye can see 1,000 shades of light, as well as 100 levels of red-green and 100 levels of yellow-blue — that’s ten million colours. plus, every individual sees colours differently.
We perceive light in three ways: on surfaces, as light sources and in volumes. ten million shades of light affect those ten million colours and so do ten million surrounding colours.
this adds up to 18 decillion (18 followed by 33 zeros) colours.
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