Death Rock of Alexander Hamilton

March 30, 2012 — Thanks to this commercial, we all know who killed U.S. founding father Alexander Hamilton in a duel: Aawon Buhh. But what the commercial doesn’t tell us is where it happened. It was New Jersey, in the town of Weehauken…and they have the death rock to prove it.

Alexander Hamilton is one of the big names of early United States history. He was a leader in the Revolutionary War, wrote most of the Federalist Papers, served as the country’s first secretary of the treasury, and earned central stage on the ten dollar bill. He was pretty much everything but a United States President and, all in all, probably a guy who shouldn’t have exited stage left over an insult.

Aaron Burr was also a leader in the Revolutionary War, as well as U.S. Senator. The biggest font on his resume is dedicated to his tenure as Vice President of the U.S. under Thomas Jefferson.

However, despite all that national relevance, they tangled over state politics in New York, where both eventually ended up. Apparently, at some point during the end of Burr’s VPship, Hamilton said something disparaging about Burr’s abilities as a politician and a man, and it got out into the public sphere. Burr demanded an apology, and Hamilton wouldn’t offer it. As these were reasonable men in enlightened times who didn’t have the option of just Twitter feuding, there was only one way it settle it: a duel.

If I remember my Bugs Bunny cartoons right, people used to walk around with these extremely fragile things called honor. If that honor was called into question even casually, they would take these little white gloves that they all wore (to carry the fragile honor) and slap each other’s faces before throwing the glove to the ground to instigate a duel. They would then meet somewhere at dawn where they would square off to the death using swords, pistols, and on one occasion a tractor trailer.

This time it was pistols, and the date was July 11, 1804. They chose a spot on the banks of the Hudson River in Weehauken, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan. The location, which is at the base of a cliff, was a popular site for dueling at the time. In fact, Hamilton’s own son had died in a duel there just three years previously.

There seems to be some confusion over the duel itself, which was witnessed by only two other people. Apparently Hamilton was the Han in this shooting scenario, but his shot went extremely high. However, he might have missed on purpose according to some inscrutable duel rule that didn’t really work out for him in the end. Burr sent his gunpowder-accelerated answer right into Hamilton’s abdomen. He died the next day.

Today, the top of that cliff overlooking the Weehauken Dueling Grounds is marked with a couple of plaques, a bust of Alexander Hamilton (even though he was the one who lost), and the supposed actual boulder on which they propped him up after being shot.

It’s located on Hamilton Avenue, a short residential street of pricey homes that parallels the edge of the cliff and offers an astounding view of the Hudson and the skyline of Manhattan beyond.

The bust faces the street and sits on a tall pedestal behind a metal gate that edges the length of the cliff. The rock itself, which is actually a boulder, is on the ground behind the pedestal. The boulder is rust-red, about the size of a bean bag chair, and looks like an altogether uncomfortable pillow for a dying man.

Behind and just below them both is a small paved dais. The gate was locked on our visit, so we couldn’t get to the dais, but other pictures show that the side of the boulder overlooking the river is engraved with the words:

Upon this stone rested the head of the patriot, soldier, statesman, and jurist Alexander Hamilton after the duel with Aaron Burr.

Elsewhere on the boulder seem carved less official pronouncements. I could make out the names of Burr and Hamilton, as well as others, carved randomly and shallowly onto the surface like graffiti.

Of course, other than those dubious indications, I assume from looking around online that nobody knows if this really is the rock that Hamilton reclined on while bleeding out. However, over the decades, possibly centuries, it’s at least become the rock that has been claimed for decades, possibly centuries, to be the one on which Hamilton bled out. And that, plus its great view, differentiates it from enough other rocks to merit a visit.

Madame Tussauds New York

March 28, 2012 — Madam Tussaud and her famous wax figures have a pretty amazing history that goes back all the way to the late 1700s. Hers is a global entertainment empire older than Disney and Ripley’s combined…and it’s based almost entirely on insect secretions.

Tussaud’s original name was Anna Maria Grosholtz. She was born in France in 1761 and learned her craft from a physician with an expertise in both wax modeling (which is how doctors would often replicate anatomy and pathology specimens) and in staging public exhibits of his work. Tussaud got the name we all know her by from her husband, and in the early 1800s she created a traveling show of her waxy charges.

In the 1830s, she made London a permanent home for her collection while continuing to expand it. For instance, she introduced the world to the Chamber of Horrors, which featured infamous criminals and victims of ghastly death. Her morbidity probably dates back to her time during the French Revolution, where she would make death masks of those freshly beheaded by the guillotine. Actually, probably even further back to helping her mentor create wax versions of Siamesed infant corpses and testicular tumors.

She died in 1850, and her museum was moved in 1884 a few blocks away from its original location to Marylebone Road, where it has remained since that time…while also growing into a world-spanning entertainment conglomerate.

All so I could see a 3D representation of Madonna during her underwear-as-outerwear phase.

Of course, I didn’t see the London site. I saw the Times Square incarnation. And, honestly, I was somewhat underwhelmed.

You know the deal on how this goes. You go in and get up close with extremely life-like wax models of celebrities and historical personages. The cool thing is they're arranged out in the open and randomly in the various rooms like it's a cocktail party, so you can get close enough to spill your drink on Robin Williams or Malcolm X. And you can take as many pictures as you want with whichever simulacrum you wish.

However, there was nothing really satisfying about that to me, and I think it’s because most of those people are constantly crowding into my media streams to get my attention already. I mean, I see George Clooney more than I see certain members of my family, so seeing a wax figure of him wasn’t that compelling. Also, when I could care less about Taylor Swift, I certainly can care less about her wax double. Same goes for Pope John Paul II.

Of course, back when Tussaud started this whole ball of wax, people rarely got to see either famous or infamous personages, so it’s no surprise that people flocked to put faces to names. Television killed the wax figure star.

And while it is somewhat interesting to flit from figure to figure, not knowing which familiar face you’ll see next, I have to admit that underlying my dissatisfaction with the experience was the price. You’re looking at $36.00 per adult at the door, so it’s almost vital to your future retirement plans to reserve tickets online for a slight discount or to find some other coupon deal for it. In our case, we were just wandering around Times Square, experience-drunk and drunk-drunk, and didn’t have the opportunity to finagle a better entrance fee.

Also disappointing was that there was no Chamber of Horrors there. There was a strangely out-of-place haunted attraction experience, though, called Scream. It featured no wax figures and was basically a short, dark, featureless hallway with a staff member or two shaking things behind the walls. I’d rather see wooden guillotines chopping off wax heads.

When I did get excited about the models, it was almost always for the few characters that were on display rather than the people. The Mummy, Dracula, and the Hulk were much more interesting to me than Beyonce and Wayne Gretzky. Which is why I waxed so enthusiastic about Count Orlok’s Monster Movie Gallery years ago. I guess it’s the difference between seeing Patrick Stewart wearing a four-buttoned blazer and Patrick Stewart wearing a Star Fleet uniform. Or better, yet, Johnny Depp in a punk rock T-shirt and Johnny Depp in his Edward Scissorhands costume (neither of which they had during my visit…instead it was Jack Sparrow).

Another factor is the crowds. We went on a week night in November, and were almost the only ones there, salving the experience considerably. But I've heard horror stories of crowds during the tourist season. If there’s even half a massive crowd thronging these figures, it’s certainly not worth the money to see how short Leonardo Dicaprio is in real life.

So in summary, it was just too little for too much money. Also, admittedly, it just might not be my thing, and you might have a blast there. Still, we went and took some pics, so I might as well get a site update out of it.

Skating in terror from the likes of the
Spice Girls and Lenny Kravitz.

If I have to sing Ring of Fire one more
Goddamned time...

Let me stand next to your fire.

Harvard Natural History Museum

The famous "Harvard Mastodon."
Been matriculating here since 1846.

March 24, 2012 — Any day spent at a natural history museum is a day well-spent. And, because I’m paid by the hyperbole, I might even go so far as to say it validates being born. Take the Harvard Natural History Museum. In just a couple of hours, I walked beneath the massive skeletons of whales, saw more meteorites than in a lifetime of sky-gazing, and came pupil-to-pupil with the glass eyes of a taxidermy menagerie representing almost the entire zoological spectrum. I couldn’t get closer to nature even if I were out in nature.

The Harvard Natural History Museum is located at 26 Oxford Street in Cambridge, MA. The museum is actually the publically accessible parts of three different Harvard research institutions, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Harvard University Herbaria, and the Mineralogical and Geological Museum, all of which range in age between 120 and 150 years old. That means that’s there a lot of great stuff on display, and probably even cooler stuff hidden away in the archives.

Meteorite fragments. The geology room was full of
minerals and crystals in all kinds of surreal colors,
shapes, and textures.

We accidentally timed our visit for Paleo Planet, an event focused on the earlier chapters of natural history. Basically, tables staffed by scientists and volunteers were set up in all the various rooms of the museum. Some of the tables had fossils and bones that you could handle and examine, others had children’s activities like coloring and drawing, and a couple even had live animals like birds and tarantulas and emperor scorpions. I actually got to hear a Madagascar cockroach hiss for the first time and met a paleontologist. They do exist.

Incidentally, admission to the Harvard Natural History Museum also includes access to the adjoining Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. But that’s a topic for another day. We have massive sea dinosaurs, live scorpions, and glass cephalopods to get to.

This 42-foot skeleton of the behemoth Kronosaurus. 

Amazingly detailed glass cephalopods. It also has a room
full of glass flowers that date back to the late 1800s. The
plants are so realistic it's almost impossible to tell them
from the real things by sight. 

Three whale skeletons covered the entire ceiling of one
of the animal exhibit rooms.

Mac Tonight

March 21, 2012 — I would love to say that some of the most formative words of my pre-teen years, the ones that stuck with me, guided me, and comforted me in my most uncertain hours were pulled from the pages of Mark Twain or the stanzas of Robert Frost or the lyrics of Bob Dylan. Instead, they were these:

When that clock strikes half past six, babe, time to head for golden lights.

If you already know where I’m going with this, then God have mercy on your poor soul. Also, get your cholesterol checked. The words were sung to the tune of Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife by a black-suited piano player in sunglasses who had a giant crescent moon for a head.

A giant crescent moon for a head.

His name was Mac Tonight. It was a McDonald’s commercial.

Two decades later, I still find myself singing these words in the shower. And the crescent moon in the sky always wears sunglasses in my imagination. And Mac Tonight has remained one of my go-to doodles, up there with tesseracts and tornado funnels with spider legs.

In the late 1980s, McDonald’s was pioneering a late-night fast food menu. That’s right. Once upon a time, McDonald’s was not a 24-hour eatery. We had to invent fire, wheels, and light bulbs first in order to have Big Macs in drive-thrus at midnight. To really push this concept, they created a new mascot. Of course, they already had the wildly popular Ronald McDonald, but you can’t use a clown for late-night advertising. Because that would be creepy.

So they decided to find a more acceptable level of creepy by creating the enormously noggin’d Mac Tonight.

His first commercial debuted in 1986, and depicted him at a white piano, flying around on a cloud in orbit lounge-singing about how awesome fast food at night is. Later, they changed the lyrics a bit and dropped his altitude to about city rooftop level. In other commercials his piano was black and his stage would be a giant Big Mac or a rollercoaster or some such (see the end of the article for a compilation video from some forward-thinking historian).

Mac Tonight starred in more than two dozen commercials, and they merchandised the craters out of him, including stints in Happy Meals for an audience that wasn’t even the target of their late-night menu campaign. The one thing they never did, though, as least as far as I could find, was to put him in a commercial with Ronald himself. Professional jealousy.

But his was a candle that burnt at both ends. By 1990s, his initial run was over and, other than a brief revival stint in 1996-1997, Mac Tonight was gone from televisions in the U.S. He went the way of the Fry Guys, anthropomorphic chicken nuggets, and the more evil-looking version of the Hamburglar. I did find online that a CGI version of Mac Tonight has been used recently in commercials overseas, where true American genius is always recognized first. Here, though, they just didn’t need anybody to push late-night fast food because it was obviously just so right and a Eureka moment for all of us. Fries taste better at midnight. They just do.

However, recently, I discovered firsthand that in the suburbs of Chicago, they still venerate Mac Tonight.

I found him in a McDonald’s in Melrose Park, Illinois, just south of Chicago O’Hare Airport. He was life-sized and seated prominently in front of a large electronic piano right in the middle of the restaurant. He was also ringed by a specially created wrap-around bar and chairs. It wasn’t just some accidental arrangement or a random display. It was the centerpiece of the entire restaurant. Someone cared. It was awesome.

His body was that of a mannequin, and his black suit was real, all the way down to his tasseled wingtips. The electronic piano looked like it worked, if the plug and socket in Mac’s stage was any indication.

Eventually, I went up and ordered some fries and talked to the manager. He told me that the owner put it up some time ago after tearing down the PlayPlace…he wanted a classier joint, I assume, the type that ball pits of kids with Happy Meal boxes on their heads couldn’t give it. The type of class that only came with a suit-wearing moon-head in shades and shiny shoes.

The manager also mentioned that there were a few of these displays in other McDonald’s in the Chicago area, naming off two or three other towns. That jived with my prior research, although this was the only restaurant whose address I could track down with certainty (2627 Mannheim Road). Like every other place on the planet, there are a lot of McDonald’s in the Chicago suburbs.

I went back to Mac Tonight, sitting at his “bar” with my fries like they were some sacrificial offering at an altar. He asked me about life. I told him my woes. Asked him to play anything that Dean Martin would approve of while I ate and drank and pondered the vicissitudes of life.

Actually, I was thinking about Doug Jones, the ex-mime who played Mac Tonight for most of the commercials. The tall, thin, tiny-headed actor is more known these days as being Guillermo del Toro’s right-hand monster, playing Fauno and the eye-handed Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth and Abe Sapien and the Angel of Death in the Hell Boy movies. He has a ton of non-Guillermo character credits, as well, including Silver Surfer from the second Fantastic Four movie, the zombie guy from Hocus Pocus, and one of the Gentlemen from the "Hush" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But it pretty much all started with Mac Tonight.

If you need me, I’ll be on eBay looking for his merchandise.

UPDATE: After posting this piece, Doug Jones himself commented about in on the OTIS Facebook Page. First time anything I've done has ever been called "accurate." Feels good:

Dream Trip: Iowa

March 19, 2011 — Iowa is another state whose Welcome signs I’ve never passed in my life. I don’t know much about it and have no real feelings toward it, really, other than being impressed by the fact that its name almost has as many syllables as letters. I do know that, on those occasions when I try to anthropomorphize a map of the continental United States, I do so in profile, and Iowa is where I usually place the eyeball. So it’s got that going for it in my mind. However, were I to find myself transported there today, these are the oddities I would search out, in, as always, no particular order…the way life should be.

Palemoon Twilight, Flickr

Future Birthplace of James T. Kirk: I’m an unashamed ashamed Star Trek fan. The fact that a random town like Riverside, Iowa (population 928), found a way in the 1980s to get Gene Roddenberry to acknowledge them as the future birthplace of the universe’s most famous captain, turning themselves into a minor Mecca and getting their state mentioned in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is, well, a pretty awesome magic trick. And for that, I will spend money at its gas stations. And write really long sentences about it.

Mike Cox, Flickr

Villisca Ax Murder House: One hundred years ago, eight people, including six children, were hacked to death with an axe in their beds in the town of Villisca. Even more ghastly, the crime was never solved. Never. Freaking. Solved. The house where it happened, however, was turned into a tourist attraction, where you can stay the night if you wish. I’ve done so at Lizzie Borden’s in Fall River, MA, so I need a matching set of harrowing nights in my life. I also need to come down on how to optimally spell ax/axe.

Theron LaBounty, Flickr

Putnam Museum Mummies: You can find mummies anywhere, but with modern imaging technology and evolving ethical considerations, you’re not always guaranteed to see a naked one. I mean, mummified bodies cocooned in strips of linen are fascinating, but seeing what’s under all that is even more so. The Putnam Museum in Davenport has a pair of the ancient Egyptians, one of which is completely unwrapped from shriveled black head to shriveled black toes. They also apparently have a shrunken monkey head made to look like it’s a human one in case you’re the type that needs two reasons to do anything.

J. Stephen Conn, Flickr

Effigy Mounds National Monument: This park is located on the eastern edge of the state (also known as the Mississippi River) and contains a couple of hundred prehistoric burial mounds in the rough shapes of various animals. Judging by the pictures I’ve seen online, they’re somewhat hard to photograph and often come off as mere grassy slopes, but I’m assuming in person they’re a lot more dramatic. Either way, ancient people buried dead people there, sure enough.

J. Stephen Conn, Flickr

Hobo Museum: On this list because it’s a museum dedicated to hobos, obviously, and because, well, it’s a museum dedicated to hobos. Located in the tiny town of Britt, this small museum chronicles the life of homeless workers who would often hop trains from town to town looking for work, creating a unique itinerant culture in the process…one which apparently still survives since the town hosts an annual National Hobo Convention.

Bryan Vorkapich, Flickr

Children of the Corn Filming Sites: Of all the horror movies I’ve seen, the conceit behind Children of the Corn just seems so right. Cornfields are about the most mysteriously ominous things on the planet this side of the ocean. The movie was filmed in the early 1980s in the towns of Hornick, Sioux City, Salix, and Whiting, and apparently many of the locations are still terrifyingly recognizable. Also, I figured I needed to stick a corn-related site here considering the state.

Susan Groppi, Flickr

Rusty the Giant Sloth: Prehistoric mammals usually get short shrift against their reptilian counterparts, but the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History is doing its part to right that scale. Since 2001, the fossil remains of four giant ground sloths have been discovered in southwest Iowa. These massive bear-gorillas reached heights of 20 feet and have been extinct about 10,000 years. Some of the Iowa sloth bones are on display at the museum, as is Rusty, a giant, hair-covered replica that has become the mascot of the museum. Here’s his Twitter account.

Krista Kennedy, Flickr

Black Angel of Oakland Cemetery: Every cemetery has its stone angels, but a few have extra-spooky ones that become infamous against the intended desires of those who commissioned them. The century-old Black Angel in Iowa City’s Oakland Cemetery is one of those. It has no real story of its own, but, over the years, it has become the source of many stories, all creepy, all suspiciously easy to predict (causes miscarriages, kills anybody who disrespects it, etc.). Of course, the legends are easily attributable to the facts that the angel has aged to almost black, that its 8.5-foot height looms over visitors, and that its wings are set at a strange perpendicular angle like one of them is broken. All I can say is, even though I want to visit it, it’s not something I’d want to run into in a cornfield.

Heyjupiter, Flickr

Buddy Holly Crash Site: The spot where musicians Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens died in 1959 when their plane crashed into a field near the town of Clear Lake. The site is marked by a stainless steel monument depicting a guitar and three records, and the road to it features a pair of concrete pillars supported by an oversized set of Buddy Holly’s trademark glasses. Today, of course, we all know the tragedy as “the day the music died,” which means I have no idea what kids think they’re listening to these days. Zombie music, I guess.

Sultec, Wikipedia

Earling Exorcism Site: In 1928, it was a beautiful day for an exorcism in the town of Earling. It was in that western Iowa town in a Franciscan convent that still stands to this day that a priest named Theophilus Riesinger evicted evil spirits from a 40-year-old woman named Emma Schmidt after 23 days of all the stuff in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist happening. I’ve kind of got a thing for exorcism sites, but I’m honest about that on my Match.com profile.

And that’s my Iowa dream trip. Honorable mentions for this list are the Field of Dreams baseball diamond, the Pappajohn Sculpture Park, and Alvin Straight’s grave. Let me know of more sites here in the comments or on the OTIS Facebook Page.

Check out my Dream Trip: Texas piece, as well.