Coachean Life: culture

Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts

Monday, November 05, 2012

General Motors at the '64 Fair

Ah, yes. This was the future I was expecting. This ride famously demonstrated the machinery that could turn a rain forest into a paved road in seconds flat. It also makes you think that, if a hurricane hits, you still won't be out of power a week later.

[Via]... And he's right about the hats.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Monday, October 15, 2012

Monday, October 01, 2012

K-Pop

I've posted a lot of K-Pop in the past. I sort of feel that this stuff is beyond criticism, which may be why I'm intrigued by it.

Let's move over to BoingBoing for a great post from them with lots of videos. Post-"Gangnam Style," America wakes up to K-pop

Friday, September 28, 2012

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Wikipedia, and beyond

It wasn't too long ago when the idea of Wikipedia was pretty much anathema to everyone in education. I was reading Why Wikipedia Doesn't Belong In The Classroom, which raises the question again, in the context of what Wikipedia is today (would you accept the word encyclopedic?), versus what it was a couple of years ago (an encyclopedia wannabe).

Times have changed, times haven't changed. But I do find Wikipedia useful for a number of things.

First of all, casual subjects. If you want to find out what songs are on an album, or Mel Torme's birthday, or anything of that nature which is simple fact about which no one could possibly argue, Wikipedia is your first stop. They may or may not correctly measure the influence of Jim Morrison on existential philosophy in Montmartre cafe society, but they do know he sang with the Doors a couple of times. The scope of the thing is ridiculous. There's hardly anything you can look up that isn't there. The same could be said for the internet itself, of course, but at least there's a veneer of objective fact to a Wikipedia entry, versus any random site that happens to pop up. And let's face it, on almost any search, Wikipedia will be in the top ten, if not the top one. There's not a lot of getting around it.

I think it's not a bad starting point for serious research, either, at least on debate subjects. Obviously, much of what we talk about in forensics is controversial, so I'm not looking to Wikipedia as a source, because I don't know precisely who, exactly, the source is, or where they stand on an issue. But if you want to learn about a subject about which you know little, it's a perfectly acceptable place to start. It will no doubt provide pointers to articles and the like that are usable as sources, and there you are.

If I'm doing personal research on a rez, in other words, I usually do start at Wikipedia to focus the mind. Then I like to search on specific terms from the rez or related to the rez. That's where the good stuff comes from. Of course, I also recommend Google alerts to keep up to date, if you can find a phrase or two that does the job. Of course, I don't do a hell of a lot of research; that's the job of the debaters, in my opinion. My job is pointer. And when you think about it, that's ultimately what Wikipedia is, a pointer. Nothing wrong with that, as long as we don't expect anything more.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Green Lantern, Arab-American

Sometimes I think that the only people in the world who aren't crazy are in the comics business. Not all of them, mind you, but some of them.

I fondly remember Green Lantern from my youth, primarily because his backstory was seriously deep and his powers, derived from his bling, were relatively limitless (within, of course, the limits of comics always trying to find a limit to limitlessness). I was very much a DC kid, but then again, this is really before Marvel hit its Golden Age in the 60s. I shamelessly admit that Superman was my favorite, but I liked almost all of them. This may be a shocking revelation, but Batman was probably at the bottom of my list. The Batman of my youth was a pretty dull character; it wasn't until he became a virtual psychopath in recent iterations that he became interesting.

Anyhow, back to GL. If you don't know how it works, I'll try to summarize. Various people are picked as Green Lantern, and there's comparable other Lanternists in different colors from different planets, and maybe other green ones as well, across a whole spectrum of good and evil, and to be honest, the last time I tried to follow the overarching story, it ranged across so many books with so many characters that I simply failed to sort it out. In any case, the latest human to be chosen as GL is Simon Baz, an Arab-American. (Here's all the details.) If you read the whole article, you'll find out that the original GL, Alan Scott, has recently been outed as gay.

Arab-American superheroes? Gay superheroes? A total disregard for the tastes of small-minded folks in aid of populating the unreal world with relatively normal (aside from the superpowers) people from the real world? I find it nicely refreshing that even the comic book stands are sending a message, albeit one that is probably subversive, of acceptance and individual freedom in today's America. Now if we could only get politicians reading comic books, maybe the country would be a better place.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Thursday, September 06, 2012

Friday, August 31, 2012

Watch this on a large screen. Don't panic.

This comes from BoingBoing. It may:

Ruin your weekend
Steer you clear of opera for the rest of your life
Convince you that, in fact, you have a career as a member of the corps de ballet in your local opera company because, hey, you can dance just as well as they can
Make you swear off sniffing glue because you're obviously seeing things

And yes, I'm sorry, because once you see it, you can never erase the experience.

AKB48

AKB48 has 64 members, broken down into various teams. If I recall correctly, the Beatles had just 4 members and 1 team, but popular music has changed over time.

I have no idea what that is a video for. The YouTube site for the group is mostly in Japanese. There's links there to their website, also mostly in Japanese. There is something that strikes me as innately bizarre about Japanese pop music, and its closely related Korean cousin. They've taken their direction from Western performers whose music is secondary to their performances and virtually eliminated the music altogether. I can't imagine even if I understood what they were singing that I would want to listen to it on the radio, much like with Madonna, where although I do understand what she is singing, I still don't want to listen to it on the radio. It's not music, it's production. But put these people on stage, a couple of dozen cute girls all dancing in unison, or one Madonna doing her best to pretend she's not old enough to be Lady Gaga's grandmother, and you've got spectacle, and a lot of popular music today stands or falls on its spectacularness, or lack thereof. Give 'em the old razzle dazzle...

I spent a fruitless fifteen minutes bouncing around on AKB48 sites trying to figure them out, after reading an article explaining how they're not allowed to date. Now I've passed them along and you can do likewise.

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Stephen Fry on a lot of things

Some great life advice from one of my favorite people.

Via

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Sea monsters

This needs to be shared. After all, any list that includes Cthulhu, Globsters and the Land Shark is a list to be savored.

Sea Monsters From A to Z!

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Julia at 100

A tip of the hat to @ktmenick for this one.

Monday, August 13, 2012

The AIDS quilt

Sometimes you see something that simply overwhelms you. This is one of those things.

You know about the AIDS quilt. Here's the story and all the details. 48,000 panels. Now Microsoft has digitized it. And here's the link.

Be warned. It may be the most amazing, and moving, thing you've ever seen on your computer screen.

[Via OpenCulture.]

Monday, August 06, 2012

When you care enough to send some damned thing or other

Sometimes I find something that I want to share as is. If I don’t have much to say about it, I’ll put it either into a general links post, or if it’s debate-oriented, a Coachean Feed post. Sometimes I’ll be inspired to write at length. After all, I like writing stuff, so why not? There are some people who like reading it, and that’s good enough for me.

Take this article on The Best-Selling Greeting Card of All Time. I don’t have a lot to say about the article per se, but I have to admit, it did start me thinking about greeting cards in general. Hence, an article on greeting cards. That is how the mind works, take it or leave it.

I went over to hallmark.com, just to grab an image, and found this one, apparently just the tip of the Bieber greeting card iceberg. I also found that their site seems to organize one's greeting card life completely, so you can keep track of all the holidays you celebrate, and the people you wish to celebrate with. In other words, greeting cards are, apparently, alive and well. Who knew?

I come from a serious greeting card family on my mother's side. I don't mean just Christmas and birthdays. I mean every holiday and event imaginable. Valentine's Day. St. Patrick's Day. Easter. Fourth of July. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Mother's Day. Father's Day. Grandparents' Day. First Communion. Confirmation. Anniversaries. Thank you. Get well. And something tells me that I'm just scratching the Hallmark surface here, as far as the phenomenon itself is concerned. They have cards for events and holidays most of us have never heard of. Which raises the primary question, why do people send cards in the first place? I mean, half the cards we sent were to people we saw all the time. If I'm going to have Thanksgiving dinner with you, why am I sending you a Thanksgiving card? For that matter, what's so special about St. Patrick's Day that we need to send a card to acknowledge it? I can understand why Hallmark is motivated to create cards for every event, but why are people motivated to buy and send them?

I wonder if the answer is a combination of things. First, yes, a card does allow us to remove ourselves from actually having personal contact with people, so it can be a nice long-distance but vague connection. My parents would send Christmas cards like crazy, mostly to people they hadn't seen in years. By the time my mother reached her Aged P status, Christmas cards were a barometer of whether or not people were still alive. If she didn't hear from my Aunt Mary, for instance—a woman who is not my aunt and who I would not recognize if I found her cleaning the litter box on a dark night—she would wonder aloud if Aunt Mary might be dead. On further inquiry, it would turn out that if Aunt Mary were alive, she'd be about 124, leading me to suggest to the Aged P that,indeed, Aunt Mary was probably no more.

Another value of cards, and here I think we're talking about the incidental cards, like the St. Patrick's Days, is to give voice to one's inner cuteness. Cute, which as far as I'm concerned is a clinical pathology, runs rampant through my family, and of course, they're not alone. Fly onto the wall of a Hallmark store any day of the week and I'll bet you you'll hear the words, "Oh, that's cute," within three minutes of your arrival, and every three minutes after that. Humans, of course, have a predilection to favor cuteness memes like big eyes and big heads and so forth, which is fine if it means adopting a puppy or not eating your firstborn, but gets a little old when it means you subscribe to every holiday on earth just to send a cute card for it. If my mother were a computer person (an idea in which she lives in the direst fear), she would no doubt spend all her days watching cat videos. Cute St. Patrick's Day cards and cat videos are symptoms of the same disease. Any one of us might, at any moment, be taken by a quick bout of the cutes (after all, I'm a Disney fan), but I keep my cute moments pure and separated from all my other moments. Come visit me in a tab room at a tournament some weekend and watch me for a couple days straight. You will not see one moment of cute lapse. I promise.

Obviously I did not inherit the strong cute gene that runs rampant through the rest of my family. As the years went by, I sent progressively fewer and fewer cards, until now I send my mother a Christmas card and a Mother's Day card, the former because she decorates her room with them (and, by the way, decorating for holidays is strongly connected to the cute disease, and my mother had maybe six or seven holidays with boxes of crap pulled out every year to celebrate them, in addition to the expected Christmas ornaments), and the latter because no doubt otherwise she would disown me. I've cut literally everyone else from my card list. I don't send greeting cards to my staff or my colleagues, I've taken my birthday off Facebook and don't acknowledge anyone else's birthdays (because acknowledge one, you've got to acknowledge them all, and seeing that I'm on fb about once a week, that's 6 our of 7 I'd miss), and if you get sick, I might visit you, but I won't send a card with a cartoon nurse sticking a thermometer up your butt. It's just not me.

And I wonder how many other people it is these days, the literal card bit, that is. There is no question that Facebook has taken over indifferent social interactions. People who don't give a crap about certain other people feel obligated to like their various life events and wish them a happy birthday, in numbers that would have made Hallmark in their heyday drool uncontrollably. It's interesting. The postal system originally allowed us to remove the human from human interactions, and the interwebs merely develop it to 21st century dimensions. Maybe all we want out of life is a handful of real friends and a lot of connections to unreal friends, and greeting cards used to do it, but fb does it even better. I know for a fact that I am friends with people on fb who I don't know, whose names mean nothing to me. Since they're all also friends of O'C, I assume when they petition me for my amity, it is because they are denizens of the forensics universe. I certainly hope that's the case. I'd hate to be friends with them just because, say, they wash dishes at Japonica.

Anyhow, here's thinking of you, you're my bestest friend, you're invited, get well soon, may the Lord have mercy on your heathen soul, my sympathies, congratulations, you don't look a day over eighty, have you lost weight, and have a happy August Civic Holiday.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Music School: Part Four, Conclusion

One great thing about having the keys to the kingdom, or at least the keys to the music school, was that I could boldly go where the music students couldn’t. We had a room-sized organ in an auditorium that, if I had wanted to, I could have sat down at and blasted out noise to my heart’s content. Not my cup of tea, though, to tell you the truth. I was never much of an organ player, not even the organ stops on my electronic keyboards. Just not my thing. More interesting to me was the arrival in the school during my watch of an antique harpsichord. I don’t remember the specific details, but I do remember that it was outrageously expensive and that the strings were made of lamb gut, or lamb chops, or lamb something, unlike the unnatural strings of modern harpsichords. And I do remember that it was absolutely gorgeous, shiny black and elaborately decorated. And it was off-limits to all the music students without special, and apparently impossible to attain, permission from the authorities. Of course, I just went into the room one night, sat down, and started playing.

I would like to report that this was some sort of transcendent musical moment, but I was no more simpatico with harpsichords than I was with organs. The thing about an antique harpsichord is that you just bang on it, and what you get is what you get. That’s why they invented the pianoforte, an instrument with pedals allowing you to modulate the tone and volume. I do admit that the instrument, when I tinkled the little bit of music I could think of that was remotely harpsichordean, sounded brilliant (in all senses of the word), but I was not moved. On the other hand, there were all sorts of interesting pianos in the building, unlike the practice pianos in the basement which were the VW bugs of keyboard playing, and those were absolutely right up my alley. I know I should have been working, up orla down, but I did know a fine way to treat a Steinway…

I was not a musical prodigy, but I was unquestionably a piano player from the earliest possible days. My mother’s friend who lived around the block had a piano in her basement, and when I discovered it, at the age of three, I sat down and started picking out tunes. I had a great ear, and what I guess was an innate sense of music. I do recall having had someone point out the black keys to me, as I was picking out a tune on vacation somewhere, maybe the Poconos, when I was about four or five. Until that time I hadn’t dabbled in them much; realizing that they were the notes I was often looking for but could never find completed my initial education. I was on my way.

My parents signed me up for lessons when I was in fourth grade, lessons given by my third grade teacher, who was also the church organist and grossly obese. She sat like Jabba the Music Master on her chair beside the piano as she introduced me to written music. She was not the world’s greatest teacher, and I was not the world’s greatest student. I loved the piano, and would play it for hours on end, but I did not get the hang of reading music. More importantly, I never learned any serious technique. After a couple of years I stopped taking lessons, but I never stopped playing. By this point we had acquired a piano at home, and I went back to mostly playing by ear.

I got pretty good, I have to admit. In addition to the ear, which may or may not be terribly unusual considering the number of self-taught musicians out there of all stripes, I also developed an amazing touch. I really did have a good musical sense, and could tease some seriously nice music out of the old box. And I could never pass one by. I would have to sit down and try it out. I was especially fond of upright Steinways. They had the sweetest sound and a most compatible action. A Steinway Grand, on the other hand, could pretty much defeat me. They are meant for, oh, Beethoven’s Pathetique, with lots of sturm und drang, and I was more of a Gershwin love tune type. Still am, come to think of it.

I bring all this up not to toot my own horn (or bang my own keyboard), but because it is sort of germane to the discussion of working in the music school. Maybe I was only sweeping the floors, but I felt like a musician. And I knew that I could have been better than almost anyone in the place, at least the keyboardists, if I had had the proper training. Not that I necessarily wanted the proper training. But it was something to feel wistful about. The few students at the school who heard me play were quite pleasantly surprised, and I think a little wistful themselves, that a naïf could pull it off that well.

My career at the music school only lasted a semester, after which I went back to school fulltime. I don’t think I ever went back into that building again. But the experience stuck with me. Mostly I remember all those students who wanted so much to be musicians, most of whom wouldn’t even make it to being music majors, much less professional artists. And then there were those like the bass trombonist, who only held out hope of achieving what he considered the lowliest position available, primarily because it was the lowest and that was the highest that he could imagine achieving. The music school was the place where adolescent dreams bumped headlong into reality, perhaps more than anywhere else on campus. English majors could get Cs on their stories and still dream of getting published someday. And, you were still an English major, even if you sucked at it. But music students who didn’t conquer the Pathetique, or whatever, did not go on to be music majors. It was over before it started.

And maybe that’s why I like working with high school students so much. It’s nowhere near being over for them. Everything is possible. They will be great musicians, great writers, great whatever it is they want to be. High school lets you dream, and lets you try out your dreams. And some of them actually will come true. Even the most over the top. Maybe my buddy the bass trombonist has worked his way up to first trombone somewhere, and is this very minute blowing his way through a Beethoven symphony on a Vienna stage in front of royalty. Maybe he's even moved on to the trumpet!

I certainly hope so.

Music School: Part Two

I was living off-campus at that point, which was not particularly unusual except that it was a section of off-campus that was off the beaten off-campus path. I’d moved there specifically because it was off the beaten path. Nevertheless, it wasn’t any further from campus than the usual haunts, but this being Syracuse and winter, it was a bit of trek at one a.m., walking home after my day at work, which a couple of times a week also included the classes I was taking. When I say it was cold out there, and snowy, I do not exaggerate. You do get used to it, but you never really enjoy it. I have seen the movie Nanook of the North; you can’t tell me that our eponymous hero wouldn’t rather be Nanook of Tahiti, no matter how well he and his family seem to have adapted to their icy world.

Berenice had to pass near my place on her way home, and of course, unlike me, she had a car, and she generously gave me a lift home most nights, along with a couple of her friends. Of course, this gave her yet another opportunity to show off her little white boy, but she also put me to work. Berenice was an inveterate numbers player, and my job was to run into the newspaper office to pick up the early edition of tomorrow’s paper, which was usually printed by the time we arrived at 1:30 or so. I would get back into the car and check the number for her; I don’t remember her ever winning, but then again, in the numbers game, the odds are against anyone ever winning.

Ah, the numbers. Nowadays we have state lotteries, which are the same general idea, but they’ve taken away all the mystique. Keep in mind that I was raised among a lot of Italians, who, along with African-Americans, were among the biggest numbers players. I already knew the numbers well before I met Berenice.

The numbers were, of course, a racket, run by racketeers. Or the mob, if you want to call them that. I learned about the numbers first from an uncle who was a big player. The thing is, being a big player of the numbers did not mean spending a lot of money. The numbers were a nickel-and-dime game. You were a big spender if you bet a quarter, or maybe boxed a number for a dollar. Let me explain this more clearly. Every day there was a winning three-digit number. If you picked that number, not just the digits but in the correct order, you won. Boxing a number meant that the digits could come in any way, in any one of the six possibilities. If you boxed a number for a buck, you were betting twelve and a half cents on each possibility. The numbers games I knew about all paid off 500 to 1. Even as a young lad in knee pants I realized that there were a thousand possible numbers within the span of 000 and 999, and that the payoffs meant that the people operating the numbers game were making out like bandits. Then again, they pretty much were bandits, so there you were. Berenice, by the way, not only played the numbers, but ran them for her friends. That is, she played her own bets and also transmitted theirs for them, thus earning a little extra on the side. It was her way of supporting her playing habit.

Playing the numbers, at least as far as my uncle was concerned, was a complicated business. It wasn’t that you had a favorite number that you always played, or at least that’s not how he did it. He went by coincidences. If he saw a fender-bender, for instance, he’d take it as a sign and copy down the last three digits of the cars in the accident. If someone told him a new phone number, those last three digits were ripe. Any event offering three digits was a sign from God. But the biggest sign from God was dreams. It seems that any dream you could have meant that you should play a specific number that that dream represented. You could actually buy dream books that didn’t interpret what your dreams meant, but instead interpreted what numbers your dreams were telling you to play. I don't know if the bigger racketeers were the people operating the numbers or the people writing these books. Morally, it's a tossup.

Because playing the numbers was so cheap, it was very popular among people without a lot of money, and there were enough of them that the mob made a fortune off the game. The question of what exactly the number was would vary, depending on locale. There was the Brooklyn number, say, or the Bronx number, or something like that. These details are fuzzy in my memory, but I do remember clearly that my uncle had to calculate his daily number, which was derived from the overall take at a certain race track, the last dollar digit of the total proceeds of win, place and show. In other words, if the track took in $4444.22 of win money in a day, $3333.76 of place money and $2321.34 of show money, the number was 431. Some numbers were simply the last three numbers of attendance at a specific track: I’m pretty sure that’s how Berenice’s were calculated. I gather there were also other ways to do these calculations, but I'm pretty hazy on all of this. I do remember that they were what they were because they couldn’t be manipulated. In the New York Lottery these, little balls pop out of a machine on television. Where’s the magic in that? Where’s the mystery? Where’s the mob?

(to be continued)
.

Friday, July 06, 2012

Friday's final links

Stuff I couldn't add anything to:

PARISIAN SHOP WINDOWS BY EUGENE ATGET, 1900-1926 These photos are amazingly evocative. It's Paris as you think it should be.
Big in Japan (and elsewhere): 29 American cultural entities that found greater popularity overseas We all know about Jerry Lewis, but still, this enlightens. Plus, who knew about Donald Duck > Mickey Mouse in Scandinavia?
Funny People: Steve Heinrich, You Don’t Know Jack head writer Oh, the hours I spent playing YKDJ. Here's the backstory (of the game, not my lost playing hours).
A History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 100 Riffs This went pretty much everywhere, but still, you may have missed it. I suggest closing your eyes and seeing if you can identify them. A good test of rock credentials.