 2013 National Hobo Convention Why your editor used to love going to Oriole games (don't miss the Earl Weaver video) 2012 Dream fades for Gen Y professionals  ADDICTING INFO Massachusetts could change our
view of death The secret history of shipping pallets The end of the Simpsons creator's comic strip What gun owners and gays can teach us about America  DEPRESSION PHOTOS
Science: the redefinition of coolness TED: a massive, money-soaked orgy of self-congratulatory futurism Loneliness, narcissism and Facebook Ten years later, the Segway is still struggling America has to learn how to manage its decline The F-word we're still scared to use Local heroes: a security guard you can love Only 16% of America is still rural Babies prefer Picasso to Monet. . . Court rules that lap dances are not tax free performance art. . . Some 60 lawsuits against various "Real Housewives" One quarter of counties had fewer births than deaths & 90% of these were rural A complete guide to American exceptionalism Monumental bathroom problem at 9/11 site Playboy surveys sex lives of Americans Americans spend as much time on mobile phone as reading newspapers & magazines What do Americans think about marriage and family? Seven of ten richest counties are in in DC area 50 things restaurant servers don't like SOME REASONS TO DUMP DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME U.S. IS LEADING BANANA REPUBLIC  2010 STUDY: AMERICANS LIKE VARIED SEX HIGHLIGHTS OF THE CENSUS BUREAU'S COMMUNITY SURVEY BABE RUTH, BARRY BONDS AND JAY WALKERS: REAL AMERICANS LADY GAGA: THE END OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION? NEW YORKERS HIRE CONSULTANTS TO GET KIDS INTO RIGHT KINDERGARTEN HARVARD LAW SCHOOL RETAINS SUPER MAJORITY ON SUPREME COURT DEATH BY POWERPOINT ADDS TO MILITARY'S CASUALTY RATE HOW TO PRONOUNCE WISCONSIN PLACE NAMES MULTI-GENERATIONAL HOUSEHOLDS HITS 50 YEAR RECORD  The remarkable Nicholas Brothers show up at about 6 minutes into this You Tube clip in the finale to the movie 'Stormy Weather.' Fred Astaire said it was the greatest movie musical sequence he had ever seen. Mikhail Baryshnikov called them the most amazing dancers he had ever seen. Incidentally, if you start at the beginning you get Cab Calloway and Bojangles Robinson as well.   MITCH COPE  AMERICAN NOTES: SWIM CLUBS DISAPPEAR WITH CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS AMERICANS BECOMING MUCH MORE POLITICALLY SEGREGATED   THE VISITOR - "In a sense, "The Visitor" is about the global econ professor bonding with the illegals, but the movie's not a tract. It's really about how people can come into our lives, change them, and leave. This is a film of our times - paranoid, heartbroken, disillusioned - and the rare recent American movie whose characters react the way actual people might." - Wesley Morris, Boston Globe CATHERINE RUSSELL: "After listening to a continuous stream of releases by purported rising jazz singers - who couldn't have lasted through a chorus in a contest with Ella Fitzgerald or Betty Carter - it's a delight to hear the real thing in Catherine Russell. . at the center of gravity that has always kept the music alive is 'the groove' that Cat Russell embodies." - Nat Hentoff       This collection of demonic kids scarfing down food in 1950s advertisements is notable not just for its artistic content but as a reminder that the efforts by the food industry to stuff our children is not a new phenomenom. What's particularly interesting is that the percentage of junk food seems strikingly lower: kids are being urged to drink Campbell's Soup [above], non-sugar enhanced cereals and so forth. Some academic might wish to compare the relative number of pitches for normal and junk foods today vs. fifty years ago.     THE BOSTON MOB IN REAL TIME ALMOST KILLED POPULAR TALK SHOW HOST |
Eternal fundamentals of leadership (Rev. 8/14/11) Blowin' in the wind of cultural decay  Buddy Holly appears on the Arthur Murray Dance Party in 1957. Watch the immobile dancers in the background.  Richard Brenneman - In his 1976 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky presciently forecast today's world of "reality" television in which the ancient Roman practice of "bread and circuses" - panem et circenses - for distracting the masses is replaced by today's politics of bread without the circus. In this scene, Ned Beatty, playing conglomerate tycoon mogul Arthur Jensen delivers a soliloquy to the late Peter Finch, who plays newscaster Howard Beale, enlightening him about the realities of the new corporatized world. No better description of our Brave New Corpocracy has ever been written.     PEOPLE - INCLUDING CHILDREN - TOO BUSY TO USE THEIR BACKYARDS TEEN TEXT MESSAGES 6,800 TIMES IN ONE MONTH  GALLERY OF PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE NOTES FROM ROOMMATES AND CO-WORKERS  & OTHER WONDERS IN RIVERSIDE, CA   ABOUT
THE TOWN WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A FARMER [Your editor recently uncovered in a forgotten file this wonderful description of what the disappearing craft of being a farmer is about. I was blessed as a young man to have worked on a farm and with farmers and as I reread this I was reminded where some of my sense of the possible comes from. I was also reminded that when I wrote the "Great American Political Manual," my editor at WW Norton apologetically told me that one of her colleagues had expressed fear that "repair" sounded too much like work. "Oh, that's right," I replied. "You folks in Manhattan don't repair anything; you just call the super."] KW CARTER, MAINE TIMES 1974 - It will take a third of a lifetime for a man to learn the many and diverse skills necessary to enable him to survive while producing beef, potatoes, milk or what have you. He will, when he has attained competence as a farmer become expert in all of the following fields plus a great many others which I have not mentioned. He will have a working knowledge of plant and animal nutrition. He will be an efficient rough carpenter, He will be a competent lumberman and woodsman. He will be a veterinarian of sorts. , He will have the skills of a mediocre housepainter and electrician. He will .have a working knowledge of many kinds of machinery and be a more or less skillful mechanic. He will know how to dig a well, wall up a spring, lay a .waterpipe and do some rough plumbing, He will ,learn how to predict the weather with greater accuracy than the U.S. [Weather] Bureau or he will be in deep trouble. He must have some knowledge of accounting or the government will nail him to the cross the first time he makes any money He must know how to build a barbed wire fence, corduroy a road through the swamp, butcher a hog, salt his sowbelly and raise his beans; how to deliver a cow of her calf, how deep to plant his beet and spinach seed, build a scarecrow to keep the crows out of the com, and shoot the foxes, racoons and squirrels that eat his poultry and raid his garden; he will learn to hang an axe, file a saw, shingle the barn, install lightning rods, repair the mowing machine, cure cannibalism among the chickens, and make a brine to cure his ham and bacon. He must learn to handle a dangerous bull or get gored in the process. He must be capable of conning his banker out of a loan when things are taught, which they certainly will be; and he will learn [guile] when dealing with those who buy his produce or they will skin him alive and nail his hide on his own barn door. This is perhaps ten percent of the skills he must learn to survive, None of them require any enormous intellectual capacity, but he will be years learning them the hard way   INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY UPDATE [Just a few from the A-B part of the list] A Box of Fish
with Tartar Sauce Bad Mutha Goose
The four leading causes for the decline of the American republic were: - Margaret Thatcher, who provided Ronald Reagan's with brains - The Yale Law School, which has cursed us with everything from Clarence Thomas to Bill Clinton. - The Harvard Business School which taught a generation of managers that they didn't have to know a damn thing about what they were managing - The disco drum machine, which inaugurated our cultural collapse In the end, it is not the culture from which we came but the one each of us is helping to create that will matter. It is our common fate rather than our disparate pasts that will ultimately describe, redeem, or destroy us. America is not the answer; it is only a good place to look for the answer. America has never been perfect; it's just been a place where it was easier to fix things that were broken. The fraud, the huckster, the salesman are not new phenomena in America; what is new is that they now so strongly control every estate of our society. Those of a character that would have once caused Americans to close the door, hang up, or say "no thank you," now teach our children, run our government, and tell us what to think. They are the Enron generation, filled with postmodern versions of Willy Loman: "He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He' s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine." America once made things people wanted, said things that needed to be said and fixed things, including itself, that needed fixing. Now it is out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. The problem, as Willy Loman discovered, comes "when they start not smiling back - that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished." A good way to think about the history of our country is that it has involved repeated conflict between the specifics of the soul and institutional abstractions -- between people and places on the one hand and, on the other, a succession of systems desiring to exploit, subjugate or supplant them. You can say that one of the great characteristics of Americans has been not merely opposition to a system of the moment but antipathy towards unnatural systems in general -- opposition to all systems that revoke, replace or restrain the natural rights of human beings and the natural assets of their habitats. We should seek a cooperative commonwealth based on decency before profit, liberty before sterile order, justice before efficiency, happiness before uniformity, families before systems, communities before corporations, and people before institutions Today almost every principle upon which this country was founded is being turned on its head. Instead of liberty we are being taught to prefer order, instead of democracy we are taught to be follow directions, instead of debate we are inundated with propaganda. Most profoundly, American citizens are no longer considered by their elites to be members or even worker drones of society, but rather as targets - targets of opportunity by corporations and of suspicion and control by government. Those who run the country, whether in government, business or media, seldom speak of this land anymore with feeling, affection or understanding. They too often carry forth their affairs unburdened by place, history or culture -- without conscience, without country, and without any sense of the pain they have caused. America is no longer a place to serve and to love. Because they have, in the name of global glories, cut themselves off from their own land, it is becoming for them increasingly a place of danger -- a place of long, grim shadows, the sort of shadows that too often conceal a foe. We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an autocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity ... a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now." The game plan of America's mandarins absolutely assumes a widening gap between the governed and the governing and between rich and poor, one that will have to be met by force of one sort or another. Those in power are prepared to do business with most favored nations abroad and to suppress least favored citizens at home. One test of the state of an empire is whether a handful of angry young men with box cutters can wreck your major economic and military edifices and throw the country into total panic. One test of the state of your culture is whether you can think of much over the past few years to which you reacted by thinking "that's the best [whatever] that I've seen-heard-read in a long time." Another test is when you find yourself saying of some public figure, "I'm sure glad such people are around at a time like this." When you can't trust your presidents of either major party, your beloved Constitution is in tatters, you have to submit to investigative fondling before flying to Des Moines, your Catholic cardinals say it's okay to bugger little boys as long as you don't do it too often and it doesn't become "notorious," a corporation thrice declared by Fortune Magazine to be the most innovative in the country turns out to be a den of thieves, the accountants who are meant to protect us from such scoundrels turn out to be co-conspirators, our lawmakers spend most of their time finding new things to prohibit, we feel we have to give kids drug tests to make sure they're safe to sing in the choir, our teachers have forgotten how to teach our children how to read, and our journalists have forgotten how to write or to tell a lie from a fact, you've got a problem and one that's not really Al-Queda's fault. Empires and cultures are not permanent and while thinking about the possibility that ours is collapsing may seem a dismal exercise it is far less so than enduring the dangerous frustrations and failures involved in having one's contrary myth constantly butt up against reality like a boozer who insists he is not drunk attempting to drive home. Instead of defending the non-existent we could turn our energies instead towards devising a new and saner existence. The drug Soma, obstacle golf, Feelie movies and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy were used in Huxley's Brave New World to placate the masses. These have been supplanted by a enormous variety of political tranquilizers ranging from actual drugs to distractions such as video games and even substitute elections such as American Idol and Survivor. Never have Americans in their off-work hours had so many ways to avoid what is really going on. Never have so many Americans been deactivated in imagination, creativity and energy by drugs prescribed by medicine rather than by taking those of their own choice. Those who would preserve the better America and recreate from its damaged remains are not naive fools; they are the new founding fathers and mothers of a time and place still to come. Nor are they fantasizing. Any place, any community, any gathering can become what Hakim Bey called a temporary autonomous zone, an oasis of freedom, decency and hope, in which a new culture can take sprout. Name it, enjoy it, use it. It's the best we have at the moment. True patriotism is an act of love, not hate. It is service not revenge, contributions not cheers, participation not prohibition, and debate not salutes. To find the real America buried in our hearts, we have to turn off the amps of propaganda and hype, the reverb and distortion of our fears and failures, and listen to the country unplugged. Some of the best things can only be heard when everything else is still. In the end, it is not the culture from which we came but the one each of us is helping to create that will matter. It is our common fate rather than our disparate pasts that will ultimately describe, redeem, or destroy us. |
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