An auto[-]generated channel is created when YouTube algorithmically identifies a topic to have a significant presence on the site. It might be because there are a minimum number of videos or watch views about this topic. We also determine if the quality of the set of videos in that channel meets some thresholds.Thanks, Google. Thanks a lot.
Pregnant — I mean expecting — and fearful, Lucy Ricardo has hired a tutor, Percy Livermore (Hans Conried), to ensure that she and Ricky and Fred and Ethel will speak proper English around the baby:
Mr. Livermore: We must rid our speech of slang. Now besides okay, I want you all to promise me that there are two words that you will never use. One of these is swell, and the other one is lousy.In the Degrees-of-Separation Department: My dad once said hello to Hans Conried.
Lucy: Okay, what are they?
Mr. Livermore: One of them is swell, and the other one is lousy.
Fred: Well, give us the lousy one first.
“Lucy Hires an English Tutor,” I Love Lucy, December 29, 1952.
Mitt Romney, earlier today: “No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate.” No doubt. It’s called white privilege, and Governor Romney, you’re soaking in it.
[With apologies to Madge.]
I like this brief exchange from Chris Albertson’s 1979 interview with clarinetist and alto saxophonist Russell Procope (1908–1981). From 1946 to 1974, Procope was a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Here Procope recalls his growing awareness of older musicians in the mid-to-late 1920s:
Procope: They used to talk about Joe Oliver and Johnny St. Cyr, and all those old guys, you know.The cornetist and bandleader Joe “King” Oliver was born in 1885; the banjoist and guitarist Johnny St. Cyr, in 1890. By the mid-to-late ’20s, they were past twenty-five, though hardly old. But age varies with perspective, right? Older than you is old.
Albertson: They weren’t really that old then.
Procope: Well, they were older than I was. I was about seventeen, eighteen, nineteen; they were probably about twenty-five. I called them old. [Laughs.]
At Contrapuntalism, a great statement from Nadia Boulanger: “Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.”
As more and more attractions and distractions compete for our eyes and ears, I think that the ability to pay attention, to attend, will become ever more prized in the twenty-first century.
Two related posts
Free advice for Bill McKibben
Richard Wollheim on looking at art
A philosopher and mechanic, on higher education:
When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: “All human beings by nature desire to know.” Students become intellectually disengaged.
Maybe we can say, after all, that higher education is indispensable to prepare students for the jobs of the information economy. Not for the usual reason given, namely, that there is ever-increasing demand for workers with more powerful minds, but in this perverse sense: college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality.
Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2009).
Living in the Middle Ages Todd Akin’s theorizing about rape and pregnancy dates back at least to the late thirteenth century.
[Zippy, August 21, 2012. Click for larger views.]
Dingburg poet laureate Slouch Gavitsky looks and sounds a lot like Charles Bukowski.
Related posts
Nancy + Sluggo = Perfection
Read Charles Bukowski 4 what?
[The Bukowski photograph is by Sam Cherry and appears in Post Office (1971). I found it here.]
[Henry, August 22, 2012.]
In May 2012 post on shoe repairmen as the new typewriter repairmen, I wrote: “I can remember as a boy sitting in a stall-like structure with a swinging door, waiting while new heels were put on my shoes. Was that common?”
In Henry, it still is.
*
March 29, 2013: It seems they were called “shoe booths.”
*
April 7, 2015: April 7, 2015: A recent post at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York visits a Grand Central Station shoe-repair shop with shoe booths. An earlier VNY post about Jim’s Shoe Repair (E. 59th Street) has more booths. Jeremiah Moss calls them ”modesty booths.”
Other Henry posts
Betty Boop with Henry
Henry, an anachronism
Henry and a gum machine
Henry buys liverwurst
Henry, getting things done
Henry mystery
Henry’s repeated gesture
The latest edition of the Beloit Mindset List is now available. I would call it the 2012 list, but Beloit calls it the 2016 list, to mark the anticipated year of graduation for this fall’s college freshmen. (A bit optimistic, that. Has Beloit not heard of The Five-Year Plan?) The new list, like lists before it, collects odd, tacky, and often unconvincing markers of changing times. A sampling:
“Michael Jackson’s family, not the Kennedys, constitutes ‘American Royalty.’” News to me.
“Herr Schindler has always had a List; Mr. Spielberg has always had an Oscar.” In other words, Schindler’s List received Oscars in 1994, the year of a hypothetical eighteen-year-old freshman’s birth. This item is particularly tasteless and would be so even without the grotesque pun on Oskar and Oscar. I’m surprised this item withstood institutional scrutiny.
“If they miss The Daily Show, they can always get their news on YouTube.” No, if “they” — or I — want to catch The Daily Show, the destination is thedailyshow.com.
“They have had to incessantly remind their parents not to refer to their CDs and DVDs as ‘tapes.’” The closest we’ve come to this goofy scenario in our household is with the words album and record, which do indeed still describe recorded works, analog or digital.
“Their lives have been measured in the fundamental particles of life: bits, bytes, and bauds.” Bauds?
“They have always lived in cyberspace, addicted to a new generation of ‘electronic narcotics.’” Electronic narcotics? No wonder they call it the Information Superhighway. Seriously though, the term “electronic narcotics” has little currency beyond the Beloit Mindset List. A Google search for “electronic narcotics” -beloit -2016 returns a mere 935 results.
My real objection to the Beloit Mindset List though concerns not its particulars but the mindset behind the list. As I wrote in a post on the 2010 (or 2014) list:
What bothers me about the Beloit list involves some unspoken assumptions about reality and young adults. The list reads like a nightmare-version of the proposition that begins Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” “The world is all that is the case” — all that is the case, that is, in the life-experience of a hypothetical eighteen-year-old American student.If you want to read more:
