As I discovered only after making a post earlier today, Charles Schulz marked D-Day in a number of Peanuts strips. So I looked them up:
1993 June 6No D-Day strip in 1999. The last new Peanuts strips appeared in January and February 2000.
1994 June 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
1996 June 6
1997 June 6
1998 May 31
Billy Joel: “And the piano sounds like a carnival, / And the microphone smells like a beer.”
Tom Waits: “And the carpet needs a haircut, / And the spotlight looks like a prison break.”
It took me lo these many years to realize that Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973) must have been the jumping-off point for Tom Waits’s “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King)” (1977). Here is Waits’s studio version, from the album Small Change. My favorite Waits performance of the song is from Fernwood 2 Night (August 1, 1977). In the post-performance interview with Barth Gimble (Martin Mull) and Jerry Hubbard (Fred Willard), Waits plays his part to the hilt.
And of course, in 1939 Earl Hines and His Orchestra recorded “Piano Man,” a Hines composition, no relation.
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December 26, 2019: Aw, jeez, I just discovered that I had this thought in 2017.
“This place isn’t a country. It’s a Coney Island madhouse!”
Dialogue from Escape (dir. Melvyn LeRoy, 1940), spoken by Mark Preysing (Robert Taylor), who, in 1936, comes to Germany in search of his actress mother. As he will learn, she is being held in a concentration camp.
The Barrett Watten story, cont. Wayne State’s Graduate Employees Organizing Committee has released a statement.
[Unlike the Avital Ronell story, the Watten story has attracted relatively little interest. How did I notice it? By way of a chance search, prompted by a years-ago interest in (so-called) “language poetry.”]
There are many questions to be asked about engineers:
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
Also from this novel
“At least nine characters”
The Washington Post examines the case for the “virtual school.” Conclusion: “It sure sounds good. As it turns out, it’s too good to be true.”
A related post
“Personalized learning”
[A “virtual school” is not a school. And “personalized learning” is utterly depersonalized.]
[Life, August 22, 1966.]
Click either image for larger servings.
I hadn’t thought about TV dinners in years. And then I listened to an episode of 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. The Swanson TV Dinner had only slight representation in Life. But, fittingly, there were also commercials.
An excellent podcast from the BBC: Tim Harford’s 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. Each episode (and there are more than fifty) is short and ultra-informative, with a list of sources on the podcast’s website. Concrete, cellophane, TV dinners: what will they think of next?
