In 1973, K-Tel celebrated (i.e., exploited for cash) Israel’s 25th anniversary. Yes, a song by Sammy Davis, Jr., a famous convert, is included.
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The day after his brilliant October 30, 1938 War of the Worlds radio production caused widespread panic, Orson Welles sheepishly met with the press to explain his intentions. How could anyone ever fully trust the voice of authority again? Audio is mediocre.
Tags: Orson Welles
“In the 1910s deodorants and antiperspirants were relatively new inventions.” (Image by Terêza Tenório.)
I’ve sat next to a lot of you on the subway this summer, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you smell like the outhouse behind a diarrhea factory. But things used to be even worse. The opening of Sarah Everts’ Smithsonian article about the birth of the underarm deodorant industry in stanky-assed America:
“Lucky for Edna Murphey, people attending an exposition in Atlantic City during the summer of 1912 got hot and sweaty.
For two years, the high school student from Cincinnati had been trying unsuccessfully to promote an antiperspirant that her father, a surgeon, had invented to keep his hands sweat-free in the operating room.
Murphey had tried her dad’s liquid antiperspirant in her armpits, discovered that it thwarted wetness and smell, named the antiperspirant Odorono (Odor? Oh No!) and decided to start a company.
But business didn’t go well—initially—for this young entrepreneur. Borrowing $150 from her grandfather, she rented an office workshop but then had to move the operation to her parents’ basement because her team of door-to-door saleswomen didn’t pull in enough revenue. Murphey approached drugstore retailers who either refused to stock the product or who returned the bottles of Odorono back, unsold.
In the 1910s deodorants and antiperspirants were relatively new inventions. The first deodorant, which kills odor-producing bacteria, was called Mum and had been trademarked in 1888, while the first antiperspirant, which thwarts both sweat-production and bacterial growth, was called Everdry and launched in 1903.
But many people—if they had even heard of the anti-sweat toiletries—thought they were unnecessary, unhealthy or both.”
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Odo-Ro-No TV ad from 1960:
Tags: Edna Murphey, Sarah Everts
In case you missed Alex Stone’s smart NYT piece yesterday about the psychology of waiting on lines, here’s the opening:
“SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.
Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.
So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.”
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Waiting on line in Akron for 23-cent pizza at Papa John’s, which is still four cents more than I would pay for it:
Tags: Alex Stone
Stanford’s driverless race car doing 120 mph. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
Wow, I had never watched this before. Paul Ryan’s favorite pro-choice atheist, Ayn Rand, interviewed by Johnny Carson in 1967. Her theories would turn the free market’s greatness into something deranged, but she did oppose the Vietnam War. The segment ran long and Buster Crabbe got bumped.
Tags: Ayn Rand, Johnny Carson
I know a good deal about the tech legend Stewart Brand–creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and author of the seminal piece of tech journalism “Spacewar,” etc.–but I didn’t realize that he was present in 1968 at Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos.” In a new Wired interview with Kevin Kelly, in which he acknowledges bio-hackers and calls for the de-extinction of bygone life forms, Brand remembers the effect Englebart’s demo had on him:
“Kevin Kelly: There was an event in San Francisco in 1968 that has come to be called ‘the mother of all demos’—when Stanford’s Doug Engelbart showed off a computer with a mouse and graphical interface. You were there. What significance did that event have for you?
Stewart Brand: It made me perpetually impatient. I saw a bunch of things demonstrated that clearly worked, and I wanted some right now, please! That demo gave a really accurate look at what was coming and made it seem so easy. But decades would go by, and it just kept not coming.
Kelly: Does that give you pause that maybe all kinds of things that look to be around the corner today—drones, magic glasses, self-driving cars—are just premature promises?
Brand: The lesson was that this is exponential technology. I don’t mean that just in terms of power or capacity—driven by Moore’s law—but also in that it starts out slow as consumers find ways to put it to use.”
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“The Mother of All Demos”:
Tags: Doug Engelbart, Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand
I don’t think the folding car is the wave of the future unless the Chinese government insists (by fiat) that it will be. But the Hiriko Fold is upon us regardless. From the Daily Mail:
“City dwellers know the most difficult part of urban driving isn’t the mental minicab drivers or suicidal cyclists, but finding a space to park the car once you have safely arrived at your destination.
But now a solution is at hand in the form of a revolutionary new car that can actually fold up to fit itself into the tiniest of gaps.
Researchers from MIT’s Changing Places group, working in collaboration with the Spanish Basque region’s development agency DENOKINN have developed the Hiriko Fold, a convenient, eco-friendly car for city commuting.”
Andy Warhol had far more lasting cultural import than the recently deceased critic Robert Hughes allowed. He sold low on the Pop Artist in a 1982 New York Review of Books piece. The opening:
“To say that Andy Warhol is a famous artist is to utter the merest commonplace. But what kind of fame does he enjoy? If the most famous artist in America is Andrew Wyeth, and the second most famous is LeRoy Neiman (Hugh Hefner’s court painter, inventor of the Playboy femlin, and drawer of football stars for CBS), then Warhol is the third. Wyeth, because his work suggests a frugal, bare-bones rectitude, glazed by nostalgia but incarnated in real objects, which millions of people look back upon as the lost marrow of American history. Neiman, because millions of people watch sports programs, read Playboy, and will take any amount of glib abstract-expressionist slather as long as it adorns a recognizable and pert pair of jugs. But Warhol? What size of public likes his work, or even knows it at first hand? Not as big as Wyeth’s or Neiman’s.
To most of the people who have heard of him, he is a name handed down from a distant museum-culture, stuck to a memorable face: a cashiered Latin teacher in a pale fiber wig, the guy who paints soup cans and knows all the movie stars. To a smaller but international public, he is the last of the truly successful social portraitists, climbing from face to face in a silent delirium of snobbery, a man so interested in elites that he has his own society magazine. But Warhol has never been a popular artist in the sense that Andrew Wyeth is or Sir Edwin Landseer was. That kind of popularity entails being seen as a normal (and hence, exemplary) person from whom extraordinary things emerge.
Warhol’s public character for the last twenty years has been the opposite: an abnormal figure (silent, withdrawn, eminently visible but opaque, and a bit malevolent) who praises banality. He fulfills Stuart Davis’s definition of the new American artist, ‘a cool Spectator-Reporter at an Arena of Hot Events.’ But no mass public has ever felt at ease with Warhol’s work. Surely, people feel, there must be something empty about a man who expresses no strong leanings, who greets everything with the same ‘uh, gee, great. Art’s other Andy, the Wyeth, would not do that. Nor would the midcult heroes of The Agony and the Ecstasyand Lust for Life. They would discriminate between experiences, which is what artists are meant to do for us.”
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“First thing I would do is put carpets in the streets”:
Tags: Andy Warhol, Robert Hughes
A cool old-school commercial for Olivetti, which was making computers with a great flair for design long before Apple.
Tags: Camillo Olivetti
Lessons learned from bacterial life forms may be used to unsnarl China’s horrible traffic. From Christopher Mims at the BBC:
“Two Chinese researchers have proved, at least theoretically, that insights borrowed from the lowly bacterium E. coli could markedly increase the throughput of a real-world traffic light in Guangzhou. No one knows what effect this could have if it were applied to an entire city, but it’s fitting that a solution from a class of algorithms that seek to mimic the collective behaviour of organisms should be applied to the teeming masses of Guangzhou’s trucks and automobiles.
Traffic lights around the world, from Guangzhou to Geneva, are managed by computerised systems housed in a metal cabinet at the side of the road, which regulate the cycle of changes from red to green to red either through fixed time periods, or through sensors in the road that can detect when a car is stationary. Both options work well when traffic is low, less so during rush hour, as any driver will tell you.
The solution Qin Liu and Jianmin Xu have proposed for improving flow during high traffic periods is what’s known as a Bacterial Foraging Optimisation (BFO) algorithm. The algorithm varies when and for how long a given light is red or green. So, for example, the algorithm has an almost traffic cop-like sense for which road at an intersection has a higher volume of traffic, and when to strategically deprioritise traffic that may be waiting on a less-used road. Simulations of a Guangzhou intersection showed that BFO-regulated lights reduce the average delay of vehicles by over 28% compared with those regulated by a fixed time cycle.
It’s part of a surprisingly rich history of applying algorithms inspired by nature to traffic light timing – researchers have applied everything from genetic algorithms to models of ant behaviour to the problem. And it’s not just traffic lights – BFO can be used on just about any engineering problem, from tuning the behaviour of simple automated control systems, such as those used to regulate the level of water in water towers, to determining the lightest and strongest configuration of structural elements in a building.”
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Godardian traffic jam, 1967:
Tags: Christopher Mims, Jianmin Xu, Qin Liu
Harvard researchers have created a soft-bodied bot capable of camouflage.
Nike touts its forthcoming eyeD technology with a futuristic promo created by Tron Legacy director, Joseph Kosinski (no relation to Jerzy). It’s a virtual athletic experience that’s supposed to translate into actual physical exercise. Well, perhaps. But way more people exercise than when Nike was founded in 1964, and way more people are obese. So we’re clearly not primarily talking about an exercise problem but one more of diet.
From the eyeD marketing materials: “Imagine being able to see what it is like to run 100m in under 10 seconds, or leap over a small forward and throw down a game-changing dunk… With Nike eyeD fans can experience more than just 2D high definition video. They can see, feel and monitor their favorites athletes through streaming Nike eyeD video (play on 2D/3D). Stereo haptics allow you feel the heart pounding thrill of elite competition from anywhere. A dynamic experience that inspires consumers to change their physical future.”
Tags: Joseph Kosinski
As President Nixon was drowning in the cesspool of Watergate, Professor Irwin Corey accepted the National Book Award in 1973 at Carnegie Hall on behalf of reclusive Gravity’s Rainbow author Thomas Pynchon.
The opening of Gravity’s Rainbow rivals that of A Tale of Two Cities and Anna Karenina:
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No lights anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall–soon–it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light only great invisible crashing.”
Tags: Irwin Corey, Thomas Pynchon'
Guitar god Les Paul and wife (and singer) Mary Ford appear on Omnibus in 1953. They play along with Alistair Cooke on a gag in which they pretend to use a Goldbergesque gadget to create their multilayered recordings. Once the jig is up, they show off the real multi–track method, which involved a gigantic tape recorder (standard size for that era) and a lot of persistence.
Tags: Alistair Cooke, Les Paul, Mary Ford
We’re born with trillions of cells and every ten years or so they’re all replaced by new ones. We go from an original to a copy to a copy of a copy to a copy of a copy of a copy and so on. Flaws set in, weaknesses emerge, the system teeters at the point of collapse. But there’s an odd beauty in the decline, in truly knowing how things fall apart. Eventually we’ll figure out how to slow the process–or stop it. That will be good, but it will be different.
Norman Mailer visits Merv Griffin in 1980 tied to the release of his fictionalized Marilyn Monroe book, Of Women and Their Elegance. “Aquarius” had settled somewhat into middle age at this point. That same year, the writer also defended the book in a hokey, interminable New York magazine piece.
Tags: Marilyn Monroe, Merv Griffin, Norman Mailer
From a recent post on Adam Curtis’ BBC blog, a recollection of a British man who convinced many in the 1950s that he had a special connection to the good people of Mars:
“To celebrate today’s successful landing on Mars I thought I would show a film of a man who claimed to have got to Mars a long time ago. He did this back in the late 1950s by communicating telepathically with the beings who inhabited the Red Planet. He also claimed that his mother went there on a UFO. And what’s more the BBC took him very seriously.
He was called George King. He was a London taxi driver who back in 1956 had a strange experience.
He was washing the dishes when he heard a voice which said
“Prepare yourself. You are about to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament.“
- At the 10:50 mark. King “contacts” our planetary neighbors:
Tags: Adam Curtis, George King
It would be a disaster if America’s Northern and Southern states separated into seas of blue and red, forming discrete nations–and it won’t happen. But it’s an interesting thought-experiment to work out in your head. What would the future hold for each if the national divide led to a mutually agreed upon division?
Chuck Thompson, author of Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession, has considered the separation–with the North being proactive about it–not as mere mental exercise but in earnest. Salon has an interview between Joshua Holland and the author. An excerpt follows.
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Joshua Holland:
So we know we have an overtly religious political culture down South, and a culture today that is pretty hostile toward organized labor. What is it in your travels or in your research that prompted you to call for Southern secession?
Chuck Thompson:
I get tired of everybody bitching about the problem. It’s like what Mark Twain said about the weather. Everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything about it. People have been having this problem with the South for my entire lifetime, and as my research pointed out to me, since even before there was a United States of America. Even in the Continental Congress, before the Declaration of Independence was signed, there were a lot of Southerners from South Carolina – particularly a family called the Rutledge family – sort of running the show back then and didn’t want any part of the United States. So a lot of the problems that have arisen between North and South have been around for a long time.
So, as I’ve said, I’ve spent a lot of my life hearing from everybody from Seattle to Savannah. Almost every American, at one time or another, has said that it’s too bad the country didn’t just split when we had the chance. We didn’t let the South go when we had the chance. We would have avoided a lot of problems. We – meaning this group in the north as we might identify ourselves – could take the country we want into a direction that we think is befitting of America without this push and pull that comes from the Southern states. At the same time the South could do the same thing.
What really led to this call for secession was understanding that a lot of people from the South are just as sick and tired of people like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid having an impact on their country as I am sick of people like Newt Gingrich and Jeff Sessions, Eric Cantor, and Haley Barbour having an impact on my country.
So why shouldn’t each of these societies that are really very different from each other in the way they approach the fundamental building blocks of society – education, religion, commerce, politics … both sides of the country really approach their problems in the way they want to put their societies together in very diametrically opposed ways. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to live in a pseudo-theocracy if they want to? If the majority of the people in a very large part of the country wants to have the Ten Commandments emblazoned in front of their legislative houses, why shouldn’t they be allowed to do so?
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If the South had won the Civil War:
Tags: Chuck Thompson, Joshua Holland
Maybe you’ve all seen this before, but I hadn’t. It’s an interview with RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan that David Frost conducted before the murderer’s sixth parole hearing. (He’s now been denied 14 times.) Alistair Cooke, who was in the main ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when the assassination was committed, provides the introduction. I normally have a problem with murderers being interviewed on-screen–were televised Charles Manson Q&A’s beneficial to humanity in any way?–but I can understand if it’s a political assassin. I would certainly take a look if there was video of John Wilkes Booth trying to explain himself.
Tags: Alistair Cooke, David Frost, Robert F. Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan
Helen Gurley Brown just passed away. She sure knew how to work that bony ass. Here she is in the ’60s surviving original shock jock Joe Pyne, touting her eyebrow-raiser Sex and the Single Girl.
Silent video from pre-Viking, pre-Rover 1972 of a collection of artist renderings which tried to approximate what Mars looked like.
Autonomous robots as earthworms, inching along, unstoppable. Be afraid.
Jackie Robinson, a trailblazer and Hall of Famer who was politically complex, brought his legendary self to What’s My LIne? in 1969, three years before his death. At the 14:40 mark.
Tags: Jackie Robinson
Selling your life–or your life insurance policy, at least–to someone who’s betting on your quick demise seems as ghoulish as peddling a kidney. But are very unpleasant and very wrong necessarily the same thing? From James Vlahos’ New York Times Magazine article on the sensitive topic:
“Selling your life and selling a house have more in common than you’d think. The seller puts a listing on the market. Prospective buyers do research and get inspections; there are offers and counteroffers until the seller accepts a bid. The seller doesn’t literally peddle his own life, of course, but his life-insurance policy. The distinction is in many ways moot, however, as the sales value is inextricably linked to a cold-eyed estimation of how much longer the seller has to live. In the case of [Ruben] Robles’s policy, a life-settlement company in Georgia, Habersham Funding, expressed interest. Escobar shipped off six boxes’ worth of Robles’s medical records, thousands of pages in all, to Habersham. The firm, in turn, analyzed the records and also had them scrutinized by an external company specializing in life-expectancy analysis. Fiedler’s recollection is that the reports confirmed the grim prognosis and that Robles had less than two years left to live.”
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Animated life-settlement discussion:
Tags: James Vlahos, Ruben Robles