Today in 1956, Elvis Presley made his second appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show, with Sullivan presenting Presley a gold record for …
One year later, Presley’s appearance at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles prompted police to tell Presley he was not allowed to wiggle his hips onstage. The next night’s performance was filmed by the LAPD vice squad.
One year later, Buddy Holly filmed ABC-TV’s “American Bandstand”:
Britishers with taste bought this single when it hit the charts today in 1961:
Today in 1965, the four Beatles were named Members of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth. The Beatles’ visit reportedly began when they smoked marijuana in a Buckingham Palace bathroom to calm their nerves.
The Beatles’ receiving their MBEs prompted a number of MBE recipients to return theirs. “Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war — for killing people,” said John Lennon, previewing the public relations skills he’d show a year later when he would compare the Beatles to Jesus Christ. “We received ours for entertaining other people. I’d say we deserve ours more.”
Lennon returned his MBE in 1969 as part of his peace protests.
… should be pleased with what Clint Evans reports:
Sources have indicated that the Milwaukee Brewers will change their uniforms and primary logo for the 2020 MLB season. Indeed, this would mark the first full uniform change for Milwaukee as a franchise since the 2000 season when they opened Miller Park. Remember, in 2020 Nike will take over as the official uniform supplier of MLB next season.
Furthermore, the organization will be going to a throwback classic from the past. From 1978 to 1993, Milwaukee had a classic baseball glove with a ball inside the glove logo on a lighter toned blue cap. Now, that is very similar to what the new logo will look like. Without question, this is the logo that many middle-aged fans remember the Brewers wearing during their formative years watching the club.
The team is expected to go with a pinstripe look similar to their current alternate uniform set. This will become the primary uniform set along with the new ball glove logo.
Equally important, a major Milwaukee Brewers site has also heard of the same rumor. Therefore, see the following tweet from ‘Reviewing the Brew’:
Hearing word that the #Brewers will be coming out with new primary jerseys for the 2020 season.
It’s always exciting when a team changes it’s logo or uniforms, especially if it’s a classic franchise with a rabid fan base like the Brewers. By comparison – floundering teams who change uniforms like the Miami Marlins or Cleveland Browns – don’t seem quite as exciting.
However this situation is different.
With a star player like Christian Yelich under contract and a solid manager like Craig Counsell, the Brewers have the organizational arrow pointing up entering 2020. They followed up a trip to the NLCS in 2018 with a Wildcard appearance in 2019, losing in heartbreak fashion to the Washington Nationals.
Now, the Brewers will have new uniforms in 2020 that should make their great fan base very happy. Equally important, a lot of people will run out and buy that new swag; which should in turn make Nike very happy as the official uniform supplier of MLB.
Which would mean something more like this …
1978–1990
… or this …
1990–93
… than this:
2000–present (multiple alternate uniforms not included)
I wasn’t especially a fan of the ball-in-glove look, which frankly ripped off teams with actual tradition, namely the Yankees. I also am not a fan of baby blue road uniforms, though as a blue team the Brewers were more appropriate for blue (as were the Royals, the Cubs — though white-pinstripes-on-blue is an abomination — and the Blue Jays) than the White Sox, Cardinals and Phillies.
Blue and gold is an accident anyway. Those were the colors of the 1969 Seattle Pilots …
… which hurriedly became the Brewers, thanks to stitch-pulling instruments, when Bud Selig purchased the Pilots (who managed to go bankrupt during their first season, believe it or don’t) during 1970 spring training.
Selig’s original idea was to emulate the Milwaukee Braves’ navy blue and red color scheme. (As if there aren’t enough teams wearing that color scheme now.)
But the uniforms the Brewers have worn since the year before Miller Park opened (they were supposed to debut in Miller Park, but the 1999 fatal crane accident delayed the stadium opening by a year) are quite uninspired, especially the name and number fonts. (Times New Roman? Really?) They have been augmented, if that’s what you want to call it, by navy blue (“Brewers” and “Milwaukee”), Spanish-language (“Cerveceros”), German-named (“Bierbrauer”), gold and even green and red (the Italian-themed “Birrai”) jerseys since then.
The MB-logo uniforms have always been more popular, perhaps partly because of the blah nature of the current uniforms, though more likely because of the success of those days. (As in one World Series appearance and a division half-title, and a few non-playoff winning seasons.) By that measure the current Brewers uniforms should be as popular since they have been worn during four postseasons, though no World Series visits.
I have argued here before that the Brewers really should adopt beer colors, such as black (for dark beer), gold (obviously) and cream (since Milwaukee is the Cream City). However, no one is paying attention to my correct views. (As usual.) Therefore, I suppose the question is whether the Brewers will go with navy blue (now) or royal blue (before the 1994 “Motre Bame” uniforms) and metallic gold (now) or yellowgold (first version) colors.
Today in 1963, the Beatles played two shows in Sundstavagen, Sweden, to begin their first tour of Sweden. The local music critic was less than impressed, claiming the Beatles should have been happy for their fans’ screaming to drown out the group’s “terrible” performance, asserting that the Beatles “were of no musical importance whatsoever,” and furthermore claiming their local opening act, the Phantoms, “decidedly outshone them.”
Three thoughts: Perhaps the Beatles did have a bad night. But have you heard a Phantoms song recently? It is also unknown whether the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” was intended as revenge against the Swedes.
One year later, a demonstration of why the phrase “never say never” holds validity: Today in 1964, the Rolling Stones made their first appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show.
A riot broke out in the CBS studio, which prompted Sullivan to say, “I promise you they’ll never be back on our show again.” “Never” turned out to be May 2, 1965, when the Stones made the second of their six performances on the rilly big shew.
This is, according to the News Media Alliance, Free Speech Week.
(Which I found out too late to include that in the newspaper this week. Media companies and organizations are notorious for bad internal communication.)
Do you remember what it was like to not be able to get the answer to an elusive question as soon as you asked it? Like how long sea turtles live? Or how far away is the sun? Or the name of that actor from that one movie? Before the omni-present Google and smartphone, these answers were likely missing (or required a lot of work to find). So when these questions came up in the past, conversation would stop.
That’s because the language of America is our common understanding of the facts of the world. Knowledge is a type of social currency, allowing us to converse and tackle the problems we collectively face. Without it, no democratic system can continue to function.
These common understandings tie us together. They allow us to communicate effectively and work together. When they are absent or under stress, like they are at this moment in society, it may sometimes feel like we will never recover that common language. But journalists are out there every day on the front lines to uncover the facts and understandings that will allow us to find our way back to a more productive democracy where decisions can be made based on mutually agreed-upon facts.
To fortify and flourish, we need to protect free speech. Journalists must be able to do their jobs without fear of censorship so that readers have unfettered access to the facts. Free speech is our most important tool in challenging abuses of power. It was a team of journalists at the Indianapolis Star that broke the Larry Nassar scandal, leading to his imprisonment this year. It was journalists who revealed the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and journalists who dug into Donald Trump’s suspected tax schemes. We’ve witnessed these brave men and women go into storm surges, disasters and war zones to bring us the news.
Yet across the globe, we have also seen egregious attacks on the press. Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was captured and murdered for practicing his profession; a shooter entered the Capital Gazette newsroom, killing five members of their staff; The Boston Globe received bomb threats – to name a few. So far, 43 journalists this year have been killed simply for reporting the news. These attacks, while unbelievably tragic in their own right, are also denying citizens their right to be informed. They are silencing the language of America.
This year during Free Speech Week, we must remember the sacrifices of these individuals and demand better protections for the Fourth Estate. The freedom of the press is a fundamental principle of the United States and one we must seek to protect.
The News Media Alliance has joined Reporters Without Borders and other organizations to encourage voters in the U.S. to ask their congressional candidates ahead of the midterm elections where they stand on press freedom. I urge you to speak with your elected officials and work to secure free speech and protections for journalists so that the language of America may thrive.
A majority of Americans believe the First Amendment should be rewritten and are willing to crack down on free speech, as well as the press, according to a new poll.
More than 60 percent of Americans agree on restricting speech in some way, while a slim majority, 51 percent, want to see the First Amendment rewritten to “reflect the cultural norms of today.” The Campaign for Free Speech, which conducted the survey, said the results “indicate free speech is under more threat than previously believed.”
“The findings are frankly extraordinary,” executive director Bob Lystad told the Washington Free Beacon. “Our free speech rights and our free press rights have evolved well over 200 years, and people now seem to be rethinking them.”
Of the 1,004 respondents, young people were the most likely to support curbing free expression and punishing those who engage in “hate speech.” Nearly 60 percent of Millennials—respondents between the ages of 21 and 38—agreed that the Constitution “goes too far in allowing hate speech in modern America” and should be rewritten, compared to 48 percent of Gen Xers and 47 percent of Baby Boomers. A majority of Millennials also supported laws that would make “hate speech” a crime—of those supporters, 54 percent said violators should face jail time.
American hostility to the First Amendment did not stop at speech. Many would also like to see a crackdown on the free press. Nearly 60 percent of respondents agreed that the “government should be able to take action against newspapers and TV stations that publish content that is biased, inflammatory, or false.” Of those respondents, 46 percent supported possible jail time.
The poll was released just two days after two University of Connecticut students were arrested for allegedly saying racial slurs in a viral video. The 21-year-old suspects were allegedly playing “a game in which they yelled vulgar words,” according to the police report. Lystad said such incidents and the rise of social media may be behind the increased willingness of Americans to curb speech rights.
“I think [our findings] are fueled in large part because of a rise of hate speech, but traditionally, hate speech is protected in the First Amendment,” Lystad said. “The Supreme Court has upheld that principle time and time again.”
Lystad launched the Campaign for Free Speech to advocate for preserving free and open dialogue in America. The group emphasizes that hate speech should be denounced, but does not think censorship is the answer. The group plans to push back against efforts to restrict speech at the local, state, and federal levels.
“Hate speech should be condemned, but legally, the answer to speech we don’t like is more speech, not censorship,” he said. “Our primary focus is education, and to help people better understand the First Amendment, free speech, free press, and why it’s so vital to our democracy.”
If that poll is accurate, it proves that a majority of Americans (that is, those who support restrictions on free speech) are idiots who should start restricting free speech by shutting the hell up. I will not. Ever.
PJ Media reports that Andrew Yang is still a Democratic vice presidential candidate:
Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, a Democratic presidential candidate, referred to job loss in the journalism field as a “tragedy” in America and proposed investing “public resources” to help support the news business.
Past studies have shown journalism to be among the worst career choices based on average annual income.
Now they tell me.
“Now you have all these measurements attached to any piece of journalism that you produce that did not exist a generation ago. It’s like, ‘how did that piece perform? How many clicks did it get?’ And the natural incentives are for you to become a little bit more aggressive and a little bit more sensationalist with the headline or the angle,” Yang said during a newsmakers event at the National Press Club on Monday.
“And that’s just the way the industry is unfolding because the almighty market is pulling all the strings so if you want to change that in communities you have to actually put some public resources to work,” he added.
Yang noted that he is personally familiar with the struggles of working journalists and aspiring journalists so he is “passionate” about addressing the challenges facing the industry.
“You all do great work. We need to make it so you can do your jobs without fearing getting fired the next day because your stuff didn’t get enough traffic,” Yang said.
Yang said American society should “find a way to support local journalism” even if the free market isn’t supporting its existence.
“If you believe in democracy you have to believe in journalism, particularly at the local level — over 1,200 local newspapers have gone out of business in the last number of years and we all know why. They used to have classified ads and revenue from those ads and now those ads went to the cloud and Craigslist and they didn’t have a new source of revenue to replace it,” he said.
“Studies have shown if you lose your local newspaper, voting becomes more polarized because you don’t know what’s going on in your town anymore and so you just vote along party lines and you have lower levels of government accountability as a result,” he added.
Yang continued, “So that is why I proposed a local journalism fund that would help create cooperative ownership business models and in some cases partner with philanthropy to help create sustainable models of journalism in communities around the country.”
Yang also said the “problem right now is if you are a newspaper, it’s not enough for you to break even. You have to make enough money to keep your shareholders happy and in some cases, those shareholders are private equity firms and hedge funders that bought your paper and then consolidated them.”
According to Yang’s campaign website, the $1 billion fund would operate “out of the FCC” and “make grants to companies, non-profits, and local governments and libraries to help local newspapers, periodicals and websites transition to sustainability in a new era.”
“It’s that or let local journalism die, which I don’t think anyone is in favor of,” Yang said on Monday.
Having government fund the media is absolutely, positively the wrong answer. Then newspapers will be reporting what the government wants them to report, of which we have far too much already.
This, however, is not Yang’s only bad idea, as Graham Piro reports:
Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang said the United States may have to eliminate private car ownership to combat climate change during MSNBC’s climate forum at Georgetown University Thursday morning.
He told MSNBC host Ali Velshi that “we might not own our own cars” by 2050 to wean the United States economy off of fossil fuels, describing private car ownership as “really inefficient and bad for the environment.” Privately owned cars would be replaced by a “constant roving fleet of electric cars.”
A video posted by the GOP War Room shows Velshi asking Yang what measures he sees the world taking to fight climate change by 2050.
“You have this ability to envision the future, right, with your proposals on universal basic income. You’ve played the whole chess game out and you see what it looks like on the other end. Play the chess game out on climate change,” Velshi said. “What does the world look like to you in 2050? What physically do you think we will do differently than we do today that will result in us fighting climate change?”
“Well I mentioned before that we might not own our own cars. Our current car ownership and usage model is really inefficient and bad for the environment,” Yang said.
“You guys all probably agree with this because you’re quite young,” he told the Georgetown University crowd, adding an anecdote about driving a 1985 Honda Accord as a young man.
Yang then proposed an alternative to individuals owning their own cars.
“What we’re really selling is not the car, it’s mobility,” he said. “So if you have mobility that’s then tied into a much more, if you had like, for example, this constant roving fleet of electric cars that you would just order up, then you could diminish the impact of ground transportation on our environment very, very quickly.”
Yang’s climate plan calls for nearly $5 trillion in spending over the next 20 years. His proposal includes embracing the impacts of climate change.
“Move our people to higher ground. Natural disasters and other effects of climate change are already causing damage and death. We need to adapt our country to this new reality,” his plan states.
The plan also includes a zero emissions standard for all new cars by 2030 and hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in emission-free ground and air transportation.
I was out and about this afternoon and got tired of the crap that passes for music these days, so I flipped to the 80’s on 8 channel on Sirius XM and “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins was on – and I immediately thought of this scene from Miami Vice and remembered how cool I thought it would be to be rolling in that black Ferrari Daytona with Sonny and Tubbs…
But I also thought about how our situation today is like and unlike the 80’s at the same time.
We had a Republican president whom the left despised, just like today and they were out to get him through non-elective methods, too. Remember Col. Oliver North and Iran/Contra? We were also coming out of the economic “malaise” and “stagflation” of the Carter years (as we are the Obama years).
But I also remember it being a happier time when politics didn’t totally consume the entertainment industry and the newswires.
If our entertainment mirrored culture, look at what we watched:
– Magnum P.I. (the real one)
– Miami Vice
– Night Court
– The A-Team
– The Dukes of Hazzard
– The Wonder Years
– WKRP in Cincinnati
There’s not a single one exploring the collapse and rebirth of families and the damage that ensues (A Million Little Pieces, This Is Us), pushing alternative lifestyles (Gray’s Anatomy, Will and Grace) or every TV series trying to be woker than the next.
In short, the 80’s were fun, the 10’s have not been.
Fun has become the enemy of our culture rather than a part of it. The evidence lies in the fact that almost none of the great movies or TV shows of the 80’s could be made today. The social justice warriors would never permit it. We can’t just be entertained, we must be scolded until we learn our lesson. It’s almost like we are supposed to feel bad about ourselves after each episode and spend the next 12 hours in navel gazing introspection.
I sorely miss Reagan and the optimism of the Reagan years. If we had a little of that, there is no limit to what we could do.
Smith then added:
Sometimes (and by “sometimes”, I really mean “often”), when I write something, I put words into electrons that are unintentionally intelligent or bear further discussion. I did this yesterday when, in celebration of Crockett and Tubbs (and the 80’s), I wrote:
“I sorely miss Reagan and the optimism of the Reagan years. If we had a little of that, there is no limit to what we could do.”
Thanks to all the folks who liked (or hated) it enough to comment, I was looking a that this morning and had another thought about our current circumstances.
I asked myself a question. I said, “Self, let me ask you something … what is it from the 80’s that the contemporary Democrats fear most?”
And after Self thought about it, he (being that I identify as a cisgendered heterosexual male of pallor with the pronouns of he, him and sire) said, “Optimism. That’s what they fear.”
More than anything, that’s really why they hated Ronald Reagan. After Carter’s disastrous turn at the wheel (the Iran hostage crisis, the failed rescue and getting bitch slapped by OPEC), Reagan made America feel good about itself again. He was clear about our greatest geopolitical enemy (about the only thing Mitt got right in 2012) and faced them head on until he broke them. He cut taxes and brought the economy back but more than that, his affable and engaging style made people feel good about themselves.
For years the Democrats have debased the language, eroded civility and destroyed tradition – and simply crushed anyone who tried to speak plainly, engage nicely and tried to keep within established boundaries. They are the ones who defined the rules by which one must fight if one has a chance win. Maybe Trump is an abrasive ass – but that’s the kind of person it takes to win – the gentleness of Reagan or the nice guy, milquetoast affectations of Bush I, Dole, Bush II, McCain or Romney wouldn’t get it done (even when Dub won, he still bent toward the Democrats).
I actually think Trump is a product of the times. He is the way he is because his environment forces him to be that way. Given different circumstances, it is entirely possible we would see a completely different side of him.
I get a feeling we are seeing the first half of Alexandre Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask play out in real time.
What is missing is optimism … and what Democrats know is that optimism is contagious. Because it is, they know they have to keep everything negative and in chaos so that people have no opportunity to realize that things have gotten measurably better and can become even more so with a little confidence.
No wonder they are such sour scolds.
Consumers of unhappiness always are.
Moreover, those whose support of this nation is based on whether or not they are in charge are bound to be unhappy as well, since the electorate swings back and forth between voting for Democrats and voting for Republicans despite their best efforts to portray conservatives as the embodiment of evil, even though evil is a concept they really don’t buy.
As someone who graduated from high school and college in the ’80s, I can attest that not everything about ’80s culture and entertainment was great, not to mention politics. If you were a UW–Madison student you were bombarded on a daily basis by tales of the evil Ronnie Raygun and how he was too senile to blow up the world in his first term in office, but was certainly malevolent enough to blow up the world should he be reelected in 1984. For four years this state had Tony Earl, sort of Wisconsin’s answer to Jimmy Carter if Carter had spent his adult lifetime in government, as governor. And there were the fortunes of UW and Packer football, which went from fair to good in the early ’80s to the disaster of 1988, when the BADgers and pACKers combined for a 5–22 record.
(Taking one of those Facebook quizzes about the ’80s that included references to shows I didn’t watch, such as “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” made me remember that during the ’80s I didn’t exactly feel like I fit in, since there was at least some popular music and a great deal of popular TV I despised and refused to, in order, listen to or watch. I didn’t race out and buy a white blazer because of “Miami Vice,” nor did I own parachute pants, and my Members Only jacket wasn’t actually from Members Only. That sense of cultural alienation trained me well for being in journalism, where you’re supposed to be an outsider. Either my life in the ’80s was a whole lot better than I probably thought it was at the time, or I remember my life in the ’80s as being better than it actually was.)
On the other hand, the properly disdained “We Built This City” looks like inspired art compared to some of what fills air time on contemporary hits radio today. It’s hardly surprising that Smith’s aforementioned adventure/dramas have either been remade on TV …
… or as a movie:
The voters get it wrong at least as often as they get it right (which is why you should never rely on the voters’ getting it right), but at least they got it right in 1980 and 1984 with Reagan and 1988 with George H.W. Bush (who was unquestionably better than any Democrat running in 1988 would have been), and 1986 with Tommy Thompson.
Smith is correct that politics didn’t inundate our lives in the ’80s, even though there was more daily politics at UW–Madison than in normal places. The culture was also less forgiving of public statements that are self-evidently stupid, such as the idea that there are more “genders” than male and female, or that anyone’s free expression is valid whether or not there’s anything correct, logical, moral or sensical about whatever they have to say. (But I was used to that from UW, where one day I read an assertion that Jesus Christ looked like Yasser Arafat.)
Someone wondered on social media how a generation raised on “South Park” could have become so emotionally fragile and prone to offense at the slightest imagined excuse. I have no answer for that, since I come from the ’80s, the decade of irony and sarcasm, courtesy of David Letterman. (“Dukes of Hazzard” reruns haven’t been shown on TV due to the Confederate flag painted on the roof of the Duke boys’ car, the General Lee.)
Trump came into prominence in the “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” ’80s, where celebrities started to exert inappropriate influence on the culture, so maybe it’s appropriate he is now president.
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