Today in 1968, Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-da-Vita” reached the charts. It is said to be the first heavy metal song to chart. It charted at number 117.
That was the short version. The long version takes an entire album side:
At the other end of the charts was South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela:
Quite a selection of birthdays today, starting with T.G. Sheppard:
With excessive heat warnings and heat advisories in southern Wisconsin today and Saturday, surely Penelope Green of the New York Times knows better than us:
Modernity was born 116 years, 11 months, two weeks and two days ago, at a printing plant in the East Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, when a junior engineer named Willis Carrier devised a contraption that blew air over water-filled pipes to dry out the humidity that was gumming up the pages of a humor magazine called Judge.
And in that moment (well, within a few decades), entire industries and geographies were transformed, and new technologies made possible, including, terribly, the internet: Without cooling, there would be no server farms.
Nearly 90 percent of American households now have some form of air-conditioning, more than any other country in the world except Japan, though that will change as global warming alters more temperate zones, and swelling populations and rising incomes in hot zones mean the folks there will clamor for AC, too.
On an overheated planet, air-conditioning becomes more and more desirable, solving in the short term the problem it helped create.
Facebook Friend Michael Smith:
I was running today and was streaming iHeart radio on my phone and heard a statistic I had to check out.
There was a discussion of how our society and culture has lost its ability to laugh and it was suggested that a measure of that could be the revenue realized from comedy movies vs. all other types.
I didn’t hear the number they quoted, so I went to look for myself and dug up some interesting numbers.
It was 7.24%.
Versus 12.5% in 2016, 13.5% in 2008 and 19.6% in 2000.
Of course, some of the action and adventure movies had comedy in them but for the pure definition, 92.76% of all movies in 2018 were NOT classified as comedies.
And it looks like America is about 64% less humorous as we were in 2000. In 18 years, we have lost two thirds of our funny.
I was surprised but not surprised – surprised that the number was that low but not really after looking at the comedy movies that were released in 2018.
They all pretty much sucked.
The leading revenue generator was “Night School” with Kevin Hart.
Given that there are almost no TV comedies (at least none that don’t bash hetero men, have a stereotypical gay character or have a political agenda) that are even mildly interesting or funny and SNL is truly awful in so many ways, there is a distinct lack of comedic production in the United States.
I didn’t think a lot about how to quantify it but I could feel it. Back about 6 months or so ago, I wrote what follows, titled “What Happened to the Happy?”:
“Over the past couple of weeks, few random thoughts and observations have been ricocheting around in my quite spacious empty skull like a marble in an empty paint can.
– If America is not to be allowed to judge the cultures of others, then other cultures are not to be allowed to judge America.
– If you think policies pursued by former presidents are now bad because they are pursued by the current president, the problem isn’t the current president, it’s you.
– America seems to be losing its sense of humor, and while it is appropriate to be serious about truly serious things, what many in America consider serious are ridiculous. It seems a minority of our country believes they have a solution and spend all their waking hours looking for problems that solution can solve…and in the process, making most Americans 100% miserable.
To me, the first two are sort of basic logic and reason. It’s the last one that really bothers me – and at the risk of a double entendre – it’s not even funny.
Losing our sense of humor is something that seems unusual in American history – one of the interesting aspects of the most difficult and dangerous times in American history, wars- and particularly WWII, gave rise to great comedians, actors and musicians – Bob Hope, George Burns, Red Buttons, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, the Andrews Sisters, Vera Lynn, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Richard Burton, Kirk Douglas, Clark Cable, Audrey Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart – and Ronald Reagan to name a few…
Our entertainment industry has bought into the idea that they need to push the postmodernist agenda…and therein lies the problem. If everything is serious enough to be an issue, then nothing is funny. Many established comedians have stopped playing college venues due to this very fact – and as a result, the comedy institutions are producing young comedians who just aren’t funny, at least not to the majority of America.
Where are people like the original SNL cast, “The Not Ready For Prime-Time Players” – Laraine Newman, John Belushi, Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Garrett Morris, and Chevy Chase (even though Chevy Chase has turned into a bitter old man) or the original SCTV cast – John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Harold Ramis, and Dave Thomas? Where are comedians like Cheech and Chong, Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy?
Where is the new Mel Brooks – for Christ’s sake, this man made arguably the funniest movie of all time, Blazing Saddles, a movie based on lampooning racial stereotypes. He even made a movie called “The Producers”, the central plot of which revolved around putting on a Broadway musical titled “Springtime for Hitler”.
Can you even imagine a film like “Blazing Saddles” getting green lit by Hollywood today?
Never happen.
As I told one of my kids, when you succumb to the postmodernist idea that there are no objective standards, that truth is relative and that opinions are equal in weight to facts, it should come as no surprise that people will be offended by anything and everything can be construed to fit any narrative. It just so happens that most of the narratives today are negative and designed to punish.
This is not to say America doesn’t have serious problems – because it does – but the attention given to issues created by the social justice postmodernists is taking time away from working on the real issues and without humor, the relief needed to deal with the true seriousness is missing.
What we need is a healthy dose of MAFA – Make America Funny Again.”
It seems the quantification agrees with the feeling I had last year.
David Bowie fans might remember today for two reasons. In 1974, his “Diamond Dog” tour ended in New York City …
… six years before he appeared in Denver as the title character of “The Elephant Man.”
Tonight at 10 p.m. Central time …
… the eighth-generation Corvette gets revealed.
This is destined to be the final Corvette for one of two reasons. It is impossible for GM — the developer of such great leaps forward in automotive technology as the Chevrolet Vega (with melting aluminum engine) and Citation (prominent on the lists of the Worst Cars of All Time), Computer Command Control, V-8-6-4 engine and other examples of Not Ready for Prime Time Tech — to get this right right away, particularly when the rumored all-wheel-drive version comes out, since GM has never manufactured a rear/mid-engine all-wheel-drive vehicle.
The other reason is its price. Either the Corvette is going to be an order of magnitude more expensive than any previous Corvette, or GM won’t make money on it. GM has made money on its Corvettes for decades, but that may end now. Either way, when GM fails to make its profit expectations on this car, that certainly will kill the Corvette.
About that, Raphael Orlove writes:
I’ll start with a little digression. Back in 2007, another gigantic corporate megalith debuted a new generation of one of its classic sports car nameplates. It was controversial in its engine layout, its styling, its size, its weight, everything. But over the years people came to understand it as a legendary vehicle. I’m talking about the R35 Nissan GT-R.
What made that car such an icon was that it offered supercar performance for decidedly not-supercar prices. As we noted a few years ago, at $69,850 was about $30,000 less than a Corvette ZR-1, but not slower.
The thing is, the GT-R has grown increasingly expensive over the years and now is not just as fast as a six-figure car, but priced as a six-figure car. If you want one, you need to drop more than $100,000 for it, at which point it’s not really moving any narrative forward. It’s just a fast car that’s expensive, just like all the other ones, only it has a V6 for some reason. There’s nothing special about it.
The point is, dynamics unchanged, the price is what made the GT-R once iconic and now normal.
The same situation presents itself with the mid-engine Corvette. As anyone who has driven a C7 (or any other modern Corvette) could tell you, the way the car drives is just about faultless. It has tons of power, even in base form. The handling is great. The ride, particularly once you get into the magnetic shocks era, is outstanding. These are usable, practical, exploitable performance cars. They have been for years. There is no reason to doubt that the C8 will be, like the C7 before it, a great driving car.
But if it costs $100,000 or more, there’s no real point to it existing. What’s the point of GM, basically, making a non-turbo McLaren of a few years ago? It’s not new thematically, other than being made by GM. There’s nothing there to prove. There’s nothing meaningful going on there.
But if the car costs what a regular front-engine Corvette does now or even just above it, say, at around an R35-esque $70,000 mark, things are different. Then GM is advancing the sports car narrative. It’s then offering an exotic car platform at a non-exotic price. It’s democratizing a mid-engine powerhouse, and it’s not coming from some low-volume manufacturer. This is Corvette, not DeTomaso Panteras being sold by Lincoln-Mercury dealers.
So while everyone else sweats 0-60 times and power-to-weight figures, keep your eye focused on the MSRP. That’s the only thing here that could make a good car great.
The childlike faith in GM management is pretty disgusting to read. GM seems to believe that one of the great performance bargains in the entire world is not sufficiently exotic enough for buyers interested in Ferraris, Porsches or other overpriced yet unreliable supercars. GM is also catering to the lazy by not equipping this Corvette with a manual transmission. I’m surprised GM didn’t throw in a V-6 instead of a V-8. And, according to Jalopnik …
… a square steering wheel.
Not that this matters, since I won’t be buying one of these. In fact, thanks to my career choice and having children, I most likely won’t ever own a Corvette. As someone once put it, life’s a bitch, then you die.
Scientific research has shown that a great and fascinating — perhaps even mysterious — bond exists between dogs and human beings. They even understand human language.
The love story between dogs and humans goes back tens of thousands of years, the results of which can still be seen everywhere, every single day. Families going out with their dogs, which are carefully groomed, looking extremely healthy and happy. The pet is a real member of the family. His needs are as important to his owners as their own. Because of this close relationship, dogs have developed the ability to perfectly understand us.
Dogs are capable of understanding the emotions behind an expression on a human face. For example, if a dog turns its head to the left, it could be picking up that someone is angry, fearful or happy. If there is a look of surprise on a person’s face, dogs tend to turn their head to the right. The heart rates of dogs also go up when they see someone who is having a bad day, say Marcello Siniscalchi, Serenella d’Ingeo and Angelo Quaranta of the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Italy. The study in Springer’s journal Learning & Behavior is the latest to reveal just how connected dogs are with people. The research also provides evidence that dogs use different parts of their brains to process human emotions.
Considering these abilities, it’s not so strange that we love dogs so much.
Liberal Twitter-user Danielle (@ladypalerider) has a different explanation for people’s love for dogs, however. Wait. I should’ve written: for white people’s love for our canine comrades. According to her, “white people love dogs so much because deep down they miss owning slaves. They love the owner and master dynamic, desperate for something to control.”
The news cycle recently has been nonstop talk about Trump’s “racist” tweets and the fallout that ensued. A lot of arguing has been going on about what exactly makes them racist, with many of the usual subjects complaining that the Right is defending a “white supremacist” and even many on the Right denouncing the tweet storm as unacceptable.
One NPR opinion writer raised a few hackles when he suggested that those journalists reporting on Trump should refrain from using descriptors like “racist”.
Keith Woods is Vice President of Newsroom Training and Diversity at NPR. After the outlet made a corporate decision to use the term “racist” when describing Trump’s tweets, Woods felt the mandate violated journalistic practice and penned an op ed explaining why he thinks journalists should refrain from using the term.
I understand the moral outrage behind wanting to slap this particular label on this particular president and his many incendiary utterances, but I disagree. Journalism may not have come honorably to the conclusion that dispassionate distance is a virtue. But that’s the fragile line that separates the profession from the rancid, institution-debasing cesspool that is today’s politics.
It is precisely because journalism is given to warm-spit phrases like “racially insensitive” and “racially charged” that we should not be in the business of moral labeling in the first place. Who decides where the line is that the president crossed? The headline writer working today who thinks it’s “insensitive” or the one tomorrow who thinks it’s “racist?” Were we to use my moral standards, the line for calling people and words racist in this country would have been crossed decades ago. But that’s not what journalists do. We report and interview and attribute.
Woods goes on to say that while he’s not a journalist by trade, he respects the legacy of the profession and feels that objectivity requires reporters to drop editorializing labels, no matter how tempting.
I am not a journalism purist. I came into the profession 40 years ago to tear down the spurious notion of objectivity used to protect a legacy of sexism, xenophobia and white supremacy. The better ideals of truth telling, accountability, fairness, etc. are what give journalism its power, while the notion of “objectivity” has been used to obscure and excuse the insidious biases we do battle with today.
Woods makes the argument that journalistic integrity is greatly damaged by “obscuring” objectivity. Of course, people on the right have been saying that forever but it is especially notable to see such a point of view from a liberal outlet. The fact that one would feel compelled to describe NPR as a liberal outlet in the first place (and many do) perhaps only proves Woods’ point.
In the end, Woods implores reporters to report, and let the reader do the editorializing…for better or for worse.
It’s already nearly impossible to separate actual journalism from the argumentative noise on the cable networks that dominate so much of public perception. There are already too many journalists dancing day and night on the line that once separated fact and judgment. When that line is finally obliterated and we sink into the cesspool beckoning us to its depths, this historically flawed, imperfect tool for revealing and routing racism will look and sound indistinguishable from the noise and become just as irrelevant.
[The President’s] words mirror those of avowed racists and xenophobes that date back to the birth of this country. Was that moral judgment, my last sentence? I would argue no. I’d call it context, and it doesn’t require my opinion, just a basic understanding of history. That’s an alternative to labels: Report. Quote people. Cite sources. Add context. Leave the moral labeling to the people affected; to the opinion writers, the editorial writers, the preachers and philosophers; and to the public we serve.
We just have to do journalism.
I heartily agree with Woods. Given the death spiral the mainstream media has thrown itself into over the last decade (and the resulting 2016 electoral response) it would seem like a good business decision to leave the opining to the opiners and just report the facts.
I would also add that if we are having so much trouble agreeing on what constitutes “racist” in this case (and we are) maybe that in itself is proof that it wasn’t really racist. Either that or we’ve overused the term so much no one even knows what it really describes anymore.
Either argument works here, and that is basically the argument Woods is making – lay off the drama, report the facts, and let the consumer do the labeling.
Thomas Friedman, no one’s idea of a conservative:
I’m struck at how many people have come up to me recently and said, “Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” And in each case, when I drilled down to ask why, I bumped into the Democratic presidential debates in June. I think a lot of Americans were shocked by some of the things they heard there. I was.
I was shocked that so many candidates in the party whose nominee I was planning to support want to get rid of the private health insurance covering some 250 millionAmericans and have “Medicare for all” instead. I think we should strengthen Obamacare and eventually add a public option.
I was shocked that so many were ready to decriminalize illegal entry into our country. I think people should have to ring the doorbell before they enter my house or my country.
I was shocked at all those hands raised in support of providing comprehensive health coverage to undocumented immigrants. I think promises we’ve made to our fellow Americans should take priority, like to veterans in need of better health care.
And I was shocked by how feeble was front-runner Joe Biden’s response to the attack from Kamala Harris — and to the more extreme ideas promoted by those to his left.
So, I wasn’t surprised to hear so many people expressing fear that the racist, divisive, climate-change-denying, woman-abusing jerk who is our president was going to get re-elected, and was even seeing his poll numbers rise.
Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!
Unless, of course, there are no decent, sane Democrats.
A recent profile of Rep. Illan Omar by the Washington Post made waves because of its revelation that the congresswoman lied to a group of high school students about witnessing racism and injustice in a Minneapolis courtroom. In an anecdote lifted almost verbatim from the plot of “Les Miserables,” Omar claimed she saw a “sweet, old… African American lady,” who had spent the weekend in jail for stealing a $2 loaf of bread to feed her “starving 5-year-old granddaughter,” handed an $80 fine. Omar, unable to control her emotions, blurted out, “Bullsh—t!” in the courtroom.
But Omar’s lies aren’t nearly as revealing as when she tells the truth. In that same speech to the high schoolers, she said “I grew up in an extremely unjust society, and the only thing that made my family excited about coming to the United States was that the United States was supposed to be the country that guaranteed justice to all. So, I feel it necessary for me to speak about that promise that’s not kept.”
The promise that’s not kept. Consider the disconnect between that statement, the seething resentment behind it, and the reality of Omar’s own life story. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine an American success story more demonstrative of America keeping its promise. Omar’s family fled civil war in Somalia when she was a child and spent four poverty-stricken years in a Kenyan refugee camp before the United States, in its generosity, granted them admission to America as refugees.
Here, safe from the violence and chaos of their home country, they flourished. Omar received a college education, started a family, won election to the Minnesota State House at age 34, and two years later, became a member of Congress.
The Left Has an Inverted View of America
What, one wonders, does Omar have to say for the country that has given her so much? Mostly, that it has failed to be the Hollywood utopia she was promised as a child, that “the classless America that my father talked about didn’t exist.” Of course it didn’t exist. There’s no such thing as a classless society, anywhere. That’s something everyone learns, or should learn, as they become an adult and encounter the real world.
Instead, Omar takes it as evidence that America is based on a massive lie—a promise not kept, as if America actually promised a classless society free from inequality, poverty, and the manifold trials of human existence. According to this way of thinking, past mistakes and injustices, whether in foreign policy or civil rights, simply reveal the hypocrisy of America’s founding ideals. The United States was fatally flawed from the beginning, conceived in sin, and deserves only damnation.
Such thinking is now commonplace and mainstream. Witness the recent Fourth of July scrum of sports stars and media outlets quoting—and utterly misunderstanding—Frederick Douglass’s famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick all cited the 1852 speech as a condemnation of America for its hypocrisy, confirming their present-day animus toward their country. WBUR Boston ran a commentary piece from a young black woman about why she doesn’t celebrate the Fourth, citing Douglass’s speech and declaring the holiday “a festivity with no substance, a celebration with no soul.”
They are of course wrong. Douglass concludes his condemnation of American slavery with an appeal to America’s founding. The Constitution, he writes (in all caps), “is a “GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” and the principles of the Declaration of Independence are to him a source of hope. He wrote and believed this in the face of American injustice and oppression incomparably worse than anything we have today. So did Martin Luther King Jr., for whom the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
For Social Justice Warriors, America’s Promise Is a Lie
This is not how elites in academia, media, entertainment, and the Democratic Party see America today. That’s why corporations like Nike repudiate American symbols like the Betsy Ross flag at the slightest provocation. That’s why Democrats, including several major presidential candidates, now support reparations for slavery (Sen. Elizabeth Warren even claims America owes reparations for denying tax breaks to gay couples before the legalization of same-sex marriage). That’s why NBC News thought fit to publish a story about how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s great-great-grandfather owned slaves, and how that fact was somehow relevant to McConnell’s opposition to reparations.
For these people, America today isn’t much better than it was in Douglass’s day. There’s a telling anecdote in the Post’s Omar profile about a young political activist and fundraiser from Omar’s district named Filsan Ibrahim. Like Omar, Ibrahim and her family fled war-torn Somalia and were taken in by the United States. Like Omar, she and her sisters all went to college. And Like Omar, she has a jaundiced view of the country that adopted her:
‘All of America is focused on people’s backgrounds,’ Filsan said. ‘It’s all anyone cares about. You can’t come here and just be an American unless you are white. Otherwise you are a Somali American, an African American, an Asian American.’
‘It’s bulls—,’ her sister agreed.
‘Hilarious,’ her other sister added.
A few days later Filsan, her mother and her sisters attended a fundraiser and rally for nine Somalis who had been convicted in 2016 of trying to travel to Syria to fight on behalf of the Islamic State.
The irony is that the hyper-focus on people’s backgrounds is a feature of the left, not the right. Democrats and progressives are the ones who push for hyphenation and separation according to ethnic and sexual identities, while conservatives generally try to see people as individuals.
Ultimately, it’s both sad and frightening that Omar and these young women, for whom America has been a lifeline, can’t see that social justice culture and identity politics, which have seeped into the mainstream, have betrayed them and turned what should have been to them a great blessing—a home in America—into a curse.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 