The first gold record — which was only a record spray-painted gold because the criteria for a gold record hadn’t been devised yet — was “awarded” today in 1942:
The number one British album today in 1968 was the Four Tops’ “Greatest Hits”:
UW-Madison journalism doctoral student Michael Mirer complains in the Washington Post:
You might think that one of the nation’s leading academic communication programs would be a good place to make a long-distance phone call.
Yet there I was on a cold January morning, the interview I needed to get less than 15 minutes away, panic mounting as each attempt to dial out on my department-issued speakerphone produced an electronic wail rather than a ring tone. I’m writing my dissertation on how Web sites owned by sports teams and leagues challenge our society’s most deeply held values about journalism. I collect my data by talking to the people who work for these sites. I need a working phone. My cell was acting as my voice recorder, so I couldn’t use it to make calls — not that the reception in my office is good enough to be trusted.
During one of the many rounds of budget cuts the University of Wisconsin has endured over the past few years, the department ended all nonessential long-distance service. This was essential to me, I explained to the front-office staff. I am hoping to log about 25 hours of interviews with people who are outside the university’s 608 area code. Long-distance phone calls cost less than 4 cents per minute; the entire project would cost about $60, surely something could be worked out? Could I pay for it myself? Write a grant? They didn’t think so.
There’s no using the telephone in, of all places, the communication department. The budget is too tight. The phone jack in my office is a vestige of a time when the state invested in higher education. …
I found a workaround for my phone problem. That day it involved using a phone line that turned out to belong to another unit in our building, so I shouldn’t have used it. The department staff found me a line in one of the research labs that should work, although it didn’t the first time. A professor on my PhD committee had just reactivated her own long-distance calling for research purposes and offered me the use of her phone, when she’s not using it. Or I can use Skype, which is glitchy and takes lousy recordings on the computer I’m holding together with masking tape. I’ll be able to get the job done, but barely. Sort of like what the university has done in the past few years.
Facebook Friend and author Virginia Postrel describes this as “self-parody,” and that Mirer’s screed is “beyond stupid. I can only conclude that the guy is somehow in Scott Walker’s employ. It’s like an extended argument for shutting down the UWM school of journalism and communications, or at least its Ph.D. program. They’re letting in idiots.”
If Wisconsin taxpayers wonder how a doctoral dissertation on “how Web sites owned by sports teams and leagues challenge our society’s most deeply held values about journalism” advances mankind, well, you’re not alone.
One person who tried to defend this, and got hammered, had to admit:
Look: this guy’s kind of a schmuck. Let’s not paint all student journalists with the schmuck brush.
Yeah, well, you’d hope someone who spent at least six years in college to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both of which considerably subsidized by your tax dollars, would not be a schmuck.
Another comment pointed out:
He is writing about websites owned by sports teams… I am pretty sure that the closet that comes to journalism is that they both involve words. Give me a guy writing his PhD on exposing public or private corruption or generally making the world a better place. But sports websites? Seriously? Why do I get the feeling his best friend is a PhD candidate over in Engineering that is upset he can’t get enough AA batteries to finish his dissertation on the evolution of Pokemon on Gameboy.
Another person in academia, though apparently with common sense, adds:
I’ve been in this profession for a quarter century, and there has never been a time where we’ve not said “we are barely scraping by.” Your use of resources always expand to what the resources are and then it seems like you are “barely scraping by.” There is lots of fat to cut in academica, folks.
Another comment makes you wonder how much Mirer has learned in his six-plus years at our state’s world-class university:
The danger of using personal anecdotes to introduce a policy oriented article is that readers will conclude from the anecdote that you are an idiot before they get to your argumentation. When I was last interviewed for an NPR story the reporter taught me how to record the interview on my smartphone, took about 20 seconds.
My own smartphone, which is really not very state-of-the-current-art (the purchase price was right), records and plays back all of my pregame coach interviews, whether on the phone or in person. It also includes pregame music. I have even announced games on it. I also chronicled damage from tornadoes onto Facebook, apparently making me the only media person live on the scene (or whatever “live” means online) immediately following the tornadoes.
I note that not to brag about my professional abilities or my technological expertise, because, as Postrel points out …
… as a professional journalist since 1982 I have utter contempt for someone in 2015 who cannot figure out how to record off a cell phone (even without involving Skype or similar services). I do it all the time. It is a basic professional skill, requiring minimal equipment
At some point, journalists have to learn resourcefulness. Media outlets are notorious, and have always been, for not entirely adequately equipping their reporters and other in-field people. (Total cost of my sound and recording and camera apps: Zero.)
But the contempt in Postrel’s previous paragraph pales in comparison to what follows:
Although I do believe that communications (aka rhetoric) is a legitimate and important field of study, it is also the unfortunate case that it exists primarily to provide easy majors for people who want to spend their college years partying or playing sports or both. I’m skeptical about whether journalism schools should exist at all.
Arguments against the proposed $300 million in UW System funding cuts should be made by someone who can use facts and logic. That apparently does not include Mirer. On the other hand, if the saying “Those who can’t do, teach” is accurate, he’s perfect for academia … unless the UW System takes up Postrel’s proposal.
Jonah Goldberg on Gov. Scott Walker, apparently now the favorite to win the Iowa Republican Caucus:
A new Des Moines Register poll has Walker in first place — narrowly — among likely Republican caucus-goers. With Mitt Romney included in the poll, Walker was the respondents’ first choice with 15 percentage points. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was second with 14 percentage points and Romney third with 13. With Romney out, Walker rose to 16 percentage points and Paul to 15. First place in a tightly packed field is better than any of the alternatives, but it’s not that big a deal this far out.
The big deal is the vanilla factor (which sounds like a terribly boring spy novel). According to the Register story that accompanied the poll, 51 percent of caucus-goers want an “anti-establishment candidate without a lot of ties to Washington or Wall Street who would change the way things are done and challenge conventional thinking.” Meanwhile, 43 percent prefer a more establishment figure “with executive experience who understands business and how to execute ideas.”
Walker is in the golden spot. He can, like Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day” listening to Andie MacDowell explain the perfect man, reply “that’s me” to almost everything Republicans say they want. Executive experience? Challenge conventional thinking? Anti-establishment fighter? “Me, me, me.”
Respondents looking for an establishment candidate said Romney was their first choice. Those preferring an outsider said Paul was their first choice. But both groups said their second choice was a big scoop of Walker.
Of course, this can all change. No matter how palatable it is, people can still grow weary of vanilla, and Walker may melt under the pressure. Though having won three statewide elections in four years — in liberal Wisconsin! — that’s unlikely.
If you’re Jeb Bush, Paul, Ted Cruz or one of the other candidates — official and unofficial — Walker should have you worried. With the arguable exceptions of Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Bobby Jindal, right now right now most of field is made up of boutique flavors, intensely popular among some, intensely unpopular among others.
Pundits talk of the “establishment versus tea party” rift in the GOP as a recent development. The truth is this schism is more like a permanent feature of Republican politics.
Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich fought the forces of Thomas Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller, Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush with hammers and tongs for decades, losing many early battles and winning later ones. Richard Nixon brilliantly played both sides against the other, alternating between establishmentarian noblesse oblige and populist hostility to the “Georgetown set” whenever it served his purposes.
These squabbles often took an ideological color, but they were sometimes simply bare-knuckle fights over who got control of the levers of power within the party. For example, even today, the ideological differences between the anti-establishment Cruz and that supposedly wan vassal of entrenched power, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are quite small.
Bush is doing a phenomenal job of securing support from big GOP donors. As a result, the Beltway news corps has dubbed him the front-runner. “Republicans have a tradition of picking an anointed one early,” Karen Tumulty and Matea Gold of the Washington Post write. “That establishment candidate almost always ends up with the nomination, although not without a fight and some speed bumps along the way.”
Yes and no. The anointed one and the establishment candidate are not necessarily the same person. And what counts as “the establishment” is often a moving target.
Just consider the Bushes. George H.W. Bush ran as the establishment candidate and lost to the anointed candidate in 1980. George W. Bush thought he was anointed in 2000 but ended up having to run as an anti-establishment candidate (recasting himself as a “reformer with results”). Ultimately, both got elected, but only after finding peak vanilla. Jeb Bush is a long way from that.
The number one single today in 1963:
Today in 1964, three years to the day from their first appearance as the Beatles, the Beatles made their first appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew:
The number one single today in 1974:
The number one single today in 1991:
The number one album today in 1969 was the soundtrack to NBC-TV’s “TCB,” a special with Diana Ross and the Supremes and the Temptations:
The number one album today in 1975 was Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks”:
Today in 1969, Jim Morrison of the Doors was arrested for drunk driving and driving without a license in Los Angeles:
The number one British album today in 1970 was “Led Zeppelin II”:
The number one single today in 1970:
At our house, we’ve been eating the fantastic chili left over from what we ate during Super Bowl XLIX.
There are other leftovers from Super XLIX, including speculation about Seahawks coach Pete Carroll’s inexplicable last play call.
NFL Nation’s Rob Demovsky asks WWMD:
Perhaps you’ve asked yourself what the Green Bay Packers would have done if they had been in the Seattle Seahawks‘ shoes at the New England Patriots‘ 1-yard line with the final seconds of Super Bowl XLIX ticking way.
Would coach Mike McCarthy have done like the Seahawks and called a pass play? Or would he have given the ball to one of his bruising backs, Eddie Lacy or John Kuhn?
History tells us either option would have been in play.
According to ESPN Stats & Information, the Packers had 19 goal-to-go plays from their opponents’ 1-yard line during the regular season. They threw the ball on 10 of them. On those 10 plays, quarterback Aaron Rodgers completed five passes — all for touchdowns.
On the nine runs, they scored five touchdowns. Lacy carried in six of those nine plays, and scored four times. Kuhn got the ball twice and didn’t score on either one. Rodgers took it once, on a sneak against the Detroit Lions in Week 17, and scored.
In the playoffs, the Packers had two more snaps with just 1-yard to go for a touchdown. They ran on both, and failed on both — once by Kuhn and once by Lacy. They came on consecutive plays — second-and-goal from the 1 and third-and-goal from the 1 — in the first quarter of the NFC Championship Game at Seattle. They tried Kuhn up the middle on second down, and the officials initially ruled he scored. However, upon further review from the replay booth, Kuhn was ruled down just short of the goal line. On the next play, Lacy ran off left guard didn’t come close to the goal line. On both plays, the Packers were in their jumbo package with seven offensive linemen, two backs and a tight end.
The Packers’ final percentages looked like this: Including playoffs, they ran the ball on 52.4 percent of their goal-to-go plays from their opponents’ 1-yard line and threw it on 47.6 percent of those plays. Their success rate was 45.5 percent when running the ball in those situations and 55.5 percent throwing it.
This is interesting, but an imperfect analysis because there was no comparable situation to having the ball on the opponent’s 1-yard line with seconds remaining. It seems obvious with one time out remaining that you have time to run the ball, and if, in Sunday’s case, Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch doesn’t get in the end zone, you can use your last time out and set up third-down and fourth-down plays.
The bigger issue to me isn’t necessarily passing instead of running. The Seahawks have a mobile quarterback in Russell Wilson. They could have run the read option with Wilson. They also could have (and this would have been my choice had I been in Carroll’s shoes) run a run/pass option play, where Wilson would roll out and, depending on what was available, run it in himself or thrown it into the end zone.
If you think you have to pass, the number one priority, with one time out, is do not turn over the ball. (If you don’t have a time out, that’s priority 1A; priority 1B is to make sure the clock stops, by going or throwing out of bounds.) So throwing the ball into the middle of the Patriots defense — which, remember, has only 11 yards to have to defend, the 1-yard line and the end zone — is the worst possible play call.
The Seahawks’ decision to pass instead of run seems even stranger when you consider that none of the Seahawks’ receivers are nearly as good as the Packers’ Jordy Nelson and Randall Cobb. Wilson may become as good a quarterback as Aaron Rodgers, but Wilson isn’t there yet. It’s hard for me to imagine Rodgers throwing the pass Wilson threw; he would have fired the ball into the seats instead of throwing into all those white shirts.
The Super Bowl now is watched almost as much for the commercials and halftime show (which featured a lion-ish-looking thing, which prompted the observation that that is the first time a Lion has gotten into a Super Bowl) as much as for the game. The Federalist picks apart two of those commercials:
1) Nissan “With Dad”
This ad was the first really bad one to air. It’s about a father missing all of his child’s milestones because he was at work (as a race car driver) and then showing up at the end in a shiny red car as if this makes up for it. To make matters worse, the ad used Harry Chapin’s “Cat in the Cradle,” as the music. That’s a song about how fathers too busy to be with their sons end up having sons too busy to spend time with their fathers. It’s horribly depressing.
If one assumes that Nissan has a goal of selling automobiles with this ad, one must assume that the ad executives thought they were portraying this absentee father sympathetically. And with 24 million children in America living in homes without fathers, this isn’t a great idea. The Nissan child wouldn’t even qualify as a child living in a home without a father, he just has a father too busy to spend time with him. But father absence plays a significant role in poverty, emotional and behavioral problems, infant mortality, incarceration, crime, teen pregnancy, child abuse, sexual abuse, alcohol and substance abuse, and educational lags. Showing up one day with a new red car isn’t really a solution to all of these problems.
The worst part of the ad? He doesn’t even let his son drive. Worst car ad ever.
2) Nationwide “Make Safe Happen”
Easily the worst of the Superbowl ads was Nationwide insurance’s ad about how your kid is going to die and it will be your fault and so you should buy insurance for when that happens. It’s just as bad as it sounds. A kid starts talking about how he won’t ever learn to ride a bike, kiss a girl or fly because he will be killed. And then it goes to the tub where he drowns. And the sink where he swallows a bunch of poison.
What’s the problem? Insurance is all about the fact that bad things happen in life, right?
Sure. But the tagline of the commercial is “Make Safe Happen” and Julia Roberts, I believe, says “Together we can make safe happen.” This is not true. We will never be safe and we need to understand that. Parents, in particular, need to grasp this. They are trying so hard to keep anything bad from happening to their kids that they’re willing to sacrifice any amount of childhood to obtain it. The very worst thing that could happen is for parents to become more obsessively concerned about keeping their kids safe from all risk. …
This helicopter parenting mentality is what causes Child Protective Services to be called when fully functioning children walk a short distance home from the park. This is what leads neighbors to fret over children mowing lawns. This is why playgrounds have become boring and why young adults know next to nothing about proper decision-making and calculation of risk.
This ad is everything that’s wrong with childhood in America. Although it did lead to some funny tweeting:
OK, that’s rather tasteless, but if it doesn’t cut too close to home to you, that would be funny. As for the Nissan ad (which some claim was misread), the use of Chapin’s maudlin dreck made me think of how Chapin died. Yes, a car crash, because Chapin was a legendarily bad driver and didn’t have a driver’s license during his last drive.
A comment added:
The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Rolling Stones No. 2”:
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1982 …
… from the number one album, the J. Geils Band’s “Freeze Frame”:
Facebook Friend Michael Smith:
Americans are “disquieted” because America doesn’t do second place. For the better part of two centuries, America was the place everybody wanted to be, an American was who everyone wanted to be and the world looked to America for leadership from everything – economics, science, law and even for morality. America doesn’t “lead from behind”.
That is why American’s seem lethargic and despondent. We are not a nation of followers, we never have been and the world is suffering because we aren’t leading.
The world is in chaos today for two reasons:
1. There are countries, political systems, and religions in the world that are using the chaos to damage and weaken America. It is to their benefit to keep the instability going as long as possible to do as much damage as possible.
2. American leadership is missing from the world today. Over the past 100 years, global crises were met with definitive American leadership. WWI, WWII, Korea, the defeat of communism at the Berlin Wall, being first at the scene of natural disasters, the eradication of terrorism, the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, defense of Israel, funding and providing the majority of support for NATO and the UN and providing the lion’s share of funds for the IMF are just a few examples.
Where are we today?
Leading from behind.
This is not a fad; it is an ethos within the Democrat Party and the “progressive” movement. The epitome of this ethos is the confusion, the moral relativism and the cultural equivocation of the Obama administration.
There are people who are cheering for America to be just another country, one country among many; America is not that special – we have no “right” to lead due to what they classify as past “sins” of imperialism, colonialism, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum. They actively devalue American citizenship through allowing illegal aliens the same rights as American citizens. They diminish traditional American values by teaching our children that the values of our grandparents are illegitimate, even though it was those values that got generations through hardships unimaginable to the dilettantes of today’s aociety. They see the world as a kindergarten class lining up for lunch and it is someone else’s turn to lead the line to the lunchroom – little Johnny was head of the line yesterday, now it is Suzie’s turn…
Well, it isn’t working and the American people feel it. No, it is more than that – they know it. So does the rest of the world.
Why? Because the world needs America to lead. No other country on earth has had the run we have had. No other country has been willing to get into a fight over the principles of freedom and liberty – and do so not just for ourselves but for others. The cries of American hegemony and imperialism fall on deaf ears for one good reason – we don’t keep what we kill.
I was on the beaches of Normandy a few years ago and at the American Cemetery there, there is a quote from General Mark W. Clark inscribed on the wall of the museum that says:
“If ever proof were needed that we fought for a cause and not for conquest, it could be found in these cemeteries. Here was our only conquest: all we asked was enough soil in which to bury our gallant dead.”
America can recapture our leadership position but to do so, the navel gazing cowards in our political system have to go. They must be challenged. I know there are Americans out there who believe this, who believe in heroes and the righteousness of our country. I know because these are the people who flocked to see American Sniper.
It is time for us to honor the values and moral certitude of men like Chris Kyle and those of the Greatest Generation who ran through a maelstrom of flying lead and shrapnel across those beaches in France. Be principled. Stand up to the progressive bullies. Speak, write and above all – vote. Politics isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but we all drink from the same teapot, so do what you can…we can begin again to be that shining city on the hill Ronald Reagan spoke so reverently of.
The number one single today in 1966:
The number one single today in 1983:
Today in 2006, the Rolling Stones played during the halftime of the Super Bowl:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 