voluntaryXchange

Thoughts On Why a Newbie Liked the Original Star Trek

Stewart at Intergalactic Medicine Show looks like a millenial from his photo. He’d never seen the original Star Trek:

Being a lifelong fan of Star Wars, I grew up with science fiction being firmly rooted in action and spectacle. What little I'd seen of Star Trek seemed boring … having watched the original series, I find myself in the unfortunate spot of having to admit I was wrong.

He reflects:

I was honestly not expecting much from it.

I’m excerpting heavily to make the point below:

… Star Trek can be slow and often falls on the side of the odd. …

That said, the show generally does well at turning its frequent absurdity into something watchable and often intriguing. …

… The show uses quality writing to overcome its sometimes zany premises.

There are countless episodes like this one where I was skeptical going in but wound up utterly committed to the story by its ends. It's one of the most skillful uses of episodic storytelling I've ever seen in a show …

… Without fancy and expensive effects to fall back on, Star Trek instead had to rely on its writing and the strength of its actors' performances. …

… There is, simply put, a sincerity and genuineness to Star Trek that is infectious. It's intelligent but lacks cynicism. It gives grandiose speeches but also has quiet moments of personal revelation that stick with you. It's a science fiction show, but one built on a foundation of likable characters and human drama. …

My impression of this is that if I deleted all the references to Star Trek, you might think that this guy has gone in skeptical, and come out a believer, after going to a week of performances at one of the better Shakespeare companies.

P.S. Oh yeah … Star Trek had a lot of Shakespearean themes and references.

Via Newmark’s Door.

Technorati Tags: star,trek,original,shakespeare

Surfing: Buddy Holly > Hogan’s Heroes

I had a question about a Buddy Holly song, so off I went to Wikipedia.

It’s in the nature of surfing that you read stuff you weren’t looking for, and I read this:

In 1949, still retaining his soprano, he recorded a bluesy solo rendering of Hank Snow's "My Two Timin' Woman" on a wire recorder borrowed by a friend who worked in a music shop.

Then I wanted to know what a wire recorder was. It turns out that the technology holding back tape recording wasn’t recording but developing the tape itself. But, in the late 40’s and early 50’s, recording on metal wire was the way to go.

But this is what caught my eye:

Though fictional, the Allied officers of Hogan's Heroes used a wire recorder to record a meeting in Kommandant Klink's office on a device that was disguised as a sewing box made of wooden thread spools.

I can remember watching that episode in repeats almost 40 years ago. And the thing is I can remember being struck by the weirdness of them recording on wire: to a kid in the 1970’s, tape was all there had ever been.

Technorati Tags: wire,recorder,tape,buddy,holly,hogan's,heroes

New Words and Phrases

It’s a good longread, although exceptionally pretentious: a 1978 article from The New Yorker on Johnny Carson.

Here’s the big words I learned (or at a minimum re-exposed my weak memory to):

• Solto mortale: a potentially lethal jump
• Molto simpatica: I never did find a definition for this, but I believe in Italian it would be used in reference to a woman who was “easy on the eyes”.
• Vide supra: I wasn’t able to track this down exactly, but I think it’s along the lines of “see above”
• Mutatis mutandis: a phrase I should know but have clearly forgotten, meaning “everything that needed to be changed, has been changed”.
• Echt: the real thing (the opposite of ersatz)
• Sodality: a fellowship or association

From a different article, an interview with Bernard Connolly, I picked up this one:

• Demos: the population of members of a society that bases itself cooperative culture rather than kinship; the set of citizens who feel they share values.

Technorati Tags: johnny,carson,new,yorker

Where Surfing Took Me Today

A comment thread that said this:

Search 劉鳳屏 for more.

The response was this:

I was searching 您在哪儿... That's why I couldn't find it.

You may well ask how white-bread-me got to such a site.

Well … it all started at FoxNews.com on Monday.

There I saw a link to a Will Ferrell Super Bowl commercial that aired … almost nowhere (Sherman, Texas, Ardmore, Oklahoma, and Glendive, Montana to be exact).

That’s because it’s really f***ing weird. (You’re not missing much if you don’t see it.)

But, I like the background music. Like, mind you … not love.

The thing is, it’s sung in Cantonese.

So I clicked on the YouTube link in the video embedded in the FoxNews article. I searched through the comments there, and there were plenty of other people looking for the song too.

And there was one comment with the name: “Mother, Where Are You?” by Liu Beng Feng.

Except that on Monday, if you put that into Google … it showed up nowhere on the internet.

But, I checked back to YouTube today, and there were over 600 comments … so the song has to be out there somewhere.

So I searched again, and this time there was a link to a Reddit page about the commercial.

Within that I searched for the word “mother”, which yielded a YouTube link to the singer: 劉鳳屏.

And when you get there, you find a song from about 40 years ago from Hong Kong. Posted in 2008, with 11 comments, 7 of them from this week, and one from the person who gave the title on YouTube. In those comments are the strings given above: apparently someone misspelled something. Perhaps the artist’s name: she seems to have also gone by Pancy Lau and Lau Fung Ping.

Ain’t the internet great?

Technorati Tags: liu,feng,beng,pancy,lau,mother,where,are,you,will,ferrell,old,milwaukee

Mad Men Trivia (Shameless Too!)

Freddy Rumson is played by Bill Murray’s younger brother, Joel:

P.S. He also plays Eddie Jackson in Shameless.

Technorati Tags: freddy,rumson,mad,men,joel,bill,murray

Envy

It’s important to point out to economics students that a lot of policy is driven by envy.

There’s a great example of irrational envy in the episode “Kafkaesque” of Breaking Bad.

In it, Jesse realizes that even though he is being paid $1.5 million to make crystal meth, the street value of the product to the wholesaler who pays him is $96 million.

Walt points out that it’s odd to be unhappy when someone makes you a millionaire, but Jesse doesn’t buy it.

This is related to a common classroom experiment with the ultimatum game. Here’s how it goes. Two players play. A pot of money is set out. The first player is asked to divide it: part for them and part for the second player. If the second player agrees to the division, they both keep the money; if the second player doesn’t agree, neither gets the money.

The rational thing for the first player to do is to divide the money into two unequal piles, and offer the smaller one to the second player.

The rational thing for the second player to do is accept anything offered by the first player: after all, anything they receive is tantamount to a gift.

The thing is, this is exactly what people don’t do. It turns out that once the split gets worse than 40/60, there’s a rapid increase in the unwillingness of the second player to accept the offer of free money.

We see this in current debates about how much of our welfare state “the rich” fund through their taxes. Even though “the rich” currently pay a far higher share of their income as taxes, a fair sized chunk of the population is unhappy with this gift.

Technorati Tags: breaking,bad,envy

Synthesizing Two Trends

This made me laugh before I’d even had my morning coffee:

Hat tip to TA.

Technorati Tags: washington,dc,zombie

It’s Not Easy to Escape Your Past

Here’s Jennifer Granholm speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 2012:

And here she is on The Dating Game in 1978:

There’s so much I can think to say … but people in glass houses …

Via bookofjoe.

Technorati Tags: jennifer,granholm,dating,game,democratic,national,convention

Spongebob

The trivia question on my kids’ yogurt says that Spongebob’s given name is … Spongerobert.

This could be a nasty rumor, so I spent many seconds looking it up. The creators don’t deny or confirm this, but in one episode Patrick does call him Robert.

Technorati Tags: spongebob,squarepants

Another Jesse-ism from Breaking Bad

We’ve just starting watching season 4 of Breaking Bad, which just came out on DVD. And there’s Jesse in the second episode showing off his new stereo with:

“… digital vacuum tubes …”

Classic.

Technorati Tags: breaking,bad,oxymoron,quote