“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”
—Darryl F. Zanuck, American director, born September 5, 1902
Have an A-1 Day
“Breaking Bad” is so good right now that I can hardly stand it. The writing, the acting, the direction are all superb. It occurs to me that television has grown up in the shadow of the cinema just as mammals did in the shadow of the dinosaurs. American cinema is over-specialized, and would not be able to survive rapid change in the ecosystem it dominates.
Here’s an interesting take on why we (baby boomers) got to see so many good movies on TV in the olden days (1950s and 60s) and why younger people have so little experience of cinema from before their own time. If you’ve ever experienced the I-don’t-watch-black-and-white look of horror and aversion, you know what I’m talking about. Old Movies and New TV
Events Today
Northampton—12:00-1:30PM Click Workspace Brown Bag Luncheon
Springfield—6:00-9:00PM SCORE Business Planning and Cash Flow
Indian Orchard—7:00PM PVM Workshop: Make your very Own Arduino Powered NAMETAG!! Part 2
Cowabunga! I Gotta Chill With Some Infotainment on My Palmtop, DawG.
“…Everyone uses words and everyone has a name. It doesn’t get more universal than the language we share. So, today, when the Oxford Dictionaries Online (not the OED) added bitcoin and hackerspace and emoji and TL;DR, everyone had some fun arguing about whether all the additions were appropriate. On one side are the traditionalists, who would prefer English remain the same as it’s always been, where ‘always’ is defined as whenever that person was 23. On the other side are the people who are right. This is literally a never-ending debate, and yes I just used literally to mean figuratively and you still knew what I meant….”
The Rad New Words Added to the Dictionary in the 90s
Ignorance About Crime Rates
“CNN recently published an interesting article about how most of the public believes that violent crime is rising, despite the fact that it has actually fallen dramatically over the last twenty years…Public overestimation of the crime rate can influence policy. On the right, people who believe that crime is worse than it actually is are probably more likely to support an aggressive War on Drugs, and to tolerate the massive militarization of the police that has arisen over the last thirty to forty years….”
However, 2.3 million, or about one in one hundred, adult Americans are in prison, and the statistics on violent crime in prisons are horrendous. I guess that doesn’t count.
Public Ignorance About Crime Rates
Perspective
“…An almost-classless society: I’ve noticed that most Americans roughly have the same standard of living. Everybody has access to ample food, everybody shops at the same supermarkets, malls, stores, etc. I’ve seen plumbers, construction workers and janitors driving their own sedans, which was quite difficult for me to digest at first since I came from a country where construction workers and plumbers lived hand to mouth….”
The Most Surprising Things About America, According To An Indian International Student