21 Comments
User's avatar
JorgeGeorge's avatar

You were doing so well telling the story of how we young ones used to buy music singles and play them on our little record players over and over and drive our parents nuts! Oh well.

Such knowledge lost to history.....

Jeff Maurer's avatar

I had singles on cassettes. Another technology that I’ll explain to my grandkids and it will be like telling them that you used to have to crank your car to start it.

William Adderholdt's avatar

I was thankful for the movie "Guardians of the Galaxy" keeping the notion of the mix tape alive in the public consciousness.

Chris O'Connell's avatar

"How to be an ___" (by Ibram X. Kendi) was a clue in yesterday's NY Times Crossword puzzle. A Friday and 10 letters! So that was a gift.

Frantic Pedantic's avatar

NYT’s Friday and Saturday crosswords have felt a little soft, lately…

Matt Benson's avatar

Ibram X. Kendi! What an embarrassment it was that he was taken seriously for any length of time. I remember some clip of him at a talk where a reporter timidly asked him to define racism and Kendi was like "Racism is when you have racists making racist policies which have racist results" and then he looked like he was about to cry from getting such a hardball question. At the time this was supposedly the most visionary thinker on race relations America had to offer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxS1gM56__4

Howard J. Eagle's avatar

Have you figured out the definition yet???

Ryan Self's avatar

I heard Kendi speak at the Texas Book Festival last weekend (it was free so I thought, what the hell) and he was interviewed about his latest book, a 400-page *authorized* biography of Malcolm X for "young readers." Not sure how many middle schoolers are into that kind of thing, but I digress.

Kendi tried to tie Malcolm X to today's fights about wokeness and how, much like MLK and anyone speaking about racism, they were automatically labelled as anti-white. In Malcolm's case, it may have had something to do with preaching that people were "white devils." Kendi also talked about Malcolm's assassination in similar ways to King, but it's mayyyybe a bit different considering Malcolm was assassinated by the Nation of Islam.

Oh, he also said the bad press he got about the closure of his Antiracist Center at Boston University was an example of how the press lies (moments before he had said Trump using phrases like "fake news" was an example of Nazi propaganda).

Jeff Maurer's avatar

Was there food though?

Ryan Self's avatar

No, but there was a standing ovation from the (overwhelmingly white) audience. Also, Kendi is very buff, an underreported aspect about him.

Cernunnos's avatar

There is a long and illustrious American history of traveling entrepreneurial experts offering both free diagnoses and definitely-not-free remedies all in one convenient package. It usually turns out that nearly everybody has the ailment in question, and that it is a chronic condition requiring the remedy be taken on a continuous basis.

William Adderholdt's avatar

A minor gripe: You make repeated references to the "flaming corpses" falling from the wreck of USS Shenandoah, even though it was a helium-filled airship, and helium doesn't burn. The picture of the German hydrogen-filled airship Hindenburg was such an impressive sight that maybe you thought all airships were built like that?

Gnoment's avatar

The feminization hypothesis - I don't understand why people call this agreeableness or empathy in women. Its using the idea of empathy to justify relational aggression.

I think both men and women can be dicks, and maybe about 1 - 5% of all people in any work place are dicks. I think the ways the men and women can be dicks do often differ. If there are more women in the work place, you're going to see more of just how women can be awful. Instead of engaging in finger pointing in some endless sex war, I wish we could ask why work places are so susceptible to enabling dickish behavior. You'd think it would be bad of business.

Tom's avatar

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: Within any organization, there are two kinds of people. Those dedicated to the ostensible goals of the organization, and those dedicated to increasing their power within the organization. The second kind always ends up in charge.

Gnoment's avatar

Totally. But again ... aren't those people bad for business? Wouldn't there be value in kicking them out?

Tom's avatar

There would be.

The problem is that the people dedicated to the goals of the organization usually tend to spend their time doing things that directly further those goals, rather than making sure that the other people within the organization are on the same page and kicking out the power-hungry

Sean's avatar

“The Wreck of the old ‘97” is great

Sean's avatar

The song, not the actual wreck

toguetogue's avatar

Was it intentional that this was posted on the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, another disaster that resulted in a quickly written/recorded and released mega-hit single (by Gordon Lightfoot)? And that you used a phrase lifted almost verbatim from Lightfoot's classic at approximately 2:15 thru 2:21 of the audio? If not, it's a shocking series of coincidences!!