So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[Bushman]

What is it with this so called, me society? Whilst millions have respected the lockdown measures, roads and parks have remained busy, and the authorities across the country have repeatedly reported that people have not respected the 6 foot guidance on social distancing while others have continued to mingle.
Reuters.

We Americans have so perfected the "me first! society" that we've forgotten what it's like not to be able to snap your fingers and get whatever you want. In the 1940s, people had to go without nails, milk, cheese, rubber, and a great many other things during the rationing of the second World War. People these days can hardly go a week without grabbing mulch and flowers at their local hardware store. It's pathetic.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Nor do we pay much attention to the mechanism by which the illusion of plenty is provided, until absolutely forced to do so. As Howard Beale so aptly ranted forty-five years ago, "We sit in the house and slowly the world we live in is getting smaller and all we say is 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms! Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel belted radials, and I won't say anything! Just leave us alone!'"

 

[Trenchfriend]

Man, after the wave of scattered disposable gloves, we now have the wave of disposable facemasks flying around the countryside.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

The other day I was at Dollar Tree and there were three trailer trash/hoodrat types, a man and two women, who were together behind me in line. They were standing too close and not wearing masks. I tried to scoot away from them only to be standing too close to the person in front of me -- I felt trapped. Further ahead in line somebody saw this and said something to which the man laughed and then replied, "They must be talking about us. We don't give a crap."

 

[tonyb]

^^^^
I fear we’ll be seeing much more of this sort of thing.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's one thing to not care. It's quite another to go out of your way to make a public point of not caring. It's the difference between being a jerk and being a sociopath.

 

[Edward]

Today at the Whole Paycheck I picked a checkout lane with one customer in the lane ahead of me. Mom and Dad wearing face masks pushing one of those little shopping carts, it looked ideal. Then up comes Buddy with face mask with another item for the cart. I think you should do your shopping, i.e., fill your cart, before you get in the checkout lane.

Next Sis dashes in with more items. Then Mom decides that she, too has forgotten something and she and Sis get out of the line while Dad is processing the items in his cart. Mom and Sis have gone to one of the impulse buy racks near another check out lane and are pawing at things there.

As Mom comes rushing back to the check out lane, I ask, "You got everything now?" She offers a weak laugh.

As in the old newspaper cartoon (I'm sure Lizzie can quote chapter and verse on its history),
"There Oughta be a Law"

In one of the supermarkets I use in Hackney, it's extremely common for older West Indian ladies to arrive in with a young man, usually a grandson, to do their shopping. Said young man (anywhere between ten and twenty-one) then joins the queue, while Grandma goes off to get the shopping, then when she's fone, she'll arrive back with the full trolley and insert herself in the position in the queue where Grandson has been all along. A variation on this practice is to come in alone, fill one handbasket, put *that* in the queue, and then leave it, get another basket, return and put that in its place in the queue..... It really grinds on me because I realise I'm deeply engrained on a set of cultural norms about how queuing works. As are these ladies - I've seen one of them challenged on the latter variation, and she quite genuinely didn't understand why somebody thought she'd jumped the queue. I have learned just to shrug it off, but it'scertainly true that you learn a lot about yourself from what annoys you about other people's behaviour!

Course, in ten years' time the currently new practice of using a mobile phone app to scan trolley items as you go along will be completely normalised, so there'll be no need for any of us to stand longer in the queue than to pay.

 

[tonyb]

At the Post Office this afternoon ...

 

[Hercule]

I find it very amusing that every so often when I open a program on my computer, usually a browser or an email application (which was the impetus for this posting), a pop up survey will appear asking how likely would I be to recommend such and such software/program to someone. I always select the "never" or "not likely at all" option, to which I am usually prompted to elaborate on my answer. Typically I write something to the effect of "Seriously, how often have YOU had cause to recommend [fill in the blank] to ANYONE?" Do these people really think that such things are the topic of conversations for normal people? I get similar questions regarding certain stores we shop at (usually the pet store) too.

 

[GHT]

I find it very amusing that every so often when I open a program on my computer, usually a browser or an email application (which was the impetus for this posting), a pop up survey will appear asking how likely would I be to recommend such and such software/program to someone.

Now you know what they do with all that information that they have about you. You are a consumer and knowing your spending habits, or your time on line, or, worse still, if you've got one of those virtual assistant AI technology wotsits, they know what you do at home, is what they need to bombard you with unsolicited spam. George Orwell got it right.

 

[tonyb]

I NEVER respond to surveys from healthcare providers — physicians’ practices, hospitals, etc. If I ever had to sue their asses for something that comes up (or doesn’t) some months after I might have completed that survey, I can easily imagine what their shysters would do with any favorable feedback.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Exactly. Never forget that the purpose of *any* survey is ultimately to monetize you -- if not one way, then another. Welcome to the Information Age -- where you're not just a customer/client/patient, you're a commodity. Online reviews, "Which Garden Vegetable Are You?" Facebook quizzes, those Google polls that come up when you're trying to read a news story posted by your local paper, all that stuff is like inviting the Boys into your house and giving them free access to every private aspect of your life.

A consumption-driven society will consume *you* if you give it the chance. Did you really think that smartphone in your pocket was invented "to make your life easier?"

 

[tonyb]

A trivial matter that doesn’t annoy so much as amuse is a TV ad for a home care agency with an actor playing a pleasant old fellow in a wheelchair and an actress playing a pleasant care provider. She’s kinda pretty. Background music sounds like the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

Those of us with more than a passing interest in the popular culture of the 1930s and ’40s are in a clear minority just about everywhere but here. A typical 80-year-old (born 1940) and his older brother would likelier listen to Chuck Berry and Little Richard than Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. (Maybe likelier yet would be Jimmy Dean and Johnny Cash.)

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
But then, maybe the ad is targeted not at the oldtimers themselves so much as their offspring, who are the ones left to arrange for care. And maybe the marketing people believe the offspring would rather hold a less than realistic vision of who their parents were before they created this baby boomer generation.

 

[GHT]

A consumption-driven society will consume *you* if you give it the chance. Did you really think that smartphone in your pocket was invented "to make your life easier?"

And did you think that collecting green stamps was the retailer's thank you for your business? Now they have gone for good, don't you believe it. Today's Green Stamps are called loyalty cards, and just like credit & debit cards, they track and trace you every time you hand the retailer your loyalty card.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Those of us with more than a passing interest in the popular culture of the 1930s and ’40s are in a clear minority just about everywhere but here. A typical 80-year-old (born 1940) and his older brother would likelier listen to Chuck Berry and Little Richard than Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. (Maybe likelier yet would be Jimmy Dean and Johnny Cash.)

My mother, born 1939, had and still has no interest in rock-n-roll. Her all time favorite entertainer -- and this was not uncommon for young women who came of age when she did -- was Liberace. This isn't as weird as it might seem -- Mr. L. was wildly popular on television in the mid-1950s, and for many impressionable girls who were in their early/mid teens when they first saw a TV set, he was one of the first personalties they saw, and the one who left the most vivid impression.

As far as out of place cultural tropes go, a similar oddity is what you often find in newspaper comic strips built around a "generation gap" theme where you have Boomer parents jousting with Millennial/Gen. Y/Gen. Z kids, and the parents are always going on about how they were at Woodstock, were hippies, etc. Well, you will look hard to find a Boomer who was at Woodstock who has a Gen Z kid unless they were participating in some geriatric fertility experiment. The parents of "Those Kids Today" are younger than me, and Woodstock, to most of them, was that little bird that hung around with Snoopy.

The cartoonists who draw these strips, though, mostly *are* geriatric Boomers, somehow caught in a time loop of their own. When they created their strips in the 80s or 90s, those "Woodstock" tropes were relevant, but now, not quite. To a young person today, Woodstock is as chronologically remote and irrelevant as Paul Whiteman and the revolutionary rise of "symphonic jazz" was to the Boomers.

 

[Fading Fast]

My mother, born 1939, had and still has no interest in rock-n-roll. Her all time favorite entertainer -- and this was not uncommon for young women who came of age when she did -- was Liberace. This isn't as weird as it might seem -- Mr. L. was wildly popular on television in the mid-1950s, and for many impressionable girls who were in their early/mid teens when they first saw a TV set, he was one of the first personalties they saw, and the one who left the most vivid impression.

As far as out of place cultural tropes go, a similar oddity is what you often find in newspaper comic strips built around a "generation gap" theme where you have Boomer parents jousting with Millennial/Gen. Y/Gen. Z kids, and the parents are always going on about how they were at Woodstock, were hippies, etc. Well, you will look hard to find a Boomer who was at Woodstock who has a Gen Z kid unless they were participating in some geriatric fertility experiment. The parents of "Those Kids Today" are younger than me, and Woodstock, to most of them, was that little bird that hung around with Snoopy.

The cartoonists who draw these strips, though, mostly *are* geriatric Boomers, somehow caught in a time loop of their own. When they created their strips in the 80s or 90s, those "Woodstock" tropes were relevant, but now, not quite. To a young person today, Woodstock is as chronologically remote and irrelevant as Paul Whiteman and the revolutionary rise of "symphonic jazz" was to the Boomers.

I've noticed a lot of this too. My mom was born in 1932, three years before Elvis, but rock-n-roll was completely foreign to her. Elvis, for example, became really famous in '56 and, while he was only 21, I bet his average fan then was five or more years younger than he was, meaning born in the '40s. My mom was 24 then and she said her friends had no interest in Elvis.

My mom's music - and she was not a big music fan (it's painful to have a conversation about music with her) - was the big bands, a bit, and the '50s crooners like King Cole and Sinatra.

When I went to high school in the late '70s, it was only the young parents (born in the '50s) that were into rock music at all. I even noticed that some of the parents that were into the early rock-n-roll (Elvis, Chuck Berry, etc.) had no interest in the mid-'60s and on rock music (which clearly was a break from what came before).

 

[Hercule]

How interesting. Come to think of it, my folks (mom b.1930; dad b.1928) never spoke, fondly or otherwise, about their musical tastes growing up. A couple of times mom mentioned liking Harry James but that was likely only because I played trumpet up to and through college. The only LPs I remember seeing in the cabinet (which wouldn't be from their childhood) were by Kate Smith and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Mom often spoke of spending lunch periods in high school in the gym dancing - everybody danced with everybody - male and female alike. But music never seemed to figure in that fond memory.

 

[Nobert]

My mother, born 1939, had and still has no interest in rock-n-roll. Her all time favorite entertainer -- and this was not uncommon for young women who came of age when she did -- was Liberace. This isn't as weird as it might seem -- Mr. L. was wildly popular on television in the mid-1950s, and for many impressionable girls who were in their early/mid teens when they first saw a TV set, he was one of the first personalties they saw, and the one who left the most vivid impression.

A woman I worked with a couple of years ago said that her grandmother had a huge crush on Liberace. She thought that he was just so elegant and classy. This amused her because, even as a kid, she could tell, 'Gramma, I'm pretty sure he would not be interested.'

Generation gap aside, the whole idiom of popular music pre- vs. post-rock and roll is so radically different in its approach, conception and performance, they might as well be two different media. As someone who's interested in both, I have to practically engage different parts of my brain to appreciate them. And learning to like older music, I never had an epiphany or a love-at-first-sound experience (well, maybe Ruth Etting). It was a slow, growing appreciation because I was interested in older stuff in general. I still don't "get" a lot of jazz music, even the stuff I like. Note to the jazz-curious who are wading into the listening experience: Don't read the liner notes. Seriously, they'll just make you feel as though you like all the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Hugh Panasie.

 

[GHT]

I still don't "get" a lot of jazz music, even the stuff I like. Note to the jazz-curious who are wading into the listening experience: Don't read the liner notes. Seriously, they'll just make you feel as though you like all the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Hugh Panasie.

Jazz comes in various forms, like you, I could never really appreciate it, but that was back in the 60's when the style known as 'Modern Jazz' was all the rage. Fortunately a musician that I knew very well explained that modern jazz was the musical equivalent of abstract art, it isn't easy to follow. That same musician told me to listen to Sidney Bechet, I did and realised what my musician friend was getting at.

My favourite past time back then was dancing, as in Latin & Ballroom, but I loved many of the off beat dances too. If you watch this video of Natalie & Daniel dancing an improvised type of jive, you can not only appreciate Sidney's music, you can see how the dancers interpret the music. Dancing helped me a great deal in understanding jazz.