Your Most Disturbing Realizations

[GHT]

Too late.

Oh dear, then I admit, I'm a Londoner, but was born in the City of Bristol, (our London house had been bombed, grandparents were, at the time, living in Bristol,) came from the poor end of the street, won a scholarship to a fee-paying Grammar school, the scholarship meant my father didn't have to pay. Higher education was at Queen Mary College of the London University. The Daily Telegraph is my preferred newspaper and breakfast usually consists of fresh fruit, dates, a handful of walnuts and brazil nuts, a bowl of porridge and a French press full of Kenyan peaberry coffee. At weekends I enjoy a smallish cooked breakfast, eggs, bacon and pancakes. A dietary habit that I picked up in America and find too moorish to desist.
As for American accents sounding harsh, not to my ear. My schoolfriend in Savannah took us out for a meal to a lovely restaurant, run by a couple from Alabama. When asked which wiiiiiiinnnnnnee I preferred, school friend said: "Do get on with it, we have a life to live."
Likewise accents from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South African all sound easy on the ear. But some of the West Indies accents can be difficult to decipher. But they will usually slow down, even explain a colloquialism that I might not have heard before.
To me, English is English is English. Now my sister-in-law has a wonderful turn of phrase. Somebody in the centre of things, as in holding court, she refers to as: "Giving it large."

 

[HoosierDaddy]

What is a wiiiiiiinnnnnnee? Do you mean southern drawl?
HD

 

[GHT]

I didn't want to call it a drawl, more a vocal elongation of speech. A very long elongation of speech. Amusing though, it was a wonderful meal, sublime company and the perfect, 'Mine Hosts.' We were made very welcome.

One of the first things non English-speakers seem to learn, when settling in the UK, language-wise, is how to use nonsense phrases like: "You must be joking," when you mean the opposite. And profanities, how quickly they learn the 'F' word.

 

[MisterCairo]

I remember when Sesame Street was a new show.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

A southern drawl by a sweet Georgia peach is actually very sexy, ya'll..

 

[Trenchfriend]

I remember when Sesame Street was a new show.

What? November 10th, 1969??

 

[Edward]

When I learned electronics tubes were in general use and transisters were just starting to become common. Printed circuits were leading edge. Now there are hardly any relaceable components in most devices and you need a microscope to see what is there.

So I became a mainframe systems programmer when computers and the rooms to house them took up thousands of square feet. My cell phone has more pure computing power and memory capacity than the largest mainframe computer I ever worked on.

Point is, these days you can become obsolete in multiple careers.

Well, you could always get into electric guitar amplification and go back to tubes.... It's amazing how technology (or anything, really) moves on. You know the average mobile phone has since about 2005 had more computer power than the whole of NASA did when it sent a man to hte moon for the first time? That blows my mind.

It's funny.... I remember when The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a fictional thing; now I've had several mobiled telephones which are basically what it envisaged, and much more. The world my brother's kids are growing up in seems as differnet to mine as my childhood did my grandparents'.

The more that one studies history, the more one realizes that "moral clarity," at least in a societal sense, never existed. Improved communication has forced more honesty, and the more knowledgeable one becomes, the more one realizes that past which we are inclined to view through rose colored glasses, never existed either.

Very true. Recently, a friend put up one of those "ever felt you were meant for an earlier time? When would you live if you could choose?" statuses on Facebook. The best answer was: "I'm black and female, so I'm rather glad to live now." Fair point.... Things change, no era is perfect, but there's an awful lot of rose-tinted glass out there. Woody Allen dealt with that sort of nostalgic distortion very well in Midnight in Paris.

The last episode of "MASH"? I saw the original film in 1970 and I watched it while sitting on the mud at an outdoor GI theater in a place called Long Binh in what was then still the Republic of South Vietnam. It was very controversial at the time because the Army thought it was anti-military and at first weren't going to allow it in military theaters, but there was a big fuss in Congress and they relented. We loved it. The "theater"only had a single projector so after each reel we had to wait a few minutes while the new reel was loaded.

Interesting. I found the TV show was much harder, in a way, on war, but less blanket critical of the military. Especially once they brought in sympathetic military characters like Potter, and how Hot Lips evolved. I doubt either would be shown in a military location today.... Mind you, I also suspect it would be impossible to get the tv show made today, at least for mainstream entertainment.

The differences between the original book, the Robert Altman film, and the Alan Alda television show really bring this out. Hot Lips Hoolihan eventually was morphed into Margaret the Proto Feminist, and Hawkeye became an Everyman with the morals of Plato, Buddha, and Christ- incorporating only the more admirable characteristics of each. Even Frank Burns was eventually replaced in the television show by Charles Winchester: a stuck up Back Bay Brahmin type who nonetheless was a compassionate person underneath it all.

I've never read the book. The film.... Well, I saw the TV show first andfor years just didn'tl ike the film, but I can appreciate it now. I found Hawkeye a more interesting character in the TV show - particularly that he wasn't married, which gae an interesting contrast to Trapper, who was married but fooling around on his wife, and BJ, who was the opposite of Hawkeye in many ways. Charles was an excellent foil too. I think they ended Frank when it was best - there was nowhere left for them to go with that character. Charles was interesting because he was a true rival for Hawkeye. He was a superior surgeon (whereas Frank was incompetent), and right from his very first episode we knew he could outsmart Hawkeye if needsbe. That was great for the show. I liked how characters were three-dimensional - and, unlike modern sitcoms, there was never an easy resolution of relationships. These days, Hawkeye and Margaret wouldd have gotten together in season two, broken up in season three, and then repeated the whole thing ad naseum for as long as the ratings stayed high enough, punctuated by "flashback" episodes featuring a key character in a fatsuit.

One thing people forget about media in the Era is that it wasn't as slow or non-comprehensive as they think. Most daily newspapers published multiple editions, updated constantly as new stories broke. I own a number of bound volumes of urban papers of the thirties and early forties which include *all* the editions of each day for the period covered by the volume. A paper like the New York Daily News or the Boston Record published as many as nine editions a day, from the "bulldog" or "Pink Edition," which hit the streets around 9 pm the day before the issue date to the "Sports Final," which hit the streets around 530pm the next day in order to include that afternoon's baseball scores and horse racing results. The content of each edition could change dramatically over the course of the day, and you were never more than a few hours from the next edition hitting the street. That's not the split-second release of news people get today from the internet, but neither is it the "waiting around twenty-four hours for the latest news" situation that most people today believe that people of that time experienced.

The big difference I see in the last twenty years is the advent of 24/7 broadcast and online rolling news. Reorting all day, every day - whether there's anything to fill the time or not. The papers at least seem to have not been so bad as that in the past... while still keeping reasonably on top of things...

I was going through school during the first six to seven years that M*A*S*H was on television, and I lost count of the number of co-students who were convinced it was set in Vietnam until I informed them otherwise. Of course, the series really was a running commentary on the war in Vietnam (and on war in general) thinly veiled under the veneer of Korea, but still...

Very common mistake in the UK too - especially given that Korea was all but forgotten here, and Vietnam was only ever a sort of "cinema war" for us.

What is a wiiiiiiinnnnnnee? Do you mean southern drawl?
HD

Wine? It's a drink made with grapes, see...

 

[LizzieMaine]

Remember the First Gulf War? "Desert Storm" and "SADdam" and "Stormin' Norman" and the "Scud Stud" and all the rest of it? We are now as historically remote from all that as the premeire of "Sesame Street" was from World War II.

We are further removed historically from the premiere of "Sesame Street" than World War II was from Marconi's first transatlantic radio transmission.

 

[Trenchfriend]

And in ridiculous 7 years from now (!), the premiere of the Commodore 64 will be FOURTY years ago! strange...

 

[tonyb]

...

One of the first things non English-speakers seem to learn, when settling in the UK, language-wise, is how to use nonsense phrases like: "You must be joking," when you mean the opposite. And profanities, how quickly they learn the 'F' word.

For a number of years I worked with many recent arrivals to his fair land, almost all of them non-native English speakers. Some had to be advised that certain occasions (court appearances, for instance) called for a different sort of diction than they were accustomed to hearing around the workplace, such as the habit of some of African descent -- the recent arrivals as well as those whose ancestors had come over some centuries earlier, in service of unfettered capitalism, Southern style -- to affectionately refer to one another by the "N" word.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The "Summer of Love" is as historically remote to us today as the Lattimer Massacre was on V-J Day.

Pearl Harbor is as historically remote to us today as Seward's purchase of Alaska was on Pearl Harbor Day.

 

[tonyb]

Lizzie, your recent posts bring to mind an old guy (since deceased) who, some teens of years ago, would weigh in at public meetings about proposed rail transit lines. I'll forever remember his commentary about how long it took to put in an existing rail line, which at that point had been around nearly a century. It was a matter of months, start to finish, he informed us, whereas these days it takes us that long to decide where the initial planning meetings might be held.
Yes, many things were different a century earlier. Far fewer people, far lower property values, very little if any concern for potential environmental effects, et cetera. But no one in the room would deny that his fundamental point was a good one.

 

[p51]

I did a talk about the space program and the military's influence in it, to several high school groups, last month.
They couldn't relate to just about anything. Sure, the moon landings are ancient history and I acknowledged that by saying I'm 46 and was a little kid when the last Apollo mission left the Moon to return. But they couldn't even relate to the space shuttle program and that only ended 4 years ago! Anyone in their teens should be able to recall that short a time...

 

[tonyb]

Shuttle program? Is that on Twitter?

 

[LizzieMaine]

The space program dropped out of public consciousness faster than any other major historic/technological development in our history. For those who weren't there, it's impossible to underestimate the feelings of those times -- the moon was just the beginning, Mars was within reach, and people imagined with all seriousness that some breakthru would make interstellar travel possible by turn of the century.

But after 1972, nobody cared anymore. At all. Even the last couple of moon missions were viewed as a waste of time and money by Joe Dinnerpail and Sally Punchclock, Skylab was a lemon, the shuttle was a yawn. Nobody gave the space program a thought between the last moon landing and the Challenger disaster, and after that nobody thought about it until the Columbia disaster.

(Remember the Columbia disaster? Every sapient American in the late sixties knew the names of Grissom, White, and Chaffee, but I bet there isn't a single solitary person on the Lounge right now -- myself included -- who could name the astronauts who died on the Columbia without looking it up.)

 

[JimWagner]

It disturbs me how the concept of personal privacy seems to be dissappearing. It's not just that actual privacy is threatened but that every little thing in your life is shared nearly real time with essentually the whole world and that's as it should be. There really does seem to be a hive mind developing.

 

[Fading Fast]

Lizzie, your recent posts bring to mind an old guy (since deceased) who, some teens of years ago, would weigh in at public meetings about proposed rail transit lines. I'll forever remember his commentary about how long it took to put in an existing rail line, which at that point had been around nearly a century. It was a matter of months, start to finish, he informed us, whereas these days it takes us that long to decide where the initial planning meetings might be held.
Yes, many things were different a century earlier. Far fewer people, far lower property values, very little if any concern for potential environmental effects, et cetera. But no one in the room would deny that his fundamental point was a good one.

It's a balance. In the past, we did things faster but also with less thought of ecological damage or, even worse, injury and death to the workers. Today, we are much more thoughtful (most of the time), but everything takes insanely longer. My experience in projects I've done and from my interaction with the government is that we have become almost stuck in the mud of process and review and getting anything done takes too long.

No one wants to go back to the old days, but there is room to improve the efficiency of planning and approval without returning to those days. What I'm always disappointed in is that this shouldn't be a Left / Right issue - everyone should want a more efficient, less bureaucratic gov't - but neither side seems to ever take it on. In my more hopefully days, I remember Al Gore taking on "reinventing gov't" or some slogan like that early in the Clinton Administration, but that never went anywhere.

 

[Trenchfriend]

It disturbs me how the concept of personal privacy seems to be dissappearing. It's not just that actual privacy is threatened but that every little thing in your life is shared nearly real time with essentually the whole world and that's as it should be. There really does seem to be a hive mind developing.

"Alien" showed, where the things are going to, off course embedded in that far future-scenario of 2144. But that film was the clear warning on that, what seem to happen now.
Look on Weyland-Yutani-styled Halliburton.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Remember the First Gulf War? "Desert Storm" and "SADdam" and "Stormin' Norman" and the "Scud Stud" and all the rest of it? We are now as historically remote from all that as the premeire of "Sesame Street" was from World War II.

We are further removed historically from the premiere of "Sesame Street" than World War II was from Marconi's first transatlantic radio transmission.

Okay, here's a mind-bender: Cleopatra lived closer in time to the building of the first Pizza Hut than she did to the building of the first Pyramid. Egyptian history is that long.

 

[p51]

Remember the Columbia disaster? Every sapient American in the late sixties knew the names of Grissom, White, and Chaffee, but I bet there isn't a single solitary person on the Lounge right now -- myself included -- who could name the astronauts who died on the Columbia without looking it up.

Wanna bet?
All from memory:

• Rick Husband, CDR
  
• Willie McCool, PLT
• Mike Anderson
• Kalpana Chawla (I think I got the spelling right)
  
• Dave Brown
  
• Laurel Clark
  
• Ilan Ramon, The first Israeli astronaut

For extra credit, does anyone know what aviation-related dangerous experience Ramon was famous for before STS-107?

Needless to say, I have more than a passing interest in the space program: