Author: NewMexiKen

Trifecta

The three DVDs that just completed their visit to NewMexiKen from Netflix were Before Sunset, Maria Full of Grace and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I watched the latter for the second time today and it too rates five ristras on the NewMexiKen scale (five being best).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as introduced by Roger Ebert —

It’s one thing to wash that man right outta your hair, and another to erase him from your mind. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” imagines a scientific procedure that can obliterate whole fields of memory — so that, for example, Clementine can forget that she ever met Joel, let alone fell in love with him. “Is there any danger of brain damage?” the inventor of the process is asked. “Well,” he allows, in his most kindly voice, “technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage.”

The movie is a labyrinth created by the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, whose “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” were neorealism compared to this.

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslett are superb as the confused and confusing couple Joel and Clementine.

Interesting and good as the film was first time through, it is much better the second time when one knows what’s happening well enough to focus on the story, characters and dialogue. If you saw it once and liked it, see it again. If you haven’t seen it, see it twice.

A word that gets more useful with each day

Kakistocracy (from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000)

SYLLABICATION: kak·is·toc·ra·cy
PRONUNCIATION: kăkibreve-stŏk’rə-sē, käk’ibreve–
NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. kak·is·toc·ra·cies
Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.
ETYMOLOGY:
Greek kakistos, worst, superlative of kakos, bad; caco– + –cracy.
Oldest use: 1829.

* Reference link 1
* Reference link 2

PUTTING THE WORD TO USE:
“Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?” – 1876 OED

From Altercation correspondent Barry R.

Gold …

was discovered by James W. Marshall on the property of Johann Sutter near Coloma, California, on this date in 1848. By the end of the year the rush was on; nearly 100,000 people arrived in California in 1849.

But these days, as The Gatlin Brothers sang —

All the gold in California
Is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills
In somebody else’s name

Team mother

In case you wondered, that really is Donovan McNabb’s mother in the Campbell’s Soup commercials. From the The New York Times —

That was Wilma McNabb, the true mother of Donovan. But in 2001, her son’s first year as part of Chunky’s “mama’s boys” campaign, an actress portrayed her. It was at that commercial shoot that Wilma, a former nurse, had an epiphany.

“I said: ‘I can do that. I can do what she’s doing,’ ” she said by telephone yesterday. “I knew all the lines. I’d seen the script.” (And, she said, she had always served Campbell’s soup at home. “Was there any other?” she said.)

Think cable has a lot of channels?

NewMexiKen surely doesn’t miss hockey on TV or anywhere else, but those that do can watch European games on Winamp via SHOUTcast — or news from China, or Hungarian talk, or “Sports Center” from Turkey, or a Björk promo or more than 8,000 radio stations. Is life great or what?

By the way, the hockey I watched had no annoying announcers. You heard the skates on ice, the grunts, the crowd and the public address system. The ideal sports telecast in my opinion.

Roots

The 12-hour mini-series Roots premiered on this date in 1977. According to the Encyclopedia of Television:

Roots remains one of television’s landmark programs….For eight consecutive nights it riveted the country. ABC executives initially feared that the historical saga about slavery would be a ratings disaster. Instead, Roots scored higher ratings than any previous entertainment program in history. It averaged a 44.9 rating and a 66 audience share for the length of its run. The seven episodes that followed the opener earned the top seven spots in the ratings for their week. The final night held the single-episode ratings record until 1983, when the finale of M*A*S*H aired on CBS.

… Apprehensions that Roots would flop shaped the way that ABC presented the show. Familiar television actors like Lorne Greene were chosen for the white, secondary roles, to reassure audiences. The white actors were featured disproportionately in network previews. For the first episode, the writers created a conscience-stricken slave captain (Ed Asner), a figure who did not appear in Haley’s novel but was intended to make white audiences feel better about their historical role in the slave trade. Even the show’s consecutive-night format allegedly resulted from network apprehensions. ABC programming chief Fred Silverman hoped that the unusual schedule would cut his network’s imminent losses–and get Roots off the air before sweeps week.

Silverman, of course, need not have worried. Roots garnered phenomenal audiences. On average, 80 million people watched each of the last seven episodes. 100 million viewers, almost half the country, saw the final episode, which still claims one of the highest Nielsen ratings ever recorded, a 51.1 with a 71 share. A stunning 85% of all television homes saw all or part of the mini-series….Today, the show’s social effects may appear more ephemeral, but at the time they seemed widespread. Over 250 colleges and universities planned courses on the saga, and during the broadcast, over 30 cities declared “Roots” weeks.

NewMexiKen co-directed a symposium at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1979, that included Alex Haley, the author of Roots. Haley, who also wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X, was a very self-possessed and self-assured speaker, confident yet pleasant and informal. He spoke for some time without notes, telling the story about the story — that is, how he learned about his family. Along with the Archivist of the U.S. and Professor Wesley Johnson, I sat on the stage behind Haley as he spoke and could see the rapture on the faces of his listeners. To an audience of genealogists this was the Sermon on the Mount.

Humphrey Bogart …

was born on this day in 1899. According to The Writer’s Almanac:

[Bogart] was expelled from Massachusetts’ Phillips Academy and immediately joined the Navy to fight in World War I, serving as a ship’s gunner. One day, while roughhousing on the ship’s wooden stairway, he tripped and fell, and a splinter became lodged in his upper lip; the result was a scar, as well as partial paralysis of the lip, resulting in the tight-set mouth and lisp that became one of his most distinctive onscreen qualities.

Django Reinhardt …

was born on this date in 1910. Reinhardt was the first significant jazz figure in Europe — and is the most influential European to this day. Play Jazz Guitar.com has some interesting background.

A violinist first and a guitarist later, Jean Baptiste “Django” Reinhardt grew up in a gypsy camp near Paris where he absorbed the gypsy strain into his music. A disastrous caravan fire in 1928 badly burned his left hand, depriving him of the use of the fourth and fifth fingers, but the resourceful Reinhardt figured out a novel fingering system to get around the problem that probably accounts for some of the originality of his style. According to one story, during his recovery period, Reinhardt was introduced to American jazz when he found a 78 RPM disc of Louis Armstrong’s “Dallas Blues” at an Orleans flea market. He then resumed his career playing in Parisian cafes until one day in 1934 when Hot Club chief Pierre Nourry proposed the idea of an all-string band to Reinhardt and Grappelli. Thus was born the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, which quickly became an international draw thanks to a long, splendid series of Ultraphone, Decca and HMV recordings.

The Red Hot Jazz Archive has some on-line recordings of the Quintette of the Hot Club of France.

It’s the birthday

… of Mariska Hargitay. Jayne Mansfield’s daughter is 41. (Mariska was in the car when her mother was killed in 1967.) Ms. Hargitay plays Detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

American Idol

According to news reports, American Idol was the most watched television program of the season when it began again on Tuesday. 33.5 million people tuned in.

That means, of course, that approximately 200 million other Americans over the age of 12 did NOT tune in.

Life 101

What You’ll Wish You’d Known, a possible talk for high schoolers by Paul Graham. Interesting reading.

I’ll start by telling you something you don’t have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you’re supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.

Like Paula Poundstone, I thought adults asked kids what they wanted to be because the adults were still searching for ideas.

… If you’d asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I’d have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It’s that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it.

… It’s dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it’s not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart.

… If you think it’s restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.

… What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college.