A couple of food videos on the shorter side today.
First off: an explanation of grog, and the importance of rum.
Bonus: how to make garum. First off, you leave a barrel of fish with some salt added out in the sun for two months…okay, not in this case, but that was basically the traditional Roman method.
Bonus #2: James May on the subject of Spam versus ham.
McThag had this story the other day, but I was waiting:
Joe Ruby, co-creator of “Scooby-Doo”.
Mr. Ruby and Mr. [Ken] Spears had been working mostly as editors at Hanna-Barbera, the leading TV animation studio, when they were charged with creating a show that was a mash-up of “I Love a Mystery,” a popular radio show heard from 1939 to 1944 about three adventure-seeking pals; the 1948 horror-comedy movie “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”; and “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” the 1959-63 sitcom about a hapless teenager.
The directive, which came from Fred Silverman, then the head of daytime programming at CBS, also asked that a pop song be embedded in each episode, as was done on “The Archie Show.” The idea was for the new series to be soothing and nonviolent, an answer to the moral panic about violence in the media in the wake of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, said Kevin Sandler, an associate professor of film and media studies at Arizona State University.
The pop song part didn’t work out. But Mr. Ruby and Mr. Spears hit all the other marks by writing an adorable half-hour comedy-mystery with a lovable and hapless Great Dane — a character modeled, they often said, on the character Bob Hope played alongside Bing Crosby in the “Road” movies. After 15 or so drafts, they realized that the dog, Scooby-Doo, was the star. (The artist was Iwao Takamoto, another Hanna-Barbera veteran, who died in 2007.)
…
Hanna-Barbera was a relatively small studio at the time that was short of writers, and the pair started submitting gags and scripts on spec. They became network darlings and were the particular favorites of Mr. Silverman, said Mark Evanier, a television writer who later worked for Mr. Spears and Mr. Ruby. When Mr. Silverman moved to ABC, he took Mr. Spears and Mr. Ruby with him, and in 1977 he helped them set up their own studio.
Over the next 20 or so years, Ruby-Spears Productions created a slew of animated programs, among them “Thundarr the Barbarian,” starring a musclebound hero and set in a postapocalyptic future, and “Fangface,” featuring a lovable werewolf and a gang of teenagers — like “Scooby-Doo,” but with complications. The company also produced a reboot of “Alvin and the Chipmunks” and many other shows.
The obit does not discuss Scrappy-Doo at all, but the Wikipedia entry on same is enlightening.
I thought I’d try some things that are lighter and shorter today.
First up: “See A Job”. Actually, I have the impression that “See A Job” is the title of this whole series of educational films, and the actual title of this one is: “The Airline Stewardess: What’s A Nice Girl Like You Doing Way Up Here When The Ground’s Way Down There?”, “the story of Elaine Vaughn, an African-American Pan Am airline stewardess.”
That was from the 1960s. Bonus: “Airline Glamor Girls”, stewardess training from the late 1940s.
More bonus, and in the interest of equal time: TWA explains their “Inflight Services Personnel Selection Process” as of 1979.
Another really short bonus. “Top Gear” enthusiasts may have seen this one, but I had not previously: Clarkson’s custom drink cabinet for the trunk of his car.
I just find that very cool. One more, but still on the short side: “A Roman Solider Prepares Dinner”.
Science Sunday!
Today, a compilation of shorter videos for once. First up: yes, it is a TED talk. But it is also James Randi. As I’ve said previously, I consider debunking pseudoscience (including “psychic” frauds) to be legitimately science.
Bonus: from the Periodic Videos channel, a short video on anatoxin-a. Anatoxin-a is also known by another name: “Very Fast Death Factor“.
Bonus #2: from the MIT Science Reporter, “Underwater Photography”. I picked this one because it features another one of my heroes, Harold “Doc” Edgerton.
I know I’ve been running long all week. I apologize for that: next week, I’m hoping I can keep things a little shorter. Also a confession: I’ve watched the second two videos, but I’m only about 50 minutes into the first one.
Since today is Saturday, and since this video sits at the intersection of two of this blog’s obsessions interests, here you go: “Hadrian’s World: Leadership Lessons from a Roman Emperor”. You know, Hadrian? The wall guy?
Bonus: We haven’t spent enough time in the UKOGBNI recently, so let us remedy that. “How To Make A Royal Marines Officer”.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Richard Van der Horst. More from the Telegram. I know this seems out of context, but it will make more sense if you watch all the way through to the graduation ceremony in part 2.
Chadwick Boseman. Variety. THR.
This is one of those cases where I don’t have much to say: his death at 43 is shocking and is being covered pretty much everywhere by everybody, and I really have nothing to add.
It seems to me that the C-130 is an underappreciated plane.
It isn’t sexy. But it can carry a lot of stuff:
It can carry a lot of troops.
It can land on a short field.
It can land and take off from an aircraft carrier.
Properly equipped versions even have a “frappe” setting.
Today’s feature: “Touchdown!” a 1960s vintage promo film for the C-130 from the Lockheed-Georgia Company.
Bonus, just for fun:
Gerald D. Hines, prominent developer.
At his death, Mr. Hines’s company had built 907 projects around the world, including more than 100 skyscrapers, many of them designed by architects like I.M. Pei, Harry Cobb, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Robert A.M. Stern and the firm Kohn Pedersen Fox.
Hines built the Lipstick Building (officially 885 Third Avenue) in Manhattan and Pennzoil Place, Williams Tower and Bank of America Plaza in Houston, all designed by Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee. It was behind the Salesforce Tower, designed by Mr. Pelli, which is the tallest building in San Francisco; the DZ Bank in Berlin, designed by Mr. Gehry; the sprawling Porta Nuova complex in Milan; the Diagonal Mar project in Barcelona; and the Aspen Highlands ski area in Colorado, a favorite project of Mr. Hines’s. (He had a home in Aspen and continued to ski into his 90s.)
Architecture was his passion, although it would probably be more accurate to say that what he cared about most was fusing a point of intersection between serious design and profit-making real estate development. He took issue with colleagues who saw creative architects as dangerous to the bottom line. Spending a little more to create a better building would pay off in the end, he believed, because tenants would spend more to be in a better building that had a distinctive identity, and that would benefit both his tenants’ businesses and his own.
…
Ada Louise Huxtable, then the senior architecture critic of The New York Times, hailed Pennzoil in 1976 as a “rarity among large commercial structures: a dramatic and beautiful and important building.”
“It successfully marries art and architecture and the business of investment construction,” she added.Pennzoil was internationally acclaimed, and it led other developers to attempt the Hines formula of hiring celebrated architects and commissioning them to design one-of-a-kind towers that could be marketed as defining points of downtown skylines. (Not all of his peers were as good as Hines, however, in simultaneously encouraging creativity and controlling construction costs.)
The success of Pennzoil Place marked the beginning of a close and long relationship between Mr. Hines and the partners Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee. It would transform Mr. Johnson’s practice from a boutique firm designing mainly expensive civic and institutional projects into a major player in commercial architecture — one that would reshape skylines around the country. Hines also commissioned the Johnson firm to design Comerica Tower in Detroit, the Wells Fargo Center in Denver, 550 Boylston Street in Boston and 101 California Street and 580 California Street in San Francisco, among many others.
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hines made an unlikely pair: the intellectual architect who rarely stopped talking and loved gossip and controversy, and the buttoned-up developer so averse to grandstanding that he would keep a slide rule in his pocket and take it out and pretend to use it during a meeting to avoid having to speak. But before his death in 2005, Mr. Johnson told the writer Hilary Lewis that he considered Mr. Hines his “first and greatest client.”
Walter Lure. Interesting story: Mr. Lure was the rhythm guitarist for the Hearbreakers (also known as Johnny Thunders and the Hearbreakers, as opposed to Tom Petty’s Hearbreakers) one of those legendary NYC punk bands.
The Heartbreakers were together for a brief three years and recorded only one studio album, “L.A.M.F.,” released in 1977 on the British label Track Records. But among the bands that clustered around downtown clubs like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB during the early punk years, the Heartbreakers had an outsize reputation.
“They were probably the best band besides the Ramones and the Dictators,” Legs McNeil, a co-founder of Punk magazine and the co-author of “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” (1996), said in a phone interview. “But they’re kind of like mythical, you know, because no one ever saw them. And when they did, Johnny was usually too drugged out to perform.”
…
…
After the Hearbreakers, he went into product testing for the FDA (he had an English major and a chemistry minor from Fordham) and from there went into Wall Street.
…
He was also the last surviving member of the Heartbrakers (with the exception of Richard Hell, who was briefly the Heartbreakers bass player. Hell left/was fired from the band and formed Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Heartbreakers entry from Wikipedia.)
Travel Thursday!
Here’s something a little different: “To Catch a Dream”, a visit to Spain by way of Iberia Airlines. I could go for Spain right now. Sherry! Tapas!
Iberia merged with British Airways in 2010, according to Wikipedia, but both airlines still operate under their own names.
Bonus video, for two reasons: in keeping with the Spanish theme, “Morocco to Madrid by train & ferry”.
The other reason is that I like The Man In Seat 61. One of these days, if I can ever get the time and money together, I want to ride the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and his site has a lot of useful information on doing that (as well as other train travel).
The first two panels of today’s “Dinosaur Comics”. Having extensively studied listened to the first 112 or so episodes of “The History Of Rome”, I am confident in stating that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire began when the Empire proscribed setting off fireworks whenever you felt like it.
All of this Babylon Bee op-ed. (Hattip: MtM.) Yes, I am aware that they are a satire site, but everything in that piece is correct: everything did start going downhill when men stopped wearing hats.
“The best thing about kids’ soccer being canceled this year”. Although I quibble slightly with this: the best thing about kids soccer being cancelled isn’t the renewed socialization, it is the fact that kids aren’t playing soccer.
More history today. And again, I’m running a bit long. I know.
British Army Documentaries has posted a three part series: “Falklands: The Land Battle 1982”.
Here’s part 1: “The Landings”.
I understand if you don’t want to watch all 46 minutes of this. Not everybody is that interested in the Falklands War. But at least listen to the first 45 seconds or so: is that literally the most 1980s music you’ve ever heard?
Bonus video: if you’re interested, part 2: “Towards Stanley”.
Part 3, “The Final Countdown Battle”.
And part 4, “In the Light of Experience”.
For the historical record: Gail “Passages” Sheehy.
Justin Townes Earle, singer, songwriter, and son of Steve Earle. He was only 38.
Norman Carlson. He ran the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 1970 to 1987.
Starting in the early 1980s, government policies like the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing had led to mass incarceration, swelling inmate populations in both state and federal systems. Aiming to ease the stress on penitentiary inmates and staff, Mr. Carlson favored building more prisons; during his tenure, he created 20 new facilities, nearly doubling the existing number.
And in Marion, Ill., he established a tough new system of solitary confinement that became the model on which future supermax penitentiaries were based. These included the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo., known as the ADX; it is the toughest prison in the federal system, housing those who have been labeled the “worst of the worst.”
…
Mr. Carlson was credited with professionalizing the Bureau of Prisons. He disciplined officers who beat inmates, setting a policy of zero tolerance for prisoner abuse. Guards were to call themselves corrections officers, and assistant wardens were to wear suits and ties. He often ate with prisoners and brought along his wife and children, to show that prison food was good enough for his own family.
And he was a stickler for cleanliness.
“Mr. Carlson viewed a dirty prison as a sign of poor management; consequently floors were highly polished and walls kept painted,” Mr. Earley wrote. He said that one warden was so eager to please the director that when the snow outside had turned muddy and brown, the warden had his staff sprinkle flour on it to make it look whiter before Mr. Carlson arrived.
…
(Pete Earley’s The Hot House is a swell book about Leavenworth specifically, and to some extent about the Federal prison system in general. I enthusiastically recommend it if you’re interested in prisons or criminal justice issues.)
I’m going long again, I know. I’m sorry. But this is something I’ve actually looked for in the past, and only now just found on the ‘Tube.
One of the non-“Top Gear”/”Grand Tour” series that James May has done is “James May’s Toy Stories“, in which he did interesting things with children’s toys.
For example: launching “Action Man” (the licensed UK knockoff of “G.I. Joe”, which someone describes as “the most derided toy in Britain”) on a rocket to see if he can exceed the speed of sound.
Example #2: build a three mile long slot car track.
Just one more: a Lego house. A Lego full-sized house.
Sadly, the house no longer exists:
Great and good FotB Borepatch has lost his mother.
If you haven’t already, please head over there to extend your sympathies.
I thought today I would:
a) be a little self-indulgent again, and
II) do some real history this time.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I know I’ve brought this up in other places: I’ve been listening to the back numbers of Mike Duncan’s “History of Rome” podcast, and enjoying them a great deal. Some other bloggers have been discussing history, and especially Roman history as well. So today’s entries are all Roman themed, for reasons.
I know these are long, and I apologize, but I think they are worthwhile.
First of all: this is a talk at Stanford University from 2011 by Dame Mary Beard: “Mistaken Identities: How to Identify a Roman Emperor”, in which she talks about various busts and statues, and why the identification of them with Romans like Julius Caesar probably isn’t true.
(You could probably fast forward to about the 7:00 mark if you want to skip the excessively long introduction.)
Bonus video: “The Accidental Suicide of the Roman Empire” by Michael Kulikowski. I have another reason for posting this: while Dr. Kulikowski is currently at Penn State, he gave this lecture in 2012 at Washington and Lee University, where he was formerly a professor of history. So this is basically bait for the Washington and Lee contingent out there.
Bonus #2: Dame Beard again, at the 92nd Street Y from 2015, talking about SPQR: The History of Rome.
I was going to write more about Dame Beard, but I find that pretty much everything I wanted to say, I wrote not long after reading SPQR in 2015.
Point of etiquette: if someone is both a PhD and an OBE, does the OBE title (Dame or Knight) take precedence over the “Dr.”? I would assume that it does, since I believe it is a lot harder to become an OBE than a PhD, but I’d like to establish that for certain.