So very late -- no time for the usual half-witty intro, but credit for today's mental relaxant goes to Andrew Erdman's informative and entertaining overview of free-spirited American theater, Blue Vaudeville. No respectable home should be without one!
In the 1880s, Boston theatre impresario Edward Franklin Albee noted that a production of a major theatrical hit was charging a steep price per ticket ($1.50 per) and turning away hundreds of would-be theatergoers every night. He and his partner rented a theater, bought costumes from a department store, got a pianist, and set about pirating as much of the show as they could for an "abridged" version. Soon they were running continuous performances from eleven in the morning until midnight. Their version, which cost only a quarter to see, was so popular that the the help of the Boston police was required to manage the daily mob of ticket buyers. They built on the show's theme with special decor in the theater, and female greeters dressed in the recognizable garb of the country in which the show was set.
What was the name of the show they so successfully abbreviated?
First correct answer posted to comments wins nearly 3/4 of a bottle of Cool Water cologne (see previous post). No Googling or asking that Reliable Source guy. One guess per comment, but comment as often as you like.
The following was posted yesterday to the Freecycle NYC mailing list, a listserv for people who have items they are looking to give away:
"Moving on the 1st, so have a bunch of free stuff. I'm in the East
Village, and if at all possible, let me know if you'd be able to come between 6 and 7pm tomorrownight, because that's when some other people are stopping by for free stuff too.
1. Bottle of Cool Water cologne, 70% full
2. Bottle of Off unscented bug spray, 70% full, complete with Guatemalan
price tag
3. Dancing Hamster Larry Love, dances to the song, "I Think I Love You".
about 8" tall. Still sings and dances.
4. 2 Wooden drawers - 16.5" x 20.5" x 8"
5. 2 Videos - Indiscreet (Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman), Operation
Petticoat (Cary Grant, Tony Curtis)
6. Plastic Small Tub/Big Ugly Vase - 13.75" tall, 9" wide at the top, 6"
wide at the bottom
7. Black and Decker Personal Coffeemaker w/ Travel Mug -
http://www.epinions.com/hmgd-Small_Appliances-All-Black___Decker_Brew__N_Go_
Personal_Coffeemaker_with_Travel_Mug_DCM18
8. 6 issues of Rolling Stone from the 80's - all with attractive men on
the cover.
9. Cigarette Power Adapter for a LG510 cell phone
10. 1 Pair (male) size 10 flip flops, light tan with grey straps
11. ~30 empty 40oz. beer bottles. Coors [Light], Bud [Light], Ballantine
12. 1.75 liter bottle of Cromwell Extra Dry Gin, about 75% full
13. 1 empty mini-keg of Becks beer - 1 gallon, 1 quart, 9 oz.
14. 1 brown corded telephone
15. 1 set/strip/thing of wooden beads - arranged so you can hang them
over your door. In so-so condition.
16. 1 set/string/thing of blinds - off white
17. 1 lamp, 17.5" tall, no shade
18. 1 34" long blue beaded (beads are .5" in diameter) necklace with 3 4"
rubber chickens attached."
Ed note: If you want the wooden beads, I'd advise showing up by 5:50.
He died twelve years ago this week. His parents fled the unrest along the border between France and Germany, and settled in the U.S., where he was born. He dropped out of school in the 4th grade, and at age 13 was performing as a professional musician. He convinced his parents to buy him his first musical instrument by promising to turn over to them all his earnings as an artist. By 21, he was a full-time performer, and three years later decided to take his band to New Orleans in search of work -- but they never made it there. Instead, they were hired by a radio station in a small town, where they remained for the next ten years, going through several name changes, including at one point the Honolulu Fruit Gum Company.
Over the next three decades he went on to greater and greater prominence, becoming a musical fixture in Chicago and becoming known nationwide in 1951. He had already scored modest hits with "Don't Sweetheart Me" and "Shame on You" in 1944. But he didn't have a No. 1 single until 1961, with "Calcutta," his only song to reach the top of the charts. He did, however, have a number of Top 10 LPs. He retired a wealthy man, controlling a very successful music publishing business and a resort community in Santa Monica, California.
Who was this tunesmith?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a box of new, beta-test Turmeric Altoids (nearly flavorless, they merely dye the mouth a powerful orange color). No Googling or taping together several computers with masking tape (a la My New Filing Technique). Only one guess per comment, but you may comment as often as you like.
Special prohibition for today's players: don't look in your wallet.
The names of some, but not all U.S. states appear on currently issued United States paper currency: Michigan (but not Ohio), Florida (but not Alabama or Mississippi*), Arkansas and Texas (but not Oklahoma or Louisiana), Iowa (but not Illinois or Indiana), Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas and Nebraska (but not Missouri); Oregon, California and Nevada (but not Arizona or New Mexico); Colorado (but not Wyoming or Montana); North (but not South) Dakota; Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts (not Rhode Island); New Hampshire (but not Vermont or Maine); Virginia and West Virginia (but not Tennessee or Kentucky), Georgia and, interestingly, "Carolina" (with no designation of North or South); Washington's name, if only because of its origin, of course, is unavoidable.
With the exception of Washington, what is the single reason some states appear, and others do not (as detailed above)?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a water-damaged Betamax copy of the Korean-made 1971 epic Dr. Goldfoot meets Dr. No meets Dr. Strangelove (subtitled in French). No Googling or pulling that great big roll of greenbacks out of your back pocket. One guess per comment, but comment as frequently as you like.
*A representation of De Soto discovering the Mississippi occurs in the old 1918 $500 bill, which is technically still in circulation, but is not currently issued.
As your humble editor has avoided making any serious (or even semi-serious) comments about real-world events for a couple of weeks now, it may seem puzzling that -- long after the breaking of the story, the circulation of universal shock and horror, the revelations of the second and third layers of the scandal, news cycle upon news cycle -- now I'm actually going to go ahead and write about it.
As serious political thought probably isn't what you come here for (in the sense that there's no convoluted puzzle about the invention of shopping carts involved), I will try to respect the fact that I am at best trying the collective patience of my two or three readers. So, just a couple of thoughts, followed by a rundown of links that may prove useful to anyone not already tired of this subject.
Firstly: Is it just me, or is it beginning to dawn on folk in general that the recent display of horror at Abu Ghraib is deeply and essentially connected to the way this whole farce of a war/occupation/liberation has been run? In Seymour Hersch's latest , he quotes a "Pentagon official" going over some ideas that should be familiar to everyone with a television, if only by inference: the war planners have consistently, insistently opted to look only at sunny-side-up estimates of everything from troop strength to the amount of business Iraqi florists would do selling rose petals to teenage boys looking to welcome a Humvee.
This habit -- insist that the job can be done quickly and on the cheap if we just, y'know, get in there and do it -- looks to be a big part of what turned a bunch of reservists into torturers. First, there was the use of at least one discredited former corrections official in a key role. And then there was the dissemination of "interrogation techniques" to civilian contractors and barely-trained reservists. And -- maybe most tellingly -- there was the pressure to get intelligence. This strikes me as important even beyond the issues of missing safeguards, inadequately trained soldiers, confused command within the prison. Important even beyond the question of the false equivalences (between Iraqis and the Al Quaeda murderers) routinely offered to military personnel.
It's a simple fact: by fucking the occupation up so completely, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their staffs set the stage for the insurgency, our increasingly flailing response, and the predictable toxic results that happen to communities when panic sets in -- including the propensity to say "the gloves are off." By all means, let's see those directly responsible for the conditions that led to the -- for gods' sake, it's come to this -- SYSTEMATIC COMISSION OF WAR CRIMES BY AMERICAN TROOPS get court-martialed. Indeed, generals ought to pay the same as PFCs, and it looks like a lot of people agree. But let's not take our eyes off of the prime movers here. Even the welcome possibility of a Rumsfeld resignation looks to be beside the point: this atrocity is the fruit of this administration's feckless antics, and if the understanding of that doesn't spur a smacking defeat of the incumbent in November, whatever disgust the world chooses to express toward America and Americans will have been justified.
Secondly (yes, that was only point one)...
Sunday, Theresa and I watched Spike Lee's 2002 film of David Benioff's novel The 25th Hour, in which Edward Norton plays a convicted drug dealer about to head off to prison for a seven-year stretch. I don't really have much to say about the film here (although I enjoyed it). But one motif within the story seemed immediately resonant with what I had just spent the day reading and hearing about.
The film makes much of a perception about the world of U.S. prisons that has become a truism for anyone who watches television or movies: in the world of the prison, the weak are largely at the mercy of the strong and cruel. This includes the notion the guards and the system not only do little to protect human rights there, but that it's understood that this is part of one's punishment, whether one has been sentenced for selling drugs or robbing liquor stores or killing someone. Norton's character dreads going to serve his sentence -- not because he rejects the idea of punishment -- because he is frightened that he will be so brutalized there that he won't be able to survive. Indeed, the police who arrest him gleefully remind him of this, and he agonizes over what little he can do to mitigate his impending existence as a human punching bag and worse.
The film leaves open the question of whether such consequences are merely the harvest which Norton's character has sown. My interest is in the extent to which the film's story about what will happen to Norton is a familiar one -- a very familiar one. Now, I don't come to this armed with a set of facts about prison conditions (although casual reading suggests that the conditions Norton worries over do indeed exist in many U.S. prisons.) Nor am I suggesting that I know how much or little comfort and security ought to typify an imprisoned criminal's daily life.
My point is that our popular culture is literally saturated with references to the hell of prison life -- how many times a week do cops in cops shows slyly allude to what might happen to the uncooperative perp with the pretty face? How many films have you seen where an ex-con implies that he had to compromise his humanity in order to hold it together while serving his sentence? And I'm not even talking about that one on HBO that's about what happens when you throw together fifty Hannibal Lecters or whatever. In almost every case, the spectre of serial rape is either explicitly or implicitly what's at stake.
The prison -- as a kind of Hobbesian zoo, in which the war of all against all properly rages within, because, hey, what can you do about people like this? -- is part of our cultural mythology now, not as a place of reform or control, but merely as a sanctioned hell in which we see elements of torture -- rape, beating, humiliation -- as inevitably present components. We think of it as normal -- and indeed we hear about it an awful lot in our popular forms of entertainment. And at least one famous study suggested that we're all ready to play the part of the sadistic C.O.
Where do you think those grinning thumbs-up morons in the photos got their ideas about what to do with prisoners? Why do you think Americans stood by while Iraqi guards raped other prisoners? Part of it goes to the appalling conditions of the commands, part of it goes back up the chain to the "Vulcans." And part of it goes to all of us, to the way we consume fevered dreams of prisons and prisoners. Maybe the script that was followed in Abu Ghraib comes as much from Hollywood as it does from the Pentagon.
Enough. Some links if you're interested:
Metafilter's y2karl put together an impressive compendium of references here. One particularly interesting article documents some accounts from enlisted personnel of how their commanders ignored warnings that the systems in place for detaining Iraqis were unstable.
Talking Points Memo has run down some facets of the story I hadn't noticed elsewhere, like this one and especially this one.
Finally, Torrid takes the domestic political measure of the scandal --you'll have to scroll down to his May 9th and May 8th entries.
(And now that I'm done wasting your time with slightly stale outrage, I'd like to remind you that Friday's quiz remains an unsolved mystery...)
Apologies for delaying factoid fun for so long. Here's today's shot in the dark.
In 1868, a writer (whose birthday is today) published a long, twelve-volume work which related the details of a real, sensational 17th-century murder case, involving a child bride, a disguised priest, a triple murder, four hangings and the beheading of a nobleman. It was based on legal documents the author had uncovered in Italy. Although the writer is known for other work as well, many still consider this his finest hour.
Who was the writer?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a macadamia nut that eerily resembles Richard Armitage. No Googling or text messaging those know-it-all kids in Finland. One guess per comment, but you may comment as often as you like.
Hug -- 1 drink
Lingering shot on sad-eyed Aniston -- 1 drink
Idly wondering what the hell the "Mix it Up" credit "Created by Courtney Cox" could possibly mean -- 1 drink
Advertisement for a prescription pharmeceutical -- mouthful of nachos and a Lipitor
Grating fake outrage by David Schwimmer -- 1 drink
Grating fake outrage by D.S. collapsing into unconvincing self-pity -- 2 drinks
Glimpse in D.S.'s eyes of existential panic at the realization of final evaporation of his reason for being famous-- chug!
Sexual Harassment Lawsuit -- 2 drinks
The beginning of a mental inventory of hours personally spent watching syndicated reruns for no explicable reason -- 17 drinks
I spend a lot of my day, for better or for worse, looking at this page (and naturally comparing against this one).
Sometimes as I scan through the mostly-all-too-familiar titles, there comes a blurring effect, and one title runs into another. The end result is generally gobbledegook, but every now and then, I get a you-got-your-choclate-in-my-peanut-butter moment: How to Get Rich Rewriting History or The New Science of Selling and Persuasion Against All Enemies. I'm looking forward to Bergdorf Blondes Reading Lolita in Tehran, and when Bill Clinton's memoir finally arrives, I know how I'd like to finish the title.
But when you get a put a strained graduation-gift standard with a lurid, ripped-from-the-talk-shows bit of panderbait, AND you get a rhyme in the bargain, the result is golden: Oh, the Places You'll Go!...On the Down Low.