When we think about the great consumer electronics technologies of our time, the cellular phone probably springs to mind. If we go farther back, perhaps we’d pick the color television or the digital camera. But none of those products were adopted as fast by the American people as the boom box.
That factoid is a sidenote in a 2011 paper that I stumbled on from the Journal of Management and Marketing Research. Author Tarique Hossain included data from the Consumer Electronics Manufacturing Association on the “observed penetration rate at the end of the 7th year” for all the technologies listed above. Hossain’s data didn’t include the starting years for these seven-year periods, but I’m assuming they mark the introduction of the boom box in the mid-1970s. That would mean that by the early 1980s, more than 60 percent of American households owned some kind of portable cassette player with speakers attached to it.
That’s the guy at the Atlantic’s definition of “boom box,” not one found in the study. Here’s one from Wikipedia:
Technically a boombox is, at its simplest, two or more loudspeakers, an amplifier, a radio tuner, and a cassette and/or CD player component, all housed in a single plastic or metal case, with a handle for portability. Most units can be powered by AC or DC cables, as well as batteries.
Note some of the other things on the chart at the Atlantic: CD Player, Portable CD Player. Color Television/Stereo Color Television. But Boombox is nebulous. It could mean a radio receiver with two speakers, it could mean a cassette player with two speakers, it could mean a compact shelf system with detachable speakers. What else could it mean in the minds of respondents? Mono cassette players? Transistor radios?
It’s the only technology referred to by its slang nickname. So no doubt it did the best.
I could not make it through this film in a single viewing.
I started watching it three or so years ago, back when I lived in Old Trees, and I got probably 2/3 of the way through before I thought of something better to do, or before my wife returned from wherever she was and I spent the time with her instead.
So the second viewing, the film had a certain familiarity with it. It was like a movie I’d seen before.
The plot: James Bond, with Timothy Dalton at the helm, helps a high-level Russian defect only to see the Russian snatched back after explaining the plot of another Russian honcho to start killing British and American spies. Bond knows the plotting Russian and thinks him incapable of the betrayal, so Bond goes roguish with a Russian cello player to find out what the Russians are up to.
Dalton’s low on my list of Bonds, so he doesn’t get that much of my innate affection that I feel for the franchise. I made it through the second viewing, but I won’t watch it over and over again.
Strange, though, how squicky these films make one feel 25 years later. Remember when those plucky Afghan freedom fighters were the good guys? James Bond helped them. Rambo helped them. Only a quarter century later and those plucky Afghan freedom fighters are blowing up Americans, and it’s hard to sympathize with them.
It’s a short, 25 minute skit from 1901 for a minstrel show, wherein I guess a white guy would put on black face and make humor from the mannerisms of colored folk. This piece features five characters: An older father who is hard of hearing; an eldest daughter who has caught a man to marry, a wealthy man; a middle daughter who is a romantic and sees the match through that prism; the youngest daughter, who has a sharp tongue; and the “wealthy” man who has just come into an inheritance of $44.75 and some shoes and who is being henpecked into the marriage by the eldest daughter.
The piece is written heavily in Negro dialect, or at least that which the author would call Negro dialect. It’s harder to read even than some of Kipling’s argot, which might be why I found a bookmark halfway through its fifteen pages. It’s not very funny, either, but I’m a hundred years past the target audience. I can see some of the gags, though, the more clever ones that don’t rely on the basic comedy elements of the father mishearing the courtier or the continual repeating of the fortune that the young man has inherited.
Meh. It comes from a whole series, which proves that before radio, television, the movies, and the Internet, people would watch anything.
Many women will need to get Pap smears only every five years under new national guidelines released this month.
“We’re going to be able to identify a subset of women that we can put at ease,” said Dr. Rosanna Gray-Swain, a obstetrician/gynecologist with BJC HealthCare. “If they have normal Pap smears and are negative for (human papillomavirus) … they have essentially zero chance of developing cervical cancer in five years.”
Essentially zero is not equal to zero. Following these guidelines, a small number of women will develop cervical cancer that could have been caught by more frequent pap smears. To the United States government, these are acceptable losses.
This new recommendation to cut testing that would catch cancer earlier mirrors the 2009 guideline that also recommended fewer mammograms which would mean breast cancer would go undetected longer in some women.
One wonders why we don’t hear about the United States Preventive Services Task Force’s War on Women, since its governmental actions put women at greater risk of advanced cancer and death.
Contrast this with the Republican “war on women” which thinks men and women should pay for their own contraception and abortifacients or insurance plan that covers them.
(Fun fact: Abortifacients in animal breeding are called mismating shots. How would it frame the debate if we used that term instead of the scientific and rational sounding “abortifacient”?)
Sansone has asked for an $11 million in tax-increment financing assistance and $4 million other tax subsidies. The city’s TIF proposal would let Sansone keep 100 percent of new property taxes and 50 percent of new sales taxes generated at the site to use for development-related costs. It would last for up to 23 years but is expected to be retired in 14 years.
Two of the four candidates oppose the TIF outright, although one is against it because it would include a Walmart, and the candidate says:
He also opposes Walmart moving to the site and says it would hurt local businesses. He added that Walmart often moves on in seven to 10 years to another city offering tax assistance.
The candidate apparently opposes inexpensive consumer goods for Ellisville residents. As to his assertion that Walmart moves on, I have to ask: Have you ever known a Walmart to move like this? The Walmarts of my youth out in Jefferson and St. Louis County are still in their original spots after 30 years, but they were built before free government money was the norm.
Need a check box? You can order one from this toll free number. Now you can offer your users the ability to select more than one answer for a question!
Seriously, though, when I received a check order last week, instead of putting the checks into little chipboard boxes and wrapping them for mailing, Deluxe (not living up to its name) put the checks between two sheets of chipboard and into a large plastic envelope to mail them out.
For the environment, of course. Because now instead of some cellophane and some reusable little boxes, Deluxe, like Puma, has redesigned its packaging to lower its costs and then tries to convince us it’s for the environment.
Unlike Puma, though, “Deluxe” offers to sell us the former packaging for an additional cost. Apparently, Deluxe is ready to throw over the environment if there’s an additional buck to be made.
The city of St. Louis chose Pinnacle Entertainment to build a casino (Lumière Place) after extracting promises that the developer would pour an additional $50 million dollars in urban Renaissance development in the city.
In 2004, Pinnacle Entertainment made a deal with the city to invest $50 million in revitalizing the riverfront area within five years of opening its $507 million Lumière Place casino.
A year later, Pinnacle promised a $25 million condo tower on Laclede’s Landing. In 2006, the company announced plans to build stores and additional condos as part of a second phase of Lumière Place, which opened in December 2007.
But the recession hit — and the projects were canceled.
Pinnacle now faces a December deadline. Its only investment outside of its casino complex: the $9.8 million Stamping Lofts project. And even though it is getting full credit for the project, its financial investment was just $2 million.
To recap how these gilded deals play out:
Pinnacle promises urban Renaissance development if it gets to build a casino first. Pinnacle builds the casino, then does not meet its other promises.
The St. Louis Cardinals promise a $550 million dollar urban Renaissance development if they can build a new tax-subsidized stadium first. The new ballpark opened in 2006. Six years later, the promised mixed use development is coming soon. After additional tax subsidies, please.
A series of developers promise to urban Renaissant (we might as well coin a verb for it) with a series of tax credits, incentives, loans, and the city of Springfield’s construction of parking garages. (The saga unfolds here.) Decades after the first attempts at public/private glory, the building remains boarded up at city expense, but the parking garages and their debt and annual maintenance costs are there.
What happens over and over: The private developer gets what it wants and breaks its promises. The iron-clad contracts to which the city thinks it has bound the developer are renegotiated when the developer is going to not meet them to save face for the city, or the developer walks away from the contracts entirely.
Sadly, the lesson tomorrow’s leaders won’t learn a lesson that these sorts of agreements benefit the private at the expense of the public. The lesson they will learn is to make their iron-clad contracts iron-cladder as they continue the same pattern.
You don’t have to be a software tester to think that’s funny. As a matter of fact, the only quality that is scientifically proven to find it funny is you are Brian J. Noggle.
Last year, when I was staining my deck, I found a little hook screwed into the outside of the deck. A small hook, not something big enough to hang a plant on, but bigger than a small eyehook screw. I had no use for it, so I took it off of the deck, and I thought I might throw it away.
Well, you know me.
Since the hook was only partially oxidized, I threw it into the drawer amongst my tools that holds miscellaneous screws, eyehooks, s hooks, and whatnot.
So we have a woodburned sign that hangs from a post beside our driveway with our family name on it (“Welcome to the Smith-Wessons”). In the recent (and by recent, I mean “a couple weeks ago) wind storm, the sign blew off the post, from which it was hanging by a couple of chain links between hooks on the post and hooks on the sign. As is the wont of our woodwork in the wind, the hook from the post was missing.
So as I was rooting in the drawer for an eyehook screw to replace the missing hook, I came across the still only partially oxidized recycled screw from the deck. And I found that it was actually the same style of hook as the missing hook from the post. So a couple bits of broken toothpick and a bit of twisting later, and the sign is back up until the next windstorm.
But using that recycled screw is now going to be all the justification I need for my normal packrattery. All the times I through something in a drawer instead of into a trash can because I might use it someday (but seemingly never do) are trumped by this one time where, yes, I did actually use it.
This book is one of MacDonald’s situational books. He takes a group of disparate, sometimes desperate, characters and puts them in a stressful situation where they interact. You see this in Murder in the Wind, and you see this in Condominium.
In this book, though, instead of a terrible storm, we have a delayed Mexican ferry.
A middle-aged man with an impulse mistress he picked up and bedded for an expensive three weeks in Mexico City heads back, guiltily, to his life. An expat American who works on his expat father’s Mexican farm waits to go buy farm equipment. A married couple whose husband is a mama’s boy and whose wife is a former model wanting a good married life wait with his mother (who flew down to join them on their Mexican honeymoon), and the mother takes ill in the heat. An American kills a jealous matador who found the American and the matador’s girl in flagrante delicto after the matador shoots the girl with a harpoon while aiming for the American, and the American finds his flight delayed. An aging comedian and the two statuesque members of his act return from a gig in Mexico and are on their way to New York, but not for the reason the comedian thinks.
They find themselves stymied by a modern ferry that’s been put into a shallow river because a Mexican official crossed there once, a while ago. The draught of the boat is too deep, and it requires Mexican laborers to dig a channel for it before it can carry its two cars across. During the hours-long delay this produces, the waiting travellers interact, reach life-altering reconsiderations and decisions, and engage in some questionable activity.
It’s the sort of thing MacDonald does and does well. Even though the book’s ending leaves the storylines unresolved (although you think they’ll resolve badly, or maybe just less happy than you’d hope for the protagonists who emerge), I enjoyed it. There’s a frame story, wherein a Mexican laborer goes to work at the beginning and at the very end returns home very weary but well-enough heeled from the overtime (he has fifty pesos, half a month’s pay for a day’s work). At the very end of the novel, he and his wife are happy with what they have, which contrasts with the busy, machinating Americans who have a lot of plots but little joy.
Recommended. Have I gone a whole year without reading a MacDonald book? (Yes. My mistake.)
An elderly cattle rancher recently came face-to-face with three thieves on his property, and he took the matter into his own hands. The thieves might have been arrested if Vance West had been able to get someone to help him.
I have a college degree in English, specifically in writing-intensive English, but my classes covered topics such as learning how enjambment makes the poem, how authentic speech mouthed by authentic characters in authentic situations makes the fiction, and how complex sentences with many clauses and many conjunctions makes your writing dense, deep, important, and self-indulgent. Professors focused on the romantic visions of writing as organic growth, something done in Parisian or Nuyorican coffee shops in the afternoon.
Unfortunately, those ideals of youth and academia don’t reflect the realities of writing for a living or even as an ascendant hobby leading to writing for a living. Fortunately, though, my newest mentor and teacher has taught me a method to efficient, guided writing. My toddler has not only shown me the value of outlining, but has provided insight into effective outlining techniques to build better articles. Continue reading “What My Toddler Taught Me About Outlining”→
As you might have noticed in one of my DeRooneyfication posts, I have been moving LPs to my parlor. Where were they before that? Some of the ones, the ones scene in the picture in that post, were in boxes in my storeroom. Others were in my beautiful wife’s office.
You see, the ones in boxes were mostly records I inherited from my mother, some of which she inherited from her mother, which is why the collection is so heavy on Reader’s Digest boxed sets and Elvis Presley titles. Many of the titles I owned or recently purchased were on my wife’s bookshelves since she has been, off and on, ripping the records to MP3s.
Since we still had room even with the polished and repackaged 45- and 78-rpm records, I went down to her office to get more of my albums to move upstairs and to listen to. Not to steal LP Cover Lover‘s thunder, but I found some things familiar and some things strange. Continue reading “Overheard in the Music Library”→
When I was looking for a paperback to read, I found this book on my shelves and thought, “Is that the William Johnston?” Which pretty much ensures I’m the only one to ask that question in the last 25 years, or maybe ever.
This is a 1971 novel based on the television show The Mod Squad, which was about a trio of young detectives in LA. They were young and hip. Mod. You dig it? At any rate, wow, that show had a bad syndication deal or something. I’ve never actually seen it. I don’t remember it replaying later in the 1970s when I was a kid with naught but a television to entertain myself. So I went into the book without anything but precursory knowledge of the program.
Which is unlike the other too William Johnston television-show-turned-novels books I’ve read, and I think it comes out a little here. It’s probably the same problem you get when you drop into the middle of a series: the book knows the characters and assumes you know a bunch about the characters, too, so it doesn’t get too much into that. Instead, onto the adventure that is more complex than a half hour sitcom plot (in the case of the Happy Days and Welcome Back, Kotter books I read) or an hour-long cop drama.
The plot: Someone kills a well-liked cop, Al Quick, who might have been dirty, and it might have something to do with a safe place for drug-addicted youth called simply Home (you see where the title comes from, do you?). It also might have something to do with a gambler named Gino Paul (seriously). And the well-liked cop’s brother is an inspector who insists upon frequent briefings and seems very eager to close the case. It’s a pretty thin plot hung upon a number of discrete scenes, too many of which are the detectives chatting with each other and wondering how they could miss the obvious for a couple more minutes or pages.
It’s a short read, and it is what it is. Apparently, a collector’s item based on the price from Amazon.
You know, there are so many paperback writers from the 1960s and 1970s who plied the trade and put out a lot of books and made a living at it that are mostly forgotten today. I guess that’s William Johnston. The books touted at the end of the book include the early Executioner books, the first Death Merchant, the first Butcher, some science fiction by Don Pendleton (!), and whatnot. Interesting stuff. Well, for me anyway.
“Well, $500,000 a Year Might Sound Like a Lot, but I’m Hardly Rich.”
“Hey, I Worked Hard to Get What I Have!”
“If I Can Do It, So Can You!”
“You’re Just Jealous Because I Made It and You Didn’t!”
“You Shouldn’t Be Punishing the Very People Who Make This Country Work!”
“Stop Asking for Handouts! I Never Got Help from Anybody!”
What follows each point in the list is What we hear, which drifts into a bunch of nonsense. Let’s take a look at them briefly:
“Well, $500,000 a Year Might Sound Like a Lot, but I’m Hardly Rich.”
It’s all about the cash flow, brother. The rich get into bigger houses, have more expensive cars, and pay more–dare I say it?–taxes than the non-rich. When I was working at a startup and had dreams of stock option wealth, I watched the multi-million dollar homes in the St. Louis area. Many of them had annual property tax bills exceeding my salary at that time (and the worth of my stock options by a factor of tens of thousands). I know, I know, you’re saying you don’t have to live in a house like that, but in some cases you do, because you have to throw parties and have the right people over to show your status. Fair? No. But $500,000 a year in salary–cut down to, what, $300,000 by income taxes and then bitten by property taxes, sales taxes, and whatnot. Suddenly you’re living well, but not Larry Ellison well.
“Hey, I Worked Hard to Get What I Have!”
You know what? A lot of them have. Read The Millionaire Next Door and learn how most millionaires make it over a lifetime. I don’t care what this “humor” writer “hears.” It’s not true.
He also goes on to mention millionaire football players, as though NFL players don’t work. The author lacks insight into the NFL experience. Those guys have lots of meetings, film to watch, things to study, and workouts to attend. (Remember the content of Run to Daylight.) To say nothing about going out on Sundays for almost half a year and getting hurt. It takes talent, but it also takes a hell of a lot of work. More than it takes to write an Internet humor column.
“If I Can Do It, So Can You!”
I don’t know many who say that except the ones selling DVDs and books about how to do it, too. It takes moxie, tenacity, intelligence, and a heaping helping of luck. You might not be able to do it, but you can try. Just don’t expect your attempt to succeed if it involves writing a column on the Internet or writing manuals for an enterprise information integration start-up.
“You’re Just Jealous Because I Made It and You Didn’t!”
The rich should definitely not say this because it misuses the word jealous when they should say envious. But the author and his thoughtless ilk are envious, even though they’re blessed with Internet connections and a standard of living better than 99.99% (est.) of humans who have ever lived (and maybe ever will).
“You Shouldn’t Be Punishing the Very People Who Make This Country Work!”
That’s a very blanket statement. The .05% calling themselves the 99% aren’t that surgical in their punishment. I’ve seen this sentiment expressed elsewhere, and it confuses the hell out of me. People expressing it often haven’t started businesses and/or hired people. They haven’t invested in corporations that have hired people. They just expect jobs and whatnot to materialize. Or maybe they expect the government to print jobs the way government prints money. I don’t understand.
“Stop Asking for Handouts! I Never Got Help from Anybody!”
You know what? This is crap. It conflates help with government help, which is different. Charity comes from voluntary contributions. Government wealth redistribution comes under the penalty of death, ultimately. The author then goes into luck (poor station at birth), family obligations (your parents fed you! That’s help!) and a bunch of other crap that pretty almost goes so far to say that the worm that makes the rich loam you grow tomatoes in HELPS YOU YOU HYPOCRITE! But he might not have thought of that.
It very conveniently smears the bright line between government-enforced extraction of wealth from those who make their own and the giving to those who do not and pretty much everything good in life.
Which, frankly, is the type of intelligent argument that one expects from the people fighting the War on Wealth.
I know, I know, it’s Cracked. It’s a humor magazine! But it’s not funny, and it makes a political argument. An unsound and invalid set of political arguments, in fact.
