MemeMachineGo!

=v= Ever since there was that ruckus in the 1960s, the media has been peddling a meme about how those kids should just settle down. It started right away with profiles of youngsters who'd switched to crewcuts, then morphed into a variety of MSM "trends" pieces featuring a nonrepresentative handful of people who have put their youthful zeal behind them and gone on to get married, make money, find Jesus, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and har! har! isn't it so ironic?

A recent story in the Los Angeles Times about street kids in the Haight Ashbury (registration required) trafficked in this meme, quoting some self-described "former flower children" who now own homes and want those damn kids to stop blocking the sidewalks and lowering real estate values. (Ironic! Har!) Actually, I recommend this article as pretty good overall and more sensitive to the plight of these kids than anything I've seen the Bay Area media, but it was really marred by this stupid meme.

The Haight is one of my own stomping grounds, and in the course of some local political activism I've met the "former flower children" quoted in this article. The Times failed to mention that all these grumblers are part of the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, a group pretty much specifically focused on getting the police to hassle the street kids. Their ex-hippie line is a schtick; they are not a representative sample of the neighborhood nor of their generation. (The actual ex-hippies have their own group, of course.)

Oh, and happy 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. I think I'll go visit me a street fair now.

(Via Boing Boing, though I regret to report that what they emphasized was the stupid meme. To which the right-wing blogosphere responded with the inevitable har! har!)

Y’know, you can spend hours watching pet videos on YouTube.

• Ferret and lion cub
• Turtle and cat
• Cat and piano

Here’s a nifty 3-minute Flash video of 160,000 years of human migration. It depicts the Toba catasprophe theory that circa 71,500 years ago, a supervolcano in Indonesia, at what’s now called Lake Toba, erupted. The eruption’s explosive energy was around a gigaton, 20 times the explosive energy of the biggest nuclear bomb detonation. India and Malaysia were blanketed with ash, in places meters thick.

Ash in the atmosphere created a volcanic winter, and in the ensuing planetary extinction event, the human race dwindled to as few as 10,000 adults.One hypothesis is that an effect of this was rapid human phenotypic differentation.

The Toba Catastrophe theory is fairly recent, but my web-searching hasn’t revealed anything challenging it.

Yellowstone is a supervolcano. Its last major eruption was 640,000 years ago. There are several others around the world. We can’t predict when the next eruption might be.

Have a nice day.

Pocahontas and I rarely watch broadcast TV live; what TV we watch, we tend to tape and watch later when we can stop it at will and fast-forward over commercials. We’ve been using a single videotape for this for months, and its reproduction has been getting staticky.

I looked through a stack of videotapes for a spare, found an unlabelled one, and popped it in to see whether it had anything I’d want to keep.

Pocahontas realized it first, from the women’s hair: “This is from the eighties!” The hair was either huge, or nearly shaved on the sides and piled up on top. It was notable any time a woman’s hair didn’t look incredibly dated.

It was a tape my mother had used to record soap operas. We narrowed the date down to October, 1987 — a news update mentioned Baby Jessica. I’m not sure how I ended up with it; my guess is that I must have said something about how I could use a videotape, and my mother gave it to me, maybe during a visit for my birthday — the timing would have been right.

We watched the whole thing. But this time, we fast-forwarded over the programs, and watched the commercials. Pocahontas found it scary how many she remembered, when she hadn’t been watching much TV at the time. I recognized only a couple — I almost never watched TV in college.

The people in the commercials were much, much more consistently white than I see today. A diaper ad featured a bunch of toddlers wearing only their diapers, engaged in a faux press conference. I’d be pretty surpised to see a topless little girl on TV these days. One ad for some diet product featured a woman walking on a beach in a swimsuit. So far it doesn’t sound any different than today, but here’s the thing — she was merely thin, not emaciated. She wouldn’t be in a diet ad now.

There were ads for exciting new products, some still with us — fudge-dipped Oreos, Dole pineapple-orange-banana juice, some deceased — Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Chicken Little, Fresh Start laundry detergent. The National Enquirer was advertising about their coverage of how Liz was furious that Joan Rivers was dating her Malcolm Forbes, and something about Michael Douglas, but the only thing I remember was that in his picture, he didn’t look old.

Police Academy 2 was making its broadcast debut, and there were ads for the River Phoenix vehicle A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon.

The creators of Family Ties had a new sitcom — Day by Day, about a day-care center. Your lack of memory of it tells you how well that worked out. Pocahontas boggled at the reference to a sitcom called My Two Dads, amazed there was a prime-time gay couple that long ago. I’d never seen it, but had heard of its premise, so I explained it wasn’t that. A mother never knew who the father of her child was; after her death, the two men it might have been agree to jointly raise the child. But, then again, a commenter on IMDB wrote:

Greg Evigan and Paul Reiser had this unspoken sexual chemistry, just like my father’s, Stan and Randy (though sometimes their chemistry was more that just unspoken but that’s a story for Dr. Phil!).

And Phil Donahue was covering the shocking topic of one-night stands.

We had so much fun with this, we thought we should start making time capsules — each year, we could watch some TV of 20 years ago. So, instead of tossing the tape we were looking to replace, we’ve labelled it “Time Capsule 2007.” (Of course, maybe it’s time to set up a PVR, as I’d wager longer odds we could watch something recorded that way in 20 years from now than that we’ll still have a working VCR.)

This New Yorker article on commuting discusses “extreme commuting” — people driving upwards of 6-hour round-trips daily — and other enormities. I didn’t know the etymology of “commuter”:

The term “commute” derives from its original meaning of “to change to another less severe.” In the eighteen-forties, the men who rode the railways each day from newly established suburbs to work in the cities did so at a reduced rate. The railroad, in other words, commuted their fares, in exchange for reliable ridership (as it still does, if you consider the monthly pass). In time, the commuted became commuters.

Like many geeks, I routinely look at New Egg when I’m shopping for computer parts. (They know their customer — for months, they had a billboard on the street I work on saying “I’d rather be modding.”)

This is a way cool warehouse tour showing how they fulfill thousands of orders a day. (This is posted for Pocahontas, who loves things like industrial tours.)

I enjoyed this MeFi comment about what happened when a self-considered “pretty decent chess player” saw a board at a friend’s place and suggested a game.

I figured I would see how good he was. During the third game, we’re about 30 moves into the game, and he steps out of the room, so I moved one of his pieces to my advantage. My friend Mark comes back in, sits down, and immediately moves the piece back. Somewhat surprised, I ask if he saw me move it.

Mark looked at me curiously, wiped all the pieces off the board, set them up from the beginning, and says to me “In Chess, you either see it or you do not.” He then makes my opening move, explaining “The standard opening for white,” pausing for effect and then adding “and also the opening move Spasky used in his third match against Fisher in the game I was studying last night.” “Boris is a ham and egger,” he tells me.

“I countered with Fischer’s move,” he says moving his piece. “Also very standard.”

“And then you did something very interesting. A very unconventional move, but I’ve seen it used a few times. When I was 13 someone did this to me and it really threw me off my tempo since it was not like any standard opening. I lost that game in 25 moves.”

Mark was 35 and he was telling me about a game he played when he was 13. At this point I began to understand that I was out of my league.

So he looks at me, and says, “I countered your move with the same move I used against the Israeli national champion at the Philadelphia Open when I was 15. He tried your same trick on me too, but by then I had figured out several defenses.”

[…] We were both playing chess, but he was playing another game. I never played much chess after that. I’ll play a game or two with a couple of ex-cons I know who learned to play in the joint, but I don’t really consider it as playing chess. I don’t know anything about the game.

But it made me sad that having it driven home that he wasn’t world class seems to have killed the writer’s pleasure in the game. It brought to mind Sing in the Voice God Gave You.

I just didn’t bother with music much anymore. The reason I didn’t strikes me as completely stupid now, though it seemed to make sense at the time. The reason was that no one else wanted to hear my music. But then, a few years into this not doing music thing I happened to put on a copy of Dimentia 13’s 1987 LP Disturb The Air. I was sitting there listening to it on earphones thinking, “This is a fantastic record!” With over ten years distance there was nothing egotistical about it. It was just a really good record. And I thought, “I’m gonna make another record. Only this time I don’t give a shit whether anyone listens to it or not.”