Author: DOuG pRATt

Daughters do the darndest things

Art Linkletter has died at age 97, and frankly I was somewhat surprised to realize that he was still alive. When Linkletter’s daughter Diane committed suicide — or, as some claim, was murdered — by falling from a sixth story window, I had recently turned fourteen. At the time it was reported that she was on an LSD trip. When my twin sister Jean and I heard the news, I said, “drugs do the darnedest things!” This elicited a tremendous laugh from Jean. Yeah, we were kids.*

I knew about Art Linkletter’s “Kids Say the Darndest Things” from his House Party show on TV, and I knew about LSD trips from watching Dragnet. “Kids Say the Darndest Things” had been around in one incarnation or another for many years, and by the late 60’s the format had grown tired and it was near the end of its run. But back in the 50’s, it was quite popular.

In 1957, Art Linkletter published a collection of his “Kids Say the Darndest Things” stories that was illustrated by Charles M. Schulz. Years ago, I found a copy in a used book store for 50-cents.

This is a TV commercial that Linkletter made with his daughter Diane not too long before her death.

A posthumous father-daughter collaboration was a record called “We Love You, Call Collect,” released after Diane was gone. I can only imagine how tortured Linkletter must have felt when he lost her.

I can’t say that Art Linkletter had a big influence on me, but I can admire how he didn’t shy away from discussing his daughter’s problems. I think back to watching Linkletter (b.1912), Lawrence Welk (b.1903), and Jack Webb (b.1920) in the 60s, and I see men who had trouble dealing with the youth culture that had taken over. After all, hadn’t the older generation regained control after the first wave of rebellion was beaten back in the late 50s? But when I think of Charles Schulz (b.1922), I see a man who was not only in tune with the times, he made them his own. The same thing can be said of Walter Cronkite (b.1916). Their strength was in their flexibility.

*Another example of my twisted adolescent humor was my Mr. Ed the talking horse joke. Imitating Mr. Ed, as voiced by Chill Wills, “Bend over, Wilbur!”

Tuesday evening stuff

Turner Classic Movies is, at this moment, showing D.W. Griffith’s first version of The Squaw Man. Who else but TCM would show a silent movie from 1914 at 8 pm ET?

Fifty five years later, the Beatles recorded and filmed Let It Be, and that was, oh, only, uh, forty one years ago. Yikes! Who else but the BBC would have a radio documentary on the making of Let It Be? Click here to listen, but do it before next Monday.

BTW, Paul will be at the White House on July 2.

Oil spill on the White House

It must be tough for conservatives to lambaste President Obama for failing to take the lead in the Gulf Coast oil leak crisis, because doing that is tantamount to saying there needs to be more industry regulation and oversight by the government. But they’re right. There may not be much the feds can do to help BP cap the pipe, but Obama’s people should be much more involved with efforts to save the coast.

Conservatives can’t say that pundits on the left are giving Obama a free ride on the situation. Keith Olbermann certainly isn’t.

Two, two, two drives in one

I really like USB disk drives. At first I used them for backing up files from the C: drive on my desktop computer, but now I keep as little as possible on the internal drive; so backing up became a matter of manually copying from one USB drive to another. I knew there was a better way, but it took a while for the hardware to become affordable.

It’s called disk mirroring, otherwise known as RAID 1. With RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) mirroring, my two 500 GB disks appear in Windows as a single 500 GB drive. This is because everything that is saved to a single logical drive is automatically written to two physical disks. Another approach is RAID 0 striping, where two 500 gigabyte disks appear as a single 1 terabyte drive. This diagram shows how data is written with RAID 1 and with RAID 0.

The nifty product that makes this possible for home use is Western Digital’s My Book Mirror Edition. Here’s a review.

The current WD Mirror Edition model has two 1 TB disks, and it sells for $200 or less. It comes out of the box configured for RAID 1, and is formatted for Windows, which is exactly what I want. WD has a utility program for those who aren’t looking for data protection, and would rather have the full capacity of both disks, along with the performance advantage that comes with RAID 0. Move your mouse over the picture below to see WD’s RAID Manager options.

When 500 GB solid state drives reach the consumer market this technology will seem bulky and clunky, but for now it’s nice to have.