Defunded PBS is fundraising with ‘Deconstructing the Beatles’.
Summer in the City
Opposed as Dick Cheney reportedly is to Donald Trump’s version of the Republican Party, they share a pathological sadistic streak. Cheney limited his torture to foreign adversaries during a war, but Trump has no such reservation. Cracking the heads of civilian American citizens is fine with him.
It will be interesting to see if the Washington, D.C. crackdown helps or hurts tourism in the nations’ capitol.
Trump says Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, and Oakland are Blue Cities, referring to their Democratic populations. But of course what he’s really saying is they’re Black Cities, referring to their racial mix.
Ya gotta admire a record that features both an autoharp and a jackhammer.
HELP! Pythons!
When starting this bloggy, with its 19th anniversary coming up on 9/5, I added a gallery section that is no longer working. The first thing I put in there were scans of a fumetti (photo comic) from the May, 1965 issue of Harvey Kurtzman’s HELP! magazine.
Not to be confused with the 1965 Beatles movie HELP! that had not yet been named when the January, 1965 issue of HELP! was published.
“Christopher’s Punctured Romance” starred John Cleese as a man with an unhealthy interest in his daughter’s Barbie doll. It starts on page 17.
Terry Gilliam started at HELP! when Gloria Steinem — yes, her — was leaving. Gilliam was the art director at HELP! when he met John Cleese in New York, and “Christopher’s Punctured Romance” was the result.
When Gilliam followed Cleese to England, he recruited Robert Crumb to be his replacement. Crumb arrived just as HELP! publisher James Warren was shutting it down.
I first heard about this amazing sequence of events from Harvey Kurtzman at a Boston NewCon, in 1975 or ’76. Maybe Denro remembers better than I do.
Getting My Wires Crossed
When I visited the Museum of Printing a month ago, I saw an Apple Lisa that, unfortunately, is no longer working. Here’s one that is.
Lisa was famously inspired by Steve Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC, where he saw a demonstration of the revolutionary Alto office system. The Alto project was headed by Bob Taylor, after he got the pre-Internet Arpanet going, and before he went to DEC to create the pre-Google search engine, Alta Vista.
In early 1983, I was flying around to install operating systems on minicomputers for medical laboratory systems at hospitals. In addition to my hi-fi magazine habit, I was reading computer magazines. One of the best was Byte. The February issue that year featured the introduction of Apple’s Lisa.
As seen by enlarging the page at right below, PARC’s influence was acknowledged.
But it wasn’t Lisa that caught my fancy in that particular issue of Byte. It was that little word “STANDARDS” in the bottom right corner of the cover.
I read that article over and over. A year later, The RS-232 Solution, by Joe Campbell was published.
https://archive.org/details/The_RS-232_Solution_by_Joe_Campbell
What I learned from studying that book became second nature to me. The next step was buying a portable RS-232 breakout box.
I took that thing with me everywhere on my business travels, for whenever I needed to figure out the interface pin-outs for a particular device. I’d draw the wiring diagram and add it to my collection.
Eventually, I wrote a RS-232 Wiring Guide that was distributed to all customers. It was one of those things that nobody told me to do, but it needed doing, so I did it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_modem
My interest in data communications, later superseded by computer networking, served me very well all the way through to retirement. Everything I’ve written here about keeping my music network running is just another expression of scratching that itch.
Returning to HEAP from STEM
College loans succeeded in burdening many students, especially liberal arts majors, with debts they couldn’t repay. Thanks in large part to the rapid rise of AI, the promise of entry level jobs paying six figures for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) majors appears to be waning. Last week’s Wall St. Week, on defunded PBS, had an unsettling report on the weak job market for recent tech grads, along with some other segments of interest.
For years, the most brilliant computer programmers and scientists of the world have been progressively rendering their less brilliant, yet highly competent, colleagues obsolete. Their code is now generating its own code. Is it too late to cash in being an influencer?
We are at a tipping point in education, where major technology firms are only accepting job applicants from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Cal Tech, and a select few other institutions of higher learning. If you are graduating from a less competitive college or university, forget it. There’s software that can do the work you would have been hired to do ten years ago, for a salary of $125,000 or more.
One notable exception I can think of is the leading healthcare software firm Epic Systems, which treats the University of Wisconsin/Madison as if it were a farm system team for recruiting new talent. Epic’s campus is even on a former farm.
It would be good to see at least a partial return to the idea of embracing education for its own sake. The value of HEAP — History, English Literature, Art, Philosophy — shouldn’t be undervalued. But how to make that affordable again, after so many millions of student loan dollars pumped up school coffers, only to see small, liberal arts colleges shutting down from the rise of STEM? What was the money spent on? Upgrading facilities to luxury accommodations, while adding administrative overhead, reducing the number of tenured faculty and relying upon adjunct professors. Not a good mix.
But there’s the problem of those fields of study being seen as “woke.” In my entire life, from the Cold War, to Viet Nam, through Watergate and its aftermath, I’ve never witnessed such a completely screwed up political environment as what Donald Trump has managed to create.
In my opinion, it all began with Ronald Reagan, acting as “Barry Goldwater Lite,” and being fond of saying, “I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” Here’s the funny part. Republicans are acting only on that statement. In one instance, the next thing Reagan said was, “A great many of the current problems on the farm were caused by government-imposed embargoes and inflation, not to mention government’s long history of conflicting and haphazard policies.” Which is exactly what Trump is doing.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/presidents-news-conference-23
Am I ranting today? Sorry.
Coup Attempt #2
I recall a day of mass lawlessness in Washington on January 6, 2021, when Trump was disinclined to call out the national guard. Today, did he contact the mayor to express his concerns, and request a meeting to discuss what measures could be taken? Of course, not.
Trump deploys National Guard to Washington DC and pledges crime crackdown
At first, I dismissed the suggestion that Trump would find an excuse to declare martial law to prevent the mid-term elections, and perhaps even the 2028 election. After his military birthday parade, I no longer doubted that. Now, with his takeover of the District of Columbia, I am feeling more certain that it will happen. (Yeah, I know, he’s only taking control of the police department, but is he really?)