Wrongs on the Right

In 10th grade American History class, 50 years ago (!), we had a discussion about determining fact vs. fiction. One of the kids said he’d heard there was a miracle carburetor. It got incredibly good mileage, but the oil companies and auto manufacturers were keeping it a secret. There was, and is, plenty of justification for doubting the integrity of oil and car companies, but my classmate’s claim reminded me of the “Paul is dead” hoax from a year earlier.

My family had visited the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, MA. A featured exhibit at the time, and of greatest interest to me, was Hitler’s Mercedes convertible touring car. It had mechanical fuel injection, and learning about that made the existence of a “miracle carburetor” seem very unlikely to me.

So here we are today, with people continuing to be sucked in by obvious hoaxes. But unlike Paul is dead or the claim of a miracle carburetor, or even the JFK conspiracy theories, they aren’t harmless. They are malicious lies that can hurt people very directly and personally, as this Associated Press article explains.

Foresight Was 20/20

Once again I have praise for The Premonition, by Michael Lewis. It’s a story of unwavering individual competence in the face of systemic incompetence.

Lewis shows how the pandemic revealed the inefficiencies of both the private and public sectors. If there’s an overarching theme, it’s that the CDC no longer does it job. Trump was the final blow to a once-great organization that began to decline 40 years ago, with Reagan and the AIDS crisis.

Square Songs

The extent of my awareness of SpongeBob SquarePants is pretty much limited to knowing what it is. That changed just a bit when I heard this song on one of my favorite SiriusXM shows, Drew Carey’s Friday Night Freak-out.

It sounds like a song-writing collaboration between Brian Wilson and Margo Guryan. That turns out to not be surprising, because the song was written by former Brian Wilson producer Andy Paley.

How about another square song for kids? As featured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hmmm… that album cover looks square.

It Takes a Village

The summer of ’68, my last summer living in Connecticut, I was glued to a particular show on the family’s 1-year-old 23″ RCA color console TV. It was exactly like the set, apparently broken, seen in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

What is it with Quentin Tarantino and feet?

The show that captivated me was The Prisoner, a British 17-episode limited series that aired Saturday nights on CBS. I’m in the middle of reacquainting myself with the series, which is currently available for free on Amazon IMDB TV. The first episode is on YouTube.

Sound Trek

For over two-and-a-half years, following a couple of hellish surgeries for a detached retina, I was essentially blind in my left eye. How essentially? I could read something only if it was literally touching my eyelashes.

I’ve always enjoyed listening to radio (heck, I used to work at a radio station) including old-time radio shows, and I did a lot of that during the worst few months of my recovery, while confined to my bedroom. That experience gave me a deeper sympathy for people who are permanently visually impaired.

Sci-Fi Old Time Radio is deserving of special recognition for their TV soundtracks with descriptive narration. The shows were originally available on the now-defunct BlindyTV service, and they include the original Star Trek series and Doctor Who.

Click to go to Sci-Fi OTR

Listening to these programs reminds me of when I was a kid, holding the mic of my little tape recorder near the TV speaker to capture bits of Trek. I’d listen to them after bedtime with an earphone (see two posts ago).