When the Tea Party got rolling, some of the anti-government furor was directed at Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank for being a primary mover behind the mortgage mess, because he pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to promote mortgages for low income Americans and immigrants. The commercial banks practiced predatory lending, and the investment banks turned sub-prime mortgages into risky securities, but it’s true that Barney Frank shares some of the blame, as explained in this interview with Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times, on NPR’s Fresh Air program.
[audio:http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/fa/2011/05/20110524_fa_01.mp3|titles=Fresh Air: Gretchen Morgenson on ‘Reckless Endangerment’]The Soul of ‘The Soul a New Machine’
I never met Tom West, who died a few days ago, but he had a big influence on me, through his work at Data General. DG was bought by another Massachusetts company, EMC, in 1999, and what made DG worth buying was CLARiiON, a mid-range storage system that I know quite well. The development of the CLARiiON was led by Tom West, and it marked the second time he postponed scrappy DG’s inevitable extinction. West’s first great success was the MV-series of 32-bit minicomputers, as detailed in the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder.
West didn’t smoke cigarettes while he was at work. Away from Westborough, between sunset and bed, he might smoke a pack or more. Once he muttered that smoking wasn’t harmful if you didn’t do it at work. Of course, West knew it was silly in any literal sense, and he uttered it barely loud enough to be heard. Some nights he would go away from Eagle [the project name for the MV] and play music, with friends and acquaintances, sometimes all night long, and then, fingers raw from his guitar strings, he would drive right in to work and become once again the tough, grim-looking manager. One evening that winter I said to him that I didn’t think it was really possible to be a businessman and a dropout all at once. West said, “But I do it.”
I worked with DG MV’s and Digital Equipment Corporation’s MicroVAX computers throughout the 1980’s. Then, during the dot.com boom of the 90’s, the unthinkable happened — DEC failed, despite having a new, cutting-edge 64-bit system called Alpha that put Data General’s AViiON servers to shame. Prime and Wang were the first Massachusetts minicomputer companies to fall, and the assumption was they’d be followed by DG. The idea that mighty DEC would disappear all together, let alone be survived by its much smaller competitor DG, was ludicrous, and yet it happened. What kept DG going was the CLARiiON. Even though DG was itself later acquired, the CLARiiON brand named lived on. It’s only now being retired, and to this day when you do a SCSI inquiry on a CLARiiON logical drive it returns “DGC,” for Data General Corporation.
The stuck of the Irish
I’m not usually one for viral videos, but tastewar shared this…
The disadvantage of armor. This makes the limo less safe, not more, for the President.
Laughing long and hard
Ace and Gary go live action, in a big and wide way! Rated PG.
Pythons before Monty
If you poke around the videos that show up after the Bonzo Dog Band skit-song I used in my last Neil Innes post, you’ll find this amazing video.
http://youtu.be/-VxV0ZjOcQg
Keep in mind this was before Monty Python’s Flying Circus. And these are cartoons that Terry Gilliam did for the programme.
http://youtu.be/edsgfNFjLYw
As I pointed out years ago, Gilliam had met John Cleese in New York in 1965, and they collaborated on a somewhat notorious magazine project. Later, at the same time when Palin, Idle, and Jones were being very silly with Innes and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Cleese and Graham Chapman were working with Marty Feldman.
http://youtu.be/DAtSw3daGoo
So, in a way, Gilliam was the bridge between the two camps — Palin-Idle-Jones and Cleese-Chapman — and Neil Innes was the de facto seventh Python.
And, of course, they just have to knock Belgium, don’t they? 😉
Japan’s K3?
I have been told by a K3 fan that the equivalent of K3 in Japan is a girl group called Perfume.
http://youtu.be/NBCAPakjr8k
Interesting, but no other Pop act in any culture or language can match this. K3 rules!
http://youtu.be/pBEK2h8QuIY
K3’s usual target audience is kids, but they branch out — Karen Damen in particular, who was in a play called Taxi, Taxi.
This is Karen in a TV show that was on, yes, Nickelodeon. Standards are a bit different in Europe!
