“One might suppose that the popular prejudice against vaccination had died out by this time,” one writer complains. It sounds like a lament from today, but in fact, it’s from 1875."
The story about how Mike "The Monkees" Nesmith's mother invented liquid paper is surprisingly interesting.
She was a secretary. She saw a need and saw that the market would be women, because secretaries were women.
She priced the product low enough so that secretaries could buy it out of the discretionary fund they had for office supplies, without needing approval from a man.
And she marketed the product in a bottle that looked like nail polish, so her customers would already be familiar with using it before they even tried it.
Smart!
Who let “Who Let the Dogs Out” Out?
99% Invisible: The world’s greatest expert on the song “Who Let the Dogs Out” finds it surprisingly difficult to answer the question of who wrote the song.
San Diego freelance writer Beth Demmon says California Assembly Bill 5, which regulates contract workers, threatens her livelihood. She says she’s taken an immediate income hit upwards of 25% due to the law.
Tinder's Most Notorious Men
The users who reappear after countless left swipes have become modern urban legends.
Like mayors and famous bodega cats, they are both hyper-local and larger than life."
The Doc nails it. The sole issue for Democratic voters in the Presidential election is “make the bad man go away.” Everything else is a distraction.
However, things get complicated because for many Democrats, Bloomberg and/or Sanders are as bad as the Bad Man.
And Warren, Mayor Pete and Uncle Joe are, for many voters, ALMOST as toxic as the Bad Man. Those voters will hold their noses and vote for any of those three candidates if they have to. But that speaks to low voter turnout – toxic for Dems.
Overall, I like the Democrats' odds. But we’re going to have to work hard to win.
Good to know the ‘doomsday asteroid’ is not going to destroy the Earth Saturday, because I’m not going to be done reading Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Calculating Stars” by then.
Dave Winer makes the case for Bloomberg: More than a candidate for president.
I’m reserving judgment. I expect I’ll vote for Warren in the primary, assuming she’s still in the race, but other than that I don’t expect to support a candidate until the convention. And then I’ll support whichever Democrat wins.
Until a month ago I would have said “except maybe Bloomberg.” But I like the way he’s going after Trump. I still have strong reservations about Bloomberg, though.
Molly Ringwald revisits “The Breakfast Club” and the other 80s teen movies that made her a star. The films were often homophobic, misogynistic and racist but they inspired women, LGBTQ people and African-Americans with their depictions of kids who were estranged from the world they lived in.
The US is charging Huawei with racketeering
The DoJ alleges that Huawei and a number of its affiliates used confidential agreements with American companies over the past two decades to access the trade secrets of those companies, only to then misappropriate that intellectual property and use it to fund Huawei’s business.
As part of his research into Trump’s $1+B disinformation campaign, journalist McKay Coppins “tried to live in the same information world as Trump supporters so that he’d receive the same disinformation supporters did.”
He said he ended up believing everything and nothing. Rumors, lies and reported journalism ended up seeming roughly equal in credibility, even though he was following the impeachment hearings closely and could see for himself that Trump supporters were lying about what transpired there.
This is exactly how censorship works in autocratic regimes nowadays, Coppins notes – no need to shut down opposition journalism; better to just flood the information channels with bullshit.
Journalist Details ‘Brazen Ways’ Trump Will Use His Power To Get Reelected - Fresh Air
A brief history of the "I, Claudius" TV series
The TV production had a lot of problems, but Robert Graves, who wrote the 1930s novels on which the series is based, had faith:
“I’ve communed with Claudius,” he said at the time, “and he reassured me that this would be a great success.”
The series launched Derek Jacobi’s career.
“I owe ‘Claudius’ so much on both sides of the Atlantic,” Mr. Jacobi said in a telephone interview. “If he has haunted me, it’s been a beneficent ghost.”…
The durability of “I, Claudius” began with Graves’s books. Cast as the secret memoirs of Claudius himself, they were grounded in exhaustive scholarship but imbued with a novelist’s imagination. They had plenty of skulduggery, perversion and other delectable malfeasance, set against the marble majesty of Roman antiquity.
The TV version, however, came close to missing the mark. “It was so badly received in its first two weeks,” recalled Sian Phillips, who played the empress Livia, “because it was so different.”
That difference lay in the series’s down-to-earth treatment of epic material. Despite its imperial setting “I, Claudius” was a small studio effort devoid of huge sets and sprawling battle scenes.
In whittling down Graves’s tomes (which total some 1,000 pages in paperback) to a little over 11 hours of television, the scriptwriter Jack Pulman, who died in 1979, effectively rendered them as a soap opera, emphasizing the dysfunctional relations inherent in any extended clan. At various points he called his teleplay a Jewish family comedy and a treatment of a Mafia dynasty.
The TV show used natural language, rather than the high prose that was common in previous Roman stories. Scenes were small. The action encompassed huge battles and riots sweeping the city, but we don’t see those. We just see and hear a few people talking about them.
Phillips, who played the ruthless villain Livia, had difficulty finding her character, but finally, director Herbert Wise told her to just ham it up.
‘Just be evil. The more evil you are, the funnier it is, and the more terrifying it is.’ ”
In the TV series and books, Rome is portrayed as being in decay, due to its transition from republican government to monarchy. But this is a bit of authorial fudging.
In reality, Rome peaked long after the action of the stories.
The Emperor Claudius died in AD 54. The land area of the empire peaked around 100 AD.
Prior to the empire, Rome wasn’t a republic as we think of it today. Only a very small aristocracy participated in government, and millions of people were slaves. Many historians say that the life of a Roman citizen was best in the period 100-200 AD., and Rome extended citizenship broadly to the people who lived within its borders.
Rome finally fell in 476 AD, four centuries after the action of I, Claudius. And that’s only the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire, which we now call Byzantium, continued on until it fell to the Ottomans in 1453 AD.
I Claudius seemingly influenced The Sopranos – though Sopranos creator David Chase doesn’t acknowledge it. They’re both stories about men who build empires despite being undermined by toxic, maternal women named “Livia.”
Hulu is doing gender-flipped miniseries based on “High Fidelity,” the excellent Nick Hornby novel and John Cusack movie.
If I can get used to a woman Doctor Who, I can give this miniseries a try.
“It’s a strange existence, being an autistic adult in a profession overflowing with autism mommy-ism and misinformation.” theaspergian.com/2020/01/3…
We’ve started rewatching “I Claudius.”
“I Claudius” is the story of a great empire that decays as its chief executive seizes dictatorial power while the Senate flatters him and otherwise stands idly by.
It’s nice to escape from the news into a TV fantasy now and then.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison is hosting a fundraiser for Donald Trump www.vox.com/recode/20…