Gordon Parks’ Jim Crow photos still resonate, alas.
David Brooks of the NY Times: The Brutalism of Ted Cruz.
Amy Biancolli: Not alone at being alone.
Affluenza and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
What militants and the pungent salad radish have in common.
The New Yorker: My Last Day as a Surgeon. “In May of 2013, the Stanford University neurosurgical resident Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic lung cancer. He was thirty-six years old.”
Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace. “Workplaces need more walls, not fewer,” something I’m painfully aware of.
‘Lost’ Jerry Lewis Holocaust film sees the light.
Your favorite movies, re-edited, including Of Oz The Wizard, the movie arranged in alphabetical order, from Aah to Zipper. Don’t watch “of”, if you value your sanity.
Periodic table’s seventh row finally filled as four new elements are added, and the song to go with it.
British actor Alan Rickman, star of stage and ‘Harry Potter,’ dies at 69. Here are his Top 20 movie quotes.
2015: SamuraiFrog’s 50 favorite pop culture artifacts and the year in 4 minutes.
2016 in the Capital District: Salaries, food and taxes, have yourself a nice hot cup of coffee while you still can.
Metroland, RIP, and Albany’s alternative weekly Metroland nostalgic, bittersweet final issue.
TEDx: James Veitch: This is what happens when you reply to spam email.
Music!
The Drifters: A Legacy of Harmony
The Beatles’ 50 Biggest Billboard Hits.
SCIENCE WARS – A capella Parody
“Cortez the Killer” – Anders Osbourne Band with Warren Haynes and Danny Louis, Island Exodus 1/18/2013
Muppets: Kodachrome and Pure Imagination.
Comics!
How Mickey Mouse Evades the Public Domain.
Morrie Turner dies at 90; broke barriers in comics.
FOUNDER OF RUTHLESS COMICS MONOPOLY SPEAKS OUT IN FAVOR OF INCOME INEQUALITY. That would be Steve Geppi of Diamond Comics Distribution.
Coming Out as Gay Superheroes.
A Nigerian comics startup is creating African superheroes.
Google alert (me)
Is Arthur a blog cheat? (I don’t think so). And he credited/blamed me for him getting out 365 blog posts in 2015. You’re welcome.
Chuck Miller’s five most prolific blog commenters of 2015.
The Sandy Hill Hoax business had passed me by, but is yet another example of that bizarre twilight world. I briefly visited their Facebook where they say they don’t actually believe in the conspiracy theory, but they want explanations about the discrepancies in the official reports. “Discrepancies” are the lifeblood of conspitacists, of course!
I had scarlet fever as a third-grader, but a relatively minor case. However, about a month and a half before I got sick, I had read a children’s biography of Laura Bridgman, a woman who (before Helen Keller) went blind and deaf as a sequalae of scarlet fever.
My mom knew what I had after she saw my rash. When she said the words “Scarlet Fever,” I kind of freaked out inside but I was kind of an uncommunicative little kid about my fears, so I didn’t say anything. The doctor agreed with her diagnosis and told me, “I’ll give you an antibiotic, you can go back to school in three or four days.”
I waited for the other shoe to drop – to be told how much longer I’d be able to see and hear, and if I should start learning Braille NOW. The doctor – he was a pediatrician – apparently sensed something more was going on and finally got out of me what was scaring me. He gently explained that my case was minor, and anyway, with the advent of antibiotics, those kind of bad effects were all but impossible. (I have since learned, of course, they were rare even before antibiotics)
I often tell that story to classes when we are discussing “serious diseases of the past” and the students usually find it amusing. (Though many of them don’t even know what scarlet fever is, I guess it’s much less common than it once was?)
Poor Mark. I had the nasty stuff in first grade, acquired in the nastiest way imaginable. Fortunately, I had no idea that it could have done me in, and didn’t find out until I went back to school.
That Jerry Lewis film, The Day The Clown Cried. Holy crap. The Library of Congress acquired what is believed to be the only copy last year and they’ve agreed to not let it be viewed for ten years. Did you read a synopsis of the plot? OMG OMG OMG I don’t ever want to see it, just reading about it is going to give me nightmares: http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Jerry-Lewis-Infamous-Holocaust-Clown-Movie-Finally-Seeing-Light-Day-76637.html
Maybe we should regard it as a horror movie…