You people.

Regular readers of the blog know I love the show Mad Men. It does a great job of invoking the early and mid 1960s. I was just a fresh faced lad when these shows are supposed to take place, but I know they get a lot of the details right. Instead of giving a full summary and critique of this week's episode, let me give a plot point that is a tiny spoiler, no more than you might get reading a preview. The new firm has a chance to work with Honda motorcycles. Roger Sterling, a WW II veteran from the Pacific theater, hates the Japanese and does everything he can scuttle the possible new relationship.

The show captures the open racism of the time. This is when the n-word was said openly by unrepentant white racists, many of them Southerners. I remember the "genteel" Southerners on TV using the word "nigras", halfway between the then acceptable term Negros and the word they really wanted to use. It had gotten through to them that the n-word didn't play well on the national stage.

There was no such gentility about anti-Asian racism as the time. We've never turned any of the different slurs into "the j-word" or "the g-word" or "the c-word", and I don't hear people say those words anymore. Maybe I just run with a nicer crowd now than I did then, but there is a lot more sensitivity in the general public and definitely in the media than there was back then.


Except when it comes to Muslims. You can say any kind of slander against anyone in the Islamic community in public or on TV and the the press broadcasts it live for all the world to see. All Muslims might as well have Osama bin Laden on their speed dial according to a disgustingly large segment of the American public. There are videos of a protest against the Islamic community center at Park51, which you may know by the name given to it by idiots. A black guy in a skullcap wandered through, the crowd got ugly and the cops escorted him out before things turned violent.

The thing is, the guy isn't a Muslim. It's hard to make out the thing hanging off his necklace in this picture, but it's a representation of the Puerto Rican flag. The white skullcap was made by the athletic clothing company Under Armor. Still, a crowd of idiots could mistake him for a Muslim and focus all their hatred on him and go home thinking they are the people defending the American way.

I started with the picture of Roger Sterling from Mad Men for a reason other than he looks good in that suit and haircut. His character feels 100% justified to hate the Japanese, but the people around him are asking him to get over it because the war is over. In the minds of many Americans, we are still at war with the entire Muslim world. Let me give George W. Bush some credit, because he tried to stop that kind of talk, even though his attempts at diplomacy were often clumsy. I haven't seen a lot of Bush era people at the forefront of this racist nonsense. The people doing most of the rabble rousing are the clever but nasty Newt Gingrich and the stone stupid Sarah Palin, amplified by Fox News and then carried like a virus by all the rest of the media reacting to them like Pavlov's dog.

Freedom of religion and freedom of speech can be hurtful things, but this is exactly why the founders decided to make them rights instead of privileges that might be put to a vote. I'm a die-hard agnostic, and it would be wrong headed of me to expect all Christians to answer for Fred Phelps or the KKK or sectarian violence in Ireland or the Spanish Inquisition, just as wrong headed as Christians stopping the building of a community center in lower Manhattan or mosques all around the country because "you people caused 9/11".

Things have changed a lot since I was a kid, but the central evil of human nature is unlikely to ever go away. The targets may change over time, but the desire to punish "you people" is deep in our genetic make-up.

We don't deserve to survive as a species. Here endeth the lesson.

Trade secrets of a trivia nerd.

I've been a trivia nerd for some time. I didn't go on Jeopardy! back in 1984 wondering if I might do okay. I expected to kick people's butts and I did.

This is a picture of David Crane, one of the co-founders of Activision and one of the best video game programmers and designers in his day. If you don't believe me, ask him. Dave did not have a lot of false modesty, or any kind of modesty for that matter. Well, to be fair, he didn't walk around naked, so he had some modesty. That's a blessing, I suppose.

The guy bought a DeLorean. Does that tell you enough about his personality?

Okay, let me add another little anecdote. Dave didn't like being second best at anything. When it came to trivia, he was good. But as long as I was around, he was second best and he'd just have to get used to that.

(Know where that line is from? I'll put the answer in the comments if no one gets it by tonight.)

So one day, David says to me. "Here's something you can't possibly know. Who are Emi and Yumi Ito?"

"That's easy." I answered, quick as a bunny. "Those are the tiny princesses from the Mothra movies."

He may have asked how I knew that. I might have told him, and I might have let him stew in his humiliation for a while, with a silent warning not to bring that weak stuff into my house.

But I will let out a little trade secret, not only of trivia but also education. There are easy ways and hard ways of asking a question, and he asked a hard question the easy way.

I know enough of language to know the two names were Japanese, and enough Japanese to know the two names were female. A nerd asks me about two Japanese chicks. Tell me another culturally important pair of Japanese females? Obviously, the two little princesses from Mothra.

If he had asked, "Who played the princesses in Mothra?" I would not have had a clue.

It was elementary, my dear Mr. Crane.

Big TV ratings? Not like in my day, whippersnapper!

Mystery voices
Drowned out by too much choice
Not to mention
The sad waste of this wonderful invention
Maintaining radio silence from now on.

Elvis Costello, Radio Silence

Mr. Costello, who is about a year and a half older than I am, writes this lyric about radio being a wonderful invention, but I want to say the same about television, the medium that replaced it as the mass entertainment source. I grew up with TV always existing, while my parents could remember the time before it was mass culture. The TV industry now worries about being eclipsed by the Internet, and of course I'm old enough to tell the young folks about a time before the Internet.

I don't currently watch TV, at least not on my TV, which is connected to a DVD player but not a cable or dish or even an antenna. As I have said before, I'm a broke-ass mofo, but I'm not poverty stricken. I could find the money in my monthly budget to spring for cable TV, whether that's $70 or $100 or whatever, I just don't see that it produces value equal to that cost. I pay about $70 a month total to be connected to the Internet and to have a phone. That cost is easily justified. That's a friggin' bargain.


There are some things I might like to watch live, but very few, and watching them free on the web or paying for a show on iTunes if necessary makes sense to me. I made a habit of watching Keith Olbermann when I had a TV, and sometimes I'd also watch Rachel Maddow. I don't make a habit of them anymore. I like both of them, but Keith lives on a mix of snark and high dudgeon that gets to be too much for me sometimes. Rachel tends towards being smarter and nicer than Keith and it doesn't always play well on TV. That said, if there is going to be a point made on TV that is almost exactly the argument I would make, it's going to be made by Jon Stewart, a decoded Stephen Colbert or Rachel Maddow.

Rachel is currently in a pissing contest with Bill O'Reilly. Let me correct that. BillO thinks it's a pissing contest, Rachel thinks it's a debate. He's winning the pissing contest, she's winning the debate. She says that Fox News has a consistent pattern of race baiting, more pronounced now since Obama was elected, and that the Shirley Sherrod incident was just the latest example. O'Reilly actually responded, which is notable because he pointedly ignores Keith Olbermann who snarks at him regularly. His response was to call her a "loon" and point out that Fox News has much higher ratings than MSNBC, the cable news outfit where Rachel works. Her counter-argument to his "look at my massive ratings" posture is to note that in that particular pissing contest, both his show and Rachel's show are getting rained on by SpongeBob SquarePants.

Bringing facts to a pissing contest. Isn't that just like a girl?


It's a very different world from the one of my youth. We still talk about ratings because there is still a major industry that cares about ratings, but it's like talking about boxing or horse racing. Some people still kind of care about those sports, but when I was a kid, those sports were big damn deals, not fading memories.

Consider the Beatles on Sullivan. I am just old enough to remember it vividly, since I turned eight years old about a month and a half before. 23 million TV sets tuned in that night, which translates to over 70 million viewers in a nation of 190 million people. Not a majority, but a very sizable minority, roughly three out of every eight people. The Beatles made a return appearance the next week and a similar number of sets tuned in, only slightly less.


The thing is, in 1964 this wasn't all that remarkable. The Beverly Hillbillies was the number one rated show for the entire season. In 1964, the most watched episode of the show titled The Giant Jack Rabbit got more viewers than the second appearance of the Beatles on Sullivan but slightly less than the first. Nine times in 1964, more than 20 million sets tuned into The Beverly Hillbillies. These records only go back to 1961, but no other show has nine spots from a single season in the top 100 of all time. In 1977, a very special TV event, the eight part mini-series Roots, put all eight of its episodes in the top 100 shows of the last fifty years. It's possible I Love Lucy had greater saturation in its day, but the Nielsen records only go back to 1961 and there were less TV sets in the 1950s than in the 1960s.

It was a much less fragmented nation when I was a kid, and not just politically. There was less choice than there is today because there were less choices. TV had three major commercial networks in theory, but in terms of ratings there was one leader, CBS. They dominated the Top Twenty shows year in and year out in the 1960s. NBC trailed, sometimes badly, and ABC was a distant third. In a cosmopolitan place like the San Francisco Bay Area, we also had a local independent station, Channel 2 KTVU, and the educational station, KQED Channel 9, which was not yet called PBS. But until UHF came along in the mid-sixties, that was it.


The ratings giant of today is American Idol. No other show comes close to its dominance of the past decade. It is fading from its peak viewership, when about 37 million people would tune in. That's 37 million out of a population of about 300 million, which is roughly one in every eight people in the country at its highest, now down to about one in ten. In the 1960s, the highest rated show could expect about one third of the public would be watching.

More than that, American Idol might be better titled Confederate Idol. Hicks like it better than city slickers, which explains why so many winners are from the South, including the aptly named non-entity Taylor Hicks. On my other blog, it's obvious that supermarket rags think Carrie Underwood, the most country tinged winner in the show's history, is the right fit for their older and unsophisticated demographic, while recording stars who can sell many more times records like Lady Gaga or Fergie are barely noticed at all by the supermarket rags, though they are popular in the Internet gossip pages.

Part of the reason I write this is because I'm really noticing not being the target market anymore for a lot of popular culture, TV, movies and music. There were times in the past when I did watch the most popular TV show or listen to the most popular music. I have seen several of the biggest grossing movies of the year over the past decade, but not all of them. The market has fragmented seriously.

When it comes to the news, I like stuff that teaches me something, discussed by people who know more than I do and reach interesting conclusions. I find that on the Internet from time to time, but on TV, not so much. If I may be allowed a moment with no false modesty, catering to an audience of people as smart or smarter than Matty Boy is not a mass market, and there just isn't that much money in it.

If blogging existed four decades ago.

If we went back forty years, the younger version of Matty Boy would have been all over this story. As a nod that young man, I report on a new scientific discovery.

(Illustration by C. Letenneur, Nature)

A new fossil find has discovered an extinct species of whale that lived about 12 million years ago. The whale was the size of a modern day sperm whale, 50 to 60 feet long, but had a much bigger and more powerful jaw, which means it could easily have been a predator of whales. The illustrator gave it a shape roughly equivalent to a sperm whale and coloring like an orca. In contrast, the modern killer whale is in the range of 20 to 30 feet long.

Quibble: the whale being attacked is shaped like a blue whale, but it is much too tiny. Adult blues are in the 90 to 100 foot range, so this ancient predator would have had to hunt in packs to bring down the really big baleen whales.

Scientists have named the previously undiscovered species Leviathan melvillei in honor of the author of Moby Dick, of course.

I loved stories like this when I was a kid. Nowadays, it probably means Syfy will make a ridiculously cheap movie with bad special effects about one of these critters still being alive and attacking humans. These kind of scripts write themselves, so you have to have an Ahab like character. I expect F. Murray Abraham or Lance Hendricksen to get the role, maybe Larry Drake if they are really strapped for cash. There will also be a semi-famous babe in distress. Think Renee O'Connor or Kari Wuhrer. They might go younger, but I doubt they will be able to afford anyone with more gravitas than Heidi Montag.

I probably won't watch. Too painful to think about how much the younger version of me would have loved this.

Pandering to an earlier version of myself.

I believe in pandering. Any longtime reader will know this is true. This blog and pandering go together like red beans and rice.

Need proof? My very first post back on April Fools' Day 2007 was a few short sentences accompanying a picture of Indira Varma.

Earlier this week over at the Other Blog, there was a Brave Last Days alert for Anne Francis, star of Forbidden Planet and the portrayer of the title role on the 1960s TV series Honey West. By all rights, I should have had a massive crush on Anne Francis, because she certainly was a honey.


But in those days just before puberty kicked me around like an empty soda can, I already had a massive crush on Diana Rigg. What Indira Varma is to the Matty Boy on the cusp of grumpy old manhood, Diana Rigg was to the Matty Boy on the cusp of regular old manhood. There was not room in my pre-teen brain for another all-encompassing female obsession.

She had such a lovely face, and that little trademark smirk made me crazy. Then there's the British accent. I think Ms. Varma's accent nudges a little trigger that is still left over from my feelings about Diana Rigg back in the day.

And, oh yeah. She had gams. Mighty, mighty fine gams.

I know I wasn't alone. In the 1970s, I read an interview with Miss Rigg saying she considered finding the addresses of the mothers of all her underage fans sending a form letter to the effect of "Do you know what a little pervert your son is?" But we weren't perverts. (Or at least I wasn't. I didn't read the other letters.) We were young men in desperate love. Whether that is better or worse than being a pervert, I will leave it to greater minds than mine to decide.

Anyone else of about my age who also wants to admit his or her uncontrollable obsession with Diana Rigg is welcome to do so in the comments, because as I wrote already, I know I wasn't alone.

Bob Wilkins

Several recent events have made me wax nostalgic. Being a fiftysomething when most of my students are twentysomethings has altered my view of what A Long Time Ago means. I recently taught my algebra students about logarithmic scales, and of course in California the best example is the Richter scale. When I brought up the Loma Prieta quake, the majority of the students had only dim recollections of it. A lot of Laney students were born overseas and weren't here in 1989, and more than a few of them weren't even born then.

I don't think of that as A Long Time Ago, but it's coming up on 21 years. At least it's a history landmark that my students know happened, even if they are hazy on the details.

Here's something young people know next to nothing about. Local programming that people actually watched.

Sometimes in droves.


If you didn't grow up in Northern California in the 1970s, the name Bob Wilkins will likely mean nothing to you. In 1971, he moved away from a station in sleepy Sacramento to the big market San Francisco Bay Area to host a late night double feature of monster movies called Creature Features.

As far as I can tell, there wasn't anybody else anything like him anywhere else.

In the world.

Other horror show hosts camped it up, like Elvira in Los Angeles or Ghoulardi in Cleveland. Count Floyd of Monster Chiller Horror Theater on SCTV is a perfect parody of them. Bob Wilkins was from the fine Midwestern tradition of comedy that includes James Thurber, Bob Newhart and Charles Schulz. All these people looked completely normal, like accountants or regional sales managers or vice-presidents of the local Elks Lodge, but for reasons passing understanding, they were about five to fifteen degrees off from level plumb.

Creature Features was definitely a guy thing, but it wasn't just a nerd thing. For guys my age from the Bay Area, it doesn't matter if you were a nerd or a jock or a stoner, you watched Creature Features. According to the Bob Wilkins page on Wikipedia, there were weekends when more people watched Creature Features than watched Saturday Night Live in its absolute heyday. The thing that was interesting was his comments during the breaks. He actually watched the movies before airing them, and even alone in your house on a Saturday night, you felt like part of a community of people watching these cheesy movies together.

(Note: According to comments here on the blog and on my Facebook link to it, it wasn't just a guy thing. My apologies for my sexist assumption.)

Wilkins passed away last year. All the tributes to him recall a line he said often. "Don't stay up, it's not worth it." This was his way to tell you that the second movie was a turkey, but his fans absolutely didn't care. You might miss something Bob said in the second movie, and you knew your friends at school would know about it and you wouldn't. That was not an option, and since VCRs were still a few years off, you watched the cheesy movie anyway, even against Bob's usually accurate advice.

Between the two movies, he'd have special guests. Before Star Trek conventions were the Big Damn Deal they later became, he would have some actor or actress that played a role on just a couple episodes talk about the Good Old Days. He also interviewed actors and directors from the movies he showed, or people who were serious horror fans. Some of the people were kind of silly, but he interviewed them straight. It was riveting television.

It's hard for me to remember his best lines. These shows weren't repeated over and over, so much of his best material is stuck in the somewhat fading memories of his fans. You can see some clips on The You Tubes. I do recall he would tell you the movies that would be on next week. One introduction sticks in my head to this day. "Next week we will be showing Attack of the Crab Monsters, not to be confused with the Army training film of the same name."

I also remember how his crew would laugh at his best lines. There was no live studio audience, but every once in a while, he'd let go with a perfect gag and the cameramen and sound guys would be laughing their heads off. I remember that with Lon Simmons when he broadcast the Giants games on the radio back in the day as well.

Watchable local TV programming. Must see local programming, in fact! There's no explaining that to young people today. If you weren't there, it's hard to believe it ever existed.

Best wishes to the friends and family of Bob Wilkins, from a fan.

Science Fun, Vol. 6:Beakman's World and soap

Back in the early 1990s, two science shows aimed at kids began to air. I have a lot of respect for Bill Nye The Science Guy, but I have to admit that I tuned in to Beakman's World on as regular a basis as I could, given that it came on Saturday afternoons and could easily be pre-empted for a ball game or other such non-regularly scheduled stuff.

Beakman's World was very silly, and as I had just turned 18 for the second time, it was right up my alley. How can you not love Lester the Rat? Who isn't in the mood for a segment called Those Disgusting Animals, in which the viewer is told about the digestive habits of the lamprey?

Most of the science Beakman discussed I already knew, but I remember to this day the discussion of soap. Some viewer sent a question in permanent marker on a filthy grease covered handkerchief asking what made soap work.

Beakman said "Soap makes water wetter."

The fancy explanation is that oil and water don't mix and oil tends to attract dirt to make grease. Things that mix with water are hydrophilic, things that don't are hydrophobic. Soap is made of long molecules that connect to water at one point and connect to grease nearly everywhere else, which means a soap molecule can be moved around by water and all the gunk that connects to the soap molecule will move around as well.

Though not as precise, I like Beakman's short version of the explanation better.