austin_dern

So, something odd in my favorite old-time-radio podcast and that doesn't quite fit in my humor blog. This week included an episode of 1945's Columbia Presents Corwin, an avant-garde sustaining series where Norman Corwin tried to advance the state of the art or just sometimes be freaking weird. This installment, by the way including the voices of Groucho Marx, Robert Benchley, Vincent Price, and Keenan Wynn, is titled ``The Undecided Molecule''. It's this rhyming comic trial that ends up being about Molecule X having to decide whether to be part of the Mineral, Vegetable, or Animal Kingdoms. Each Kingdom sends a representative to make its case. Sylvia Sidney, as representative of the Animal Kingdom, makes this pitch. It's at about 23:15 in this week's podcast episode, if you want to check my work. Because it sounds to me like she says:

[Sylvia Sidney, Animal Kingdom]: ``I urge X to join the toucan
Or some other nice animal clan
Like the beautiful cootie
Or the charming agouti''
[Groucho Marx, Judge]: ``But what of the species of man?''

So. I know cooties are bedbugs (or worse bugs). And that scientifically, a bug is an animal. But casual speech does not count bugs as animals, and certainly does not call one ``beautiful''. Is this a typo for coati? The secret coati chat room agrees it might just maybe be, possibly.

(CW: that episode of Columbia Presents Corwin has a quick one-syllable reference to the Japanese, the kind of thing you might say because it was July 1945. Did not want people caught unaware.)

It was big essay day in My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Big-O and Little-O Notation which kind of stretches the idea of an 'O' subject but, you know? It's my blog and I'll write it as I like it.

Here's some more fireworks for you, both professional and personal.

Great fountain of colors during the fireworks.

Boy, I hope I figure out what these camera settings were because they definitely worked.

And I'd love to know how I got the timing on this right, to get one firework that sharp and another that fuzzy.

And back to bunnyhugger's parents', to set off fireworks, many of them bought by her father.

Firework art is really its own strange wonder.

So here's a bunch of film scratches as seen from the porch.

Another fountain; a bunch of their fireworks ended up like this.

Of course these are the ones that it's easiest to photograph. There was no photographing the one that misfired and shot across the street to the neighbor's driveway.

And here we finally get the resolution to see some nice colors and different focuses.

Trivia: David Walker, abolitionist and second-hand clothing merchant, stitched copies of his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World into the clothes of sailors bound for the South. Georgia put a bounty of US$10,000 on his head. Source: Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, David S Reynolds.

Currently Reading: Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements, Paul Strathem. OK, but no. I am not going to believe the Magdeburg Hemispheres (those hemispheres held together by the vacuum inside, and like eight horses couldn't pull apart) inspired the English to compose the rhyme about Humpty-Dumpty. Certainly not without a citation to a reputable etymologist and guess what this book lacks? Citations worth a dang. This is why real historians look at pop science that way, you know. (For what it's worth the Wikipedia page about Humpty Dumpty doesn't rate this hypothesis as even worth mentioning.)

OK, I have to take a break from recounting my life in relentless detail to grumble about an old-time radio program. Well, not actually old-time radio but something created by the Radio Enthusiasts of Puget Sound, a group that does a lot to celebrate old-time radio and which tries, enthusiastically, to provide new content, by doing re-creations of shows whose recordings have been lost, or writing entirely new scripts, a candle-flame of a genre now basically dead in the United States.

One that I heard yesterday started historically, with Edward Jenner facing a crisis of confidence about testing his smallpox vaccination on the eight-year-old boy James Phipps. Then it gets weird: he's brought forward in time by the Royal Society to receive the acclaims of modern medicine for his work. This includes a lot of Jenner's guide blasting modern terms at Jenner without context or much point --- I'd imagine the Time Travel Division of the Royal Society could find someone who could be neither patronizing nor oblivious --- and then, when Jenner says he's still deciding whether to carry out his experiment, they offer to send him into a future in which he doesn't try to vaccinate Phipps.

And so he goes, to circa 2000 in a world that never tried vaccination, because nobody else would ever have thought of it ever, and quickly learns that about the only cure for any problem, including gout, is amputation; and that smallpox is indeed still with society and claims ``five or six million of us'' per year. From the dialogue I'm not sure whether that's meant to be ``us'' as in the world population, or just the population of the United Kingdom, but either way that seems like a rather more serious smallpox plague than the world ever supported.

Anyway. The point of all this is ... I honestly don't know. I think the starting point is a really good one, especially if someone on the brink of great work that's tormenting their conscience could have some idea of the good and ill that comes from it, but this is just ... Well, after all, vaccination has one of the highest good-to-ill ratios of all human ingenuity, and, ``do the thing that works brilliantly and keeps the future from sucking roundly'' isn't much of a lesson.

I know, it's hard to do an alternate history that isn't stupid, especially when you have a couple minutes of screen time to do the whole thing. But this one really forgot to give anyone any points where they have to make choices, and shouldn't there be some better reasons behind plucking Jenner out of the 18th century for a stretch than just have him get applauded by strangers? It's a weird misfire.

Trivia: O'Hare Airport cost $120 million to complete in 1963. Source: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Alastair Gordon.

Currently Reading: Macro-Life, George Zebrowski. Wow, Zebrowski really went in for O'Neil Colony propaganda, didn't he? Of course it was the 70s.

So This Is Washington is a barely-over-an-hourlong movie featuring Chester Lauck and Norris Goff, Lum and Abner. It takes the stars of the rambling serial-comedy radio show and comes up with an excuse to put them in Washington, rather akin to the way Fibber McGee and Molly were dropped into Washington in Heavenly Days, and for the same reason: there was a war on, don't you know? It's not really satisfying, for about the same reason: most of what's fun about these characters is their interactions with their setting. Drop them in with a bunch of strangers who don't have clearly defined personalities and histories and what do you even have them for?

The version of this that aired on Turner Classic Movies came with title cards mentioning its restoration and preservation by National Film Museum Incorporated, which seems odd given the slightness of the film. However, it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Sound, so it has historic significance, I guess. But you can watch it on archive.org just as fine and probably not miss anything important.

Trivia: A Gallup Poll during World War II showed 71 percent of respondents were wiling to give up double features for the duration. Source: Don't You Know There's A War On?, Richard Lingeman.

Currently Reading: Dare, Philip José Farmer.