The Chat Thread

[Karl Henning]

I remember there being a protest here in Boston.

[North Star]

CIA at its very best:

Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched by the Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1960s attempting to use cats in spy missions, intended to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies, recording the links between the buildings in the area. A battery and a microphone were implanted into a cat and an antenna into its tail. This would allow the cats to innocuously record and transmit sound from its surroundings. Due to problems with distraction, the cat's sense of hunger had to be addressed in another operation.[1] Surgical and training expenses are thought to have amounted to over $20 million.[citation needed]

The first Acoustic Kitty mission was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and killed by a taxi almost immediately.[citation needed] However, this is disputed by former Director of the CIA's Office of Technical Service, Robert Wallace, in the Weapons Of The Superspies episode of the TV series The World's Weirdest Weapons: Wallace states that the project was abandoned due to the difficulty of training the cat to behave as required, and "the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time, and lived a long and happy life afterwards".[2] Subsequent tests also failed.[1] Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss.[3] The project was cancelled in 1967.[1]

[Karl Henning]

That was a joke in a Get Smart episode . . . .

[ibanezmonster]

I remember there being a protest here in Boston.

My bad, Karl, I somehow missed this post.

Reasonable quote from the article:
"I think things may change after we do this. At least to $10 or $11. I am not saying $15 though but more than $10 would be better,"€ Mendes said.

$10 would be good to keep up with inflation. I was reading the debate about minimum wage for about an hour or so on other news sites and the most hilarious talking point is how so many people say, "Well, if you don't want minimum wage, go to college and educate yourself." It's like they just quit their job and went to school somehow without having to have a paycheck to survive for 4-8 years in the meantime.

[Cato]

From today's (Dec. 6th) Wall Street Journal: Terry Teachout on the dominance of "pop culture" (what I call "kulcher").

When Elmore Leonard died in August, the papers were full of obituaries that described him as "a novelist who made crime an art." So, at any rate, declared a headline writer for the New York Times. A year earlier, the National Book Foundation had presented Mr. Leonard with its annual medal for "distinguished contribution to American letters," calling him a "great American author,"...I didn't want to rain on his cortege, so I didn't say what I thought, which was that he was one of the most overpraised writers of our time. A very good one, mind you...but overpraised all the same...

It used to be that we didn't take popular culture seriously, but now we don't take anything else seriously...

It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art. Can you honestly say, for example, that "Citizen Kane" is a "better" movie than "Chinatown"? Or that Ned Rorem wrote "better" songs than Donald Fagen ? Maybe, but I wouldn't want to have to argue the point.

The problem is not that pop culture doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. It's that a culture totally dominated by popular art is by definition limited...

Once again, it's not my purpose to demean pop culture. I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns. But there's more to life than getting your head blown off in a drug deal, and more to be said about love than can be crammed into a 32-bar ballad....

See:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304854804579236160640661166

[ibanezmonster]

South Park has just written the greatest intro song to any show, ever.


http://www.youtube.com/v/XifUlSyQ2CI

[Karl Henning]

"South Park" is a person?

[PaulR]

Someone broke the only good dryer.  If I ever find out who did it.............................I'll write them a strongly worded letter........

[mn dave]

I have no Santa hat.

[Karl Henning]

Won't they let you join in any reindeer games?

[mn dave]

Won't they let you join in any reindeer games?

I have no bright nose. 

[North Star]

You know how to fix that

[mn dave]

You know how to fix that

[Karl Henning]

So he does, my little chickadee . . . .

[Karl Henning]

(Oh, I kid.)

[North Star]

It is hard to take a critique of a quite popular low fantasy book series seriously when the only noteworthy thing in the review is how the critic manages to misspell Tolkien as ''Tolkein' and still think that he's smarter than those who like the books...

[Karl Henning]

Fatal error.

[mn dave]

"low fantasy"

?

[North Star]

?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_fantasy

Though I see the definitions are rather flexible.

[mn dave]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_fantasy

Though I see the definitions are rather flexible.

I rate it as high.