Lately I’ve been spending way too much time flipping through Meta’s primary offerings to kill time. A friend and I send each other links to reels and posts on a wide variety of topics from political to plain funny. This morning he sent me a clip from the 70s sitcom “All In the Family”. You know the show whose claim to fame was the first toilet flush broadcast nationally (or anywhere) on the old tube (quite literally).
For the younger ones, TVs was not a series of OLED points of light but instead a cathode ray tube. Electrons were fired from ray guns – red, green, and blue for colour TVs that were distributed across a phosphor coated screen. The cathode ray tube was the primary reason old TVs were so deep and weighed a ton. For more info visit How Television Works | HowStuffWorks.
Anyway, back to Archie, Edith, and the family. Here is the clip my friend this morning with Archie and Meathead debating why cave women had short legs and fat butts…
As I watched, it donned on me that this show, a cultural juggernaut in its time would never have aired in 2023. Ironic because the entire point was to expose the social issues of the day. The same issues that still plague society today. You could argue that many of the movement exist or thrived because of “All In the Family”, its spin-off show “The Jeffersons” and other shows that followed a similar path.
All In the Family was one of the watershed moments in Western pop culture. It brought many of the issue of race, sex and inequality into the public consciousness. The show was a bold statement in its time that represented two steps forward in our social evolution. It is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s. Unfortunately, the pendulum it helped push in the right direction, has swung so far beyond its maxima, never mind equilibrium that it would have been cancelled long before it made it to Netflix.
Well, aside from one post about a week ago I have been conspicuously absent. I wrote about it in that last post but still haven’t made it back to the blog. It really is just summer and family that has kept me away. When the weather turns nice and Nate is home from school it is more difficult to spend time in front of a computer.
Unlike some bloggers, I just can’t wrap my head around blogging from my phone. Sure pictures and the like are fairly easy to post but finding the train of thought to write on a small keyboard eludes me. Maybe it’s my age showing but that just sounds like an excuse. Many of the bloggers I follow who are older than me have no problems with their phones. So I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I mean I still carry cash, in a wallet, I think Twitter’s rebrand to X is ridiculous (oh wait so does pretty much everyone else), and I believe Facebook (Meta for the youngins) and Google are only interested in collecting my data to further line their pockets with my small amounts of gold. I still worry about privacy although I’m probably not very good at protecting mine. As for China, I make a conscious effort to not buy shit from the commie bastards (yep, they are the new Soviet Union) and TikTok even if they set up some independent American subsidiary is a massive no-go zone. They won’t fool me like they have fooled today’s youth.
Jesus, it sounds like I’m only one step away from pulling my pants up to my armpits, wearing Tilly hats and griping about everything, especially dem kids, and calling bylaw enforcement because I’m lonely.
On that same note, I appear to be living in my musical past. These last few weeks have been the 70s and 80s music nonstop. On that note, I have two tracks for you from Joy Division and their reincarnation as New Order following the suicide of Ian Curtis.
The week in review…
Actually it’s the last three weeks in review. Thanks to everyone who has participated.
T-Shirt Wisdom | The most recent installment of this bi-weekly feature.
Next week…
Five Word Weekly and the return of Four Line Fiction plus another installment of T-Shirt Wisdom are on tap. Don’t forget your entry for July’s Creative Writing Monthly is due by July 31st. Yikes that almost sounded like homework!
As I sit down to write Sunday Digest late on this Sunday night it occurs to me that it has been a busy week. The blog itself started the week okay but as the activities and time required with my son ramped up my work here fell off. School is out and that means my days are filled with bike rides, Lion Safari’s and stopping at every park I see.
On Friday we took Nate to African Lion Safari, an animal rescue and reserve where you get to ride through the animal enclosures in your car. The lions and tigers are usually sedate. Mostly because they have been so well fed they cannot move. The Orangutans are Nates favorite. Especially the one who decided to jump up on our car and pee down the windshield. I know little boys and the things that excite them!
He also loves the waterpark they have for the kids to play in. It is a great spot on a hot day and he spent almost three hours in the water. Running on the play structures and riding the slide. He is a little Casanova too. The kid will talk to just about anyone but gravitates to the prettiest moms and starts up full conversations with them. Even at the mall or in a restaurant before we finish he has the clerks or waitresses gathered around while he holds court!
Also this weekend I have been busy canning strawberry jam and relishes. I also set a a crick with 4 lbs. of cucumbers. Hopefully in about a week I will have fermented dill pickles. In the meantime, I made a couple of jars of refrigerator pickles to hold us over. It was Nate who noticed the happy face in the jar of pickles.
I dug deep into my Madchester sounds record collection this week to find this classic. James were a Manchester band who are best known on this side of the pond for the title track of their 1993 album “Laid”. The track initially found success on U.S. college radio before peaking at No. 3 on U.S. Alternative Radio.
The week in review…
Choices A tales of choices written by Paula at Light Motifs II.
Milestones | Just some stuff about my blog stats and some new records in 2023.
T-Shirt Wisdom | The most recent installment of this bi-weekly feature.
Next week…
Five Word Weekly has already dropped about 3 hours ago and Four Line Fiction is on tap for Tuesday. Don’t forget to get your entry in for July’s Creative Writing Monthly, July 31st is almost here. Have a great week everyone,
This week marked the 156 anniversary of Canadian Confederation. The British North American Act took effect on July 1st, 1867 and Canada passed from being a British colony to a member country of the British Commonwealth.
I for one refuse to forget that past. There has been a huge push against colonialism in recent years. The British now looked upon in an unpleasant light. Once again the statue of Queen Victoria in Kitchener’s Victoria Park was vandalized, doused in red paint in an act that has played out four times in the last two years. What I find most intriguing is that these former colonies, the places where we now try to erase people like Sir John A. MacDonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister and deny our history, are the very places where people want to immigrate. As much as we want to abhor the blue-eyed devils we flock the places they built.
All I can say to Canadians, members of the British Commonwealth and those countries who were founded on British and European ideals, do not be ashamed of your history, embrace it. Many of the places our people have built are a beacon of peace and civility for the rest of the world.
As Google and Meta get set to turn off links to Canadian news sites I ponder an interesting question. The Canadian government passed legislation that would force content giants like Google, Microsoft and Meta to pay for content they display or link to on their platforms. Up until this point they have presented content from independent sources free of charge. In the process, making billions of dollars in advertising revenue that those providers will never see. The Canadian government has become the first to protect homegrown content providers by forcing these giant tech companies to properly compensate creators.
We could argue whether that is fair or even feasible but that is not the crux of my question. You see, for years these entities have claimed they are not responsible for the content they present and as such can’t or shouldn’t be held liable for it. They don’t believe they have an obligation to monitor or regulate the content to which they provide access. They claim it is too large a financial burden to expect them to build the apparatus to police content. Interesting that moment they have to pay for the content they present all of the apparatus to block it, the apparatus they claimed was too expensive to build, suddenly isn’t that costly and even more alarming already exists. All they need to do to ensure they don’t have to pay for content is flip the switch to have it blocked.
As we celebrate this Canada Day I have been listening to Canada’s greatest songwriter who passed away earlier this year. It was once said that the offices of SOCAN have one storage room (this was before computers) for all the songs written by Canadian artists and a second room for all the works of Gordon Lightfoot. I have previously featured The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Here are some other faves, Canadian Railroad Trilogy, Sundown and Carefree Highway.
The week in review…
Who Knew Proof from Fandango at This, That and the Other that Seniors love heavy metal too.
Five Word Weekly and Four Line Fiction and another installment of T-Shirt Wisdom. Don’t forget to get your entry in for July’s Creative Writing Monthly, July 31st is almost here. Have a great week everyone,
It’s said that shoes can change your outlook on life. Take a bad day and make it good. This week Jim at A Unique Title for Me has ask that we find songs that are about or mentions Socks, Shoes, Boots and/or Feet for Song Lyric Sunday.
This week I am highlighting a track by Scottish singer, songwriter and musician Paolo Giovanni Nutini. Nutini who hails from Paisley is Scotland released his debut album “These Streets” in 2006 where it peaked at #3 in the UK. The fourth single “New Shoes” reached #21 in the UK and #1 on the Adult Alternative Airplay chart in the USA.
Clive Davis was once famously referred to as the “Man with the Golden Ears”. The stable of artists he discovered or nurtured is vast, making him a legend in the music business. Janis Joplin, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel are just a few iconic names from the list of music royalty influenced by Davis.
The task for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday is simple, select a song by an artist that was discovered, nurtured or produced by Clive Davis. I am going to step outside the box and stretch the rules a little. The post will most certainly be related to Clive Davis but the artist was not a Clive Davis product. Instead, I have chosen to focus on someone who auditioned for Davis but he chose to pass on as discussed in a 2017 interview with Rebecca Jarvis on the ABCNews’ weekly show Real Biz.
We may use high tech instruments to record time down to the most infinite of units but it is still and arbitrary contruct. For the most part people don’t measure time in hours and minutes. Sure, the clock runs our daily lives, work at 8:00, doctor’s appointment at 2:30. Its always there but as time goes by the days are less important and we tend to measure its passage by our memories. The smell of Grandma’s apple pie brings you back to those Thanksgiving dinners, the sound of the rain brings you back to that camping trip, or the taste of a good Bordeaux transports you back to the French Vineyard where it first passed your lips. For me music acts as that catalyst. So many memories wrapped up in the sounds that defined the time period when they happened.Continue reading →
This week brought to a close the life of Charles Mansion. Thanks in part to the man who personified evil the aftermath from the summer of love would be bloody and violent. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy would both be gunned down in 1968 but it is Charles Mansion who has remained in the American psyche and has garnered a morbid fascination more than any other figure of the late 1960s. Continue reading →
As the movie industry reels from the recent allegations of sexual impropriety and Hollywood comes to terms with a long and storied sexual past one has to ask, “Can Hollywood Change?” Continue reading →
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