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Archive | July, 2009

Krankheit: The Way It Was

By on July 19, 2009 5

The main thing I’ll miss the late Walter Cronkite for is his charming yearly New Year’s concert broadcasts from Vienna. Still, when I heard of Cronkite’s death it was the following two anecdotes that came to mind:

  • He's thinking about your teenage daughterOnce when he was asked how he’d like to die, creepy old man Cronkite said “I’d like to go out the way Errol Flynn did – on a 60 foot yacht with a 16-year-old mistress.” His wife, sitting beside him, quickly put a damper on this fantasy by adding, “You’ll be lucky to get a 16-foot yacht and a 60-year-old mistress.” (Reports of his death have thus far not specified which it turned out to be.)
     
  • A friend of mine for whom Cronkite recorded some historical narratives on tape once told me that Cronkite seemed to have surprisingly little idea of the meaning of anything he was reading; he also read “King George III” as “King George Three,” and had to be told that the preferred rendering was “the Third.”

There’s also a certain irony in the fact that just last month Cronkite’s people were informing the media: “His condition is being grossly exaggerated. … It is not true that he’s gravely ill.”

Go Ape

By on July 19, 2009 7

Everyone knows what the “Tarzan yell” sounds like in the version popularised by Johnny Weissmuller (and unlike most of his successors he actually makes it sound scary, especially if you’re not expecting it):

But what did Edgar Rice Burroughs intend it to sound like? That’s much harder to say.

Burroughs simply described it as the supposedly terrifying “victory cry of the bull ape.” Unfortunately, there is no particular sound in real life that this description picks out: when apes are fighting, they mainly grunt or screech – not in an especially terrifying way (and once a fight is over they’re usually quiet):

There’s one particular sound – the word mangani or tarmangani (in Burroughs’ fictional language, meaning “ape” and “white ape/white man” respectively) yelled with a rising pitch – that was used in the 1932 Tarzan radio serial and the 1935 movie New Adventures of Tarzan. Burroughs himself was heavily involved in both productions, leading some to speculate that this is Burroughs’ intended sound; you can hear it at 14:14 here:

But it’s not especially prepossessing.

If one wants a sound that seems like it might actually involve an ape, I’d suggest something like this:

That one sounds like a cross between a lion’s roar and a gorilla’s grunt, which might be about right. But who knows?

All Your Book Are Belong to Amazon

By on July 18, 2009 11

If you’ve bought an e-book from Amazon, you probably thought it was now yours.

Well, okay – not quite. You knew you couldn’t distribute it to other people, thanks to IP laws. But you probably thought you could at least keep it for your own use.

Kindle, redactedGuess again. If – irony alert – you’re a fan of George Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm and bought an electronic version for Kindle, Amazon’s handheld reader, the book you bought has been retroactively “disappeared” by Amazon at the request of the publisher. (CHT Sheldon.)

Oh sure, the money you paid has been refunded. But if you thought the book was yours and you were free to turn down any offers from Amazon to buy it back – welcome to 1984. (Assuming I’m still allowed to use that sequence of numbers.)

There’s been some outcry, and Amazon says they won’t do it again; but by their own terms of service, they already promised they wouldn’t do it the first time, so their credibility is not high at this point.

The real problem here is IP laws, of course. But in the shorter term, I’d really like to see Amazon get burned over this. They should be sued, their Kindle-swindle should be boycotted, and, oh yeah, someone should hack that thing.

Inquiring Minds Wanna Know

By on July 15, 2009 13

I just heard Douglas Rushkoff on Colbert talking about his new book. I don’t know anything about Rushkoff, but what he said sounded LL-compatible, and a websearch revealed this quote:

Most people seem to think having written a book as stridently anti-corporate as mine qualifies me as a lefty. While I might be left-leaning, I find myself disagreeing with pro-market publications only about as often as I disagree with pro-labor or progressive ones.

Pro-market advocates often forget that the corporations whose interests they’re championing are actually the beneficiaries of government policies and rule sets developed to favor the activities of giant, centralized, conglomerates; they argue against regulation, when it’s regulation that have built the monopolies preventing truly free commerce from taking place. Anti-market arguments, on the other hand, too often rely on the false promise of central planning or equally large institutional forces to address societal ills. They may hate corporations, but they see them as necessary employers of the masses.

So, can anyone tell me more about him? Is he a homeless or potential left-libertarian, or is there a bunch of disappointing statist stuff lurking in the background somewhere?

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