OK, YHB is back. I still have a floppy of notes from the dial-up nightmare, but now I need to find an easy way to transfer that file from the floppy to this computer. I figure it’ll mean going to the library and emailing it to myself. Well, anyway. I must say, it’s nice to be back on-line and blogging. Either as coincidence or evil plot, my move coincided with a tremendous increase in the amount of spam comments here. I mean, from two or three a week to over a hundred this month. I have no idea whether that’s a standard amount, but it seems like a lot. As a result of not actually blogging, the logistics of stuff around the move, and the spam attack, for the first time I felt this Tohu Bohu was a burden, rather than a joy. I’m figuring, though, that I’ll be back to daily (or so) notes, and the conversations that I have missed.
Also, with DSL, I have the occasional thing that actually inspires me to write a note. For instance, Beloit College has released this year’s Mindset List. For those of you who are not in academe, the Mindset List is a reminder that the fresh folk entering college this month were born in 1986, most of ’em, and so the old profs references’ to the Shah or to Smokey and the Bandit are not really connecting. I know that the Benoit folks are riding the fence between entertaining and informing, but out of 50 items on the list, there are only a few that it would really be a good idea to keep in mind. I mean, yes, it’s startling to think that Baby Jessica may be starting college now, but I doubt that the information will necessitate a change in Ye Olde Lecture. On the other hand, it might be a good idea to finally remove that last reference to Oliver North’s testimony or Baby Doc fleeing Haiti, which happened before they were born. Also, it might be a good idea to remember that for these kids, AIDS has always been treatable; if for some reason they happen to hear Romanovsky and Phillips singing “Living with AIDS”, they will not break down and cry like babies. As far as their experience tells them, doctors and lawyers have always advertised, and there have always been ads for prescription drugs.
And, of course, they missed the Wrigley thing. They get the Fenway Park thing, for whatever reason, but since Wrigley has always had lights, what is there to know about it?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
That’s actually last year’s list. This year is going to be the class of ’09, a fact which startled me no end when I was looking at a list of advisees.
Some of those are things that have always been true as far as I‘m concerned. Like, “Castro has always been an aging politician in a suit.” As opposed to what, a young revolutionary? By the time I was born, Castro was over 40 and had been in power for almost ten years; and I wasn’t paying enough attention to politics to have any idea who he was for at least another ten years beyond that.
Of course, that may partly be because we didn’t have a TV when I was a kid. But still, I think some of their “always” things are probably dated by birth year when they should be dated by age of political awareness/attention-paying, which for most kids (I suspect) is at least ten.
Anyway, there are also a bunch of references I don’t get at all. Partly due to general pop-culture illiteracy, but partly, I suspect, because some of the references were in vogue in the formative years of people younger than me….
Oops. I know they released this year’s list, so I assumed the web page had it. I am (thank the Lord) only very peripherally connected to academia.
And, yes, Castro has always been old, as far as I’m concerned, possibly because when I was ten, fifty was old. I do remember, or think I remember, him wearing fatigues all the time, but that memory may well be of reruns of Saturday Night Live, by means of which I learned lots of seventies news.
Actually, the mindset thing I was thinking of last night is that if a fresh is seventeen now, that means when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, he was five, so no real recollection of Poppy. The President has always been a southern Baby Boomer. A real southerner, not a Connecticut southerner. Further, since (as you point out) most kids don’t really have political awareness until ten or twelve, W. is their president. He was elected when they were twelve. Presidential elections have always been followed by allegations of illegimitacy. The country has, essentially, always been at war with Terrah.
I don’t think there’s anything I really don’t get (whoo-hoo! culturally literate!), although I, too, never got a chance to drink Apple Slice. Not that I would have taken the chance, but there it is.
I do think it’s worth keeping in mind, or in mindset, that there has always been a Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, and that not only the Stones but, say, the Pretenders have always been aging rockers, parent music. The idea that there should be a museum for rock music, which I remember as being preposterous and totally antithetical to the whole idea of rock music, is completely natural to these kids, who likely enough view “rock” as totally Lawrence Welk.
Thanks,
-V.
Rock and roll is dead? Really? I thought it was here to stay, and it will never die….
Civilization will have plummeted to new depths at such time as the Hip Hop Hall of Fame opens. Especially if it opens in some mild-mannered place like Dayton or some high-rent part of the Upper West Side. But at least if hip hop gets to the museum hall-of-fame stage, that’ll mean it’s finally dead, right? So I guess that would be cause celebré. Not that I’m opinionated or anything, no sir 🙂
How is it that Philadelphia never had a Playboy Club while Omaha, Lansing, Buffalo, and Columbus, Ohio, did? We really are the overlooked city (though oddly, Washington, DC, didn’t have one either, apparently).
still, you could run a list like that for each region and each ethnic group and the results would be pretty different. gameboys aren’t free.