Famous People Born In 1915 - It Was A Very Good Year

[1916 list is now up]

Billie Holiday was born 8 months before Frank Sinatra who was born a week before Edith Piaf.



It's always interesting to consider at all the folks who were born in the same year.  We don't normally think about famous people in terms of their birth year cohorts.    As kids, had they been in the same school, the months they were born in would have mattered quite a bit.  And it would be interesting to know which ones would have been friends.   How many actually got to meet each other?  How many were good friends?



Three of these folks born 100 years ago in 2015 appear to still be alive - Herman Wouk the novelist who wrote the WW II novel The Caine Mutiny, Nobel Prize winning Physicist Charles Townes who was part of the team that created laser beams, and banker David Rockefeller and could have their 100th birthdays in 2015.

[UPDATE Jan. 30, 2015:  Charles Townes died January 27, 2015]



Some of the best known are singers Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, and Billy Holiday.  Also best known are actors Orson Welles, Ingrid Bergman, and Anthony Quinn.  There's Moshe Dayan and guitarist Les Paul.





Sargent Shriver, as the first director of the Peace Corps, has special meaning for me.  And I actually got to meet Nobel Prize winning playwright Arthur Miller in the Anchorage museum when we were both waiting for our wives.  [UPDATE See Oct 17, 2015 post, Miller's 100th Birthday, with Alaska connections in Death of a Salesman.]

We've got some heavy thinkers like philosophers Roland Barthes and Thomas Merton.

*Picture sources at bottom of post

The women, not many, are all entertainers.

I cherry picked the names from NNDB which has a much longer list.  And most of the links go to NNDB.  I've sorted this table by the age they lived to.  It's always interesting (and a little creepy) to think about why some people live short lives and others long ones.  I know Thomas Merton was electrocuted in a hotel shower in Bangkok in 1968.  I was in Thailand at that time too, but didn't know anything about him then.




And there are some who are there simply because they were big names and their roles have had some influence on American culture like Barbara Billingsley -  June Cleaver, the mother on Leave It To Beaver - and Lorne Greene, the patriarch of Bonanza.

There are several Nobel Prize winners, no US presidents (but a Supreme Court Justice, Potter Stewart),  and at least one villain - Augusto Pinochet.

Edith Piaf	Dec 19 1915	Oct 11 1963	38	Fantastic French Singer
Thomas Merton	Jan 31 1915	Dec 10 1968	43	Catholic Thinker
Billie Holiday	Apr 7 1915	Jul 17 1959	44	Jazz Singer
Philip L. Graham	Jul 30 1915	Aug 3 1963	48	Washington Post publisher, 1947 - - 63
Billy Strayhorn	Nov 29 1915	May 31 1967	51	Composer  Take The A Train
Alan Watts	Jan 6 1915	Nov 16 1973	58	Philosopher Zen
Bobby Hackett	Jan 30 1915	Jun 7 1976	61	Jazz Musician
Zero Mostel	Feb 28 1915	Sep 8 1977	62	Actor - Fiddler on the Roof
Roland Barthes	Nov 12, 1915	Mar 23  1980	64	Philosopher
Moshe Dayan	May 20 1915	Oct 16 1981	66	Israeli military leader, politician
Muddy Waters	Apr 4 1915	Apr 30 1983	68	Amazing Blues Musician
Ingrid Bergman	Aug 29 1915	Aug 29 1982	68	Actor
Potter Stewart	Jan 23 1915	Dec 7 1985	70	US Supreme Court
Orson Welles	May 6 1915	Oct 10 1985	70	Actor Citizen Kane
Theodore H. White	May 6 1915	May 15 1986	71	Historian
Robert Hofstadter	Feb 5 1915	Nov 17 1990	75	Nobel Prize Physics
Robert Motherwell	Jan 24 1915	Jul 16 1991	76	Abstract Expressionist Painter
Lorne Greene	Feb 12 1915	Sep 11 1987	77	Ben Cartwright on Bonanza
Fred Friendly	Oct 30 1915	Mar 3 1998	82	President of CBS News, Journalist
Frank Sinatra	Dec 12 1915	May 14 1998	82	The Boss
Ring Lardner, Jr.	Aug 19 1915	Oct 31 2000	85	Playwright
Anthony Quinn	Apr 21 1915	Jun 3 2001	86	Actor Zorba the Greek
John C. Lilly	Jan 6 1915	Sep 30 2001	86	Human/dolphin communication
Abba Eban	Feb 2 1915	Nov 17 2002	87	Foreign Minister of Israel
Alan Lomax	Jan 30 1915	Jul 19 2002	87	Musicologist - Saved folksongs
Saul Bellow	Jun 10 1915	Apr 5 2005	89	Nobel Prize Literature
Arthur Miller	Oct 17 1915	Feb 2005	89	Playwright - Death of a Salesman
William Proxmire	Nov 11 1915	Dec 15 2005	90	US Senator Wisconsin
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf	Sep 1915	Aug 2006	90	Opera Soprano
Augusto Pinochet	Nov 25 1915	Dec 2006	91	Chilean Dictator
Barbara Billingsley	Dec 22 1915	Oct 16 2010	94	Leave It To Beaver’s Mother
Les Paul	Jun 9 1915	Aug 13 2009	94	Electric guitar/multitrack recording pioneer
Paul Samuelson	May 15 1915	Dec 13 2009	94	Nobel Prize Economics
Sargent Shriver	Nov 9 1915	Jan 18 2011	95	1st Peace Corps Director
Charles H. Townes	Jul 28 1915		99	Nobel Prize Phyics Laser
David Rockefeller	Jun 15 1915		99	Trilateral Commission Founder
Herman Wouk	May 27 1915		99	Novelist The Caine Mutiny

*Sources for photos in the image

Orson Welles http://becuo.com/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds Ingrid Bergman http://www.ncm.com/photos-casablanca Moshe Dayan http://www.bitwallpaper.net/moshe-dayan.html Les Paul http://www.lespaulonline.com Thomas Merton http://mertonfellowshipireland.wordpress.com Arthur Miller https://byu425crucible.wordpress.com/2013/09/29/the-early-life-of-arthur-miller/ Alan Lomax  (with Jerome Weisner)  https://jazzinphoto.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/alan-lomax-and-jerome-weisner-transcribing-folk.jpg   Charles Townsend  (with James Gordon) http://aip.org/history/exhibits/laser/sections/themaser.html  (image enhanced) Zero Mostel http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/photocredit/achievers/pri0-005 Barbara Billingsley  http://social.dol.gov/blog/june-cleaver-meet-juana-solis/

Mugged By LA Parking Authority

[UPDATE Jan 28:  There are two followup posts:
January 2, 2015 and January 28, 2015]




I felt like I'd been mugged.  I was happily minding my own business, when the LA Parking Authority snatched $58 from me.

"The best way to make money is not to spend it."  That's a basic tenet I picked up along the way.  It doesn't mean you have to be a miser, but just don't spend money you don't need to spend.  And parking tickets are a good example of money you shouldn't have to spend.

So, I'm reasonably careful about parking.  Biking helps a lot, but I do use a car too.

People who knowingly park without putting money in the meter or who take up two parking places or park in a handicapped zone when their ego handicap hasn't been diagnosed, all should pay for parking tickets.

But this one feels more like entrapment.



We went to see the movie Wild.  After I got past the silliness of the early scene where she struggles to pick up her heavy pack, but then manages to walk with it for 5 miles, it got good.

We checked out some sale items in the mall, then got the car from the mall parking lot (there are three free hours) and decided to find street parking while we ate dinner.


Here's the scene of the crime:

1 (the numbers match the numbers in the satellite view above) - far right of the picture, is where we came out of the mall parking lot.












The view from the parking lot exit of the block we're going to park on.





You can (almost) see that there are 6 parking spaces.  It's a really short block.  We turned left out of the parking lot and stopped in the red space on the right of the Starbucks (2 on the map) so we could read the parking sign.  Basically, we wanted to know if we had to put money in the meter or not.



2.  Here's where we stopped when we got out of the parking lot to check the parking sign (2a) to see if you still had to feed the meters or not.

The sign (2a) says:  No Parking from 4-7pm on top.  It was just after 7pm
Below it says 2 hour parking from 8am - 4pm.







(I took this picture that night after we found the ticket and drove back to the scene.  The others I took the next afternoon when I biked back to see if there was a white curb where I parked or any other warning.)




So, it said that we didn't have to pay for the meter because it was after 4pm and we could park there because it was after 7pm.  We pulled out of this space and looked for an empty space.  There was one.  It was the sixth and last parking space on the block.  All the others were full.




3.   We were parked where that gray car is - the last spot.  As you can see, the curb is just cement and it has a parking meter like all the other spots.






















Just to emphasize that the two spaces on the end look exactly like the other four on the block, this picture is from the middle of the block.  There are the three cars you can see in front and three behind.  There's also a truck parked on the corner beyond the metered spaces.

This picture is from 3 where we were parked.  You can see that in front of us it is painted red.  And there's enough room for about two cars and that truck.


We got out of the restaurant and as we walked back to the car, I noticed the car behind us had a note or something under the windshield wiper.  We got in the car and drove off.  But then I noticed there was something under our windshield wiper.  Some ad I assumed and we stopped the car to get rid of it.  It was an envelope with the ticket inside.

What the hell did we do wrong?  J read it - "Passenger loading only 7pm-2am"  Huh?

So we went back and looked.   The car behind us still had the ticket on the windshield.  There was also a car parked in the space we'd been in.   So they didn't see the sign either.   (By the way, did you notice the sign in the picture above by the truck?  This picture is during the day and we were there at night.)

This sign was behind the car behind us.  When we walked from the car we saw the back of this sign.  You can see this also two pictures above that says "Kitche" on it.  You probably didn't notice.

There's also a sign at the corner, next to the tree in the picture with the truck.  Its arrow points in the other direction.

So two spaces with meters and no white paint on the curbs are reserved in the evening for passenger loading.  We didn't see this sign.  We'd checked the sign at the other end of the block which had a convenient place to pull over and look at the sign without blocking traffic.  And there are only six parking spaces with meters on the whole block.


But even if we did see the sign at the corner - about the distance of three or four parking spaces away as you can see in the picture with the truck - I don't know that I would have realized that it meant my space.  First, the sign is very far from where I was parked.  Second, the arrow points to a long area of red pained curb.  There's room for three or four cars to stop and let off passengers.  Why would they  take two more metered parking spaces in addition?

Could I have figured this out before getting a parking ticket?  Well, if I had walked to the end of the block and checked the sign and then checked the sign behind where I parked, I might have figured it out.  Or at least been concerned and considered moving to another spot.  I like to walk so it wouldn't have mattered.  But I've never seen a no parking sign like this that took metered parking spaces away at night.  Passenger loading spaces I know about are painted red or white or yellow.  I'd looked at the sign to see when you had to use the meter.  It told me I didn't need to use it after 4pm and the sign also told me I could park there after 7pm.

This feels like entrapment.  The signs are so complicated and unexpected that an ordinary person wouldn't know he couldn't park there.  Even a reasonably careful person trying to obey the law and avoid a ticket.   The car behind us didn't know either.  Nor did the car that pulled into our space as soon as we left.

Am I whining or is this legitimate?  I checked on line and found  an October 2014 article that says parking signage is such an issue in LA that the  city council is trying to make the signs more consistent and less confusing.

Los Angeles officials pushed forward Wednesday with two programs that target one of the city's most ubiquitous problems: finding a place to park.

During a downtown committee meeting, City Council members asked transportation officials to test a simplified street parking sign that could replace the classic red, white and green placards, saying that the current, sometimes towering stacks of notices can confuse drivers and unintentionally result in parking tickets.

And there are a number of online stories about confusing parking signs in LA.  Here are a few:

• 13 Of Los Angeles' Most Ridiculous Parking Signs

 
• L.A.'s signs of madness
  Confusing and contradictory signage almost seems designed to result in parking tickets — not to mention extreme frustration. There's got to be a better way.
• There Is Now An App To Decode LA's Insane Parking Signage

Does this mean I won't have to pay the ticket?  I doubt it.  After all, they're still ticketing people at this tricky no parking spot.  And my ticket was at 7:32pm which means they are checking it right after it stops becoming a "no parking from 4-7pm" zone.


My son turned me onto a book long ago called  "Turn Signals Are The Facial Expressions of Automobiles" by Donald A. Norman.  A Kirkusreivew of the book notes:

"It's coping with the technology of quotidian life that wears us down, of course. Norman (Cognitive Psychology/UC San Diego) reassures us that it's not our fault: It's design flaws. If it's broke, Norman knows how to fix it."

The book gives lots of examples of bad design, where the message and the use conflict.  I remember particularly the example of a door with a handle to pull, but the sign says push.

I doubt the sign designers and the people who place them on the street are trying to entrap us. They are simply making signs that reflect laws or regulations that someone has passed and now the sign folks are required to implement the rules with signs.  And because they are so immersed in the making of the signs, they think it's all obvious and people should understand.  We all, generally know what we intend and it's clear to us, even though it may not be clear to others.  But part of me wonders whether this is the parking equivalent to a speed trap.  A way for LA to get needed revenue.  At $58 a pop (and that seems to be the minimum level ticket) they can ring up a lot of money.  100 tickets would be $5800.  And they got two tickets right there in a couple of minutes.  And I saw two parking enforcement vehicles when I biked over there to take the pictures.

The "Turn Signals" book points out numerous situations where this sort of rote filling out of orders results in bad design and poor instructions.

[UPDATE Jan 28:  There are two followup posts:  January 2, 2015 and January 28, 2015]

ADN Edits Out Crucial Part Of Article

Reading the Alaska Dispatch News online, I noticed an article about the British trying to get the Americans to return the original Winnie The Pooh who's been in the US since the author gave the stuffed animal to his publisher.  Who, according to the article, gave it to the New York Power Authority, who gave it to the New York public library.  The article cites a Times of London editorial:

“Winnie-the-Pooh is not just a reference to a fictional bear, but to a national concept of a childhood Eden – an identifiable woodland in which stuffed animals, belonging to an archetypal nursery, roam in gentle complacency.”
And, the editorial went on to note, “It is obvious then that Winnie-the-Pooh, whatever else he is, is not an American.” 

 My immediate reaction, reading the headline, was "You've Gotta Be Kidding!"  The Brits have long refused the Greek government's requests (or maybe even demands) that the Brits return the Elgin marbles to Greece, which were stolen from Greece long ago.  The insult was increased recently when the British Museum agreed to loan the marbles to, of all countries, Russia.

How could they have an article on this without mentioning the Elgin marbles?

I can't put up links to the online version I read (that is a facsimile of the newspaper) because you need a password to get in.  So I googled for a copy of the article and found it at McClatchy DC.

But this article had a whole paragraph on the irony of this request:

Still, there is irony in the Times’ position, as the arguments are a mirror image of a case made recently for why the British Museum, and not Athens, was the rightful resting place for the so-called Elgin Marbles, statues that used to adorn the Parthenon but were transferred to Britain in the early years of the 19th century. Greece has wanted the statues back for 200 years, almost as long as they’ve been gone, and the arguments are the same: They weren’t sold by the Greeks but plundered by occupiers, who gave them to the British ambassador, Lord Elgin; a special museum has been built for their return, and the statues are much more than simply works of art but symbols of the greatness that was Greece.

So does someone in the ADN editing room think that Alaskans are only interested in a stuffed teddy bear, but not the theft of cultural treasures?  That the hypocrisy of wanting Winnie the Pooh while rejecting Greek claims would be lost on Alaskans?

This is Alaska where Alaska Native tribes are still working to repatriate artifacts taken from them.  

Or perhaps there's even more to the story that wasn't reported in the original McClatchy article.  Was the Times editorial a satire of the Brits' refusal to return the Elgin Marbles?  Or of the Greeks demands to get back the Marbles?


I did try to read the original London Times editorial.  What I found looked more like an article than an editorial, and when I finally found a way to get around The Times block on seeing the whole article, the quote was not from that article.  I finally found my way to  the original editorial.  I do think it is a satire - hopefully on the British refusal to return the Elgin Marbles.  It ends:

So today enlightened Americans who can imagine what it would be like if the original Moby Dick were to be displayed in, say, a Chinese museum, will surely want to join us in calling for the return of Pooh. They understand that for English people it would be almost as good as a balloon.

Maybe one of our British readers can fill us in on this story.

 

Pope Francis Taking On Climate Change

An article in the Guardian  yesterday discusses Pope Francis' interest in the movement to deal with climate change.  

". . . But can Francis achieve a feat that has so far eluded secular powers and inspire decisive action on climate change?
It looks as if he will give it a go. In 2015, the pope will issue a lengthy message on the subject to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, give an address to the UN general assembly and call a summit of the world’s main religions.
The reason for such frenetic activity, says Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, is the pope’s wish to directly influence next year’s crucial UN climate meeting in Paris, when countries will try to conclude 20 years of fraught negotiations with a universal commitment to reduce emissions.
“Our academics supported the pope’s initiative to influence next year’s crucial decisions,” Sorondo told Cafod, the Catholic development agency, at a meeting in London. “The idea is to convene a meeting with leaders of the main religions to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion.”

I learned of the Pope's interest in this topic earlier this year or last year at a Citizens Climate Lobby meeting when it was reported that one of the members had written the Pope on the topic and had been invited to a climate change meeting the Pope was hosting.

The Guardian article covers a number of activities the Pope has undertaken, but mainly focuses on climate change.

Following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated in 2012 by typhoon Haiyan, the pope will publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology. Urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds, the document will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners.

His language is pretty strong:

In October he told a meeting of Latin American and Asian landless peasants and other social movements: “An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it. 

“The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands. 

“The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said. 

But I think even the Guardian is misled in its choice of the term 'radical'  to describe  Pope's stand on climate change.

However, Francis’s environmental radicalism is likely to attract resistance from Vatican conservatives and in rightwing church circles, particularly in the US – where Catholic climate sceptics also include John Boehner, Republican leader of the House of Representatives and Rick Santorum, the former Republican presidential candidate. [emphasis added]

The overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that climate change is happening and humans are causing it.  The majority of the people in the US believe that climate change is real and needs to be addressed.  And the Citizens Climate Lobby's proposal for a revenue neutral carbon fee is supported by an array of prominent people including prominent conservatives.   His position is only radical if the opinions of Koch brothers and their ilk are given far more weight than the rest of us.

Television, One Big Corporate Commercial - The Need For New Business Curriculum In Public Schools

Screenshot Disney Park Frozen Christmas Celebrationl

My mom watches channel 7 here in LA. Sitting with her, I get to see my fair share too.   Rosie O'Donnell, at the end of The View, which she co-hosts, was telling us how she has a Frozen family - all the members of her family love the movie.  Then there was a 'show' full of more syrupy testimonials about  to how Disney has been the glue for so many families for 77 years.  It took a while but I found Disney Parks Frozen Christmas Celebration.  There's a short trailer for it here which gives you the flavor of the film.  How I imagine people in North Korea publicly talk about their leader.

I've been noticing this sort of self-promotion show since I've been visiting my mom so regularly and seeing television with her.  The networks do 'shows' that essentially are touting their other shows.  The stars of one show come on another show to talk about their shows.

I had this bit of memory nagging at me.  And so I had to look up the ties between ABC (channel 7 in LA) and Disney.   Here's what I got from Wikipedia:

ABC, Inc.[1] DBA Disney–ABC Television Group[2] manages all of The Walt Disney Company's Disney and ABC-branded television properties. The group includes the ABC Television Network (including ABC Daytime, ABC Entertainment and ABC News divisions), as well as Disney's 50% stake in A&E Television Networks and its 80% controlling stake in ESPN, Inc.[3] While holding the controlling stake in ESPN, Disney-ABC TV Group and ESPN operate as separate units of Disney Media Networks.[4]

Essentially, this is a program length commercial for the Disney parks, the Disney movie Frozen, and all associated spinoff products on the television network that Disney owns.

With conglomerates melding many different businesses together, particularly media corporations, any pretense of fair and objective news reporting is totally out the window.



Need For More Sophisticated Schooling On Businesses

This raises an issue I've been thinking about for a while.  In a democracy, people need to understand how government operates and who the big power players are.  In today's United States, that means we all need to understand, not just the structure of states and local governments and the federal government.  We also need to understand the structure of American businesses - how they are interconnected and how they relate to government.

So,  school curricula should include, beyond teaching maps of the states and countries (they do still do that don't they?),  teaching the ins and outs of corporate structure and relationships.  Which companies own which companies?  Who sits on the boards of these different companies and how much do they get paid to do their board work?  And how do their duties on different boards affect corporate competition and government actions?

Without knowing well the structure of corporate America (and the corporate World as a whole) we cannot make reasonable election decisions.  How many people even know the ten largest publicly held companies?  (that question assumes people know what a publicly held company is.)  Well, trying to find the answer on Google demonstrates the problems.  I got all sorts of options, but not the top ten publicly traded companies in the US.  I got the top 20, but it was for 2007.  Changing the search to top ten US companies in 2014, I had to keep going to page three before I got a list of the top ten in North America.


But I'm not just interested in the top ten or top 100.  I'm interested in how those companies are interrelated - who owns whom and how does that affect how they do business?  The most dramatic impacts are likely on media companies that present us the news.  The impact of being owned by Disney on ABC, means that, at one level, viewers see shows that tout the products of the mother corporation.  What happens to their news reports?  How much about Disney products find there way into 'news' stories?

Here's an out-of-date 2006 map of media companies from Advertising Age.

It's a start.  It's level of complexity should help people realize why this needs to be a school topic where kids spend time studying all the interrelationships.  Maybe they'll start understanding the financial impact of McDonald's television ads or how their favorite movies are pitched over and over again on the stations owned by the movie company that made it (or they're both owned by the same company).  And how the boards of directors sit on each other's boards.  Maybe if they spend time looking at how much money corporations spend on elections and lobbyists, they'll start to wake up.


The Columbia Journalism Review has page where you can look up media corporations and see who they own.  I looked up CBS which has this note on the top of the list:

"CBS
National Amusements has controlling interests in CBS and Viacom.
51 West 52 Street
New York, New York 10019-6188
Voice (212) 975-4321"

So I looked up National Amusements.  Wikipedia tells us:

National Amusements, Inc. is an American privately owned theater company based in Dedham, Massachusetts, United States. The company was founded in 1936 as the Northeast Theatre Corporation by Michael Redstone. National Amusements is now owned by Michael Redstone's son, Sumner Redstone, who holds 80% of the company, and Sumner's daughter, Shari Redstone, who owns the remaining 20%. Through National Amusements, the Redstones control both the CBS Corporation (owner of CBS) and Viacom (owner of Paramount Pictures) through supervoting shares.[1] The company operates more than 1,500 movie screens across the United States, the United Kingdom, Latin America, and Russia under its Showcase Cinemas, Multiplex Cinemas, Cinema de Lux, and KinoStar brands. National Amusements is equal partners in MovieTickets.com.

So, do you think that the huge media emphasis these days on what movies are coming out and how much they're grossing has anything to do with the fact that television companies are owned by companies with an interest in movie theaters and film studios?  National Amusements owns CBS and Paramount.  Disney owns ABC.  And 20th  Century Fox is connected Murdoch's Fox News  (though I'm not completely sure how given recent changes.)   Comcast owns Universal (movies) and NBC (among many other things.)  Comcast is waiting for FCC approval of its $45 billion purchase of Time Warner.  However, an article on Re/code  that is interesting because it has this note at the bottom,

* Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is a minority investor in Revere Digital, Re/code’sparent company.

says there's a new group that's teamed up hoping to block the merger of Comcast and Time Warner.

Just to give a sense of how long the tentacles are, National Amusements, through CBS, also owns radio stations in about 28 cities - big ones mostly, including New York, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, and in most of them they own three or four or five different stations.

My point here is not to expose  the connections among corporations and how those connections bias how those corporations operate - that's way too big a project.  I'm just trying to illustrate through one tiny example - O'Donnell's testimonial for Disney and the ABC tribute show to Disneyland, how these relationships breed massive conflicts of interest that most people have no clue about.

That example is there to make the bigger point:  School curriculum should teach kids about corporate structure and ownership.  I'm not talking about the Junior Achievement goal - "dedicated to educating students about workforce readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programs."  I'm talking about getting a base for understanding the power of corporations in a democracy, understanding who has that power, and how that power affects what we know, how our laws get made, and what we can and cannot do.


I tried to find a clip of Rosie O'Donnell touting Disney on the View.  I didn't find the clip, but I did find the link to the show I saw mentioned at the beginning of this post and an announcement for another such show: "ABC to Air 'Backstage With Disney on Broadway: Celebrating 20 Years' on Sunday, December 14th"

I also found some O'Donnell/Disney connections (besides Disney owning ABC where O'Donnell is one of the hosts of The View.) From the Disney Wiki

Roseann "Rosie" O'Donnell (born March 21, 1962) is an American comedienne, actress, author, and television personality who voiced Terk in the 1999 Disney animated film Tarzan and appeared as one of the hosts in The Boudin Bakery Tour, an attraction at Disney California Adventure in Anaheim, California. She currently voices The Bouncing Bumble Queen on the Disney Junior original series Jake and the Never Land Pirates.

 Someone posted a video of the bakery tour here.

ETonline, snarkily headlines a feud between O'Donnell and another actress who said she didn't like the movie Frozen.  O'Donnell apparently called her out for that on The View:

"I just want to say, that I feel that Frozen is the best Disney movie ever made," O'Donnell told the crowd with the same level of intensity that is usually reserved for witch trials. "I've seen it 250 times, I can say it, every word of it, memorized. I love it like the rest of America."

Can we attribute the dissing of O'Donnell's love for Frozen to the fact that ETonline is a part of the
CBS corporate world, and  an ABC rival?  According to Wikipedia

As of the 2014 awards season, the staff and hosts of ET handle all red carpet event coverage for CBS's sister cable network TVGN (which CBS acquired a half-interest of in mid-2013), and air said programming on that network leading into award and movie premiere events as an extension of ET, usually under the title of ET at the (event name).

As you can see, this can go on and on.  And with all that corporate money and power behind what's on the networks and cable shows, the rest of us will have to work pretty hard to first understand all the connections and how they bias things, and second, to explain it to others.  



I know there will be people who will see the Disney show this post started with and wonder what I'm talking about.  It was a great show they'll say.  How can you say bad things about Disneyland?  All I can say to those people is that temptation, if it were ugly and repulsive, wouldn't tempt people, wouldn't seduce them.  From a Christian blogger:

"I always see Satan depicted as this red, horned, hideous-looking creature, when in all actuality he is one of the most beautiful of all of God’s creation. . . God says of him, “You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty.” 

Disney is a huge business that sells fairy tales for lots of money.  I went to their site and checked on tickets.  Two adults and two kids for two days costs $686.  Parking costs $17 more (per day I'm guessing.)  According to Allears (I couldn't find the answer where you buy the tickets) the tickets cover most rides, but not arcade games and shooting galleries.  And, of course, not food or other purchases in the stores.

If you make minimum wage in California, you would earn $9 an hour or $360 for forty hours.  If you consider the taxes that would be withheld,  a minimum wage worker in California would have to work about two weeks to pay for two days at Disneyland for a family of four.  More if they were going to eat in the park.   And shows like Disney Parks Frozen Christmas Celebration - essentially a long commercial for the movie Frozen (and all the products from it) and Disney Parks shown as a 'program' on the network the Disney corporation owns - puts a lot of pressure on parents to spend that money at the park.  Money they're hard pressed to spend.

Lianna Lisiulinka Will You Marry Me? And Other Santa Monica Pier Folk

I had four generations of women around this week from my mom to my granddaughter.



Got to take my little shark for a bike ride along the beach Wednesday.  I was able to rent a kid trailer to attach to my bike - and we rode to Santa Monica pier.



Here are just a couple of people we saw.

Desmond Bellow played sweet sweet music on his steel guitar.  The little shark watched and listened intently.  Here's a little bit from his website.  It sounds much, much better live.

I didn't get this artist's name.  He certainly was the most colorful person on a pier full of colorful folks.

As we went by he sang the ABC song, then itsy bitty spider which had the shark entranced.









And as we were listening to the music, we saw this sign being pulled by a small plane over the ocean.

This could be romantic, weird, and even creepy depending on the story surrounding it.

I did google the name, but nothing came up.  Did she see it?









[Photo honesty:  The sign wasn't clear in the picture I got with the plane and the sign.  So I took the plane from that picture and put it into the picture with the sign clear.  Seeing is no longer believing.  But then it never really was.  But in this case, this is pretty much what it looked like.]

". . . being like Jesus was the only point"

Scott Korb  reviewed  James Carroll's Christ Actually: The Son Of Good For The Secular Age in the LA Times Sunday edition.

It's not too long,  but I did have trouble following it.  Kolb, from what I can tell here, has seriously explored the ideas of religious belief in the modern and ancient worlds and is much closer to Carroll intellectually than most.   But it was also compelling and I read it. The basic message I got was that in the modern world belief itself is less and less believable.   Ultimately, imitating Christ is the way to make belief believable again.   I found myself having to go back and reread parts
as I started writing here.

Here's an example:

"I'm convinced, for instance, by recent arguments, notably one by writer Paul Elie, that most contemporary novels fail to "grant belief any explanatory power" and thus refuse one sense of "the fullness of life." Arguably the most popular Christian factual writing in recent years, "Heaven Is for Real," recounts a child's round trip to heaven, where Jesus keeps a rainbow horse. Another popular and perhaps more believable factual approach involves academics — like Reza Aslan in "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth" — uncovering and reconstructing the Jesus of history and not the Christ of Christianity.
For all its merits, this approach typically abandons the question of religious belief, and in doing so, says Catholic writer James Carroll, ignores the historical reality of Christ's impact over the centuries. Because despite the successful storytelling approach of Aslan and others committed to seeing Jesus the man as "someone worth believing in," Carroll argues in his new book, "Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age," that it's hard to imagine anyone would still think much about him were it not for the "two-thousand-year-old divinity claim" that puts Jesus in our lives today. And nothing but our own religionlessness would make necessary or believable Carroll's new book."

Still, I don't understand this enough to know for sure if Korb is citing "Heaven Is for Real" seriously or is dismissively.  I assume the latter.   I looked it up.  Here's what the Heaven website says:

"Heaven Is for Real is the true story of a four-year old son of a small town Nebraska pastor who experienced heaven during emergency surgery. He talks about looking down to see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn’t know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear … "

I've heard about Aslan's book on Jesus.  I read an earlier book of his on the life of Mohammad   No god but God. It's a serious attempt to write a factual account of Mohammad's life and the Jesus book, as I understand it is a similar volume.  It's an attempt at history and biography, not at promoting a religion.  

I'd like to read Carroll's book to figure out what actually he's saying.  And because I have an ambiguous attitude toward belief in a divinity.  To the extent that often people can understand complex ideas best metaphorically, I think the stories of different religions that hold the ideals of the faith are a reasonable way to convey the moral lessons.  To the extent that Christians imitate Christ, on a daily, continuous basis, this would be a much better world.  I don't know that one has to believe in Christ's divinity to imitate him.  One just has to believe in his goodness.  At least that's what I understand.  And I'm interested whether Carroll agrees or disagrees.  

Korb ends his review:

"Imitation," Carroll contends, "can make us more than human." And while the Christian devotional practice may have its roots in Thomas à Kempis' 15th century handbook "Imitation of Christ," Carroll reminds us that "from the start, those who fell under his spell understood that being like Jesus was the only point." Through imitation we transcend ourselves. Offering the further examples of humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer and pacifist Dorothy Day, Carroll argues that the imitation of Christ is one truly viable way that remains to make belief believable. 

In their moments, believers like Bonhoeffer and, later, Day, whose very lives opposed the infernality of war, groped for words that might give Christ some meaning amid the ruins of Christendom. Carroll gropes too and well. But there are no words as powerful as our human lives. Carroll knows this. It is his final word. And for Christians, he concludes, the fullness of their lives remains Christ's only hope."

The Mysteries Of Gas Pricing And Our Reactions - Stock Market To Drop When Prices Go Up And When They Go Down

I just filled my mom's car in the nearby Costco here in LA.


$2.39.



We all know that gas prices have been dropping and that Alaska is lagging behind in that fall.  Anchorage Gas Prices reports the lowest prices in Anchorage right now are $.45 higher than the lowest price in LA.  (And Alaska has an $.08 tax per gallon while California has $.41 tax per gallon.  Without the tax, the price difference is $.33 more.

Screenshot from Anchorage Gas Prices 12/23/14 11am Alaska time

I find it interesting that the Dimond Costco is $.04 cheaper than the the DeBarr Costco.  Is that because one was checked one hour ago and the other two hours ago?  I decided to call DeBarr Costco and the person who answered the phone checked with the manager and said that the two stores do price differently and they try to match the prices in the neighborhood.  She couldn't tell me whether the two Costco's order gas separately, or not, but her answer does imply that the price of gas reflects, not what they pay, but what gas costs close by their location.  But this is all really an aside.

I did start a post on gas prices back in October and this seems like a good place to add those thoughts in too.

Large Drop [In Oil Prices] A Boon To Consumers But Could Pose Long-Term Economic Problems 

That was the subtitle of an AP story published in the ADN in October this year.  I couldn't find a linkable ADN copy of the article, but here's the headline for the same article at The Great Falls Tribune:  "Why drop in oil prices has downside for US economy." 

If you're scratching your head about this, that's good.  It means you're thinking, and possibly somewhere in your subconscious you've stored old headlines from another time.  Like this one from CBS-DFW in February 2013:  "Fast Rising Gas Prices Could Hurt Recovering Economy."   


Dropping prices are bad and rising prices are bad.  So, would slowly rising prices be ok?  What about stable prices?  Are the people writing these headlines just using the knowledge that bad news gets more readers?  Are they reading the articles?  

Notice that both headlines include qualifiers - "could" and "may."

The October article says the lower prices are good for consumers, for big energy consumers like airlines and manufacturers.

"But a sharp fall in energy prices often results from weakening economic growth, and the benefit of lower fuel costs ins't enough to offset it."

That sounds like the falling energy are CAUSED by a weakening economy, NOT the CAUSE of it.   It seems to me, except for oil companies and oil producing states like Alaska, a drop in oil prices has to be good for most businesses and thus for consumers, which should help the economy down the line, though stockbrokers who don't like uncertainty sell when anything changes.  Or maybe these kinds of headlines means they can churn the stocks in their portfolios.

Conclusions I can draw from this:

1.  Despite the assurances from the oil companies and our former governor and other oil company supporters, the oil companies squeeze as much out of us as they can and Alaska is simply a place to get oil and they'll tell us whatever they think people will believe.

2.  Costco also isn't your friend either.  Their prices don't reflect their costs, but what they think they can get away with.  So don't assume it's cheaper because you're at Costco.

3.  The media generally either do not have a clue about economics and/or they don't care what's true, they care about headlines that sell copy.

Of course, none of these conclusions should be a surprise to anyone paying attention - but unfortunately, in Alaska anyway, not enough people who vote are paying attention.

AIFF 2014: Their Bests And My Bests - Features

I've had posts like this - where I compare my picks to the festival picks - because I've had real disagreements with the festival picks.  This year, I'm not too much in disagreement with the festival picks, but there are some films I'd like to focus on a bit more.

In this one I'll go on past the table of picks to talk about the features and the made in Alaska categories.

Category	Festival Picks	Steve's Picks
Feature*	Best: The Ambassador to Bern Runner-Up: Come To My Voice Honorable Mention: I Believe In Unicorns	Ambassador to Bern Come to My Voice Rocks in My Pocket
Documentary	Best:  White Earth Runner-Up:  Coney Island: Dreams For Sale Honorable Mention: Seeds of Time	White Earth Shield and Spear Mala Mala Barefoot Artist
Made in Alaska*	Best: Detective Detective Detective  Runner-Up: Tracing Roots  Honorable Mention: The Empty Chair	The Empty Chair
Short	Best: Till Then [Bis Gleich]  Runner-Up: What Cheer  Honorable Mention: How Hipólito Vázquez  Found Magic Where He Didn’t Expect It	Universal Language* One Armed Man Bis Gleich Reaching Home Into the Silent Sea
Super Short	Best: Four Brothers. Or Three. Wait…Three  Runner-Up: Full-Windsor  Honorable Mention: Enfilade	Enfilade ** didn't see Four Brothers
Animation	Best: 365  Runner-Up: Wire Cutters  Honorable Mention: Ronald Gottlieb	Speed Dating 365 Ronald Gottlieb and Moving Out

Discussion

Not too much difference in our picks here.  There were not as many really good features this year as in the past.

Features

Ambassador to Bern - Most everything worked in this intelligent drama about two Hungarian immigrants who break into the Hungarian embassy in Bern not long after the Russian invasion of Hungary and the execution of the former prime minister Nagy in 1958.  The characters are all real, three dimensional (except maybe Vermes), the light and pace and decency of everyone all reflect a different time and place.   Overall, a very satisfactory film.  All the people I talked to after the film (there's a video of audience reaction here) enjoyed it, called it intense, though they weren't all sure of the historical context.

Come To My Voice-  This Turkish film focuses on the personal burdens on Kurdish villagers in Turkey.  We see the grandmother and granddaughter as they struggle to get their son/father released from the Turkish soldiers.  The situations are very mundane yet tell a very big story with the dramatic mountain scenery almost a character in the movie.

Rocks In My Pocket - Was the wild, sardonic, extravagant, and brilliant tour of the mind of a  Latvian-American woman, exploring the history of her mental illness (depression) in her family in gorgeous animation.  Each frame is a piece of art.  The reactions I heard were all strong - people loved it or hated it. I'm in the former category.  It was a long involved story which interwove the history of Latvia in the 20th Century, the condition of women, and the migration of depression from generation to generation via the women in her family.  Was it too long as many complained?  I'm sure it could have been edited, but I couldn't tell you where.  Tying all the various threads together was one of the important parts of the film and that took time.  It just wasn't packaged like a typical Hollywood movie.  It requires people to go into a different mental and temporal space, the break loose from our cultural expectations of how a film is supposed to be paced.  Even if someone thought the story got too entangled or long (I didn't) you could just sit back and enjoy the rich imagery of the animation.

The other films I saw (all those in competition, but not all the features at the festival) were at a different level of overall quality.  To my surprise, I liked I Believe in Unicorns.  There was a certain amount of playing with the film images that could have been tacky, but worked.  The film told the story of a young girl and her first love.  The short affair was an escape from taking care of her disabled mom and her choice of boys was not the best.  It felt real and believable.
I also liked Appropriate Behavior and Listening.

One other feature I'd mention is the Mexican Consulate's offering - The Zebra.  It offered us a view of the Mexican revolution through the eyes of two young men who were headed north and looking to join one of the revolutionary groups, though their reason for joining one over the other had little to do with political ideology.   I suspect there is a lot of symbolism I missed.  Certainly the zebra of the title - not a painted horse, not a donkey with stripes, not a Yankee horse, or an African horse (as it was variously described in the film) - symbolized something about knowing what different revolutionary groups.  The theme of every man for himself also must have had more meaning than I understood.  Unfortunately I didn't think of any of these questions when the director was in Anchorage and I could ask him.

Made In Alaska

I only saw two films in this category - The Empty Chair and Kaltag, Alaska - which played together.  (I just checked and I did wee one more - WildLike which I discussed briefly elsewhere.)

So I can't judge how good the other films were.  But I can say that The Empty Chair was a very important film.  Greg Chaney, the film maker, was able to use his own interviews of still living members of the Juneau community who were around in the late 1930s and early 1940's - including some who were sent to internment camps in WWII for being Japanese-Americans - as well as archival footage and home movies from the time to capture an important historical event - the internment of Japanese-American citizens of Juneau in WW II and how the community reacted.  I've written more about what I liked about this film in an earlier post.   Without having seen more than a clip of Detective, Detective, Detective  , but having talked to people who did see it, I would wager a significant amount that in 10 years The Empty Chair will still be an important film - maybe even more so because the some of the people in it might no longer be alive - but the others will have been long forgotten.  I would rank The Empty Chair in among the best documentaries in the festival.

OK, I've gotten that off my chest.

I'll do one or two more posts like this that cover documentaries, shorts, super shorts, and animation.