Category Archives: Art/Style/Culture

Jerry Seinfeld: “The Scholar of Comedy”

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Excellent interview in The New Yorker by David Remnick. Not sure if the piece is behind a paywall or not but it’s a good read.

“That’s the way you go through life. You only care about laughing and being funny.”

“And I don’t like old people, either. Even though I’m seventy—I don’t like old people. […] They don’t look good. Everything’s going. Everything’s deteriorating. I don’t want to see this. If you want to hang around, fine, but we’re moving on to younger people. I’m with you up to about thirty-eight. If you want to stay, you can stay, but I’m moving on.”

“There were no sitcoms picked up on the fall season of all four networks. Not one. No new sitcoms.”

Clues that you are rich

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A lot of rich people don’t even realize they’re rich. Here are some clues:

  • You are worried about someone hijacking your car when you drive downtown.
  • You can afford things you actually need, like healthcare.
  • You don’t use a calculator while grocery shopping, and you don’t use the produce scales in grocery stores.
  • You spend money on traveling for leisure.
  • You never worry about hidden, snowballing fees or “poor tax”.
  • You never have to hustle to work out where you will sleep or where your next meal comes from.
  • You can invest in something that pays off later or just simply stock up because buying more is cheaper.
  • You don’t hold up the line with your complicated benefits when checking out in the grocery store line.
  • You don’t have to worry about logistics, like how you will show up to appointments on opposite sides of the city in one day.
  • You shop online.
  • You don’t have to worry about your kid’s tech access for school.
  • Bureaucratic procedures, such as getting a driver’s license, are not prohibitively impossible.

— It’s Training Cats and Dogs

How Many Pictures Are There (2024)

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The following statistics are from an article by Matric Broz at phototutorial.com.  The article presents “photography and photo statistics procured with scientific and mathematical methods, including answering questions like “How many photos are taken every day?”

How many photos are taken every year?

  • 1.81 trillion photos are taken worldwide every year, which equals 57,000 per second, or 5.0 billion per day. By 2030, around 2.3 trillion photos will be taken every year.
  • According to Photutorial data, 1.2 trillion were taken worldwide in 2021 and 1.72 trillion in 2022.
  • The global pandemic reduced the number of images taken by 25% in 2020 and 20% in 2021.

How many photos are taken every day?

  • The average person takes 20 photos daily. This number is higher among younger people and lower among older people.
  • According to Phototurial data, 4.7 billion photos are taken every day worldwide in total.
  • By region, the number of photos taken by a smartphone user is led by the US: 20.2/day, Asia-Pacific 15/day, Latin America 11.8/day, Africa 8.1/day, and Europe 4.9/day.

How many images are on the internet?

  • 750 billion images are on the internet, which is only 6% of the total photos that were ever taken since most of the photos we take are never shared.

How many images are on Google Images?

  • There are 136 billion images on Google Images.
  • By 2030, there will be 382 billion images on Google Images.

How many photos does the average person have on their phone?

  • The average user has around 2,100 photos on their smartphone in 2023.
  • iOS smartphone users have approximately 2,400 photos on their phones, while Android users have around 1,900 photos on their phones.

Other photo stats

  • 12.4 trillion photos have been taken throughout history. By 2030, this number will increase to 28.6 trillion.
  • Users share the most images on WhatsApp: 6.9 billion per day. 1.3 billion images are shared on Instagram daily, with about 100 million in posts and more than 1 billion on stories and chats.
  • 92.5% of photos are taken with smartphones, and only 7% with cameras.

Bleak, Crime Infested Towns In the (Missouri) Bootheel

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There is a seemingly endless variety of genres on YouTube, and one that has been showing up in my feed more frequently of late is what I call the “driving tour of small town America” videos. During my many years, on the road in the Midwest, I had occasion to drive through lots and lots of small rural towns, so I’ve found this series interesting.

The video above offers a rather depressing look at four towns in southeast Missouri: Caruthersville, Hayti, Kennett, and Cardwell. Some of the demographic statistics were almost as bleak and shocking as the images.

Tattooed underwear model

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This direct mail marketing piece showed up in our mailbox yesterday. Two things immediately caught my eye: the model didn’t look like he spent hours in the gym every day, his body looked more like a normal person’s body. And the tattoos. Lots and lots of tattoos.

According to a 2023 survey by Pew Research, 41% of Americans under the age of 30 have at least one tattoo. And we’re not talking high-grade Yakuza-class fine art here. These tats look like something you could get in the strip mall. Once again, I turned to ChatGPT for some insight on this cultural phenomenon.

Small American Towns

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“The country had changed since the last time he d been through this way. Many of the little country towns, which had seemed prosperous, even smug, back in the seventies when he’d last made this drive, had been hollowed out, their storefronts empty, their economies wasted by out-migration, the collapse of small farming, the big box stores; their civic life was composed largely of the high school football team, the big signs painted on the water tank, the brick walls of the low, sunburned buildings: GO COUGARS! GO HAWKS! GO REBELS! On the dusty streets of towns named for nineteenth-century cattlemen, pioneers, heroes of the Civil War, they now saw few descendants of such people, only little clots of dark-skinned men and signs in Spanish. The Indians were slowly reconquering the land, for the white people had everything but enough children, and the children they did have wanted the life they saw on television, not the life of the small American towns.”

— The Return by Michael Gruber

Wes Scott’s Speed Wagon

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The following is from the Autumn 2015 issue of Air Cooled News (An Official Publication of The Franklin Club)

In 1933, The Reo Automobile Company shipped 800 leftover 1933 Reo “Flying Clouds” to the Franklin Automobile Company. Franklin engines were installed and they were sold as 1933 Franklin “Olympics.”

In 1934 Reo still had unsold “Flying Clouds” so they decided to cut them off behind the front door and build pickup trucks. It is possible that at least one of these pickup trucks was shipped to Franklin where an air cooled 1934 Franklin engine was installed and it was sold as a 1934 Franklin “Speed Wagon.” If that did happen, the truck cold have looked exactly like this one.

In 2012, Wes Scott traded a Model A truck for the remains of a 1933 Franklin “Olympic.” This would provide the chassis for the Franklin “Speed Wagon.” In 2013 Wes’ son Donald found a 1934 Reo Speed Wagon in Shaniko, Oregon. This would provide the cab.

The bed for the “Speed Wagon” came from a Reo pickup in West Plains, Missouri. Richard Harry of Wisconsin provided an extra set of fenders so pickup rear fenders could be made from two sets of sedan fenders.

Another Franklin Club member, Ed Joy of Idaho provided a nice green hood that matched what was left of the original paint on the cab. The goal was to make all the pieces look like they came on the truck originally and to build a truck that could be used and enjoyed. At the Fall Midwest Region Meet in Clinton, MO the comments ranged from “When are you going to paint it?” to “Don’t touch it we like it.”

Wes is going with “Don’t touch it.”

Wes’ garage/shop/farm is just about 20 minutes from where I live and some car buddies drove me down and introduced me. Wes was kind enough to let me record a little video (5 min) of his amazing collection of Franklins and Model A Fords.

This brief video barely scratched the surface (you should forgive the expression) of Wes’s amazing collection. I hope to have another opportunity share some more.

Additional photos on Flickr »

“Being negative also helps you appear smart”

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Following thoughts from an article (Chicken Littles Are Ruining America) by David Brooks in The Atlantic. (No link because it’s behind a paywall). He warns “doomsaying can become a self-fulfilling prophecy)

Being negative also helps you appear smart. In a classic 1983 study by the psychologist Teresa Amabile, authors of scathingly negative book reviews were perceived as more intelligent than the authors of positive reviews. Intellectually insecure people tend to be negative because they think it displays their brain power.

Believing in vicious conspiracy theories can also boost your self-esteem: You are the superior mind who sees beneath the surface into the hidden realms where evil cabals really run the world. You have true knowledge of how the world works, which the masses are too naive to see. Conspiracy theories put you in the role of the truth-telling hero. Paranoia is the opiate of those who fear they may be insignificant.

 

Saturday Night at the Movies

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While endlessly scrolling through the hundreds (thousands?) of movie titles in Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, HBO Max, and all the other streaming services, I flashed back to my youth (‘50s and ‘60s) when watching a movie on TV was a rare treat. Following from Wikipedia:

NBC Saturday Night at the Movies was the first TV show to broadcast relatively recent feature films from major studios. The series premiered on September 23, 1961, and ran until October 1978, spawning many imitators. Previously, television stations had been only been able to show older, low-budget, black-and-white films that wouldn’t be shown at movie theaters. In the late 1970s, competition from cable television and home video led to a decline in viewership.

It’s difficult to convey what a treat it was to watch a feature-length movie on network TV. The “late show” usually came on right after the ten o’clock news and ran into the wee hours with lots of commercials. We could never have imagined watching almost any film ever produced. Never mind on-demand streaming to a hand-held device.

YouTube isn’t just a platform. It’s infrastructure.

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The excerpts below are from an article adapted from a blog post by Ryan McGrady. Ryan McGrady is a senior researcher with the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a researcher with Media Cloud and the Media Ecosystems Analysis Group.

There are 14 billion videos on YouTube. More than one and a half videos for every person on the planet and that’s counting those that are publicly visible.

According to McGrady, YouTube started (February 2005) as a video platform, “but it has since become the backbone of one of the 21st century’s core forms of communication.”

Videos with 10,000 or more views account for nearly 94 percent of the site’s traffic overall but less than 4 percent of total uploads. Just under 5 percent of videos have no views at all, nearly three-quarters have no comments, and even more have no likes.

I uploaded my first video to YouTube on February 12, 2006 and more than 560 videos since. Those videos have been viewed 1,171,459 times for a total watch time of 19,171 hours. Amazingly, (to me) my channel has accounted for 3,376 views in the last 28 days. From day one I have had no interest in comments or likes and I never considered trying to monetize my videos. I always saw it as a place to park my videos so I could include them in a blog post.

I cannot argue with McGrady’s view that “YouTube is now less an opportunity than a requirement—something you have to use, because basic elements of society have organized around it.”