When I was just a small child, I saw that episode of "Leave It to Beaver" where Beaver and Whitey spend the night trapped inside a giant steaming coffee cup on a fancy billboard. Perhaps because I empathized with the Beav, instead of laughing along with my sisters I felt this intense feeling of horror and shame. The strong emotion must've somehow imprinted itself on my brain, because to this day there are things other people find funny that just make me want to curl into a fetal position and rock back and forth for hours.
I made it about 35 seconds into this clip before I had to turn it off.
(It probably doesn't help matters any that I'm a trumpeter.)
Before there was Lights Out, there was The Witch's Tale. Arguably the first horror anthology outside print, it introduced the first horror host (Old Nancy, the Witch of Salem, and her black cat Satan) in any medium. (God, I love Old Nancy. "A hundred and eight year old I be. A hundred and eight year old. Satan, tell those people to douse their lights. Douse 'em out good. Now look deep into the embers. Deep into the embers. Yer standin' in a house in New Orleans, late in the last century....")
The Witch's Tale was early enough that it didn't really make use of the unique possibilities of radio, but it's a great historical document of pre-radio, pre-soundie stage acting, as well as some very cool old horror stories.
The Creaking Door "borrowed"* a lot of scripts and concepts from the long-running Inner Sanctum Mysteries. Inner Sanctum Mysteries was more of a mainstream, prime-time horror anthology, unlike Quiet Please and other Lights Out spinoffs and ripoffs that aired at odd hours and often without sponsors.
On the other hand, Inner Sanctum's host, Raymond, was one of the best pre-TV horror hosts, and a big influence on late-night movie hosts, such as Zacherle.
The great Wyllis Cooper started out as a writer on Lights Out, but quit around the time Arch Oboler's ego threatened to eat Chicago (mp3). He was the genius behind Quiet, Please. He wrote "The Thing on the Fourble Board," which is widely considered the finest radio drama of all time. Many, including myself, consider it the greatest work of horror/science fiction/fantasy ever produced outside of print media.
* For all you copyfighters out there: classic American Old Time Radio operated without any basic copyright protection from its inception until 1976, when it had already been effectively dead for 15 or 20 years. There's a great academic/legal paper on how radio dramas produced thousands of hours of original entertainment without copyright protection, for someone who has the stuff to write it.
"Change 'war-torn jungle' to 'suburban Connecticut' and 'lion-eating Bili ape' to 'sexually insecure executive,' and I think I can sell it to the New Yorker."
So, for those of you who learned math easily without the rote stuff, how did you get there?
I found that having a grasp of what's actually going on with numbers means that you don't have to spend nearly as much time memorizing stuff, because you can just see it.
I did well in math(s) until I hit trigonometry. And then my Dad, bless his heart, told me, "Here's all you need to know about trig: Oscar and Oliver have had algebra." Which is great mnemonic for remember the derivation of sine, cosine, and tangent.
S C T
O A O
- - -
H H A
That said, I'm not really a math guy, so I left off there. Although, I've found that, as a trumpeter, a basic understanding of wave functions is a big help when dealing with practical acoustics.
For the last 12 years or so, my day job has been documenting high-end engineering software, and it's nice to be able to grasp some trickier mathemetical concepts without necessarily being able to solve them. For that matter, set theory and logic are great skills to have when deciding how to describe complex technical subjects.
Like I say, the "new math" wasn't abandoned because it didn't work; it was abandoned because it was insufficiently tedious and awful.
I started school at the tail end of the New Math phenomenon. By the start of fourth grade, I had a reasonable grasp of number theory, set theory, boolean operations, base-8 (octal) and base-12 arithmetic, etc. Then my family moved to another part of the country where they were memorizing multiplication tables. I was considered "backward" and uneducated by my teachers.
Luckily, I was able to see the patterns and understand the structure of the multiplication table, so I caught up in a couple of weeks, and then went on to outperform my classmates for most of my school career. I was also the only kid in my school who enjoyed "story problems." But I hated drills and busywork, and my success rate at solving quadratic equations never got much above 70 percent.
I maintain that the New Math wasn't dropped because it didn't work; it was dropped because reactionaries didn't like the idea of kids not doing mindless drills.
Great post. Back in 1984, I heard a concert performed on lurs, (pic and sound files) which are Viking bronze horns, about twice as big as the largest Irish horns in the fpp, and held on your shoulder like a berserker sousaphone.
What surprised me about the Irish instruments was the number of side-blown horns, which are usually associated with Africa.
[Long-time lurker, first-time poster. Hi, everybody!]
When I was just a small child, I saw that episode of "Leave It to Beaver" where Beaver and Whitey spend the night trapped inside a giant steaming coffee cup on a fancy billboard. Perhaps because I empathized with the Beav, instead of laughing along with my sisters I felt this intense feeling of horror and shame. The strong emotion must've somehow imprinted itself on my brain, because to this day there are things other people find funny that just make me want to curl into a fetal position and rock back and forth for hours. I made it about 35 seconds into this clip before I had to turn it off. (It probably doesn't help matters any that I'm a trumpeter.)
posted by M Valdemar 17 years ago
In "Lights Out"
Before there was Lights Out, there was The Witch's Tale. Arguably the first horror anthology outside print, it introduced the first horror host (Old Nancy, the Witch of Salem, and her black cat Satan) in any medium. (God, I love Old Nancy. "A hundred and eight year old I be. A hundred and eight year old. Satan, tell those people to douse their lights. Douse 'em out good. Now look deep into the embers. Deep into the embers. Yer standin' in a house in New Orleans, late in the last century....") The Witch's Tale was early enough that it didn't really make use of the unique possibilities of radio, but it's a great historical document of pre-radio, pre-soundie stage acting, as well as some very cool old horror stories. The Creaking Door "borrowed"* a lot of scripts and concepts from the long-running Inner Sanctum Mysteries. Inner Sanctum Mysteries was more of a mainstream, prime-time horror anthology, unlike Quiet Please and other Lights Out spinoffs and ripoffs that aired at odd hours and often without sponsors. On the other hand, Inner Sanctum's host, Raymond, was one of the best pre-TV horror hosts, and a big influence on late-night movie hosts, such as Zacherle. The great Wyllis Cooper started out as a writer on Lights Out, but quit around the time Arch Oboler's ego threatened to eat Chicago (mp3). He was the genius behind Quiet, Please. He wrote "The Thing on the Fourble Board," which is widely considered the finest radio drama of all time. Many, including myself, consider it the greatest work of horror/science fiction/fantasy ever produced outside of print media. * For all you copyfighters out there: classic American Old Time Radio operated without any basic copyright protection from its inception until 1976, when it had already been effectively dead for 15 or 20 years. There's a great academic/legal paper on how radio dramas produced thousands of hours of original entertainment without copyright protection, for someone who has the stuff to write it.
posted by M Valdemar 17 years ago
In "New Yorker Monkeys Caption Contest"
"Change 'war-torn jungle' to 'suburban Connecticut' and 'lion-eating Bili ape' to 'sexually insecure executive,' and I think I can sell it to the New Yorker."
posted by M Valdemar 17 years ago
In "Daniel Greenberg taught a group of students of different ages six years' worth of arithmetic in 20 one-hour sessions."
So, for those of you who learned math easily without the rote stuff, how did you get there? I found that having a grasp of what's actually going on with numbers means that you don't have to spend nearly as much time memorizing stuff, because you can just see it. I did well in math(s) until I hit trigonometry. And then my Dad, bless his heart, told me, "Here's all you need to know about trig: Oscar and Oliver have had algebra." Which is great mnemonic for remember the derivation of sine, cosine, and tangent.
That said, I'm not really a math guy, so I left off there. Although, I've found that, as a trumpeter, a basic understanding of wave functions is a big help when dealing with practical acoustics. For the last 12 years or so, my day job has been documenting high-end engineering software, and it's nice to be able to grasp some trickier mathemetical concepts without necessarily being able to solve them. For that matter, set theory and logic are great skills to have when deciding how to describe complex technical subjects. Like I say, the "new math" wasn't abandoned because it didn't work; it was abandoned because it was insufficiently tedious and awful.posted by M Valdemar 17 years ago
I started school at the tail end of the New Math phenomenon. By the start of fourth grade, I had a reasonable grasp of number theory, set theory, boolean operations, base-8 (octal) and base-12 arithmetic, etc. Then my family moved to another part of the country where they were memorizing multiplication tables. I was considered "backward" and uneducated by my teachers. Luckily, I was able to see the patterns and understand the structure of the multiplication table, so I caught up in a couple of weeks, and then went on to outperform my classmates for most of my school career. I was also the only kid in my school who enjoyed "story problems." But I hated drills and busywork, and my success rate at solving quadratic equations never got much above 70 percent. I maintain that the New Math wasn't dropped because it didn't work; it was dropped because reactionaries didn't like the idea of kids not doing mindless drills.
posted by M Valdemar 17 years ago
In "Prehistoric music"
Great post. Back in 1984, I heard a concert performed on lurs, (pic and sound files) which are Viking bronze horns, about twice as big as the largest Irish horns in the fpp, and held on your shoulder like a berserker sousaphone. What surprised me about the Irish instruments was the number of side-blown horns, which are usually associated with Africa. [Long-time lurker, first-time poster. Hi, everybody!]
posted by M Valdemar 17 years ago
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