Category Archives: Media & Culture
Grayson “The Professor” Boucher
(Wikipedia) “Grayson “The Professor” Scott Boucher (born June 10, 1984) is an American streetball player, actor, and former professional basketball player. He is most known for playing on the highly stylized, international AND1 Mixtape Tour; he has also appeared in several movies, most notably Ball Don’t Lie. Boucher is 5’10” and weighs 145 pounds (178 cm, 66 kg) and his jersey number is 12.”
I’ve watched a couple of his YouTube videos and was moved by this one:
This one is a bit more light-hearted:
According to his YouTube page, his videos have been viewed 1,168,739,158 times. If I’m reading that correctly, that’s one trillion, 168 billion, 739 million, 158 thousand. Assuming most of those are sponsored or have ads, how much is this guy worth? According to a website called Nailbuzz (as of March 2022), just north of $4 million.
The channel has over 7 million subscribers as of 2022 and has accumulated over 950 million views so far. It is able to get an average of 450,000 views per day from different sources. This should generate an estimated revenue of around $3,600 per day ($1.3 million a year) from the ads that appear on the videos.
Two old radio guys reminiscing
“Card dick” was my phones best guess at “cart deck.”
Television on the iPhone
When commercial television was introduced in the 1950s, a 16-inch set was the biggest available. Twenty years later, the biggest screen size was 25 inches.
We recently purchased a 60 in OLED TV and it’s amazing. But last night I watched an Apple TV episode on my iPhone using my AirPods (3rd gen).
There was no sense of watching (for an hour) a small screen. And the sound was unlike anything I’m used to sitting across the room from the big screen. Occasionally had the sense of being in the room with the characters.
We called them “pay phones”
There was a time (before mobile phones) when I knew the location of every Casey’s and Hardee’s pay phone in Iowa. They were the only way to stay in touch with the office. Check for messages, etc. Here’s how I remember making calls from the road:
- enter 10-digit Sprint Card number
- enter 10-digit number of the person being called
- enter my personal Sprint number (10 digits?)
And while I couldn’t recite those Sprint numbers, I could punch in the numbers without thinking.
Is life better when we’re together?
“Sometimes, it was hard just to stop focusing on the simple reality that other human beings can kill you — and often, it seemed, that they can kill you without much compunction or consequence. They can kill you by refusing to pull their mask over their nostrils, by bureaucratically denying you adequate health care, by allowing you to live on the street, by keeping you at work while a tornado closes in, by shooting you with their guns just because they felt scared.”
— New York Times
Another good Trump impression
I assume this was scripted and not ad libbed. But the impressionist (J-L Cauvin is a stand up comedian and sketch writer) doesn’t appear to be reading from a prompter screen. The clip above has >8,000 views in less than 24 hours. Hard to remember a time before YouTube.
One big room for everything
Imagine a big room in your house where you keep the stuff you want to find later. Things you had written; articles from magazines; newspaper clippings; excerpts from books; cassette tapes of recorded music; VHS video cassettes… everything.
To save something you simply opened the door and tossed it into the room. Yes, in time my stuff would accumulate in piles waist high. But I know where everything is. It’s in this room.
To what extent does any such saved item really exist if I can’t find it?
Now imagine said room lined with filing cabinets, each clearly labeled as to contents. In each drawer there are section dividers and folders within. A 3-ring binder hanging on the wall for quick reference to what is in each of the filing cabinets (or banker boxes).
This has been my thinking as my blog has grown to 6,000+ posts in the last twenty years. I’ve been pretty disciplined about putting each post in one or more categories, and tagging for the finer grain. Without that metadata, my blog would be almost useless.
BUT WAIT! you say. You can also search the blogs db? You can, if you can remember what to search for.
PS: Sadly, I can’t think of an appropriate category or tag for this post… so I put it in STUFF.
Live Streaming Star in China
From the New York Times: “Over the past year, as Covid-19 has severely limited our ability to interact with the world beyond our front door, livestreams have helped transport us to places we couldn’t visit, people we couldn’t see and events we couldn’t attend. In China, live streaming services command an audience of nearly 560 million, with streamers broadcasting to devoted followers who tune in every night. Successful live streamers can earn thousands of dollars each month in direct donations from fans, and those at the very top earn millions from brand sponsorships and major contracts. In the short documentary above, we enter two agencies that scout promising newcomers and mold them into high-earning stars. But what’s it like working for a company that engineers every aspect of your life — and then requires you to livestream it all day?”
Not sure which I found more frightening… the lives of the “stars” or their fans.
“What Makes A Cult A Cult?”
It’s a little surprising how many cults I’ve seen come and go over the years. Heaven’s Gate, Branch Davidians, Peoples Temple, Aleph (formerly Aum Shinrikyo), Moonies. And let’s not forget Scientology. Yes, most of the members considered these religious sects. But who you gonna believe, me or some guy in a cult?
A fascinating essay in The New Yorker Magazine (What Makes A Cult A Cult?) got me thinking about cults. A few of my favorite bits from the piece:
“One stratagem favored by Keith Raniere, the leader of the New York-based self-help cult NXIVM, was to tell the female disciples in his inner circle that they had been high-ranking Nazis in their former lives, and that having yogic sex with him was a way to shift the residual bad energy lurking in their systems.”
“A great many people were, after all, able to resist his spiral-eyed ministrations: they met him, saw a sinister little twerp with a center part who insisted on being addressed as “Vanguard,” and, sooner or later, walked away.”
“Few of us believe in our heart of hearts that Amy Carlson, the recently deceased leader of the Colorado-based Love Has Won cult, who claimed to have birthed the whole of creation and to have been, in a previous life, a daughter of Donald Trump, could put us under her spell.”
Easy to laugh at these folks but they were never funny (and getting less so). Down in Jonestown, old Jim sometimes conducted “White Nights.”
During such events, Jones would sometimes give the Jonestown members four options: attempt to flee to the Soviet Union, commit “revolutionary suicide”, stay in Jonestown and fight the purported attackers, or flee into the jungle.
The Soviet Union is no more so I’m thinking I might flee into the jungle.