Michael Bates: February 2019 Archives
Quick Silver P51 Mustang - Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities
Volumes of federal acquisition regulations exist to ensure that federal contracting is fair to every business that seeks to do work for the government. But sometimes only one company can do the job, and even then, there's a process that has to be followed, forms to be filled out, notices to be posted, even to bring in a historic aircraft for an air show flyover. Fair contracting isn't cheap.
"The 11th Contracting Squadron at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland intends to award a simplified acquisition on a sole source basis to Quick Silver P-51 Airshows for an aerial demonstration with a North American P-51D Quick Silver Mustang for the 2019 Air Show, in accordance with FAR 6.302-1(a)(2), Only one responsible source is capable of responding due to the unique or specialized nature of the work."
Why Walkable Streets are More Economically Productive -- Strong Towns
"Visit the most thriving commercial district in any city -- the one full of shops and restaurants and people -- and I would bet that it's an area where walking is prioritized.
"A walkable street ensures that people can safely cross from a clothing store to a coffee shop and spend money at both. It means that people who live in the neighborhood can grab groceries and other necessities easily, so they'll probably visit nearby establishments more often. Perhaps most importantly, a walkable street is one in which many businesses occupy the bulk of the land, meaning that dozens of destinations can be accessed in a matter of minutes on foot, and that every inch of land is put to economically productive use -- not squandered in empty parking lots or unnecessary landscaping."
My battle with the transgender thoughtpolice - spiked
An interview with psychotherapist James Caspian, whose research into transgender detransitioning was spiked by his university.
"The young women that I had been hearing from said they had been drawn into trans as a kind of a movement. Many of them had discovered trans on the internet. They would spend hours online with a community of people that welcomed them. It seemed exciting, it offered promise as something that could resolve their considerable difficulties. But of course it didn't. Then when they detransitioned, that community rejected them....
"I was on the board of the psychotherapy regulator when [the Memorandum of Understanding on conversion therapy] was being broadened and I was asked to advise on it. When I read it, I realised immediately that it was dangerous. It was influenced by trans activists who wanted to prevent any questioning of self-declared trans identity.
"I persistently advised that the wording should make it clear that some people detransition or regret transitioning. I wanted to make it safe for therapists, doctors and social workers to work with people who wanted to reverse their transition. Under the terms of the Memorandum, as it stands, they could be struck off their professional register. It would prevent professionals working ethically and safely with anyone who wanted to detransition.
"One doctor I know made a huge list of reasons as to why people went to him and presented as trans. The whole issue is very complex and multi-layered. But the idea that there can be any psychological reasons for cross-sex identification, which seems to be the most obvious explanation, is the one that is most rejected by trans activists. And so we're not supposed to talk about that."
Feminists Screaming about 'Transgenderism,' Their Own Demon Child
}Let's take a trip down Bad Memory Lane. For approximately three decades, the prevailing feminist doctrine was 'gender neutrality' theory; it held that the sexes are the same except for the superficial physical differences, therefore raising boys and girls the same way will result in their being identical beneath the skin. This was embraced so radically that, as iconoclastic feminist Camille Paglia once related, feminists would corner her on college campuses in the '70s, glaring, and swear that hormones didn't exist and that even if they did, they couldn't possibly influence behavior.
"Though I never believed it, I was accosted with this theory as a teen and young adult, as many of you no doubt were. It was convenient for feminists. After all, convince people of the sexes' sameness, the thinking (feeling?) goes, and there can be no justification for keeping women from traditionally male arenas....
"When I used to work with kids, I encountered an 11-year-old boy who, it came out, supposed the women's mile record should be better than the men's; another lad of about the same age believed that the performance gap between the sexes was 'very slight.' In this vein, Sportscience News reported in 1997 that 'a pre-Olympic poll of 1,000 adults last May found that 66 percent of Americans believe "the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels" (Tharp, 1996).'
"This is serious dislocation from reality. Note here that the 800-meter-run record for 14-year-old boys is better than the women's world record; that Australia's national women's soccer team, then ranked fifth in the world, lost a 2016 scrimmage to an under-15 boys' team 7-0; and that, more or less, this reflects the general intersex performance gap. But, again, the illusion is convenient for feminists. I mean, if women would equal men athletically but for discrimination, we'd better kick the opportunities and funding for them into high gear, right?
"That is, it was convenient -- until that desired effect had a side-effect. It's another corollary: if the sexes' athletic performances aren't very different to begin with, and if women are destined for parity, what's the big deal about MCW competing in "women's" sports?...
"No, not everyone believes the above. But enough do -- because of feminist brainwashing -- to sorely weaken the opposition to MCW in women's sports."
In 1960, the Cooperative Extension Service put together a map of Washington County, Oklahoma, showing the rural communities and unofficially named areas, based on reports from county extension agents. It's rare that folk geography that isn't tied to post offices, churches, schools, or municipalities gets recorded in any way. If you've wondered where Steel Camp, Stepp, Searsville, Truskett, Antioch, Cotton Valley, or Middale are, here you go.
America's Signature Mode of Transportation Is High-Cost Rail - Hmm Daily
"American infrastructure is this costly because of immense, endemic, universal public-private corruption--systems of both direct and financialized graft at every stage of infrastructure development, from the planning to the ribbon-cutting to the use of deferred maintenance to ransack public transportation budgets for cash, year after year, after which the responsible authorities claim that fixing the century-old signals is just too damn pricey. This system of legal fraud begins with the bevies of project consultants, continues through ludicrous private contractor and labor costs, and continues when, years later, high-paid administrative fixers and new armies of consultants and contractors arrive to fix what broke because it was never maintained. It is a system of tolerated kleptocracy that may be the only thing that America still does better than anyone else in the world. It is baked into every assumption about building for the public benefit." (Hat tip to Dustbury.)
1968 BANANA SPLITS CLUB OFFICIAL CHARTER MEMBER MEMBERSHIP KIT Complete | eBay
I sent off for this (coupon from the back of a Kellogg's cereal box) when I was small -- would have been 1969, after we moved to the Tulsa area. The thing I loved most about it was the secret decoder. I tried organizing a chapter of the Banana Splits Club on our street. We had one meeting and elected officers, but I think that was probably all. The other kids didn't have the intensity of interest to sustain it. (Wikipedia has a comprehensive article about the Saturday morning TV show, the Banana Splits Adventure Hour.)
How to Write a St. John's Paper - Colloquy @ SJC
Geoffrey Young, graduate writing assistant at St. John's College in Annapolis, explains how to write an essay in the school's distinctive Great Books program.
"It is not a summary of the text in question. It is not a 'personal essay' in the sense of the text serving as a means to fly freely and gleefully into the realm of your thoughts on the world. It is not 'a work of specialized research'.... [Y]our essay will not use outside sources that provide academic context or commentary...."
"It is the 'pursuit of a difficult question in dialogue with a great author,"... a conversation... in the open-ended and exploratory mode of a seminar... an attempt, a trial, a try. Consider that you are not answering a question; you are asking one, and then trying out an answer."
How to get started?
"Free write!... Now is the time to write uncritically -- no editing, no crossing out. Write out why a particular text is confusing, or why it is beautiful. Write out why you're having trouble writing. The process of writing -- writing anything at all -- has a funny way of demanding clarification in your thought. A mere 10-15 minutes of free writing will likely take you a long way toward a fruitful opening question."
The American Bookstore: A List | Front Porch Republic
Tara Ann Thieke offers a list of 30 bookstores across America that she has visited and loved. I've only been to one -- Powell's in Portland -- and a different branch of another -- Wonder Book in Frederick, Maryland. Some day I want to browse the old textbooks and Loeb Classical Library editions at Raven Books in Cambridge, Mass.
"Used and independent bookstores are the true resistance against what Russell Kirk called 'the enemies of the permanent things,' the resistance against all which would sand us down and dehumanize us; against that which praises satisfaction and comfort over communion and encounter. How can one encounter that which human hands have barely touched, a throw-away coffee table book meant to be replaced next season? But the faces of these owners, the roaming cats, the tumbling piles, the derisive notes pointing to certain sections if you so dare, the odd hours, the employees who tell you the whole history of a street or draw you a map to the other bookstores in town, the yellowed editorials stapled to a wall, the $2 copy of a rare Kierkegaard that the owner himself tells you is a treasure beyond worth: these were the best memories I brought home of America."
Kevin T. Baker writes:
"In 1984, the developer Will Wright had just finished work on his first video game, a shoot-em-up called Raid on Bungeling Bay. In it, the player controls a helicopter dropping bombs on enemy targets on a series of islands. Wright was happy with the game, which was a commercial and critical success, but even after it was released, he continued tinkering with the terrain editor he had used to design Raid's levels. 'I found out,' Wright later told the Onion AV Club, 'that I was having a lot more fun doing that part than just playing the game and going around bombing stuff.' Enthralled by the islands he was making, Wright kept adding features to his level editor, adding complex elements like cars, people, and houses. He became fascinated with the idea of making these islands behave more like cities, and kept tinkering with ways to make the world 'come alive and be more dynamic.'
"Looking to understand how real cities worked, Wright came across a 1969 book by Jay Forrester called Urban Dynamics. Forrester was an electrical engineer who had launched a second career as an expert on computer simulation; Urban Dynamics deployed his simulation methodology to offer a controversial theory of how cities grew and declined. Wright used Forrester's theories to transform the cities he was designing in his level editor from static maps of buildings and roads into vibrant models of a growing metropolis. Eventually, Wright became convinced that his 'guinea-pig city' was an entertaining, open-ended video game. Released in 1989, the game became wildly popular, selling millions of copies, winning dozens of awards, and spawning an entire franchise of successors and dozens of imitators. It was called SimCity."
The latter half of the article is criticism of Forrester's model of urban development, which, writer Kevin Baker complains, encourages a more hands-off, non-interventionist approach to nurturing cities. The writer is offended by the idea that well-intentioned interventions can have the opposite of the desired effect, but anyone who compares the neighborhood-killing results of Great Society-era urban planning to the dynamism generated by neighborhoods created in a more laissez faire time will see that Forrester was closer to the truth. Mr. Baker prefers intuition leading to massive government subsidies and interventions.
ESPN: The day MIT won the Harvard-Yale game
Kyle Bonagura writes about one of the greatest college football pranks of all time:
"Patrons at a small bar in Pocatello, Idaho, were a bit confused as to why a stranger showed up intent on watching the Harvard-Yale football game one day in 1982. He tried to explain, but no one really paid much attention until he offered to buy all the beer.
"Had they been listening, they might not have believed him. He was only there because he received a cryptic phone call that consisted of just three words: 'Watch the game.'
"Still, the message was received. There was only one reason he could have received such a strange call: After four years, plans for an elaborate prank he helped design as part of a group of MIT students -- to this day willing to identify themselves publicly only as the Sudbury Four -- had been put into motion....
"All four had graduated at this point and were either pursuing graduate or additional undergrad degrees from MIT. Once they came up with blueprints for the cylindrical device, they cobbled together parts from wherever they could: a motor from one of their mother's electric can openers, contact points from a 1967 Ford Mustang and, most famously, a piece from a leather motorcycle jacket to create a piston seal....
"'I think we packed it up and sealed it up in 1979 after we had done that six-month underground test and so forth,' one of them said. 'And then I think that was kind of it. I think we all decided we really needed to work on finishing graduate school, getting a job and things like that. We kind of stopped working on it.'
"Added another: 'It damn near flunked all of us out of school trying to get this device built and solve all the problems.'...
"Four years later, in 1982, the Sudbury Four had gone their separate ways, but the idea to deploy the device was still alive inside the Deke house...."
Convert Units - Measurement Unit Converter
Useful collection of unit converters, including some rather obscure ones. Here you can convert between smoots and feet.
Smoots | Lambda Chi Alpha | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Harvard Bridge is an almost-half-mile span across the Charles River linking the MIT campus in Cambridge with Boston's Back Bay, where MIT was first located and where many of its fraternities are still housed. It is a windy and miserable walk in Boston's long winter. This article tells the story of how, in 1958, the bridge was measured by fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha in lengths of the shortest pledge, 5' 7" Oliver Smoot. The bridge is 364.4 smoots long, +/- one ear. The markings (every 10 smoots, plus a "Halfway to Hell" marker) are repainted each year by the fraternity and are used as locators by local law enforcement. Smoot went on to serve as chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization of Standards (ISO), possibly the only time in history that a unit of measure has overseen the standardization of units of measure.
owen cyclops on Twitter - fairies, alien abductions, psychedelics, and the demonic
A fascinating but long and winding twitter thread in which the author (now a Christian) sees patterns and parallels between the stories told by people on psychedelic substances (with which he has extensive experience), and alien encounters, mysterious disappearances, demonic encounters, folklore about fairies and djinns, and fallen angels. In the end he provides a plausible explanation for why the word pharmakeia means sorcery, linking it to a passage in the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
Al Mohler's Incomplete Apology: My Story - Janet Mefferd Today
What in the world happened to Al Mohler?
"Dr. Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, apologized in the Houston Chronicle yesterday for his longtime support of a man the paper described as 'helping conceal sexual abuses at his former church' and 'for making a joke that (Mohler) said downplayed the severity of the allegations.'...
"I began covering the Sovereign Grace Ministries scandal in 2012, on my previous nationally syndicated Christian radio show. As I dug more deeply into sexual-abuse victims' accusations in a class-action lawsuit, spoke with some of those affected and began to conduct interviews to glean more information, I stated that the SGM scandal was American evangelicalism's biggest sex scandal to date.....
"In 2013, several months after I had been covering the SGM scandal, I was blindsided by two executives from my former radio network's corporate headquarters on an extended conference call.
"They told me that they had received a call from 'Al Mohler's office' that expressed 'concerns' over my radio interviews with [former SGM pastor and whistleblower Lee] Detwiler, who had weighed in on the class-action lawsuit filed against Mahaney and others. They communicated to me that Mohler's office did not believe Detwiler was a good guest choice.
"Knowing that Mohler served on our company's editorial board, I said, '"Mohler's office" didn't call you. You mean Al Mohler called you.'
"Neither executive denied it."
Radio Show Archives - bennewsam.co.uk
Extensive (and in some cases complete) archives of these classic British radio comedies and comedic panel shows:
California High-Speed Rail is Still On - Streetsblog San Francisco
They haven't killed it. They're just waiting for us hayseeds in flyover country to pay for it.
Waiting When God Seems Silent | Desiring God
Randy Alcorn writes:
"Waiting on God involves learning to lay our questions before him. It means that there is something better than knowing all the answers: knowing and trusting the only One who does know and will never forsake us (Hebrews 13:5).
"Trusting God when we don't hear him ultimately strengthens and purifies us. If our faith is based on lack of struggle and affliction and absence of doubt and questions, that's a foundation of sand. Such faith is only one frightening diagnosis or shattering phone call away from collapse. Token faith will not survive the dark night of the soul. When we think God is silent or absent, God may show us that our faith is false or superficial. Upon its ruin, we can learn to rebuild on God our Rock, the only foundation that can bear the weight of our trust. "
Pyromaniacs: Dwelling upon excellencies
C. H. Spurgeon: "I have already said, those who are doing no good are the very ones who are creating mischief. Have you ever observed that exceedingly acute critics are usually wise enough to write no works of their own? Judges of other men's works find the occupation of the judgment-seat so great a tax upon their energies that they attempt nothing on their own account."
Religion and Totalitarianism - Merited Impossibility
"My father was a closeted Christian in the USSR. There was no way for him to get his hands on a Bible or talk to a priest but he was desperate to learn about the teachings of Christ. So he'd pore over the textbooks in his university courses on Scientific Atheism (yes, that's the real, official name) that everybody had to take and he would underline every quote from the Bible that the textbooks included to demonstrate the supposed stupidity of Christianity. He didn't read the Soviet critique of the Bible that filled the space between the quotes. But the quotes were the only way for him to access the text of the Bible...."
Religion and Totalitarianism - Merited Impossibility
"My father was a closeted Christian in the USSR. There was no way for him to get his hands on a Bible or talk to a priest but he was desperate to learn about the teachings of Christ. So he'd pore over the textbooks in his university courses on Scientific Atheism (yes, that's the real, official name) that everybody had to take and he would underline every quote from the Bible that the textbooks included to demonstrate the supposed stupidity of Christianity. He didn't read the Soviet critique of the Bible that filled the space between the quotes. But the quotes were the only way for him to access the text of the Bible...."
Travel Tips from a Journey Round the World - Tim Challies
"I spent a lot of last year traveling the world to carry out research for my forthcoming church history project-a project that took me to 24 countries across 6 continents. Now that the travel is winding down, I'm beginning to think about a few of the travel lessons I learned along the way. I decided to jot them down and share them in case they prove helpful to you next time you set out on a journey of your own."
Growing Up Fundamentalist, Part One: Salvation and Baptism | Religious Affections Ministries
A heartwarming testimony from Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary.
"Later in the week the Baptist preacher stopped by our home to visit. My father was at work, but the pastor led my mother to the Lord. Though it was probably the first time she had ever heard the gospel, she understood that she was a sinner who needed to be saved. She believed that Jesus had died and risen again to save her. That day she became a child of God.
"When my father learned what had happened, he was dumbfounded. He had an aunt who claimed to be saved, and (as he later put it) everybody thought that she was a religious nut. What could it mean that his wife was now saved? He determined to find out, and the sooner the better. The next service of the church was supposed to be a prayer meeting on Wednesday night, so he took my mother on a fact-finding expedition...."
C. S. Lewis on economic independence
As quoted in a column by Joe Sobran:
"I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has 'the free-born mind.' But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and employer?"
Why You Should Stop Reading News: Farnam Street
Shane Parrish writes:
"The point is, most of what you read online today is pointless. It's not important to your life. It's not going to help you make better decisions. It's not going to help you understand the world. It's not going to help you develop deep and meaningful connections with the people around you. The only thing it's really doing is altering your mood and perhaps your behavior.
"The hotels, transportation, and ticketing systems in Disney World are all designed to keep you within the theme park rather than sightseeing elsewhere in Orlando. Similarly, once you're on Facebook, it does everything possible, short of taking over your computer, to prevent you from leaving. But while platforms like Facebook play a role in our excessive media consumption, we are not innocent. Far from it. We want to be well informed. (More accurately, we want to appear to be well informed.) And this is the very weakness that gets manipulated....
"Being well informed isn't regurgitating the opinion of some twenty-two-year-old with no life experience telling me what to think or how outraged to be. Your first thought on something is usually not yours but someone else's. When all you do is consume, you are not only letting someone else hijack and direct your attention; you are also letting them think for you.
"Avoid the noise because it messes with the signal. Your attention is valuable, so why spend so much time on stuff that will be irrelevant in a few days? Read what stands the test of time. Read from publications that respect and value your time, the ones that add more value than they consume. Read what prompts you to think for yourself. Read fewer articles and more books. Read books that have stood the test of time, those that are still in print after 20 years or so."
Why You Should Stop Reading News: Farnam Street
Shane Parrish writes:
"The point is, most of what you read online today is pointless. It's not important to your life. It's not going to help you make better decisions. It's not going to help you understand the world. It's not going to help you develop deep and meaningful connections with the people around you. The only thing it's really doing is altering your mood and perhaps your behavior.
"The hotels, transportation, and ticketing systems in Disney World are all designed to keep you within the theme park rather than sightseeing elsewhere in Orlando. Similarly, once you're on Facebook, it does everything possible, short of taking over your computer, to prevent you from leaving. But while platforms like Facebook play a role in our excessive media consumption, we are not innocent. Far from it. We want to be well informed. (More accurately, we want to appear to be well informed.) And this is the very weakness that gets manipulated....
"Being well informed isn't regurgitating the opinion of some twenty-two-year-old with no life experience telling me what to think or how outraged to be. Your first thought on something is usually not yours but someone else's. When all you do is consume, you are not only letting someone else hijack and direct your attention; you are also letting them think for you.
"Avoid the noise because it messes with the signal. Your attention is valuable, so why spend so much time on stuff that will be irrelevant in a few days? Read what stands the test of time. Read from publications that respect and value your time, the ones that add more value than they consume. Read what prompts you to think for yourself. Read fewer articles and more books. Read books that have stood the test of time, those that are still in print after 20 years or so."
Time for a Grammar Lesson | bonneamieknits
Bug: "A octopus did got him? Is that grammatiwackle?"
Pogo; "As grammacklewak as rain -- 'is got' is the present aloofable tense an' 'did got' is the part particuticle."
Bug: "Mighty strange! My teachers allus learnt me that the past inconquerable tense had a li'l' more body to it."
Owl: "Octopockles got me!"
Bug: "There he go makin' those ungrammatipickle outcries an incries- who but a iggerant uncouth type boor could unnderstand such slovenlike English?"
"'Course what he ought to holler is Octopatamus is got me!"
Pogo: "He could of hollered Octopots did got me!"
Bug: "That'd be more the past invokable tense-only for use 'gainst elephant an' other dry type game."
Digitizing My Life: Five Vinyl Album Takeaways - The Fire Ant Gazette - A Texas Hill Country Blog
Eric Siegmund has a USB turntable recommendation, and some lessons learned in the course of digitizing his collection, including the rediscovery of some long-forgotten and best-forgotten purchases:
"The oldest album in the collection was a 1964 release entitled Draggin' and Surfin' with classic songs like Little Surfer Girl and Wipeout. Sadly, I had forgotten that instead of featuring the original groups like the Beach Boys and Surfaris, the LP was recorded by a studio band called The Jalopy Five. The cuts didn't make the cut."
Starr County woman arrested for illegally voting using dead person's identity | WOAI
"A Starr County woman has been arrested for illegally voting using a dead person's identity in 2016.
"According to a release by the Texas Attorney General's Office, Bernice Annette Garza was indicted by a Hidalgo County grand jury and charged with voter impersonation, illegal voting and providing false information on an application for an early voting ballot.
"The release stated that Garza signed and submitted an application for early voting ballot by mail for Hortencia Rio, who died nine years earlier. Garza then used the woman's identity to cast a vote by mail.
"'Mail ballots are inherently insecure. Vote harvesters, who make a living by exploiting vulnerable processes intended to make it easier for people to vote, threaten the viability of the mail ballot system and must be caught and prosecuted,' Attorney General Paxton said in a release. 'My office will continue to use everything in its power to prevent voter fraud and restore integrity to the voting process in Texas.'
"If convicted, the illegal voting charges against her are punishable by two to 20 years behind bars."
"It turns out that a buffet can be a marvelous way to eat, but not such a great way to study. To study and learn well, humans have learned that it is important to study a few things deeply, even to mastery, rather than to dabble and sample dozens of things. C.S. Lewis puts it this way in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, while recounting his junior-high education:
"'In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life. Smewgy taught us Latin and Greek, but everything else came in incidentally.'"
"Studies show profound latent demand in America for walkable urban neighborhoods (again, allowing some local businesses is an essential part of walkability). One of the most compelling examples is a 2005 study by Jonathan Levine which found that in cities such as Atlanta with a stark shortage of mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods, up to half of the people who expressed a strong preference for such a neighborhood were nonetheless not living in one. Most likely they were unable to find a home in such a place within their price range--the 'shortage of cities' drives up the price of housing in walkable areas (Redfin found that one point of Walk Score was worth about $3,000 in home value)...."
"Legalizing live-work arrangements is a good low-risk experiment. Certain types of home-based businesses--a photographer's studio, a hair salon, a coffee shop--can blend in very easily in a residential area and begin to set a precedent that mixed use can be unobtrusive and pleasant....
"Furthermore, from the city's perspective, live-work can mollify critics of the proposal who worry about disruptive impacts on neighbors, for three key reasons: The business owners, in this case, are also residents and therefore have skin in the game when it comes to not creating negative impacts (noise, congestion, litter, crime) on the surrounding neighborhood. Businesses will inherently be confined to those that can operate on a residential property. No big stores. The city can choose a trial neighborhood or two: maybe there's a historic one that already has some mixed use 'grandfathered in' where it's technically illegal now."
Carol Burnett: 'Cleverness' in Entertainment is Becoming Extinct | Intellectual Takeout
"Funny is funny. I dare anyone to look at Tim Conway and Harvey Korman doing the dentist sketch, which is more than 40 years old, and not scream with laughter. But I am kind of bored of producers saying, 'It's got to be edgy.' Edgy is fine -- I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination -- but what's wrong with a good ol' belly laugh? I miss that. A lot of comedy today is so fast -- it's like: "Boom! Boom! Boom!" -- because they think people can't pay enough attention. Barry Levinson [who wrote for The Carol Burnett Show before becoming a director] and Rudy De Luca wrote one of my favorite sketches. It was called "The Pail," and in it, Harvey is my psychiatrist and I'm having a session with him. It takes about five or six minutes into the sketch until we got our first laugh, but it built and built and built, and the punch line was great. It's about a girl who was traumatized by a bully in the sandbox when she was 6 years old, and he stole her little pail -- and it turns out the psychiatrist was the bully. It is absolutely hysterical, but it took all that time to build. Today the suits say, 'It's got to be fast.' So I think some of the writing isn't good anymore. Now sitcoms sound like they've been written by teenage boys in a locker room."
