One man clapping

The second-worst sitcom in human history?

I very vaguely remember this '70s (or '80s?) sitcom, with James Coco working in some dreary office from hell, doing God knows what. The preview has a Dante quality to it, with everyone working in thick, slow-mo, zombie-faced torpor. Coco looks like he wants to commit suicide. The show lasted a few episodes, maybe made it through a season. But it definitely wins the prize for worst opening credits. 

BLOGGER'S INCREDIBLE DISCOVERY! Here is a summary of every episode of Calucci's Department - eleven in all. One can see why it failed, but it failed with such a . . . clunk! The last episode had Calucci on a quest to discover the meaning of his life. It sure wasn't this.

Episode #	Episode Title	Original Airdate	Episode Summary
1	"The $80 Heist"	September 14, 1973	After the $80 he has collected from staff is stolen, Calucci does some detective work to find the culprit, but becomes a psychoanalyst and peacemaker in the process.
2	"Calucci, His Brother's Keeper"	September 21, 1973	Gonzalez asks Calucci for $400 after having his life threatened by loan sharks.
3	"Calucci, the Matchmaker"	September 28, 1973	When Calucci's date with Shirley also involves finding a date for Elaine, he and Gonzalez go to great lengths to find her a date.
4	"Calucci Goes on a Diet"	October 5, 1973	Calucci's trip to the doctor for stomach pains results in a directive to lose weight, an edict he finds it increasingly difficult to focus on.
5	"Winners and Losers"	October 12, 1973	After Calucci is told that a member of his office staff must be fired, it becomes an incredibly difficult decision for him.
6	"The Bloom is Off the Rose"	October 19, 1973	Calucci is upset when he finds out that his secretary and girlfriend, Shirley, once had another man in her life.
7	"Life is an Anchovy"	November 2, 1973	The office staff is concerned when the usually sour Woods is even grumpier than ever because of problems at home.
8	"A Mother's Love"	November 9, 1973	When Cosgrove begins to act neurotically, Calucci attempts to diagnose his problems. However, he doesn't count on the prescription for the cure from Cosgrove's mother.
9	"Gonzalez's Thrill"	November 16, 1973	Confirmed bachelor Gonzalez appears ready to take the plunge into matrimony when he buys an engagement ring after meeting Samantha.
10	"Calucci and the Chicken or the Egg"	November 23, 1973	Calucci finally gets up the courage to take Shirley home to meet his mother.
11	"Calucci's Raison D'Etre"	November 30, 1973	Gonzalez decides there must be more to life than the office, setting Calucci off on a soul-searching quest for the meaning of his own.

Bentley Meows!

Bentley meows!  This is a statement as significant as "Garbo Talks". It may not mean a lot to you, but he meows about twice a month. He sort of purrs, but it sounds wheezy and a little pathetic. You can feel a slight vibration, mostly at the back of the neck. He wheezes once or twice, a sort of token purr, then stops.

We have wondered if his vocal cords were damaged when he was thrashed by a dog or coyote (he was a rescue, found near death at the side of the road after a vicious mauling). But then I read that some cats don't meow at all. I'd quote this, but I'm too tired and the quotes are kind of stupid. The fact he DOES meow, and purr (half-assed), means he's likely just a quiet cat.

Hybrids in love

The continuing saga of Bosley, the magpie duck/mallard hybrid, who has finally found love in Belinda - another hybrid. At least, we're pretty sure, with her pied markings and flipped-up tail. And she has a green bill, which I've never heard of! Every time we go to Como Lake, we see the two of them together, but there is always a third presence - a mallard drake who just hangs around them. At one point, he seemed very attached to Bosley and even chased him all over the park, while Bosley ran in terror. Is this a romantic duck triangle, or what?

Oh gee! Oh joy!

I am not the same table

This is just one of those crazy things. A piece came into my head tonight that I hadn't even thought about in years - some sort of crazy whistling or pinging, only synthesized. Then I heard myself say, "That's Debussy." Yes, it was the  Arabesque by Debussy, but whatonearth version was this?? Hadn't I heard it on TV a long time ago? Where, and when?

All it took was to do a search on YouTube under Debussy Arabesque Synthesizer, and up it popped, over a dozen versions of the same piece: and it was the right one, the whistling, pinging one. But it didn't solve where I had heard it before.

I had to go to the comments for that.

I am JUST SICK of comments sections now, and have started not to read them at all - particularly on YouTube where people wage bloody war on each other for no reason, wishing each other a slow horrendous death. Racism, sexism and every other kind of ism abound, and there are no rules, no laws, no holds barred.

But this time it was worth it. Someone mentioned that this piece was the theme song for a short program called Star Hustler that came on PBS in the '80s, usually late at night,. Later, as the name "hustler" increasingly came to mean prostitute, it was changed to Star Gazer. Jack Horkheimer, whoever he is, would come on and blather on for five minutes about the wonders of astronomy. He was fat, cheesy, decked out in a grey polyester windbreaker, a kind of bargain-basement Carl Sagan. Star Gazer was a crash course, fast and aggressive, a kind of "learn this or else" that made you feel even dumber at the end - but the only really interesting thing about it was the theme song.

Realizing that this DID come from somewhere, that it was an actual "thing", was a revelation. I had not imagined it.

I've pulled information out of the internet like this before, and found my neurons exposed to certain things for the first time in decades. It's a weird experience. They say that every seven years, every single cell in your body is replaced. One by one, they die and are regenerated, until there's no original material left at all. In that case, it's a completely new me who is listening to this music - which means that, in truth,  I've never heard it before.

This piece also jacked open the cover on a new genre, or a new composer of a genre - new to me, at least. I must admit that I had never heard of Isao Tomita, but he is everywhere on YouTube - master of the synthesizer before anyone was using it in movies or in recordings. I had a delicious album called Moog by Dick Hyman (and I've found that one again, too) which was a dinosaur version of synthesizer, quite primitive by any standard, but which I still love to hear, because . . .  I've never heard it before!  All my cells have been replaced multiple times since I first heard it in the '60s, so it's REALLY new to me now.

I went through a time in my life when I feverishly took courses - not to get a degree, which I knew was useless and impossible, but just to try to learn something. One of the courses - Philosophy 101 or something - talked about how, if you had a table, and one day replaced a leg, then the next day replaced another leg, and so on, and so on, and then replaced the top. . . so that ALL the parts were now completely different parts. . . would it be the same table?

I am not the same table. I know I am not the same table, but I am able to hold on to the shape of the table I used to be, because of a little thing called Memory. Memory is a dense tangle like seaweed, with molluscs and clams and giant squid attached to it. Without it, I would be a piece of meat, plain and simple. But even animals need Memory, or they would not know who to flee, or where to fly.

BLOGGER'S REALIZATION. My God, the Arabesque on the synthesizer is just like the X Files theme! I mean that whistly, swoopy effect that is almost human, but not quite. Whoever composed this eerie snippet must have been influenced by Isao Tomita. Or is it possible they had never heard him before?

Strawberries that look like stuff

Fuzzy foal fall

Girl in a cage

Solid gold turtle

Someone left the cake out in the rain

Spring was never waiting for us, girl

It ran one step ahead

As we followed in the dance

Between the parted pages we were pressed

In love's hot, fevered iron

Like a striped pair of pants

MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark

All the sweet, green icing flowing down

Someone left the cake out in the rain

I don't think that I can take it

'Cause it took so long to bake it

And I'll never have that recipe again, oh noooooo

I recall the yellow cotton dress

Foaming like a wave

On the ground around your knees

Birds like tender babies in your hands

And the old men playing checkers, by the trees

MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark

All the sweet, green icing flowing down

Someone left the cake out in the rain

I don't think that I can take it

'Cause it took so long to bake it

And I'll never have that recipe again, oh noooooo

(Short instrumental interlude)

There would be another song for me

For I will sing it

There would be another dream for me

Someone will bring it

I will drink the wine while it is warm

And never let you catch me looking at the sun

And after all the loves of my life

After all the loves of my life, you'll still be the one

I will take my life into my hands and I will use it

I will win the worship in their eyes and I will lose it

I will have the things that I desire

And my passion flow like rivers through the sky

And after all the loves of my life

Oh, after all the loves of my life

I'll be thinking of you - and wondering why

(VERY long instrumental interlude)

MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark

All the sweet, green icing flowing down

Someone left the cake out in the rain

I don't think that I can take it

'Cause it took so long to bake it

And I'll never have that recipe again

Oh noooooo, o-oh no-ooooo

Vintage peacock windup toy: I WANT ONE

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Dumb things that are posted and reposted until they become true!

THAT VIRAL INFOGRAPHIC ABOUT ‘SURPRISING READING FACTS’ IS TOTAL FICTION

(from Inquisitr.com)

An infographic meme of “surprising reading facts” refuses to die even years after its own author admitted the statistics were bogus, and after polls have shown that reading is 
actually thriving in America.

The infographic, which was created by Robb Brewer in 2011, shares some shocking statistics about how much reading Americans are supposedly doing these days. It claims that 33 percent of high school graduates never read another book in their lives, that 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy a single book last year, and that 70 percent of U.S. adults have not read a book in the past five years, among other figures.

The infographic continues to be shared wildly on Facebook and other social media sites, but there’s only one problem — it’s completely untrue.

Even Brewer, the author of the infographic, publicly admitted in 2012 that he couldn’t back up any of the statistics and asked people to stop sharing it.

“I think it’s safe to say the stats from the original graphic are questionable, and I am therefore recanting any and all connection to them.”

Brewer claims to have used statistics from a survey by an organization called the Jenkins Group, though the group itself says the statistics were incorrectly attributed to them. Brewer has never been able to provide any other source of the numbers he used in the infographic.

The questionable statistics seem to have originally come from a 2011 Mental Floss article, which claimed to have taken them from a Jenkins survey from 2003. Mental Floss has updated the original article saying they have no idea where the statistics came from, either.

http://www.inquisitr.com/3850347/that-viral-infographic-about-surprising-reading-facts-is-total-fiction-debunked/

OK - so I have dealt with this one before and thought I stomped it into the ground, but apparently not. One of the smartest people I know on Facebook just posted this thing with an invisible eye-roll, and all her friends chimed in with their ain't-it-a-shame comments.

NOT ONE PERSON questioned the veracity of these "statistics" or even wondered where they came from. Things that are posted and reposted have a when-you-wish-upon-a-star quality to them: if you say it enough times, then it will be true. Or should I say: if enough intelligent people are willing to swallow it unquestioned, then it will be dangerous.

Or so I believe.

I feel a bit sorry (but not too sorry) for this Brewer character, who says he got his stats from Mental Floss (that towering inferno of intellectual prowess), who in turn got them from The Jenkins Group, who say they've never heard of either one of them and had nothing to do with these highly-questionable "statistics". Now Mental Floss is confessing that the whole thing is a complete sham. It's a made-up chart, people, a thing a guy slapped up because it looked kinda good, kinda shocked a lot of people, and went viral before things were even GOING viral. This thing had to get up on its legs and walk, like a chain letter, but it still fooled millions of people, and what shocks me is that it's still doing so.

Why did the con catch on, and why won't it go away? Because it's telling disgruntled, disgusted people exactly what they want to hear. It's affirming their ain't-it-awful prognostications, their what's-the-world-coming-to lamentations, and their sense that the whole bloody culture is going to hell in a handbasket.

That may be so, but these stats, with their haphazard, grab-a-handful-of figures-and-throw-them quality, must have been invented by someone, somewhere, at some point. Brewer turned out to be less of a donkey than I thought, because he came up with ANOTHER infographic:

Apparently, even these stats aren't entirely accurate or up-to-date. They have done nothing to erase the wild distortions of the original, and in fact, if people find this one, they tend to say, "Hey, look, somebody's ripping off that cool thing about reading! What a pack of lies."

I personally don't believe anything on either infographic. When I first posted about this, about five years ago, when people were already running around like chickens with their heads off over this irrefutable proof of galloping illiteracy, I had the most trouble with that statement at the bottom, which Brewer (now picking the tar and feathers off his clothing) decided to keep. "Reading for one hour per day in your chosen field will make you an international expert in 7 years." Whaaaaaaat?
Is that some kind of joke?

Notice, too, the citations, or whatever they are, at the bottom of this updated infographic. He's actually telling us that these figures COME from somewhere - he didn't just pull them out of his ass. Now that's a refreshing change.

I'm not worried about literacy. Actually I am, terribly, but what worries me even more is that people no longer have that vital piece of equipment Hemingway talked about: a built-in bullshit detector. No, it's all consumed, swallowed whole, lies, truth, info this and graphic that. If it's catchy, if it has bold colours, if it's designed just right, people will not only believe it but keep sending it around to millions of other people, who will accept it without question and immediately hit "share".

About a million years ago I took a communications course which claimed you could "read yourself stupid". I do believe it's true. How does that come about? By being literate as all ding-dong and reading a book every three days, but never THINKING about what you read, never evaluating it, critiquing it or even digesting it. Over time, you will slowly, inexorably lose the ability to think for yourself.

Even worse, you will stop getting out of your chair, stop living and experiencing and writing your own book of life. . . because you will be too busy reading. And if your shit-detector is as eroded and corrupted as most people's have become, you might just be reading yourself into a strange new world of literate  illiteracy.