Posts Tagged ‘culture’

A Funny Vic Power Story that Says a Lot About How Far We’ve Come

Posted: February 18, 2022 by datechguy in baseball, culture
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My wife bought me both Bill James Historical Abstracts for Christmas the 1985 and the 2003 edition. The newer one had a story about Vic Power the premiere defensive first baseman of the late 50’s and early 60’s that made me laugh out loud and when I repeated it told a story about how far we’ve come on race in the US.

Power was a very dark skinned Puerto Rican player who came up in the early 50’s just as the integration of baseball was taking place. He as I noted (and as his stats at baseball reference.com can tell you) was a spectacular fielding first baseman winning gold gloves every year from 1958-1964 a six time all star in four years (some years two AS games were played) who could hit a bit often in the top ten of hitting categories and leading the league in triples once.

He was also rather outspoken and outgoing and was considered by racists of the time “an uppity nigger” (FYI Bill James notes this reference without spelling the actual word saying “uppity n-word”. I don’t believe in this N-word bullshit. I prefer to quote the actual offensive words being used, even that most offensive of words: “Semprini” , because it’s proper for us to see things as they actually were. If you are offended by their use at that time, good you should be. If you are offended by me quoting said offensive language to illustrate it, may I suggest there are plenty of other blogs out there for the weak of heart to read, but I digress…) but Power didn’t care not let such people stop him. A great illustration of this came in a story that James told of him.

He stopped by a restaurant in Syracuse to eat and the waiter walked up to him nervously saying to him: “I’m sorry sir we don’t serve colored people in this restaurant.” Power didn’t miss a beat in his reply: “That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people.”

James doesn’t relate what happened next but I laughed so loud & hard when I read it that all the people in the lunch room turned to stare, but the most interesting thing came when I was heading back from break toward my work station.

I passed by the guards station and the guard on duty was a thirty year old fellow who I knew to be a baseball fan. I told him the story and he smiled at the punch line but it was his reaction to the words of the waiter that struck me.

It was utter amazement. I’m almost sixty and while not old enough to remember ever hearing that in person I’m old enough for such a thing to be not unfamiliar to me, but to him the very idea that a person might choose to deny service to a person because of their race was so foreign and unthinkable to him that he just couldn’t process it.

I can think of no more concrete sign that we have really moved forward on race than that.

Still nowhere near that high score so I suggest you read one of the most important piece you can on how we got here

Posted: January 25, 2022 by datechguy in culture
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Well yesterday didn’t see Dan’s high score fall so under my “blogging will be light” meme let me suggest you read what might in terms of our cultural history both the saddest and in fact the least surprising story I’ve seen (via Don Surber)

“I didn’t go into this thinking I was going to hear these really shocking things,” said Dean, who originally had no interest in launching an investigative dig through the erotica tycoon’s dirty laundry. “I figured it’d be fun, but kind of lightweight.”

Dean had just wrapped production on Paris Hilton’s gripping “This Is Paris” documentary in early 2020 when she was tapped to probe Hefner’s previously impenetrable kingdom at the dawn of the pandemic. 

“But as I started to have these conversations [with the survivors of Hefner], the project transformed 180 degrees, from lightweight to super-critical,” she said, deeming the documentary the crown jewel of her career. 

I’ve been saying for a long time that men won the sexual revolution hands down. We went from a culture where a man was expected to marry a girl if he wanted to sleep with them (As my dad taught me and as I taught my sons “If she’s good enough to sleep with she’s good enough to marry”) to one where women are taught to put out and now even in schools we are encouraging kids in this direction.

“The women were telling me what they’d been through, and why it was important for us to re-examine who Hef really was,” Dean continued. “Our ideas of emancipated womanhood, sexuality and sexual freedom are all wrapped up with Playboy. But is a man like Hugh Hefner fit to define that?”

We went from the vice squad and porn being something tough to find to something so prevalent that they were unable to do a study on its effect because they couldn’t find a control group that hadn’t been exposed to it. Hefner was the man their pried this door open and many who wanted the benefits of making perversion socially acceptable ran right though it.

Theodore clinched the coveted post as Hef’s main squeeze for five years during the late ’70s through the early ’80s. And his unending supply of cocaine and “leg spreader” Quaaludes helped her dull the pangs of being coaxed into orgies five nights a week, being ordered to have sex with a revolving door of men and women while Hef watched voyeuristically and she caught him engaging in sexual activities with her pet. 

Multiply this by all the different women who went though that mansion over 4 decades and the “revolving door of men and woman” who they serviced and you might get the scope of what this was. This was Jeffrey Epstein on steroids.

I submit and suggest that that the war on Christianity was all about enabling this.

Closing thought:

Speaking of Epstein on steroids, does anyone really believe that there were not camera rolling while all those people were in those rooms?

The 49th Parallel and the horrible Parallels this movie has to today

Posted: January 20, 2022 by datechguy in covid, culture
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Via Wikipedia

The Oscar winning 1941 Movie 49th Parallel was available on Amazon Prime this month for free. Despite it being a famous movie and a WW 2 picture I had never seen it. The Basic plot is a German U-Boat is sunk in Hudson Bay but a landing party had been sent ashore to get supplies and so five sailors and an officer are stranded in Canada. It’s 1941 and the US hasn’t officially entered the war so if they can get across that 49th parallel they are safe. The story is about how they encounter Canadians on the way from a Trapper (Laurence Oliver) to a group of German immigrants of a religions sect including a young girl who lost family when a U-Boat sunk their ship ( Glynis Johns ), to a Professor studying the Blackfeet Indians (Leslie Howard) to a Canadian Soldier who has stayed behind his leave (Raymond Massy).

It’s a commentary on the character of Canada and free government vs the Nazi way.

As I watched this picture the portrayal of the Canadian national character that was portrayed was very familiar to me but I was surprised at how familiar the portrayal of the Nazi character was because it was what the Canadian, Australian and in many states run by Democrats, American character is becoming.

What’s horrible is that these nations that stopped Nazism have fallen so far and are so ignorant of what they were and are that they would not likely see what I saw.

What’s even worse is that I suspect a lot of people actually would see how far they have fallen but are too cowardly to acknowledge it because it would require them to act.

That’s the real tragedy here.

Closing thought along that line Manchin and Simena saved the filibuster yesterday in the teeth of their party.

The Wonder isn’t the Manchin and Sinema were willing to save the Filibuster the wonder is that the democrats have fallen so far that two were publicly willing to stand up for it.

Update: OK maybe not such a shock:

Nearly Half of All Democrats — Who Claimed to #Resist Fascism — Support Actual Internment Camps for the Unvaccinated

Hey Salon, Hollywood remaking South Korean movies is not racist

Posted: December 19, 2021 by John Ruberry in Uncategorized
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By John Ruberry

Every once in a while I come across an article on the internet that makes me want to scream in disbelief. Such as is the case with a piece on Salon by Carolyn Hinds with the headline, “Hollywood, please stop adapting K-dramas. It’s not just unnecessary, it’s racist.”

Wow, look who is woke.

While acknowledging adaptation of motion pictures from one culture to another is commonplace, Hinds, who begins one sentence with, “As a Black woman, cultural appropriation is behavior I’m all too familiar with,” unloads on the wave of Hollywood remaking South Korean movies. And she spews this awful offal, “Instead, I’m referring specifically to how Hollywood seems to be making a concerted effort to focus on South Korean – as well Japanese – content, for the sole purpose of remaking the stories to appeal to American audiences, i.e. white audience.”

But as Mark Levin so often responds on his radio show to a recording of some liberal, “Oh, shut up you idiot!”

Hinds calls the Asia-to-Hollywood artistic transfer “whitewashing.”

There are plans in Hollywood to remake the Korean thriller Parasite, a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed and one that I felt was deserving of its Best Picture Oscar. In her Salon piece Hinds brings up other movies from South Korea that were remade by Hollywood, including Oldboy, another fabulous film. The flat American version (or so I’ve heard, I haven’t seen it) was directed by Spike Lee. Il Mare was redone as The Lake House, which starred Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. Moving beyond South Korea, Hinds notes that Martin Scorsese’s The Departed was inspired by a Hong Kong flick, Internal Affairs.

No society exists in a vacuum, not even North Korea, which is it should be. Culture crosses borders, as does science as well as political notions. The modern version of democracy comes from the European Enlightenment. The greatest form of government is utilized not just in the United States, but also in South Korea and Japan.

Another South Korean film I enjoyed is The Good, the Bad, the Weird, which as you probably guessed is a remake of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And weird it is–instead of an American Civil War setting, this Western takes place in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1939. Hinds ignores this specific cultural transfer in her Salon piece. The soundtrack of The Good, The Bad, The Weird includes an instrumental rendition of the Animals’ 1965 hit “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” The original was recorded by Nina Simone, an African-American woman.

Moving on to television, do you know that there is a Korean version of the American television series, Designated Survivor?

What about Japan, which Hinds mentioned earlier. The stellar collective of writers here at Da Tech Guy is known as Da Magnificent Seven, a tip of the hat to the 1960 Western that starred Yul Brynner and many others. That film is an acknowledged remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. The first movie of Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy,” A Fistful of Dollars, is an unacknowledged remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

Kurosawa, who named John Ford as one of his major influences, filmed a Japanese warlord version of Shakespeare’s King Lear, a brilliant epic, Ran.

So now you know why I called Hinds an idiot.

Dan Bongino on his radio show often notes that the unhinged left run will run out of enemies, so it is doomed to devour itself.

Hey Hollywood: Remake more South Korean and Japanese movies.

Hey South Korea and Japan: Remake more Hollywood movies.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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