I’m still feeling cruddy, but I thought that in leiu of a regular post you all might enjoy this old ad from 1943. You know, back when Bob Hope was doing a lot of work for Pepsodent. And our GYNOCRATIC OVERLORDSLADIES. Click on it for a bigger and slightly more readable version!
I can’t stand him either. He has moments where he seems nice, then he does something that shows he’s actually a Nice Guy. I haven’t seen the bit you mention, but I can see him having an attitude of “well, of course they are inferior to us, but that doesn’t mean we have to treat them badly”, which seems to be his attitude to just about everyone.
Don’t you think Paul Kinsey is somewhat enlightened? He dated a black woman and went with her to a civil rights protest. Though he did seem like he was less interested in her as a person, than for the cool points she’d give him. But the whole show moves very quickly past anything that doesn’t impact the main characters directly, which is fair enough that their thing is focusing on them. But it does leave their side stories feeling very unsatisfying. I guess most other shows don’t even bother touching on social justice issues at all.
Oarboar, you are missing out on some amazing history.
A good source for how radiation was viewed in the 40’s is Lester del Rey’s story, “Nerves”, which is about an accident at a plant that produces radioactive isotopes. This was written after Pearl Harbor and before Hiroshima, and features a Japanese-American scientist who dreams of building a nuclear weapon because he is ashamed of his people’s “cowardly” sneak attack and wants to make sure the U.S. will never have to endure something like that again. Exposure to radiation in the workplace is considered a job hazard just like any other and mostly treatable.
One of my favorite hooks for a soft science fiction story – it is discovered that advertising has no measurable effect on sales. What happens to the economy, society, industry etc. once advertising goes away? Suddenly, a lot of people have to find useful work.
RE: Robert
One of my favorite hooks for a soft science fiction story – it is discovered that advertising has no measurable effect on sales.
Interesting. I can’t buy the concept, but it sure would be nice just to have LESS advertising. (My own sci-fi stories involves a world where you need to have a brain implant to be qualified for most decent-paying work… but the cheaper implants don’t come with adblocking software, so your mind gets bombarded with advertising.)
At first, perhaps, but its obvious he has a genuine change in heart about race – given he becomes an admirer of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Unfortunately, Kinsey is kind of a pseudo-intellectual phony.
There’s a scene where a pot dealer, one who he knew in college, comes to their office and mentions how different he was before – suggesting he was far less sophisticated than how he acts now and prone to hopping on bandwagons that made him feel superior to others. Kinsey gets mad over it and the dealer, as if a long time friend, acts horribly betrayed when told to fuck off.
This is further cemented by the fact that, after disappearing for a good while, he shows up again as an adamant Hari Krishna. Meaning his involvement with a black woman and the Civil Rights Movement are done for entirely the wrong reasons (vanity and egotism), as opposed for a genuine interest in race issues. When things didn’t go well there and working at an ad firm – he joined a New Age cult to make himself feel better…about himself.
Yeah, part of what makes advertising work is that it effect at a sub-conscious level – even if, consciously, we may be dismissive of it.
It is annoying how, even when we’ve found ways around advertising, ad firms find another way to still deliver them. The fact you have sites with “free” material like Hulu which gives you as many commercials as one would find on a cable channel. I particularly dislike the free ads I have to deal with on my cell phone – because they actually get in the way of using apps.
Split the difference and have a story where you can upload software to your brain that makes you immune to advertising.
RE: katz
Split the difference and have a story where you can upload software to your brain that makes you immune to advertising.
I write that, actually! The world with the brain advertising… well, there are hackers who work on cracking things like advertising and such and using their implants to their own ends. The society mostly acts like only revolutionaries or crooks do it, but actually, a lot of people do things like break the adware or load their own privacy programs into it.
They can’t make themselves “immune” to advertising, because at that level, so much is connected to everything else that even if you broke the advertising circuit, it’d probably also break other stuff, like appreciation of art or color theory. But they can definitely BLOCK it so they don’t even recognize it’s there.