George Carlin and Richard Pryor

They had a miserable childhood, and somehow became superstar comedians.......interesting.

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The Delanceyplace End-of-Year Comedy Week

In today's encore excerpt - the lives of superstar comedians George Carlin and Richard Pryor bear witness to the pain beneath much of our humor: "George Carlin's father, an ad salesman, was a drinker prone to violent outbursts, and when George was only two his mother grabbed him and his older brother fled down the fire escape and left for good. Mary Carlin and her boys spent two years shuttling among friends and relatives before finally getting an apartment of their own - with George's father stalking them all the way. 'He hounded her' says Carlin. 'And he frightened her. When we lived on One Hundred Fortieth Street, we would come back from downtown, get off the subway, and the procedure was my mother would go to the call box get the local precinct and say 'Hi it's Mary and the kids. I'm at One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street. Come and get us.' And they would drive us home and see us into the house. Sometimes he'd be across the street just looking.' Even when they finally moved into an apartment that his father didn't know the whereabouts of, his mother was still on edge. If they got an unexpected knock she'd tell George to peek under the door. If he saw a lady's shoes, he could open it. A man's shoes and they would stay quiet until the visitor went away. This family drama ended only when his father died. George was eight. ... "He was born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor on December 1, 1940, in Peoria, Illinois. His mother, who appears to have been a prostitute, and his father married when Richard was three and split up when he was ten. He then went to live with his grandmother, who ran a chain of whorehouses in town. In his autobiography, Pryor Convictions, Pryor describes learning about sex by peeking through keyholes to watch the prostitutes at work, and soaking up neighborhood lore at a bar called the Famous Door where 'people came in to exchange news, blow steam, or have their say.' He was kicked out of Catholic school when they found out about the family business and he moved into an integrated elementary school. There he got an early taste of racism when he gave a scratch pad as a gift to a little white girl he had a crush on. The next day, as Pryor tells it, the girl's angry father came to school and berated him in front of the class: 'Nigger don't you ever give my daughter anything.' " Author: Richard Zoglin Title: Comedy at the Edge  Publisher: Bloomsbury Date: Copyright 2008 by Richard Zoglin Pages: 19-20, 44

About Us Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context.  There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.  To visit our homepage or sign up for our daily email click here To view previous daily emails click here. To sign up for our daily email click here. Read more at campaign.r20.constantcontact.com

 

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What's all this about "Mainstream Media" ?

So much for that fairy tale about the liberal bias of mainstream media !

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Thom's blog

Mainstream media has been taken over by Conservative ideology

You need to know this. The mainstream media has been taken over by Conservative ideology. A new Pew Research Center Survey studied the media exposure of politicians during the recent midterm elections. What they found was - out of the ten most covered candidates during the election season - the top 3 were all Republicans. And most surprising - Sarah Palin - who essentially has no job and was not running for one - received three times more coverage to spew her talking points than the sitting Vice President Joe Biden. Also - conservative commentators like Glenn Beck received considerably more media coverage than their more liberal counterparts like Keith Olbermann. These findings from the Pew Research Center are similar to a study by MediaMatters back in 2006 that found that Republican talking heads appeared on Sunday morning news shows 58% of the time compared to Democratic commentators appearing only 42% of the time. And finally - reporter Sebastian Jones - with "The Nation" magazine - uncovered at least 75 corporate lobbyists or PR officials that now appear on television political talk shows with no disclosure of what business interests they actually work for. Their job? To do the bidding of their corporate overlords under the disguise of "expert political commentary". So now can we finally put an end to the myth that there is a liberal bias in the mainstream media? And hopefully now start recognizing we need to create new media outlets that aren't beholden to corporate interests or the talking points of their billionaire owners like Rupert Murdoch. Maybe then American will again hear the news they need to know.

-Thom

(Have you noticed this? Tell us here.)

Watch the show live

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Why? Because We Still Like You~ !

Kids can be cruel !

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In today's excerpt - The Mickey Mouse Club television show was cancelled in 1958 after three seasons, and almost all the Mouseketeers, who were pre-teens and teenagers, found themselves out of work and trying to reenter normal life. Very few received help from Disney or were able to sustain careers in the entertainment world, and most went on to lives filled with disappointment. Even returning to their former schools proved daunting:

"The clash between the [ex-]Mouseketeers' former selves still on television in reruns, and the teenagers careening toward adulthood who they now were, highlighted the larger conflict that would mar their lives for years to come: the idyllic '50s sensibility their screen images represented versus the hipper grown-ups they were trying to become. 'After a while it was a part of my life that I wanted over, and it just wouldn't die,' Dennis Day said in an interview. 'There were all those reruns, and people kept recognizing me.'

"This conflict first played itself out in the halls of the schools to which the Mouseketeers were hoping to return quietly and without incident. Kids in Karen Pendleton's seventh-grade class would ask her for her autograph, but when the guileless middle-schooler would give it to them, they'd tear it up in front of her.

Her classmates would say things like, 'Wiggle your ears and I'll give you some cheese.'

"Don Agrati, a tiny thirteen-year-old, acquired the nickname 'Mouse' the second he returned to public school and suffered from the same unoriginal - though still hurtful - teasing methods

Kids would sing 'The Mickey Mouse Club March' whenever he entered the cafeteria. 'I was in fights every day and I was just miserable,' he recalls. '

Author: Jennifer Armstrong Title: Why? Because We Still Like You Publisher: Grand Central Date: Copyright 2010 by Jennifer Armstrong Pages: 164-166 Read more at campaign.r20.constantcontact.com

 

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The Brain,...Stress,.....and Human Perception

Some interesting facts about our sensory perception in times of stress.

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In today's excerpt - in moments of extreme duress, such as that which police experience during a shooting, human perception alters radically:

"Over a period of five years, [researcher Alexis] Artwohl gave hundreds of police officers a written survey to fill out about their shooting experiences. Her findings were remarkable: virtually all of the officers reported experiencing at least one major perceptual distortion. Most experienced several. For some, time moved in slow motion. For others, it sped up. Sounds intensified or disappeared altogether. Actions seemed to happen without conscious control. The mind played tricks. One officer vividly remembered seeing his partner 'go down in a spray of blood,' only to find him unharmed a moment later. Another believed a suspect had shot at him 'from down a long dark hallway about forty feet long'; revisiting the scene a day later, he found to his surprise that the suspect 'had actually been only about five feet in front of [him] in an open room.' Wrote one cop in a particularly strange anecdote, 'During a violent shoot-out I looked over ... and was puzzled to see beer cans slowly floating through the air past my face. What was even more puzzling was that they had the word Federal printed on the bottom. They turned out to be the shell casings ejected by the officer who was firing next to me.' ...

"The single distortion under fire that Artwohl heard about most, with a full 84 percent of the officers reporting it, was diminished hearing.

"The brain's tendency to steer its resources into visually zeroing in on the threat also explains the second most common perceptual distortion under fire. Tunnel vision, reported by 79 percent of Artwohl's officers, occurs when the mind locks on to a target or threat to the exclusion of all peripheral information.

"According to Artwohl's findings, the warping of reality under extreme stress often ventures into even weirder territory. For 62 percent of the officers she surveyed, time seemed to lurch into slow motion during their life-threatening encounter - a perceptual oddity frequently echoed in victims' accounts of emergencies like car crashes.

The truth, psychologists believe, is that it's really our memory of the event that unfolds at the pace of molasses; during an intensely fear-provoking experience, the amygdala etches such a robustly detailed representation into the mind that in retrospect it seems that everything transpired slowly. Memories, after all, are notoriously unreliable, especially after an emergency. Sometimes they're eerily intricate, and yet other times vital details disappear altogether.

Author: Taylor Clark Title: Nerve Publisher: Little, Brown Date: Copyright 2011 by Taylor Clark Pages: 245-248

About Us Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context.  There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.  To visit our homepage or sign up for our daily email click here To view previous daily emails click here. To sign up for our daily email click here. Read more at campaign.r20.constantcontact.com

 

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The annexation of Mexico

From sea to shiny sea!

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In today's excerpt - in 1836, a small group of "Texans" living in northern Mexico rebelled against that country in a quest for independence, in some part because Mexico had outlawed slavery. Mexico's General Santa Anna failed to quell that small rebellion, then was captured and lost that territory. He was released and allowed to return to Mexico, where he regained the leadership of the country, rationalizing his defeat by comparing his loss to Napoleon's war against the Russians. However, the bitter humilation of defeat stayed with Santa Anna and the Mexican nation, and led directly to the Mexican America War of 1845. There Santa Anna again lost - and had to cede a vast portion of the country from New Mexico to California to the United States:

When Sam Houston and the Texans laid a trap with 800 men along the San Jacinto River, an overconfident Santa Anna dismissed the possibility of an attack. Assaulting 1,500 Mexicans in the late afternoon of April 21, the Texans defeated them in about eighteen minutes and promptly vented their anger over the Alamo and Goliad on their prisoners. Six hundred and fifty Mexicans were killed while just two Texans met the same fate. Santa Anna escaped, only to be captured the next day, disguised as a common soldier wearing diamond studs in his linen shirt.

"The loss of Texas was a decisive moment in the development of Mexican attitudes toward the United States. ... The creation of the Republic of Texas transformed apprehension into anger.

By the late 1830s, Mexican newspapers were calling for war against the United States. The manifest design of the [United States on the northern territories of Mexico] seemed all too clear. Santa Anna's adviser, Jose Marfa Tornel, later explained that Americans had been united since 1776 in 'their desire to extend the limits of the republic to the north, to the south, and to the west,' by whatever means necessary. The American 'frenzy to usurp and gain control of that which rightfully belongs to its neighbors' resembled the 'roving spirit' of 'barbarous hordes' from a 'far remote north.' ...

Why should a civilized people respect the Americans? 'Nowhere else on the face of the globe is the feeling of the white race stronger against those which, in its pride, it designates as colored.' Americans exploited and cheated Indians. Americans enslaved African Americans. Their pompous support for the rights of man rested on tyranny over others. How could Americans, who had 'opened a vast market of human flesh in Texas ... dare to acclaim the sacred name of liberty[?]' Americans' behavior in Texas echoed their behavior in Florida.

The loss of Texas would inevitably lead to the loss of New Mexico and California. 'Our national existence ... would end like those weak meteors which, from time to time, shine fitfully in the firmament and disappear.'

"In 1837 Santa Anna managed to restore his reputation, with his usual flair

In the early 1840s he commissioned a statue of himself with a finger pointing north to Texas, as if to trump his critics by reminding the world of his unfinished business."

Author: Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton Title: The Dominion of War Publisher: Penguin Date: Copyright 2005 by Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton Pages: 268-271 Read more at campaign.r20.constantcontact.com

 

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Why? Because We Still Like You

Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?

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n today's excerpt - to help finance the construction of his new theme park, Walt Disney launched a new 1955 television show that revolutionized programming and dominated the daytime ratings with the unheard of strategy of letting regular kids be the stars of a show. For the kids that starred, the work was hard, and they survived in part with their own small subversions. For example, the pre-teen boys who starred in The Mickey Mouse Club defied the wishes of the show's producers and tilted their Mouseketeer caps back to show off their golden pompadours:

A guy could have the coolest hair in town, but no one would know about it if he wore his Mouseketeer cap according to regulation.

The guys had to have their waves out. And producers' demands that they wear the stupid hats way down on their heads wrecked everything. 'All the guys hated the ears,' Lonnie says now. 'They'd always want us to wear it like a monk.'

"The solution: the boys would act like they were going along with the producers' ridiculous rules until the last second before shooting started, then sneak the cap back two inches or so, just as cameras started to roll, pushing as much hair as possible forward with it to approximate a decent wave.

"More than ten million children watched the first season of The Mickey Mouse Club, and two million Mouse ears sold in the show's first three months,

The Mickey Mouse Club made a generation of kids feel like they belonged to their own elite group, a feeling that would lodge itself in their hearts and make them remember Mouseketeers Annette, Tommy, Darlene, Cubby, Karen, Lonnie, Sherry, Doreen, and the rest of the gang for the rest of their lives."

Author: Jennifer Armstrong Title: Why? Because We Still Like You Publisher: Grand Central Date: Copyright 2010 by Jennifer Armstrong Pages: 3-6 Read more at campaign.r20.constantcontact.com

 

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200 Years In 4 Minutes (this is a must see video!!)

Statistics, presented visually..... Interesting!



Despite only lasting 4 minutes, this remarkable video is sure to have a very long lasting impact. h/t to @amp-arif for first Amplifying it.

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Via the BBC, Hans Rosling examines the correlation between income growth and life expectancy in 200 countries over the last 200 hundred years in an amazing animation. Take a look:

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