Roger O Green

Couch Guy: why people are watching

shame as a tool

As is often the case, my daughter says to me something that just doesn’t register. A few days ago, she asked “Have you heard about Couch Guy?” It is her apparent obligation to keep me up to date on cultural trends. I had no idea what/who she was talking about.

If you go on Yahoo, you can type in Couch Guy Tiktok and find the video; it’s less than a minute. It is ostensibly about a young woman surprising her long-distance boyfriend. What it became is what NBC News suggested how internet sleuthing can be toxic.

“The video, posted Sept. 21 by Lauren Zarras, shows her boyfriend, Robbie…surrounded by friends and sitting on a couch next to three other women.

“Many of the people who have commented on the video.. suggested that Robbie was, in fact, not happy to see Zarras. Some went so far as to accuse him of being unfaithful to her. Not long after it went viral, TikTokers began meticulously combing through the video…”

My first position was to be the grumpy old man and think, “Why should anyone care about this?” But as someone who recognizes that how people communicate matters, I found myself utterly fascinated. Not by Robbie, the couch guy, for whom I feel bad that people find the need to so scrutinize ten seconds of his life.

Now some folks – I found several examples that won’t bother linking to – who ‘analyzed” the video out the sense that it was hot copy, even though they thought it was a lame narrative.

However, this phenomenon – I have to say obsession – provides some odd validation for these online sleuths. Indeed, for those who have rooted out racism and violence, e.g., that is an accomplishment.

Conversely

The NBC piece discussed Morgan Forte, 23, who has “experienced what happens when it feels as though the internet has collectively decided to pick apart your life based on a seconds-long clip.

“Forte, of Jacksonville, Florida, said she posted a short video of her parents dancing a few years ago. Some claimed that Forte’s mother was acting grumpy in the clip.

“When the video blew up, getting about 15 million views across accounts that had shared it, some commenters began saying Forte’s father should leave her mother because of her demeanor in the video.” As they say, OMG.

Experienced

Producer and activist Monica Lewinsky – yes, that Monica Lewinsky – is an anti-bullying advocate. She has produced a movie called 15 Minutes of Shame which she discussed recently on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

As Rolling Stone quoted her, “’One of the factors in the film is around the idea of how shame has been used since the beginning of time as a social tool.’ With the onset of the internet and tabloid culture — the problem worsened.”

John Della Volpe reported on new polling:

1) Nearly 2/3 of Americans who use platforms believe life was better without them.
2) 42% of #GenZ addicted, can’t stop if they tried.

It’s useless to rant, “You kids, don’t you have better things to do?” For many of them, the answer is no.

My (sort of) brand-new iPhone 8!

He MAY text

For the longest time, I wasn’t really all that fond of cellphones. Part of it was an aversion to being available all of the time. Is this a societally GOOD thing?

And now that almost everyone has a camera, they all feel the need to share the most mundane content. I will acknowledge that it is has been important in pointing out abuse and injustice. But it has so distorted what news is. Is a cat falling, but caught by people holding a flag, newsworthy? It is as if there’s an amateur video. Otherwise, it doesn’t exist, or so I’m told.

Still, the real issue apparently is that I have managed to acquire a series of duds for Android cellphones. They were unreliable. My most recent one would drain the battery by 5% from the time I turned it on until it was fully functional. And then it would continue to lose power so rapidly that it’d be pointless to leave it on. It was passive/aggressive behavior on my part towards the phone that I’d misplace it so often.

Then months ago, I bought an iPhone 8. It wasn’t the latest and greatest, but it had to be miles better, didn’t it? And it was reasonably priced, so if it didn’t work out, the investment wouldn’t have been too bad.

I started the process of setting it up, but I was interrupted and didn’t get back to it for a couple of weeks, by which time I couldn’t remember my two-step authorization number. Or something. Anyway, I just gave up on it for a few months.

Help!

Finally, I went to the Apple store in the mall – I hate the mall – and they reset it to the original mode. I was able to set up a better authorization process. And it was all good.

Well, except that I didn’t have a SIM card. My previous phone always said No SIM card, yet worked; not so on this phone. So I waited for the new card to arrive. I called my carrier to get my service switched to the new device.

I couldn’t get the card on this little tray, and my carrier’s customer service guy couldn’t talk me through it. So I went BACK to the Apple Store, and five minutes later, voila.

This means that now, probably, I’ll text! You can send photos to me by phone instead of emailing because that’s been so onerous for some people. I’ll add apps, which I was shedding on the old phone – and I didn’t have that many – because it didn’t have enough memory.

But I’ll still use my watch to tell time because pulling out my phone while riding my bicycle doesn’t seem like a good idea.

My fear now, of course, is that I’ll become so enamored of my new phone – it’s at least like at first sight – it’ll be disappointing if I break/lose it.

Mostly unrelated: Arthur is doing something, and I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Matt Amodio, JEOPARDY champion

Over $1.5 million

Unsurprisingly, quite a few people have asked me how I felt about Matt Amodio as a JEOPARDY champion who won more money than all but two contestants. I think of the topic in two related, but separate ways.

The guy: I have no special feelings about him. According to my daughter’s Twitter feed, some folks are annoyed because he ALWAYS responds, “What’s…” Not “What is…” or “Who is…” or “Where is…” It is efficient, and always using the contraction saves him a fraction of a second…

…to figure out the answer. He now seems to ring in if he thinks he’ll come up with the correct question in the allotted time. In most cases, this works.

He only gives the minimum information required. This usually means giving the last name only in name categories. Occasionally, there were times when I thought the host might have sought more clarification, but that’s on the show, not him.

Like many recent champions, he started on the row of the highest value clues and works up the board. When he got the Daily Double in the first round, he usually bet it all. But, usually with a commanding lead by the beginning of the Double JEOPARDY round, his wagers tended to be more conservative, if betting $6,000 when one has a $15,000 lead is conservative.

He wasn’t as bold as 32-game winner James Holzhauer, who’s now third in the number of regular-season wins, but second in regular-season cash, barely less than Ken Jennings, who had won 74 regular-season games. James threw shade at Matt because the new guy hadn’t won as much per game as James had, which made Matt a bit sympathetic to me.. That’s because James has the 10 highest single-game winnings. No one has the per-game average of the gambler from Las Vegas.

The larger problem

It wasn’t until September 2003 when JEOPARDY changed a major rule. Prior to that, once you were a five-day champion, you had to stop. But you were almost certainly going to appear in the Tournament of Champions, comprised of those five-day winners and a few four-day contestants.

The rule change tipped the ToC on its head. When Ken Jennings won 74 regular-season games, his ToC had a three-day winner. So the rule change has made stars of people such as Amodio and 32-game winner James Holzhauer. And I gather there are people who appreciate their excellent play.

But when these people dominate so that Final JEOPARDY, and heck, the second half of Double JEOPARDY, doesn’t matter – it’s a lock game – the joy of watching it diminishes terribly for me. It’s boring TV, like a 43-12 football game.

As a matter of protest, I always root against the defending champion once they’ve won five games. Part of the problem is the way I watch the program. I might watch a week at a time. But I can’t now because either I’ll hear no J news, which means Matt Amodio won again [snore], or I’ll hear the rumors as I did when Jennings and Holzhauer finally lost.

I’m reminded of an episode of MASH when the camp was always getting for dinner “A river of liver and an ocean of fish.” Hawkeye Pierce jumped onto a table, leading the chant, “We want something else.” On JEOPARDY, I wanted someone else, somebody who’s waited their whole life to get on the show and might have a fighting chance of coming home victorious.

And finally, after 38 Amodio wins, relief.

Musician Jim Seals is 80, and alive

Brother of England Dan

I noticed that Jim Seals, most famous as half of Seals and Crofts, was turning 80. I was not going to write about him since I had discussed my recollections of the duo three years ago here.

But I changed my mind for a couple of reasons. One was the 2013 headline in That Nashville Sound that I Googled. “Singer-Songwriter Jim Seals Passes Away.” Except that, as the first sentence notes, “Country artist Jim Seal passed away April 17 [2013] at his home in Nashville. He was 68.” A different guy.

The other was an extensive article in Texas Monthly in February 2020 entitled The Secret Oil Patch Roots of ‘Summer Breeze’. “The incredible true story of two brothers raised on the hardscrabble country music of rural West Texas who dropped out, tuned in, found God, and helped launch the seventies soft-rock revolution.” It is behind a soft paywall, meaning you can get two free articles; this should be one.

“Wayland [Seals] followed his father into the oil fields. He married young, and he and his wife, Clodell, had a son, Eddie, in 1937. But Clodell died three years later, and the boy was taken by her parents, who raised him in Stephenville. A few years later, Wayland married a woman named Susan, and in 1942 their son Jim was born.”

This is an odd error in that EVERY other source, from my Billboard books to Wikipedia and NNDB has his birth on October 17, 1941. Still, there are lots of useful details to come.

Oil and music

“When Jim was four, the family moved to Iraan, a recently founded boomtown. Wayland worked for Shell—first as a roustabout, digging ditches, and then as a pipeliner—and he and his family lived in a modest company house surrounded by derricks that stood like trees in a forest…”

“Wayland… loved going to work, and he loved coming home at the end of the day and pulling out his guitar, playing country and western songs he heard on the radio and songs he had written. Sometimes he hosted casual jam sessions and sing-alongs in his living room. Neighbors would stop by, bringing dinner and cakes, and everyone—including Susan, who played the Dobro—would sing, sometimes long after dark.

“Jim, a shy, sensitive boy, was five or six when a fiddler named Elmer Abernathy visited the Seals home. The boy was mesmerized by the man’s instrument, and the next day Wayland, who’d always wanted a family band, ordered him a fiddle from the Sears catalog. When it arrived, Jim tried to play it but couldn’t figure out where to put his fingers or how to draw the bow, so he slid it under his bed.

“One night a year later, Jim had a dream that he was playing his fiddle. ‘It was the most beautiful music,’ he said. ‘I could play anything. When I woke up, I remembered the position of my fingers in the song and pulled out my fiddle. I played the song from my dream, and it wasn’t as good as the dream, but it was a start.’”

Ruby Jean

“Neither Jim nor Dash [Crofts] had grown up particularly religious, but they felt that in Baha’i they had found a modern faith that spoke to them. In 1967 they converted, first Dash (who had married… Billie Lee), then Jim. “It was the first thing I heard in my life that made sense,” Jim said. His connection to his new faith grew even stronger when… he met a fellow Baha’i named Ruby Jean Anderson… Ruby was African American, and even in L.A. in 1969, dating across racial lines was a daring move. But the two fell in love, and the Baha’i community openly welcomed their relationship.

“Soon, Jim asked Ruby to marry him. She said yes, but there was one obstacle: before a couple who were members of the Baha’i faith could get married, they were required to obtain the permission of their parents. Ruby’s mother and father gave their blessing to the union, as did Susan.

“But Wayland had been around few black people in his life, and he carried the sort of prejudices that were common among men of his time and place. No, he told Jim in a letter, he would not give his permission. Jim, disappointed and genuinely distraught—there was no way around his religion’s stipulations—replied with a letter that addressed his father with an emotional honesty that was uncommon between the two men. ‘You raised me to believe that we should have love in our hearts for everybody. Has that changed?”

Anyone who owned the Diamond Girl album knows the answer. The second song is Ruby Jean and Billie Lee, and the women are pictured on the back cover, holding their babies Joshua and Lua, who are namechecked in the song.

England Dan

There’s a lot about Seals and Crofts in the article, about whom I know a lot. But there is also a bunch about England Dan and John Ford Coley; them I only recognize by name. Dan Seals was Jim’s younger brother who loved the Beatles and often spoke in a British accent growing up. Then Dan had a successful solo career as a country artist. For a time, the brothers performed as Seals and Seals. Dan died in 2009 from lymphoma.

Jim and Ruby Jean have lived on a coffee farm in Costa Rica periodically since 1980. They also reside in Nashville and southern Florida.

1991: twenty-seven (!) #1 songs

Janet, PM Dawn, Madonna

There were 27 songs that reached #1 on the Billboard pop charts in 1991. I wasn’t listening much to pop radio, apparently. Some of the songs I never heard of. Then there are those, such as the most popular song of the year, that I must have heard, but my mind and my ear wouldn’t accept it.

(Everything I Do) I Do For You – Bryan Adams, #1 for seven weeks, triple-platinum single. I knew this was from the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But it didn’t imprint.
Black Or White – Michael Jackson, #1 for seven weeks, platinum single. I MIGHT have heard it on the radio. But I surely saw the video several times.

Rush, Rush – Paula Abdul, #1 for five weeks, gold single. I actually own the Spellbound album on which this appears. (There’s a story about that.) But I don’t recall hearing the tune on the radio.

Emotions – Mariah Carey, #1 for three weeks, gold single. I have her #1s album, but I otherwise don’t recognize it.

Two weeks at #1

Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) – C+C Music Factory, platinum single. The song in toto, I don’t recall. But the parenthetical part of the title I heard EVERYWHERE. The First Time – Surface, gold single. IDK.
I Don’t Wanna Cry – Mariah Carey. I own this on her Number #1’s album, but I don’t listen to it much.
Justify My Love – Madonna, platinum single. Maybe I heard it on the radio? But I know it from her The Immaculate Collection greatest hits album, my only Madonna album.
Baby Baby – Amy Grant. I know the song and the video, to my surprise.
Cream – Prince and the N.P.G., gold single. Know this from his The Hits/The B-Sides compilation
All The Man That I Need – Whitney Houston, gold single. I have I’m Your Baby Tonight on CD, where this appears. I do also have a cassette of her first album.
Someday– Mariah Carey, gold single. This is on the international version of her #1s, but not the version I own
I Adore Mi Amor – Color Me Badd, gold single. I’ve vaguely heard of the group but IDK the song.

A single week at #1

More Than Words – Extreme, gold single. Somehow, may have actually heard this, possibly on an oldies station.
I Like The Way (The Kissing Game) – Hi-Five, gold single. IDK
One More Try – Timmy-T-platinum single. IDK, but doesn’t it sound like a whole lot of other songs?
Unbelievable – EMF, gold single. The hook I’ve heard endlessly.
When A Man Loves A Woman – Michael Bolton. This I heard. Not my favorite version of this song.
Set Adrift On Memory Bliss – PM Dawn, gold single. This I actually own on a CD.
Romantic – Karyn White. I couldn’t have identified it, but it sounds vaguely familiar
Love Will Never Do (Without You) – Janet Jackson, gold single. Now, the Rhythm Nation 1814 album I played quite often.
Good Vibrations -Marky Mark and Funky Bunch. Not only do I not remember the song, but I also couldn’t find it on YouTube, though it is on Spotify.
You’re In Love – Wilson Phillips. Somehow, I have heard this, though I couldn’t have identified the artist.
Joyride – Roxette. Vague recollection.
I’ve Been Thinking About You – Londonbeat, gold single. I own the album on which appears, though I don’t recall buying it.
The Promise Of A New Day – Paula Abdul. Also from Spellbound. Never heard it on the radio.

It’s weird; I knew so many songs from only a decade earlier. I hadn’t stopped listening to music. From the top albums of 1991, I own collections from R.E.M., Paul Simon (who I saw live that year), Travelling Wilburys, and the Vaughan Brothers, plus the aforementioned Madonna and Janet.

From the first Boyz II Men album, which I own, a song that “only” made it to #3, Motownphilly.