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George Takei

I really like a good Second Act story, and the George Takei narrative is that.

Chris is mixing it up! “It’s not really a traditional style ‘Ask Roger Anything’ question, but can you do a post on George Takei?”

To be honest, when you asked the question, I didn’t have all that much to say. Subsequently, there’s been a bit more.

Let me start with the original Star Trek (1966-1969). I was not a big fan, but my father was. I suspect it was because it had a strong black character in Uhuru (Nichelle Nichols), just as Mission: Impossible had with Greg Morris’ Barney.

I did watch the reruns enough so that when The Next Generation started, I was primed. I saw the first five Star Trek movies, featuring Takei’s Sulu (hated #5, was bored by #1, but liked the middle three).

I vaguely remember that George Takei was politically active. When he was running for office in Southern California, the Fairness Doctrine (1949-2011, R.I.P.) was invoked, precluded local stations from showing Star Trek in syndication during the campaigns, lest the program provide him with an unfair advantage.

I didn’t think much about Takei until he came out as gay in 2005. That was obviously quite liberating, as he became more visible in the public eye. And when he joined Facebook in 2011, his wit engendered millions of followers. He became a TV pitchman, usually working his catchphrase, “Oh, MY!” into each ad.

More importantly, he spoke out for gay rights, and for those Japanese-Americans who, like himself as a child, had been interred in camps in the United States during World War II. I guess I really like a good Second Act story, and the George Takei narrative is that.

I don’t follow him on social media, but he’s often reposted, so I get to see his wisdom, and I’ve even shared them, usually in the fortnightly roundups. Sometimes it’s humor, often in a science fiction vein. Frequently he is pointing out political injustice. He was, this election cycle, a nag to Bernie Sanders supporters who weren’t switching to Hillary Clinton, and I found THAT annoying.

Recently, it was announced the Sulu persona in the Star Trek reboot is gay in honor of George Takei. Interestingly, Takei found the news “really unfortunate” because it is twisting of “Gene [Roddenberry’s] creation, to which he put in so much thought.” It’s not surprising that he is so protective of the integrity of the character he brought to life.

Apparently some Star Trek fans have gotten all bent out of shape over the storyline news. The late Gene Roddenberry did promise to include gay people in Star Trek, but the studio put the kibosh on it. George Takei’s opposition is to Sulu’s character being gay but would have embraced a different, not so well established character having a same-gender relationship.

Undoubtedly, there are many Trek fans who are gay and want to know that they can be represented on the Enterprise, which I’m sure George Takei, more than most, understands.
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Bob Fletcher Dies at 101; helped interred Japanese-Americans

Garry Marshall

I could, but I won’t, blame Garry Marshall for Scott Baio of Joanne Loves Chachi.

If Garry Marshall had only co-written 18 episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and created the classic The Odd Couple for television with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, I’d have been eternally grateful.
Continue reading “Garry Marshall”

B is for Betamax

There was a story late in 2015 that Betamax cassette tapes would be discontinued in March 2016. This surprised me. Sony had discontinued making the RECORDERS more than a dozen years earlier.

Betamax was “a videotape format in competition with VHS (introduced in Japan by JVC in October 1976 and in the United States by RCA in August 1977)…”

According to Sony’s own history webpages, the name came from a double meaning: beta being the Japanese word used to describe the way signals were recorded onto the tape, and from the fact that when the tape ran through the transport, it looked like the Greek letter beta (β). The suffix -max, from the word “maximum”, was added to suggest greatness…

Betamax and VHS competed in a fierce format war, which saw VHS come out on top in most markets. The VHS format’s defeat of the Betamax format became a classic marketing case study. Sony’s attempt to dictate an industry standard backfired when JVC made the tactical decision to forgo Sony’s offer of Betamax in favor of developing its own technology…

It is odd, too, because all the experts, and most of the users, considered Betamax a superior product in terms of recording quality.

By 1980, JVC’s VHS format controlled 60% of the North American market. The large economy of scale allowed VHS units to be introduced to the European market at a far lower cost than the rarer Betamax units. In the United Kingdom, Betamax held a 25% market share in 1981, but by 1986, it was down to 7.5% and continued to decline further. By 1984, 40 companies made VHS format equipment in comparison with Beta’s 12. Sony finally conceded defeat in 1988 when it, too, began producing VHS recorders though it still continued to produce Betamax recorders until 2002.

In Japan, Betamax had more success…, but eventually both Betamax and VHS were supplanted by laser-based technology…

One other major consequence of the Betamax technology’s introduction to the U.S. was the lawsuit Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984, the “Betamax case”), with the U.S. Supreme Court determining home videotaping to be legal in the United States, wherein home videotape cassette recorders were a legal technology since they had substantial noninfringing uses.

I never owned a Betamax machine. Seeing two incompatible technologies vying in the marketplace, I bought NEITHER machine until it was clear that VHS was going to win out. My first VHS player I didn’t purchase until c. 1985, one of the late adapters.

ABC Wednesday – Round 19

Knowing stuff

Janis Joplin was the second artist to have a posthumous #1 single on the US Billboard charts.

I tell these, not out of boastfulness, but to show how my mind works. It seems to like knowing stuff.

Baseball and WWII

Someone posted this picture on Facebook, with the caption “Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Dom DiMaggio, 1942.” A response: “Joe was not with the Yankees in 1942. He was wearing Uncle Sam’s uniform.”

I didn’t think the “correction” was right, but I didn’t know why. Maybe I read an old bio. So I checked with Baseball Reference and confirmed it: Joe DiMaggio played for the New York Yankees in 1942, and the warrior Yanks in 1943-1945. The same was true, BTW, of the two Boston Red Sox pictured, Williams and Dom DiMaggio.

Commonwealth

At the Olin family reunion last Sunday, someone asked their electronic helper how many states in the US are designated as commonwealths. Before the Siri-like device could respond, I said four and named them. An Olin high-fived me. BTW, these are essentially nominal differences, whereas the commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a whole ‘nother issue.

Before Janis

This issue came up a week ago Friday night when The Wife and I went to see A Night with Janis Joplin at the Capital Repertory Theatre in downtown Albany. We ran into a couple from the neighborhood, and like me, they railed at the reliance on Google, noting that it had been an issue professionally.

I asked them a trivia question. Janis Joplin was the second artist to have a posthumous #1 single on the US Billboard charts. Who was the first? (Dustbury: do not answer!)

They had no idea, but as they said, it was FUN to try to guess, not just pull out a device. Was it one of the people from The Day The Music Died? No, much later, but the artist died the same way. They guessed Jim Croce (d. September 20, 1973), but in fact, his posthumous #1 (Time in a Bottle – December 29, 1973) was AFTER Janis.

I finally indicated it was an individual on Stax Records, and while they didn’t know he had died in a plane crash, they eventually got to Otis Redding (d. December 10, 1967) and Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay (March 16, 1968).

Not incidentally, A Night with Janis Joplin was quite fine, although it’s interesting/strange that the performances her “influences” (Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Nina Simone, Odetta, et al, played by Jannie Jones, Danyel Fulton, Nikita Jones, Kimberly Ann Steele) often outshone Kelly McIntyre as Janis, who was nevertheless very good.

July rambling #1: Equality Feels Like Oppression

Smokey Robinson, a Leader of ‘a Musical Revolution,’ to Receive Gershwin Prize

Refugees Encounter a Foreign Word: Welcome

‘When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression’

Whiteness.

Medicalization and its Discontents

Expats and accents

N.J. forces mom to pay son’s student loans: Murder ‘does not meet the threshold for loan forgiveness’

Noel Neill, R.I.P.

Stephen Colbert Fondly Recall the Moment He Knew His Wife Was the One

Now I Know: The Friendliest of Fire and A (Stuart) Little Discovery and A Whale of a Discovery and A Run on the Runs

Stars and Stripes

Are we overdoing the Founding Fathers?

Three-part series of American Revolution-themed Sesame Street sketches from 1986/1987.

‘Is Lady Liberty a man?’: Fox worries France ‘pulled a fast one’ with transgender Statue of Liberty

Hanging Clothes

Trouble With Comics: Nationalism and the comics

How Justice Scalia’s Absence Has Affected the Supreme Court’s Decision

Racism In My Front Yard

The Negro Motorist Green Book and Black America’s Perpetual Search For A Home; Yes, I wrote about this here

Real Time with Bill Maher: How “Trickle Down” economics has never worked

Fun facts: Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. His father, John A. Chaffetz, was previously married to Katherine (Kitty) Dickson, and they had one son, John. Later, John Sr. married Jason’s mother, Margaret A. Wood. Kitty subsequently married Michael Dukakis (D-MA), the now-former governor. Jason worked on Michael Dukakis’ 1988 Presidential campaign.