Sadie Lou

The well-known website I Can Has Cheezburger? has produced yet another branched-off collection of captioned pictures: Once Upon a Win. It provides user-submitted photos and videos of relics from the past, including (so far) original Chuck Taylors, Duck Hunt, Fun Dip, and Bob Ross, that painter guy with the afro who was sometimes on TV.

Of course, some fads come back into style years later—one cannot walk across the SLC campus without seeing at least one pair of Converses. Thanks to the amazing innovation that is the Internet, games like Duck Hunt can still be found. And old-school candy, like Fun Dip, bubblegum cigarettes, Ring Pops, and rock candy, is still available online and at some candy stores.

Vampires can run around during the day.

If you’re like me, that statement probably has you scratching your head a bit. According to the book series-turned-film phenomenon Twilight, vampire-death-by-sunlight is pretty much…well, dead news. Other myths now include garlic, holy water, and that pesky lack of a mirror reflection.

In a recent article in Slate, Christopher Beam (who’s usually a political reporter) examines “why movie vampires always break all the vampire rules”:

The modern reworkings of the genre are traceable to a few different factors. For one thing, rewriting the rules is just good storytelling. Upending conventions lets you surprise the audience. You thought garlic was going to ward off the boss vampire? Sorry. You planned to kill him with that little piece of sharpened wood? Good luck. These days, you’ll see vampires slapping crosses out of the way more often than shrinking in fear.

Not sure what Buffy would think, but at least the sex appeal factor still remains…

Many children show a talent for singing, acting, or some other high-profile Hollywood careers at a very early age. But what happens when they grow up? Some lucky celebrities manage to make a decent living for themselves as adults, whether they stick with acting or singing or move on to something more “normal.” Most end up as has-beens living off the money they made as children. The lucky few, including Haley Joel Osment of “I see dead people” fame, Natalie Portman, and Britney Spears and others from the Mickey Mouse Club have moved on to bigger and better things (though it’s slightly doubtful just how successful Britney has been, depending on how you look at it).

The blog Former Child Star Central, run by Joal Ryan and called “an information mecca” by The London Times, keeps one up to date on the latest child star news – where are they now? FCS Central can tell you. It even has a convenient list of tags, from celebrities’ names to television shows and movies to “babies,” “did porn,” and “drugs.”

With the recent announcement of actor Joaquin Phoenix’s retirement at 34, it is becoming more and more apparent that celebrities are unhappy with career limitations. Phoenix indicated that he wanted to pursue his interests in music (he is currently recording an album with Tim Burgess, lead singer of The Charlatans). He stated, “I’m not doing films anymore…I’ve been through that…I’ve done it.” But can he really stay away from what he’s been doing since the age of twelve? Many other celebrities have “retired” only to return a short time later.

Years ago, back in 1993, Michael Jordan revealed that he was retiring from basketball due to loss of interest in the game. To everyone’s surprise, he moved on to baseball with the Chicago White Sox. Two years later Jordan made his return to basketball known with a two-word press release: “I’m back.” Jordan ended up retiring twice more after that, the third one eventually sticking. The well-known rapper Jay-Z retired publicly at a concert in 2003, but he continued to pursue various side projects and make appearances, including a greatest-hits record. In 2006 Jay-Z released a comeback album, and has been back in commission since then.

Is Joaquin Phoenix really retired? It seems legitimate, but based on other celebrities’ “retirements,” there is good reason to be a bit skeptical.

In this week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell looks at the (unfortunate) cultural phenomenon of equating genius with precocity. There’s been some talk of this recently, mainly in terms of economist David Galenson’s work, as well as a lecture given to the Association For Psychological Science by Gladwell in 2006. A high point of the argument:

On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. (Let’s just be thankful that Cézanne didn’t have a guidance counsellor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.) Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to acccept that there’s nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?

Also listen to Gladwell remark on the differences between artistic prodigies and late bloomers.

Canadian-based Adbusters —which touts itself as “a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age” and whose “aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we live in the 21st Century”—features a fascinating article this month on the emergence of hipster culture. From Douglas Haddow’s essay, Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization:

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.”

(via)

Michael Erard describes how English spoken among non-native speakers may be evolving into a new form of English:

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it’s escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

The future of unified language is, of course, already known to fans of the show Firefly.

In early 2006, Nerve began publishing A History of Single Life, Ken Mondschein’s hip examination of courtship across cultures—more often than not, our own—and the topic’s historical, psycho-social, and political implications. This month’s column features a season-appropriate exploration of our preoccupation with diamond engagement rings:

Engagement rings have been around since antiquity, and various theories suggest they originated as a miniaturized form of slave bands, a ritualized exchange of wealth, or as symbols of eternity. But while the rich often decorated such rings with jewels, the idea that “only a diamond will do” is a relatively recent innovation.

See Mondschein’s webzine Corporate Mofo for essays on myriad topics, including the economy, politics, religion, and how to stay afloat in a city like New York.

The Boston Globe’s website has a great new blog called The Big Picture, which shows some of the day’s news captured through photos. Andy Baio has a good interview with the site’s creator, Alan Taylor. On what inspired the site:

Lots of things – my parents used to always have Life and National Geographic magazines around the house, I fell in love with the visual storytelling way back then. When I was getting my feet wet in the online journalism world as a developer at msnbc.com, I had the good fortune of working alongside Brian Storm and a few others in MSNBC’s photo department, who were just phenomenal as far as selection, editing and presentation.

I wondered why other sites didn’t reach that level. Many have by now, but I was still frustrated by the presentation – either far too small, or trapped in click-after-click interfaces that were in Flash or just acted as ad farms.

David Brooks nails geek- and nerd-dom in his Friday Times op-ed, and ties the current cultural status of geeks and nerds in an important way to Bush’s anti-intellectualism:

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.