The Great Atlantic and Pacific Athletic Conference

It's great that the ACC Basketball Tournament will finally be properly honoring Jason Kidd and Phil Chenier as ACC Legends.

The Party for Your Right to Fight

Smithsonian magazine with a great article about the pride of the East Bay, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and its co-founder Huey P. Newton.

Traditional Armenian Folk Music

Peak '70s

 I saw the end of a "McMillan and Wife" episode (thanks, Roku channels!) in which an earthquake revealed a skeleton in the chimney of Rock Hudson and Susan St. James's San Francisco home.  Richard Dawson guest starred as an American who was impersonating a British insurance claims adjuster in order to steal Greek emeralds hidden in the chimney. 

Get that man a harmonica!

And I Even Kind of Knew Who Alison Moyet Was

It was a week ago that I realized that the singer of "Only You" wasn't a guy. 

Go Bears!

 Agnes Callard (of course, she's a Chicago grad and Berkeley PhD) eviscerates tourism -

"The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-case-against-travel

Why do anti-intellectuals endlessly promote anti-intellectualism when we all know that it is the most fundamental form of bigotry and the American disgrace?

Hey, Bo Diddley!

The Clash - Career Opportunities (Live at Shea Stadium)

The One U2 Song That Somehow Didn't Get Overplayed

San Antonio de Valero

 

Eight IS Enough to Fill Our Lives with Love

I've been watching "Eight Is Enough" episodes being shown in marathon form on one of the Roku channels.  It's a show that I was vaguely aware of when I was a little kid from ads on ABC and Willie Aames and Adam Rich kind of being third-tier teen and kid idols, although I never watched a second of the show, probably because it was on past my bedtime.

It's actually pretty good, better than I would have supposed.  It's a very light family drama (I think some episodes might actually have a laugh track).  It sometimes has elements of melodrama, although it isn't really a soap opera in a traditional sense in that there is absolutely no villain.  It probably hearkens back to the earliest days of TV as well as radio and family dramas such as "Mama" (which featured "Eight" star Dick Van Patten) and the original "The Goldbergs."  It's also very clearly from the late '70s and early '80s with references to disco and later designer jeans.  Several episodes deal with equal rights for women, with some resistance from the men in the family, and one concerns a high school girl wanting to go on the pill.