More Weird Stuff
I ran across a site today that reprinted newspaper articles from the paper in Lubbock, Texas that had to do with the late rock music pioneer, Buddy Holley. For those, like me, who come from a small town, you know that it is no great accomplishment to get your name and picture in the local paper. It might even be easier than getting your name in the U of L student paper.
Lubbock can't be a real small town, since it has a university, but it is or was small enough that it carries birth announcements, such as the one announcing Buddy Holley's entrace to the world in 1936. Unfortunately, the paper claimed that he was a baby girl.
Anyway, there was an article from around 1956 which talked about how Buddy and group of his friends detained a knife-wielding shoplifter until police arrived. Buddy was the driver of a car that chased after the shoplifter, who was on foot. One of Buddy's friends told the paper "We believe in justice." While I think there is way too much of a tendency to romantacize the past, and the 1950s were far from perfect, I can't imagine that today a young person would make a statement like "We believe in justice" completely devoid of any irony. Its not that I think young people today don't believe in justice, but that we are in a culture that is skeptical (which is often healthy) of the notion of justice, hence the unliklihood of anyone making such a grandiose claim. Unfortunately, I think our language, as much at is acted on by cultural conditions, also acts on our culture. So my fear is that since neither real people or even fictional heroes make statements like this, it may lead to an actual erosion of the sentiment, and future rock stars will make no effort to stop knife-wielding shoplifters.
In other weird news, I read that Stalin once tried to get Soviet scientists to make human/chimp hybrids to be super soldiers. I've verified this from a couple sources, as the documents were just recently uncovered. I wonder why this story hasn't caught on more. Is it just to bizarre for people to comprehend? Is it because the Soviets aren't a threat anymore? I would think if one of our former presidents had a project like this it would be a big media story. I guess that's what blogs are for.
Lubbock can't be a real small town, since it has a university, but it is or was small enough that it carries birth announcements, such as the one announcing Buddy Holley's entrace to the world in 1936. Unfortunately, the paper claimed that he was a baby girl.
Anyway, there was an article from around 1956 which talked about how Buddy and group of his friends detained a knife-wielding shoplifter until police arrived. Buddy was the driver of a car that chased after the shoplifter, who was on foot. One of Buddy's friends told the paper "We believe in justice." While I think there is way too much of a tendency to romantacize the past, and the 1950s were far from perfect, I can't imagine that today a young person would make a statement like "We believe in justice" completely devoid of any irony. Its not that I think young people today don't believe in justice, but that we are in a culture that is skeptical (which is often healthy) of the notion of justice, hence the unliklihood of anyone making such a grandiose claim. Unfortunately, I think our language, as much at is acted on by cultural conditions, also acts on our culture. So my fear is that since neither real people or even fictional heroes make statements like this, it may lead to an actual erosion of the sentiment, and future rock stars will make no effort to stop knife-wielding shoplifters.
In other weird news, I read that Stalin once tried to get Soviet scientists to make human/chimp hybrids to be super soldiers. I've verified this from a couple sources, as the documents were just recently uncovered. I wonder why this story hasn't caught on more. Is it just to bizarre for people to comprehend? Is it because the Soviets aren't a threat anymore? I would think if one of our former presidents had a project like this it would be a big media story. I guess that's what blogs are for.
posted by Azor at 11:54 AM
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