Roman Culture vs. American Culture

Submitted by dkranker on Mon, 10/31/2016 - 14:33

The spectacle of animals, prisoners, and gladiators fighting and dying in the Collesseum spoke directly to the Roman viewer’s sense of the proper order of the world. Even an impoverished shopkeeper could watch a famous gladiator die and know that he, the observer, was still above that poor wretch. To be Roman was to know that there was always someone below you, and what happened in the arena was the quintessential reminder of the boundaries of us, the crowd, versus them, the damned.

Trusting the Internet as a Primary Source

Submitted by dkranker on Tue, 08/02/2016 - 13:15

The internet is the great enabler but what drives misinformation is human nature, and that is hardly new. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” said Winston Churchill. Except he didn’t. It was allegedly Mark Twain first, and the evidence for that is patchy. On this, as so much else, truth is still reaching for its pants.

Paul Simon - Kodachrome Review

Submitted by dkranker on Thu, 08/22/2013 - 12:51

If you took all the girls I knew when I was single, brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match my sweet imagination, and everything looks worse in black and white

So it's a good thing we had Kodachrome film, color slide film to capture the colors of the time period. I always saw the black on white lyrics as a play on words for seeing something in writing, like a legal notice or the actually losses or gains of a company

In this case, the actual number of women he dated being likely less than he imagined.
 

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Neil Young - Heart of Gold Review

Submitted by dkranker on Thu, 08/22/2013 - 12:41

The song takes us to the Pacific Northwest, from Redwood, California down to Hollywood, it's a little bit of a drive, but on the scale of the entire U.S., or in the context of the entire world not all that far apart physically, but could sum up some people's perception of a totally different way of life in the two places.  Certainly, a completely different landscape.

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