Feeling Old

Here are some cute French kids trying to make sense out of 1980's technology:

(YouTube video.)

See, even today kids think 8-track players are "the bomb." And what about the kid who tries to use the 3-1/2 diskette as a camera? Not a bad guess really -- the way that little metal part slides open and shut. But let's not forget that kids are pretty smart! As the Indian "hole-in-the-wall" experiment showed us, kids can pick up computer skills on their own with no supervised instructions.

I'm sure those French Kids would have figured out the diskette and the track ball if they had a compatible computer system to use in their experimenting. But in isolation, each one of those artifacts is useless.

And realizing that these once-cool things are "artifacts" makes me feel plenty old.

Damage is Done

Remember the pimp and whore undercover team who caught some ACORN workers giving some really stupid advice? Well an independent report by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger concludes that neither the amateur sleuths nor ACORN did anything illegal.

However, Harshbarger found that the videos that sparked the scandal appear to have been substantially edited:

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms. Giles's comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

I fully expect the wingnuts to discredit the report and disparage Harshbarger -- and what an easy target he is having been the prosecutor in a notorious satanic child abuse case in the 1980's. But the wingnuts have nothing to complain about. Congress has defunded ACORN. The Republicans got what they wanted. The damage is done.

Maybe it could have been avoided. Why, when Congress and the media were in a frenzy over these tapes, didn't anybody look closely at them? Everybody swallowed the BS about ACORN. Oddly, the lack of reasoning parallels those 80's satanic abuse cases. Nobody asked the obvious questions until after harsh judgments were made.

Totally Swing

Forgive me, but I'm going to show you something truly awful, and if you have any respect for 80's pop music, this video is not only insufferable but also blasphemous:



The announcer asks us "Ever wondered what would happen if you blended the cool sophistication of a Big Band sound with the familiar and well-loved hit songs of that most flamboyant of decades, the 1980's?" Well no, I never did... and um... wait. Is this a joke??? Doesn't every SNL fake commercial start out with"Ever wonder what would happen if...."? Come on. This is as bad as thong baby diapers.

Oh, I know. Maybe he's being ironic?

I never thought I'd see Limahl fall to this lowly state. Actually, I haven't thought about him in years, but my brain is suddenly cranking out every odd factoid I ever read in Smash Hits. His stage name is an anagram of his real last name -- Hamill. He was the lead singer of Kajagoogoo whose hit "Too Shy" was produced by Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran and Colin Thurston. Limahl also had one solo hit called "Never Ending Story."

But right now I'm wishing he'd just follow that one famous lyric -- "hush hush."

Coke Classic

Here is a fascinating Flickr photo album: The Cocaine Photos. It really captures a certain 80's vibe. Though the 80's were my high school and college years, I didn't participate in the drugs, but I do remember those jackets, those hairstyles, that Duran Duran poster, and the furniture. Huh? What happened to their furniture? They must have sold it all to buy the drugs.

I had another random thought while staring at these pictures. They didn't have digital cameras back then, so they had to actually get their film developed at a convenience store or photo booth, but I bet nobody turned these guys in to the police. Maybe the guy at the Fotomat was a stoner too, or maybe people simply understood the concept of privacy back then.

Of course, by "back then" I mean before 9/11 when we suddenly became very comfortable with the government invading our privacy. There are two interesting federal laws most of us (including me) don't fully understand: the Bank Secrecy Act, and the USA Patriot Act. By these two laws, banks are required to report any transaction that they suspect is intended to violate or evade any federal law or any federal regulation. Americans took solace that these laws would certainly only be used to fight terrorists, drug traffickers, and money launderers. But no, of course not. This is how Elliot Spitzer was caught. He withdrew a few thousand dollars which required the bank to file a “Suspicious Activity Report" (SAR). The Feds followed the money, and discovered the prostitution ring.

So, this is great, right? We are catching all kinds of criminals now! But I, for one, am not enthusiastic about this. From bankrate.com, "In total, 919,230 SARs were filed in 2005. You cannot find out if one has been filed on you; anyone revealing that information is breaking the law." Many of these reports are triggered by legitimate financial transactions, and the transactions can be blocked or frozen while being investigated. I wish we valued bank secrecy as much as the Swiss.

Now I am stumped by the irony of my own blog post. That first link above goes to a photo album which somebody found at a swap meet. They scanned the pictures and posted them on Flickr without the permission of the people captured in the photos. I'm on a soap box about the government invading our privacy, and yet, by circulating that link, am I doing it too? I guess because I did not create that Flickr album, I don't feel guilty... I feel a bit voyeuristic though.

Update April 5, 2008: The owner of the Flickr photo album has now marked the photos "private" probably because there was some talk of a lawsuit over on Boing Boing. However, some creative types have been kind enough to recreate the original photos. They're just not the same without the Duran Duran poster.