Category: The Fifties

Some links: 102

  • People movers (mobile lounges) at IAD are sticking around for at least 20 more years. I like ’em. Remember to hold on for when the lounge starts to move! (Eurgkkh, lots of clickbaity slop on this local TV news channel page.)
  • Why did Tom Lehrer give up writing, recording, and performing? Francis Beckett doesn’t really answer this question, but he does offer a nice recap of Lehrer’s oeuvre for the younger folks.
  • Jason Kottke reprises this lovely post about flying in a small plane with his father in the upper Midwest. Low on fuel. With a thunderstorm approaching.

    But the thing was, I was never scared. I should have been probably…it was an alarming situation. I’d been flying with my dad my whole life and he’d kept me safe that whole time, so why should I start worrying now? That’s what fathers are supposed to do, right? Protect their children from harm while revealing the limits of the world?

  • When I visited the Westmoreland Museum of American Art last month, I noticed that several works were labelled “artist once known.” Here’s an explainer from the Hood Museum of Art for that new convention.

I haven’t really decided whether I will continue posting at IEFBR14. In the meantime, here are two computing/math links:

Dove Pete Panto?

The Hook, a screenplay by Arthur Miller from 1950, never produced due to its leftish sympathies, now adapted for the stage, has just completed a run at the British regional theater the Royal and Derngate.

Although [Harry] Cohn [of Columbia Pictures] agreed to make the film, the McCarthy-era mood prevailed….

Soon after the meeting [with Miller], Cohn declared the script had to be vetted by the head of the stagehands union, and — according to Miller’s autobiography — by the F.B.I., which feared the film might cause unrest in the dockyards that supplied the Army fighting in Korea. Changes were demanded, Miller wrote, notably that “the bad guys in the story, the union crooks and their gangster protectors, be communists.”

Furious, Miller returned to New York. Soon after he received a telegram: “It’s interesting how the minute we try to make the script pro-American, you pull out. Harry Cohn.”