A Short Commercial Break

Internet Archive

   You may not know about the Internet Archive, but you will have used it if you use the Internet and we should all support it. It is the library for all of those rotten links that no longer work for you and a massive graveyard where all of the Internet content produced is saved. And you can visit this cemetery for free. Here is what has been saved to date:

35 billion web pages

41 million books and texts

14.7 million audio recordings (including 240,000 live concerts)

8.4 million videos (including 2.4 million Television News programs)

4.4 million images

890,000 software programs

Classic TV Commercials

  I rarely watch current television commercials, but remember some from the past which serve as historical markers over the years. Chances are good that if you want to pull up a commercial from your childhood, you will be able to do so from the Internet Archive where over 17,000 are found dating back to 1949. They can be searched by year, by subject and media type and there are even some non-commercial public service examples. Click on the link above to learn more about the Internet Archive. Click on the links below for some enjoyment:

Cars - A Mustang Mid-60s Ad - The Car Even Had a Stereo-Sonic Tape Player.

Canadian - There are many. See this Zellers one from 1999 or this one from the Nova Scotia Department of Health in 1996.

Cigarettes- There is more Canadian content in this Viceroy ad from 1963 with William Shatner. 

   

   There are even commercials for products that no longer exist. If you have 1:36 to spare, see these Classic Commercials for Defunct Products where you will learn about hair products such as "Tip Toni Curl Permanent" or "Satin Set." 

   Listen to the songs from the decades when you were younger with, K-Tel's Let's Disco Album Commercial or Time-Life's CD set of Love Songs of the 60s. 

 And let's not forget Jim Varney, who you will remember as "Ernest." 

The Bonus: 

  During the summer of 2023 you will have not been able to avoid "Barbie." Here she is over 60 years ago - See "Early Barbie Doll Commercials." 

A REAL COMMERCIAL - DONATE HERE. 

I can assure you that I get nothing if you do so. I just think such efforts need to be supported. Do so quickly since Muicahy's Miscellany may disappear soon and suddenly from whatever cloud it is in.

Subtitles

 

  By 'subtitles' I mean the ones that appear at the bottom of a screen at the theatre or on your television. They are useful if the people on the screen are speaking a language you don't understand and the subtitles appear in a language you do, or if you cannot hear. The subtitles that appear after the title on a book constitute a different subject and it is a subject about which I have amassed a considerable amount of information. That will be presented to you if I ever stop being distracted by minor topics such as this one.

   I am now old and so are my ears. My ability to hear has diminished along with many others and I have come to rely on subtitles or "closed captioning" when watching television (chyrons are somewhat different in that they offer words at the bottom of the screen directing you to something else you should be watching or worrying about.) Apparently many people, even the younger versions, are reading subtitles while watching what is on the screen. That readership is increasing among viewers is not disputed and if you search for articles about subtitles you will find many. 

  My purpose here is to direct you to an article which offers some explanations for why the subtitles are on, even if the characters speaking are not Irish. If you are older and don't know how to turn them on, call your service provider. In advance, you should turn up the volume on the phone so you can hear the reasons why you are being put on hold and, as well,  listen to the music. 

  Here is the useful part and it represents only a portion of what the author has to say. You should read the entire piece which is by Devin Gordon and it came in a newsletter from the Atlantic magazine around June 6: "Why Is Everyone Watching TV With The Subtitles On?: It's Not Just You." 

The good news, according to Onnalee Blank, the four-time Emmy Award–winning sound mixer on Game of Thrones, is that it’s not your fault that you can’t hear well enough to follow this stuff. It’s not your TV’s fault either, or your speakers—your sound system might be lousy, but that’s not why you can’t hear the dialogue. “It has everything to do with the streaming services and how they’re choosing to air these shows,” Blank told me.

Specifically, it has everything to do with LKFS, which stands for “Loudness, K-weighted, relative to full scale” and which, for the sake of simplicity, is a unit for measuring loudness. Traditionally it’s been anchored to the dialogue. For years, going back to the golden age of broadcast television and into the pay-cable era, audio engineers had to deliver sound levels within an industry-standard LKFS, or their work would get kicked back to them. That all changed when streaming companies seized control of the industry, a period of time that rather neatly matches Game of Thrones’ run on HBO. According to Blank, Game of Thrones sounded fantastic for years, and she’s got the Emmys to prove it. Then, in 2018, just prior to the show’s final season, AT&T bought HBO’s parent company and overlaid its own uniform loudness spec, which was flatter and simpler to scale across a large library of content. But it was also, crucially, un-anchored to the dialogue.

“So instead of this algorithm analyzing the loudness of the dialogue coming out of people’s mouths,” Blank explained to me, “it analyzes the whole show as loudness. So if you have a loud music cue, that’s gonna be your loud point. And then, when the dialogue comes, you can’t hear it.” Blank remembers noticing the difference from the moment AT&T took the reins at Time Warner; overnight, she said, HBO’s sound went from best-in-class to worst. During the last season of Game of Thrones, she said, “we had to beg [AT&T] to keep our old spec every single time we delivered an episode.” (Because AT&T spun off HBO’s parent company in 2022, a spokesperson for AT&T said they weren’t able to comment on the matter.)

Netflix still uses a dialogue-anchor spec, she said, which is why shows on Netflix sound (to her) noticeably crisper and clearer: “If you watch a Netflix show now and then immediately you turn on an HBO show, you’re gonna have to raise your volume.” Amazon Prime Video’s spec, meanwhile, “is pretty gnarly.” But what really galls her about Amazon is its new “dialogue boost” function, which viewers can select to “increase the volume of dialogue relative to background music and effects.” In other words, she said, it purports to fix a problem of Amazon’s own creation. Instead, she suggested, “why don’t you just air it the way we mixed it?”

The appearance of the subtitles on your screen also varies widely by platform—the streamers control that dial too—and some of them put more effort into the task than others. But their default typefaces are all clunky and robotic and bear no connection to the content. If they can beam Severance into our homes and invent dialogue-boost features, surely they can figure out how to let us pick our own typeface, or shrink the font size, or move the words to a different spot on the screen. You know who’d really benefit from that? Deaf people! Non-English speakers. Anyone who finds that subtitles make them feel included in the culture, rather than shut out of it. And maybe the ubiquity of words at the bottom of the screen will inspire filmmakers and showrunners to craft their own subtitles as a viewing option—you can watch this Jordan Peele art-house horror series with Hulu’s charmless sans serif or with Peele’s signature typeset."

Sources: 
  As mentioned, there are many. The graphic above is from: "Survey: Why America is Obsessed With Subtitles," Matt Zajechowski, preply.com, 03/06/2023.

I see that I hinted about my larger project on print subtitles in a post about: "Titling." Perhaps I should see if I can find my notes.

The Important Subject of Bed-Pushing

 Frivolity from 55 Years Ago

      One has to go back quite a ways to find evidence of any type of fun on a university campus which is not at the same time extremely controversial. Things appear to have been different back in the early 1960s and it is only by the late 1960s that such things become grimmer and darker and frivolity no longer countenanced. I am pleased the Canadian universities were in the forefront of such frivolousness back then, even if now they are in the vanguard of those places which seek to have their students be, shall we say, rather seminarian. As an example (of the current severity not the earlier frivolity) the university up-the-road recently curtailed and shifted homecoming activities which typically involve a few-hundred people at the football game and perhaps a few more at a block party (a short block, I might add) who threaten to drink beer and fall off roofs. I guess these days that does seem pretty serious. Some perspective is added, however, if one notes that somehow over 100,000 fans arrive at the  stadium in near-by Ann Arbor on most fall weekends and apparently many of them survive.

Canadian College Craze

    Although one can find earlier accounts of bed-pushing, the fad took off in the early part of 1961 and most of the reports relate to Canadian universities where it was thought to have originated. In a full account in The New York Times the reporter indicates that contests involving such things as stuffing phone booths and swallowing gold fish typically originate in the United States and are denounced when imported to Canada “as dilutions of Canadian culture”.

“This latest one, however, is indigenous. It seems to have originated on the Pacific Coast at the University of British Columbia , where students claimed to have established a world record. Since no one had thought of establishing one before, they had the record for a little while. Their claim set off a chain reaction that swept across Western Canada and the East like prairie fire.”

    The beds were either pushed or carried in a relay event with many students taking turns. In most cases the races took place on public roads. In the photo provided below the Western students started in Windsor and raced back to campus. Some sources and accounts are provided below.

(These Ontario Western (sic) university students claim a world record in bed-pushing, latest college craze. Students pushed bed 111 miles to their home university city, London, Ontario. The feat erased previous “record” of 102 miles established by New Brunswick students.” Source: (UPI Telephoto).)

Panty Raids

    There is a phrase you will not have seen for a while and I am rather nervous typing it although the nearest campus is about 6 kilometres away. It is mentioned in a column by a female syndicated correspondent who notes that while the Canadians pushed beds the more traditional male students at the University of Arizona used a telephone pole to break down a sorority door during one such raid and got into a little trouble. She concludes, “If the boys had tried to batter the door down when I was a coed, I would have been too busy putting on my make-up and the coffee pot…” Another American reporter noted that “Canadian coeds are thrilled by the generation of furniture movers available for them to marry”. Such sentiments indicate that things were much different back then. (The use of the word 'indigenous' in the account above would surely be questioned).

Provided here is a good video that shows the Western undergrads in a bed-pushing race. In the preamble it is dark and the students are carrying torches. By the late 1960s such an introduction would presage less innocent events particularly on American campuses. CFPL TELEVISION.
[ Update: This link originally worked and led one to a TV episode from CFPL in London. That program and others are found at the Archives of Ontario. This content is migrating to YouTube. If you go to this website and search for CFPL you may be able to access it and other programs from the period: Good luck.]
Here is a description: "When television station CFPL in London first went on the air on November 28, 1953, it was just the second private broadcaster in Canada. It has now been in operation for over 50 years and has become an integral part of the cultural fabric of the London area, and a vital communications link throughout southwestern Ontario. In June of 2002, CFPL generously donated, to the Archives of Ontario, the entire news output for their first 15 years of operation. This material represents a time capsule that vividly illustrates life in the province half a century ago. Contained in the more than 2700 rolls of film is a rich tapestry of stories ranging from charming public interest events to devastating tragedies: from stories about Mother Nature flexing her muscles to the fortunes of the political figures of the times. It is a significant historical record documenting social and economic changes that profoundly shaped Ontario in the post-World War II era. And, it is a unique portrait of who we were."]

Postscript

     The craze ceases to exist after the early 1960s. One does find the odd mention of bed-pushing which is usually done for a charitable purpose.  There was recently such an account from the University of New Brunswick.   Off-campus one does find two annual events which often feature bed races.

The Kentucky Derby Festival ‘Great Bed Races’ event brings out five-member teams to push hand-built “racing beds” in a contest the week before the ‘real’ one.

In Galveston about this time of year there is a  Victorian holiday festival known as “Dickens on the Strand” and it usually features “Victorian Bed Races." (This looks like a pretty good event and those who market such things for cities should take note. Apparently a visit by the author is not required. Think of just the alliterative possibilities: "Proust and Portland", Kafka in Kansas City"....)

Some sources:

“Bed-Pushing Is Latest Fad Among University Students,”The Globe and Mail, 02 Feb 1961: 3. This article reports that UWO students are about to set out at 3 a.m. to push a bed from Windsor to London - a distance given as 113 miles and they hope to be done by 4 p.m. It also reports that students at UNB had just pushed one from Coldbrook near Saint John to Fredericton a distance of 102 miles. Apparently this is in reaction to undergrads from the University of Waterloo who had just pushed a bed from London to Waterloo (70 miles) in 8 ½ hrs claiming the world record.

“And If They Get Sleepy…” Chicago Daily Tribune, 05 Feb 1961: a3.
This is one of the first U.S. references - just the photo provided above.

“Oh...Bed Pushing,” The Christian Science Monitor, 10 Feb 1961: 14.
This story is recounting the one from the G&M with this additional description “The bed, fitted with red lanterns, front and rear, was propelled by about 50 students in relays.”
On the 19th of February The New York Times picked up the story with this headline: .”If You're a Canadian Student, Bed Pushing Is Newest Craze; Object of Outdoor Winter Sport Now Sweeping Campuses Is to See How Far Team Can Push Hospital Bed”. This was filed out of Ottawa on the 18th and is one of the fullest accounts. Pride and chauvinism show up and there is some chest beating since unlike events involving phone booths or gold fish, this one is healthy and more productive than rioting.

Although most accounts claim that the craze originates in Canada, this report traces the origin to South Africa: “The Hemisphere: The Bed-Pushing Craze,” Time, Feb. 24, 1961. It is clear that such events were universal; one can find  Pathe news film  from Adelaide.
“The latest caper in Canadian colleges is bed pushing. Born at the University of Rhodesia, and perfected—as was last year's college craze, phone-booth stacking —at South Africa's University of Natal, it spread over some sort of Commonwealth bush telegraph. Last week Canadian college students from Nova Scotia to British Columbia were indefatigably mounting beds on wheels and pushing them over highways, prairies and frozen lakes. The current world's record of 1,000 continuous miles is claimed by a team from Ontario's Queen’s University, which kept its Simmons rolling day and night for a week.”

“British Youths Are One Up As Bed-Pushers,” The Globe and Mail , 24 June 1961: 20. "British youth push and carry one up Thorpe Cloud in Derbyshire and the young woman between the sheets only fell out once."