San Francisco before the Quake

Exactly 105 years ago today, April 18, 1906 at 5:12 AM San Francisco suffered a devastating earthquake.  The death toll from the earthquake and resulting fire was estimated to have been above 3,000 and remains the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California's history.

What we want to share is an extraordinary 35 mm film taken 4 days before the earthquake.

A very similar video was sent to us earlier today by Mr. Bruce Nicholas of Greenwich, but we have substituted a slightly-longer version we found that takes the viewer all the way to the end of Market Street at the trolley turntable.

Some of Bruce's accompanying comments:

A camera was mounted on the front of a street car. 

Perhaps the oldest "home movie" that you will ever see ! 

I watched it a couple of times. 

Look at the hats the ladies were wearing and the long dresses. 

Some of the cars had the steering wheels on the right side. 

I wonder when they standardized on the left ? 

Sure were still a lot of horse drawn vehicles in use. 

Mass transit looked like the way to get around. 

Looks like everybody had the right of way.

Watch the beginning carefully. 

At the 33 second mark and immediately after an oncoming trolley clears the screen,

a well dressed policeman walks across the street from left to right. 

Notice his right hand that he's carrying a truncheon (26 inch police baton)

and although he appears walking his beat, he looks ready to use it. 

Imagine the police of today walking down the street carrying a

26 inch club in their hand...???

This film was "lost" for many years.  It was the first 35mm film ever. 

It was taken by camera mounted on the front of a cable car. 

The number of automobiles is staggering for 1906. 

The clock tower at the end of Market Street at the

Embarcadero wharf is still there.

How many "street cleaning" people were employed to

pick up after the horses ? 

Talk about going green !

**This film was originally thought to be from 1905 until

David Kiehn with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

figured out exactly when it was shot. 

From New York trade papers announcing the film showing

to the wet streets from recent heavy rainfall & shadows

indicating time of year & actual weather and conditions on

historical record, even when the cars were registered

(he even knows who owned them and when the plates were issued!).

It was filmed only four days before the Great California Earthquake

of April 18th 1906 and shipped by train to NY for processing.

Is it time for Nanny McPhee?

Here's a quick quiz.  Can you spot good manners from bad manners in the following pictures?

Whoops!  They all show BAD manners.

Yesterday's (Sunday, April 17th) New York Times had a piece by David Carr entitled, "Keep Your Thumbs Still When I’m Talking to You."  The article will resonate with other Old Dogs, but it should be required reading for everyone with a smartphone!

How many of you share our frustration and annoyance when those with whom we are speaking tune out, or should we say "text out"?  Isn't it time for some help from Nanny McPhee?

David Carr offers a very good, "Guide to Smartphone Manners" that we recommend.

As the saying goes, Behave or Beware.

Black Fridays: Colbert, Cease, Dylan, and Groundhog

In our March 23rd posting, "Who is this Girl?" we introduced Rebecca Black's YouTube video, "Friday".  At that time she'd gotten 34 million hits in the 6 weeks of the video's existence.  As of this morning that number has jumped to over 84 million hits.  


You want to know what's impressive?  That represents 609 years of listening to this horrific song!  Takes us back to the oldies of 1401, when Henry IV, aka, Bolingbroke, was King of England.  Not inappropriate are the words of Falstaff, the young prince's corpulent pal, memorialized by William Shakespeare, " Company, villainous company, hath been the spoil of me."

Also impressive are the number of  "covers" done by others.  The best, in this OD's opinion, is one by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, The Roots, and Taylor Hicks on April Fool's Day.

BTW, sorry about the ads on Hulu.  Haven't figured out how to delete them.  


But there have been a host of other me-too's of "Friday". I particularly like these three.


Kyle Cease's version...

Another for all you Dylan fans...

And, finally, a Groundhog Day tribute... 

Just goes to show that success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan.

It's Not Only About Booksellers and Fish

Do you know what this image by Pieter Bruegel (the elder)...

 has to do with this company?

Maybe there's a digital brewer in our future.

You've Got Fail

Something dawned on us this weekend while driving through a large northshore shopping area.  We saw yet another huge yellow "CLOSING" banner on a large Borders Books store, one of the hundreds being closed as part of the company's bankruptcy filing.  

It made us think how things have changed since 1998 when Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in the movie, You've Got Mail.  

As other ODs will remember, the story related the face off between a small intimate book shop and a massive impersonal chainstore.  Typically bittersweet, while Fox & Sons Books (the mega chain) handily dispatches The Shop Around the Corner, the two owners ultimately become an item.  Good ending for romantics -- Not so great for small business owners. 

What dawned on OD was the renewed poignancy of this movie, and we envisioned a possible remake.  The new movie's title could be "Retributive Justice" and would star Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) and another Meg, Meg Whitman (formerly of eBay and Half.com).  The plot line here would be how on line booksellers push bricks-and-mortar chains out of business and steal their customers.  The cost and inventory advantages of the digital stores is simply too great.  As if that weren't enough, the exponential growth of e-books entirely eliminates the need for conventional bookstores.

But there is also a subplot creating a twist to this story.  While on line booksellers thrive at the expense of Borders and Barnes & Noble, small intimate focussed bookstores may be exhibiting a renaissance.

Old Dogs are finding that the intimate bookstores of their youth, once the victims of mega stores, are beginning to regain some lost ground, filling a niche in the market.  

Small bookstores are at a distinct disadvantage when comparing breadth of offerings or cost advantages.  However, they offer a number of economic characteristics that have been identified as ways to effectively compete in the expanding e-commerce world.

Kevin Kelly, a founder and former executive editor of Wired magazine has written about certain services for which vendors can charge and customers will pay in an internet world where much is exchanged for free.  Kelly explains, "A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold."

Kelly lists the 8 generatives as:  Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability.  While not equally valued by consumers, each trait offers something that is, as Kelly puts it, better than free.  Maybe boutique bookstores will once again find commercial support due to the generatives they can uniquely provide. 

One other interesting observation was triggered specifically by the movie title, "You've Got Mail."  Where is AOL headed these days?  The questionable logic of their most-recent acquisition of Huffington Post appears almost straw clutching.  Writing about the future of this once-powerful service, one critic stated, "You've got irrelevancy."

On that note we close with a poem learned in our youth that seems to resonate today.

OMG's now in the OED!

Announcement in this morning's news:  The one hundred twenty-six year-old Oxford English Dictionary just added a host of popular texting initialisms, including OMG, LOL, and FYI, to their august collection of "authorized" words.  

This is not the first time the OED has caved to an assault on the English language.  The walls had already been breached by their embracing IMHO (In My Humble Opinion), TMI (Too Much Information), and BFF (Best Friends Forever).

They also added "Muffin Top" to the dictionary.  Gracious!  OD will reserve his thoughts on this questionable decision as well as the OED's earlier inclusion of "frenemy" and "bromance".

How far we've come from those Halcyon Days recounted in Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne.

The madman remains, but the scholarship fades.

OD wonders whether the addition of WTF is not far behind.

Who is this Girl, and Why Should I Care?

She's Rebecca Black, and thanks to social media, she has gone from obscurity to becoming something of a global sensation in the last 2 weeks.

This OD came across Rebecca Black earlier this week on Twitter.  It was and remains one of Twitter's top global hashtags. (OD+NT will offer more on tagging and hashtags in a later post, but CCs, Curious Cats, can go here for an introduction.)

Rebecca Black is a 13 year old tween from Anaheim, CA who, with the help of LA record company, Ark Music Factory, recorded a song entitled, "Friday," which is about hanging out with friends and looking forward to the weekend.

Nothing unusual about that, you say, and OD says, "Stick around."

Rebecca Black's video was shot at her father's house this January then edited and uploaded onto YouTube on February 11, 2011.  In the first month "Friday" was viewed about 3,000 times.  That's not a bad reception, but still nothing interesting.  

But wait, it gets better.

On March 11th, Daniel Tosh of the Comedy Central series, "Tosh.O", posted the "Friday" music video on his blog under the title, "Songwriting Isn't For Everyone."  Tosh wasn't necessarily slamming Miss Black's talent so much as poking fun at the song's absurd lyrics.  Tosh.O's blog offers the following dialogue:

Rebecca Black: "Are you sure these are the lyrics you want me to sing?"

Producer: "What are you talking about?"

Rebecca Black: "This part where I just kinda slowly explain the ordering of the days of the week?"

Producer: "That's the hook, baby!  We breakin' it down for the kids!  They gonna know those days!!"

But other Old Dogs should judge for themselves.  Here's the video in question:

Then something began to happen.  During the next week, this video got 18 million hits on YouTube.  

Then, in the next week the number roughly doubles.  As OD is writing, the YouTube tally stands at 38 million!  That's right.  Rebecca Black's "Friday" is one of YouTube's all time top streams.  

With this much attention, people must love the song.  NO WAY!  YouTube's rating survey shows roughly 8.5 people dislike this video for every 1 who likes it!   There seems to be a full spate of negative comments about the song and the video on the web, but there are also some admirers. 

Music idol, Lady Gaga, has come out as a fan of Rebecca Black despite the fact that "Friday" has now gotten more YouTube views than LG's newest hit, "Born This Way."  (Lady Gaga's video might be too much for ODs.  This link is for reference purposes only.)

Then last evening, Black was Jay Leno's guest and performed her song on The Tonight Show.  Hey, wasn't last night a school night?

So, the real question is, "What makes this girl famous and this song go viral?"   

The answer to that question is way above this OD's pay grade!