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That's like how two numbers in The Music Man are basically just lists of 1900s Midwest Americana references. Really the whole show is a 'nostalgia for that time you don't properly remember because you're not quite old enough' fest.The Music Man - Rock Island posted:SALES MAN 3: The Music Man - Ya Got Trouble posted:....
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Feb 4, 2021 03:48
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echopapa posted:There are several issues of Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang on Project Gutenberg. Captain Billy's Whizz Bang posted:Dear Capt. Billy—What is a good name for a new college sorority?—Al E. Wrat.  quote:“Is my wife forward?” asked the passenger on the Limited.  quote:Dear Skipper—When is a good girl not a good girl?—McNotty.  'Trouble in River City' indeed! Not least because Captain Billy's first published in 1919 and The Music Man is set in 1912. Professor Hill is a time traveller!
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Feb 4, 2021 21:13
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Cemetry Gator posted:It's funny - there was a very brief window of time during the period when usability really started to be taken more seriously by various people that there was active discussion about getting rid of the floppy as a save icon, because after all, nobody used it and what good is an image of it doesn't mean anything anymore. This is also why road signs tend to be frozen in whatever time they were standardised in terms of iconography. Here in the UK, the signage we have now was drawn up in 1963, so the standardised depiction of 'a car' (in front or profile) is based on a big-selling model of Ford which went out of production in 1962, the sign warning of a railway crossing (without gates) is a steam locomotive and the sign for a crossing with gates is a symbol of a wooden picket fence. The sign warning of children on/near the road shows a boy and girl in 1950s fashion and the one for 'workforce in road' shows a burly man sticking a shovel into a pile of asphalt while bereft of modern PPE. If you're near a military training area you might see a sign warning of a tank crossing point, depicting a tank straight out of WW1, and there's a sign in the catalogue to warn of slow-moving horse-drawn carts on the road. The sign warning of a speed camera shows a big Victorian-style plate glass camera. The accuracy of the depictions doesn't matter, of course, just that the symbols are standardised and understood. The fact that speed cameras have never looked remotely like a Victorian camera isn't the point - it's a distinctive symbol that everyone knows means 'speed camera ahead'.
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Mar 18, 2021 01:19
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Imagined posted:Apologies if this has been discussed recently in the thread, but we were watching Looney Tunes just now and I was reminded of how many references there are in it that are so forgotten now that we don't even recognize them as references. For example, anyone watching in the 1940s would've known: Same with Gilbert & Sullivan operas. Obviously a lot of the jokes and witicisms still hold up, as does a good deal of the general satire aimed at British society and institutions (some of it disturbingly so...) but some of the dialogue and lyrics are densely-packed with little nods and references that only the original audience would even discern as references. Some of the asides rely on the fact that the audience was sat watching an opera in the SavoyTheatre to properly work. Gilbert updated his libretti to keep the references as topical as possible while he was alive. For instance, the Queen of the Fairies line in Iolanthe, "Could thy brigade, with cold cascade, quench my great love, I wonder?" relied on the fact that the head of the London Metropolitan Fire Brigade always attended first nights at the Savoy - in this case the singer sung the line while gesturing to and making eye contact with the man in question. How many references from the Dragoon Colonel's song in Patience actually work still?. They're obviously references, but modern audiences wouldn't have a clue what most of them mean: "The pluck of Lord Nelson on board of the Victory - Genius of Bismarck devising a plan - The humour of Fielding (which sounds contradictory) - Coolness of Paget about to trepan - The science of Jullien, the eminent musico - Wit of Macaulay, who wrote of Queen Anne - The pathos of Paddy, as rendered by Boucicault - Style of the Bishop of Sodor and Man - The dash of a D'Orsay, divested of quackery - Narrative powers of Dickens and Thackeray - Victor Emmanuel - peak-haunting Peveril - Thomas Aquinas, and Doctor Sacheverell - Tupper and Tennyson - Daniel Defoe - Anthony Trollope and Mister Guizot! If you want a receipt for this soldier-like paragon, Get at the wealth of the Czar (if you can) - The family pride of a Spaniard from Aragon - Force of Mephisto pronouncing a ban - A smack of Lord Waterford, reckless and rollicky - Swagger of Roderick, heading his clan - The keen penetration of Paddington Pollaky - Grace of an Odalisque on a divan - The genius strategic of Caesar or Hannibal - Skill of Sir Garnet in thrashing a cannibal - Flavour of Hamlet - the Stranger, a touch of him - Little of Manfred (but not very much of him) - Beadle of Burlington - Richardson's show - Mister Micawber and Madame Tussaud!" (the footnotes explaining all of these are here - https://gsvloc.org/gilbert-sullivan-resources/gilbert-sullivan-glossaries/patience/) And it's not just the lyrics - Sullivan wasn't beyond putting musical references in his scores, either. I doubt many modern viewers realise that the ensemble chorus in Trial By Jury is a deliberate parody of contemporary Italian opera, that it's meant to be overwrought and over-complex and the fact that it grinds the action to a halt right at the climax of the plot while s the entire cast sing two lines of dialogue back and forth for five minutes is the joke.
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Apr 13, 2021 00:12
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Arsenic Lupin posted:That's weird. I hear the English one as in 1/2, while the USAian one is in 1/4. Not a triplet in sight. Nerd Alert! The American loco has four cylinders but compounded into two pairs, so the combination of piston and exhaust beats will tend to sound 1/4. The British loco (at least the first in that video) has a simple pair of cylinders, hence the even 1/2 beat. But there were a number of British steam locos with three cylinders, which do make a distinctive syncopated beat: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv12t1YQ-5E
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May 15, 2021 00:32
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Wait -- so I know very little about Starlight Express, but is it basically just Night on the Galactic Railroad and a few related Kenji Miyazawa short stories repackaged as western theatre? It grew out of a failed attempt by Andrew Lloyd Webber to produce a TV series based on Thomas the Tank Engine in the 1970s, after which he decided to do a stage musical that was 'Cinderella...With Trains'. During writing and production it turned into...whatever the hell Starlight Express is. Andrew Lloyd Webber is a weird guy. The North Tower posted:This is really cool, and I’m not a train guy. We have a couple of musically talented people at work, and I’m going to share this with them on Monday. These days the preserved three-cylinder locos do relatively few miles and are fastidiously maintained. In actual service heavy use and poor maintenance brought out a flaw in their particular design of valve gear which led to two exhaust beats overlapping. Instead of the neat 6/8 time of a restored and perfectly set up and maintained example, you got a jazz-like "one-two-THREE-fourfive.....one-two-THREE-fourfive" rhythm. As here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teWD6ssgm84&t=5m32s
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May 15, 2021 10:57
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Platystemon posted:The guinea is just bad, though. There’s no excusing that. It’s worth twenty‐one shillings, five percent more than the pound. Wow what a useful unit! Really fills a niche! We haven’t minted any since the eighteenth century, but let’s occasionally specify amounts in it anyway! The guinea was originally a gold coin, equal to a pound (lb - the weight) of sterling silver. That lb was made of 20 shilling coins. Exactly how many shillings were equal to a guinea originally varied over the years depending on the relative value of silver and gold until it was fixed at 21 shillings in the 1700s. In 1816 the guinea coin was replaced by the sovereign (nominal value £1 or 20 shillings) but the notional idea of an amount of money being 'a guinea' (21 shillings) remained. Being Britain, there was of course a social class aspect to this. Stuff that the upper classes bought and sold between each other - land, country property, art, high-end furniture, racehorses, army commissions and banking and other professional fees were quoted in guineas. The middle classes earned their salaries, paid their bills and mortgaged their houses in pounds. The working classes received their wages, and paid their rent and bought their food, weekly in shillings. Medical doctors quoted their fees in guineas but surgeons (not being degree-holders) were paid in pounds.
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Jun 6, 2021 18:57
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Victorian surgeons would mostly have been barbers moonlighting as medical professionals no? That's traditionally where the distinction between medical doctors (physicians with a university degree and accredited by a Royal College which set standards and administered examinations) and surgeons (tradesmen without degrees, no official governing body or examinations and, yes, traditionally spending most of their days earning money as barbers) came from. That's why surgeons were paid in pounds and physicians paid in guineas. But by the Victorian era that had already been put in the past. The Company of Surgeons had been founded in the 1740s (officially breaking surgeons away from the medieval barbers' guild) and that became the Royal College of Surgeons in 1800. One condition of the RCS's new charter was that its members all had to be degree-holding physicians, thus formalising a long-developing trend where surgeons were specialised doctors rather than skilled 'amateurs'. So by the Victorian era surgeons were just as much doctors as physicians, and by 1900 (as tacit recognition of this), the top city surgeons were also quoting their charges in guineas. However the lingering tradition (actually rather in keeping with the thread) is that, right to the present day, British surgeons who have passed their RCS Membership Diploma cease to use their 'Doctor' title (which they earned when they graduated from medical school) professionally. Instead they revert to just being 'Mister'. Of course that is a throwback to the days when surgeons didn't have a degree and physicians were very careful to make the distinction that they were doctors and surgeons were misters. Like many put-downs, surgeons adopted it as a point of pride and so RCS members call themselves 'mister' as a historical snub to the stuck-ups at the RCP. So if you're in a British hospital for surgery and your doctor introduces themselves as 'Mister' or 'Miz' then you know that, far from being unqualified, they're actually as qualified as they can be.
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Jun 6, 2021 19:56
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MightyJoe36 posted:The hotels also used to give out bag tags that you could put on the handle of your suitcase. You put your name and address on one side, and the hotel logo was on the other. In the days when international travel was mainly for the well-off, they'd often vacation for quite long periods and they tended to travel with a lot more luggage than we would today. So it was common to send Luggage In Advance - you (more accurately your servants...) would do all your packing and then that luggage would be sent a few days ahead of you so it would be at your hotel when you arrived, so you only had to actually travel with a smaller suitcase or trunk for your journey. As well as your luggage attracting various labels from the courier/railway/shipping lines that carried it to your destination, it was common for hotels to slap a sticker or label on each item of luggage as it arrived as proof of receipt and to record who owned what piece, which room it was to go to and on which date. Those labels were often very colourful bits of advertising in their own right. If you were dispatching luggage for a sea journey you could also designate items as 'wanted on voyage' so they'd be in your cabin when you boarded rather than in the baggage hold. Which was an opportunity for another set of labels, again often used as an advertising medium for the shipping line. And human nature being what it always is, right from the start of practical international travel in the 19th century people have liked to collect labels as a record of where they've been, what hotels they stayed at and which ships and trains they've travelled on.
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Nov 21, 2022 16:04
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