In 1999, Henry Allen at the Washington Post wrote a series of articles where he tried to capture what it was like to live in each decade of the 20th century.

Here they are: 1900′s, 1910′s, 1920′s, 1930′s, 1940′s, 1950′s, 1960′s, 1970′s, 1980′s, 1990′s.

It’s similar to the approach Andrew Marr recently used for his Modern Britain documentaries.

This is what I find so fascinating about the 20th century: The speed at which perceptions of the world were changing – and still are.

.. så da har julen kommet?  Jeg har aldri helt forstått dette med sjokoladejulekalendere.  Jeg fikk denne av søsteren min, hun syntes jeg burde ha en.  Men hvis jeg vil ha sjokolade kjøper jeg det vel på vanlig måte?  Og da er det ikke fullt så tungvint innpakning?

Bah, humbug!

It’s only been half a year since the previous 256 posts anniversary, but here we are again at 512 posts.  It’s because of all the movie posts – there’s one about every second day now.  I sometimes wonder if there may be some readers who aren’t the least bit interested in movies from the 1940′s.  But nah – that would be peculiar.  Full speed ahead!  We may reach the 50′s within a year.

For the 512 event I’ve redesigned the blog, by which I mean I’ve moved it to WordPress and selected one of their generic themes.  I picked one with black and grey, which for some reason appealed to me.

WordPress is a much better blog platform than Blogger.  They provide the basics for free, and charge for upgrades, (such as domain mapping), which may be why I got such immediate, friendly help today when I struggled to import the old blog entries.  Yay profit motive.

The new address is http://max256.bearstrong.net/, but thanks to the magic of The Internet, you won’t have to update any feeds or bookmarks.

John Scalzi presents The 10 least successful holiday specials of all time, not including That One.

Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)

In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible. Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”

Also: An Algonquin Round Table Christmas, and The Lost Star Trek Christmas Episode: “A Most Illogical Holiday”.

At war’s beginning, few men who wrote the news, and fewer still who broadcast it, could resist the purple technique of dire warnings, manic-depressive cycles, sweeping prognostications. Many a news commentator offered his audience little more than a 15-minute nervous breakdown. Not so Elmer Davis. His voice was calm, incisive, with a Hoosier twang as reassuring as Thanksgiving, as shrewd as a small-town banker.

[..]

But last week to Elmer Davis, as it must to all wartime officials, came pots of trouble. His ears had scarcely finished burning from attacks on the expense and political tone of Victory, the de luxe glamor magazine designed to sell the U.S. to the world as a kind of Hollywood 3,000 miles square, when his sprawling OWI issued a cartoon booklet on the life of President Roosevelt, also designed for distribution abroad. A U.S. soldier sent a copy to New York’s Republican Congressman John Taber. Mr. Taber, who has a low irritation point, was moved to cry: “Purely political propaganda, designed entirely to promote a fourth term and a dictatorship. . . . How much longer are the American people going to have that kind of stuff pulled on them?”

- TIME, March 15, 1943

I’m not particularly interested in 1940′s history or movies, more than other periods, it’s just that this is where I happen to be at the moment. Which is why it is so fun to stumble about in the old archives of TIME Magazine.

Here’s a fantastic – and possibly, hopefully ironic – letter to the editor, from the Dec. 18, 1944 issue:

Sirs: The G.I. Bill of Rights, while practically assuring every veteran a Chris-Craft speed boat, two cars in every garage, a home in the country, a penthouse, and an egg in his beer, has, in our opinion, failed to deal with a question which is destined to present one of the most controversial issues of the postwar world. To wit: Will the returning G.I. be able to maintain the same balance of power in his home that he enjoyed in the halcyon days, or will the female of the species assert herself and declare the “old order” relegated to the limbo of nostalgic memories? . . . Upon settlement of this question rests the stability of the state and the determination of whether G.I. Joe is to enjoy the freedoms he fought for. (PVT.) ED G. LANCASTER Camp Claiborne, La.

Also, a first-hand account of D-Day.

It’s fun to see the search queries people use to find your site. Here’s two from probably the same person: “”babes on broadway” publicity still spanked” and “”bright eyes(1934)” spanking“. Spanking scenes from old movies is one very specific fetish that I’m unable to cater to. Shirley Temple movies particularly so.

Then there are the automated search queries, set up by people who want to follow blog posts about a particular topic. When I review books, I often get a hit from the author’s name the next day. I actually do the same thing myself, in order to hunt down and ridicule anyone who says anything bad about me.

But here’s one that baffles me: “site:bearstrong.net “atlas shrugged”" What makes it odd is that this query has given me regular hits for over a month.

Somebody wants to be notified immediately the next time I write about Atlas Shrugged. Don’t ask me why. Fetish queries (“site:bearstrong.net “atlas shrugged” spanking“) I can understand. This, less so. It’s a bit passive aggressive. “Hey, it’s your blog and you write about whatever you want to. I just want you to know that if you ever do write about this book that I love/hate, I’ll be there immediately to read it, because that’s how much I care. But hey, you know, whatever.”

So I’ll make a deal: If whoever is doing this explains why they care, I might write a post about Ayn Rand.

Also, my deepest apologies to all Ayn Rand spanking enthusiasts I’ve now accidentally led here.

No more conventional medicine for me: Malletopathy is here, an alternative treatment that combines ancient wisdom with modern technology.

The Mallet is made of wood, borrowed not harvested, from the deep forests in Norway. The arctic climate, combined with virtually no pollution, makes the wood hard, pure and very susceptible to energy transfer The Mallet is handcrafted by experts in Malletopathy, sized and fitted to the specific illness or injury.

The Cloth of Healing is handmade, using only virgin arctic cotton. It is thereby ideal for energy reception and molecular memory storage. The weaving of the arctic cotton prolongs the energy storage time to practically infinity, limited only by the natural degeneration of organic material.

The energy transfer, through the art of Mallletopathy, is a complex process on molecular level. In layman’s terms, it is similar to the transfer of light to heat, fuel to propulsion, and sunlight into vitamins. Energy is constant, what varies is the state it is in.

The secret to properly transfer and store energy lies also in the way The Mallet is struck onto The Cloth of Healing. Ten times for each element, rotating east to west. This ensures that all the latent energy is transferred from The Mallet to The Cloth, thereby clearing The Mallet for a new energy transfer session.

Hungry Beast explains media outrage as a bubble economy: