When comedian Laurie Kilmartin found out her father had advanced lung cancer, she processed it the best way she could: by tweeting jokes about her father’s decline. The real-time mourning gave rise to Kilmartin’s stand-up special, “45 Jokes About My Dead Dad,” available on Seeso. Kilmartin is a writer for Conan on TBS and author of Sh*tty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us.
In the Spiel, noting the death of Debbie Reynolds and the prospects of a two-state solution.
The Big Apple, Sin City, the Big Easy -- all famous nicknames for American cities. But have you heard of Man Jose? This week we explore if San Jose should be called Man Jose.
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice. And use the #BayCurious hashtag!
Does occupational licensing hamper ex cons who want to be productive members of society? Stephen A. Slivinski of Arizona State has some new research on the subject.
When the Russian ambassador to Turkey was killed in front of cameras by an assassin, Alexandra Zapruder had one thought: “There’s another Zapruder film.” Her new book, Twenty-Six Seconds, looks at how her grandfather’s film of the John F. Kennedy assassination changed media and American life, and how her family dealt with the grave responsibility of being part of American history.
How customers get eyeglasses in South Carolina could be undergoing a big change, but not if the incumbent industry can help it. Robert McNamara of the Institute for Justice discusses the case.
f you’ve walked past Adobe’s corporate headquarters in downtown San Jose, you may have spotted them: four big orange LED lights that look like flat-head screws, turning in apparently random patterns.
This week’s Bay Curious question comes from listener Geoff Morgan, who wanted to know:
What do the turning wheels on the top of the Adobe building mean?
To start with, it helps to know Adobe makes computer software for people who work with words, pictures and sound.
“At the core of our DNA, really, is art and technology,” says Siri Lackovic, the company’s senior brand strategist.
That’s why you’ll find clever art installations all over their office towers.
Siri is one of the two people on the planet who know the whole story behind the glowing orange orbs Geoff noticed. The other person, of course, is the guy who came up with the concept, New York artist Ben Rubin.
“The hope is that someone would look up and say: ‘What is that?’ ” Ben says. “What is that thing trying to say, you know? What is its message?”
The name of this installation is San Jose Semaphore.
“Semaphore, by definition, is really a form of visual communication,” Siri explains.
Way back when, the only way to communicate surreptitiously over a short distance — say, from land to a ship — would be to rely on flag bearers.
“They would hold up the flag, and depending on the position of the flag, would let them know if it was safe to come in, or better to stay put,” she says.
This resonates with Geoff, the KQED listener who asked the question.
“I actually was in the Navy, and so I remember people communicating with flags, and it was always interesting to me because it looked very official, but a lot of times, they were talking about the latest baseball scores from ship to ship and things like that,” he says.
In case you didn’t serve in the Navy, here’s an amusing set of dramas executed in semaphore by Monty Python.
So, the short story on San Jose Semaphore is that it’s an art installation. The long story stretches back to artist Ben Rubin’s childhood in Boston during the 1970s. Back then, he owned a Heathkit shortwave radio. Sometimes, when he turned it on, he’d hear the strangest things.
“These sort of clicks and beeps and mechanized announcements,” Ben says. “Who could not listen to an encrypted message and not wonder what it says, you know?”
As NPR reported in a 2000 feature for the “Lost and Found Sound” series, these were numbers stations, shortwave radio broadcasts that historians believe transmitted messages to spies stationed around the world, starting in World War I.
To the average listener, the letters, numbers and songs broadcast on the stations sound random. But if you have the key to decode the gobbledygook — it’s a message.
Ben was fascinated by these numbers stations. So when it came time for college, he got a bachelor’s degree in computer science and semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. After graduation, he starting making art inspired by his studies. Now he makes media installations using technology, sound, images and physical structures — like the piece on the top of Adobe’s building in San Jose.
Silicon Valley Loves A Challenge
Each of these orange discs can assume four positions: horizontal, left-leaning diagonal, vertical, right-leaning diagonal. Four positions, plus four discs, means there are 256 possible combinations.
Every 7.2 seconds, those wheels turn to a new configuration of sort of positions. Then they rest.
Well, it's finally here: the last Opening Arguments of 2016. We're looking forward to 2017 (and our amazing two-episode-per-week schedule). We begin with some announcements about Law'd Awful Movies, and then turn to Thomas Takes the Bar Exam, where we find out how our intrepid co-host did in answering real-life bar exam prep questions. Then, we answer a listener question from Jim Sabatowski about the foreseeability of one's negligence by taking a trip back to law school and talking about the crazy, fireworks-on-a-train-exploding-scale madness that is Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R., 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99 (1928). In our main segment, we tackle the confusion world of religious-themed holiday displays. When is it okay to put a little baby Jesus on the courthouse steps? We'll tell you insofar as the Supreme Court has told us, which... isn't always perfectly clear. In our "C" segment, we tackle yet another listener question; this one from Skeptic Sarah regarding the controversy over trademark registration for the all Asian-American band "The Slants" and their unique crowdfunding of their Supreme Court legal costs. Finally, we conclude with TTTBE #4. Remember that you can play along by following our Twitter feed (@Openargs) and quoting the tweet that announces this episode along with your guess and reason(s). We'll see you in 2017... twice as often! Show Notes & Links
While we're at it, this is the full-text link to Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R., 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99 (1928), the case every law student knows.
Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971), set forth the "Lemon test" that we talk about in the main segment.
Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984), was the 1984 case that said it was perfectly legitimate for a courthouse to display little baby Jesus in a manger.
But weirdly, Allegheny County v. ACLU, 492 U.S. 573 (1989), was the case from just five years later where the Supreme Court said no, courts couldn't just display little baby Jesus in a manger, but they could display a menorah, a Christmas tree, and a liberty plaque all together.
We defy you to explain the difference between Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005), which upheld a Ten Commandments monument in Texas, and a decision handed down the exact same day, McCreary County v. ACLU, 545 U.S. 844 (2005), which struck down Ten Commandments posted on the walls out two courthouses in Kentucky.
How should the Federal Reserve clear the way for competitive currencies? Jim Grant is publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer. We spoke during Cato's monetary conference in November.
