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Monthly Archives: November 2017

Overheard on a Disneyworld shuttle bus: near-insurrection over the lack of order to the theme park experience. Hard not to hear echoes of broader political currents: substitute “fast passes” & “shuttle buses” for “health care” & “tax reform,” & it’s basically the same argument.

Following up on a student question from today, I spent some time reading the research errata at the @ctrvisualmusic website. Were it that every research field had such a comprehensive, accessible web resource. http://bit.ly/2hFeN2l

In the same vein: I’m not the type to fastidiously check Google Doodles, but this summer’s Oskar Fischinger project is pretty cool. https://www.google.com/doodles/oskar-fischingers-117th-birthday

Prepping for class tomorrow, rewatching Florey & Vorkapich’s *The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra*. A bonkers film. Kudos to Brian Taves @librarycongress, for pointing out the work of a 23-yr old Gregg Toland on camera. http://bit.ly/2zU7tKr

Listening to (terrestrial) radio at home in 2017 is not as easy as I figured it would be. I’m going to have to exhume something from my basement to make this work…

Reading through some of the “reviews” written by FBI agents on the hunt for communist influences in mid-century Hollywood films. Even in the glory days of film criticism, it must have been tough to get a job you could feel happy about.

(N.B. that’s only counting cities on the Woodward corridor: Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge, Huntington Woods, Berkley, Royal Oak, Birmingham, Bloomfield Township, Bloomfield Hills, Pontiac.)

Correlation of Yes votes from Oakland County on 2016 @RTAMichigan ballot question to distance from bus stop at Woodward/8 Mile: r= -0.64. Pontiac is the outlier; eliminate it from the analysis and the correlation between distance and support was -0.91.