[ExI] smoke 'em dano

[spike at rainier66.com]

> On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] smoke 'em dano

On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 7:33 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:


>>...show ended with his commanding his deputy "Book em, Dano!" or some variation on that theme.
>
>> https://youtu.be/uVz_kJpv-Fs
>
>>... I completely get it if I need to explain it to people outside the US and young people, no worries.

Thanks! I can understand the reference now. Of course, it doesn't have the same resonance for me. I immediately was thinking Paul Dano had something to do with it, but it made no sense to me. Then again, I don't follow celebrities much, so I was wondering.

Now I also get where the term 5-0 comes from. :)

Regards,

Dan

_______________________________________________


Dan you are a writer from Australia.  A friend of mine and countryman of yours (Damien Broderick) took my suggestion: insert some arcane Americanisms attributable to one of his characters from the states.  He put "Book em, Dan-o" in one of his short stories.  It worked.

This whole thing got me to thinking about cultural fragmentation of all things.

Dan since you are young, I will offer some old-timer stories and perspective, to which other senior Yanks may wish to contribute.

We had only three channels when I was growing up and not much else to do in the evenings but pick one of them.  Central Florida is a stormy place, so there were plenty of evenings when we only got one channel.  Usually CBS was pretty good, so I knew Hawaii Five 0 better than the other cop shows (eeeeeverything was cop shows and detectives in the 1960s as westerns faded in popularity from over-use (cop shows provided the titillating danger and offered sex in addition.))

HA-5-0 was pretty good as cop shows go: McGarrett had style, and the stories were sophisticated enough to be interesting.

Where I am going with the cultural fracturing: back in the olden days, people just had common references which did span generations.  Now we have thousands of channels on TV alone, never mind the internet which is the equivalent of a million-channel TV, which changes everything: we now have a difficult time coming up with a name that even half of the Yanks ever heard of, so... our new universally-known cultural icons are... politicians.  

Even popular sports stars are no longer cultural icons really, for we have hundreds of sports now whereas it used to be four: football, baseball, boxing and basketball, in that order.  So... sports stars are not universally-known, entertainers are not, but politicians are.  I see this as most unhealthy, for we imagine them to have more power than they really do, the result of which is we give them more power than they deserve.

But I hope to keep it lighthearted and not get us booted over to ExiPolitics.

Every society has its silliness, and the USA is a powerfully-silly place.  Of all of them, the 60s were a most powerfully silly decade.  I could go on and on.  References to 1960s American silliness would add to your stories, particularly if it is arcane and caused the reader to go to the internet to look up what you are talking about.  I enjoyed Damien's aussie-isms that I needed to look up.

spike