[ExI] smoke 'em dano

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 8:52 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> > 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. :)
>
> Dan you are a writer from Australia.

What gave you that idea? I've never even been there, though I've got
nothing against the place or its people. :)

> 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.

Little things like that can work for sure. One has to be careful,
though, to make sure they're appropriate. It helps to have someone who
can give feedback if you're making a character or setting up a
situation where you might not have enough background knowledge. This
is one reason why I usually write science fiction or am careful just
making up places and people. I still made an error in a novella I'm
working on that a friend who's a doctor pointed out. I just wrote some
scenes in a completely made up clinic. He pointed out that in actual
hospitals the staff wouldn't behave anything like I said. So back to
revision. :)

> 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.))

I can see that. I think many of the stories are morality plays too:
someone does something bad and they eventually get what's coming to
them.

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

I'll have to check it out. I saw there's a recent reboot.

> 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.

I believe things also move faster too. If you grew up with email being
the main Internet interface, then social media came along and the
world is very different. Now imagine you were raised on My Space, FB,
and Twitter. There's a generation now that sees them as old and now
even Snapchat is old. Etc.

> 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.

I'm not a sportsfan, but I think there are some all-time greats that
still have an audience. But this is like entertainment in general. I
watch a lot of old movies, but few of my friends know who Billy Wider
or John Huston are. :) But I'm old enough to remind when the era of
the blockbuster movie was supposed to have ended -- sometime in the
early 2000s. Yet Hollywood seems to have to discovered the formula of
using comic book material and also doing endless reboots of Star Trek
and the like.

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

I'm not on the ExiPolitics list and fear joining. :) Anyhow, I'm sure
you're all aware there's a Supreme Court vacancy now.

> 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.

Regarding the 1960s, I've been meaning to read more on this, but
there's so much to know. I have some broad outlines of some of the
stuff happening in the US and Europe and obviously big stuff in
Southeast Asia and China. One book I've been meaning to read is Jeff
Riggenbach's book _In Praise of Decadence_. I believe this article of
his from 1979 gives a taste of what might be in the book:

https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/praise-decadence

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/