Happy 32nd anniversary! Of what? It’s the 32nd anniversary of the first photo posted to the World Wide Web, of course! It was a photo of Les Horribles Cernettes (The Horrible Cernettes), a spoof rock band (“the one and only High Energy Rock Band”) made up of employees at CERN when Tim Berners-Lee was developing the WWW. The initials of the band, LHC, are the same as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
It’s also the 96th birthday of Baddiewinkle, or Helen Ruth Elam, who was an internet sensation in 2016 for her tag line “Stealing Your Man Since 1928.” She was one of Tme Magazine’s “30 Most Influential People on the Internet” in 2016, and was “Instagrammer of the Year” then. If I had any social media accounts I could report whether Baddiewinkle is still active (as of about 2020 she still had millions of followers), but I don’t.
The rise of social media was a profound paradigm shift in the way individuals interact, at least remotely. And we wouldn’t be calling it a “paradigm shift” except for Thomas Kuhn, who was born July 18, 1922 in Ohio in the US. Kuhn was a philosopher of science who wrote the 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which both introduced the term and prompted a paradigm shift in the understanding of how scientific knowledge progresses.
A paradigm shift, in the fairly rigorous use of the term in Kuhn’s work, involves a change in understanding from one fundamental model to another. Everything changes, from understanding of the processes involved to the language used. That would have been something S.I. Hayakawa would have found both interesting and confirmative. Hayakawa (guess what, born July 18, 1906) was (sometimes) an academic, and wrote Language in Thought and Action in 1939. It was about “general semantics,” which is a slightly weird field that studies how observable phenomena are perceived, and our perceptions are influenced (and altered) by the language we use to describe them. In turn, the language shapes cognitive and emotional responses. The field is “slightly weird” (my own description) because it’s not exactly a scientific field on its own, and occasionally veers into screwball ideas promulgated by folks who are not exactly scientific in their methods or claims. Hayakawa’s book is a good read though, as is Kuhn’s (that is, they’re both short and not written in academic jargon). Hayakawa himself was a colorful character. After academia he entered national US politics and won a Senate seat in 1976. He took a relaxed attitude toward being a US Senator and didn’t seem to care much about attending votes. He was also incredibly quotable. At the time there was a debate in the US about the Panama Canal and whether to transfer possession to Panama. Hayakawa opined “We should keep the Panama Canal. After all, we stole it fair and square.” (He voted for the transfer, though.)
On a day like this I can’t close without mentioning that it’s also the day Hunter S. Thompson was born in 1937. Thompson was a journalist and author who became famous in the 1970s for his books Hell’s Angels (about the motorcycle club; he lived with them for a year to research the book) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, about the failure of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and corruption at the highest levels of US politics (the infamous “I am not a crook” Richard Nixon was president around that time. TL;DR: yes, he was a crook). Thompson was sort of the epitome of colorful characters. His reports about the quantities of drugs and alcohol he claimed to regularly consumed are, well, pretty hard to believe, but his reporting was sharp and insightful but expressed, um, spiritedly. He also loved guns, especially machine guns. Which I guess might be appropriate, since he shared a birthday with American gangster Machine Gun Kelly, who was born in 1900. Kelly’s real name was George Barnes, and like many (possibly most) of the well-known US criminals in the 1920s and 1930s, owed his underworld career to the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, which in 1919 banned the sale, transportation and importation of alcoholic beverages. It was repealed in 1933, but its most lasting effect was the creation of organized crime networks, which evidently still exist.
As Hunter Thompson observed, “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
