Douglas Willis is a native Houstonian, alumnus of the University of St. Thomas (Houston, Texas), contributor to Wikipedia (a "Wikipedian" / "Wikieditor") and House/Trance addict!
This is my "whatever" page - you know,
whatever catches my and your interest in music, travel, history, current events, religion, politics, etc.
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HISTORY AND HAPPENINGS . . .
AND A SALUTE TO . . .
Marshall McLuhan . . .
BOOKS & ARTICLES REVIEW
Stunning!
My Disclaimer - legal and otherwise . . . My "cup of tea" may not be yours! This page reflects my opinions, likes and affliations - no mis-representation, solicitation or monetary gain is intended by it - my page is presented solely for your enjoyment and information.
Douglas Willis
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
SHIRLEY JACKSON
JAMES RHODES
MUSIC . . . Starting with . . . .
DYSTOPIAN PARADISE
ON TO "TRANCELAND" . . .
ORSON WELLES
MOTHER JONES
AND STOP AT THE HOUSE BEFORE LEAVING . . .
THOMAS STERNS ELIOT
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher of communication theory and a public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. McLuhan is known for coining the expressions the medium is the message and the global village, and for predicting theWorld Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented. Although he was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. With the arrival of the internet, however, interest in his work and perspective has renewed.
In the early 1950s, McLuhan began the Communication and Culture seminars, funded by the Ford Foundation, at the University of Toronto. As his reputation grew, he received a growing number of offers from other universities and, to keep him, the university created the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963. He published his first major work during this period: The Mechanical Bride (1951) was an examination of the effect of advertising on society and culture. He also produced an important journal, Explorations, with Edmund Carpenter, throughout the 1950s. Together with Harold Innis, Eric A. Havelock, and Northrop Frye, McLuhan and Carpenter have been characterized as the Toronto School of communication theory. McLuhan remained at the University of Toronto through 1979, spending much of this time as head of his Centre for Culture and Technology.McLuhan was credited with coining the phrase Turn on, tune in, drop out by its popularizer, Timothy Leary, in the 1960s.
In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that slogan was "given to him" by McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary said McLuhan "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that’s a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'"
AND A LITTLE EDM NEVER HURT ANYONE . . .
ELECTRONICA . . .
CIRCUIT . . . and stayed tuned for MORE!!
And here is Nicky Romero - Protocol Radio 90
4 May 2014
"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."
Graham Greene
International Herald Tribune (October 7, 1977)
I'm thinking about . . .
NEW AND NOTABLE . . .
. . .walking the Camino!
A largely anecdotal account of the SS Ahnenherbe research project. Driven by the ideological fixations of Heinrich Himmler and other prominent Nazis, the Ahnenherbe was founded to validate the Nazi idea of Aryan supremacy by tracing Aryan supremacy thoughout human history and prehistory. This effort involved some truly strange ideas and unusual, to say the least, efforts. Examples include an expedition to Tibet to look for Aryan conquerors of Inner Asia and ethnomusicological investigations in Finland to recover lost Aryan religion. Some of the work of the Annenherbe was bound up with even stranger ideas such as the World Ice theory and Himmler's delusional search for ancient super weapons. Pringle also discusses the involvement of the Ahnenherbe in Nazi efforts to find a system for racial classification and the horrible crimes of the Holocaust.
Pringle, an experienced science journalist, clearly did a significant amount of archival research for this book and some of the information is novel. Written well, this book is a useful introduction to the bizarre Nazi ideology. Pringle, however, is not a historian and this book has some significant shortcomings. This is not a systematic history. The later chapters on expansion of Ahnenherbe activities and involvement in the Holocaust don't provide the necessary context on the huge expansion of the SS during WWII. Nor were the individuals described by Pringle an aberration. The SS successfully recruited a substantial number of well educated and talented individuals. Similarly, understanding the Nazi racial ideology requires some context about 19th and early 20th century racism. While many of the ideas pursued by the Ahnenherbe were bizarre, they are easier to understand in context. The idea that you could recover crucial features of vanished prehistoric cultures by studying folk traditions was pursued by prominent mainstream scholars well into the 1960s.
9 August 1945 – World War II: Nagasaki is devastated when an atomic bomb is dropped by the United States Army Air Force
On August 9, 1945, Nagasaki was the target of the United States' second atomic bomb attack at 11:02 a.m., when the north of the city was destroyed in less than a second, and an estimated 40,000 people were killed instantly. According to the statistics published by the city of Nagasaki, an estimated 73,884 people died and 74,909 people were injured by the bomb codenamed "Fat Man" by the end of 1945. The original target for the bomb was Kokura but as this was obscured by clouds on the day it was replaced by Nagasaki, an important port in the vicinity.
