posty

https://deadline.com/2022/12/george-newall-dead-schoolhouse-rock-obituary-1235193577/ George Newall, who was an advertising agency creative director in the early 1970s when he helped create what would become one of TV’s most beloved and educational children’s titles with Schoolhouse Rock!, died Nov. 30 at a hospital near his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 88. His death was announced to The New York Times by his wife Lisa Maxwell, who said the cause was cardiopulmonary arrest. The series of interstitial animated shorts that ran on Saturday mornings from 1973 to 1984 (later revived in the ’90s) got their start in the early 1970s when ad exec David McCall of the McCaffrey & McCall asked Newall, the agency’s creative director, to set multiplication tables to music to assist McCall’s young son. Newall soon assembled a songwriting team that included Ben Tucker and Bob Dorough, and their output quickly inspired the agency’s art director Tom Yohe to add illustrations. The end result was a series of short films that the agency presented to client Michael Eisner, then director of children’s programming at ABC, and Schoolhouse Rock! was born. The shorts, presented during ABC’s Saturday morning cartoon block, would include such inspired titles as “Conjunction Junction,” “I’m Just A Bill” and “Three Is A Magic Number” and win four Emmy Awards. With its whimsical approach to educational content, Schoolhouse Rock! became a generational touchstone of the 1970s and ’80s, teaching young viewers about grammar, science, math, civics, history and economics. Newall and Yohe co-wrote Schoolhouse Rock! The Official Guide in 1996, the same year Eisner’s Walt Disney Company acquired the franchise. McCall died in 1999, Yohe in 2000, Tucker in 2013 and Dorough in 2018. Newall is survived by his wife, a stepson, and three sisters.

A high profile leftist American... If you or me got detained, we would be rotting inside the cell...

Got nothing more to say at the moment, except... 200

Terri Schiavo?

She will probably get the medal of freedom now...

I wonder if she loves the United States now?

Yeah I saw that. Looks like Judge’s 62 might not be legit…

MLB can’t trade picks unless they are the competitive balance picks at the end of the first round…

That is the McDLT...

What if you lost your job immediately and couldn't find work for over a year or two?

What a headline... https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/05/shark-week-diversity-study/ Lisa Whitenack loved sharks as a kid. She spent rainy days leafing through a guide to sharks in Reader’s Digest. Every summer, she would watch “Shark Week,” Discovery’s annual TV event that spotlights the ocean predator with seven days of dedicated programming. But when the scientists appeared on her TV screen, she rarely saw any women she could look up to. “Why would I know I could do that?” Whitenack said. “I don’t come from a family of scientists. I didn’t see very many people that looked like me on television.” Whitenack, now a biology professor at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., found her way into shark research anyway. When the pandemic lockdowns came in 2020, she saw an opportunity to study the source of her old misconceptions. Was “Shark Week” feeding audiences the wrong messages about sharks — and who studies them? Whitenack led a team of researchers to examine hundreds of “Shark Week” episodes that aired between 1988 and 2020. In a study published last month by the Public Library of Science, their research claims that Discovery’s programming emphasized negative messages about sharks, lacked useful messaging about shark conservation and overwhelmingly featured White men as experts — including several with the same name. The programming featured more White experts and commentators named “Mike” than women, said David Shiffman, a conservationist at Arizona State University who was a co-author of the study. “When there are hundreds of people of color interested who work in this field, [and] when my field is more than half women, maybe it’s not an accident anymore that they’re only featuring White men,” Shiffman said. Discovery did not respond to a request for comment on the study’s findings. The company told NBC Boston that it wouldn’t comment on a study “that has yet to pass any scientific approvals” after a preliminary version was presented 2021. It has since undergone a scientific review, Whitenack said. “Shark Week,” a 34-year tradition and consistent ratings draw for Discovery, has faced criticism in the past. Scientists and TV critics blasted the event in 2020 for announcing a roster of TV specials that featured six White men out of eight named experts. Whitenack’s study found that the trend persisted throughout almost all of the television event’s history. Over 90 percent of the 229 experts featured in 201 “Shark Week” episodes were White, the study found, and about 78 percent were men. Carlee Bohannon, a marine biologist and co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences, praised the study for putting numbers to her and her colleagues’ long-standing concerns about diversity in both the media and shark science. When Bohannon founded her organization with three other Black scientists in 2020, it was the first time any of them had met other Black women in their field. “We all grew up seeing one type of person on TV,” Bohannon said. “‘Shark Week’ was really the biggest thing, and it was always filled with White men.” According to a separate diversity study co-written by Shiffman, more than half of the members of the American Elasmobranch Society, an academic group supporting the study of sharks and other fish, are women, but over 70 percent of the group’s leadership positions have been held by men. Women in marine sciences can also face a misogynistic culture, marine biologist Catherine Macdonald wrote in Scientific American in 2020. “‘Shark Week’ further concentrates power (in the form of publicity and media attention) in the hands of white male ‘featured scientists,’ exacerbating academic power imbalances,” Macdonald wrote. In the latest study, Whitenack and the other researchers also found that more “Shark Week” episodes included stories of attacks and other fearmongering messaging than positive language describing sharks as “awe-inspiring” or ecologically important, which the study called a missed opportunity. “Shark Week” also lacked effective messaging about conservation issues, researchers said. Though Discovery has used the show to promote legislation protecting sharks, “Shark Week” rarely gave viewers actionable information about conservation issues, such as avoiding seafoods caught in ways that also trap and harm sharks, the study claims. But Whitenack and Bohannon agreed that the biggest concern was with the program’s lack of diversity and how that might shape young scientists’ perceptions of marine biology and whether they could enter the field. “Diversity in people brings diversity in thought, which ultimately brings innovation,” Bohannon said. “Being able to see someone who looks like you in this field really has an impact.” Whitenack said Discovery hasn’t contacted the research group. In 2020, National Geographic developed a partnership with Minorities in Shark Sciences that allowed members of the organization to participate in the network’s competing TV program, “SharkFest,” Bohannon said. Seven scientists of color from the group appeared in this year’s programming. Bohannon appeared on “SharkFest” twice to talk about nurse sharks in the Bahamas and how they have adapted to swim in shallow water. It felt like a milestone — one she wishes more of her peers get to experience. “Just seeing myself on TV,” Bohannon said, “it was very surreal.”

Jesus wiff, do you even know how to Google? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/16-days-trapped-pearl-harbor-battleship/

Coach isn't in the initial list...

This is probably what would happen... I hope we never have to find out though as it is still scary to think that it might not unite us for a little bit...

I have always wondered about that now... If 9/11 happened today, and it was the first time ever, I wonder if this statement would still be true? I hope it would be, but as divided as this country is now, I am not convinced...