Telephone to glory?

Something a bit curious I found on Tumblr, via Cory Doctorow. When I first looked at it I misunderstood it as some sort of telemarketing for Jesus type of deal (and wondered how many of the 70,000 individuals on the back cover were happy to have their day interrupted by Harold trying to palm God off onto them in the middle of dinner), but then I realised it was actually one of those things people call into… and how did they get people to do that? Well, as I found by a little extra research, by being ever so slightly deceptive…

More than a year ago a Seventh-day Ad­ventist layman visited me in my office in Atlanta to interest me in purchasing a Code-a-phone. Now a Code-a-phone is a telephone answering machine capable of giving as much as a three-minute message and also capable of receiving and record­ing a message from one who calls. This layman suggested that it might be possible to give Bible studies over the telephone. […] Arrangements were made, the telephone line was installed, the ma­chine was delivered to the office, and I re­corded the first message. […] We called a newspaper and put the ad in the personal column of its classified section: “DO YOU NEED AD­VICE? DIAL 288-1666.”

https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1967/11/the-magic-of-telephone-evangelism

I suppose telling people upfront that “this ad has been placed by a cranky 19th-century semi-cult” might’ve put people off, and this vague enough to be meaningless thing might at least have attracted some people’s curiosity. Which, according to Harold in the above article, it did:

Of the 650 people who called the first week of operation more than 100 gave their name and mailing address. In just a few weeks our line was so busy all day long that we installed a second telephone and a second answering machine. In another few weeks the two machines were so busy we needed a third, then a fourth. Our four Code-a-phones are now giving our two­-and-a-half-minute message twenty-four hours every day and are receiving names and addresses by the hundreds […]
In about eight months 80,000 have called and listened to our daily program in the city of Atlanta. Of that number 11,500 have given their name and mailing ad­dress to receive our free Bible course. You can readily see that this is a way by which the masses can be reached on an individual basis.

Which, however, is an awful lot more people not doing that, and I do wonder just how unhappy some people would’ve been having called this mysterious phone number only to find Adventism at the other end. At least Harold acknowledges that sort of thing did happen, but that doesn’t make it any better; I presume, too, that they still made money off the 70,000-odd they didn’t succeed in selling their thing to, cos I daresay that phone call wasn’t free… I feel weirdly sure the money the Adventists would’ve made from this thing mattered more than the 11,500 people they got addresses from (wonder how many of the latter actually persisted with them afterwards)…

January 26

It’s nothing if not a complicated day here in Australia today, what with our complicated history and our… mixed response to that in the present day. I confess my own response has been blunt in the past, given my own Scottish ancestry; England has been fucking over my folks’ old country for several centuries longer than this one. You’d think I’d be more sympathetic to our indigenous cousins on that account but no, I wasn’t, which is something I’m not proud of…

Anyway, I found the above image on the Aboriginal Tent Embassy FB page nearly ten years ago, it turned up in my FB memories today, and, well, it offers a perspective I’d never considered before that time. I’m still somewhat indifferent to Australia Day as such cos, let’s face it, I’m not affected by it, but there’s a lot of people who are affected by it and I have more sympathy for them these days than I once did. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think the majority of people here give a fuck about the national day itself and wouldn’t care about the date being changed as long as they don’t lose a public holiday…

It’s spelled Raymond Luxury-Yacht

Spotted this on Mastodon (Burlington Free Press for that date, apparently). I’ve seen the “jass” spelling before (they were the Original Dixieland “Jass” Band and their first record was “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step” after all, even if they adopted the -zz spelling within a year of the recording) but “jacz” and “jasz” are new to me. The -zz spelling seems… you know, exactly right for the music, but that could just be because that how it’s been for the last hundred-plus years. Eubie Blake said “jass” was considered a Very Bad Word, hence maybe the -zz spelling (a bit softer and sounds less like “ass”?). I wonder if jacz or jasz would’ve ever stood a chance given how Slavic they look by comparison…

The Space Merchants

First book for the year at last (we are clearly not out of the reading slump yet). I’ve had ebook copies of the Library of America’s series of American SF of the 50s and 60s, and I decided to finally kick the year off by breaking into those… starting off with messrs Pohl & Kornbluth’s Space Merchants from 1952. I’ve never been 100% sure how I feel about SF literature, but I have admittedly simply never read a lot of the generally acknowledged classics in the genre, so I should probably do that…

Anyway, I liked this one, some time in the future the US is very much ruled by competing advertising agencies (corporations have senators and the presidency is inherited), and our hero is an exec at one of these agencies charged with solving the ultimate problem: how to sell the colonisation of Venus. Basically what ensues is a kind of futurist corporate thriller (the other big agency is not happy at the exploitation of Venus being stolen from them) embedded in a somewhat acrid satire of 50s American concerns, with a conservationist organisation clearly meant as a stand-in for communism; plot isn’t always the clearest when it comes to who’s doing what and why, some aspects are only thinly explained, but on the whole a decent read from start to finish.

Well that’s encouraging

The Doomsday Clock has apparently never been this far advanced in the 75 years since it was first conceived of, mostly thanks to the invasion of Ukraine. (I do feel there’s an element of fingerpointing in how the website specifically offers Russian and Ukrainian translations…) Looking at the history of changes to the clock over the decades, that means it’s not even quite as bad as the 80s when I think we all just expected nuclear war as a matter of course, something Reagan would get around to whenever his astrologer said it was a good time to do it. I love living in the modern world…

When did you even start?

One thing I hate about Youtube is these fucking bot-produced “motivation” channels that it keeps recommending to me. I had to kind of laugh at this one, called WAKE UP, capitals used advisedly, cos it recommended me a video about Jordan B. Peterson (as an awful lot of these channels do, which is a large part of why I hate them) called “Stop Being the Nice Guy”. Which is, clearly, something I don’t think Jurr Durr ever started being in the first place…

Anyway, went to see what other nuggets of “wisdom” this channel had and, well, I found the above three “Stop Being the Nice Guy” videos in a row, two by Peterson and there’s a THIRD by him further down the page. The third one in the row above is, of course, by Andrew Tate, whose cult is even more obnoxious that Peterson’s and who seems to be the other main source of videos for the channel. Like Peterson, I don’t think that being a “nice guy” (even in the Elliot Rodger “I’m the perfect gentleman!” way) is something Emory has ever suffered from… This appears to be the channel’s earliest video and it comes from him:

“Time to up wake”? And this is a more recent one:

Yeah. That seems more like him. Parenthetically, there was yet another “Stop Being the Nice Guy” video featuring Tate immediately after this one. But I suppose “WAKE UP” works better as a Youtube channel name than “BE A CUNT”, even though the latter appears to be the message it really wants to convey…

950,000?

So I just discovered these are a thing:

NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND VOLTS? I can’t find anything online that agrees about how dangerous voltages of this sort are (as little as 50V could kill you but 10,000V might not?), and indeed I’m finding stuff saying 950,000V here is advertising bullshit and current flow is what you should really worry about… but even if it is advertising bullshit, I’m still a bit worried about who would want something that theoretically deadly and why…

Anyway, I heard about Hike N Strike via Stephen Colbert, funnily enough, whose latest monologue addressed some January 6 insurrectionists being jailed, one of whom was a guy called Richard Barnett, the guy who was photographed in Nancy Pelosi’s office, and who was just found guilty on all counts including entering with a deadly or dangerous weapon… the weapon in question being one of these Hike N Strike things. Though, hilariously, he apparently tried to claim it wasn’t dangerous cos it had been in the shower with him the day before; I can only suppose there was no toaster he could take in the bath with him…

Lena

This was fascinating viewing. I think I may have been dimly aware that “the Lena image” was a thing, I have somewhat vague memories of reading somewhere that an image from Playboy had played some sort of key role in the development of digital image processing, but I knew nothing else apart from that… so this was really educational, and I have a lot better understanding of why Lena was and is important, and what she means for the industry and the culture at large.