{"id":17941,"date":"2015-12-19T11:43:50","date_gmt":"2015-12-19T18:43:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17941"},"modified":"2015-12-19T11:43:50","modified_gmt":"2015-12-19T18:43:50","slug":"smile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17941","title":{"rendered":"Smile!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"boy<\/a>I posted this vintage Christmas card to Facebook to amuse my friends. The kid’s woeful expression prompted a few comments. Really, though, if you study\u00a019th and early 20th century portraits, photos, and illustrations,\u00a0unsmiling faces were\u00a0the rule rather than the exception. People always looked somber. I started to wonder why that was.<\/p>\n

Well, for one thing, you had to hold still, not just for an instant but for a second or two, in the early days of photography; longer yet if you were modeling for a drawing or painting. How hard it is to hold a smile or grin? Pretty hard, unless you’re The Joker. And then there were the teeth. Before modern dentistry, nearly everyone had bad teeth, and people with bad teeth tend to keep them hidden. These seemed the likeliest explanations to me.<\/p>\n

Then I read this, a Washington Post article titled “Why people used to look so serious in photos but now have big smiles<\/a>.” Turns out we’ve been taught to smile when being photographed, and to expect to see smiling people in photos, by the same people who taught us to worry about bad breath and B.O.<\/p>\n

But to smile for the camera, to mug and pose, is strictly a learned habit. Historians say that the photographic grin not only a recent ritual, but also a somewhat artificial one:\u00a0abetted by the camera industry, and entwined with the rise of cheerfulness as an American cultural norm.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This part rather got under my skin:<\/p>\n

Though photography was still relatively new in the 1850s, portraiture was not, and tradition said that proper people should not grin or bare their teeth in their pictures. Big smiles were considered silly, childish, or downright wicked.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the fine arts a grin was only characteristic of peasants, drunkards, children, and halfwits, suggesting low class or some other deficiency,\u201d Kotchemidova writes, citing research from historian Fred Schroeder.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Damn you, Don Draper! I’ll never smile for a camera again.<\/p>\n

Curious, too, that Jeff Guo, the Washington Post reporter, wrote his article right about the time I posted that vintage Christmas card to Facebook. Maybe\u00a0I’ve a wider circle of readers than I\u00a0thought.<\/p>\n

\n

This week, and specifically December 17th, marked\u00a0the 112th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight<\/a>. The 17th\u00a0was also the 80th anniversary of the Douglas DC-3<\/a>.\u00a0I wonder if\u00a0Donald Douglas intentionally chose that day for the new airliner’s first flight\u00a0… he had to have, no? By the way, the first production DC-3s were actually DSTs (Douglas Sleeper Transports) … the DC-3\u00a0(DC=Douglas Commercial),\u00a0the version without sleeper berths, came a little later.<\/p>\n

A little additional research<\/a>: the first flight of\u00a0the Boeing B-47 Stratojet\u00a0was December 17, 1947. The first powered flight of SpaceShipOne<\/a>\u00a0was on the same day in 2003. Gotta love Wikipedia, amirite?<\/p>\n

\n

Got an email from Sirius\/XM, offering\u00a0me a free two-month trial. The one-year-old GMC truck we bought came with it originally, and I’m sure they’d love to sell me a new subscription. All I had to do to accept the free trial was to go online and ask Sirius to send an activation signal to my truck. Normally I’d don my\u00a0hair shirt and say no, not gonna take a free sample of something I’m not gonna buy, but hey, it’s Christmas, so what the hell.<\/p>\n

As before (I had a Sirius subscription several years ago, before it merged with XM), I quickly zeroed in on five of the 140 or so\u00a0channels they offer: classic vinyl rock, real (not “lite”) jazz, big band swing, classical, and opera. It’s pretty sweet, although there’s no easy way to go from channel 26 (classic vinyl) to 74 (swing bands): the\u00a0truck radio doesn’t let you\u00a0earmark\u00a0favorite Sirius\/XM channels, as it does favorite FM stations, so you\u00a0have to call up a complicated menu and touch tiny numbers\u00a0on a screen, not something you want to be doing while driving.<\/p>\n

Pandora, where you set up your own stations, is far more flexible in terms of finding the music you\u00a0like (I have a Manhattan Transfer station, for example, and one for space music), and if you have a newish vehicle with Bluetooth you can install Pandora on a smart phone and run it through your car radio. Changing\u00a0stations while driving, however, is even more dangerous: you have to punch in menu commands on your tiny-ass cell phone screen. I wonder if tech companies are working on voice-activated commands for Sirius\/XM and Pandora automotive applications. They need to be.<\/p>\n

Every now and then a speeding car\u00a0will crash into an overpass abutment, killing everyone inside. With no first-hand witnesses, it’s anyone’s guess what\u00a0happened. Could have been a wasp. Or a spider. A burning cigarette accidentally dropped in the driver’s crotch. Trying to change Pandora stations on an iPhone.<\/p>\n

Maybe self-driving cars aren’t such a bad idea.<\/p>\n

\n

Speaking of not smiling, I scolded a lady for spamming Facebook with discount Ray-Ban ads. She wasn’t\u00a0a Facebook friend (and she for sure will never be now), but she spammed a friend with it\u00a0and as a result it\u00a0showed up in my news feed.\u00a0Ray-Ban spam makes me see red, so I used strong language. “But my account was hacked,” she said. Of course<\/em> she’d say that. That’s what they all say. Bullshit. She clicked on something.<\/p>\n

Two days later? More Ray-Ban spam in my news feed. Another friend of a friend.<\/p>\n

Good lord, people, stop clicking on shit, okay?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I posted this vintage Christmas card to Facebook to amuse my friends. The kid’s woeful expression prompted a few comments. Really, though, if you study\u00a019th and early 20th century portraits, photos, and illustrations,\u00a0unsmiling faces were\u00a0the rule rather than the exception. People always looked somber. I started to wonder why that was. Well, for one thing, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,3,64,2,827,6],"tags":[1943,2020,145,2019,2022,2021,966,229],"class_list":["post-17941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumerism","category-flying","category-history","category-personal","category-social-media","category-a-series-of-tubes","tag-dc-3","tag-december-17","tag-facebook","tag-kodak","tag-pandora","tag-siriusxm","tag-spam","tag-wright-brothers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17941"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17952,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17941\/revisions\/17952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}