Loaf and Found

An incredibly strange “industrial musical” created, performed and released as a “souvenir” to employees and customers by the American Standard bathroom fixtures company.  From 1969.  Check out WFMU’s Beware of the Blog to  listen to this warped artifact of late sixties “promotainment”.  This one made an appearance as one of “Dave’s Record Collection” on the Late Show.

From the Liner Notes:

The Bathrooms are Coming premiered a new decade of bathroom fixtures born out of exhaustive human and product research by American-Standard. The story began with the introduction of a mythical Greek goddess Femma, the epitome of all women’s attitudes, reflections and desires and the leader of all women’s movements. In the play Femma is called upon by other women to start a bathroom revolution – “Join the fight for bathroom safety, Femma…the fight for beauty and luxury. We need freedom from bathroom oppression. Join the fight for better bathrooms.”

And so it was that Femma led the story. It began with a declaration that “plumbing” is a feminine business, shoring a profile of the “woman of the 70’s,” and the case for change against the status quo, She carried the audience through the Cornell research, to a view of markets in terms of people. Then, the Revolution unfolded in terms of new attitudes, new programs. Then one by one, the real stars of the show were revealed – Economy Wall Surround, Proximatics, Ultra Bath, Bone and Spectra 70.

We sincerely hope that this delightful music helps you to recapture the excitement, color and laughter of the original show.

Sociologists have developed elaborate theories of who spreads gossip and news — who tells whom, who matters most in social networks — but they’ve had less success measuring what kind of information travels fastest. Do people prefer to spread good news or bad news? Would we rather scandalize or enlighten? Which stories do social creatures want to share, and why?

Now some answers are emerging thanks to a rich new source of data: you, Dear Reader.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.) {Read on}

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When Sachin Tendulkar travelled to Pakistan to face one of the finest bowling attacks ever assembled in cricket, Michael Schumacher was yet to race a F1 car, Lance Armstrong had never been to the Tour de France, Diego Maradona was still the captain of a world champion Argentina team, Pete Sampras had never won a Grand Slam.

When Tendulkar embarked on a glorious career taming Imran and company, Roger Federer was a name unheard of; Lionel Messi was in his nappies, Usain Bolt was an unknown kid in the Jamaican backwaters. The Berlin Wall was still intact, USSR was one big, big country, Dr Manmohan Singh was yet to “open” the Nehruvian economy.

It seems while Time was having his toll on every individual on the face of this planet, he excused one man. Time stands frozen in front of Sachin Tendulkar. We have had champions, we have had legends, but we have never had another Sachin Tendulkar and we never will.

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