View from my seat while eating lunch in downtown Baltimore at the corner of Holliday and Baltimore Streets, at the Big Apple Tree Café on Tuesday, September 1, 2009
BALTIMORE — A string of random attacks in downtown Baltimore has prompted police to beef up patrols around the Inner Harbor and other tourist-friendly areas.
In several incidents, tourists and city residents have been beaten by roving groups of young people who say little and take nothing from their victims.
The victims include an off-duty police officer from New Jersey and his girlfriend, who said they were beaten by a group of young men and women. The officer, George Williams, wrote a letter to Mayor Sheila Dixon saying that they now feel unsafe in Baltimore.
[…]
20090601 Baltimore police try to quell violence downtown
As much as I appreciated P. Kenneth Burns calling to our attention the need of Baltimore mayor Dixon to go outside of the city for support for her re-election campaign, I was particularly intrigued with the reference to the “Last Train to Clarksville.”
And only Mr. Burns knows if he was referring to mayor Dixon’s trip to Howard County in the manner in which the 1966 Monkees’ meant it… Or if he was referring to mayor Dixon and “Betamax” metaphorically or if it is a coincidence…
But what a trip down memory lane that reference causes an aging Baby Boomer such as me.Although, I gotta tell ya, “The Monkees” were a little lame for my taste to put it mildly; it nevertheless brings back a time and place from many years ago.
“It was 40 years ago last Saturday, June 2, 1967, when the Beatles released their eighth album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Although musical taste can be fiercely debated, many music critics and publications consider this album to be one of the most influential of all time. Rolling Sto...”
“The Last Train to Clarksville,” from 1966, may be considered to be a pop song and to be sure, it certainly has a bubblegum feel and sound to it.Nevertheless the song was about a serious dynamic in the lives of young men eligible for military duty.
The song, with its “pop flavor” and seemingly light-hearted approach is forever engrained in my head as a great example of cognitive dissonance…
The song is about a man who is trying to arrange one last date with his sweetheart because he has been drafted and he is about to be deployed to Vietnam.Listen for :
'Cause I'm leavin' in the morning
And I must see you again
We'll have one more night together
'Til the morning brings my train.
And I must go, oh, no, no, no!
Oh, no, no, no!
And I don't know if I'm ever coming home.
And the reference to “Betamax players[2] in home” was equally a hoot.Yes, I actually still have content on old “beta” tapes.”And I thought some of the data migration from my old columns and short stories in DOS-based “Word Perfect” was hard…
Meanwhile if you are not reading Mr. Burn’s excellent work at Maryland Politics Today,” there is no better time than now….Err, after ya watch, “The Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees:
Oh what the heck…Let’s hear more.This is a song that I did like:
The first half-inch, analog videocassette recorder (VCR) format, introduced by Sony in 1975 and commonly known as "Beta." The first Betamax cassettes held only one hour of video, but the capacity was subsequently increased to hold an entire movie. Sony later introduced Beta Hi-fi, which improved audio quality, and SuperBeta, which offered a better image.
Beta Vs. VHS
One year after Beta was introduced, the VHS format came out with a slightly larger cassette that held a full movie from the start. VHS began to overtake Beta almost immediately, but for several years, both formats were widely used, and pre-packaged movies were offered in both Beta andVHS. By the late 1980s, Beta had been almost entirely eclipsed by VHS, although Betamax machines were still manufactured by Sony until 2002.
Betamaxed!
The Betamax technology was considered to have superior image quality over VHS, but was hardly noticeable on ordinary home equipment, especially if the recording was done off the air and not from a high-quality master tape. To this day however, "Betamaxed" refers to a superior technology that is overtaken by an inferior one. See VHS, helical scan, Beta/VHS debacle and Betacam.
