Cultural Gulfs Tribute to Lucille (I Love Lucy) Ball, Chica Brava

The Woman Behind the Clown

Honorary new member of Chicas Bravas.  Lucy passed 25 years ago.

Sunday AM tribute in the vein of "Cultural Gulfs", and how urban USA markets create an incubator for diversity and equality to triumph in.  USA television became a vehicle for women's rights, cultural integration, and spawned a "Star Trek" culture where the vision of the future is cooperative diversity - the exact opposite of Hitler's Nazi Arian monoculture and Sharia etc.   Thanks, Lucy.

(PS: Funny, I wrote and posted this without even realizing it was the 25th anniversary of her death, I was just inspired by laughing at a rerun of I Love Lucy, and started blogging..."Like laundromats heros are sometimes right under our noses"... written with no clue she's on the cover of Huffington Post today)

Hispanic husband 6 years younger? So?

Rising on my list of heroes. Lucille Ball.  An honorary Chicas Bravas.

Hardest working woman in 1950s showbusiness.

Lucy's insistence on better quality led to invention of live studio taping, multi camera editing rooms. She and Desi negotiated to pay (rather than network pay) for the higher quality in return for the first "syndication" (rerun) ownership rights of their own I Love Lucy show, a smart move that paid for their own studio. She strong-armed Hollywood into accepting America would accept a bicultural husband-wife sitcom, and carried the ball.

What brought them down? Divorce didn't help. But according to this article Lucy got leveraged on production costs for these weird expensive production shows... Star Trek and Mission Impossible - which all the other studios had passed on.

She was scorned by many older, more powerful, Hollywood men. A real glass ceiling pounder. If we had had stronger womens equality in the 50s and 60s, and a kickstarter campaign, Lucy would probably be bigger than George Lucas.

Another Desilu production passed over by bigger Hollywood Studios?  Carl Reiner's Dick Van Dyke Show, which I grew up loving.  She sold Desilu to Gulf and Western in 1967, which combined it with Paramount pictures, a studio G&W bought a year earlier..

And I would add that it was Lucy who muscled in the inter-cultural marriage which made Loving vs. Virginia, the Supreme Court case legaizing all interracial marriages, easier for America to swallow.

Search periodicals like "The Economist" for insights into how Womenomics works.   Glass ceilings (and bamboo ones) hold back Japan, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

How Lucille Ball Made STAR TREK Happen

Published September 08, 2013 by Devin Faraci

Interlude: Geography, DNA, and Functionality

Loving v. Virginia

We have so many unpublished blogs at Good Point Ideas Blog that I'm thinking of publishing in a parallel universe.

The Demanufacturing Chapter was well received, and I'm working on trucking, tech and sorting and admin.

Here's a quick fact, however.  I have successfully transplanted techs from other countries.  I have transplanted Peru techs to the USA, and I've transplanted Malaysia techs to Egypt, and I've transplanted USA techs to Mexico.  And you know what?

It's just like organ transplants.  DNA (race) does not matter.  Borders do not matter.  All that matters is functionality.  If you need a kidney, it doesn't matter if you find the donor ugly, and the citizenship papers don't matter to the doctor.

The circuitry repair works exactly the same.

Another Rich Story Ends: Yadji Moussa

Yadji Moussa was a man I met in Cameroon.  He became my most trusted friend there.  We spent many mornings speaking philosophy, over a cup of sugared tea into which I'd dip the fresh local bread. I trusted him to give it to me straight if I wanted to know the "African Street".  He kept me under his wing.


He told me he had problems in the past, that he had been at "rock bottom", and described those tough times in detail, with humor, making me laugh.  


During the 30 months I lived there, he only seemed to do better and better.  I have written about times that he was a hero in the town of Ngaoundal in Adamawa Province.  He had a way of being covertly confrontational, leaving friends and authorities to puzzle whether he was religiously passive, or feigning self-effacement, or ready to cut to the chase with a direct challenge.

He continued to do better and better after I left Cameroon, and Renee, my peace corps volunteer replacement, agreed he was something special.   They married and had two kids, Innah and Adamou, and returned to the USA to live in Michigan, around 1989 or 1990 I think.


He revisited rock bottom a few times, and the marriage broke up in 2000.   I owed him a lot from my time in Cameroon, and brought him to Vermont to start a business with me.  Yadji worked with me for 12 years in Middlebury.  

Yadji drowned June 21, while I was celebrating my twins birthdays in Arkansas.  I got a lot of calls in the spotty coverage of the Ozarks.  I wrote most of the blog while sitting in my parents living room in Searcy County, trying to decide whether to take my kids canoeing on the Buffalo River.  We decided to return and assist with the arrangements for Yadji, who for many years I described as my best friend, and for many times I was furious with, as only a brother can be.  I've decided to give this rewrite, to give the record another shot, because Yadji Moussa deserves the best.

Happy Loving Day 2012: Right to Share Lives

This is a terrific website, set up to celebrate the outcome of the Loving Case of 1967.  I wrote about the Loving case on Valentine's day.

Don't have time to write much more about it today.   Mr. and Ms. Loving were a real couple who fought for their right to marry regardless of race.

This pertains to Fair Trade Recycling very simply.  The case made in defense of the Virginia law banning their marriage was based on statistics and fear.   They tried to justify the ban on interracial marriage with horrible anecdotes about all the things that can go wrong.

That is how the backers of HR2284 describe my trade with Las Chicas Bravas, refurbishers in southeast Asia, and geeks in Africa.   Because it might go wrong, I should be banned from doing business there.

So we ban Peace Corps volunteers from starting small businesses aimed at proper recycling, repair and refurbishment in the countries they lived in.  Perfect thinking.  It helps you to imagine the attitudes of the people, long passed away, who argued against women's suffrage, argued against voting by non-land-owners, who argued against popular democracy.

We are lucky to be arguing about fair trade recycling, at least from our side of the ocean.  The people being accused of being primitive idiots and having their containers of computers seized by dictators in Africa - not so much.  A ban on the export of used computers, as "e-waste", is based on what someone else is accused of doing, not what we are doing, and not even what most exporters are doing.  The right to share my life with people who repair and recycle computers in countries which need it is not something EPA or Congress or Vermont ANR should attempt to infringe on based on photos of black children taken at landfills.