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

Wonder and Doubt: Solved by Machines

Reading about how IBM's Watson computer is learning to make pastries on NYTimes.   If we had the right Bayesian statistics, the right DNA code (to predict likelihood of gene X "liking" taste Y), and the supercomputer to put them all together... theoretically you'd have a Utopia where everyone always got precisely what they ordered in life.  The right taste, the optimum number of calories.  Maybe Watson can even do Kosher...

Taking the hypothesis of ultra intelligence to its next step, what if we really know the absolute outcome of every recipe we make in life?    Not fake, not "The Truman Show".  What if our experience and judgement and data and correct premises were increased a thousand-fold, or by a million?   If we could almost intuitively anticipate the "butterfly effect?"

It might make life incredibly boring.   Would we be like cattle or ants, grazing?   Grazing on lots of different ideas and information, but all predictable, and it would pass through us like cud.

Or we might replace the "risk" and uncertainty by expanding our horizons geographically, taking what we know and are certain of, and placing ourselves in new frontiers.  "Star Trek" or "Dr. Who" is a way we can always imagine shaking things up, going to other solar systems, to seek out new worlds and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before.

Trying new foods is good.  Eat the same thing, every time, is like ... eating grass.

What if we actually make ourselves feel more in command of all information by reducing the amount of information?  What if we limit our geography so much that we really do know and can anticipate an extremely high percentage of what we encounter?  Instead of a hypothesis where we increase our intellect a million-fold, and then reach outside the solar system, why don't we shrink our system so that the intellect, intelligence, and data we have is preponderant.

If we put our butterflies in fishbowls, or vacuum tubes, their effects will be easier to predict.

When an African really wants to buy something from me... not everything, not all assorted junk, not 75% of the "e-waste", but something rather specific - say a 17" display screen (which will light up in a slum with electric current too weak for a 27"), I may have to admit I don't know what will "ultimately" happen to it.  Perhaps I cannot predict the fate of the monitor in our custody.

If we shred it together with the 32" TVs and obsolete printers and clickety keyboards, and spit out a stream of shredded plastic, shredded copper, aluminum, and steel, drawn by magnets, optical sorters, and eddy currents, then I don't really need Watson to make the decision what to sell anymore.   Everything is now a commodity, a stream of raw material.

Moo.