This Toto song just came up on my iTunes shuffle and it made me think about how crazy it is that there’s this handful of engineers who’s work has had this huge, incredibly outsized impact on how popular music sounds: Moog, Scholz, whoever wrote the Antares autotune routine, whoever put together the sample set for the Fairlight CMI (ORCH5), Roger Linn, etc. So I was looking up who designed the original Eventide Harmonizer (fair or not, Toto puts you in the mind of old Eventide hardware) and I found this on the Eventide webpage about the H910, the original Eventide pitch processor that is on old Bowie tracks, etc:

Early customers included New York City’s Channel 5 putting an H910 to work, downward pitch shifting the audio portion of “I Love Lucy” reruns that were sped up to squeeze in more commercials.

Elsewhere on the internet, it says that the idea was that if you sped up the tape, you could edit in a few more commercials, but the audio would end up being all pitched up, so you need to be able to do a pitch-without-time-change to get the dialog and such back to normal human sound. The thing is, how many people saw I Love Lucy when it was originally on? How widespread was this practice? Do we all know Lucy’s madcap pace from these sped-up reruns? Is this the comedy equivalent of a sped-up martial arts sequence? Maybe in the original, Lucy looked like a slacker when she wasn’t able to keep up with the assembly line at the bon-bon factory. How much of its manic energy comes from being replayed sped up?

…And the pages that inspired them:

• But Mom!: Various moms from different subcultures take their middle-school aged daughters back-to-school shopping. Ideally the subcultures the mothers and daughters identify with are as different as possible, and the kids as awkwardly middle-schooly as possible, and the moms as anxious as possible, The prototype episode in my mind has a Berkeley urban farmer with a long grey ponytail agreeing to take her sparkly daughter to Sephora as long as she reads this Naomi Wolf book. During this exchange, the daughter’s eyes never leave her phone’s screen.
• Rapemen: Shellac and Odd Future compete to make the most money on a ‘tour’ of the world They don’t have any shows booked and they never know where they are going. The producers drop them off in each city and we watch them scrambling around to see who can make the most money while they are in town by booking a show, doing in-stores, selling merch. Etc. It’s a contest. Plus there will be all sorts of challenges and punishments, like if Odd Future makes more money in a town, Albini has to personally digitally remaster the Big Black catalog. Also, under the credits, Brooklyn Vegan commenters are shot by a firing squad. That’s just a bonus.
• Ghostface Killah Presents The 84th Academy Awards: Ghostface hosts the Oscars, just like James Franco and Anne Hathaway, only hilarious and coherent. Plus there’d be a million guest appearances. Also, there’d be a memorable sketch involving RDJ as Iron Man and Ghost as Toney Starks.

That article about them using a Canon SLR to shoot the season finale of House included this bit from Wikipedia:

In 2008, House was distributed in a total of 66 countries. With an audience of over 81.8 million worldwide, it was the most watched television show on the globe and far surpassed the viewership figures of the leading TV dramas the previous two years (CSI and CSI: Miami).

There’s only like 6bn people on the globe, right? And that’s including feral wolf children and fuel-starved hermits living on sun tea in the Chinese desert. And yet, if aliens did some random sampling of people around Earth, they’d find that more than one in every hundred of us watches House. “The Earthlings’ religion is based on weekly silent observances of medicine-man figure called ‘Dwelling-Place’ in the local tongue. Possessing supernatural powers of observation and an ability to perform healing miracles, this god also suffers from hubris and vanity, and he is susceptible to the temptations of certain potions. Essentially, we are grading Earth’s religious development somewhere between animist and monotheistic. Not yet adequately prepared for Operation Helping Hand. Revisit in 1,000 local solar units.”

Fucking House? Are you serious? I bet this means that most people in the world who know who Hugh Laurie is think he’s American. Eighty-two million people! It is possible that more people on Earth at any given time would know the answer to “Is it lupus?” than know what lupus is. “Did you know that keeping flies from landing on both food and excrement can prevent many diseases that are frequently fatal to children? In fact, some of these diseases are among the major preventable killers of children around the globe? No? Oh well, I guess the Peace Corps will just have to try harder.” “What diseases of the spinal cord can be confused with a recurrence of leukemia? Transverse myelitis! That is correct! Oh, what? No, I’m sorry, I’m not fully caught up on season six of House.”