But nothing in comparison to the changes in pop music between 1956 and 1967.
That reminds me of when I was nine years old, in the late 70s, and I heard the 1966 Rolling Stones song “Miss Amanda Jones,” with the lyric “she’s the darling of the discotheque crowd.”
I remember thinking, “that can’t be right — disco and discotheques just started to become a thing about two years ago!”
Later I learned that discotheques predated disco music.
Yep - there’s also a “discotheque” reference in Allan Sherman’s “The Rebel,” recorded the same year.
Cool.
Sorry to continue the hijack — it ends with this:
It’s funny that “discotheque” is a play on the French word for “library.”
I don’t think it’s actually a play on the word - I think theque is a noun ending meaning something like “repository” similar to the -eria ending in Italian , which often means “a place where something is sold” (gelateria, latteria,panneteria , etc)
It’s true that “-theque” means that, from a Greek word, but “discotheque” was specifically modeled on “bibliotheque”:
Yeah, one of those places in the 1960s where they had go-go dancers and projected psychedelic patterns on the walls.
Unca Cecil’s column on go-go dancers:
Oh, I’m sure it was modeled on “bibliotheque” - but I think a play on a word involves some sort of humor, and I don’t see it.
Fair enough.
In the Simpsons episode “Burns, Baby Burns,” Mr. Burns tries unsuccessfully to instill some breeding into his loutish long-lost son Larry (voiced by Rodney Dangerfield) by getting him admitted to Yale. I just realized this is a nod to Dangerfield’s similarly middle-aged character attending college in Back to School.
Not my millionth time watching it (my first run through) but maybe for other people…
I just watched an episode of American Dad where Francine and Roger end up in a motel attic spying on the guests through the vents. That was exactly the premise of a documentary called Voyeur about a motel owner that did exactly that, right down to the catwalks he installed to make it easier to walk around. There was even a picture of Gerald Foos and Gay Talese (the voyeur and the reporter that wrote the story) hanging on a wall.
In the Vorkosigan books, one of the relevant planets is named Sergyar. It’s one of the three planets in the Barrayaran Empire. It was first discovered by the Barrayarans in the first book… at which time, the heir to the thronecampstool was Prince Serg.
Duh, of course it’s named after him!
I’ve been re-watching Star Trek: Lower Decks and two things I’ve noticed this time around:
The engineer’s name is Billups not Phillips.
In the opening credit scene (the one where the Cerritos traces out a Starfleet insignia) the nebula and stars in the background look like a koala.
Billy Joel wrote “Only the Good Die Young” in 1978, when I turned 23. Although I don’t think I ever bought any of his albums, I liked him and knew his work pretty well. It was all over the radio back when I still listened to pop music on the radio. I must have heard OTGDY hundreds of time over the past 48 years.
I’m sure you know the song, too, sung by guy who is trying to seduce a young Catholic girl.
It wasn’t until I listened to it by chance this morning that I consciously realized the significance of the girl’s name: Virginia.
