Millennials Gotta Be Different -- Popular Girl and Boy Names

Are you a Millennial? Your parents tried to show some creativity in picking your name. The Baby Boomers had a limited group of names, making things seem bland. All of my classmates seemed to be John, Michael, Linda, or Kathy. Thing have changed. Nowadays... everybody wants their child to have a unique name!

The data below comes from the Social Security Administration and only applies to USA. The most common names are listed (top 21)-- along with the number of children receiving that name throughout the 2010s decade. Here it is:

2010s Girl Names

Girl # with name 1 Sophia 121,787 2 Emma 119,168 3 Isabella 111,984 4 Olivia 109,329 5 Ava 93,595 6 Emily 79,590 7 Abigail 76,894 8 Mia 75,583 9 Madison 67,825 10 Elizabeth 58,628 11 Chloe 57,522 12 Ella 53,439 13 Avery 50,336 14 Charlotte 49,957 15 Sofia 49,844 16 Addison 49,157 17 Natalie 46,303 18 Amelia 45,643 19 Grace 45,213 20 Evelyn 45,112 21 Lily 44,450 Boy # with name 1 Jacob 112,227 2 Noah 107,552 3 Mason 104,642 4 William 100,397 5 Ethan 99,209 6 Liam 95,953 7 Michael 95,382 8 Alexander 92,346 9 Jayden 89,352 10 Daniel 86,874 11 Aiden 86,204 12 James 83,105 13 Elijah 82,667 14 Matthew 81,038 15 Benjamin 79,108 16 Logan 78,253 17 Anthony 77,234 18 David 76,075 19 Joseph 74,916 20 Joshua 74,143 21 Jackson 73,601

The Fifties-- Top 21 most common names

Are you a baby boomer? The good old Fifties... a time when everybody wanted to be normal. The beatniks had not really taken hold. People were thrilled to have survived World War II. They chose names from a limited spectrum of choices. This data comes from the Social Security Administration. The most common names are listed (top 21)-- along with the number of children receiving that name throughout the 1950s decade. Here it is:

Boys:

	Boy Name
1	James	843,377
2	Michael	837,084
3	Robert	830,032
4	John	797,528
5	David	769,555
6	William	590,973
7	Richard	535,149
8	Thomas	454,169
9	Mark	382,419
10	Charles	360,979
11	Steven	333,513
12	Gary	329,751
13	Joseph	299,854
14	Donald	273,413
15	Ronald	271,011
16	Kenneth	262,683
17	Paul	253,081
18	Larry	245,535
19	Daniel	243,591
20	Stephen	207,171
21	Dennis	204,131

Girls:

	Girl Name
1	Mary	625,532
2	Linda	564,261
3	Patricia	459,587
4	Susan	437,688
5	Deborah	430,493
6	Barbara	345,686
7	Debra	341,282
8	Karen	332,483
9	Nancy	286,757
10	Donna	270,310
11	Cynthia	263,388
12	Sandra	251,533
13	Pamela	237,367
14	Sharon	232,782
15	Kathleen	224,300
16	Carol	222,620
17	Diane	210,605
18	Brenda	209,226
19	Cheryl	171,355
20	Janet	167,500
21	Elizabeth	165,641

Nowadays, for the Millennial generation it's different. Everybody wants their child to have a unique name! My next post will show the most common names from the 2000s decade.

Understanding Trump-- A Struggle for Images

An election is a period of programmed violence, because it is a quest for new images of national identity. The present election is a “tragic” one, because the American sense of identity has been in jeopardy from new technology for some time. Every new technology creates a new sensory environment that rearranges the images we make of ourselves. To discover and to elect representatives in a period of deep personal uncertainty is to be involved in a struggle for images, not a struggle for goals.      

Anyone who looks as if he wants to be elected had best stay off TV. TV demands sophistication—that is, multi-level perception. It is a depth medium, an X-ray form that penetrates the viewer.

TV, of course, has transformed the primaries from regional popularity contests into national image-making shows. Radio and jet travel, like press coverage, still count on the candidate’s having a special slogan, a special issue, that identifies him. TV has ended that. The press can only tag along to comment on what happened on TV.

But, in a deep sense, TV bypasses the ballot box as a means of creating political “representatives.” TV is not concerned with views or interests or issues. It is a maker and finder of images that ride over all points of view and over all age-groups as well. The TV image ends all national and party politics.

Why should TV demand sophistication and insouciance? Simply because it is a depth medium for which earnestness is fatal. Depth requires perception on many levels and, therefore, an absence of single purpose or direction. An all-at-once world, fashioned by electric information, demands a candidate full of puns and unexpected nuances. Such a man is one who knows so much about the contemporary interface of all cultures that he cannot possibly be deluded into any earnest regard for any one of them. The new changes are not moral but technological. 

(Marshall McLuhan, 1968)

Barack Obama v. Larry Wilmore (a win-win)

What happened tonight at the White House Correspondents Dinner... many said Barack Obama outdid Larry Wilmore on the comedy front. Barack delivered a fine performance-- skewering Hillary Clinton, by imagining myself pulling down a much of Harriet Tubman's ($20 bills) by taking Goldman Sachs money for delivering speeches after he leaves office. Barack has been to eight of these events and his experience showed nicely. He knows the journalists well but chose to make most fun of his own kind, politics and politicians, and that focus gave his remarks a certain modesty and self-deprecation. Wilmore, had to find another tact, and made fun of the journalists in the room. He highlighted the struggles of news outlets, the dying print media and brainless CNN reporters, and that proved a trickier endeavor. Wilmore attempted to add comic intensity, but often sounded mean-spirited.  Nothing could be further from this comedian's true colors, Larry Wilmore is by nature an easygoing, amiable personality.

Truthfully, I think Larry Wilmore is too cerebral a comedian, more a comedy writer than a rough and tumble standup, to perform the role of emcee at a Roast. Wilmore strongest performance actually occurred in a non-comic vein when he lauded President Obama's amazing achievement, proving a black man capable for the biggest leadership role in the world.

Wilmore's comment came toward the end of his performance. Wilmore, approximately the same age as Obama, reminded us that years ago many did not believe a black man capable of playing quarterback much less leader of the free world. I found Wilmore's tribute to Obama more significant that any joke could ever be. Wilmore embraced the real truth of Obama-- a miracle in our lifetime, the game changer of an African-American president-- and did a great service in that moment.

Wilmore struggled to get an edge to his performance-- but he seems more capable of provoking thought and quiet laughter in his cerebral comic style. The material was there but maybe the standup's  anarchic personality, the  ..."I don't give a damn 'cause I just walked in off the street" persona is not a natural pose for this nuanced comedian. Wilmore has great comedic skills but the assignment works better for the Stephen Colbert type performer, full of piss and vinegar and loving the attention and the spotlight. We were lucky to have the selfless Wilmore on hand to deliver thanks to Barack Obama, a more important task than "killing" the audience with laughter.

How We Got Into Vietnam (David Halberstam)

Finished "The Best and The Brightest" book by Halberstam on Vietnam. I'm glad I got to the end. He talks about LBJ's failed decision-making on Vietnam. LBJ looked to the past and the Cold War to try and understand Vietnam:

"The forces at work in the fifties were very real to him. If Jack Kennedy was a man who knew more about where the sixties were headed but whose intellect preceded his courage, who stepped forward gingerly, then Johnson was more a man of the past. He reacted to what he thought the country was; the country which twice defeated Stevenson for the Presidency, where the powerful people on the Hill seemed primarily to be hawks, where the dominant figures of journalism were proud survivors of the worst of the Cold War, and where American universities had also given willingly, too willingly in fact, of their talent and support to the Cold War." (p. 592)

And here is how LBJ got us so deeply involved in the war, using his astute political skills, for subtly escalating the War, while missing the boat on the sixties revolution brewing and about to explode:

"That would all come later: perhaps another politician might have sensed it, if not clearly identifying the change. But Lyndon Johnson did not sense it, rather he sensed that he had position on everybody else, he had control of the center, he had moved all opponents to the extreme. He had handled the Congress, signed it on without really signing it on: he had handled the press by slicing the salami so thin that they are never able to pin him down, and he handled Ho by making it seem as if Ho were attacking him at Tonkin. He was using force but using it discreetly, and he was also handling the military. They were moving toward war, but in such imperceptible degrees that neither the Congress nor the press could ever show a quantum jump. All the decisions were being cleverly hidden; he as cutting it thin to hold off the opposition." (p. 593)

This poses some interesting questions for me on how public policy lurches forward-- often based on the prevailing, conventional wisdom, based on the leader's beliefs about his peers and what they will find acceptable, as rational behavior. Of course, our Vietnam policy does not appear rational in retrospect, but LBJ operated within the paradigm he knew and had experienced.

What do we believe now-- based on a present-day conventional wisdom that is actually totally inaccurate and misplaced? People think we need to get industry back to America? Is there any likelihood of that? How might our energies and resources be used to improve the situation in our country? I'm sure there is much confusion on the subject, and some of our unlikely Presidential candidates (Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders) have risen because of confusion around where the country should be heading. Not sure any of the candidates has proposed anything of substance. Mainly its emotion-- Make America Great Again, Stop the 1%....  Obama has kept a cool head. He didn't come out with a "New Deal" or anything on a grand scale. I doubt there would have been support for that kind of thing in this environment. The candidates kind of imply that they will achieve something on a grand scale. That seems unlikely.

Life At the Speed of Light

McLuhan said we get messages from satellite transmissions careening around the globe at the speed of light. That is the new reality.

Check out the article from Slate online magazine entitled-- "Is Facebook Live Video The Future Or The Latest Social Media Fad"

Mr. Zuckerberg knows that the faster moving process races around the slower media and will defeat the slower moving programs. TV defeats movies, Online media defeats newspapers. So getting you face-to-face, literally, with your Facebook friends is the place he is headed.

Marshall McLuhan makes life easier. He is the Oracle of Toronto!

See-you,

John

The Meaning of Commercial Television (1966)

The Texas-Stanford Seminar (1966)

The Texas-Stanford Seminar on “The Meaning of Commercial Television,” a gathering of television broadcasters was held by the two universities in 1966 with the ambitious goal "to help bring about the general improvement of television.” TV Guide sponsored the conference. Marshall McLuhan was one of the headliners and Stanley Donner, a professor at the University of Texas, documented the seminar for a University of Texas Press publication.  McLuhan, not surprisingly, blew the assembled minds and Stanley Donner does a nice job capturing the process. Donner reviews describes McL’s demeanor and impact on the conference with a nice freshness. The information which follows comes from Donner's work. I’ll quote Donner from here (The Meaning of Commercial Television (1966)-- pages 108-110):

Marshall McLuhan’s unusual views of the electronic media and their effects on society evoked considerable interest among the broadcasters.

The audience was particularly impressed by the concept that our present total environment is invisible and produces a nostalgia for past environments—thus the popularity of Bonanaza and, on a different level, Batman. Final judgment was suspended, although many were persuaded in part by compelling arguments and equally compelling examples from film, radio and television, and from cultural and social changes in current society. The listeners were not sure where total agreement might lead them: what kind of commitment they would be making. Also, there was the suspicion that, although McLuhan’s argument was plausible, there might be some hidden fault in the scheme which could nullify the whole theory.

McLuhan assisted this suspended belief by not requiring any particular action from the audience. In his view whether a person favors or opposes his ideas, or whether his ideas are considered helpful, is completely beside the point. We are in the midst of electronic circuitry where everything happens at once and the influences upon society are inexorable. McLuhan’s concern was the description of electronic circuitry, not its evaluation: and he described with considerable clairvoyance what is taking place in our society at present.

The discussion developed into a further explication of McLuhan’s ideas. He held the position that in the electronic age no one is responsible and he used Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood as an example. This view was disturbing to some in the audience, since its acceptance means that the development of events in time must be denied and it would no longer be possible to maintain a clear relationship between cause and effect in the fixing of guilt.

McLuhan spoke of the possible future of television in the world of electric circuitry. The television would become a work force rather than consumers of programs as is now the case. Problems of any kind could be presented to the audience and possible answers obtained through the use of technology, which is even now in experimental stage.

In response to a question McLuhan described LSD as a dislocation from environment, in a sense a medium. He did not, however, advocate its use.

To a question concerning computers, McLuhan maintained that computers are really a method of discovery. The use of computers to catalogue and categorize does not belong in the world of electric circuitry, but rather to the world of clear relationships of cause and effect of the nineteenth century. McLuhan also dismissed the rating systems and the “numbers game” as belonging to nineteenth-century cataloguing, and thus not truly relevant to television.

To another point McLuhan answered that the only audience participation in television and movies is fantasy. Reality in the old art sense of the term is meaningless in the electric world. Reality of the outside as compared to inside fantasy has disappeared, since the concept of outside and inside no longer exists.