When film critic Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw to cancer, he lost the ability to eat and speak. But he did not lose his voice. In a moving talk from TED2011, Ebert and his wife, Chaz, with friends Dean Ornish and John Hunter, come together to tell his remarkable story. [Ted Talk video - 20minutes]
posted by hippybear
on Apr 21, 2011 -
10 comments
Am I supposed to be laughing or taking notes? Comic Charles Fleischer, who played Carvelli on
Welcome Back, Kotter and voiced Roger Rabbit, gives
a Ted talk which degenerates into what appears to be a dissertation about the number 37 and its relationship to string theory, delivered in a rapidly shifting sequence of accents; watch the audience get more and more uncomfortable as they try to figure out whether they're watching a stand-up routine, a Kaufmannesque prank, or a guy going crazy right before their eyes. TED should have known what they were getting; Fleischer has been performing some form of this routine
for decades. (Warning: numbered suit.)
Transcript of the routine. Fleischer's strange myspace page. (Warning: strange music/talking on click which I can't figure out how to turn off.)
posted by escabeche
on Aug 12, 2010 -
17 comments
No matter their approach, the typical French physician who accepted the notion of male hysteria continued to think that its victims were in some way sexually abnormal: "Thus, despite Charcot's innovative work, the male victim of hysteria in late-nineteenth century French medical imagination was still frequently envisioned as an effeminate heterosexual, an overt homosexual, or a physical or emotional hermaphrodite." If not different sexually, male hysterics were said to be different in other ways, such as race or nationality, among whom African, African-American, south Asian, Arab, or Eastern European Jewish men predominated. Outside of France, other methods of denial appeared, such as the suggestion that male hysteria was restricted to Frenchmen. The medical literature of the time is full of evasions and denials and contradictions of the truths that Charcot had quite obviously demonstrated.
-
Macho Misery, an extensive and interesting review of
Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness.
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 26, 2009 -
8 comments
