This came up when I was making dinner.
"Pasta primavera?" I asked.
"I think that jumped the shark in about 1972," Uncle Fishy replied.
"Yeah, but would you eat it?" I asked.
"Sure. It's yummy, and vegetables are always good," he said.
But then, as we were eating, it occurred to us that the Happy Days episode that spawned the concept of jumping the shark was broadcast in 1977 (premiering on September 20th, to be precise).
In light of this fact, is there any X for which X can be said to have jumped the shark prior to 20 September, 1977?
No fair using a time machine,
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 32
Table of Contents
Chapter 34
Chapter 33
Jon Visits, January 27, 2056
On Sunday Jon called to say he would be dropping around to visit next week. The Senator was scheduled to hold a series of meetings with Provincial and First Nation leaders. He…
I once knew a young woman who was in high school and shall remain nameless. One day I picked her up at school to drive her home, and asked how she was doing.
"Depressed, actually," she said.
"Why, did something go wrong at school?"
"Kinda," she replied. "The social studies teacher was out today…
I was reading the comments on Dr. B's brief query on ethical lines in response to a horrific story about the feeding of a live puppy to a large snake for the "entertainment" of teenagers, and I could not help but recall a conversation I had with my children a couple years ago about the feasibility…
... sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler – Robert Frost
It was a typical hot and humid summer's day, so I entered a nice dark bluestone pub, hoping the dark would offer some cool and beer. As it was about 11 in the morning, the bar was empty save for one fellow sitting at a table…
oh geez, looks like you and Fishy found the Jameson. pace yourselves.
I don't think there should be any general problem with this. Lots of phenomena precede the names for such phenomena, or the particular events that caused us to form the names. A theory that didn't make room for this would impoverish our discourse about things like the times before humans existed.
Religious beliefs as a explanation for the natural world; e.g., flat Earth, geocentralism, and creationism, to take three notorious examples.
Ignorance of environmental impacts. Silent Spring was published in the 1960s, albeit just who or when first jumped the shark after that is not known to me.
Selecting for slow stupid grounded visible gastropods. Your efforts to enhance gastropodry has left the boring kind in my yard looking like they've done a lot of shark jumping.
Lassie clearly jumped the shark when the dog went to live with a park ranger, not a kid. That was 1964. It doesn't matter that the case the condition was named for a later case. If a caveman tore his meniscus, he tore his meniscus, even if he called it "oochie-oochie-ouchie knee."
blf: invisible flying gastropods?
"Jumped the shark" is especially valid retroactively when judging classic TV shows. "The Flintstones" j'd the s either when Pebbles was born or with the Great Gazoo, depending on your ideology. I'm sure one could identify such a moment on "Leave it to Beaver." "Password" might be a bit tougher...
Never heard it applied to a pasta recipe before, though.
In general, and, oh, so philosophically, we can't confuse a concept with its name. Sufficiently young sprogs do that, with comical results: "Mommy, you can't be Janet. The red haired girl at the playground is Janet!"
And, after all, what's in a name? That which we call a snail, by any other name would eat our petunias.
Jared: Dr Freeride, our bloggermad scientist, is on c.27 day (to-date) campaign to breed very mighty gastropods. She's been giving a fatal bath to the snails and slugs who are too stupid or slow to escape her each morning; i.e., she's been selecting for the fast and the smart.
In the course of her campaign, she's also been selecting for flight, invisibility, slimeing waterproof-superglue, invisibility, salt-resistant, and various other attributes, such as being big, heavy, and very nasty.
This breeding and artifical selection has obviously been having successful results. She's finding fewer and fewer of the slow, stupid, visible boring old snark-jumping gastropods.
A true, heroic, mad scientist!