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 8
Table of Contents
Chapter 10
Chapter 9
Henry, June 10, 2055
When Thursday rolled around, I rode my bike over to Fontaine Enterprises on Woodward. I arrived about a quarter to four. Matt and I sat in his office drinking coffee which wasn't ersatz…
How do you use science outside of the lab?
People say that transferring knowledge and skills from one subject to another represents one of the highest levels of learning. They also say that it hardly ever happens. Perhaps this explains some of the more astounding things that we hear from Nobel…
It is only on really stressful days when I refer to them as my unholy army of the night. The rest of the time, at least at meals, it is just "my army" and we really do go through a stunning amount of food.
For example, in late August, right around the time this photo was taken…
The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 15
Table of Contents
Chapter 17
Chapter 16
Carman, Sept. 25, 2055
Matt had been on the west coast for two months. Jon was in Ottawa with the Senator. I was happy with Olivia. Our life was never dull. Doc Y, as Jim Yablonski was affectionately known…
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!