Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Cheer Up, Good Buddy. You Still Got Me.

2024-Feb-11

Hey blog readers! We’ve got a colorful update. With outside data! None of my models is sourcing this update. I found a dataset on Kaggle that has the top 100 Spotify songs for 73 countries (across the past 3 months or so) that is updated daily. After a quick introduction to the Kaggle API, I have a job running to pick up the daily change. Right now a full data rewrite happens, meaning I download the whole csv and then overwrite the csv I have in the spot my Python files expect it to be. As I type this, I feel lured to do an upsert job, even though there is no extra cost for the compute involved for rewriting all 90ish Mbs of the CSV rather than just appending a new day's worth of data. It also gives me some ideas about setting up more backend jobs to split out this upsert job into directories partitioned by date so that I can eventually get his dash an archive view of prior 90 day spans of data.

We’ll see.

As of this moment I have yet to write the expected data pruning jobs so that the Dash app won’t have to make such slow and heavy data queries everytime the dropdown menu selects a new country. There really isn’t any variation to the query patterns the dropdown could pick, so I ought to be able to make a filtering job that delivers only the usable data that makes up each possible view. And what a view!

You can find this ‘view’ at /spotify/global/ or as the last item on the sidebar in the Spotify section. The view is a Plotly-Dash app showing the top10 of a lot of Spotify stats for each country in that Kaggle dataset. If you are reading this blog post well after it was published, there is no guarantee the URL path works. It felt fair to warn you. I had been going through the blog posts recently to make sure there were no errors for new templates. A reader deep in the blog archives should be warned to not bother trying any paths mentioned a few months in the past. This fredlambuth.com is an ever changing beast.

For my review screed today we have something from the TV sitcom medium. I believe this is only the second one to be addressed on this blog; King of the Hill being the prior. The full title of this show is The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, but usually shortened down to just the name of the titular character. The most referenced characteristics about the teenage boy is his manic pursuit of nice looking girls or his utter blandness as a person. The latter part could sound rather scathing but the show presents Dobie as a paragon of virtue to compensate for his uninspiring presence. This virtuousness gets Dobie in trouble just as much as his 1950s TV level of lust.

Much like King of The Hill, Dobbie Gillies is another semi-rural American comedy with picayune scale problems. Set at the dawn of the 1960s in a never explicitly named midwest state. I don’t recall if the name of the town even came up. I would describe it as larger than Mayberry or Hooterville, but not by much. It does feel more connected to national currents than the rural shows on TV at the time. Several episodes had characters leaving the town to have the characters bumble into topics affecting the national zeitgeist.

This connection to a larger world gives me portraits of how concepts at the time sounded novel like a computing machine, psychology, or paternal affection. The high school classroom effectively became a vehicle for the show’s writers to introduce new provocative topics into the balanced status quo of the town that raised these teenagers hearing new ideas that they later assert with comic effect. Dobie pushes things too far with either his horniness or with his short-sighted altruism. Sometimes his parents(mostly the father) or his incredibly awesome friend Maynard G. Krebs push the comedy forward with their own situations.

Maynard I find to be the star of this show. Although he is written to be the village idiot of this possibly unnamed Midwest town, I think the writers of the show present a character that makes authentic yet unorthodox choices. Dobie and his father both hound over and over about their own inadequacies or desires each episode, and each find fault with Maynard for not doing the same. Maynard rarely exhibits any internal doubt. His only real problems are externalities caused by his untempered personal life choices; that is to be lazy, listen to jazz, beat on the bongos, and eat donuts. Anything else is boring. His parents are one of the first examples of a never seen but often talked about character. Any time they would have cause to appear a joke is delivered about how their detachment to Maynard is well deserved and understandable.

Dobie’s father hems and haws in most appearances. Either about how Dobie is always asking him for money or his running gag about mentioning his good conduct medal as a first sergeant in the big one, WW2. My sitcom watching does not go further back than 1959 so I have never actually seen the very example of 1950s American TV Dad. The pipe smoking, self assured, authority figure that's quick on the draw to give status quo affirming advice. I found him to be somebody who also has that idea of fatherhood, conforming to it rather than genuinely believing in it. He does go along with whatever his wife concludes. There is not much going on for the mother except that she worries about her boy and sometimes about her marriage.

Dobie has a semi-stalker named Zelda. A sweet girl that puts up with just about anything Dobie does with other girls because he has only the most transitory of affection for Zelda, almost always after some turn of events that came out in his favor. By the next episode, the glow has faded and Dobie is back on the prowl. Their cat and mouse games don't move into ‘will they or won’t they’ territory. Dobie will discover a new type of girl he’s attracted to and sometimes he’ll duplicitously get Zelda to help him woo this girl of the week. Sometimes he flat out tells Zelda he wants to use her skills to help him with other girls! That poor girl deserves better.

The ladies of the week are another avenue for inserting 1960s topics into the show’s fishbowl of a town. Dobie has had the hots for French New Wave girls, jazz loving girls, daughters of the Confederacy girls, and officers in the US Army. Dobie, who has no qualities other than his dopy virtuism and girl craziness leaves him in a jam with the very girls he is crazy about. They all have some sort of guy they are going after and Dobie has absolutely no serious interests other than girls. This has him resorting to bald faced lies about his own interests.

A curiosity I had with the general casting of the show is how aged the adults are. Not just Dobie’s parents who each are said to be in their late 40s. Every character that is not a teenager is well into their 40s, including other teenager’s parents. People aged 20-39 in this town are rare. It looks like a world of rambunctious but utterly harmless adolescents and authority figures containing their good natured misadventures.

I expect to finish watching the series as long as the rhythm of the first two seasons I watched keep up, perhaps on the strength of Maynard’s hijinks alone. I wonder how far out the writers will go with the variety of ‘exotic’ women Dobie will hopelessly pursue.