In this video from William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line,” beat novelist and poet Jack Kerouac declares himself a lifelong Republican and chews out a hippy:

From the website of “The American Museum of Beat Art”:

Despite the ‘beatnik’ stereotype, Kerouac was a political conservative, especially when under the influence of his Catholic mother. As the beatniks of the 1950′s began to yield their spotlight to the hippies of the 1960′s, Jack took pleasure in standing against everything the hippies stood for. He supported the Vietnam War and became friendly with William F. Buckley.

Image Source: LiveScience

An Irish filmmaker’s claim that footage from a Charlie Chaplin movie premiere in 1928 reveals a time-traveling woman speaking on a mobile phone has been debunked:

“As you can tell from these, old-fashioned mechanical or resonating hearing aids were not necessarily long and rounded,” said Philip Skroska, an archivist at the Bernard Becker Medical Library of Washington University in St. Louis. “Short, compact rectangular forms were not unusual.”

A hearing aid sounds about right, but I am still amazed that George Clarke (who discovered the footage and promoted the theory) skipped right over this woman is insane to this woman is a time traveler.

See the video that started it all here.

Pitchfork Media has published ”The Top 50 Music Videos of the 1990s.”

This nostalgic look back at the videos of the 1990s includes “Buddy Holly” by Weezer (1994), a nostalgic spoof of “Happy Days,” a sitcom (’74-’84) which itself reminisced an idealized 1950s. Count it: 3 layers of nostalgia. And when I look back upon this post years from now, we will have reached Inception-level nostalgia.

SEE ALSO: A compilation of the some of the most 90s stuff ever.

Alex Chilton– precocious frontman for the Box Tops and then leader of the influential power pop band Big Star– has died at age 59.

Here a 16- or 17-year old Chilton performs the Box Tops’ hit “The Letter”:

We’ve got Olympics fever, but it’s for Lillehammer, 1994 and one magical performance…

From a New York Times article on Wednesday. Wednesday, June 3, 1892. (Not a joke.)

A HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR; PROMISED RATE OF TRAVEL FROM ST. LOUIS TO CHICAGO. DR. WELLINGTON ADAMS TELLS ELECTRIC CLUB MEMBERS OF A WONDERFUL ELECTRIC RAILROAD — THE SECRET OF HIS MOTORS RETAINED.

The Empire State Express, which flies from New-York to Buffalo, is soon to be entirely eclipsed by an electric express traveling at thunderbolt speed over a road as straight as an arrow’s course, if the story be not a dream which Dr. Wellington Adams unfolded last night to the members of the Electric Club…

Another excellent installment of “Afterburner,” in which Bill Whittle wistfully recalls his visit to GM’s Futurama exhibit at the World’s Fair in New York City in 1964.

I feel something similar for Disney’s Tomorrowland (probably heir to Futurama), but the nostalgia is balanced out to some degree by a sense of parallel-world eeriness.

(I’m still looking for a great word for “nostalgia for a future envisioned in the past,” but I enjoyed this piece from the Atlantic’s Word Fugitives from a few years back– October 2001, as it turns out– curiously apropos.)