Rives: The Museum of Four in the Morning

283,283 views ・ 2014-05-16

TED


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00:13
The most romantic thing to ever happen to me online
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started out the way most things do:
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without me, and not online.
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On December 10, 1896, the man on the medal,
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Alfred Nobel, died.
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One hundred years later, exactly, actually,
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December 10, 1996,
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this charming lady, Wislawa Szymborska,
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won the Nobel Prize for literature.
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She's a Polish poet.
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She's a big deal, obviously,
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but back in '96, I thought I had never heard of her,
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and when I checked out her work,
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I found this sweet little poem,
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"Four in the Morning."
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"The hour from night to day.
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The hour from side to side.
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The hour for those past thirty..."
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And it goes on, but as soon as I read this poem,
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I fell for it hard,
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so hard, I suspected we must have met
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somewhere before.
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Had I shared an elevator ride with this poem?
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Did I flirt with this poem
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in a coffee shop somewhere?
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I could not place it, and it bugged me,
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and then in the coming week or two,
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I would just be watching an old movie,
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and this would happen.
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(Video) Groucho Marx: Charlie, you should have come to the first party.
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We didn't get home till around four in the morning.
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Rives: My roommates would have the TV on,
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and this would happen.
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(Music: Seinfeld theme)
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(Video) George Costanza: Oh boy, I was up til four in the morning
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watching that Omen trilogy.
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Rives: I would be listening to music,
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and this would happen.
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(Video) Elton John: ♪ It's four o'clock in the morning, damn it. ♪
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Rives: So you can see what was going on, right?
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Obviously, the demigods of coincidence
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were just messing with me.
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Some people get a number stuck in their head,
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you may recognize a certain name or a tune,
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some people get nothing, but four in the morning
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was in me now, but mildly,
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like a groin injury.
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I always assumed it would just go away
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on its own eventually,
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and I never talked about it with anybody,
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but it did not, and I totally did.
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In 2007, I was invited to speak at TED
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for the second time,
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and since I was still an authority on nothing,
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I thought, what if I made a multimedia presentation
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on a topic so niche
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it is actually inconsequential
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or actually cockamamie.
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So my talk had some of my four in the morning examples,
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but it also had examples
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from my fellow TED speakers that year.
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I found four in the morning in a novel
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by Isabel Allende.
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I found a really great one
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in the autobiography of Bill Clinton.
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I found a couple in the work of Matt Groening,
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although Matt Groening told me later
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that he could not make my talk
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because it was a morning session
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and I gather that he is not an early riser.
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However, had Matt been there,
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he would have seen this mock conspiracy theory
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that was un-freaking-canny for me to assemble.
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It was totally contrived
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just for that room, just for that moment.
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That's how we did it in the pre-TED.com days.
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It was fun. That was pretty much it.
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When I got home, though, the emails started coming in
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from people who had seen the talk live,
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beginning with, and this is still my favorite,
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"Here's another one for your collection:
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'It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.'"
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The sentiment is Marlene Dietrich.
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The email itself was from another very
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sexy European type,
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TED Curator Chris Anderson.
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(Laughter)
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Chris found this quote
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on a coffee cup or something,
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and I'm thinking, this man is the Typhoid Mary
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of ideas worth spreading, and I have infected him.
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I am contagious,
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which was confirmed less than a week later
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when a Hallmark employee scanned and sent
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an actual greeting card
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with that same quotation.
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As a bonus, she hooked me up with a second one they make.
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It says, "Just knowing I can call you
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at four in the morning if I need to
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makes me not really need to,"
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which I love, because together these are like,
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"Hallmark: When you care enough
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to send the very best twice,
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phrased slightly differently."
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I was not surprised at the TEDster
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and New Yorker magazine overlap.
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A bunch of people sent me this when it came out.
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"It's 4 a.m.—maybe you'd sleep better if you bought some crap."
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I was surprised at the TEDster/"Rugrats" overlap.
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More than one person sent me this.
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(Video) Didi Pickles: It's four o'clock in the morning.
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Why on Earth are you making chocolate pudding?
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Stu Pickles: Because I've lost control of my life.
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(Laughter)
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Rives: And then there was the lone TEDster
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who was disgruntled I had overlooked
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what he considers to be a classic.
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(Video) Roy Neary: Get up, get up! I'm not kidding. Ronnie Neary: Is there an accident?
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Roy: No, it's not an accident. You wanted to get out of the house anyway, right?
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Ronnie: Not at four o'clock in the morning.
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Rives: So that's "Close Encounters,"
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and the main character is all worked up
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because aliens, momentously,
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have chosen to show themselves to earthlings
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at four in the morning,
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which does make that a very solid example.
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Those were all really solid examples.
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They did not get me any closer to understanding
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why I thought I recognized this one particular poem.
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But they followed the pattern. They played along.
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Right? Four in the morning as this scapegoat hour
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when all these dramatic occurrences
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allegedly occur.
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Maybe this was some kind of cliche
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that had never been taxonomized before.
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Maybe I was on the trail
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of a new meme or something.
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Just when things were getting pretty interesting,
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things got really interesting.
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TED.com launched, later that year,
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with a bunch of videos from past talks,
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including mine,
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and I started receiving "four in the morning" citations
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from what seemed like every time zone on the planet.
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Much of it was content I never would have found
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on my own if I was looking for it,
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and I was not.
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I don't know anybody with juvenile diabetes.
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I probably would have missed the booklet,
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"Grilled Cheese at Four O'Clock in the Morning."
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(Laughter)
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I do not subscribe to Crochet Today! magazine,
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although it looks delightful. (Laughter)
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Take note of those clock ends.
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This is a college student's suggestion
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for what a "four in the morning" gang sign
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should look like.
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People sent me magazine ads.
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They took photographs in grocery stores.
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I got a ton of graphic novels and comics.
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A lot of good quality work, too:
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"The Sandman," "Watchmen."
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There's a very cute example here from "Calvin and Hobbes."
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In fact, the oldest citation anybody sent in
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was from a cartoon from the Stone Age.
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Take a look.
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(Video) Wilma Flintstone: Like how early?
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Fred Flintstone: Like at 4 a.m., that's how early.
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Rives: And the flip side of the timeline,
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this is from the 31st century.
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A thousand years from now,
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people are still doing this.
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(Video): Announcer: The time is 4 a.m.
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(Laughter)
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Rives: It shows the spectrum.
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I received so many songs, TV shows, movies,
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like from dismal to famous,
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I could give you a four-hour playlist.
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If I just stick to modern male movie stars,
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I keep it to the length
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of about a commercial.
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Here's your sampler.
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(Movie montage of "It's 4 a.m.")
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(Laughter)
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Rives: So somewhere along the line,
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I realized I have a hobby
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I didn't know I wanted,
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and it is crowdsourced.
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But I was also thinking what you might be thinking,
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which is really, couldn't you do this
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with any hour of the day?
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First of all, you are not getting clips like that
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about four in the afternoon.
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Secondly, I did a little research.
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You know, I was kind of interested.
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If this is confirmation bias,
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there is so much confirmation, I am biased.
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Literature probably shows it best.
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There are a couple three in the mornings in Shakespeare.
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There's a five in the morning.
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There are seven four in the mornings,
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and they're all very dire.
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In "Measure for Measure," it's the call time for the executioner.
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Tolstoy gives Napoleon insomnia
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at four in the morning right before battle
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in "War and Peace."
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Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" has got kind of
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a pivotal four in the morning,
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as does Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights."
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"Lolita" has as a creepy four in the morning.
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"Huckleberry Finn" has one in dialect.
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Someone sent in H.G. Wells' "The Invisible Man."
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Someone else sent in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man."
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"The Great Gatsby" spends the last
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four in the morning of his life
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waiting for a lover who never shows,
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and the most famous wake-up in literature, perhaps,
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"The Metamorphosis."
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First paragraph, the main character wakes up
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transformed into a giant cockroach,
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but we already know, cockroach notwithstanding,
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something is up with this guy.
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Why? His alarm is set for four o'clock in the morning.
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What kind of person would do that?
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This kind of person would do that.
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(Music)
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(4 a.m. alarm clock montage)
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(Video) Newcaster: Top of the hour. Time for the morning news.
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But of course, there is no news yet.
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Everyone's still asleep in their comfy, comfy beds.
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Rives: Exactly.
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So that's Lucy from the Peanuts,
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"Mommie Dearest", Rocky, first day of training,
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Nelson Mandela, first day in office,
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and Bart Simpson, which combined with a cockroach
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would give you one hell of a dinner party
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and gives me yet another category,
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people waking up, in my big old database.
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Just imagine that your friends and your family
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have heard that you collect, say, stuffed polar bears,
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and they send them to you.
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Even if you don't really, at a certain point,
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you totally collect stuffed polar bears,
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and your collection is probably pretty kick-ass.
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And when I got to that point, I embraced it.
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I got my curator on. I started fact checking,
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downloading, illegally screen-grabbing.
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I started archiving.
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My hobby had become a habit,
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and my habit gave me possibly the world's
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most eclectic Netflix queue.
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At one point, it went, "Guys and Dolls: The Musical,"
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"Last Tango in Paris,"
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"Diary of a Wimpy Kid,"
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"Porn Star: Legend of Ron Jeremy."
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Why "Porn Star: Legend of Ron Jeremy"?
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Because someone told me I would find this clip in there.
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(Video) Ron Jeremy: I was born
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in Flushing, Queens
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on March, 12, 1953,
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at four o'clock in the morning.
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Rives: Of course he was. (Laughter) (Applause)
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Yeah. Not only does it seem to make sense,
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it also answers the question,
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"What do Ron Jeremy and Simone de Beauvoir
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have in common?"
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Simone de Beauvoir begins her entire autobiography
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with the sentence, "I was born at four o'clock in the morning,"
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which I had because someone else had emailed it to me,
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and when they did, I had another bump up
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in my entry for this, because porn star Ron Jeremy
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and feminist Simone de Beauvoir
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are not just different people.
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They are different people that have this thing connecting them,
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and I did not know if that is trivia or knowledge
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or inadvertent expertise, but I did wonder,
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is there maybe a cooler way to do this?
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So last October, in gentleman scholar tradition,
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I put the entire collection online
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as "Museum of Four in the Morning."
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You can click on that red "refresh" button.
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It will take you at random to one of
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hundreds of snippets that are in the collection.
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Here is a knockout poem
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by Billy Collins called "Forgetfulness."
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(Video) Billy Collins: No wonder you rise
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in the middle of the night
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to look up the date of a famous battle
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in a book on war.
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No wonder the moon in the window
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seems to have drifted out of a love poem
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that you used to know by heart.
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Rives: So the first hour of this project
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was satisfying.
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A Bollywood actor sang a line on a DVD in a cafe.
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Half a globe away, a teenager
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made an Instagram video of it and sent it to me,
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a stranger.
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Less than a week later, though,
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I received a little bit of grace.
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I received a poignant tweet.
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It was brief.
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It just said, "Reminds me of an ancient mix tape."
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The name was a pseudonym, actually, or a pseudo-pseudonym.
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As soon as I saw the initials, and the profile pic,
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I knew immediately, my whole body knew
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immediately who this was,
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and I knew immediately
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what mix tape she was talking about.
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(Music)
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L.D. was my college romance.
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This is in the early '90s. I was an undegrad.
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She was a grad student in the library sciences department.
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Not the kind of librarian that takes her glasses off,
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lets her hair down, suddenly she's smoking hot.
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She was already smoking hot,
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she was super dorky,
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and we had a December-May romance,
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meaning we started dating in December,
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and by May, she had graduated
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and became my one that got away.
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But her mix tape did not get away.
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I have kept this mix tape in a box
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12:21
with notes and postcards, not just from L.D.,
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from my life, but for decades.
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It's the kind of box where,
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if I have a girlfriend, I tend to hide it from her,
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and if I had a wife, I'm sure I would share it with her,
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but the story — (Laughter) — with this mix tape
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is there are seven songs per side,
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but no song titles.
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Instead, L.D. has used the U.S. Library of Congress
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classification system, including page numbers,
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to leave me clues.
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When I got this mix tape,
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I put it in my cassette player,
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I took it to the campus library, her library,
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I found 14 books on the shelves.
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I remember bringing them all
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to my favorite corner table,
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and I read poems paired to songs
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like food to wine,
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paired, I can tell you,
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like saddle shoes
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to a cobalt blue vintage cotton dress.
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I did this again last October.
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I'm sitting there, I got new earbuds,
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old Walkman, I realize this is just the kind
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of extravagance I used to take for granted
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even when I was extravagant.
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And then I thought, "Good for him."
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"PG" is Slavic literature.
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"7000" series Polish literature.
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Z9A24 is a collection of 70 poems.
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Page 31 is Wislawa Szymborska's poem
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paired with Paul Simon's "Peace Like a River."
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(Music: Paul Simon, "Peace Like a River")
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(Video) Paul Simon: ♪ Oh, four in the morning ♪
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♪ I woke up from out of my dream ♪
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Rives: Thank you. Appreciate it. (Applause)
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About this website

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