Tommy Magliozzi provides shocking evidence about the progress and happiness of mankind

Tommy (with Ray on his right, at MIT, June 4, 1999) explains that once the boys finally got down to thinking about their commencement speech, they determined through close study of other commencement speeches that one thing they seemed to have in common was that they all had a beginning, a middle, and an end -- providing them with not just inspiration and a guideline but a challenge. (UPDATE: Here again is the link for MIT's 1999 commencement festivities. Again, the boys are introduced at 11:05.)

by Ken

I was horrified to discover earlier today that the MIT video of their 1999 commencement which I had plunked atop my Tuesday remembrance of the latem great Tom Magliozzi -- either Click or Clack (it's much debated) of Car Talk's Click and Clack -- was branded as "unavailable." I assume that this means "unavailable to the likes of youse," because the video could hardly be more available on MIT's website.

Well, I've already made some adjustments to the original post, substituting a still shot for the non-embed, embellished with introductory nuggets of wisdom from each of the esteemed speakers, and adding a link -- complete with time cue -- to the MIT video repository. (As I've noted in the But today I think we need to take a closer look.


HOW IT ALL CAME TO PASS



As Ray explains at the outset, if anything in this life bears explaining, it's how the Magliozzi brothers came to be MIT's commencement speakers. He traces it back to a two-year campaign that began with Tommy doing one of his patented on-air rants about alma mater's choice of U.N. Kofi Annan as 1997 commencement speaker, and never mind that he happened to be secretary general of the United Nations. Why, he wasn't even an MIT alum! And yet he and Ray had been totally passed over!

This blossomed into a year's worth of back-and-forthing, in which the school let it be known that the Magliozzis' case was perhaps fatally compromised by their not having a flag, and could likely be helped with some big-time alumni financial contributions. Even Tommy's not entirely credible claim that they indeed had a flag, which was met with great skepticism within the hallowed halls, was enough to leapfrog them over 1998's speaker, Bill Clinton, who brought to the proceedings not only a flag but an official seal and an actual podium of his own!

When the 1999 invitation finally came, Ray points out, the brothers studiously avoided the obvious explanations that it was a hoax, or a joke, and that they were of course expected to say no. Even then, he say, they weren't dumb enough to fail to realize that they weren't MIT's first choice, and in all likelihood were pretty far down on the list of possibles.

Curious, they enlisted their regular investigator, Paul Murky of Murky Investigations (not to be confused with his brother Paul Murky of Murky Research) to find out who had been ahead of them on the list, having been offered and having declined the honor. The result was this stack of correspondence Ray hefted onto the podium. (No, the podium is MIT's. Unlike Bill Clinton, the Magliozzis didn't have one of their own. There also doesn't seem to be any evidence of their supposed flag.)


DEBUNKING THE "SHOULDERS-OF-GIANTS HYPOTHESIS"



I really should check to see whether the boys' MIT gig has been put on a DVD -- it's something I can imagine watching over and over. (I don't suppose anyone out there knows?) But it wasn't all typical Car Talk foolishness. They undertook some serious research on subjects of vast human importance.

Okay, so maybe that was Car Talk foolishness too.

In this picture we see Tommy brandishing, or co-brandishing, his visual aid -- actually Slide No. 2 from the PowerPoint presentation he prepared, which he was unable to use because, he says, MIT was unable to lay hands on an overhead projector, as per his request.

The visual aid is a finely calibrated chart generated from research undertaken by the boys' regular researcher, Paul Murky of Murky Research (again not to be confused with his brother Paul Murky of Murky Investigations). What they wanted to know was whether it's always true of great figures in history, that they stand -- as Isaac Newton claimed to -- on the shoulders of their predecessors. For Tom and Ray, this implies an ongoing perfection of mankind that doesn't exactly square with their experience, which suggests that rather than getting smarter and smarter we're getting dumber and dumber. This counter to the "on-the-shoulders-of-giants hypothesis" Tommy calls the "oh yeah? hypothesies."

As apparently often happens with Murky research, the results they got weren't exactly what they had been looking for. What they got was a study of relative left- and right brain-use, tracked on the X-axis, correlated on the Y-axis with (wait for it) happiness. And seeming to show that the stupider you are, at least according to left-brain notions of stupidity, Tommy notes, the happier. From there it's just a Magliozzi hop, skip, and jump to overturning the commonly held proposition that man is the highest of the earthly life forms -- and is more likely the lowest. This must have come as quite a surprise to all those MIT eggheads.

Thanks, Tom and Ray!

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