Who Knew?

May 28, 2007

Beatles Poll

 by Jeremy

OK, Norm, here's my entry in your latest poll: my five favorite Beatles songs (I'm ignoring the distinction between 'song' and 'recording' because it's hard to separate the two where the Beatles are concerned)...

In no particular order:

• Hey Jude
• Rain
• Something
• Getting Better
• Sexy Sadie

In my defense:

"Hey Jude" - No defense needed.

"Rain" - It's Ringo's favorite, or so he once said. His drumming is great on that track. Actually, every Beatle is in fine form: it's a song that could not have been as good with any of the four absent. The fact that it's obviously inspired by the mysterious Celtic beauty you sometimes hear coming out of a set of bagpipes does not detract from the song's purity or originality. It's pure Beatles.

"Something" - No defense needed.

"Getting Better" - Strictly speaking, "Yesterday", "Michelle", "Here, There and Everywhere" (etc) are better songs (I ruled them out only because I will occasionally skip over them because I've heard them too many times or, in the case of Eleanor Rigby, because I sometimes can't handle the sublime intensity). But I love this song and I don't know why. I suppose it's simply pure, undiluted Beatle Paul emitting, as he did, the music of the spheres like it was body odor. It makes me happy (though I don't like hearing the line about John hitting Cynthia).

"Sexy Sadie": This song haunts me. It pops up in my head frequently as it has done for years, but I never get tired of hearing it (or 'hearing' it). There's something magically beautiful about the opening piano part. The crazy wah-wah-wah-wah backing vocals are strangely perfect. I don't know how John and/or George got guitars to sing like cellos (actual cellos would have killed the magic). The bridge always breaks the spell for me, but I get re-bewitched as soon as it's over.

* * *

AND NOW, JUST FOR FUN:

Beatles Songs I Hate:

Glass Onion (though there are a few interesting word associations, like 'trying to make a dovetail joint')

Only a Northern Song (George did his best here to write an ugly song and actually didn't entirely succeed: it has a few interesting moments)

Revolution Number 9 (though it amuses for half a second or two here and there)...I think those are the only ones.

Best Use of a 'characteristically "Beatlesy" descending chord sequence'¹:

Or, in this case, The Beatlesy descending chord sequence, called variously here, a "chromatically altered Plagal cadence", the "Plagal Minor Miracle", the "Minor Plagal Cadence." It's just a cadence consisting of the four chord, then the minor four chord, then the tonic (IV-iv-I). It's probably been around for a zillion years, but the Beatles certainly own it now: no one since knows how to use it without sounding trite, schmaltzy, unoriginal:

In My Life (...[in my] Life, though some have changed...)

Nowhere Man (...making all his nowhere plans for nobody...)

All I've Got to Do (...yeah, that's all I gotta do...)

I'll Follow the Sun (...[and now the] time has come and so my love I must go...)

I can't think of or find any others, but I bet there are some (a cigar to anyone who can come up with another...or to anyone who can name examples that predate the Beatles).

Best Songs Written by Wiggling the Little Finger Around on a D Chord

If I needed someone
"'If I Needed Someone' is like a million other songs written around a D chord. If you move your finger about you get various little melodies. That guitar line, or variations on it, is found in many a song, and it amazes me that people still find new permutations of the same notes." - George Harrison (from "I, Me, Mine")

Norwegian Wood

A THOUGHT IN CLOSING...

The Beatles may have used all the same tricks and shortcuts as everyone else, but those things were just the structural devices they used to contain the miraculous strains of melody they were able to bring about. Glenn Gould, the brilliant but nutso classical pianist, didn't like the Beatles because he thought they wrote simple songs that pretended to be more complex than they really were (you can listen to him explain, in floridly brilliant acrobatics of pure bullshit, why the Beatles [and Charlie Parker, for that matter] are crap compared to Petula Clark, by clicking the top link here. His thesis, in a nutshell, is: 'me like Petula...me not like Beetuls'). That is like looking at the face of a beautiful woman and saying, "two eyes, a nose, a mouth...who the hell do you think you're fooling with that hackneyed tripe?" But hell, if you say it cleverly enough, maybe she'll go out with you anyway.

April 23, 2007

Yeltsin, not Putin

 by Jeremy

Old Papa Legba is to blame (you'd think guarding the crossroads would fill up his time but he doubles as the trickster god). It was he who must have made me think Vladimir Putin just died when in fact the headline clearly said Boris Yeltsin.

I thought referring to Putin, before the body is even cold, as the "former Russian president" was a slight breach of etiquette. I was already thinking that this might bring me back to blogging. Putin, president of a country that has become the poison capital of the world, is not the type to come by his death honestly.

If the name "Yeltsin" in bold type wasn't enough of a clue, I suppose the word "president" should have tipped me off, since Putin, as we know, is Czar.

But Yeltsin? I thought (as is commonly thought of Abe Vigoda) that he was already dead.

Is this reason enough to resume blogging? Let's see how it goes. I owe it to the huddled masses of disappointed readers to at least give it a try.

March 24, 2007

Chinese Fingers and Inarticulate Jews

 by Jeremy

"The Chinese finger trap is a commonly-used metaphor for overcoming a problem by not trying too hard to solve it." That is something I grabbed from Wikipedia and it is as close as I can get to explaining why I haven't been able to blog regularly for some time.

Getting stuck inside of YouTube while trying to research something on the internet is, as you know, like getting involved in a square-dance inside a pinball machine. Consequently, because I wanted to build on my understanding of the physics of and the subjective experience of relative humidity, I ended up googling Bob Dylan's height, which resulted in my watching an old video interview with Carlos Santana and Bob Dylan. Santana speaks fluidly and lucidly but doesn't convey a whole lot and Dylan, of course, knows himself better than to even make the effort.

The interviewer, for some obscure reason, asked the two how they felt about the problem of violence in American society and about guns in the hands of children or something:

Interviewer: "Do you think the availability of guns is a problem?"
Dylan: "I don't think there's enough guns."
Interviewer: "What about guns among kids? Do you think that's just too prevalent?" [oddly, he prounounces 'prevalent' as if it rhymes with 'assailant']
Dylan: "Toy guns. They have more toy guns than real guns, really."
Interviewer: "Where do you think kids get these guns?"
Dylan: "They get 'em in a toy store."

Here's the YouTube thing. The gun bit happens at 4 minutes and 3 seconds.

My advice to those who would interview Bob Dylan is this:

• Don't try to force him to make sense. Maybe he will make sense and maybe he won't.


• Bring Stephen J. Hawking along as an interpreter.


• Don't act like you're baffled by how hard it is to figure him out. You can't figure Tony Blair out any better, or Regis Philbin, or Dawn Wells, or Billy Mumy, or Walter Pidgeon, or Betty Hutton, though they make trick you into thinking otherwise.

It reminds me of something I read in a memoir or something by one of the most articulate people on the planet: Martin Amis. He was recalling a series of thin scholarly books published as introductory guides to famous authors: "Understanding [name of author]" I think he was talking with his sister about how there was one called "Understanding Kingsley Amis" and one that had just come out called "Understanding Martin Amis" and they laughed about how they couldn't wait to read these books and how they hoped there would be ones published about everyone else in the family too.

Bob Dylan once said something like "If you don't understand what a white ladder covered with water symbolizes then I feel sorry for you." He says things like that and you think he's being arrogant. But I think what he really means is that you're the one who's beating your head against the wall trying to figure it out and that's your problem, not his. It's the beating and the head that are the problem, that is to say, rather than the not understanding.

Anyway, if you don't see how this explains my inability to blog lately, then I feel sorry for you ;-)

March 22, 2007

The Montgomery Clift Gender Identity Assessment Scale

 by Jeremy

I apologize for my extended absence from this blog. I've been busy working on the following psycho-social self-assessment tool.

Abstract
Heterosexual men and homosexual women cannot see any discernible difference between Montgomery Clift before and after his 'disfiguring' car accident. Heterosexual women and homosexual men wax poetic on what they consider to be the quintessential case of lost beauty. This perceptual discrepancy lends itself to the development of a powerful self-assessment modality with respect one's own sexual orientation.

The following is a sample implementation of this new modality.

PLEASE CLICK THE LINKS TO VIEW IMAGES

CONTROL:
M. Clift before accident
M. Clift after accident

INSTRUCTIONS:
Click each image below then choose which one more closely describes your subjective experience of the control pictures above. More precise results may be obtained by rating each image pair from 1 to 5 per the above criterion and then subtracting the score for image pair 2 from that of image pair 1. Add 5 to the resulting number to obtain an ascending homosexual-male/heterosexual-female-->heterosexual-male/homosexual-female score between 1 and 10 (image pairs may be reversed to remove any perceived gender-numerological bias).

IMAGE PAIR 1 [straight-male, lesbian vector]
IMAGE PAIR 2 [straight-female, gay-male vector]

January 08, 2007

Mass Destruction

 by Jeremy

On one recording, Mr. Hussein presses the merits of chemical weapons on Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, his vice-president, and now, the Americans believe, the fugitive leader of the Sunni insurgency that has tied down thousands of American troops. Mr. Douri, a notorious hard-liner, asks whether chemical attacks will be effective against civilian populations, and suggests that they might stir an international outcry.

“Yes, they’re very effective if people don’t wear masks,” Mr. Hussein replies.

“You mean they will kill thousands?” Mr. Douri asks.

“Yes, they will kill thousands,” Mr. Hussein says.

Before he was hanged Dec. 30 for offenses in another case, Mr. Hussein had used the so-called Anfal trial, involving the massacre of as many as 180,000 Iraqi Kurds, as a platform for arguing that the chemical weapons attacks of the kind that devastated the town of Halabja on March 16, 1988, were carried out by Iranian forces then fighting Iraq in an eight-year war.

But the recordings told another story.

[...]

One recording revealed, more clearly than anything before, Mr. Hussein’s personal involvement in covering up Iraq’s attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, the program that ultimately led to President Bush sending American troops to overthrow him. Talking to the general who led Iraq’s dealings with United Nations weapons inspectors until weeks before the 2003 invasion, he counseled caution in the figures being divulged on the extent of Iraq’s raw supplies for chemical weapons, so as to disguise the use of unaccounted-for chemicals in the attacks on the Kurds.

But it was Mr. Hussein’s chilling discussion of the power of chemical weapons against civilians that brought prosecutors and judges to the verge of tears, and seemed to shock the remaining defendants. One of the recordings featured an unidentified military officer telling Mr. Hussein that a plan was under development for having Soviet-built aircraft carry containers, packed with up to 50 napalm bombs each, which would be rolled out of the cargo deck and dropped on Kurdish towns.

“Yes, in areas where you have concentrated populations, that would be useful,” Mr. Hussein replies.

January 06, 2007

A Real Hero

 by Jeremy

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New Yorker dubbed "Subway Superman" received the city's highest civic award on Thursday after pinning down a stricken stranger on subway tracks just enough to allow an oncoming train to run over the top of them.

Wesley Autrey, 50, jumped onto the subway tracks at a station in Manhattan's Harlem neighborhood on Tuesday to help Cameron Hollopeter, who had suffered a seizure and fallen.

Autrey held down Hollopeter's convulsing body in the track bed as the train passed just centimeters above them. Both were uninjured, but Hollopeter, 20, remains in hospital undergoing tests to discover what caused his seizure.

Autrey, whose knitted cap was brushed with grease and dirt from the train passing overhead, played down his daring act as he accepted the Bronze Medallion -- for exceptional citizenship and outstanding achievement -- from Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

[...]

While Bloomberg called Autrey a "true hero" and the New York Post newspaper dubbed him the "Subway Superman," the construction worker -- who went to work as normal after the incident -- said the real heroes were U.S. troops in Iraq.

He's right and he's not right -- he's a real hero too.

Seattle Times

December 30, 2006

Overwhelmingly Sad

 by Jeremy

This Kos 'diarist', while not denying that Saddam was, he thinks, a 'bully', is overwhelmingly sad (you can say that again):

[bracketed comments and bold type are mine]

He was a bully I think. He was a man who never knew happiness I think...I feel sadness because we repaid cruelty with cruelty...We killed his children while he was still alive. We hunted them down like animals and slaughtered them without dignity. As a father I will say no human deserves this...We destroyed Saddam Hussein’s history [let us hope so]...We turned him around and made him watch his footsteps in the sand, watch them disappear as the ocean washed over them. As a man who has reached middle age I feel an emptiness inside of me when I think of this– to watch yourself slowly disappear. [he thinks this is Death of a fucking Salesman!?]...we were beating a dog over and over again because he bit us, making him yelp, humiliating him so he no longer had an identity, so that he was an empty shell. And when we knew he was an empty shell, we kept beating, our eyes on fire, snot dripping from our nose, wheezing under the strain of our constant blows...We made fun of him, jabbed with sticks through the bars of his cage. There was nothing left of him, but we kept jabbing anyway,..we would put the jabbing on the morning news for our viewing pleasure...He was like a hospice patient we were propping up and kicking and slapping...I would pour my corn flakes, and turn on CNN, and get my daily dose of jabbing what was once Saddam Hussein with a stick. I couldn’t even really remember who he was...But he was human – he had dreams, he had aspirations, I am sure. He did kind things sometimes, I am sure...

It's a eulogy that you want to believe was penned ironically by Tim Blair or Scott Ott but you have to face the overwhelmingly sad fact that it is the real article.

Did we learn nothing from the relentless bullying and jabbing and name-calling that led a heartsick Adolph Hitler, finally bereft of his hopes and dreams, to take his own life?

December 29, 2006

Saddam is Dead...

 by Jeremy

'E's passed on! This dictator is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in in eternal torment. E's pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-FASCIST!!

And I'm marking the occasion with a nice glass of 12 year old Bowmore single malt scotch whisky. It's quite smooth and has a nice smoky bouquet, though I wish I'd sprung the extra dozen sawbucks for the 30 year old stuff, to match Saddam's long reign of terror. Cara's enjoying a lovely Blackstone Cabernet -- a bargain at about 10 dollars a bottle.

The cigar? A Cuban Rounds Churchill. It cost a buck and a half but tastes like a cigar 4 times that price. Mildish, yet complex in taste with an almost meaty flavor at times (in a good way, though too subtle) with very faint leathery notes (also in a good way and also too subtle) with none of that annoying peppery assault on the tongue that often passes for full flavor and none of that yucky 'vegetal' (read bad carrots) taste that you sometimes get half way through a Macanudo.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: If you think my reviews are silly or pretentious, consider what you'd have thought if I'd said, of the Bowmore's 'nose', that it had a "Peaty aroma with lemon and sea salt, giving a true Hebridean complexity." And how weird would you have thought me if I'd said: "The first impression is of air freshener and 'Izal' brand cleaner, fragrant smoke, smoked salmon and a whiff of brimstone."

And if you think my 'tasting notes' on the cigar were a put-on, then consider these comments on the Punch Rare Corojo, one of my favorite cigars and one that the Cuban Rounds strikes me as a poor man's substitute for: "the flavor was gorgeous - creamy yet meaty with hints of chocolate and leather."

Oh, and if you think it's unseemly to celebrate Saddam's death by hanging, consider this opinion put forth by an Iraqi blogger: "if the punishment for murder is to be death... then Saddam deserves at least a million or so executions."

December 18, 2006

Farnsworth Q. Pig-Dog

 by Jeremy

Cara took this excellent portrait of Pig Dog while he was waiting for his humans to emerge from an Apple Orchard at an undisclosed location. We believe this image to be proof of the existence of a top-secret government experiment in genetics. This dog squealed in a manner that struck one as more than a little porcine. He seemed confused about the purpose of one such as he in a world in which some screwy hand would dare to frame his fearful symmetry. And, too, he wondered if that hand would dare to bring him a treat upon its return. We reassured him by saying things like "Awww! Don't worry wittle pig doggy!" I pray that this judicious ration of eloquence provided some small comfort to the beast, though his porky wimpers and piggy squeals diminished but little.

[click the image for the full impact. You will feel a flutter in your viscera; that is perfectly natural and is no cause for concern.]

* * * To see the previous posts in this series, click here.

December 11, 2006

Student Activism Reality Check

 by Jeremy

Back in the 1980's when the anti-Apartheid protests at UMASS were out-attended by the rally to oppose the ban on beer at the Campus Center cafeteria, I knew that the days of meaningful student activism were just about put to bed and ready for seepy byes. Campus protests since then have reminded me of those Civil War re-enactments on the town green (and protests have only gotten scurvier in recent years).

Even those anti-Apartheid rallies were a bit self-congratulatory, though pressuring the University to divest from South Africa was a worthy hobby, and we had some reason to think we could push the University a few millimeters closer to doing the right thing with each festive outdoor event we attended with our girlfriends (&tc;, as appropriate).

But the student anti-fascist movement in Iran is a case of true student activism:

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- A group of students Monday briefly interrupted a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at their university by booing and chanting "Death to the dictator," Iranian semi-official news agencies reported.

[...]

According to the student news Web site, ADWAR, the protesting students apparently avoided security guards who tried to prevent them from attending the speech at Amir Kabir University.

As Ahmadinejad approached the podium to speech, the members of the Islamic Students Association -- a banned group -- began booing and chanting, while some even burned pictures of the Iranian president, ADWAR reported.

November 29, 2006

The Reason for the Season

 by Jeremy

The Sun may be 93 million miles away, but some of us think it's pretty great. While many of us find ourselves pointing the other way, let us rejoice that it still pops up for a bunch of hours each day. If you live north of the arctic circle and experience polar night this time of year, then it totally sucks to be you. If you live in the southern hemisphere...well why don't you try having Christmas in June? That's what I'd do.

November 26, 2006

The City Bakery

 by Jeremy

* * * To see the previous posts in this series, click here.

November 11, 2006

Why They Love Us

 by Jeremy

I'm not one to accuse Democrats of being pro-terrorism, though I think most are keen to avoid having to take any blame for the ugly things that must be done to fight Islamist fascism. They're going to be in a tougher spot now that they control both houses of congress.

And job one is coming up with a PR strategy for responding to endorsements such as this one:

In the tape, al-Muhajir [head of Al Qaeda in Iraq] praised the outcome of Tuesday's elections in which Democrats swept to power in the House and the Senate, in large part due to U.S. voter dissatisfaction over the handling of the war in Iraq.

Here's his head shot. I hope if he ever decides to do any Summer theater that he hires a different photographer:

Here's a lovely headshot he could use for his theatrical work:

Now isn't that much nicer?

Also offering the Democratic Party congratulations this week:

Rasputin:

Charles Manson:

Marshall Applewhite:

Damien Thorn:

Igor:

This baby:

October 31, 2006

Happy Halloween

 by Jeremy

Hey, everybody. I Hope your Halloween was as spooky and hyperglycemic as a Halloween should be.

We had many Trick 'r Treaters here in Belchertown, but I had a bad stomach day today (very rare these days) so I spent the evening lying on the couch. I felt like a halloween scrooge, but it couldn't be helped. Oh yes it could have -- what it needed was a Dracula costume and some corrugated cardboard to make the couch more like a coffin. Then a simple folding of my arms across my chest each time the doorbell rang would have more than sufficed.

It was unseasonably warm this evening and so -- because the coyote-wolves only descend from the hills when it's extra nippy -- there was no spooky howling from the woods behind our house. That was, as it were, a solid bummer.

But Cara pulled out all the stops (though she couldn't locate her witch hat) and made the house look quite haunted. And we watched The Beast With Five Fingers on TV.

October 17, 2006

Diplomacy Mugged by Reality

 by Jeremy

This illustrates the problem with blaming America for what ails the world. The relationship between the European Union and the U.S. reminds me of something I learned (the hard way) about major engine trouble: If your problem is a loss of power due to poor compression, you might be able to fix that by doing a valve job. Then your problem will be that the increased compression resulting from the valve job will blow the piston rings (because there's no rational reason to imagine they'll be any more sound than the valves were). So if you're interested in fixing the problem you've got to face the fact that you need a complete engine rebuild.

The Pentagon has already freed all but a few European citizens from Guantanamo. But U.S. officials have struggled to persuade Britain, Germany and other allies in Europe to accept prisoners who once had legal residency there, or who are effectively stateless.

"We think countries whose nationals are in Guantanamo ought to take responsibility for them," Bellinger said. "We have also, in certain cases, encouraged European governments to see if they would be eager to take detainees of other nationalities."

So far, there have been few takers.