The Loudest Weep
/While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Prince kills it at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, where the song’s writer, George Harrison, was inducted, along with Prince, Traffic and others.
A huge amount of talent on one stage including, Prince, Tom Petty. Steve Winwood (ex-Traffic), Jeff Lynne, Dhani Harrison (looking spookily like his father), Marc Mann, Steve Ferrone and others.
Prince didn't rehearse the outro-solo, he just reassured everyone that he had it down and knew it. And then...WOW! One commenter suggests that Prince was proving a point as the month before this event took place Rolling Stone magazine named the 100 top guitarists and , unbelievably, they left Prince off that list.
Prince threw his guitar in the air at the end but where did it go? Steve Farrone said: "everybody wonders where that guitar went, and I gotta tell you, I was on the stage, and I wonder where it went, too.”
UPDATE: I finally saw where the guitar went. I was looking UP but it went into the audience, caught by the big guy who helped during the lean back. Magic!
Autobiology
/
My school chum from back in the sixties has published his autobiography. "This is the story of a south London lad who became a vet and spent his life caring for animals "great and small", becoming a highly respected and successful practitioner, teacher and cardiac specialist.
It covers his early days in training, his nerve-wracking time in Idi Amin's Uganda, his development and adoption of the latest methods and technology and the growth of his practice in rural Kent.
But mostly, it is about the animals with all the joy and sadness that entails. Funny, poignant informative and humane it is a great insight to what it means to be a vet in 20th/21st century.”
A great read!
Paul Ehrlich can’t admit he’s wrong
/
Paul Ehrlich can’t admit when he’s wrong. In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich predicted that “in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” due to unchecked population growth. Instead, people started farming more efficiently.
Then, Ehrlich famously lost $576.07 to Julian Simon in 1990 when he made a 10-year bet that five basic metals would increase in price. The five-metal basket actually fell in price by an average of 36 percent, despite the global population increasing by 800 million…
The lesson for Ehrlich and company is don’t bet against human beings that are free to create and innovate. While there are still lots of problems on our planet, we have made astonishing progress in lifting ourselves out of poverty and feeding one another.
The Intellectual That We Deserve
/A Critique Of Jordan Peterson By Nathan Robinson,
Phd student in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard.
If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts.
Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured.
This article first appeared in
Current Affairs On 14 March 2018
Size IS everything
/Professor brings in 10MB hard drive from the 1960s.
My first Apple Mac had a 0.75GB hard drive. The latest Mac OS wouldn't fit on that!
