Murderer classification

Google is definitely losing it. After yesterday's odd search suggestion, today I opened the news section to find:

I actually (hangs head in shame) read Gawker sometimes, but I wasn't prepared to have the Gawker headline "Search for Escaped Murderer With Huge Dick Extends into Vermont" featured as the top news story on the page.

Rarely do I find myself needed to classify murderers by dick size.

I see Gawker gets the words "penetrated" and "extends into" in the tiny quotable section of the headline/story, so obviously years of training are paying off there. I couldn't help noticing that "for" is uncapitalized while "With" and "Into" get caps. Truly, their stylebook must be prodigious.

We're doomed (probably)

From Facebook's trending column, February 16th.

I realize Facebook tailors the column to what it thinks are your preferences, but here's one from a friend of a friend:

It's not surprising that we are unable to gauge the seriousness of threats and challenges, is it? Everything's equal. Jack White's guacamole (actually, it's Lalo's guacamole), execution of 21 poor souls and the attempted destruction of free speech in Denmark.

Interplanetary, interstellar, intergalactic

The Financial Times proves that familiarity with the upper classes and a dedication to enabling companies to make giant piles of cash is not synonymous with literacy.

This article, entitled, We Should Not Be Too Excited About Intergalactic Neighbours, is by Anjana Ahuja, who is a science commentator.  She's writing about a planet that's 12 light years away from Earth.

It's quite probable that the headline was written by a sub-editor, not the science commentator, but even so, believing that twelve light years away is "intergalactic" means the person is either dull and uninterested in things or is in such a hurry that it was impossible to look it up. Neither of those possibilities makes me inclined to trust the Pink 'Un. Except on stocks.

Men and women paying the same premiums: but It's GUY-necology, not GAL-necology!

Under Obamacare, men and women will pay the same premiums. Fox News has decided that this is unfair on teh mens, as they don't have babies and therefore go to the doctor less.

Let's get over the libertarian hurdle first. There may be libertarians who believe that the babies are for the woman, rather than for society as a whole, and therefore the woman should pay. I would ask all three of you who believe this to consider an even more libertarian view, which is that the baby isn't a project for the individual woman, but for itself. Babies should pay for themselves. And since 51% of them are boys, that's a lot of OB-GYN costs per boy they need to make up when they start earning the dough.

Stephen Colbert supports Fox in this issue, of course. If women go to the doctor more, then they should pay more. He showcases some choice Fox talking points. I have had to remove the video from this blog as it autoruns in an annoying loud fashion, but you could check it out at his website http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/430200/november-04-2013/obamacare-s-gender-blind-premiums

Partial Transcript:

8/27/2013:

DR. DAVID SAMADI: That's not a really fair system.  She sees her doctor all the time.  When was the last time you went to see your doctor?
BRIAN KILMEADE: Two years ago.
DR. DAVID SAMADI: Exactly.  And you?  Last week.
GRETCHEN CARLSON: I've had Lyme disease for the last 10 days, so....
DR. DAVID SAMADI: That's what happens.  So you're basically paying for her.

Yeah, that's what happens.  Women get bitten by an insect, they get Lyme disease.  A man gets bitten by an insect, he becomes a superhero. [Shows picture of Spiderman.]

Jokes aside, I love the breathtaking insouciance with which the talking head dismisses Lyme Disease as a woman's issue. I don't know if he didn't hear her, or whether he just assumed that she would say "OB-GYN checkup" and marched on, or whether he just didn't care as long as he could talk over her to make his stupid point.

I also loved the earlier remark that free birth control only benefited women - it had no utility for young men. If this is true, young men have changed since I was a young woman.

One major problem is, of course, that it isn't "health insurance". Insurance is like earthquake insurance. 10,000 people buy it for $100 each, a quake happens and two houses fall down. The insurance company gives them $250,000 each and pockets the rest.  Healthcare doesn't work like that - it isn't, and can't ever be, a Free Market, as you can't vow to just do without it, unlike a Lamborghini or a second home in the Catskills. You also can't shop for best prices, particularly in the back of an ambulance after a car goes straight through a crossing and breaks your legs without deigning to stop. Healthcare costs will eventually eat all the money going into it, which is why a single-payer system works best.  Somebody is going to pay, and it's better to endow that body with sufficient clout to negotiate for standard prices and monitor for better outcomes - like a government.  Calling it "insurance" and forcing everyone to buy it on their own behalf is a silly, mixed system.

But it's oh-so-much better than the previous system where some people got "insured" and some people didn't. And the ones who didn't quite often ended up bankrupt - and their remaining bills were paid by us, in the guise of increased premiums. This is quite literally the worst of all worlds.  Untreated sick people, bankrupt people AND other people have to pay for it. The mind boggles as to how this ever came about. Obamacare is such a win compared with the baseline.

Some people are going to say, "Of course you think that way - you're old, and you want me to pay for you. I don't need insurance." Well, first, Mr. Chivalry, thanks for the assessment. Second, I would be happy for my "insurance" to coexist with your literal pay-as-you-go service - which I believe the US had a hundred years ago. I have a modest proposal. If you go to the doctor, you pay him or her. If you don't go, you don't pay. But to avoid the I-don't-need-no-insurance brigade from becoming scroungers dependent on my money, this system would have to include hospitals. If you turn up at the emergency room either because you didn't take preventive care, or because you developed an acute condition, or because of an accident, the hospital should first x-ray your pockets. If you have either an insurance card or a credit card, they admit you. If you don't they push your gurney into the parking lot and phone your next of kin. Next of kin arrives with a bag of cash, and you're admitted, assuming you're still alive. Treatment continues until bags of cash/and or credit card runs out and then you're discharged - into the parking lot, sans gurney.

I think after a few evening news items featuring dead telegenic young mothers, handsome young motorcyclists with soon-to-be-fatal brain bleeds and little children with skunk bites banging on the hospital doors to no avail, and a single payer system will be well on its way.

Edit: For a description of an even better way to ensure no-one has to pay for other people's healthcare, here's an update.

Slightly late review of Crawdaddy magazine, 1966-1968

I was recently pointed at this ad-hoc archive of Crawdaddy magazine from 1966 to 1968.

Crawdaddy was the first magazine of critical rock'n'roll writing in the US. Founded in 1966 by a zine maker, it went on to become professionally published and highly-regarded. Critics Jon Landau, Richard Meltzer and Sandy Pearlman began writing there; a later issue included the famous interview of Jimmy Page by William Burroughs.

Trawling my way through the downloaded wordage this morning, I eventually discovered that I can't really follow it. American rock criticism has always been largely incomprehensible to me. As an avid NME, Sounds and Melody Maker reader in the seventies, I would read thousands of words of British rock criticism a week, and never had a problem understanding what the writers were getting at, even if I didn't know the music in question. I'm sure some allusions and puns went over my head, of course, but I would read an article and come away enlightened on the subject and often entertained and amused by the writer. I could count on Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray and Mick Farren to provide readable prose on a consistent basis. Even when I branched out into the rare British monthlies, such as Dave Laing's short-lived Let It Rock, I discerned no appreciable difference from the weeklies writers in readability terms.

But American critics? Once, early on, I made the mistake of buying a Greil Marcus book, because it sounded totally cool. Mystery Train, Images of America in Rock'n'Roll. With a bit on Robert Johnson. Doesn't that sound cool? It has a Mystery Train in it, and it's about images of America. Always loved music, always loved folklore, and that Mystery Train...always loved ghost trains!

It turned out to mostly be about Elvis, the Band and Randy Newman - my god, what?! - and did not have any cool images of America or actual mysterious trains in it whatsoever, just page upon page of  earnest prose whose entirely unmysterious train started nowhere and went nowhere while visiting Nowheresville Not-Station on the way. It's a long stream of consciousness ramble. I can't describe it without rambling myself, but there's a read-inside-this-book on it here.

A couple of years ago, I bought Marcus' The Old Weird America, because it sounded cool. It's about Old America, and where it's weird! Everyone wants to meet the old weird America, right? Chautaquas in Chappaqua, Snake Oil in the Dust Bowl and probably even mysterious trains! The back cover blurb says, "This is Greil Marcus's acclaimed book on the secret music made by Bob Dylan and the Band in 1967, which introduced a phrase that has become part of the culture: "the old, weird America." It is this country that the book maps - the "playground of of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, Illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes"." Doesn't that sound cool? Fooled again. Apart from the fact that it's about the Band, again, which I kind of glossed over when I read the description, it's yet another long hike through the sulci and gyri of Marcus' brain which is suspiciously short on ghost trains. I didn't manage to finish it.



However, given the chance to trawl through the well-known-to-me late sixties music and political scene with a bunch of the best budding rock critics the world has ever known (according to their Wikipedia articles) I went ahead and browsed through Crawdaddy to see how Richard Meltzer, Samuel R Delany (yes, that one) and Paul Williams (not that one) stacked up - would they be Greil Marcuses or would they be Charles Shaar Murrays?

Well, Paul Williams got off to a good start with me. He was a science fiction fan, and wrote the definitive book (IMO) on Philip K Dick, Only Apparently Real, which I enjoyed no end. As an SF fan, he was familiar with APAs and publishing Zines, and transferred that knowledge to rock music, producing Crawdaddy as a hand-typed, mimeographed zine. He mailed copies to the labels and manufacturers, which eventually got him enough advertising revenue to begin professional publishing. The first issue of Crawdaddy is the plainest thing imaginable, but the fire and passion for music comes through. Williams appears to write the majority of the first few issues.

Unfortunately, as other writers join in, most of what else comes through is wordcount. Some of these things are about as long as a mystery train. The Samuel R Delany pieces are as convoluted and incomprehensible as his books and I had to close my eyes while I read the piece in October 1968 on Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company that praises the men's bodies and completely blasts Joplin's. I'd read that people called her ugly, but I hadn't realized they'd put quite so much of it into print. The article reads like a YouTube comment written by a professor of literary post modernism.

Paul Williams, an engaging and practical writer, was definitely not the norm at Crawdaddy. The standard is the up-your-own-bum writing of the Greil Marcus variety. There's the article called Richard Meltzer Interviewed, for instance, in March/April 1968. It's mostly about a tongue (which sucks pumice in summer and is imperceptibly tiny).

The basic unknown tongue is, if you care, you know you can sort of fit it out through all four levels of Plato's divided line, you know, all those levels. It's increment of change, increment of mere awe, parenthetical awe, objectified awe or any of that, and lastly, increment of taxonomic urgency you know, like you just gotta label it tongue. You know; there's a tongue or there was a tongue right there. Oh it's a musical transition jargon thing.  [...]

Oh, aardvark tits! I guess I'm like an arab in a bernoose standing almost near a telephone pole watching a swarm of red efts go by...

Neil Louison in the February 1968 issue:

And even the Stones predictated greatness doesn't get in the way of our jocular communion. For all the time we have been in awe of our condition and no one could deny that we have also been singing. For the consciousness of the request does not have to be shackled by a life context and therefore the character of the action toward the black and the mystical, toward the forest of satyrlike formal whoredom, toward the land of rigor-mortal idylls. And this is precisely where the Stones lead us. it is no wonder that much of the album adds up to unmitigated rhythmical passage.  

No life/cognition duplex is around to convolute the direction of our jog in the country. The spiritual whisking of Their Satanic Majesties Request is roughly comparable to the post detergent rejuvenation which Jack Cassidy brings to us with his mandolin-picked bass. The difference lies in that Airplane trip with satyr-Jack and the boys and girls is implemented and derived merely from technique and therefore leads us only to formal appreciation and so only to limbo. In contrast, the Stones are quite consciously being historically cosmic--directed toward a primally erotic cornucopia. 

Thirty years on from reading the NME and for that matter, tony Brit critic Tony Palmer's book Born Under a Bad Sign, vocabulary no doubt much larger, experience of new weird America infinitely richer, since I've lived here twenty years, and I still can't understand this stuff. But it must be just me as everybody agrees it's great.

Edited for clarity 09:25 am; added italics to title 10.06 pm

Men on Page 3

No, not men actually printed on Page 3, that would be unthinkable. Men commenting on Page 3.

The Graun prints a piece from "the presenter of Radio 5's Men's Hour" who thinks the time has come for the sun to set on the Sun's Page 3 titstravaganza:

I used to love Page 3 – but the time has come to banish breasts from the Sun

The presenter of Radio 5's Men's Hour on how he finally came to the conclusion that nipples in our newspapers have had their day – and why other men should do the same 

But why? Is it because it demeans women, as women have been saying since its inception?

The long-standing arguments about female objectification are, I'm sure, perfectly valid. But what resonated with me was what Page 3 says about men. Sure, we are visual creatures; and I love getting a sext as much as the next man. But having a daily pair of breasts at the front of Britain's biggest-selling newspaper just sends the message that we're simple – that we're more likely to part with our 40p for a smidgen of areola.

Why no, it's because it demeans men. What else would the presenter of "Men's Hour" think?

 (Actually I didn't even know there was a "Men's Hour". The radio used to have a "Women's Hour" with the implication that the other hundred or so hours were generally speaking de facto men's hours. Kind of like you have a Black History Month in the US but not a White History Month, because whites get a lot of press for their history the other eleven months, without any hoopla, or indeed much attention to the fact, and kind of like the way that a man talking about his husband is still sometimes seen as "shoving homosexuality in your face" while everyone else earnestly discussing their relationships is just, well, normal chatter.)

RIP Mick Farren

Mick Farren, anarchist, Deviant and science fiction writer died last night after collapsing on stage at a festival where he was performing with his band, the Deviants.  It's more or less where he came in, so I'm sure it's where he would have wanted to go out, just not so soon.

RIP, Mick my friend, and condolences to your family,.

Facebook

Dangerous Minds' blog writer Richard Metzger with a longer tribute to Mick

Ultimate classic rock obit

Guest post by our air crash correspondent Shirley U. Jest

I think we've all heard by now that a TV station, KTVU channel 2, broadcast fake names of the pilots in the recent Asiana plane crash.



The fake names were:

Sum Ting Wong
Wi Tu Lo
Ho Lee Fuk
Bang Ding Ow

The names were apparently 'verified' with the NTSB - by a summer intern, who I gather is unlikely to be offered a permanent job.

There's been much debate on whether this is racist, or unfeeling, or both: For what it's worth, I think it's always funny to hear someone being pranked into saying something dumb. Years of hearing Moe yell, "I need Amanda Huggenkiss!" and Bart chuckling in the background, or any other of the giant list.  I've even made prank phone calls myself. (In my defense, I was twelve at the time.)

Even Language Log got into the act, debating mostly whether the words making up the names could possibly exist in Korean. (The answer, as pretty much everyone who knows any Koreans can tell, is no.)

Apparently Asiana plans to sue the TV company - a daft move, I think, as they did 'fact check' in their own little way. I personally feel that if Asiana want people to respect their pilots, the pictures of a crashed plane with gaping holes and fire damage all over it didn't help at all. Giggling over someone punk'd into saying Ho Lee Fuk on TV isn't the worst thing that's happened in this incident.

However, interestingly enough, the same TV station was caught by what seems to be a similar prank before. In July 2008, the station interviewed local area man Mike Litoris.  The video has been taken down now, but there's a screenshot here, and a write up by SF Gate here.




No one's been able to prove Mike doesn't exist, so if you're reading this Mike, no offence!


Edit to add: Looks like KTVU is sending in DMCAs to have the video taken off YouTube - the first copy that I had here disappeared within a couple of hours. I've put another copy in the post. If it goes away again, let me know in comments and I'll find another one. I have it saved to my hard drive if they manage to chase it off YouTube entirely. May I remind KTVU about the Streisand Effect? 

Edit on 07/23 - more DMCA takedowns. Boing boing has picked this up, as has techdirt. 

Techdirt notes that the reasons given have nothing to do with copyright, so it's a misuse of the DMCA. 

First things first. If you're not taking it down for copyright reasons, then why the hell are you using the DMCA takedown system? Noah H. Webster, it's got "COPYRIGHT" right in the frickin' name! Wouldn't a polite note to the YouTube account holders stating the above accomplish the same thing (i.e., a minimal level of compliance)? 
As for the arguing it should be removed because "most people have seen it," I don't even know where to go with that. Continuing to show the video isn't "offensive." Only the original act is. Pretending this has something to do with making amends for an earlier error is just kind of sad, especially when the station manager tries to drag viewers into his Shame Circle with "thoughtless repetition of the video by others." 

 I do still have a copy of the video on my hard drive, obvs, and can put it up as necessary.

From around the web

In an article about the Colorado shooter, the Examiner writes:

The legal definition of insanity in Colorado is "the ability to distinguish right from wrong, caused by a diseased or defective mind." 

I'm sure it isn't.  The inability perhaps, or, the definition of sanity is the ability to distinguish right from wrong, or something.  The definition in the article is hopeless.

I'd leave that in the comments except it requires Facebook to sign in.  The ghettoization of the famous web 2.0 is unbelievable. Why any adult would need to join a high school facebook page to comment on a news rag is beyond me. I'll stick with web 1.0. Actually, I'd have been happy with Usenet and the Examiner could have remained on paper, or whatever it used to be.

When it had sub-editors.

From around the web

An occasional series.

I know the Dow Jones has been crazy all year, but I didn't know it was this crazy. (The graphic is usually an easily read trend chart.)




I went to the Chicago Sun-Times to read an article on the increase in middle age suicides, and this is what it looked like.



The article begins:

The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans climbed a startling 28 percent in a decade, a period that included the recession and the mortgage crisis, the government reported Thursday. The trend was most pronounced among white men and women in that age group. Their suicide rate jumped 40 percent between 1999 and 2010. 

 But much more scarily, the picture is of the Terminator and the caption reads:

Machines such as the ones seen in the movie "Terminator Salvation" could one day make humanity wish they'd never crawled out of the primordial goo. 

 What?! No wonder the suicide rate is peaking! Is there no hope?   (Bored sub editor, maybe?)

Man finds his "dog" is actually a weasel shock

A bit of deja vu this morning when just about everywhere exploded with the news that in Argentina's Buenos Aires, ferrets on steroids are sold in the market as toy poodles.

As a long-term reader of alt.folklore.urban and the Jan Harold Brunvand books, I knew this was a variant of one of the oldest urban legends of all - in fact, it's "The Mexican Pet", the title of Brunvand's 1986 book. He collected a similar story "in the wild" in 1983. Snopes has the details from the book and more:

  [Brunvand, 1986]
A woman from La Mesa, California, went to Tijuana, Mexico, to do some shopping. As any visitor to this border town knows, the streets near the shopping areas are populated with stray dogs. The woman took pity on one little stray and offered it a few bites of her lunch, after which it followed her around for the rest of the afternoon.

When it came time to return home, the woman had become so attached to her little friend that she couldn't bear to leave him behind. Knowing that it was illegal to bring a dog across the international border, she hid him among some packages on the seat of her car and managed to pass through the border checkpoint without incident. After arriving home, she gave the dog a bath, brushed his fur, then retired for the night with her newfound pet curled up at the foot of her bed.

When she awoke the next morning, the woman noticed that there was an oozing mucus around the dog's eyes and a slight foaming at the mouth. Afraid that the dog might be sick, she rushed him to a nearby veterinarian and returned home to await word on her pet's condition.

The call soon came. "I have just one question," said the vet. "Where did you get this dog?"

The woman didn't want to get into trouble, so she told the vet that she had found the dog running loose in the street near her home in La Mesa. But the vet didn't buy it. "You did not find this dog in La Mesa. Where did you get the dog?"

The woman nervously admitted having brought the dog across the border from Tijuana. "But tell me, doctor," she said. "What is wrong with my dog?"

His reply was brief and to the point. "First of all, it's not a dog — it's a Mexican sewer rat. And second, it's dying."
 

---

I guess in the modern variant, the man actually pays for two of them. No one seems to be saying how he found out his weasels (or ferrets, or giant rats - the reports vary) were not actually dogs.

Statistics Corner

46% of pre-retirees do not believe that they will live as long as the average population, according to a July report from the Society of Actuaries. Underestimating their life expectancy is another reason they're likely to exhaust all their resources, other than Social Security, in the early years of retirement.

(USA Today, today, in article: Test-drive retirement before taking it on the road)

Really, 46% don't think they'll live as long as average?  There may be some weird psychosocial implications of that, but statistically speaking, it sounds as though Baby Boomers at least paid attention in math class. 

Great Ape-spectations

A few days ago,  we had a post about a monkey - actually, a chimp is an ape - who asked some humans a question in fluent human sign language, and went away disappointed.

Today, we have a chimp - actually a bonobo, which is a different species to a chimp, but still an ape - who, having learned from his human friends how to make stone tools, now makes and uses them to get food.  The article, in the Daily Mail (of course) Kanzi the bonobo chimp learns to create tools by himself - repeating humanity's first steps towards civilisation does what it says on the tin. On New Scientist's page, there's a video, also.



Of course, nobody told Kanzi that the human had used his considerable tool-making skills not only to teach the bonobobo "genius" to make tools, but more importantly, to hide the food so thoroughly that Kanzi would have difficulty getting to it. Had he known, their friendship might have been impacted.

As always, a large part of the charm of anything to do with monkeys, evolution, climate change,  or science in general is watching the commenters get riled up about everything.  Daily Mail readers rose to the challenge.

Frances says,

As I drive in my car down the road and I look at all the amazing things Humans have created and built, I can't believe that your still pushing this myth that in a few thousand years chimps will be able to do the same thing. Like the chimp himself, I am a creation of God.

Actually, Frances, you're in luck, as starting now, nobody will push the myth that in a few thousand years chimps will be like humans. In fact, no one has ever pushed that myth, unless you count the Planet of the Apes movies, of course, but I think they were allegory rather than myth (or science).

Anon writes, and I quote him, her or it in full as you wouldn't believe I'd quoted fairly if I selected part of it.

Why are we always fed this tosh about evolving from chimps. I don't know, i don't believe it. I was reading up on the Annunaki, now, they were here many, many years ago. What people are saying, is that they, effectively, created us, shaping us to be more intelligent. That were were originally made to be slaves. Now this challenges religion and Darwin's theory HOWEVER, there is proof out there, on the carvings, writing, documentation. Apparently we've been lied to. They can tell us a load of lies and we wouldn't think any differently, we'd assume its the truth and we have just taken it as it is. I felt the need to write this and i'm sure i'll be thumbed down but i can guarantee the ones who wont listen are either religious or ignorant. When you know this, it's like you become detached from other people, i see most people as, basically, stupid because you're all so blinded, just wish more people would research this.Unlikely though.

Well, once again the commenter is in luck, as no one is saying we've evolved from chimps. That's like saying you're descended from your cousin. It doesn't happen. Not because animals have those Magic Vaginas that have been in the news recently where "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down" but because of the sheer technicality that you can't descend from things that didn't give birth to your ancestors.   But in the same way you and your cousin are descended from your grandparents, all the apes, including chimps (especially bonobos) and humans are descended from a common ancestor.

Now if that were the only problematic statement in Anon's post, we'd be home dry.  First I have to figure out who "they" are who are telling us a load of lies.

Fed Up With This gets down to brass tacks.

What a conclusion to reach. If we came from chimps there would be none left. He is just copying like a child and they do make primitive tools in the wild anyway. It just proves a common designer NOT that we come from chimps, although looking around Britain today it is almost believable ;-)

Isn't it weird the common designer grouped most of the similar things in animals and plants in exactly the order you'd get if similar animals were descended from a common ancestor? Humans can knap stone tools and so can (when pushed) the similar looking bonobo, and yet neither has a poisonous sting (like bees and wasps) nor are either of them hermaphroditic and can fire packets of sperm under each other's skin like many molluscs. Just once, you'd expect the common designer to say, "Fuck this for a game of soldiers, it'd really help if this plant had legs, so shazam you've gottem," or "All my bears look basically the same. You can hardly fit a knife blade between the polar bear, brown bear, kodiak bear and panda bear. I think I'll give the grizzly bear eight starfish arms. Then it could catch clams more easily," or "I feel an absolute compunction to use a mammal-style backbone on a whale for reasons that are unclear to me. Bah, using the mammal backbone means the tail isn't going to move from side to side like a fish! Yikes! Good goddamn, it looks like some of them are going to have to keep their hind legs as well. I'll just make the pelvic girdle as small as creatorly possible and hope those humans don't notice or they'll be all over it with their descent-with-modifications bollocks."

It's also weird that the common designer made us from dirt and yet there's still dirt. You can't explain that.

The History of the NME by Pat Long: review

My copy of  The History of the NME: High Times and Low Lives at the World's Most Famous Music Magazine arrived, and I read it with the fascinated fascination of the fascinated.  I mentioned it was on its way here a few weeks ago, where I also said most of what I could say in this review.  That's because I read the NME cover to cover for six or so years in the Seventies, and maintain enough memory of the writing to spill it out long before the actual history of the mag arrived.

It's a little difficult to explain the appeal of the weekly rag, The New Musical Express - the NME - to someone who comes across it these days, where it's a horribly foreshortened magazine with a webpage that commands slightly less respect than say, Brooklyn Vegan or TNT.  But for a while, in the 1970s, when the post-hippie generation were growing up in their vast late-baby boom numbers and searching for their teenage expression, it was not only an arbiter of taste, but also the only window on society and politics that most of us (who had missed International Times and Oz) would see, at least until we left home and went to university.


I use the NME - Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols

Musical Express started publishing in the forties, after cannibalizing and driving around a zombie publication called Accordion Times for a few years. (The thirties craze for accordions had, as they do, slowed to a standstill.) For a while, it had "incorporating accordion times" on its masthead, but eventually even that went away.  The Musical Express cultivated a very British relationship with pop, and then rock when it was invented, by drinking with the stars and managers during the night and gossiping heavily about them during the day. Or rather, drinking any time after breakfast until the next dawn and then writing about them during any subsequent minutes between hangovers and the next round of drinks. Although the ME was well-placed to follow, report on, boost, and gossip about, the late fifties and early sixties stars - the 2i's crowd, the British Answers to Elvis (assuming we knew the questions)- it didn't quite *pop*, didn't really get one over on its early and permanent Moriarty, the Melody Maker.  It reacted by changing its name to the New Musical Express.  And although it grew mightily and prospered, it still wasn't differentiated.  Rolling Stone appeared, and ate its lunch.

Things had to change. Then, "one afternoon at the end of 1971, Alan Smith was pulled out of the New Musical Express writers' room and sent for a crisis meeting with senior IPC staff". The "hands of the NME clock were at five to midnight and unless something was done within months to arrest the decline in sales, the magazine would be shut down." He was given three months to turn the paper around.

This turned out to be an unbelievably apropos time. Not only was February 1972 the date when I started buying newspapers and taking an interest in music and the world around me, it was also the approximate date when the younger siblings of the hippies, who had missed out on 1967, Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix and any associated Surrealistic Pillows, also all sat up and started to take notice. The book quotes cultural commentator Peter York (who he?): "The story of the seventies was the story of everyone getting in on what a minority got in the sixties because they were in the right place at the right time." That's a slightly different slant, but same effect: The NME modernized itself in a few weeks, brought in the best brains of the Underground Press, took in the effect of the music festivals, including Bowie's performance at Glastonbury Fayre, and absorbed the influence of Time Out and the burgeoning mimeographed fanzines.



Reading my underground press - That's All You Need by the Faces.

My favorite writers came on board - Nick Kent, Mick Farren and Charles Shaar Murray. The older writers were hippies, but sort of forward looking - they had, after all, produced Schoolkid's Oz - and all were prose stylists with a wonderful turn of phrase. Many of the newer writers had heard of this Rock'n'Roll shit and wanted a piece for themselves, and some, chiefly Nick Kent, were quite capable of outdoing their heroes in the drugs and rock'n'roll arena. (We don't hear a lot about the sex, although there seem to have been convulsions later based on who was screwing, or should be screwing, Julie Burchill.) NME continued to add excellent writers and more articles about what was happening - Rock Against Racism, gay rights, the UK's successful attacks on the remaining unions - all through the seventies. We had Tony Parsons - he was a hip young gunslinger, once - and Steven Wells (Seething Wells). Half a dozen other stars.


Nick Kent namechecked sarcastically as the best dressed man in town in Press Darlings, by Adam and the Ants. Nick couldn't catch a break - he was once beaten up by Sid Vicious.

Post punk, I pretty much stopped reading the NME, and according to the book, I wasn't the only one. It continued, of course, but with a vastly shrunken page count and weekly circulation. The ads went to the new glossies, as lifestyle magazines were becoming a thing and the readers drifted off, to adult life or to those glossies. New readers tended to go to new glossy Smash Hits, founded by NME staffers, but in color, funny and snarky, and concentrating on pop.

The book does seem to end not with a bang but a Wimpy, but perhaps that's just me, as the paper I knew did indeed collapse into the Big Whimper. It's a great read, if you were there, and that's from 1935 to 1980, or thereabouts.

I couldn't close a book review without complaining about the proof reading.  This has few of the standard errors; I caught a "gyspy" and a "Quadrophrenia", and that was about it. But it has an instance of a startling new development in publishing. Language Log has noticed that ebooks tend to have people who do a global find-and-replace without considering what might be affected - in that case, a book where every instance of the word "kindle" was replaced by "Nook" which makes sense only if publishers are talking in the attached ads about the e-readers called Kindle and Nook, but not in the actual fictional text, where people are now apparently referring to lights as having being "Nookd".  In this (non-e-)  book, every instance of the word "matt" has disappeared. This may be because someone who features in the book is called "Mat" with one 't', but if that's true the expected replace function hasn't been performed. This means that in several cases, something really ers, or people are asked what's the er.  In the first instance, which puzzled me for most of the book, until I worked it out, we were told about the "people responsible for foring text submitted by the journalists." Other than that, it's well written and edited. 

Elephants and pandas cosplay

No idea, but it's incredibly cute.  It's from this website, translated by Google.

If you're wondering what on earth I was looking up when I found it, I was Googling images for
paul klee  "vor dem thor"
and no, that doesn't make it any easier to understand what's going on.

***

Quote of the day

I don't suppose you can expect an article on the death of screamy right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart to have an exactly civil comments section, and this one doesn't buck the trend.

Clearly you people have zero moral fiber or common sense to follow such ridiculous political ideology and propaganda of the Liberal Media who shoves what you want to hear and what they want you to hear down your throats.

I chose it because I think it's important that my Lie-brul Lamestream Media learns what it's doing wrong, and instead aims to shove it into our ears where it might have some effect. I could have picked the following comment instead, but it made me depressed (and also hug my guns):

Leave America, Commie. Remember Real Americans have guns, libs don't. Really think about that punk. When the SHTF you think your local police are going to help you? They're going to be running for their lives.

Something something improve the discourse re American politics goes here.

I use the NME - Happy 40th Birthday, Glam Rock!

Reminiscing on this blog about the forty years between Marc Bolan and the sadly Bolan-free world of today reminded me of my love affair with the New Musical Express, known to friends and enemies alike as the NME.   I first started getting it in early 1972, about the same time it made a major push for the younger music lovers, and succeeded mightily, peaking at more than a quarter of a million broadsheets sold each week.

NME has never actually been thought well of, so I can't say that people think less of it these days, but it's definitely shrunk a little from being the paper of me and mine and of the moment to being just another pop/rock fishwrap, and that's a terrible shame. I haven't gotten it for years - it's too expensive to import to the US, and anyway if it gets any scoops the rest of the internet steals them within 8 hours. (I'd hate to be a journalist today.) The NME, perhaps realizing that now is the time for a tell all, is bringing out its biography, The History of the NME: High Times and Low Lives at the World's Most Famous Music Magazine, by Pat Long, an ex-assistant editor. I've preordered it, but it won't be here until June. [Ed: It's here.]

There is a related blog, which features at least a couple of good articles. There's an interview with my mate Mick Farren, an underground press alumnus who worked for the NME during the Golden Age. (The Golden Age of a music paper, like the Golden Age of Science Fiction, is when the reader is aged between 14 and 16.) He brought a less frivolous, more gritty edge to a paper, which after all, was there mostly to tell us about this week's Bowie haircut, or what Bryan Ferry was doing, as the other interesting article, an interview with writer Nick Kent, puts it.

Farren was the one who knew how society worked and actually ran one to the extent he ran an open air festival, and could critique society at large with a White Panther's unflinching gaze. Nick Kent was the one who dressed more outrageously than the Stones and lived a more rock'n'roll lifestyle than even Keef (and you didn't believe that was possible!) He was also a one-time Sex Pistol who got beaten with a bike chain by Sid Vicious during one of those times when gangs go off-message and do something odd. Mick, on the other hand, wrote and sang with the (Social) Deviants, and could maybe best summed up by my describing how once I heard the greatest Bob Dylan track I'd never heard before, wondering why I hadn't come across it in the past, and realizing much later it was Mick Farren singing. I don't mean to sound as if all rock writers are frustrated musicians - they obviously all have some feel for music or they wouldn't be driven to write about it, but rivaling the Stones' glamour or outdoing Dylan is rare even among NME scribes.

Mick has written many books, the most germane...no pun intended Mick...being Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, which I've never reviewed here but is worth tracking down and reading. Nick Kent's more recent book Apathy For The Devil is more intensely personal, as living the glam rock life entailed taking the glam rock drugs, which subsequently meant a long nightmare of recovery, but has more than a glimmer of his unbelievable early writing and kept me so entertained I read it twice through in one sitting. I reviewed it here.

My collection of NMEs used to stretch from 1972 - Bowie and Bolan, Sweet and Slade - to 1977 - the Sex Pistols and the Damned.  Sometime in the mid-seventies I answered an ad from a bloke paying cash for 'any articles on Bowie', and shortly opened the door to a man with a broad Yorkshire accent and a bright red Ziggy mullet. He paid me an incredible amount of money for the early NMEs and wandered off, happy. That means the ones in my cupboard stretch from 74 to early 77, a tedious musical wasteland that included bright but ultimately pointless gems such as Be Bop Deluxe and Kilburn and the High Roads. It wasn't until mid-77 that the power of punk actually became clear. (Despite Mick Farren's legendary polemic in the 1976 Titanic Sails at Dawn piece prophesying the new order...not the New Order, the new order...which I still have.)

I watched the BBC's mammoth documentary of popular music, All You Need Is Love, recently. I've been meaning to write about it but never got around to it. The last episode, in 1977, is hilarious and yet sad in its blind aimless search for the next big thing that's so obviously due, and in fact actually there, yet quite invisible to people over 15, a demographic which the film-makers did not fit. AYNIL desperately interview the Baker Gurvitz Army, and stare at Mike Oldfield or ELO or Black Oak Arkansas hoping they'll Do Something.  Well, they didn't, and unfortunately that's the time period of NME I still have in the closet. But I remember my long-sold 1972 to 1974 runs with great fondness. Great fondness.

Cherchez la femme. Also quote of the day.

Here's something that combines Cherchez La Femme with quote of the day.

Does this sculpture look like a vagina?




Well, of course not. It looks like a vulva. A vagina is the inside part. It's dark there. But given there's a whole internet bunch of interest in it, doesn't that mean it looks like a "vagina"? Eh, no.  Thinking it's a vagina (or a vulva) and needing to have something done about it  is definitely cherchez la femme.

For the quote of the day, a commenter writes:

Disgusting. Replace this sculpture w/ something noble & pure, maybe erect a single free-standing column or something

I agree, god dammit.

Cherchez La Femme! #1

Cherchez La Femme #1.

An incidental and occasional series on How To Blame Women for everything.

LA Times, 02/26/2012 Travel section, article on jetlag:

What's the culprit in jet lag?

....It could be genetics (thanks mom!)....

What about thanks, dad? Or doesn't the writer know who his or her father is?

Gotcha!

The last time I saw PC Plod, he was having a Scanner Darkly moment. Guided by a CCTV dispatcher, he was chasing himself around the streets of a town in Sussex.  Every time the operator told him the suspect was round a corner, he ran round it to find it - empty! Because, you know, laws of physics.

Today Constabule Plod has redeemed himself, by raiding the offices of The Sun, a Murdoch rag which although it is pretty insignificant in the overall Murdoch empire, owning as he does Fox and Sky, is the tenth biggest selling paper in the world. It's roundly hated by me and by many people like me. It's what I cut my hating teeth on. It was always a dull paper, largely designed to appeal to the working classes while attempting to gently ease us into stupidity in some Orwellian language-based fashion. After Murdoch bought it in 1969, it became a propaganda machine and entrapped more readers by the use of the famous Page 3 Girls,  topless models, sometimes photographed as young as legally possible - on their sixteenth birthday - draped over what passed for news reporting.

Two weeks ago, four senior staff  at the Sun were arrested on corruption charges. The Daily Mail reports that the deputy editor, the picture editor and several others were arrested yesterday and released on bail. And the paper says that the investigation has "widened" suggesting that there is a suspicion of other kinds of corruption. The DM has a handy timeline of events in the investigations of Murdoch journalists, which has been dragging on since 2007. Possibly this indicates that "agents of the crown" who are bought, stay bought. At least for about five years.

The journos seem to think this is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut - or in newspaper parlance, breaking a butterfly on a wheel - and it probably is. But since it's the Super Soaraway Sun we're talking about here, I can't help smiling.