Orange County, CA is, or at least was, a very conservative area. When we first moved here we had never seen more BMWs, Volvos, Corvettes, or Italian sports cars in our entire lives. It's odd then, that the cultural highlight of life in Orange County is "Moon the Amtrak Day", held on the second Saturday in July each year.
It has a website, http://www.moonamtrak.org/, which has instructions on how moon safely and constructively. According to the Sunday July 11, 1999 edition of The Orange County Register, the article "Full moon over Amtrak keeps Laguna Niguel tradition alive", the tradition started as follows: "Twenty years ago (1979), at The Mugs Away Saloon, a K.T.Smith told his buddies he'd buy a drink for all who would run outside to the rail road tracks and "moon" the next train, which many did. The mooning tradition has prevailed, but there is no longer a volunteer to buy free drinks for thousands of "Mooners"."
People have shown up to moon ever since. I went once, when I first came here, and it's been on my calendar to go ever since, although without fail I have managed not to get there. The inability to attend extended to this year, which is lucky, because this year the mooning crowd got its ass busted. So to speak.
According to an LA Times article, Police halt 'mooning' of trains in Laguna Niguel after a crowd of 8,000 gathers, "Police were called out to break up the annual "mooning" of Amtrak trains in Laguna Niguel on Saturday when the crowd grew to 8,000 and many began baring more than just their behinds."We had some mooners and some female flashers and some people who were nude altogether," said Jim Amormino, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff's Department. "There was also lots of drinking. We felt that it was in the public's interest to shut it down.""
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Why I trust the internet
Someone on one of my message boards today posted that Urban Legend about the Nova not selling well in Spanish speaking countries because it means "no go" in Spanish. I've heard this a thousand times and there's no evidence that this is true, or at least that it was true at the time the Nova was on sale. (The ubiquity of the myth on the internets has muddied the waters.) I posted the standard refutation – the Snopes page. It's not perfect, but it's available and it's readable and well-researched. He wrote back to say "I tend to rely on at least one other source than the internet, which is often my memory" with the clear implication that someone "relying on the internet" was a moron.
Now, what I posted, was, admittedly, available on the internet (that's the only thing you *can* post) but was written by people I've known vaguely - as well as I know this guy – since 1995 or longer, about 15 years. Endless discussion over this issue took place on a Usenet newsgroup called alt.folklore.urban, where about fifteen regulars, using real names or unmunged handles, discussed and sifted information on this and every other Urban Legend as it came in. I believe them, because I've interacted with them for years and they are actual people who have devoted considerable time to this, and many other more fascinating issues. But to this poster, Snopes is "the internet".
It made me wonder about "the internet". The people whose only interaction with the internet is to read information from it, or watch porn, or both, must think the 'the internet' was put into place by Magic Overnight Fairies, who are capricious and frequently wrong, and therefore the internet is an unreliable place of great pitfalls and lies. And yet on this particular group, where the post quoted above was made, there are the usual sprinkling of wizards or gurus who Know What the Frell They're Talking About. I won't name names, but let's say that Jimbo has every Led Zeppelin bootleg ever released and Elisa can date a picture of any concert from the band's costume, stage set and audience. If Elisa tells me that a particular picture is from Kezar, June 2, 1973, and Jimbo tells me the available bootlegs are Who's Next, Imperial Kezar and so forth, then I have a choice. I can put the information into the "my trusted friends" category and act on it, or I can put it into the "found on the internet" category and discount it. In their case, I'll act on it.
So, where did I get my confidence in 'the internet', which clearly and self-evidently is stocked by con-artists, politicians, amateur liars, mad people, people with an axe to grind and folks who want to sell me something?
I got that confidence by being here before 'the internet' was built. Let's look at that for a minute. Searching on "who built the internet" and "history of the internet" brings up thousands of posts about Tim Berners-Lee, Al Gore, Transatlantic Cables and Arpanet. B-O-A-R-I-N-G! I don't, at this point, care that deeply about nodes, the Department of Defense and/or hypertext mark up language. No wonder the fairy theory is popular.
Who actually put all that content up there?
Well, I don't know. I thought I'd better put that up front since this post started out with a "I know what I'm frakking doing" statement. Web and Usenet history is so well-known to the real pioneers that if I say I know, I will be corrected, forcefully. So, I admit I don't completely know. But I've been told. And unlike most people, even people my age, I have lived it. I just didn't write it all down as it was happening.
I started off in Usenet, before there was a web. Usenet was first up and running in 1979. It was originally designed to share "news" articles written e-mail style by one person and uploaded to a backbone of computers where the article could be grabbed and read by other users. To help sort the articles (even though only a few a day were anticipated), there was a naming hierarchy so that the articles could be sorted and placed in a number of "newsgroups". A post to a newsgroup could be replied to by any user and all other users could see both original and reply. If you read the original article and the reply together, you were reading a "thread". Usenet is not hypertext based (of course, there are html news articles nowadays), so a thread was a thread. To find a related thread, you had to keep up with the news and remember where the original was.
The original computers in the system (1980) were:
..........reed....phs
..............\../...\
......uok ----duke---unc
............. ./......\
.............research...vax135
...............l
.............ucbvax
Arpanet and various mailing lists joined on to this until it became – wait, get this – a world wide web! (But not *the* world wide web (WWW). That came later.)
Within a few years, thousands of users were sharing news articles. Gamers, of course, were early adopters. Unix wizards appear to have been 97% [1]of the population, but despite that, the number of articles continued to grow rapidly until there were literally tens of thousands of newsgroups available, millions of articles and hundreds of thousands of users.
I was online in 1992 (possibly earlier; I can't remember) through Compuserve at home and a work email address borrowed from a friend's workplace. The original newsgroups I subscribed to included alt.folklore.urban, which discussed Urban Folklore, as in the commonly passed-around material that Jan Harold Brunvand wrote books about – the baby in the microwave, the Red Velvet Cake Recipe, the Death Car and so on. In those days, since there was no internet or even email for most people, all folklore was passed by word of mouth, or by careless media called 'vectors'. (Now that the internet exists, urban folklore eats its own tail, and so alt.folklore.urban is basically useless. If you go and look at it today, you'll see it's a pale shadow of its old self.) The first recognizable post of mine still in the Google archive was to alt.folklore.urban on February 27th, 1995.
Usenet is very different from what most people call the internet, the WWW. You don't need a browser to connect to it (although most people these days do connect through a browser), and you don't read "webpages" written by businessmen or salesmen or media outlets. You talk, in an email-based way, with thousands of users of like mind, who have self-sorted based on the newsgroup names, or their charters, or in some cases have squatted an unused newsgroup and just began chattering on it. Take a look at one of my favorites, uk.rec.sheds!
What is usually known these days as the internet is the World Wide Web. This is a series of documents (now a rather large collection) which are linked together by navigation elements called hyperlinks. A document hyperlink is an address that can be typed into a "browser" which will then display the document on the user's computer. In the document may be other hyperlinks, which a user can click on to go to the next document, and by "next" I mean the next one to catch the user's eye. The documents aren't actually in any order, and anyone can upload a document to the WWW, tell someone the hyperlink address, and that person can find it, read it, and link to it – but not alter it.
The WWW took off in 1993 with the introduction of the web browser. Funding for the first high-profile one, Mosaic, came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by then-Senator Al Gore's High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 also known as the Gore Bill . (I thought I'd just throw that in, in case anyone asks.) Mosaic was rapidly displaced by Netscape, and then Netscape was more or less destroyed by Internet Explorer, which started in 1995. With the introduction of IE, the WWW was readily available to people with PCs and little computing experience.
Much of the WWW is composed of documents put together by big companies, governments, health organizations and so on, who need a big soapbox to shout from. Other documents come from grassroots people – fans, collectors, hobbyists, photographers, anyone who has interesting stuff to share with others. A middle ground comes from larger companies who put up web pages and then ask their users to fill the pages with "content" for free, which they then sell, or they sell the advertising. YouTube will take your videos. Flickr or Photobucket will take your photos. Fanfiction.net will take your fanfiction. Allrecipes or Foodnetwork will take your recipes and publish them, asking little except a treasured family secret in exchange for nothing at all. IMDB will take your movie reviews and your hard-won knowledge of movie crew and cast. Clever sites do many of these things at once – Amazon will try to sell you something, but it does it by having previous buyers rate what they bought and review it, providing content; and their software aggregates buying habits of people like you and they like in order to prepare suggestions for what you should buy next. Some folk believe in the Wisdom of Crowds and have built Wikipedia, to which you can add your own information.
Google has made a point of providing astonishing tools to people and not actually asking for anything in return except your personal details, every document you've ever written, whether uploaded or not, every email you've ever sent or received, every trip you've ever taken and every web search you've performed, which they will sell to the Martians in 2009 in exchange for nice uniforms and swagger sticks. [2] And I for one welcome our new Martian overlords.
Another subset of WWW comprises the areas set up by companies to allow people to express themselves. Blogspot and LiveJournal give you a place for a personal soapbox. MySpace and Facebook and so on provide an area for you to advertise yourself and keep friends informed. Tens of thousands of message boards, many with minimal advertising and owned and operated by private citizens paying out of their own pocket, have been set up on thousands of topics.
The last category is similar to Usenet, and it is still the way I spend most of my online time now I've mostly transferred to the WWW. I belong to literally dozens of Message Boards, User Groups, Notice Boards, Groups, Live Journals, Blogs and so forth. The content in these web pages is dynamic, and is almost entirely written by individuals. Most of it is in the form of posts, whether at a regular frequency, like a blog, or in response to other's posts, as in a message board. The individuals may be named Gandalf, or JimmyPage666 or RavenRoseGoth, or whatever, but each one is a human being, not a conglomerate or an agency. I have half a dozen names out there myself, mainly to keep straight what I'm supposed to be talking about, although, to be honest, there is a certain amount of not wanting my friends to meet my other friends, and god forbid, talk about me behind my cyberback.
Each of these people is known to me. I haven't been round their houses. Most of them are a continent or more away. I don't know what most of them look like. But over the weeks and months, the ones who come back, who make sense, who can read and write, who are respected by their peers – these people float to the top in internet culture. They used to be called gurus or wizards, but I guess the web doesn't bother with titles like old timers did. The respect is earned the old way, over the years. I trust them, at least in their chosen fields. I don't trust 'the internet'; I don't trust Exxon, or whitehouse.gov, or Wikipedia, or nuttyhomeopathicremedies.com. But I do trust the wizards.
[1] Made up figure
[2] Made up business plan
Further reading: 1993 article by Bruce Sterling on the History of the Internet.
Now, what I posted, was, admittedly, available on the internet (that's the only thing you *can* post) but was written by people I've known vaguely - as well as I know this guy – since 1995 or longer, about 15 years. Endless discussion over this issue took place on a Usenet newsgroup called alt.folklore.urban, where about fifteen regulars, using real names or unmunged handles, discussed and sifted information on this and every other Urban Legend as it came in. I believe them, because I've interacted with them for years and they are actual people who have devoted considerable time to this, and many other more fascinating issues. But to this poster, Snopes is "the internet".
It made me wonder about "the internet". The people whose only interaction with the internet is to read information from it, or watch porn, or both, must think the 'the internet' was put into place by Magic Overnight Fairies, who are capricious and frequently wrong, and therefore the internet is an unreliable place of great pitfalls and lies. And yet on this particular group, where the post quoted above was made, there are the usual sprinkling of wizards or gurus who Know What the Frell They're Talking About. I won't name names, but let's say that Jimbo has every Led Zeppelin bootleg ever released and Elisa can date a picture of any concert from the band's costume, stage set and audience. If Elisa tells me that a particular picture is from Kezar, June 2, 1973, and Jimbo tells me the available bootlegs are Who's Next, Imperial Kezar and so forth, then I have a choice. I can put the information into the "my trusted friends" category and act on it, or I can put it into the "found on the internet" category and discount it. In their case, I'll act on it.
So, where did I get my confidence in 'the internet', which clearly and self-evidently is stocked by con-artists, politicians, amateur liars, mad people, people with an axe to grind and folks who want to sell me something?
I got that confidence by being here before 'the internet' was built. Let's look at that for a minute. Searching on "who built the internet" and "history of the internet" brings up thousands of posts about Tim Berners-Lee, Al Gore, Transatlantic Cables and Arpanet. B-O-A-R-I-N-G! I don't, at this point, care that deeply about nodes, the Department of Defense and/or hypertext mark up language. No wonder the fairy theory is popular.
Who actually put all that content up there?
Well, I don't know. I thought I'd better put that up front since this post started out with a "I know what I'm frakking doing" statement. Web and Usenet history is so well-known to the real pioneers that if I say I know, I will be corrected, forcefully. So, I admit I don't completely know. But I've been told. And unlike most people, even people my age, I have lived it. I just didn't write it all down as it was happening.
I started off in Usenet, before there was a web. Usenet was first up and running in 1979. It was originally designed to share "news" articles written e-mail style by one person and uploaded to a backbone of computers where the article could be grabbed and read by other users. To help sort the articles (even though only a few a day were anticipated), there was a naming hierarchy so that the articles could be sorted and placed in a number of "newsgroups". A post to a newsgroup could be replied to by any user and all other users could see both original and reply. If you read the original article and the reply together, you were reading a "thread". Usenet is not hypertext based (of course, there are html news articles nowadays), so a thread was a thread. To find a related thread, you had to keep up with the news and remember where the original was.
The original computers in the system (1980) were:
..........reed....phs
..............\../...\
......uok ----duke---unc
............. ./......\
.............research...vax135
...............l
.............ucbvax
Arpanet and various mailing lists joined on to this until it became – wait, get this – a world wide web! (But not *the* world wide web (WWW). That came later.)
Within a few years, thousands of users were sharing news articles. Gamers, of course, were early adopters. Unix wizards appear to have been 97% [1]of the population, but despite that, the number of articles continued to grow rapidly until there were literally tens of thousands of newsgroups available, millions of articles and hundreds of thousands of users.
I was online in 1992 (possibly earlier; I can't remember) through Compuserve at home and a work email address borrowed from a friend's workplace. The original newsgroups I subscribed to included alt.folklore.urban, which discussed Urban Folklore, as in the commonly passed-around material that Jan Harold Brunvand wrote books about – the baby in the microwave, the Red Velvet Cake Recipe, the Death Car and so on. In those days, since there was no internet or even email for most people, all folklore was passed by word of mouth, or by careless media called 'vectors'. (Now that the internet exists, urban folklore eats its own tail, and so alt.folklore.urban is basically useless. If you go and look at it today, you'll see it's a pale shadow of its old self.) The first recognizable post of mine still in the Google archive was to alt.folklore.urban on February 27th, 1995.
Usenet is very different from what most people call the internet, the WWW. You don't need a browser to connect to it (although most people these days do connect through a browser), and you don't read "webpages" written by businessmen or salesmen or media outlets. You talk, in an email-based way, with thousands of users of like mind, who have self-sorted based on the newsgroup names, or their charters, or in some cases have squatted an unused newsgroup and just began chattering on it. Take a look at one of my favorites, uk.rec.sheds!
What is usually known these days as the internet is the World Wide Web. This is a series of documents (now a rather large collection) which are linked together by navigation elements called hyperlinks. A document hyperlink is an address that can be typed into a "browser" which will then display the document on the user's computer. In the document may be other hyperlinks, which a user can click on to go to the next document, and by "next" I mean the next one to catch the user's eye. The documents aren't actually in any order, and anyone can upload a document to the WWW, tell someone the hyperlink address, and that person can find it, read it, and link to it – but not alter it.
The WWW took off in 1993 with the introduction of the web browser. Funding for the first high-profile one, Mosaic, came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by then-Senator Al Gore's High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 also known as the Gore Bill . (I thought I'd just throw that in, in case anyone asks.) Mosaic was rapidly displaced by Netscape, and then Netscape was more or less destroyed by Internet Explorer, which started in 1995. With the introduction of IE, the WWW was readily available to people with PCs and little computing experience.
Much of the WWW is composed of documents put together by big companies, governments, health organizations and so on, who need a big soapbox to shout from. Other documents come from grassroots people – fans, collectors, hobbyists, photographers, anyone who has interesting stuff to share with others. A middle ground comes from larger companies who put up web pages and then ask their users to fill the pages with "content" for free, which they then sell, or they sell the advertising. YouTube will take your videos. Flickr or Photobucket will take your photos. Fanfiction.net will take your fanfiction. Allrecipes or Foodnetwork will take your recipes and publish them, asking little except a treasured family secret in exchange for nothing at all. IMDB will take your movie reviews and your hard-won knowledge of movie crew and cast. Clever sites do many of these things at once – Amazon will try to sell you something, but it does it by having previous buyers rate what they bought and review it, providing content; and their software aggregates buying habits of people like you and they like in order to prepare suggestions for what you should buy next. Some folk believe in the Wisdom of Crowds and have built Wikipedia, to which you can add your own information.
Google has made a point of providing astonishing tools to people and not actually asking for anything in return except your personal details, every document you've ever written, whether uploaded or not, every email you've ever sent or received, every trip you've ever taken and every web search you've performed, which they will sell to the Martians in 2009 in exchange for nice uniforms and swagger sticks. [2] And I for one welcome our new Martian overlords.
Another subset of WWW comprises the areas set up by companies to allow people to express themselves. Blogspot and LiveJournal give you a place for a personal soapbox. MySpace and Facebook and so on provide an area for you to advertise yourself and keep friends informed. Tens of thousands of message boards, many with minimal advertising and owned and operated by private citizens paying out of their own pocket, have been set up on thousands of topics.
The last category is similar to Usenet, and it is still the way I spend most of my online time now I've mostly transferred to the WWW. I belong to literally dozens of Message Boards, User Groups, Notice Boards, Groups, Live Journals, Blogs and so forth. The content in these web pages is dynamic, and is almost entirely written by individuals. Most of it is in the form of posts, whether at a regular frequency, like a blog, or in response to other's posts, as in a message board. The individuals may be named Gandalf, or JimmyPage666 or RavenRoseGoth, or whatever, but each one is a human being, not a conglomerate or an agency. I have half a dozen names out there myself, mainly to keep straight what I'm supposed to be talking about, although, to be honest, there is a certain amount of not wanting my friends to meet my other friends, and god forbid, talk about me behind my cyberback.
Each of these people is known to me. I haven't been round their houses. Most of them are a continent or more away. I don't know what most of them look like. But over the weeks and months, the ones who come back, who make sense, who can read and write, who are respected by their peers – these people float to the top in internet culture. They used to be called gurus or wizards, but I guess the web doesn't bother with titles like old timers did. The respect is earned the old way, over the years. I trust them, at least in their chosen fields. I don't trust 'the internet'; I don't trust Exxon, or whitehouse.gov, or Wikipedia, or nuttyhomeopathicremedies.com. But I do trust the wizards.
[1] Made up figure
[2] Made up business plan
Further reading: 1993 article by Bruce Sterling on the History of the Internet.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Squeeze my lemon
Harper's Magazine has a piece on "Culture-Bound Syndromes" which sounds really boring, but they've picked the most exciting one to chase down and use as an illustration: it focuses on Penis Thieves. I remember reading about penis thieves in Private Eye's Funny Old World column (or whatever it was called then) in the 1970s. The newspaper clipping described Africans running around with their privates held in their hands, believing they were shrinking and eventually disappearing,whereupon they would die.
The Harper's article, A mind dismembered: In search of the magical penis thieves, is written by a man who went to Nigeria in the midst of the current penis-stealing epidemic and asked a few people there how the witches do it, and what it felt like.
The article also discusses latah, a sort of zombie-hood in which the sufferer is unable to resist orders from others, and amok, episodes of senseless violence, among others. The name "culture bound syndromes" was given to them by a psychiatrist called Pow Meng Yap in Hong Kong in the 1950s.
It's a difficult subject to confront in an article, because it's funny if you don't believe in it, but it's literally deadly serious if you do. Many of the accused "witches" have been torn apart by mobs and the lives of the snatchees permanently affected. The fear suffered by someone who thinks his penis has been stolen is very real, and the panic that follows is real and spreads fast (the true meaning of 'panic').
It made me wonder about our culture and what Culture-Bound Syndromes we have. More or less by definition, we wouldn't know we had them, because they are part of our culture. ("We" here is generic Anglo-American.) We know white Europeans did have them; there's a bit in the article about the Malleus Maleficarum, which apparently has several chapters on European witches and their membrum virile-stealing ways. Then there's the case of nostalgia. For most of us today, nostalgia is a sort of wistfulness that comes over us when we think about something from our childhood and is about as serious as a desire for another latte. But when the word nostalgia was first coined, it was a serious condition that afflicted Swiss soldiers – in many cases the homesickness was so severe that the soldier died. Another, more recent, panic is McCarthyism, the belief that your neighbor may have looked as American as Betty Rubble but she was secretly working for Uncle Joe, helping him overthrow the United States.
But today, what widespread penis-thievery-level panics are there? What completely irrational fears, deeply believed by small sections of the non-mentally-ill population? My entry for bizarre modern white culture-bound syndrome is the "Satanic Ritual Abuse". Most people have heard of it; enormous numbers of people believe it is happening, and a fair number of people claim it's happened to them.
"Witchcraft" can still happen.
More:
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
By Charles Mackay
Ponzi Schemes, Invaders from Mars & More Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
By Joseph Bulgatz
(Update of Mackay. Even more interesting but no preview on the web.)
The Harper's article, A mind dismembered: In search of the magical penis thieves, is written by a man who went to Nigeria in the midst of the current penis-stealing epidemic and asked a few people there how the witches do it, and what it felt like.
The article also discusses latah, a sort of zombie-hood in which the sufferer is unable to resist orders from others, and amok, episodes of senseless violence, among others. The name "culture bound syndromes" was given to them by a psychiatrist called Pow Meng Yap in Hong Kong in the 1950s.
It's a difficult subject to confront in an article, because it's funny if you don't believe in it, but it's literally deadly serious if you do. Many of the accused "witches" have been torn apart by mobs and the lives of the snatchees permanently affected. The fear suffered by someone who thinks his penis has been stolen is very real, and the panic that follows is real and spreads fast (the true meaning of 'panic').
It made me wonder about our culture and what Culture-Bound Syndromes we have. More or less by definition, we wouldn't know we had them, because they are part of our culture. ("We" here is generic Anglo-American.) We know white Europeans did have them; there's a bit in the article about the Malleus Maleficarum, which apparently has several chapters on European witches and their membrum virile-stealing ways. Then there's the case of nostalgia. For most of us today, nostalgia is a sort of wistfulness that comes over us when we think about something from our childhood and is about as serious as a desire for another latte. But when the word nostalgia was first coined, it was a serious condition that afflicted Swiss soldiers – in many cases the homesickness was so severe that the soldier died. Another, more recent, panic is McCarthyism, the belief that your neighbor may have looked as American as Betty Rubble but she was secretly working for Uncle Joe, helping him overthrow the United States.
But today, what widespread penis-thievery-level panics are there? What completely irrational fears, deeply believed by small sections of the non-mentally-ill population? My entry for bizarre modern white culture-bound syndrome is the "Satanic Ritual Abuse". Most people have heard of it; enormous numbers of people believe it is happening, and a fair number of people claim it's happened to them.
"Witchcraft" can still happen.
More:
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
By Charles Mackay
Ponzi Schemes, Invaders from Mars & More Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
By Joseph Bulgatz
(Update of Mackay. Even more interesting but no preview on the web.)
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Laissez les bons temps rouler!
As you may know, I saw Robert Plant play with Strange Sensation last year. They're a proper rock band, playing some mixed modern music, a little folky here and there but basically rocking out. I had a great time.
A friend of mine saw the Plant/Krauss show in Memphis this week. She didn't like it. Her feelings about the whispered, banjo-led arrangement of Led Zeppelin's Black Dog were less than entirely positive. I haven't seen them live, but I've heard the album, Raising Sand, and I've watched their version of Black Dog, and her sentiments certainly echo mine.
I've read review after review of this tour that rhapsodizes about Alison Krauss, Genius Producer T Bone Burnett, eerie Down to the River to Pray and beyond earthly Sister Rosetta Something Something. Some of these reviews are so fulsome I've wondered many times if the reviewers are telling the truth. Are they, a voice at the back of my mind wonders, perhaps telling us how great the Emperor's New Clothes are because they'd get noticed if they didn't say that?
Here's what I think. I think listening to Robert Plant sing Black Dog as quietly as possible accompanied by a banjo is time that could be spent more productively, e.g. scraping that weird black paste made up of old skin cells and grease off the car's steering wheel where it mysteriously accumulates.
It was mildly amusing at first to see a major cultural raider like Plant abandon his pet Mississippi delta bluesmen, Chicago bluesmen, Egyptians, Moroccans and other "others" who never had the dollar to push back, and instead latch on to a rich white woman, but after a while I got pissed off that he'd selected a *woman* to anoint with his Rock God elixir. I bet he would never pick on someone his own size - i.e. a male star of a western non-rock idiom.
Eventually, I realized he'd actually gone native like so many cultural tourists do and started to side with "Americana" over rock. Living with them might not have turned his brain on its own, but he may have driven over the edge by having Jimmy Page hassle him for more Zeppling after the December reunion gig.
Watching Robert Plant sing Black Dog with this band is akin to watching a victim of Stockholm Syndrome beg to wash her kidnappers' socks. He's gone native now and isn't coming back - bully for him, but I don't have to like it.
In case you think I'm overreacting, here's the July 3rd Phoenix version of Black Dog.
At first I thought he was screwing with the audiences' heads - seeing how much they would take before someone shouted, "Lookee! He's got no clothes!" After a while I think I got what he was trying to do. By reducing the noise and the flash and limiting Black Dog entirely to feel, he's trying to bring out the sheer presence and atmosphere inside the song. Face it, it's a spooky number. There's a hysterical edge to it that takes it out of the ordinary. "Eyes that shine burning red, dreams of you all through my head" is adolescently transcendent.
The problem is, the rearrangement didn't work. There's an effortless spookiness to real blues players which means they don't have to go to the swamp; the swamp goes to them. Just a few minutes with Robert Johnson and you believe he did sell his soul to the Devil, because no one gets that supernatural edge unless something magic and inhuman oozed its way through the pores of in his reality like oil seeping through stone, darkening his words and haunting his guitar.
But that video of Black Dog just sounds like Black Dog played really, really quietly on a banjo with a fiddle.
A friend of mine saw the Plant/Krauss show in Memphis this week. She didn't like it. Her feelings about the whispered, banjo-led arrangement of Led Zeppelin's Black Dog were less than entirely positive. I haven't seen them live, but I've heard the album, Raising Sand, and I've watched their version of Black Dog, and her sentiments certainly echo mine.
I've read review after review of this tour that rhapsodizes about Alison Krauss, Genius Producer T Bone Burnett, eerie Down to the River to Pray and beyond earthly Sister Rosetta Something Something. Some of these reviews are so fulsome I've wondered many times if the reviewers are telling the truth. Are they, a voice at the back of my mind wonders, perhaps telling us how great the Emperor's New Clothes are because they'd get noticed if they didn't say that?
Here's what I think. I think listening to Robert Plant sing Black Dog as quietly as possible accompanied by a banjo is time that could be spent more productively, e.g. scraping that weird black paste made up of old skin cells and grease off the car's steering wheel where it mysteriously accumulates.
It was mildly amusing at first to see a major cultural raider like Plant abandon his pet Mississippi delta bluesmen, Chicago bluesmen, Egyptians, Moroccans and other "others" who never had the dollar to push back, and instead latch on to a rich white woman, but after a while I got pissed off that he'd selected a *woman* to anoint with his Rock God elixir. I bet he would never pick on someone his own size - i.e. a male star of a western non-rock idiom.
Eventually, I realized he'd actually gone native like so many cultural tourists do and started to side with "Americana" over rock. Living with them might not have turned his brain on its own, but he may have driven over the edge by having Jimmy Page hassle him for more Zeppling after the December reunion gig.
Watching Robert Plant sing Black Dog with this band is akin to watching a victim of Stockholm Syndrome beg to wash her kidnappers' socks. He's gone native now and isn't coming back - bully for him, but I don't have to like it.
In case you think I'm overreacting, here's the July 3rd Phoenix version of Black Dog.
At first I thought he was screwing with the audiences' heads - seeing how much they would take before someone shouted, "Lookee! He's got no clothes!" After a while I think I got what he was trying to do. By reducing the noise and the flash and limiting Black Dog entirely to feel, he's trying to bring out the sheer presence and atmosphere inside the song. Face it, it's a spooky number. There's a hysterical edge to it that takes it out of the ordinary. "Eyes that shine burning red, dreams of you all through my head" is adolescently transcendent.
The problem is, the rearrangement didn't work. There's an effortless spookiness to real blues players which means they don't have to go to the swamp; the swamp goes to them. Just a few minutes with Robert Johnson and you believe he did sell his soul to the Devil, because no one gets that supernatural edge unless something magic and inhuman oozed its way through the pores of in his reality like oil seeping through stone, darkening his words and haunting his guitar.
But that video of Black Dog just sounds like Black Dog played really, really quietly on a banjo with a fiddle.
Monday, July 07, 2008
Octopuses, again.
Do octopuses have a favorite tentacle? asks the Independent.
Claire Little, a marine expert at the Weymouth Sea Life Centre, explained: "Uniquely, octopuses have more than half their nerves in their arms and have been shown to partially think with their arms. "
I remember something like that from Blindsight. I'm pretty sure mammals partly think with their limbs too, but unless we unfortunately stumble into some Futurama-Disembodied-Head scenario, we probably won't be able to show it to any great extent.
The paper says, "Octopuses belong to the same family as slugs and snails, but scientists believe they are far more intelligent than their relatives." This is slander, of course, as they are in the Class Cephalopoda, and the slugs and snails are in their own Class, the Gastropoda. (Classes contain Orders, which contain Families, which contain Genuses, which contain Species.) They are all in the same Phylum, Mollusca, and subphylum, Conchifera (Shell Bearers), but still.
As a comparison, all mammals are in the same Class, so humans and naked mole rats are phylogenetically closer than slugs and octopuses. (We're in the Phylum Chordata, Subphylum Vertebrata, in case you're wondering.)
Anyway, the important thing is the octopuses have been given Rubik's Cubes to play with.
Claire Little, a marine expert at the Weymouth Sea Life Centre, explained: "Uniquely, octopuses have more than half their nerves in their arms and have been shown to partially think with their arms. "
I remember something like that from Blindsight. I'm pretty sure mammals partly think with their limbs too, but unless we unfortunately stumble into some Futurama-Disembodied-Head scenario, we probably won't be able to show it to any great extent.
The paper says, "Octopuses belong to the same family as slugs and snails, but scientists believe they are far more intelligent than their relatives." This is slander, of course, as they are in the Class Cephalopoda, and the slugs and snails are in their own Class, the Gastropoda. (Classes contain Orders, which contain Families, which contain Genuses, which contain Species.) They are all in the same Phylum, Mollusca, and subphylum, Conchifera (Shell Bearers), but still.
As a comparison, all mammals are in the same Class, so humans and naked mole rats are phylogenetically closer than slugs and octopuses. (We're in the Phylum Chordata, Subphylum Vertebrata, in case you're wondering.)
Anyway, the important thing is the octopuses have been given Rubik's Cubes to play with.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Peanut Envy
I requested a cup of peanut-butter and chocolate ice-cream from BaskinRobins, and my friend went to get it for me.
"It doesn't have peanuts on top," I said when it came back.
"No," said my friend, "They don't have peanuts any longer because 'people have allergies to peanuts'."
"Oh," I said, poking at the ice-cream with a plastic spoon, "isn't this peanut-butter and chocolate ice-cream?"
"Yes, it is," he said.
"Did you point that out to them?"
"No, by then we were already well into the does-not-compute part of the conversation."
I have yet to pluck up courage to ask how weird the first part of the conversation was.
It can be tough, as a Brit, attempting to buy common food items in Southern California. Fraught with dangers. Sometimes I think the life of a muskrat trapper in British Columbia must have been easier. At least it was more logical.
"It doesn't have peanuts on top," I said when it came back.
"No," said my friend, "They don't have peanuts any longer because 'people have allergies to peanuts'."
"Oh," I said, poking at the ice-cream with a plastic spoon, "isn't this peanut-butter and chocolate ice-cream?"
"Yes, it is," he said.
"Did you point that out to them?"
"No, by then we were already well into the does-not-compute part of the conversation."
I have yet to pluck up courage to ask how weird the first part of the conversation was.
It can be tough, as a Brit, attempting to buy common food items in Southern California. Fraught with dangers. Sometimes I think the life of a muskrat trapper in British Columbia must have been easier. At least it was more logical.
Live Music
Yesterday I wrote about live music. Impossible to copy, share or P2P, live music is both thriving and profitable.
The Sunday Times today had an article on the subject – "Computer says get a life – and we have" by Simon Jenkins. His argument is that futurologists are not completely correct when they point to the internet as the killer app in music. The internet has made recorded music easy to obtain. But, Jenkins says, futurologists are ignoring what Imperial College historian David Edgerton called "the shock of the old", which is to say human needs do not change over time.
The only thing that changes is the market's way to supply them. Downloads are virtually free, but not sufficient. One thing people have always wanted is live art, live music. Jenkins says, "Last year sales of CDs fell by more than 10% and prices plummeted, while attendance at live concerts rose by 13% and prices soared". He gives examples – Plant/Krauss, Prince. He says the "fastest growing cultural activity in Britain is literary and music festivals."
"People like people. They crave the immediacy of human contact and congregation. They want to see those who inspire or excite them live, not digitised. And what they want, they will pay for."
Will it replace the money bands used to make selling records? Of course – if you can draw people in to see you. As Bob Lefsetz says in his blog, " If I hear one more "artist" complain that he can’t make any money selling recorded music I’m going to explode."
"And you’ve got to play live. Not only for the performance fees, but the merch fees. It would be as if you could sell during sex. […] High on the show people will blow money they’d keep in their wallet the next week, if not the next day. And, having spent their money on merch, they’re going to utilize it, wear it, spreading the word."
Here's a picture of Jimmy Page, just because we haven't had one for a while.
Sorry, uncredited photographer – I didn't see a name
associated with it where I found it.
Trackback for this entry: Live and In Person "My thoughts that Peromyscus did not address were about what Jenkins said regarding cd sales falling and live music attendance increasing. Recorded music is heading in the direction of becoming the promotion..."
The Sunday Times today had an article on the subject – "Computer says get a life – and we have" by Simon Jenkins. His argument is that futurologists are not completely correct when they point to the internet as the killer app in music. The internet has made recorded music easy to obtain. But, Jenkins says, futurologists are ignoring what Imperial College historian David Edgerton called "the shock of the old", which is to say human needs do not change over time.
The only thing that changes is the market's way to supply them. Downloads are virtually free, but not sufficient. One thing people have always wanted is live art, live music. Jenkins says, "Last year sales of CDs fell by more than 10% and prices plummeted, while attendance at live concerts rose by 13% and prices soared". He gives examples – Plant/Krauss, Prince. He says the "fastest growing cultural activity in Britain is literary and music festivals."
"People like people. They crave the immediacy of human contact and congregation. They want to see those who inspire or excite them live, not digitised. And what they want, they will pay for."
Will it replace the money bands used to make selling records? Of course – if you can draw people in to see you. As Bob Lefsetz says in his blog, " If I hear one more "artist" complain that he can’t make any money selling recorded music I’m going to explode."
"And you’ve got to play live. Not only for the performance fees, but the merch fees. It would be as if you could sell during sex. […] High on the show people will blow money they’d keep in their wallet the next week, if not the next day. And, having spent their money on merch, they’re going to utilize it, wear it, spreading the word."
Here's a picture of Jimmy Page, just because we haven't had one for a while.
Sorry, uncredited photographer – I didn't see a name
associated with it where I found it.
Trackback for this entry: Live and In Person "My thoughts that Peromyscus did not address were about what Jenkins said regarding cd sales falling and live music attendance increasing. Recorded music is heading in the direction of becoming the promotion..."
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Led Zepagain
Music's everywhere now. Despite the best effort of the record companies and the RIAA to make it only available in formats people can't use at prices they can't afford, music escaped and is available to everyone, all the time. It's a law of unintended consequences, I guess, that something which is ubiquitous is hardly valued. Like writing, music is becoming something ordered up to fill containers provided by other people. Whether those containers are weddings, or DJs, or websites, or theme tunes for TV shows, or ads, music is so available it gets used by the bucket as filler. Music, even hard core, is just hard core to fill a void. "Content providers", they call writers. Musicians who can write content to order, like a Jamaican performer providing personalized music for a local sound system, will win out in this phase of the battle. That's a subject for a whole other post, I'm sure.
There remains one type of music that is rare, rationed, and normally very expensive. That is live music. It can't be copied; it has to be provided by other people. But folks like live music. Unlike music on an iPod, you experience it in extraordinary circumstances (you have to go to where it is being held), and the social interactions involved are very different and highly sought after.
I've mentioned before that music never dies – Within seconds, I can find and listen to The Hollies or Blind Boy Fuller or The La's. Live music is the exception. Most best selling bands are defunct as a live outfit and the few still touring play stadiums or arenas and charge a premium. And the void gets larger every year – the desire to see live music never seems to diminish, but the number of touring bands gets smaller every year. Enter the tribute band, which fills this void.
Last Friday I went to see a tribute band called Led Zepagain. As you might guess, they fill the Led Zeppelin live void. Led Zepagain work on the details of emulation very carefully, the idea being to recreate the original experience as closely as possible.
They were playing a local concert hall, the OC Tavern. I have no idea how the economics of live music in So Cal work. The OC Tavern can't hold more than 700 on the live music dancefloor. That night there were two bands on, and a DJ/Sound System on a smaller dancefloor which attracted exactly zero people. The bar/café must have held 200 maximum. I know that slightly larger places like the Coach House survive with major bands and big-name live acts playing there, and smaller places always seemed to do ok. Perhaps the bars have some kind of device that silently vacuums money out of your pockets. It's the only way I can imagine they make a profit. It can't be the beer – you don't drink that much more because you're watching a live band.
I've seen Led Zeppelin themselves twice. I've also seen the band in person from a short distance, at The Song Remains the Same premiere. I've watched The Song Remains the Same so much I know most of the shots by heart. I have DVD. I made a start on the extra songs in the re-released The Song Remains the Same. I have a collection of every scrap of video of Led Zeppelin that has ever made it out to general-level bootleggers. So I have a good grasp of what Led Zeppelin looked like and sounded like. And if I wanted, I could play Zeppelin music constantly. I could watch them on my TV, or on my computer, around the clock. But I could never again see them live. And that's where Led Zepagain come in.
Led Zepagain blow me away. The recreation is uncanny – the sound is almost perfect and the visuals close enough to cause flashbacks. The wildly distorted scale – 1/40th the audience size, 1/10th the stage size – is a little disconcerting at first, but you get used to it. And best of all, you get all the benefits of live music.
The place was packed. The people around me were there to rock and did so with evident gusto. Most of them seemed to be Led Zepagain virgins, but all were converted by the energy, showmanship and virtuosity of the band. We all ended up dancing and singing along with the exception of a girl in front of me who wanted to play out some major life drama with her boyfriend. I guess getting to watch a living soap opera is part of the social benefits of live music I was extolling up there in the second paragraph.
Next weekend, July 12th, Led Zepagain will be playing the Santa Fe Springs swapmeet. Ticket price is one buck. Can't beat that.
There remains one type of music that is rare, rationed, and normally very expensive. That is live music. It can't be copied; it has to be provided by other people. But folks like live music. Unlike music on an iPod, you experience it in extraordinary circumstances (you have to go to where it is being held), and the social interactions involved are very different and highly sought after.
I've mentioned before that music never dies – Within seconds, I can find and listen to The Hollies or Blind Boy Fuller or The La's. Live music is the exception. Most best selling bands are defunct as a live outfit and the few still touring play stadiums or arenas and charge a premium. And the void gets larger every year – the desire to see live music never seems to diminish, but the number of touring bands gets smaller every year. Enter the tribute band, which fills this void.
Last Friday I went to see a tribute band called Led Zepagain. As you might guess, they fill the Led Zeppelin live void. Led Zepagain work on the details of emulation very carefully, the idea being to recreate the original experience as closely as possible.
They were playing a local concert hall, the OC Tavern. I have no idea how the economics of live music in So Cal work. The OC Tavern can't hold more than 700 on the live music dancefloor. That night there were two bands on, and a DJ/Sound System on a smaller dancefloor which attracted exactly zero people. The bar/café must have held 200 maximum. I know that slightly larger places like the Coach House survive with major bands and big-name live acts playing there, and smaller places always seemed to do ok. Perhaps the bars have some kind of device that silently vacuums money out of your pockets. It's the only way I can imagine they make a profit. It can't be the beer – you don't drink that much more because you're watching a live band.
I've seen Led Zeppelin themselves twice. I've also seen the band in person from a short distance, at The Song Remains the Same premiere. I've watched The Song Remains the Same so much I know most of the shots by heart. I have DVD. I made a start on the extra songs in the re-released The Song Remains the Same. I have a collection of every scrap of video of Led Zeppelin that has ever made it out to general-level bootleggers. So I have a good grasp of what Led Zeppelin looked like and sounded like. And if I wanted, I could play Zeppelin music constantly. I could watch them on my TV, or on my computer, around the clock. But I could never again see them live. And that's where Led Zepagain come in.
Led Zepagain blow me away. The recreation is uncanny – the sound is almost perfect and the visuals close enough to cause flashbacks. The wildly distorted scale – 1/40th the audience size, 1/10th the stage size – is a little disconcerting at first, but you get used to it. And best of all, you get all the benefits of live music.
The place was packed. The people around me were there to rock and did so with evident gusto. Most of them seemed to be Led Zepagain virgins, but all were converted by the energy, showmanship and virtuosity of the band. We all ended up dancing and singing along with the exception of a girl in front of me who wanted to play out some major life drama with her boyfriend. I guess getting to watch a living soap opera is part of the social benefits of live music I was extolling up there in the second paragraph.
Next weekend, July 12th, Led Zepagain will be playing the Santa Fe Springs swapmeet. Ticket price is one buck. Can't beat that.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Pet Hates (Part 6,432)
I went to the gym today. I go almost every day, except that about eight months ago I took a day off and didn't go back. It seemed mostly familiar - with the caveat that since it was July 4th, there really weren't that many people working out. There was someone there I haven't seen before, straining with 275 pounds on the incline leg press. When he'd finished he got up and staggered away and did some back exercise. I assumed that when his legs had forgiven him, he'd be back to take the plates off the incline leg press machine.
But no.
He left the plates on the bar after his next exercise too. Tubby white dude, probably 225 pounds, most of it in his beer gut, long kinky hair. Pretty old too, about 45. I'm talking about you. Yeah, you! You left your weights on the machine for the next person to deal with, you asshat! Perhaps you can't lift 45 pound plates and had to leave them on. Maybe that's why you were struggling to rep with such a girly weight on the machine. In which case I (mostly) forgive you.
It's up to the person who loads the machine to leave it ready for the next person - it's the rule at that gym as well as polite. I lost a lot of upper body strength after an operation a couple of years ago and I don't like lugging them around myself. Every time someone leaves a bunch of weights on a back or leg machine, or bar, it can cost me the opportunity to use it.
But no.
He left the plates on the bar after his next exercise too. Tubby white dude, probably 225 pounds, most of it in his beer gut, long kinky hair. Pretty old too, about 45. I'm talking about you. Yeah, you! You left your weights on the machine for the next person to deal with, you asshat! Perhaps you can't lift 45 pound plates and had to leave them on. Maybe that's why you were struggling to rep with such a girly weight on the machine. In which case I (mostly) forgive you.
It's up to the person who loads the machine to leave it ready for the next person - it's the rule at that gym as well as polite. I lost a lot of upper body strength after an operation a couple of years ago and I don't like lugging them around myself. Every time someone leaves a bunch of weights on a back or leg machine, or bar, it can cost me the opportunity to use it.
Monday, June 30, 2008
He's got the whole words in his hands.
I'm old now, so I can tell you youngsters – in confidence – that when we were young ourselves we used to make our own fun. What we used to do – on Tuesdays with no R in the month – is play "Guess what Mick Jagger is singing". We would get in the car, wind up the old Victrola and put on Black and Blue, or if we were feeling masochistic, Exile on Main Street, point the horn out of the window and drive slowly around the neighborhood annoying the street urchins with our "Beat Music" or "Maximilian R&B" as we called it in those days.
Every time Mr. Jagger sung a line, someone would attempt to translate it into English. It was quite hard to do and I well remember the day that it occurred to me that the line in Ventilator Blues that sounds like "some kind of ventilator" actually is "some kind of ventilator." That was a major breakthrough and enabled me to go on to more difficult "cuts" such as Hand of Fate and Crazy Mama. (Clue: In Crazy Mama Mr. Jagger is actually singing "crazy mother". It does make a difference when you know this.)
A Red Letter Day came when I figured out that some of the words in Hey Negrita that sound like garbled Italian ("come si chiama") are actually garbled Spanish ("come se llama"), and what's even better, it's sung without a heavily mannered accent so you can understand it first time around. I was able to take this knowledge across the entire "pop" spectrum and use it to understand the lyrics to "Spanish Bombs" by The Clash, which, once you realize they too are in Spanish, are quite easy to follow. This made me a bit of a superstar in the Wednesday games "Guess what Joe Strummer is singing", I can tell you!
I can hear you wondering out there in "cyberspace" why I didn't just look up the lyrics on the interwebs like a normal person. There's a story behind that. You see, I was born in 1965, and in those days we didn't have the Internet. Actually, we did; it had been invented, but logons were only available to Peers of the Realm, the Ministry of Defence and a type of war veteran called Pearly Queens. It ran on coal gas, which was shipped to the computers using big canvas bags on top of butchers' vans. I could tell you a good story about the day in 1968 the MOD sent my Granddad to Ongar in Essex to fix a broken link. I'll save that terrible tale for later but I will always remember the way he cried if he saw cracked Linoleum after that.
Not only that, but the Committee for Making Sense of Mick Jagger (C4MSOMJ) had not yet been formed. In fact, they had not yet been born! All of those web pages where you now see rock music lyrics were just empty pages with ads down the side, Lorem Ipsum where the words should be and viruses hiding in the Javascript. For years I thought the words to Brown Sugar went:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
Consetetur sadipscing elitr,
Sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor
Invidunt ut labore et dolore magna
Aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
At vero eos et accusam et justo duo
Dolores et ea rebum.
Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea
Takimata sanctus est
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
(Later I found out those actually were the words.)
I've recently learned that the "tater tots" (as today's youth is called) play exactly the same game. Instead of looking the words up on the internet where they have been transcribed by fourteen year old "rock" fans with attention deficit disorder, poor hearing and cognition issues, the tater tots listen to a piece of music and then draw cartoons representing the words. Instead of drawing them on paper, folding them over to hide their work and passing them on to the next person to draw the next line, they use a service called "YouTube" and "cut and paste" the cartoons into a box on the webpage. This means that they can share their guesswork with the rest of us.
I'd just like to point out the following two people got the words entirely wrong. Wrong wrong wrongity wrong. But I will publicize their laughable efforts nevertheless.
Joe Cocker, With a Little Help From My Friends - video sadly removed by copyright owner.
Led Zeppelin, Immigrant Song
And I believe there are more misheard lyrics where they came from!
Every time Mr. Jagger sung a line, someone would attempt to translate it into English. It was quite hard to do and I well remember the day that it occurred to me that the line in Ventilator Blues that sounds like "some kind of ventilator" actually is "some kind of ventilator." That was a major breakthrough and enabled me to go on to more difficult "cuts" such as Hand of Fate and Crazy Mama. (Clue: In Crazy Mama Mr. Jagger is actually singing "crazy mother". It does make a difference when you know this.)
A Red Letter Day came when I figured out that some of the words in Hey Negrita that sound like garbled Italian ("come si chiama") are actually garbled Spanish ("come se llama"), and what's even better, it's sung without a heavily mannered accent so you can understand it first time around. I was able to take this knowledge across the entire "pop" spectrum and use it to understand the lyrics to "Spanish Bombs" by The Clash, which, once you realize they too are in Spanish, are quite easy to follow. This made me a bit of a superstar in the Wednesday games "Guess what Joe Strummer is singing", I can tell you!
I can hear you wondering out there in "cyberspace" why I didn't just look up the lyrics on the interwebs like a normal person. There's a story behind that. You see, I was born in 1965, and in those days we didn't have the Internet. Actually, we did; it had been invented, but logons were only available to Peers of the Realm, the Ministry of Defence and a type of war veteran called Pearly Queens. It ran on coal gas, which was shipped to the computers using big canvas bags on top of butchers' vans. I could tell you a good story about the day in 1968 the MOD sent my Granddad to Ongar in Essex to fix a broken link. I'll save that terrible tale for later but I will always remember the way he cried if he saw cracked Linoleum after that.
Not only that, but the Committee for Making Sense of Mick Jagger (C4MSOMJ) had not yet been formed. In fact, they had not yet been born! All of those web pages where you now see rock music lyrics were just empty pages with ads down the side, Lorem Ipsum where the words should be and viruses hiding in the Javascript. For years I thought the words to Brown Sugar went:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
Consetetur sadipscing elitr,
Sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor
Invidunt ut labore et dolore magna
Aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
At vero eos et accusam et justo duo
Dolores et ea rebum.
Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea
Takimata sanctus est
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
(Later I found out those actually were the words.)
I've recently learned that the "tater tots" (as today's youth is called) play exactly the same game. Instead of looking the words up on the internet where they have been transcribed by fourteen year old "rock" fans with attention deficit disorder, poor hearing and cognition issues, the tater tots listen to a piece of music and then draw cartoons representing the words. Instead of drawing them on paper, folding them over to hide their work and passing them on to the next person to draw the next line, they use a service called "YouTube" and "cut and paste" the cartoons into a box on the webpage. This means that they can share their guesswork with the rest of us.
I'd just like to point out the following two people got the words entirely wrong. Wrong wrong wrongity wrong. But I will publicize their laughable efforts nevertheless.
Joe Cocker, With a Little Help From My Friends - video sadly removed by copyright owner.
Led Zeppelin, Immigrant Song
And I believe there are more misheard lyrics where they came from!
Sunday, June 29, 2008
I love the whole world...
I'm an old cynic, but occasionally something gets through. In this case it's an ad, which is weird and possibly ironic, but there it is.
An ad for the Discovery Channel that explains, in 60 seconds, why it's nice to be alive.
Via Making Light, among many other blogs pointing it out. Hey, Discovery Channel - you have to live up to your billing now!
An ad for the Discovery Channel that explains, in 60 seconds, why it's nice to be alive.
Via Making Light, among many other blogs pointing it out. Hey, Discovery Channel - you have to live up to your billing now!
Rite of Passage
Jimmy Page was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Surrey on Friday 20th June, for services to the music industry. The ceremony was held in Guildford Cathedral. It seems to have been a full Pomp & Circumstance affair.
The members of the Led Zeppelin group I frequent seemed to prefer to eschew ritual altogether. Their comments were:
The first thing I thought of when I saw it was clowns. How can the prestigious unis of England have such outrageous costumes for their doctors? LOL!!!
I just saw this online - that outfit is HY-sterical!
he looks like a jester!
Awww thats too cute. I wonder if he felt ridiculous in that outfit?
Writer's Block Central asked the fundamental question:
What's up with dressing people who graduate (or get honorary degrees, etc.) in brightly colored robes? Why robes, for that matter?
Good question. Glad you asked! The robes mark a fundamental change in the individual's relationship to society.
Charles-Arnold Van Gennep wrote the canonical works on Rites of Passage, the near universal tendency of human societies to perform ceremonies when marking the major changes in the social status of an individual. The rites show that the person's change in status is recognized and validated by the society in general. Such major transformations include birth, adulthood, marriage and death, and there may be similar rituals marking initiation (academic, religious or into a secret society), attainment of a new degree in that establishment, and taking political office.
Rites of passage help preserve the stability of society by ensuring that individuals do not change status without the knowledge and guidance of society. Change is surrounded by ritual and incorporated into society at large, minimizing disruption and disequilibrium. Individual struggle for recognition is replaced by a general validation of the new status. A rite where many individuals are in a cohort being recognized also serves to produce strong bonds between the persons present at the ritual who may maintain social contacts afterwards, further strengthening society as a whole.
Van Gennep compared the rituals in different cultures and discovered that the rituals normally involve three stages.
1. Separation from society
2. A 'liminal' state where one belongs to neither the old order nor the new
3. Reincorporation into society with the new role or responsibility
I will leave out any anthropological asides and not discuss ceremonial rites such as circumcision, tonsure or scarification. The ceremony is often likened to a rebirth: the individual is "killed", undergoes a period of non-existence and then is reborn into the new role, with helpers present to reintroduce the individual into society in their new role.
The graduation ceremony is a modern rite of passage. Graduation from school or attainment of a baccalaureate may be considered the equivalent of attaining adulthood. The higher doctoral degree is more akin to entry into a magico-religious or secret society.
The rules for academic clothing are long and complex – for instance, the candidate will be required to wear the gown at the academic procession, i.e. on the way to receiving the degree, but the candidate may not wear the hood until the degree is conferred. The dress itself dates back to the 13th century, and is itself liberally surrounded by ritual and arcane knowledge. An academic in the 13th century would also have taken clerical vows, which adds another layer of complexity to the dress and may also explain why the ritual seems to be preparing the candidate for a much more fundamental removal from secular society than is normally associated with a modern doctorate. The tam, or academic hat, may have originally served to cover the candidate's new tonsure.
For the doctoral degree ceremony, the three Van Gennep stages are still observed today. The ritual dramatizes the change in status by removing the candidate from their usual abode to a building or room decorated for the purpose. This removal from society is often achieved by a formal procession to the ceremonial hall, along with the other candidates. Their regular clothes are covered with gowns, signifying their change in status from a secular role to academic society. In the procession and the subsequent ceremony, the candidates' membership of their new group is emphasized, superseding their previous identity as members of mundane society.
In the hall, they are in the liminal stage, neither members of society nor yet doctors. They listen to an address to the candidates by the master which outlines their new responsibilities and the fundamental changes in relationship with their peers that they will undergo. The degree is then conferred. In most doctoral ceremonies, the master hoods the student for the first time.
The new role confers not only the change in dress, but also a change in name. On re-entering society, they will henceforth use the title "doctor" instead of "mister".
Some observers believe that capitalist societies shun rituals of Rites of Passage. The American dream is predicated on the belief that each person is just a purchase away from attainment of fulfillment. Where one adheres to the old paradigm requiring society approves of and validates changes in status, the capacity for ultimate happiness is removed from the hands of the individual. Change in status in America today is advertised to be a function of purchasing power, and there is a mythology heavily promulgated by those with a financial stake in growth and change that there are no barriers which cannot be overcome by a sufficiently motivated individual.
With this significant difference from the societies originally studied by Van Gennep, there has been a change in the mix of rituals which are valued by the population. The rituals of adulthood and marriage – representing major changes in financial status – are still almost universally celebrated. They are open to anyone, and shore up the belief that changes in status are within the grasp of all. The rituals of attainment of degrees or initiation into limited societies are celebrated mostly by the ruling classes and/or by the intellectually elite. Individuals not selected for the new status regard the clothes and ritual as outlandish, which is entirely true. The candidate has left the common society and become a member of another, elite, society.
.
Further reading:
University of Surrey Press Release
Wikipedia: Rite of Passage
Wikipedia: Academic Dress
Guildford Cathedral
Graduation at Oxford regarded as a rite of passage.
List of some transitions in life that are marked with ceremonies.
Academic Costume Guide (American)
Lecture notes on anthropological rites of passage
The members of the Led Zeppelin group I frequent seemed to prefer to eschew ritual altogether. Their comments were:
The first thing I thought of when I saw it was clowns. How can the prestigious unis of England have such outrageous costumes for their doctors? LOL!!!
I just saw this online - that outfit is HY-sterical!
he looks like a jester!
Awww thats too cute. I wonder if he felt ridiculous in that outfit?
Writer's Block Central asked the fundamental question:
What's up with dressing people who graduate (or get honorary degrees, etc.) in brightly colored robes? Why robes, for that matter?
Good question. Glad you asked! The robes mark a fundamental change in the individual's relationship to society.
Charles-Arnold Van Gennep wrote the canonical works on Rites of Passage, the near universal tendency of human societies to perform ceremonies when marking the major changes in the social status of an individual. The rites show that the person's change in status is recognized and validated by the society in general. Such major transformations include birth, adulthood, marriage and death, and there may be similar rituals marking initiation (academic, religious or into a secret society), attainment of a new degree in that establishment, and taking political office.
Rites of passage help preserve the stability of society by ensuring that individuals do not change status without the knowledge and guidance of society. Change is surrounded by ritual and incorporated into society at large, minimizing disruption and disequilibrium. Individual struggle for recognition is replaced by a general validation of the new status. A rite where many individuals are in a cohort being recognized also serves to produce strong bonds between the persons present at the ritual who may maintain social contacts afterwards, further strengthening society as a whole.
Van Gennep compared the rituals in different cultures and discovered that the rituals normally involve three stages.
1. Separation from society
2. A 'liminal' state where one belongs to neither the old order nor the new
3. Reincorporation into society with the new role or responsibility
I will leave out any anthropological asides and not discuss ceremonial rites such as circumcision, tonsure or scarification. The ceremony is often likened to a rebirth: the individual is "killed", undergoes a period of non-existence and then is reborn into the new role, with helpers present to reintroduce the individual into society in their new role.
The graduation ceremony is a modern rite of passage. Graduation from school or attainment of a baccalaureate may be considered the equivalent of attaining adulthood. The higher doctoral degree is more akin to entry into a magico-religious or secret society.
The rules for academic clothing are long and complex – for instance, the candidate will be required to wear the gown at the academic procession, i.e. on the way to receiving the degree, but the candidate may not wear the hood until the degree is conferred. The dress itself dates back to the 13th century, and is itself liberally surrounded by ritual and arcane knowledge. An academic in the 13th century would also have taken clerical vows, which adds another layer of complexity to the dress and may also explain why the ritual seems to be preparing the candidate for a much more fundamental removal from secular society than is normally associated with a modern doctorate. The tam, or academic hat, may have originally served to cover the candidate's new tonsure.
For the doctoral degree ceremony, the three Van Gennep stages are still observed today. The ritual dramatizes the change in status by removing the candidate from their usual abode to a building or room decorated for the purpose. This removal from society is often achieved by a formal procession to the ceremonial hall, along with the other candidates. Their regular clothes are covered with gowns, signifying their change in status from a secular role to academic society. In the procession and the subsequent ceremony, the candidates' membership of their new group is emphasized, superseding their previous identity as members of mundane society.
In the hall, they are in the liminal stage, neither members of society nor yet doctors. They listen to an address to the candidates by the master which outlines their new responsibilities and the fundamental changes in relationship with their peers that they will undergo. The degree is then conferred. In most doctoral ceremonies, the master hoods the student for the first time.
The new role confers not only the change in dress, but also a change in name. On re-entering society, they will henceforth use the title "doctor" instead of "mister".
Some observers believe that capitalist societies shun rituals of Rites of Passage. The American dream is predicated on the belief that each person is just a purchase away from attainment of fulfillment. Where one adheres to the old paradigm requiring society approves of and validates changes in status, the capacity for ultimate happiness is removed from the hands of the individual. Change in status in America today is advertised to be a function of purchasing power, and there is a mythology heavily promulgated by those with a financial stake in growth and change that there are no barriers which cannot be overcome by a sufficiently motivated individual.
With this significant difference from the societies originally studied by Van Gennep, there has been a change in the mix of rituals which are valued by the population. The rituals of adulthood and marriage – representing major changes in financial status – are still almost universally celebrated. They are open to anyone, and shore up the belief that changes in status are within the grasp of all. The rituals of attainment of degrees or initiation into limited societies are celebrated mostly by the ruling classes and/or by the intellectually elite. Individuals not selected for the new status regard the clothes and ritual as outlandish, which is entirely true. The candidate has left the common society and become a member of another, elite, society.
.
Further reading:
University of Surrey Press Release
Wikipedia: Rite of Passage
Wikipedia: Academic Dress
Guildford Cathedral
Graduation at Oxford regarded as a rite of passage.
List of some transitions in life that are marked with ceremonies.
Academic Costume Guide (American)
Lecture notes on anthropological rites of passage
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
The Commonly Confused Words Test
Your result for The Commonly Confused Words Test...
English Genius
You scored 93% Beginner, 100% Intermediate, 100% Advanced, and 100% Expert!
You did so extremely well, even I can't find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don't. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you're not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!
For the complete Answer Key, visit my blog: http://shortredhead78.blogspot.com/.
Take The Commonly Confused Words Test at HelloQuizzy
That's all very well, but it appears I missed at least one question at the basic level. That's pretty typical for me - I probably mixed up a "their/there" and yet got all the "complement/compliment" type questions right.
Edit: The Journal entry I stole this from has a bunch of comments after it which I didn't read until after I posted the above. They are almost all from leftie PC types moaning about how terrible prescriptivism is and aren't we all just beyond that now?
Well, yes... or no... but anyway, a quiz that said: "Hanged or hung, what's the diff? Whom or who? Whom cares? Hearty appetite or hardy appetite? WTF is that question about?" might be an interesting conversation starter, but would be a rotten quiz. Please just assume that the quiz is by a prescriptivist, and proceed or possibly precede accordingly.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
There's a Chicken on the Path
It's been unbelievably hot here, so all I did this weekend is try to stay out of the sun. I'm not used to this; this near the ocean it's usually temperate all year round. It's not like I live in the desert or the Inland Empire. The tiny brick pond I have in the back yard died a couple of weeks ago and now has about an equal weight of water and mosquito larvae in it, so I daren't go outside after dusk anyway or I'll be eaten alive. Getting anything done inside this weekend proved to be far too much effort too. I did manage to code up the Timewave Zero article but just doing that amount of coding and cross checking took about as much effort as getting a man on the moon.
Nights are spent putting Raccoon-B-Gon on the roof to prevent them from falling off the beams and crashing through the mosquito netting into the atrium. Raccoons are as sure-footed as iguanas, i.e. they are not sure-footed. They fall out of the sky like little angry bears on a weekly basis. I can hear them outside at night – they whistle like Clangers calling the Soup Dragon and rustle through the undergrowth.
Work is so far this week is without significant incident. I shouldn't speak too soon, though. It can turn on a dime. I have San Juan Capistrano swallows, as in the famous song, diving around my windows and the window ledges are full of bright red finches having little bright red finch arguments/love fests with each other.
Occasionally, one of those gigantic California crows lands nearby and gets mobbed by an angry finch parent or two. One of the chicks fell from the eaves a few days ago and the office cleaner told me about it - There's a chicken on the path! Are chicken and chick the same word in Spanish?
Sometimes I'd like to start an ESL class at work. Unfortunately my keenness lasts only about as long as working out the first lesson plan and after that I'm exhausted. And knowing Human Resources, attempting to teach folks useful English would bring the wrath of the diversity group down on my head. I wouldn't want that.
In case you're wondering, I would very much like to go to Chinese-as-a-second-language classes if someone decided to reciprocate. Tagalog and Spanish, not so much.
Nights are spent putting Raccoon-B-Gon on the roof to prevent them from falling off the beams and crashing through the mosquito netting into the atrium. Raccoons are as sure-footed as iguanas, i.e. they are not sure-footed. They fall out of the sky like little angry bears on a weekly basis. I can hear them outside at night – they whistle like Clangers calling the Soup Dragon and rustle through the undergrowth.
Work is so far this week is without significant incident. I shouldn't speak too soon, though. It can turn on a dime. I have San Juan Capistrano swallows, as in the famous song, diving around my windows and the window ledges are full of bright red finches having little bright red finch arguments/love fests with each other.
Occasionally, one of those gigantic California crows lands nearby and gets mobbed by an angry finch parent or two. One of the chicks fell from the eaves a few days ago and the office cleaner told me about it - There's a chicken on the path! Are chicken and chick the same word in Spanish?
Sometimes I'd like to start an ESL class at work. Unfortunately my keenness lasts only about as long as working out the first lesson plan and after that I'm exhausted. And knowing Human Resources, attempting to teach folks useful English would bring the wrath of the diversity group down on my head. I wouldn't want that.
In case you're wondering, I would very much like to go to Chinese-as-a-second-language classes if someone decided to reciprocate. Tagalog and Spanish, not so much.
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