Undersea Boris Johnson found

Possibly the cutest sea monster ever, the avocado-sized piglet squid.

Found at Zooillogix by the indefatiguable Oceangal. Picture courtesy of Cabrillo Marine Aquarium.


The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was overjoyed to learn of the existence of his watery cousin:

Pretty Jack White

I was checking my stats and someone came to the blog this morning on a search for 'pretty jack white' (no quotes). It seems like slim pickings out there for blogs using the words "pretty jack white" so I might as well get in at the head of the curve.

I bought the two Raconteurs CDs this week, Consolers of the Lonely and Broken Boy Soldiers, having been seduced a live boot provided by a friend. They got here yesterday and I will listen this evening.

I missed the White Stripes bandwagon, but that's all right. A bit of artistic maturity is a fine thing.

OK, pretty Jack White. I think we can all agree on this.

Hand to mouth shots always slay me.

Yeah, I know the cash shirt is photoshopped.

Edited to re-up photos, 06/03/15

Baroque and Berserk

Ol' Roy Harper - hats off to him - is on a bit of a publicity push at the moment. I've been listening to his stuff recently, and even - gasp! - buying some! Yes, in the 21st Century I've paid money for music! Via his web site so he actually gets some of it!

From one article, "Cult Fave Roy Harper Reintroduces Himself to the US", I learned that he is recovering from prostate cancer, but will consider touring again, plucky man.

And that there are reissues:

While Harper's musical style and lyrics may account for the lack of greater mainstream acceptance, his name and voice are probably familiar to rock fans. Led Zeppelin recorded the song 'Hats Off to (Roy) Harper' from 1970's 'Led Zeppelin III,' and Harper sang lead on 'Have a Cigar' from Pink Floyd's 1975album 'Wish You Were Here.' Now his distinct music is being reintroduced to Americans through the recent reissues of his earlier studio albums: 'Flat Baroque and Berserk' (1970), 'Stormcock' (1971) and 'What Ever Happened to Jugula?' (a collaborative album with Jimmy Page, 1985).

There's another, much longer, article at Popmatters, Hats Off: An Interview with Roy Harper

It says he's in his seventies and was born in 1941, so it must be being published in the future... or my math is crap. It's a full career retrospective and includes a little on my heroes, e.g.

Yet while Harper never achieved mega-rock star status, the people he hung out with did. Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, David Gilmour all were close long-time friends. In 1970, Led Zeppelin recorded the tribute “Hats Off to Roy Harper” and put it on the folk-leaning, III. Harper remembers how he heard about the song.

“I went up to see them in their office, and Jimmy handed me the record, and I was like ‘Oh, new record ...’ and twirled it around a bit and said, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ And I gave it back,” he says. “[Jimmy] he handed it back to me, and said, ‘Well, look at it then.’ And I sort of realized I should be looking at something else. And then, of course, I saw it, and I said, ‘Oh, dear ...’”

Harper says he’s still in touch with friends from the old days, and had just attended Robert Plant’s 60th birthday. Still the gap between their success and his was large. Was that ever difficult?

“Well, you can imagine, being a multimillionaire and all of that ... the level on which I operate is nowhere near that,” he admits. “Automatically, they have completely different lives from me. Although I must say that particularly Robert does his absolutely level best to keep his feet on the ground and stay in touch, constantly. Robert actually does his best all the time. Not that the others don’t. But after so many years, after so much life experience, people do become separated, you know?”

I can imagine that. I've lost touch with a lot of friends from the seventies, and I don't even have the being-a-multi-millionaire excuse.

The long article is well worth a read.

If you feel an inkling to buy Roy Harper albums, do visit his own website, www.royharper.com . You can buy the them there and have the satisfaction of knowing he'll see the sales and not just a royalty check 18 months down the road.


***

Four Chords

All the following songs use the same chord progression. It is the famous C Am F G, or various keys and minor variants of same.

Happy listening.

D'yer Mak'er – Led Zeppelin


Apparently people have problems with that title – it's pronounced Jamaica and is the penultimate line of the old joke,
"I took my girlfriend to the West Indies last week."
"Oh? Jamaica?"
"No, but it was fun trying."

You might not get it. I doubt anyone this century has taken a girl to the West Indies and not made her, but I said it was an old joke.

Edit: Having since heard an interview with Robert Plant where he gives the punchline, he actually meant the clean version.

"My wife went to the West Indies last week."
"Jamaica?"
"No, she went of her own accord."

Not as funny, but apparently definitive. :)

Bleeding Love - Leona Lewis

For some reason they don't want this embedded – fine, don't sell records then. Usually I embed them myself but can't be bothered with this one. Nice record, though, in its way. And she was tied to a pole in the dark with Jimmy Page at the Olympics, so she's all right by me.

Grown ups are just silly children - Roy Harper

Can't find an embeddable one of this either, but Roy's all right by me, and he has quite likely been tied to a pole with Jimmy Page at least once, so I'll forgive him.


Stand by Me - Ben E King





Every Breath You Take - The Police



Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love – Dion and the Belmonts



Who Put The Bomp – Barry Mann




Hungry Heart – Bruce Springsteen

(A little different)




Last Christmas - Wham




There are thousands more – apparently over 100 hot hits with the same chords. It's not what you've got, it's what you do with it that counts.

Keep a'Coolin', Baby

There's a persistent belief that scientists used to believe that an ice-age was imminent, and now they believe that the Earth is warming. The subtext is that scientists can't make their minds up and clearly can be ignored as hysterical lunatics. I've mentioned before that this is not true; there was no general belief amongst scientists in the seventies that the Earth was cooling. In that piece I mentioned a round up of texts from the time published on the web as "Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No."

There's now a newer review of the literature out. What's their conclusion?

The team’s survey of major journal papers published between 1965 and 1979 found that only seven articles predicted that global average temperature would continue to cool. During the same period, 44 journal papers indicated that the average temperature would rise and 20 were neutral or made no climate predictions. The findings were “a surprise to us,” Peterson says. For decades the “skeptics had repeated their argument so often and so strongly that we misremembered the tenor of the times.”

Their report is published in in the September Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and there is a write-up of the paper in Science News: Cooling climate ‘consensus’ of 1970s never was.

Today's Gleanings

A couple of interesting things from the interwebs today. Making Light points up John Walcott's speech accepting the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence on October 7th. It's refreshing to hear a journalist (actually, a bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers) with his feet on the ground and a healthy understanding that some things are true, and some things are not true, and "balance" does not mean a mix of the two.

Does the truth lie halfway between say, slavery and abolition, or between segregation and civil rights, or between communism and democracy? If you quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Winston Churchill, in other words, must you then give equal time and credence to Hitler and Joseph Goebbels? If you write an article that's critical of John McCain, are you then obligated to devote an identical number of words to criticism of Barack Obama, and vice versa?

The idea that truth is merely a social construct, that it's subjective, in other words, first appeared in academia as a corruption of post-modernism, but it’s taken root in our culture without our really realizing it or understanding its implications.

It began with liberal academics arguing, for example, that some Southwestern Indians' belief that humans are descended from a subterranean world of supernatural spirits is, as one archaeologist put it, "just as valid as archaeology." As NYU philosophy professor Paul Boghossian puts it in a wonderful little book, "Fear of Knowledge": " ... the idea that there are many equally valid ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them, has taken very deep root."

Although this kind of thinking, relativism and constructivism, started on the left, many conservatives now feel empowered by it, too, and some of them have embraced it with a vengeance on issues ranging from global warming and evolution to the war in Iraq.

"Journalists live in the reality-based world," a White House official told Ron Suskind, writing for The New York Times Magazine back in the headier days of 2004. "The world doesn't really work that way any more. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

I respectfully disagree.

The rest is worth reading, too.

And on a completely different tack - but producing the same joy - a Baltimore Sun blogger finds a Page/Plant video of Since I've Been Loving You from Glastonbury in 1995 that packs a visceral punch. Always one of my favorite tracks, here it is in a very late incarnation, sounding, quite improbably, just as good as the first time.

Take On Me: Literal Video Version

Found via Matt Ruff's blog: This is Aha!'s gigantic hit Take On Me retrofitted to match its famously groundbreaking video. Now the words describe the action in the video.

What's wonderful is the sheer perfection of the redone track. The voice is beautiful, the words are funny (and get much funnier towards the end), nobody screws up and everything works out right. I don't know how people do this - there are many people with actual recording contracts who plainly can't sing at all, or even worse use Auto-Tune. It's strange to live in a world where some guys and presumably their pet Pro Tools can put together a wonderful version of a very famous song.

I get the impression that for every three people who actually produce a thing there are a dozen more riffing off it, fanficcing it, slashing it, parodying it, derivately working it or otherwise performing other post modern occupations of the same general sort. Is it just the way I live my life, or is it true?

Changing My Name to Fannie Mae

Arlo Guthrie updates "I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler" (Tom Paxton) for the Bailout Days.

Archer Fish

An Archer Fish. No particular reason; just part of the general sea monster theme here. The fish can shoot an insect several inches away, making allowances for the fact its eyes are underwater and its target above water (which changes the apparent position of the prey by refraction) and adjusts for the effects of gravity. The narrator calls it computation, which isn't strictly true. A kid who knows no math can shoot hoops, which is much the same thing, minus the refraction. But the really cool feature of the video is the "bullet time" photography (array of still cameras trigged by a very fast event) which freezes the "arrow" in the middle of the action and allows you to see what a great shot this fish is.

My Favorite Things

Combining my three favorite things, Japan, Sea Monsters, spooky green glows and the Nobel Prize...wait, that's four things...

Osamu Shimomura shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into the green glowing protein in jellyfish, GFP. The protein can be made on a structure of interest and then "lit up" so that the other protein or structure can be easily located under a microscope. It has led to several breakthroughs in Biology and Medical Research.

To do the initial research, Shimomura had to catch 100,000 jellyfish.

Daily Yomiuri reports:

In the state of Washington, where Shimomura was based at the time, there were so many Aequorea victoria jellyfish living in the sea nearby that local residents said they could walk on the water as a result. As his research would require up to 3,000 jellyfish a day, Shimomura, his family members and his assistants would repeatedly scoop up jellyfish using long-shafted nets, depositing them in one of about 30 buckets placed at intervals of five meters along a pier.

It goes on:

Due to a rapid decline in the number of jellyfish over the past 10 years or so, it has become impossible to capture large quantities of them.

Perhaps we also need a Nobel Prize in population dynamics.

What?

John McCain calls his audience "my fellow prisoners".

(YouTube video)



I'm beginning to wonder if my friend isn't right - the one who sends me webpages to read about who our masters are, what the Federal Reserve really is, and what the real people in power are up to.

As Anti-War Blog says, savvy politicians usually wait until after they're elected to tell you they're nullifying all your rights.

Of course, as being paranoid is a way of life for me, I can't tell if he's deliberately throwing the election by appearing elderly, ill and mad or whether he's genuinely elderly, ill and mad.

Back in the Garage

I watched a documentary on The Clash today, called The Clash's London Calling. It's a potted history of the boys with a lot of live footage and several talking heads saying how great they were. And they were, weren't they?



What's My Name and Garageland, Live at the Elizabethan, Manchester, 1977




Janie Jones, Live at the Elizabethan, Manchester, 1977



White Riot 06-07-1978 Dunfermline Kinema,Scotland

I did see them live once, and all I remember is they had a lot of very large male fans wearing leather jackets. I suppose it would be better to say "I attended one of their performances", because I didn't actually see any of them.

Thank goodness for YouTube.

In 1977, I'd given up my Led Zeppelin habit. Now I look at what I was missing, and, y'know, stylistically there are certain similarities.

And yet more "Bailout"

Upset that the government hasn't given the thugs on Wall Street their $700 Billion yet? So was Wall Street. The Dow plunged on Monday when they learned they wouldn't get their graft money.

But did you notice this? The Federal Reserve printed took $630 Billion from the vaults and sent that into the system on Monday. I'm not making that up. Wall Street didn't get its $700 Billion, but the financial system as a whole got $630 Billion. And it vanished, again.

There's no point in giving them any more. And adding $150 Billion of pork for individual Senators for such things as removing the excise tax on wooden arrows for children (still not making this up) does not make the bailout "sweeter". It makes it bigger and more...porky.

Fed Pumps Further $630 Billion Into Financial System

The Federal Reserve will pump an additional $630 billion into the global financial system, flooding banks with cash to alleviate the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression.

The Fed's expansion of liquidity, the biggest since credit markets seized up last year, came hours before the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a $700 billion bailout for the financial industry.

Don't give them any more money. They lost the last lot and they'll lose this lot too.

Gimme Some Money - the Federal Bailout

A Ponzi scheme is one in which the thing on sale is valueless. Instead, the first tranche of people to go in the scheme are paid by the next tranche to go in. The third tranche pay for the second wave. The last set of people to buy into the scheme pay their money and eagerly await the next round of suckers. If there isn't a next round of suckers, then they lose their shirts.

They ought to teach people about Ponzi schemes and pyramid schemes at school, because people fall for them.



Bankers, for instance. They've been selling each other rounds of increasingly worthless paper based on one concept – that house prices can only increase. It turns out that this eternal verite is not true – who knew?

Under the circumstances, it is vitally important that they convince the next round of suckers – Congress – that taxpayers should put money into the scheme. Financiers are depending on this money, or they will lose everything. They are fighting for their very Lamborghinis, and are very, very persuasive on the subject of why we need to put money in. Just a little more, and everything will work again.

George Bush says we need to bail them out, which seems like an excellent reason to look twice at the deal. He's panicked America into paying no-questions-asked money to his friends so many times that simply hearing it from him is enough to make you think. His cronies hollowed out the entire treasury in eight years and now we have to give more?

They have a great sales spiel. Buy this paper off us or we're all gonna die! But with their Jacuzzis and private jets at stake, they would say that, wouldn't they? Americans are strong, have a good work ethic, want to pay their bills. They'll make more money. China isn't going to completely pull the plug as the Chinese internal market is not well developed. It has to sell to someone to make money, and America is where it sells stuff. The collateral – housing stock - is still standing, even at reduced prices, and eventually it will free up. Lots of bankers will go tits up, but man, they didn't give me any money when they had it and I don't see why I should give them any now.

We don't need to bail the financiers out. They sold worthless paper to each other hoping against they wouldn't be the ones left holding when the bills needed to be paid. They are professional risk takers. They took a risk. It blew up in their faces. Let them learn their lesson.

The real argument for the bail out is that the money for these loans is gone, evaporated into thin air (that's why they call it a bubble) and isn't going to be replaced, but – and it's a big but – the banks are now frozen into place, unwilling to lend anything to anyone, including each other, and without cash to lubricate the system, it will never move again.

I guess if we have to do it, we have to do it. Generally speaking, I don't have much enthusiasm for giving money to people who got themselves into debt over mortgages and mortgage backed loans. However, I have about a million times more sympathy for giving them money than I do giving Paulson and his friends the right to spend $700B at a time without any congressional oversight by giving it to bankers who once earned hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions each - all while losing billions on behalf of their customers.

Especially after reading this article, Let's put this bailout into perspective, ok? . A little sympathy, there.

Charlie Stross says,

Never mind bailing out the banks: what needs bailing out is the human beings behind the collateralized debt obligations. The money would be better spent keeping roofs over their heads (and servicing those currently-non-viable mortgages, which action would, incidentally, keep the banks liquid).

In my more cynical moments I look at the demands for money emanating from the White House and what I see is the Mafia hoods running up the lines of credit on a business they've taken over before they complete the bustout. Eight years of asset-stripping and looting, and finally the coup de grace: $700Bn in no-questions-asked, no-oversight slush money.

I don't want the people who ran the financial institutions into the ground playing with any more of my money. Ponzi schemes don't work; there's always someone left holding the paper, and I don't see why it has to be me.

No Led Zeppelin Tour

Some official words at last, from Robert Plant's site.

Official Statement, September 29th 2008.

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss are currently touring the USA on the last leg of their 'Raising Sand' tour. They played a benefit concert in Oklahoma City for victims of Hurricane Ike last Friday; Austin,Texas last Saturday and tomorrow they play Portland, Oregon before finishing the tour in Saratoga, California on October 5th.

After those dates, Robert has no intention whatsoever of touring with anyone for at least the next two years. Contrary to a spate of recent reports, Robert Plant will not be touring or recording with Led Zeppelin. Anyone buying tickets online to any such event will be buying bogus tickets.

“It‘s both frustrating and ridiculous for this story to continue to
rear its head when all the musicians that surround the story are keen to get on with their individual projects and move forward,” Robert Plant said.

“I wish Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham nothing but success with any future projects,” he added.

On the group I'm on this is being hailed as a sign something is happening and that after all, jokey statements about there not being enough doctors to support a show were made by Plant only 2 months before O2. Ah, fans. Hope springs eternal.