Getting Biblical Inerrancy right

This one would be 'wrong'.

It's funny because the same book in the Bible forbids tattoos.

Leviticus 19:28 "Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD."

Seen via makinglight.

Jack White and Third Man Records at SXSW

Ok, this is what comes out of the Third Man Rolling Records Store when it stops:



It's Jack White with a couple of iconic performances - Not Fade Away followed by Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground followed by Seasick Steve bringing it all back home, or at least back to SXSW which is sort of home.

And dig all the young people texting their appreciation in the front row! What bands may need is an Applause App so at the end of each song the performer knows we're not all talking about Shah-Lin-Da and how she's like totally into that weird dude, but actually keeping half an eye on the band.

Jack White is up to stuff

My childhood, several centuries ago, was enlivened with stories of English rock bands and their touring vans, which were cramped and unheated and full of battered cheap gear that musicians these days would give an arm and a leg to obtain - and how often these beat groups got sick on the road, and how often the bands got laid in the back of those vans. Paul Kossoff, the druggiest of Free, was the best driver in that group and would cheerfully drive the length of Great Britain without a protest or a problem. Jimmy Page, touring with a combo of now-mostly-forgotten rockers in a van, famously got sick from Glandular Fever (Mono, in US-speak) and retired from touring forever at the ripe old age of 19 (or something), vowing to spend the future as a session musician. (I believe he went back to touring with some group or other later, when he preferred charter jets with fur-topped beds in the cabin.) The rivalry between those groups who preferred the Bedford van and those groups who preferred the legendary Transit van is the stuff of sagas.



So now Jack has translated the full musical van-experience from live music to vinyl, transferring the romance of the touring troubadours of rock to the staff of the record store. Four or fewer Lovable Moptops (Ben Swank) will soon arrive at our doorsteps to personally provide us with sounds at whatever cost to their selves, their relationships and their health.

One hopes Jack has taken to heart the tales of all those English boys tested - and so many of whom were broken - by the stress of having to get to Bradford St. George's Hall by 1 pm next day after the Hammersmith Odeon gig last night, in the freezing fog with the top two gears f*cked and the brakes a bit slushy and a slapper in the back seat who's forgotten her shoes. If not, we'll no doubt hear these epic tales of struggle and victory from Third Man in their tweets and web-updates.

Actual footage of a fictional group race between a Bedford and a Transit. You don't want to know the movie it comes from.

Also, the first person to glom/glue/clamp/magnet a GPS on the underside of this sucker at SXSW and tell us where it's headed in future will win my undying appreciation.

Vanalden Cave

Last Sunday, inspired by a post on boing boing, we went to Vanalden Cave. This is in Tarzana, Los Angeles. It's a relatively easy half mile hike, although it was quite slippy on the trails that day. If you follow the directions on the internet, it will tell you to get out of the car when Vanalden Avenue dead ends, and follow the trail to the cave. They also state that when you come to the place where you don't know which way to go, go right. This very psychedelic description is quite fitting, as apparently Vanalden cave is where the 'shroomers hang out, but it's not very useful as there are at least two places where you don't know which way to go.

At the first one, go left.

At the other one, go right.

I'm used to great sweeping limestone caves like Gaping Gill, so Los Angeles' sandstone cavern seemed very different to me.

It's dry and warm inside, although there are a lot of holes in the roof where it rains in when it does rain.

What makes it interesting is generations of people have carved the soft sandstone inside, and painted the walls outside. It's like an Angelino Lascaux or Tassili.

This was a fun trip, especially as I also got to eat a double-double at In 'n' Out Burger.

Surfing teh interwebs

On a Sunday morning, surfing teh interwebs is my favorite activity. Today I spent a couple of hours reading about a fascinating controversy over whether a cabal of writers known as the YA Mafia really do have the power to crush aspiring writers who negatively review their books on the internet. Thrilling stuff, brought to my attention by adult and YA writer John Scalzi's blog, where he protests too much that he and all of his YA writing friends could never find time to fuck with anyone's careers. I read all the source material...well, not all of it. There's reams of blog posts. Hundreds of them. And tens of thousands of comments.

After that I headed off to Fandom Wank to see if the YA Mafia had made the grade to be discussed there and found that it had not. Slow off the mark, FW! At FW, I learned that My Little Pony posts had so overwhelmed 4 Chan that it had been forced to start banning them to avoid being broken. If anything was going to break 4 Chan, I guess it had to be My Little Pony. And then I read some other wanks, mostly about someone called Misha and a rhino. [Fandom Wank has disappeared and links have broken, alas. 10/2017]

Yessirree, surfing the nets is the way to go.

Then I followed up on my google alerts, and one of them - for the Dead Weather - turned up a picture of me! Yes, me, on the internets! Here I am.

That's probably too large to display properly, but you could save it to your hard disk and treasure it. I'm the one on the very far left of the picture. Go me. That was at the Roxy in Los Angeles, and I mostly remember being very impressed with Little Jack Lawrence's trousers, which were of a much thicker and costlier schmutter than I thought they would be. Reminded me of Coleridge- 'as if this earth in fast, thick pants were breathing'. One of poetry's greatest lines, I always thought.

False alarm

I thought I didn't have any emails from work. But I took the battery out of the BlackBerry and put it back in again and now I have about ten irritating questions from work to answer. Let this be a lesson to you. If you aren't getting emails from work, then the mantra "Switch it off and switch it on again" should not be applied until Monday morning.

All Quiet on the Western Front

My bastard work BlackBerry ran out of juice yesterday and I finally managed to charge it up today and it when it woke up it registered zero - zero! - emails from work. The last one was Saturday evening.

I've no idea how that happened as the work guys seem to work in relays to shovel things to my door on Sundays. Thought I'd finished reviewing standard operating procedures? Surprise! Here's another five I finished on Saturday at 11 pm. It's a work BlackBerry. I don't have a phone. I have this one purely because work wants me to have a phone that lets me know if I need to work at night or during the weekend.

No emails at all on Sunday. That's actually quite odd. Either all the others have developed civilized attitudes to work, or...

Or I don't have an alternative. The world ended and nobody told me?

Recipes: The Other Dismal Science

My other half says cooking is hard. I say cooking is easy. He cites the lack of proper standard operating procedures, and, even where they are available, the preponderance of phrases like "beat until well mixed", "cook until done" and "heat until hot".

I bought a joint of meat today and the helpful instructions on the peel-off tag read, in full:

Cooking Instructions:

Place roast, fat side up, on rack in shallow roasting pan. Do not add water or cover. Remove roast when thermometer registers 135-140°F for medium rare, 150-155°F for medium. Let roast stand 15-20 minutes. Roast will finish cooking and be easier to carve.

If I followed those instructions, I'd have a piece of beef sitting on a kitchen counter forever, because of course the kitchen never (I hope) reaches 135°F. It's usually around 70°F, in my estimation. If the kitchen was one day to set on fire, I would afterwards come in and take the roast out of the shallow roasting pan and let it stand.

The tag does not mention anything about using an oven or a grill, or what temperature it should be set at. A novice might guess from the instructions, if you realized you needed a heat source, that it should be from 135°F to 155°F, depending on which one you want to obtain, but I think most of us know that's not the case. The options range from 350°F to 550°F, so a hint might be a good idea. There isn't even the slightest estimate of time, so if we want to roast potatoes or vegetables, we can't begin to estimate when to add them to the pan.

And this is a professionally-written label for the meat. On the internet the situation is far worse, as everything seems to be written by amateurs, or possibly pranksters, with the exceptions of recipes ripped off of Madhur Jaffrey without regard to her copyright. Something that tasted right to some beery lunatic in Mississippi or Essex and, after being misremembered, incorrectly typed on to the internet three days later, gets copied and re-copied on to every recipe site. This means that a Google search will bring up seventy recipes for say, butternut squash ravioli in BBQ sauce, and 69 of them will be identical, but surrounded by slightly different ads for a local housewife who has discovered One Trick Of A Tiny Belly, and, amazingly, ads by another local housewife who has discovered One Trick Dermatologists Don't Want Me To Know!

Some of these recipes have missing ingredients. You assemble everything in the ingredients list and then gamely try to follow the drunk instructions until you hit "grate the onion finely" or "add the chopped artichoke hearts". No onions were specified in the ingredients, never mind artichoke hearts. Others are missing steps, so that you are to add the ingredients you blended in step number four, except step number four is to simmer for four hours. Is it safe, then, to just blend those ingredients? Who the hell knows?

The 70th one will inevitably be copied from a 1953 Good Housekeeping and include food ingredients that are no longer legal, such as kerosene, whale oil and maraschino cherries.

For a moment there I went into a dream where the Food and Drug Administration controlled food labeling in the same way they control drug labeling. The package insert would be 40 pages of 6 point type and include every possible interaction, contraindication and side effect. Dosages of the meat for persons under 18 would have not been established, and parents would have to prescribe the food for their kids off-label, risking severe penalties, malpractice suits and civil money penalties if Medicare or Medi-Cal was involved.

RIP Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart

I was sorry to hear about his passing.

I'm not at all sure how Nicholas Courtney, Brigadier Alex Lethbridge-Stewart, got to be 81, and subsequently died, but apparently he did and now there is another thing to mourn in the Doctor Who canon.

He always portrayed a large and in charge personality on Doctor Who, although he was regularly undermined as a bit of a blowhard.

I think Doctor Who should concentrate on stopping the deaths of his compadres. They are scaring me.

Grumpelstiltskin

My little lizard, Grumpy, died today.

Grumpy was a rescue iguana who always seemed to have a note or two in her repertoire missing, hence our appellation of Grumpy. Possibly something in her early upbringing had led to her tendency to pour cold water on anything new. Whatever, she was a healthy and active iguana who graced our house from 1993. She lived with James Jewel Osterberg (Jimmy) and they kept each other happy. She was about nine pounds and five foot long.

At 17 she was an old iguana. Many don't live past 7 in captivity. But eventually the common old-age ig-killer of kidney failure kicked in late last year - we saw the colored urates and the pale tongue - and she started to go downhill.

She's survived by James Jewel Osterberg, who is currently wondering what happened, and I hope we can explain it to him, as iguanas are not good at understanding why today is different from yesterday.

Grumpy is on the right, below, and Jimmy is on the left.

Surfing in on a putrid tide

I always wondered what happened to That Petrol Emotion. I loved Chemicrazy.

It turned out that nothing happened to them. They broke up shortly after and have recently re-emerged as a festival band, like everyone else. That's a shame, unless you're you're a festival goer.

But in the eighties, when I wasn't listening to Pop Will Eat Itself, I was listening to That Petrol Emotion, and they were supplying my jones with a wonderful guitar-based boogie, their completely internalized Chuck Berry riff, endlessly mutating to provide top-shelf pop.

zombies

Created by Oatmeal

I like Oatmeal's take on Twilight...and ended up on a quiz page.

More Oatmeal Zombie Lore.

Joy Division Transmission

I'm having a struggle with making the Playmobil (Lego) version of a video be the first music video I recommend for a seminal musical track, but here we have Lego and deep rock meeting, in a video that still manages to meet hipster standards.

Joy Division's Transmission.

Christ, that's a hell of a track. If Lego fails to move you, buy the vinyl instead. I did.

Dex Romweber

A friend trawling the intarwebs sent me this Dexter Romweber clip from MTV in 1985. I'm used to Dex being a patriarchal fellow who will school anyone in extreme rockabilly. But here Dex is a teenager living in a garden shed who will...school you in extreme rockabilly. He was always dynamite.

Excellent fucking clip.

Shepard Tone

A few years ago, I was enjoying a meal at Luxor in Las Vegas and the music surrounding me was someone playing a scale that seemed to ascend forever. It continually went higher in pitch. Obviously that was impossible, but that's how it sounded. It was a slow, stately ascent as though someone was ascending Escher's stairs. It wasn't annoying ( I was eating dinner), and it wasn't background music. It was demanding music, but every time I thought it would become transcendent, something happened and I found myself listening to it climb the ladder again.

Yesterday I learned that this wasn't a clever invention of Luxor, but a known phenomenon. There's a way to balance the ascending scale with the loudness of the tone and the loudness of its octave below to fool the ear into thinking the scale is always ascending. It's called the Shepard Tone, and here's an example of it rising, although nowhere near as stately as the one I heard in Vegas. And here's an example of it falling.

As you can imagine, the Las Vegas scale was beautifully worked out, not continuous but resembling that of a keyboard instrument, and it had me captured for an hour. These web versions aren't as hypnotizing, but man, what an illusion. I'm used to optical illusion, but that was the first aural illusion I had. The mp3s I link to aren't nearly as captivating as the real thing in the wild, but I couldn't find the genuine article out there.