Spirit, again, in the sky

When I posted a video of Norman Greenbaum's Spirit In The Sky a couple of days ago to signal the end of the world (whatever happened to that?) I didn't know that this week would mark the end of Spirit, the Mars Rover, who has done such sterling duty in the sky. NASA has been trying to contact her for a year, and yesterday gave up the ghost, so to speak.

Spirit, and her sister robot Opportunity, were only specced to last 90 days on Mars. They have both given seven years of service. Spirit was the one who found evidence that water was at one point abundant on Mars, and gave hope that there might at least at some time have been life there. Spirit eventually developed a bad wheel - she drove backwards for a year or so - and in time dust on her solar panels reduced her ability to respond to NASA. Her ground crew waited for the Martian winter to end, but she did not respond to recent signals, and NASA decided this week to let her go.

XKCD has the definitive requiem, but it is so sad I'll give the second comic, the remix version, first.

Here's a cartoon on how much fun it is to explore the Arean surface. The upbeat one.

And here is the XKCD take on it, bleak but somehow less quotidian.

RIP Spirit.

Wednesday Octopus

Except this is a cuttlefish, which is the same as an octopus or a squid, except instead of playing up the Cthulu-Weird and Glittery-Alien roles, a cuttlefish just gets down to business.



A cuttlefish is the bubba of the octopus world. Sashays along, sees a prey animal, shoots it, boogies right on. I'm glad I'm not on the cuttlefish menu, as their hunting seems...lethal.

Seen via James Nicholl.

End of the World today

Well, today is the end of the world - apparently. I commend you in the arms of Norman Greenbaum, who is Jewish but scored one of the world's biggest ever Christian hits with the astonishingly catchy Spirit in the Sky.

One of my earliest loves. Not sure which of the iconic parts, vocals, bass or guitar, really sells it, although of course the guitar fill (bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep) has to be the signature motif.

"I've been asked a lot over the years how I did the 'beep beep' guitar parts on Spirit, so for any guitar players out there who would like to learn how, try the following: Using a 2-pickup Gibson, set the neck pickup volume to zero, bridge pickup volume to max, with the pickup switch in the middle position (with Gibson wiring this gives you silence in the middle position). Do a string bend, picking the B & E strings together with one hit, just ahead of the beat, then use the pickup switch to kick in the bridge pickup in triplets (6 per bar) as you let the B string bend down two frets."

That track is aural crack. I'd discuss other tracks that have transfixed me as much, but apparently the world is ending so I have run out of time.

Today's lesson: Matthew 26:52

As I was randomly following links on the interwebs, I came across a supposedly religious site discussing the attack that killed Osama bin Laden. Several posters quoted (as one does) Biblical reasons for not killing people in cold blood, but one person countered this reading, saying that Bible quotes could be used to justify anything. They suggested that killing someone who had killed other people was fine by Jesus. They quoted - I know you know I'm going to say this - Matthew 26 verse 52.

Then said Jesus to him, Put up again your sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

This one is as clear as day to anyone who has read more than one verse in isolation.

"Put up again your sword into his place."

Sheath your damn sword.

"For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword."

Because if you use violence, you're doomed.

There are people out there who can read this verse to mean, "Kill him because he has killed". That gives me hives. No particular Osama bin Laden reference, just, come on, folks, if you say you're Christian give it at least a half-hearted shot.

Robert Johnson, 100 today

Today would have been Robert Johnson's 100th birthday, if he hadn't died in 1938, most likely poisoned by a jealous husband.

When I was growing up, in England in the 60s, his name was everywhere. Robert Plant mentioned him as incomparably superior to himself. Eric Clapton called him a genius. The Rolling Stones covered his songs.

R Crumb's famous drawing of Johnson

As a child with no money, it was virtually impossible to get hold of his records. Yes, in those days, if you didn't have any money, you didn't have any music. A lot of musicians look back on those days fondly, both because they got paid back then and because they think anticipation is good for people - you value something more if you are not immediately gratified. I don't really believe that in general, and I can tell you that in this specific instance it sucked.

I'm told Keith Richards met Mick Jagger when one of them saw the other standing around with a blues album under their arm, and that was actually a common way of meeting people. I remember in the 70s that you used to see a lot of men in greatcoats standing on street corners with an album under their arms, cover ostentatiously displayed, and they were waiting for like minded men to approach them. It all sounds rather strange now, but how else would you know if someone in your district was a fan of your sort of music and you could swap LPs with them? (Of course if you go back to someone's house to listen to his albums the musician didn't get paid for that either, but that has always been legal whereas swapping MP3s has always been illegal.)

I don't think I got hold of a copy of one of the King of the Delta Blues Singers LPs (I forget whether it was Volume I or Volume II) until 1974. By then my musical tastes had canalized down a rockist path. I was geeky enough to have a copy of Back Door's Walking Blues, for instance but I hadn't heard much original material at all. When I got my Robert Johnson, I could barely make out what he was saying, and couldn't get over the gulf between say, Cream's Crossroads versus Johnson's Crossroads or his Travelling Riverside Blues versus Led Zeppelin's Traveling Riverside Blues.

Through the agency of the Stones (Stop Breaking Down, Love In Vain) I eventually found a key, and through Greil Marcus' book Mystery Train - a description of Johnson's lyrics that was almost anguished enough to count as some woodpulp form of blues in itself - I learned to understand the lyrics.

By that time, I think, the CD had been invented (by Norio Ohga, who passed away recently, may he rest in peace) and reissued music was tumbling into the market like water through a broken levee. Even I could get hold of it. I got the Robert Johnson complete collection on CD among many, many other things, and could finally hear him, and the other Delta blues singers, and compare their lyrics and borrowings and commonalities and begin to understand the original blues.

It did take me until last year to learn what his line "she's got Elgin movement from her head down to her toes" meant, however. I'd seen the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum but I was sure Robert Johnson hadn't. And I'd noticed the thing they plainly didn't do was move. But the internet - now that information is free, as well as music - informed me recently that Elgin watch movements were the most prized watches of the era for a man like Robert Johnson. Mystery solved, and it's not as far out as I thought it was but I feel a little more relaxed for knowing it.

For me, it'll always be Robert Johnson. I guess for Americans it's usually Son House. A little cultural difference there. Now that music is easy to get, I've been able to catch up with House, and with the others, but it will always be Johnson. Maybe there's something in that thing about appreciating it more if you have to wait for it.

Wikepedia

NPR on Robert Johnson's 100th

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the fourth be with you.

Road Trip: Chattanooga

I have had the world's worst flu, and haven't been able to post for a while.

I went to Chattanooga on the Sunday after my birthday. We went for a riverboat tour sponsored by the Tennessee Aquarium - not realizing, as we booked, that the Tennessee Aquarium would be 140 miles from Nashville, where we had been staying.

After a long drive through the green and lovely southlands, we got to Chattanooga and learned that the choo choo had last departed in the fifties, as far as we could tell. Their great marshalling yard was completely abandoned and rusted, and no current choo choos were noted.



We got to the riverboat tour and learned that the boat was basically the biggest Sea Doo ever made. The endless explanations of how the boat was like a Sea Doo, but the biggest and fastest and hardest and most masculine one ever, took up most of the commentary. And truly, it was fast. The boat got up to fifty non-nautical miles per hour in a flash, and (more to their coastguard-limited point) stopped in half a second if it saw a boat go by that we were not allowed to rock with our wash.

We heard the history of Lookout Mountain, and the history of John Brown's Ferry Landing. We learned that, as far as I could tell, Chattanooga had done okay up to the early fifties, when, as did the rest of America, it took a tumble.



They flooded the river to make it less difficult to navigate, but even so, businesses died along the banks (above). Yuppification seems to have worked to some extent - hence the river tour, and the nice aquarium, but one wonders if the business will ever come back on the shore.

I was there a couple of days before the tornadoes. Chattanooga was glancingly hit, but Tuscaloosa was wiped out. My spare dollars are going, once again, to the Red Cross for the American South.

Osama Bin Laden Dead!

It was nice of Barack to wait until after the Royal Wedding was over so as not to steal their thunder.

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of seeing The Dead Weather at Jack's house.

Happy May Day!

It's May 1st, the day of worker solidarity around the world, and around the world people have been marching. There are some fine pictures here.

I'll just borrow this one for illustrative purposes.

The people's flag is indeed deepest red. I've always been bemused by the way the US has managed to entirely wipe out the memory of May Day (and moved Labor Day to the other end of the year), and also managed to make the word "red" mean right-wing instead of socialist. It's an impressive feat of brainwashing, but luckily the rest of the planet doesn't seem to have been affected.

Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus

Paul Davies, writing in the Grauniad, has thought of a way to approach a cancer cure. The clever bit is, Professor Davies is a noted physicist - nay, a cosmologist, yet - who was asked to think about cancer from a non-biologist perspective, to "think outside of the box", as it is termed.

In the article, Cancer: The beat of an ancient drum? he says,

Two years ago, in a spectacularly enlightened move, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) decided to enlist the help of physical scientists. The idea was to bring fresh insights from disciplines like physics to help tackle cancer in radical new ways. Twelve research centres were created to focus the effort, and I was approached to run the one based at Arizona State University.

With no prior knowledge of cancer, I started asking some very basic questions. What struck me from the outset is that something as pervasive and stubborn as cancer must be a deep part of the story of life itself. Sure enough, cancer is found in almost all multicellular organisms, suggesting its origins stretch back hundreds of millions of years.

So far so good.

A century ago the German biologist Ernst Haekel pointed out that the stages of embryo development recapitulate the evolutionary history of the animal. Human embryos, for instance, develop, then lose, gills, webbed feet and rudimentary tails, reflecting their ancient aquatic life styles. The genes responsible for these features normally get silenced at a later stage of development, but sometimes the genetic control system malfunctions and babies get born with tails and other ancestral traits. Such anomalous features are called atavisms.

Charles Lineweaver of the Australian National University is, like me, a cosmologist and astrobiologist with a fascination for how cancer fits into the story of life on Earth. Together we developed the theory that cancer tumours are a type of atavism that appears in the adult form when something disrupts the silencing of ancestral genes. The reason that cancer deploys so many formidable survival traits in succession, is, we think, because the ancient genetic toolkit active in the earliest stages of embryogenesis gets switched back on, re-activating the Proterozoic developmental plan for building cell colonies.

That's "Haeckel". And the plot appears to be from the X-Files, although I think the Cigarette Smoking Man was also involved somewhere along the way. Biologist PZ Myers at Pharyngula has a blog post showing where Davies is wrong, he's wrong, and where he's right, biologists have already thought of it. (They had a head start, after all.) One clue - Haeckel, who came up with his theory in the 1860s, wasn't exactly correct. Ontology does not actually recapitulate phylogeny.



Anyway, the 'theory' doesn't actually include much physics. So I have a better one for you, Prof. Davies. You know how biologists in the 1600s knew that sperm have a little homunculus sitting in the head which, when implanted in a womb, develops into a child and then into an adult? Well, why don't you invent a sort of micro-MRI that you can use to scan the homunculi, and if they have tiny cancers, cut them out using a small knife...a "gamma knife" sounds small, that'll do...and then fertilize eggs with the cured sperm that will grow up to be cancer free adults?

That's "thinking outside the box" for you!

We can share the Nobel.

Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard - Poly Styrene, RIP

In 1976 I left home for London to go to university. My new pals mostly listened to well-spoken young men from Canterbury who took acid and punted up and down the River Cant, or whatever the hell it is, being twee, idyllic and musicianly.

Not everyone, though. One day someone put on Oh Bondage Up Yours, instantly scaring away the bucolic scenes conjured up by people who all, in retrospect, seemed to have been Phil Manzanera. It was fun, and liberating. Yes, I used that word. It used to mean something, in a woolly short-life-housing, yoghurt-weaving sort of way.

Between the Slits' angry and dynamic female punk and that of Poly Styrene's X Ray Spex, the seventies made it possible for women to get on stage and tell it like it was. (I bought and read Patti Smith's memoir of her time with Robert Mapplethorpe [Just Kids] yesterday, and she mentions auditioning guitarists for her band in late 1974, when "none of them warmed up to a girl being the leader", until she found Ivan Kral.) Now Ari Up of the Slits is dead and Poly Styrene is dead as well. She probably doesn't mind, being a Krishna Consciousness devotee, but I mind.

Rather than the raucous Oh Bondage, I think I'll start listening with Germ Free Adolescent, which in a way was less part of the last of punk and more one of the first few things of the eighties. I can remember hearing this on a day much like today, sunny with birds singing, and with cheese sandwiches avec mustard in the kitchen, except days like that are much more rare in London than in So Cal.

Yes, their songs got on Top of the Pops.

And Identity:

And here's a long punk medley that will last the rest of this quiet and bright, almost Canterbury-esque day. [Link alas decayed]

Wars.

Told you so:

Britain sending military team to Libya.

Told you so too, although I didn't think it would be less than 24 hours between the two:

Libyan rebels support having Western troops help evacuate civilians.

The Kills

I'm off to see the Kills in Nashville on Friday.

I couldn't resist seeing them in San Diego last Friday with my friend LOT. Beautiful day to be there.

Due to a certain amount of hangover, I wasn't up to writing a review of it, but I enjoyed the show very much. Next week I'll be seeing them in Nashville with LOT and Aquamarine.

The House of Blues was much more congenial than the last time I was there - or maybe there isn't such a high percentage of twits at a Kills concert compared with Dead Weather fans. The tickets came with a signed picture of the Kills, and on mine Jamie has put his "x" over his own face. I guess he got bored with signing them all.

No, I didn't actually get the set list. Barry Benchpress, the eight foot tall 250 pound security guard with gigantic rocklike pectorals that got into every photo I took, along with his hair, fluorescent earplugs and craggy visage, passed it to the young women beside me and I took a photo of it as I left.

The hangover was due to starting early in the hotel room, I guess. House of Blues certainly made it difficult to drink. Last time I was there they had waitress service, but this time, I went to the bar and the bouncer made me go upstairs to show my ID at the door again and get a wrist band (and who wants to do that trek when you have a spot at the barrier and you know it could close up at any instant), and then I came back down and bought two drinks, and the bouncer stopped me from coming out with them and said I had to drink them at the bar....! I said, 'You could have told me that first!' He just shrugged. So I drank one and the nice barman kept the other one for my friend while we saved her spot, but of course we didn't dare try for a second drink. Next time - nylon hip flask! It's got to be done.

My friend said the problem with the Naked and the Famous was that they were neither naked nor famous. Perhaps that will change and we can look forward to them in all their glory later.

Satellite acoustic, which is apparently non-embeddable.

And the current radio medley, You Don't Love Me/Steppin' Razor is also non-embeddable. This attempt to figure out who is watching the videos will backfire in the end, as when I'm not drunk I'm perfectly capable of pseudo-embedding them. But for today, do click the link.


Edit: Here's You Don't Love Me/Steppin' Razor

Koi

Also at the Mission, SJC - koi in the fountain, with rain and palm tree reflection.

Mission visit

We went to the SJC mission the other day. For no apparent reason they had a Lewis and Clark exhibition. Or the Corps of Discovery...are those two different things? Surely Southern California wasn't a big part of the Lewis and Clark deal?

Anyway, they had activities for kids, so we did them.